Analysis of Intention to Use on Pay Later Payment System During COVID-19 Pandemic

This time around, technology development is growing at a very fast pace, especially in the area of information technology. It brings a lot of changes in other fields as well, like the field of financial technology. Digital payment, such as Pay later can be recognized by a large number of people. As the time goes by, the usage of Pay later has increased, and people would rather choose Pay later rather than other payment methods. Aside from that, since the COVID-19 pandemic, people tend to use Pay later more than before. Hence, this research will show the analysis of Intention to Use on Pay later payment system during COVID-19 Pandemic. The result in this study is based on 439 respondents that were obtained from November - December 2020 who are actively using Pay later to do transactions as a mobile payment method in Indonesia and collected by using SmartPLS as a tool for the Structural Equation Model (SEM), with a purposive sampling method. With the proposed model, there are eight hypotheses. In this study, Perceived Ease of Use has no siginificant impact on the Intention To Use, but other hypotheses resulted to be significant. © 2022 The authors.

Vaccination against upper respiratory infections is a matter of survival in Alcoholic Liver Disease

Background Chronic liver disease (CLD) patients, including those with ALD, are particularly susceptible to infections. Thus, respiratory infections such as seasonal flue or COVID 19 may be speculated to be a major threat to these patients. However, despite general recommendations for seasonal flu vaccinations systematic evaluations of the efficacy of such vaccinations are widely lacking. In the current pandemic, substantial evidence on the efficacy on vaccination against upper airway respiratory infection is essential to improve the outcome of patients with Alcoholic liver disease. Methods Evaluating a large cohort of patients with alcoholic liver disease form the USA with a total of 4667 patients, we investigated the efficacy of vaccination of patients with ALD. As quality of hepatological treatment may have significantly changed and improved over the past several decades the analysis was limited to the years 2000 to 2020. Results During the last decade vaccinations against several seasonal influenza A variants (H1N1 (p = 0.000), H3N2 (p = 0.000)), influenza B virus (p = 0.000), Massachusetts-2-2010-liver variant (p = 0.000), and B-Wisconsin-1-2010 (p = 0.006) variant all demonstrated a highly significant survival benefit for these patients. Discussion and Conclusion Vaccination against ongoing or seasonal viral upper airway infections improves survival of patients with ALD and should therefore be recommended and carried out consistently.

Detecting methanol in hand sanitizers.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has increased dramatically the demand for hand sanitizers. A major concern is methanol adulteration that caused more than 700 fatalities in Iran and U.S.A. (since February 2020). In response, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has restricted the methanol content in sanitizers to 0.063 vol% and blacklisted 212 products (as of November 20, 2020). Here, we present a low-cost, handheld, and smartphone-assisted device that detects methanol selectively in sanitizers between 0.01 and 100 vol% within two minutes. It features a nanoporous polymer column that separates methanol selectively from confounders by adsorption. A chemoresistive gas sensor detects the methanol. When tested on commercial sanitizers (total 76 samples), methanol was quantified in excellent (R2 = 0.99) agreement to "gold standard" gas chromatography. Importantly, methanol quantification was hardly interfered by sanitizer composition and viscosity. This device meets an urgent need for on-site methanol screening by authorities, health professionals, and even laymen.

Frontline Employees’ Display of Fake Smiles and Angry Faces: When and Why They Influence Service Performance

Service firms invest much to ensure authentic and positive emotion displays from frontline employees. And yet, inauthentic positive displays (fake smiles) remain common, and at times, employees even show authentic negative displays (e.g., anger), thereby compromising service performance. Customer reactions to such unwanted emotion displays are heterogeneous, so managers need to know when possible negative effects on service performance are more or less strong. The literature on customer reactions to inauthentic displays is inconclusive and focuses on the moment of service delivery. We shine light on how predelivery choice confidence shapes customer reactions to inauthentic positive displays and demonstrate that customers? high confidence in their service provider choice mitigates the negative effects of display inauthenticity. We present evidence in terms of tipping in a field study and replicate this interaction effect in three experiments. A serial mediation by cognitive dissonance and decision regret explains the conditional effect of inauthenticity. We also contrast inauthentic positive displays with authentic negative displays. The latter yield the worst service performance, unmitigated by choice confidence. We provide recommendations on how to ensure authentic positive displays (e.g., recruitment, resources, and rewards), taking into account circumstances that affect choice confidence and market shocks (e.g., the COVID-19 pandemic).

Sniffing Methanol in Hand Sanitizers (preprint)

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased dramatically the demand for hand sanitizers. A major concern is their adulteration with methanol that caused more than 700 fatalities in Iran and U.S.A. (since Feb. 2020). In response, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has restricted the methanol content in hand sanitizers to 0.063 vol% and blacklisted 194 products (as of Oct. 1, 2020). Here, we present a low-cost, handheld and smartphone-assisted device that detects methanol selectively in hand sanitizers between 0.01-100 vol% within two minutes by headspace analysis. It features a nanoporous polymer column that separates methanol from confounders by adsorption (i.e. van-der-Waals forces) rendering it selective. A chemoresistive gas sensor detects the methanol. When tested on seven pure and spiked commercial sanitizers (total 76 samples), methanol was quantified accurately, in excellent (R2 = 0.99) agreement to "gold standard" gas chromatography. Most importantly, methanol quantification was hardly interfered by different sanitizer compositions (e.g. 2-propanol, ethanol, butanone, glycerin, aloe vera essence, various odorants and colorants) and gel-like viscosity while other potential contaminants (e.g. 1-propanol) were recognized as well. This device meets an urgent need for distributed and on-site methanol screening by authorities (e.g. customs, police), health product distributers and even laymen.