The authority of fashion: The impact of brand credibility and gender blurring on attitudes towards gendered fashion advertisements

<p>Gender identity is increasingly accepted as a continuum. Consumers feel that they are no longer constrained by the norms of gendered consumptions, so they are expressing themselves and their identities through new purchase behaviours. Gender blurring refers to the crossing of gender boundaries, when masculine and feminine traits are swapped. This has been seen in the fashion industry, where brands are featuring male models in womenswear and vice versa. Despite the increasing usage of gender blurring in fashion campaigns, there is little empirical evidence as to how consumers respond to it. This study attempted to fill this gap in knowledge, investigating how brands that can utilise gender blurring in their advertising without eliciting negative consequences. Brand credibility influences the persuasiveness of advertising, and it is evident within luxury fashion brands and their ability to set fashion trends. In this study, a 3x2x2 between-subjects experimental design was used. Subjects were exposed to a fashion advertisement, featuring either a high- or low-credibility brand (Louis Vuitton or the Warehouse), with a male model wearing stereotyped, androgynous, or gender blurred clothing. The clothing was framed in either a work or casual context. As the purpose of the study was to assess responses irrespective of gender or social class, the sample was made up of adult consumers from New Zealand randomly assigned to experimental conditions. The findings indicate that overall consumers respond more negatively to gender blurring in fashion advertising, and more positively to advertising from a high-credibility brand. Interestingly, no main effect of context was found. The analysis suggests that brand credibility moderates the effect of gender blurring, as consumers exposed to gender blurring by the Louis Vuitton advertisements reported more positive attitudes than those in the Warehouse conditions. This normalising effect contributes to our understanding of cultural authority and the movement of meaning. High credibility brands have an authority over consumer culture, and thus can facilitate the movement of fringe issues, like gender blurring, into the mainstream, fostering wider acceptance. Managerially, marketers should be aware of the potential negative impacts of utilising gender blurring, and understand that brand credibility is an important factor.</p>

The authority of fashion: The impact of brand credibility and gender blurring on attitudes towards gendered fashion advertisements

<p>Gender identity is increasingly accepted as a continuum. Consumers feel that they are no longer constrained by the norms of gendered consumptions, so they are expressing themselves and their identities through new purchase behaviours. Gender blurring refers to the crossing of gender boundaries, when masculine and feminine traits are swapped. This has been seen in the fashion industry, where brands are featuring male models in womenswear and vice versa. Despite the increasing usage of gender blurring in fashion campaigns, there is little empirical evidence as to how consumers respond to it. This study attempted to fill this gap in knowledge, investigating how brands that can utilise gender blurring in their advertising without eliciting negative consequences. Brand credibility influences the persuasiveness of advertising, and it is evident within luxury fashion brands and their ability to set fashion trends. In this study, a 3x2x2 between-subjects experimental design was used. Subjects were exposed to a fashion advertisement, featuring either a high- or low-credibility brand (Louis Vuitton or the Warehouse), with a male model wearing stereotyped, androgynous, or gender blurred clothing. The clothing was framed in either a work or casual context. As the purpose of the study was to assess responses irrespective of gender or social class, the sample was made up of adult consumers from New Zealand randomly assigned to experimental conditions. The findings indicate that overall consumers respond more negatively to gender blurring in fashion advertising, and more positively to advertising from a high-credibility brand. Interestingly, no main effect of context was found. The analysis suggests that brand credibility moderates the effect of gender blurring, as consumers exposed to gender blurring by the Louis Vuitton advertisements reported more positive attitudes than those in the Warehouse conditions. This normalising effect contributes to our understanding of cultural authority and the movement of meaning. High credibility brands have an authority over consumer culture, and thus can facilitate the movement of fringe issues, like gender blurring, into the mainstream, fostering wider acceptance. Managerially, marketers should be aware of the potential negative impacts of utilising gender blurring, and understand that brand credibility is an important factor.</p>

Pemanfaatan Travel Writing Sebagai Sumber Informasi Bagi Wisatawan Nusantara

The era of information and communication technology provides opportunities and convenience for tourists to meet their needs of self-actualization by telling their experiences through writing, so-called travel writing. Travel writing can be used as a source of information to guide some potential tourists in planning their travels. Furthermore, it can also increase the number of domestic tourists’ visit to several tourist destinations spread across the nation. This research, through the descriptive qualitative approach, aims to thoroughly describe the phenomenon of the use of travel writing as the source of travel information. The informants in this research were 7 people. The data were collected through in-depth interview and questionnaire. The research results shows that magazines, newspapers and web portals have high credibility, while travel blogs have an objective and reliable. There were 5 characteristics of travel writing which expected by the reader such as simple writing, clear language, photo display, facts, and have value of benefits

Credibility of Different Agricultural Information Sources Utilized by Farm Women of Uttarakhand

Credibility of agricultural information sources affects the adoption of new or improved agricultural practices by farmers. Credibility refers to perceived trustworthiness accorded to a source by its audience at any given time and situation. Therefore, Credible sources of agriculture information play major role in diffusion of agriculture innovations. This study was carried out in Nainital district of Uttarakhand state with specific objective to explore the relative credibility of information sources as accorded by the farm women of the region. A sample of 120 farm women was selected by PPS (Probability proportional to size) sampling method. The agriculture information sources were categorized into three broad heads namely personal localite, personal cosmopolite and mass media. It was found that majority (62.5%) of respondents had „medium‟ credibility towards agriculture information sources followed by 20 per cent having low credibility and only 17.5 per cent had high credibility to different agriculture information sources. It was further found that family members, KVK officials and newspaper were considered as the most credible sources of agricultural information among personal localite, personal cosmopolite and mass media sources.

Genetic Diversity of Natural Morchella spp. from the Southern Gansu Province Based on rDNA-ITS, China

Background: China is a mainland country rich in natural Morchella spp. resources. At present, about half of the natural Morchella spp. in the world has been recorded in China. The current study was aimed at the classification and cultivation of Morchella spp. This study provided a more accurate molecular trait for the systematic classification of Morchella spp. in southern Gansu Province, China.Methods: From April to May 2019. Based on the molecular biological analysis of 16 natural Morchella spp. strains collected from the southern Gansu province, China. the ITS fragments between transcripts of the rDNA gene were amplified by PCR and sequenced.Result: The results of BLAST comparison according to GenBank showed that the 16 tested strains of Morchella spp. were classified into 5 species, which were M.angusticeps, M.esculenta, M.elata, M.crapssipes and M.conica. According to the molecular evolutionary trees constructed by the Maximum-Parsimony method (MP) and the Neighbour-Joining method (NJ), the topological structures of the two molecular evolutionary trees were similar and the Bootstrap verification had a high support rate, indicating that the phylogenetic relationship had high credibility.

Evaluation of E-exam during Covid-19

Electronic exam's' non-reliability is one of the most critical gaps in this type of exam, whereas any electronic exam is considered entirely unreliable. In addition to that, it is not protected and free from cheat. The continuous validation that the examinee is the one who solves the questions of the electronic exam permanently and continuously is the most crucial goal of this research. Many methods and procedures will be discussed, which will protect the validity of this type of exam. For example, one of these methods matches the student's fingerprint and takes random snapshots while taking the electronic exam in more than one format. In this research, it's proposed to use student handwriting during the electronic exams to built the value of validity. This way is considered one of the rare methods in the electronic exam. The research also tackles the process of reality for electronic exams through a fingerprint during the examination period. It takes random snapshots for the student without paying attention to him or appearing those pictures to the observer or correcting the exam. The difficulty of offering a safe and high-credibility exam and reducing the phenomenon of cheating requires excellent capabilities in some countries. It also needs prior arrangements and good preparation. It also needs to develop technological capabilities continuously in a high-cost material that may reduce the cheating rates in such a kind of exam.

Q -Learning-Based High Credibility and Stability Routing Algorithm for Internet of Medical Things

With the outbreak of COVID-19, people’s demand for using the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) for physical health monitoring has increased dramatically. The considerable amount of data requires stable, reliable, and real-time transmission, which has become an urgent problem to be solved. This paper constructs a health monitoring-enabled IoMT network which is composed of several users carrying wearable devices and a coordinator. One of the important problems for the proposed network is the unstable and inefficient transmission of data packets caused by node congestion and link breakage in the routing process. Based on these, we propose a Q -learning-based dynamic routing selection (QDRS) algorithm. First, a mathematical model of path optimization and a solution named Global Routing selection with high Credibility and Stability (GRCS) is proposed to select the optimal path globally. However, during the data transmission through the optimal path, the node and link status may change, causing packet loss or retransmission. This is a problem not considered by standard routing algorithms. Therefore, this paper proposes a local link dynamic adjustment scheme based on GRCS, using the Q -learning algorithm to select the optimal next-hop node for each intermediate forwarding node. If the selected node is not the same as the original path, the chosen node replaces the downstream node in the original path and so corrects the optimal path in time. This paper considers the congestion state, remaining energy, and mobility of the node when selecting the path and considers the network state changes during packet transmission, which is the most significant innovation of this paper. The simulation results show that compared with other similar algorithms, the proposed algorithm can significantly improve the packet forwarding rate without seriously affecting the network energy consumption and delay.

Cyber-Physical System (CPS) Application- A REVIEW

Due to its vast number of suitable applications, Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) has been one of the emerging and rapidly-developed technologies in modern life. Its applications can be integrated and deployed in numerous sectors, for instance the automobile, home appliances, medical and industrial sectors. This field has seen immense development and research taking place, including the architecture model, security, communications mode, control systems model and also signal processing. CPS plays an important role in Industrial Revolution 4.0, where it is an integration of urbane network with intelligent production or process system. CPS main objective is to control the global networks with high credibility of data secured. This paper is basically a review of the CPS architectures, characteristics and its applications in daily basis. This review paper discusses how CPS are implemented in various industries and how it improves the efficiency of a system or application. Additionally, security enhancements in certain aspects of CPS application will also be reviewed and addressed.

Credibility Based Imbalance Boosting Method for Software Defect Proneness Prediction

Imbalanced data are a major factor for degrading the performance of software defect models. Software defect dataset is imbalanced in nature, i.e., the number of non-defect-prone modules is far more than that of defect-prone ones, which results in the bias of classifiers on the majority class samples. In this paper, we propose a novel credibility-based imbalance boosting (CIB) method in order to address the class-imbalance problem in software defect proneness prediction. The method measures the credibility of synthetic samples based on their distribution by introducing a credit factor to every synthetic sample, and proposes a weight updating scheme to make the base classifiers focus on synthetic samples with high credibility and real samples. Experiments are performed on 11 NASA datasets and nine PROMISE datasets by comparing CIB with MAHAKIL, AdaC2, AdaBoost, SMOTE, RUS, No sampling method in terms of four performance measures, i.e., area under the curve (AUC), F1, AGF, and Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC). Wilcoxon sign-ranked test and Cliff’s δ are separately used to perform statistical test and calculate effect size. The experimental results show that CIB is a more promising alternative for addressing the class-imbalance problem in software defect-prone prediction as compared with previous methods.

A new approach for the identification of gas hydrate in marine sediments

It has always been the focus of researchers to accurately identify gas hydrate location. Geophysical prospecting is a widely used method for gas hydrate exploration, which has high credibility, especially seismic exploration technology is most generally used. In our study, we analyze the different physical properties of gas hydrate and other minerals bearing in unconsolidated marine sediments based on the effective medium theory. Then, a new attribute is put forward to discriminate gas hydrate. The logging data in the Dongsha area of the South China Sea and the Hydrate Ridge along the Oregon continental margin are applied to validate this method. Our test results are basically in line with actual situation, which provides a new approach in hydrate identification.