Search results

The choice of crops to produce at a location depends to a large degree on the climate. As the climate changes and food demand evolves, farmers may need to produce a different mix of crops. This study assesses how much cropland may be subject to such upheavals at the global scale, and then focuses on China as a case study to examine how spatial heterogeneity informs different contexts for adaptation within a country.

A global agricultural economic model is linked to a cropland allocation algorithm to generate maps of cropland distribution under historical and future conditions. The mix of crops at each location is examined to determine whether it is likely to experience a major shift.

Two-thirds of rainfed cropland and half of irrigated cropland are likely to experience substantial upheaval of some kind.

This analysis helps establish a global context for the local changes that producers might face under future climate and socioeconomic changes. The scale of the challenge means that the agricultural sector needs to prepare for these widespread and diverse upheavals.

This paper aims to provide thermal elastohydrodynamic lubrication (TEHL) contact model to study all balls’ lubrication performance of the ball screw when the multidirectional load is applied.

A new TEHL contact model combining the multidirectional load and the roughness surface texture is established to describe fatigue life of the ball screw. Meanwhile, the authors use the Reynolds equation to study the lubrication performance of the ball screw.

When the multidirectional load is applied, contact load, slide-roll ratio and entrainment velocity of all balls have a periodic shape. The TEHL performance values at the ball-screw contact points including contact stress, shear stress, minimum film thickness and temperature rise are higher than that at the ball-nut contact points. The TEHL performance values increase with the increase of root mean square (RMS) except for the film thickness. In addition, the radial load of the ball screw has a significant effect on the fatigue life.

The results of the studies demonstrate the new TEHL contact model that provides the instructive significance to analyze the fatigue life of the ball screw under the multidirectional load.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/ILT-03-2020-0097/

The study aims to discuss how the attributes of Chinese tea beverage brands influence consumers' evaluations of brand positioning and the differences and competition among brands.

A perceptual map, developed using probabilistic discriminant analysis algorithms, depicts the relative position of each brand and illustrates their attractive properties. This statistical technique can enhance managers' ability to identify promising brand positions and enhance the overall brand design process.

The study finds that Chinese tea beverage brands pursue various goals, such as quenching thirst, attractive advertising, or reliable quality, to develop their positions. Brand positioning implies that consumers remember particular information conveyed by the brand. The study illustrates consumers' brand awareness attributes, potential market demand, and brand competition conditions.

Brand positioning, when linked with market segmentation, can yield effective guidelines for the design and coordination of a marketing strategy. The scope of this study, however, does not enable elaboration on segmented differences in product positioning.

The study provides a useful source of information for managers, who should introduce brands to the market carefully and deliberately and choose a position that is both appealing and sustainable over time.

The study provides a unique method to understand the current market structure and determine a target brand and its best competitive position.

The purpose of this paper is to review evidence on the impact of black tea on health, highlighting the role of flavonoids.

This review builds on previous systematic reviews by incorporating new studies on black tea and health published between 2004 and 2009.

Black tea was strongly associated with heart disease prevention by plausible mechanisms linked to flavonoid bioactivity. In vitro studies suggest that tea has anti‐cancer properties, but this needs to be confirmed by additional long‐term human studies. Emerging research indicates that tea may benefit cognitive function and weight management, although more studies are needed. Tea flavonoids are bioavailable with or without milk.

The benefits of tea drinking are of relevance to public health as tea is the main contributor to dietary flavonoids in Western countries. Consuming one to eight cups of black tea per day is associated with a reduced risk of chronic disease. Caffeine intakes at this level are moderate.

Energy production and distribution is undergoing a revolutionary transition with the advent of disruptive technologies such as the Internet of Energy (IoE), 5G and artificial intelligence (AI). IoE essentially involves automating and enhancing the energy infrastructure: the power grid from grid operators to energy generators and distribution utilities. The IoE also relies on powerful connectivity networks such as 5G, big data analytics and AI to optimise its operation. By incorporating the technology that employs ubiquitous devices such as smartphones, tablets or smart electric vehicles, it will be possible to fully exploit the potential of IoE using 5G networks. 5G networks will provide high speed connections between devices such as drones, tractors and cloud networks, to transfer huge amounts of sensor data. Additionally, there are many sources of isolated data across the main energy production units (generation, transmission and distribution), and the data is increasing at phenomenal rates. By applying AI to these data, major improvements can be brought at each stage of the energy production chain. Tying renewable energy to the telecommunications sector and leveraging on the potential of data analytics is something which is gaining major attention among researchers and industry experts. This chapter therefore explores the combination of three of the most promising technologies i.e. IoE, 5G and AI for achieving affordable and clean energy, which is SDG 7 in the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Consumption of breakfast is often associated with important health‐related behaviours. For example, skipping breakfast is related to obesity and eating breakfast is also correlated to cognitive, behavioural, and affective components. The purpose of this paper is to review the breakfast eating literature, and investigate the circumstances under which people consume breakfast, what is actually being consumed, and how much breakfast is eaten therefore.

This systematic review summarises the results from 24 studies which focus on who is eating what, where, and with whom.

All 24 of the included studies are of a self‐report nature, from which nine were analysed from second‐hand survey data. Sample sizes vary from 100 to a total of 35,119 with a reported participants' age range from two years old to 70 years of age. Ready‐to‐eat cereal and dairy foods are the most commonly consumed breakfast items across the studies. Between 1.7 and 30 per cent of participants are found to skip breakfast and approximately one‐quarter of the studies report that those with lower socio‐economic status, non‐whites, and females were the groups more likely to omit breakfast.

The evidence provided in this review suggests that there is still considerable variation in studies into breakfast consumption. This has implications for future research into breakfast eating if interventions are based on these studies.

There are very few systematic reviews detailing the quality, context, and content of breakfast consumption and the lack of consistency in the results show the need for further research to be conducted to find a degree of consistency in how breakfast should be defined and measured.

Micro-video platforms have gained attention in recent years and have also become an important new channel for merchants to advertise their products. Since little research has studied micro-video advertising, this paper aims to fill the research gap by exploring the determinants of micro-video advertising clicks. We form a micro-video advertising click prediction model and demonstrate the effectiveness of the multimodal information extracted from the advertisement producers, commodities being sold and micro-video contents in the prediction task.

A multimodal analysis framework was conducted based on real-world micro-video advertisement datasets. To better capture the relations between different modalities, we adopt a cooperative learning model to predict the advertising clicks.

The experimental results show that the features extracted from different data sources can improve the prediction performance. Furthermore, the combination of different modal features (visual, acoustic, textual and numerical) is also worth studying. Compared to classical baseline models, the proposed cooperative learning model significantly outperforms the prediction results, which demonstrates that the relations between modalities are also important in advertising micro-video generation.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study analysing micro-video advertising effects. With the help of our advertising click prediction model, advertisement producers (merchants or their partners) can benefit from generating more effective micro-video advertisements. Furthermore, micro-video platforms can apply our prediction results to optimise their advertisement allocation algorithm and better manage network traffic. This research can be of great help for more effective development of the micro-video advertisement industry.

Few studies illustrate how contextual effects (e.g. assimilation and contrast) in pay-per-click ad design may impact consumers' attitudes and purchase intention. To fill this research gap, the authors provide theoretical predictions and empirical evidence on how ad design may prompt an assimilation and/or a contrast effect that may influence consumers' attitudes toward the ad and the brand and purchase intention. They also investigate whether the impact of contextual effects on consumers' decisions depends on the level of vividness in the ad.

A 2 (vividness: dynamic motion vs. static page) × 2 (information design: assimilation vs. contrast) × 2 (aesthetic design: assimilation vs. contrast) between-subjects experimental design is used to examine the effects of vividness, information design and aesthetic design. Conditional process analysis is used to assess the mediating role of attitudes toward the ad and the brand in the relationship between contextual effects and purchase intention.

For dynamic ads (i.e. high vividness) but not for static ads (i.e. low vividness), combined information contrast and aesthetic contrast designs generate a more favorable attitude toward the brand and a higher purchase intention than do combined information assimilation and aesthetic assimilation designs. Notably, combined information contrast and aesthetic contrast designs have the strongest effects than any other combination of assimilation and contrast designs of information and aesthetics. Attitudes toward the ad and the brand are significant mediators between contextual factors and intention to purchase.

The study examines the effectiveness of online ads from a new theoretical angle based on the attributes of pay-per-click ads.

The results suggest that when advertisers decide to use dynamic ads, they should adopt a contrast design for both the ad information and its aesthetics.

This study fills a research gap in the contextual effects literature, including providing evidence of an underlying process in the relationship between certain contextual effects and purchase intent. It also extends previous findings of assimilation/contrast in information design to aesthetics design and advances the literature on vividness by examining a moderation effect of vividness.

This research aims to investigate the role of consumer resistance (CR), display advertising context, appeal and type of exposure for the successful launch of a brand into a new market.

To accomplish this goal, two experiments manipulated the digital context of advertising (congruent vs. incongruent), the advertising appeal (emotional vs. informative) and the type of exposure (incidental vs. forced) using an energy drink brand. In Study 1, data were collected from 80 participants using eye-tracking and an online questionnaire. In Study 2, a total of 138 participants visited a website with the targeted display ad and responded to an online questionnaire.

Overall, the results of two studies show that the relationship between CR and display advertising effectiveness is moderated by the advertising context and advertising appeal in incidental exposure, whereas only the advertising context moderates this relationship in forced exposure when launching a brand into a new market. Moreover, the study illustrates the importance of collecting subjective and objective data in advancing the knowledge and understanding of interactive marketing communications such as display advertising.

The study is a novel attempt within the well-established realm of interactive marketing and, specifically, of digital advertising to examine the persuasive effects of display ad features such as the context, appeal and exposure on display ad effectiveness, considering consumers' predispositions such as resistance to change.