Cleaning up wastewater from domestic sewage and industrial processes is essential for safeguarding public health and the environment (for an overview of wastewater treatment processes see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Sewage_treatment). Biological wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) employing sludge represent one of the most widely used biotechnological processes, with more than 120 billion lit...

brand has been considered as one of the most important intangible assets of organizations. development of relationship between customer and brand has transformed to one of the most important strategies of the organizations which raise effective results for them. this research intends to examine role and effect of social websites on development of customer relationship and brand in firms listed ...

Proprietary brands are a major vehicle for producer profits: consumers have been shown willing to pay a considerable “brand premium” for a branded product over an otherwise identical unbranded product. Prior literature has implicitly assumed that only producers develop brands. In this paper, we report that user communities also can and do develop strong proprietary brands capable of commanding ...

Environmental microbial communities are known to be highly diverse, often comprising hundreds and thousands of different species. Such great complexity of these populations, as well as the fastidious nature of many of the microorganisms, makes culture-based techniques both inefficient and challenging to study these communities. The analyses of such communities are best accomplished by the use o...

Discrete choice models such as the multinomial logit assume that consumers choose from the full set of alternatives available to them. However, because (i) consumers may not be able to recall or recognize available brands, (ii) consumers may not have the cognitive capacity or mental energy to process information pertaining to all available brands, or (iii) careful consideration of all available...

plexity. This conclusion is conceptually similar to our own, and it little alters the broader impacts of our published findings; still, the general relevance of the issues warrants a response. In their reanalysis, Gutierrez-Ibanez et al. [2016] perform a ‘residual analysis’, which regresses body weight on brain weight with phylogenetic generalized least squares (PGLS) to obtain size-corrected r...

Despite the potential of cellular RNA as a tool for the study of bacterial activities in natural environments, cellular RNA has rarely been measured because of methodological limitations. In a previous study, we quantitatively analyzed single-cell RNA content with multiple 16S rRNA-targeted fluorescent probes. In the present study, we explore the potential of this approach with 12 samples of na...

Brand image measures using the typical ‘pick any’ answer format have been shown to be unstable (Rungie et al . 2005) . In the present study, we find that these poor stability results are mainly caused by the pick-any measure itself because it allows consumers to evade reporting true associations . Using a forcedchoice binary measure, we find that stable brand attribute associations are in fact ...

Open online brand communities represent a significant potential for innovative ideas. Companies are seeking ways to utilize this source of information and knowledge and to promote knowledge exchange between the company and active members of open online brand communities. In open online brand communities, members voluntarily contribute and control their knowledge. For this research, we collected...