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The objective of the present study was to investigate the impacts of familiarity with and awareness of Florida as a snowbird destination, and satisfaction with the snowbird experience on Florida's image and on snowbirds' permanent relocation intention to Florida. Additionally, the influence of Florida's image on snowbirds' behavioral intention to move to Florida permanently was investigated.

Data gathered from 304 snowbirds were utilized in employing structural equation modeling to assess the research model.

The study results showed that awareness of and familiarity with Florida as a snowbird destination, and satisfaction with the snowbird experience significantly influenced participants' image perceptions of Florida. In addition, awareness of and familiarity with Florida as a snowbird destination, and participants' image of Florida had a significant influence on snowbirds' intentions to move to Florida permanently.

The findings of the study provide significant insights for destination marketing and management organizations and local policymakers in formulating and enacting policies in snowbird destinations to efficiently address migration trends.

This study is one of the first papers to empirically investigate and successfully construct a comprehensive model that explicate the determinants of snowbird tourists' permanent relocation intention.

Resident satisfaction is a catalyst for continuing care retirement communities (CCRCs) to enhance their competitiveness in the expanding senior living market. CCRC attributes play an imperative role in resident satisfaction when older adults reside in these communities. The purpose of this study was to identify the attributes that affect CCRC resident satisfaction and quantify their relative levels of importance. In addition, the impact of resident satisfaction on word of mouth (WOM) and satisfaction with life was examined.

The proposed hypotheses were tested by performing structural equation modeling on the data collected from 332 CCRC residents throughout the USA.

The study results revealed that all 10 of the CCRC attributes identified in this study significantly influenced resident satisfaction. Sociopsychological factors had the strongest influence on resident satisfaction, followed by cost and value, medical services, availability of activities, food and beverage services, design, rooms, management and staff, location, and spiritual environment. The study results further indicated that resident satisfaction had a positive impact on WOM and satisfaction with life.

This study provides significant practical implications for CCRC owners and operators to help them better identify the types of CCRC attributes and their relative levels of importance for resident satisfaction.

This study is one of the first comprehensive studies to identify CCRC attributes associated with resident satisfaction and examine the impact of resident satisfaction on satisfaction with life within the senior living field.

The purpose of this study is to propose a modeling method of the equivalent circuit for a new type of high-temperature superconducting partial-core transformer (HTS-PCT) made of ReBCO-coated conductors.

The modeling process is based on the “Steinmetz” equivalent circuit. The impedance components in the circuit are obtained by the calculations of the core losses and AC losses of the HTS windings by using theoretical methods. An iterative computation is also used to decide the equivalent resistances of the AC losses of the primary and secondary HTS windings. The reactance components in the circuit are calculated from the energy stored in the magnetic fields by finite element method. The validation of the modeling method is verified by experimental results

The modeling method of the equivalent circuit of HTS-PCT is valid, and an equivalent circuit for HTS-PCT is presented.

The equivalent circuit of HTS-PCT could be obtained by the suggested modeling method. Then, it is easy to analyze the characteristics of the HTS-PCT by its equivalent circuit. Moreover, the modeling method could also be useful for the design of a specific HTS-PCT.

The study proposes a modeling method of the HTS-PCT made of the second-generation HTS tapes, i.e. ReBCO-coated conductors.

Visual object tracking plays a significant role in intelligent robot systems. This study aims to focus on unlocking the tracking performance potential of the deep network and presenting a dynamic template update strategy for the Siamese trackers.

This paper presents a novel and efficient Siamese architecture for visual object tracking which introduces densely connected convolutional layers and a dynamic template update strategy into Siamese tracker.

The most advanced performance can be achieved by introducing densely connected convolutional neural networks that have not yet been applied to the tracking task into SiamRPN. By using the proposed architecture, the experimental results demonstrate that the performance of the proposed tracker is 5.8% (area under curve), 5.4% expected average overlap (EAO) and 3.5% (EAO) higher than the baseline on the OTB100, VOT2016 and VOT2018 data sets and achieves an excellent EAO score of 0.292 on the VOT2019 data set.

This study explores a deeper backbone network with each convolutional network layer densely connected. In response to tracking errors caused by templates that are not updated, this study proposes a dynamic template update strategy.

In complex environments, a spherical robot has great application value. When the pendulum spherical robot is stopped or disturbed, there will be a periodic oscillation. This situation will seriously affect the stability of the spherical robot. Therefore, this paper aims to propose a control method based on backstepping and disturbance observers for oscillation suppression.

This paper analyzes the mechanism of oscillation. The oscillation model of the spherical robot is constructed and the relationship between the oscillation and the internal structure of the sphere is analyzed. Based on the oscillation model, the authors design the oscillation suppression control of the spherical robot using the backstepping method. At the same time, a disturbance observer is added to suppress the disturbance.

It is found that the control system based on backstepping and disturbance observer is simple and efficient for nonlinear models. Compared with the PID controller commonly used in engineering, this control method has a better control effect.

The proposed method can provide a reliable and effective stability scheme for spherical robots. The problem of instability in real motion is solved.

In this paper, the oscillation model of a spherical robot is innovatively constructed. Second, a new backstepping control method combined with a disturbance observer for the spherical robot is proposed to suppress the oscillation.

The purpose of this paper is to present a novel gradient‐based iterative algorithm for the joint diagonalization of a set of real symmetric matrices. The approximate joint diagonalization of a set of matrices is an important tool for solving stochastic linear equations. As an application, reliability analysis of structures by using the stochastic finite element analysis based on the joint diagonalization approach is also introduced in this paper, and it provides useful references to practical engineers.

By starting with a least squares (LS) criterion, the authors obtain a classical nonlinear cost‐function and transfer the joint diagonalization problem into a least squares like minimization problem. A gradient method for minimizing such a cost function is derived and tested against other techniques in engineering applications.

A novel approach is presented for joint diagonalization for a set of real symmetric matrices. The new algorithm works on the numerical gradient base, and solves the problem with iterations. Demonstrated by examples, the new algorithm shows the merits of simplicity, effectiveness, and computational efficiency.

A novel algorithm for joint diagonalization of real symmetric matrices is presented in this paper. The new algorithm is based on the least squares criterion, and it iteratively searches for the optimal transformation matrix based on the gradient of the cost function, which can be computed in a closed form. Numerical examples show that the new algorithm is efficient and robust. The new algorithm is applied in conjunction with stochastic finite element methods, and very promising results are observed which match very well with the Monte Carlo method, but with higher computational efficiency. The new method is also tested in the context of structural reliability analysis. The reliability index obtained with the joint diagonalization approach is compared with the conventional Hasofer Lind algorithm, and again good agreement is achieved.

The characteristics of spherical robots, such as under-drive, non-holonomic constraints and strong coupling, make it difficult to establish its motion control model accurately. To improve the anti-interference performance of spherical robots in practical engineering, this paper proposes a spherical robot motion controller based on auto-disturbance rejection control (ADRC) with parameter tuning.

This paper considers the influences of the spherical shell, internal frame and pendulum on the movement of the spherical robot during the rotation to establish the multi-body dynamics model of the XK-I spherical robot. Due to the serious coupling problem of the dynamic model, the motion control state equation is constructed using linearization and decoupling. The XK-I spherical robot PSO-ADRC motion controller with parameter tuning function is designed by combining the state equation with the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. Finally, experiments are performed to evaluate the feasibility of PSO-ADRC in an actual case compared to ADRC, PSO-PID and PID.

By analyzing the required time to reach the expected value, the control stability and the fluctuation range of the standard deviation after reaching the expected value, the superiority of PSO-ADRC to ADRC, PSO-PID and PID is demonstrated in terms of the speed and anti-interference ability.

The proposed method can be applied to the robot control field.

A parameter-tuning method for auto-disturbance-rejection motion control of the spherical robot is proposed. According to the experimental results, the anti-interference ability of the spherical robot moving on uneven ground is improved. Therefore, it provides a foundation for the autonomous environmental monitoring of the spherical robot equipped with sensors.

Nowadays, the rapid growth of information technology strategies such as cloud computing is very noticeable in organizations. The advantages of the cloud environment are unavoidable because of an increase in innovation, flexibility and economy. Therefore, the critical topic is considering the factors affecting the adoption of cloud computing. This study aims to understand the factors of the adoption of cloud computing and its benefit in companies.

A research framework with four hypotheses has been developed based on the results of previous studies. Structural equation modeling has been used for data analysis.

The proposed model is verified by the results. In addition, the results have shown that cloud computing adoption is affected by four variables as follows, including human factor (with sub-indicator personal innovativeness and knowledge), organizational factor (with sub-indicator size, adequacy of resources and top management support), technical factor (with sub-indicator compatibility and security) and environmental factor (with sub-indicator regulatory environment, competitive pressure and trading partner).

There are crucial implications in the findings: they have an essential contribution to the research community, administrators and Information and Communications Technology providers with respect to framing improved tactics for the adoption of cloud computing. The proposed model can enhance the perception of service providers about why some services sectors accept cloud computing amenities, whereas apparently the same ones having the same market situations do not. In addition, the above providers should enhance their interaction with the services sectors contributed to the cloud computing experience to make a well-organized setting for the adoption of cloud computing, and eliminate any ambiguity about this sort of technology. Moreover, the sample has been limited to Iran respondents.

The research studies about the usage of cloud computing have shown its effects on organizations today. Also, the different impacts of cloud computing on other contexts and organizations are in the center of attention. By carefully considering and managing cloud computing adoption logics, organizations could get significant advantages.

Cloud computing’s technical and operational issues have been central in most of the previous studies. Some surveys have referred to the adoption of cloud computing by the organizations in terms of human characteristics or the contextual factor. Therefore, there should be a model and outline to assess the effect of aforesaid factors on cloud computing adoption.

The purpose of this paper is to maraging 18Ni-300 steel fabricate by powder bed based selective laser melting (SLM) process. Microstructure and mechanical properties of the maraging steel part before and after heat treatment at a slow cooling rate were investigated.

The microstructure of the printed part was observed by optical microscopy and scanning electron microscopy. The phases were determined by X-ray diffraction. The surface roughness of the part was recorded by a profilometer. The tensile properties and microhardness of the parts before and after heat treatment were characterized by an electronic universal tensile testing machine and a Vickers hardness tester, respectively.

Maraging 18Ni-300 steel part comprised of the martensitic phase and a small fraction of austenite phase. After heat treatment, the volume fraction of austenite slightly increased. The surface roughness of the part was about 96 µm. The printed part was dense, but irregular pores were present. The yield strength, ultimate tensile strength (UTS), elongation and Young’s modulus of as-fabricated parts were 554.7 MPa, 1173.1 MPa, 10.9% and 128.9 GPa, respectively. The yield strength, UTS, elongation and Young’s modulus of as-treated parts were 2065 MPa, 2225 MPa, 4.2% and 142.5 GPa, respectively. The microhardness values of surface and cross-section of the as-fabricated part were 407.1 HV and 443.0 HV, respectively. After short-time heat treatment, the microhardness values of the surface and cross-section of the part were 542.7 HV and 567.3 HV, respectively. After long-time heat treatment, the microhardness values of the surface and cross-section of the part were 524.4 HV and 454.8 HV, respectively. The microhardness and tensile strength increased significantly with decreasing elongation due to the changes in phases and microstructure of the parts after heat treatment.

This work studied the effect of heat treatment at 550°C combined with a subsequent slow cooling rate on microstructure and mechanical properties of maraging 18Ni-300 steel obtained by the powder bed based SLM process.

Entrepreneurship researchers use various types of screening criteria to select samples for study. In that selecting these criteria is, in effect, choosing a definition or model of entrepreneurship, the consequences are immense and have had a direct impact on the generalizability of research and theory development in our field. The purpose of this study is to help entrepreneurship researchers better understand these consequences and, thereby, improve our understanding of entrepreneurial phenomenon. Four of the most commonly used screening criteria are included in this study: firm age, firm size, firm growth, and innovation. Based on a sample of 368 manufacturing firms, the results indicate that few firms fit all or even most of the considered screening criteria and independent-dependent variable relationships vary considerably by screening criteria selection.