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Along with the popularity of social network site, social commerce such as Facebook has rapidly become a promising platform to conduct online advertisings and business activities. Drawing from Latent State Trait theory (LST), we conducted an online experiment to empirically investigate the impact of information quality, picture of product presentation, the number of people’s “Like”, and impulsiveness on female customer’s urge to buy impulsively as well as the interaction effect of environmental cues and individual trait. The results showed that information quality, picture of product presentation, impulsiveness positively affected urge to buy impulsively. Contrary to our expectation, only information quality was found to interact with impulsiveness to jointly influence impulsive buying behavior, while the interaction of impulsiveness with product presentation and the number of like was insignificant. The findings not only help to enrich our understanding about important factors influencing impulse buying within Facebook B2C social commerce but also offer social commerce practitioners better strategy in selling their products and services, specifically for female customers.

PurposeTo provide better services to customers, especially immediate responses and 24/7 availability, businesses are implementing text-based automated conversational agents, i.e. chatbots on their social platforms and websites. Chatbots are required to not only provide customers with necessary consultancy and guidance but also communicate friendly and socially. Based on the cognitive fit theory, this study attempts to examine the role of chatbot as a decision aid and how the match between information presentation in forms of decisional guidance and communication style and the shopping task influences consumers' perceived cognitive fit and decision performance outcomes.Design/methodology/approachA 2 x 2 x 2 between subject online experiment was conducted to identify which kind of decisional guidance (suggestive and informative guidance) and communication style (task-oriented vs social-oriented style) are the most appropriate for each type of shopping task (searching vs browsing task).FindingsThe findings show that when customers interact with chatbots, they will perceive higher cognitive fit if the chatbots provide them with suggestive guidance and communicate in a friendly style especially when they perform a searching task.Originality/valueThis study is the first attempt to understand the role of chatbots as a decision aid to customers using the communicative language. This study also tries to explore the cognitive fit theory in a novel way, and we propose the information presentation in forms of communicative language rather than matrices, tables and graphs.

PurposeThis study aims at investigating the effects of two-way review system and how reach and richness of information influence the perceptions of risks and benefits among service providers and their intention to continue sharing their property on sharing economy.Design/methodology/approachTo generate the variance, a 2 × 2 × 2 full factorial experiment was conducted to collect data. The research model was then tested using the structural equation model technique.FindingsThe study finds that reach of information predicts the social and economic benefits among service providers, while richness of information negatively relates to perceived informational privacy risks, which, in turn, significantly influence the decision of the service providers to continue sharing. The results also suggest that the existence of the two-way review system weakens the effects of reach on perceived social benefits and of richness on perceived informational privacy risks.Originality/valueThe present study investigates the two-way review system as the intervention of platforms to protect the service providers. Also, the emphasis is on the service providers rather than on consumers on sharing economy platforms to investigate their behavioral intention as customers on such platforms.

Augmented Reality (AR) technology has been increasingly utilised in mobile shopping apps to enhance consumers’ mobile shopping experiences, thereby affecting consumers’ impulse buying behaviour. Drawing upon the Spatial Presence Theory and the Elaboration Likelihood Model, the current study aims to empirically investigate AR-related factors (vividness, spatial accuracy, local presence) and their impacts on impulse buying behaviour related factors (arousal, perceived diagnosticity, and urge to buy impulsively) in the context of AR mobile shopping apps. In this study, an experiment employing a full 2X2 factorial between-subject experimental design was carried out. There were a total of 137 participants actively involved in this experiment. The data analysis results and findings, along with the implications of this study, are provided in the paper.

In recent years, cruise travel has become an important branch of tourism. However, the existing cruise function system is designed based on the Western lifestyle and is not entirely suitable for Chinese tourists. Therefore, it is necessary to carry out user research on the usage preferences of Chinese tourists. Considering the specicularity and complexity of cruise space, this study adopts a novel user research method: Behavior Mapping (BM) method, which can be used to understand the unique behavior path of Chinese tourists and analyze their demands. In addition, the BM method was also used combined with the observation method and in-depth interview method in this study. The results show that BM is a good supplement to other research methods and can make the research results more comprehensive and accurate.

The research proposes an in-car entertainment system for children to relieve their in-car boredom and further enhance the travel experience. While more and more attention has already been paid on human-car interaction, there is still minimal research considering the interactions between back seat passengers and the car. Many parents reported the quality time they spent with their children in the car was invaluable [7, 23]. Due to the limited space of a vehicle, car traveling is a perfect opportunity to pull a family together and build the memory. However, the travel experience with children is usually not so pleasant for the parents. More than 60% of parents in the survey [6] admitted that traveling without children made them happier. Besides, driving with children also possibly compromise driving safety. We further executed user research to understand real users and their travel experience, especially with entertainment devices. As a result, we identified four significant pain points parents have been encountering. With the findings and insights, we generated the designs iteratively and finally proposed a system composed of three major components – 1. Mobile Application, 2. Interactive Block - BlokCar and 3. AR Interactive Window, to solve the problems, and more importantly, to enhance the riding experience for the children.

The visual analytics system HeatMosaic aims to reveal spatial-temporal patterns and uncertainty from a large dataset of crowd-sourcing disaster damage reports. The system consists of real-time monitoring and aftermath analysis tools does not empower fast discovering adversity and damage patterns and reliable removal of uncertainty, but also provides just-in-time scanning and rewinding on damage reports. This paper summarises the system's design and architecture, followed by the data interpretation and insights gained by adopting the system.

This study investigated how music tempo impacted drivers’ fatigue and quality of attention in a long-distance monotonous highway environment. Sixteen drivers were enrolled in four sessions of real-road driving tests under the following four music conditions: no music, slow tempo, medium tempo and fast tempo. Specifically, the drivers’ electroencephalogram parameters and eye movement parameters were recorded to measure their extent of fatigue and quality of attention, respectively. Of the three tempos, medium-tempo music is the best choice to reduce fatigue and maintain attention for a long-distance driving. Slow-tempo music can temporarily boost the quality of attention, but after a long period of driving, it significantly deteriorates the driver’s levels of fatigue and attention. Fast-tempo music helps relieve driver fatigue but significantly deteriorates drivers’ attention after an extended driving time. This study offered practical references for drivers regarding the use of music to avoid fatigue, maintain attention and improve their driving safety. Based on previous theories of music and driving, we have explored the underlying mechanism of how music tempo maintains the alertness of drivers.

Satisfaction plays an important role in creating loyalty to a tourism destination. However, ensuring consistent satisfactory trip experiences for tourists and increasing their revisit intention remain challenging for many international tourism destinations, including Myanmar. We conducted a survey with 465 international tourists visiting Myanmar. Results indicate that need gratification and flow can increase tourist satisfaction. The perceived risks of tourism destination can decrease tourist satisfaction. Satisfaction is an important factor to mediate the influence of need gratification, flow, and perceived risks. A tourist’s intention to revisit Myanmar can be largely improved by attending to these independent and mediating factors.

This study develops an integrated model from service-profit-chain model, privacy-trust-behavioral intention model, and expectancy-disconfirmation model to investigate the loyalty and profitability of very important person (VIP) and non-VIP customers in the banking service industry. Our results indicate that firm’s profitability is influenced by customer’s satisfaction and loyalty. Consumers’ privacy concerns decide their trust toward the firm. However, disconfirmation as a mediator of perception and expectation to satisfaction does not affect customers’ satisfaction.

In this human subject study about interaction with head-up displays (HUDs), the impacts of three types of HUDs (flag, perspective, and flag and perspective) on experienced and inexperienced drivers were subjectively and objectively measured. The driving experiment divided 60 participants into two groups (experienced and inexperienced) and assessed their driving experiences in real high- and low-level driving tasks using the three types of HUDs. During the subjective performance evaluation, the participants executed secondary display tasks and performed a primary driving task with eye-tracking and physiological monitoring. The flag and perspective display (display FP) and the perspective display (display P) were more effective in helping drivers execute simple tasks and complex tasks, and both experienced and inexperienced drivers were HUD-dependent. Based on the study, we provided an optimized design strategy for the HUD interface. Also, we suggest the HUD design should give special consideration for inexperienced drivers.

Social data from city level provides unprecedented opportunities to identify urban attributes from various angles. Citizens are likely to evaluate the quality of the neighborhood and make important decisions by their perceptions and the feedback from the environment. In this paper, we studied the correlation between the neighborhood's environment with their properties values and land values. It is profitable to train the algorithm by parallel deep convolutional neural networks on the visual urban scenes data associated with quantitative non-visual urban characteristics in the same views. The result of our approach defines a scenarized profile from building-level details to city-level traits. The main contribution of this work is providing a unique and more accurate perspective to urban valuation estimations, by integrating the scattered sources of pieces of information and implanting into the available images. This urban evaluation approach will be more human-centered, which can be extended to help urban planners and citizens to explore the significant impacts on city decision optimization or spatial economics-related issues like decreasing the cost of properties assessment.

In the face of increased cyber risks, we present our iterative design process and the resulting principles of SpringRain, an information visualization (infoVis) display design concept for large screens in network control rooms (NOCs). It aims to raise team situation awareness by visualizing large-scale multidimensional computer network data sets as a live “rainfall.” We used aesthetic principles and theories of perception to prototype this ambient, yet data-dense, visualization. By applying multiple data dimensions to different properties of a line segment, such as length, motion, and color, the two-dimensional visualization offers analytical affordances (i.e., graphic qualities that make it clear how the display should be “read”) that can be processed pre-attentively (i.e., under 200 ms). This grants that time-sensitive anomalies in the network can be noticed, processed, and addressed in a timely manner. Our design approach was driven by theories rather than existing design works in the hope of encouragi...

The purpose of this study is to explore the moderating effect of Big Five personality traits on the relationship between the predictors (need for affiliation, need for popularity, and self-esteem) and self-disclosure on Facebook. The sample of this study is 354 Facebook users from 5 different cultures in East Asia. A partial least square structural equation modeling data analysis technique was performed to analyze the moderator research framework. This study demonstrates that particular Big Five personality traits moderate each relationship. Specifically, Conscientiousness and Emotional Stability negatively moderate the relationship between need for affiliation and self-disclosure. Agreeableness negatively moderates the relationship between self-esteem and self-disclosure. Openness to New Experience negatively moderates the relationship between need for popularity and self-disclosure. The study suggests the importance of the interaction of personality variables to better understand self-disclosure phenome...

ContextThe information technology (IT) field presents a unique context for the management of multiple projects because of the variety of stakeholders involved, the complexity of interdependencies among projects, and the frequent use of external vendors. In practice, IT vendors typically employ advanced project governance techniques such as program management to work effectively with the numbers and variety of clients while still pursuing the benefits of a single oversight. These structural features lend themselves to conflict across teams with individual requirements. However, little research exists on program management, much less in the IT context, that represents conflict across IT project teams. ObjectiveIn this study, the effectiveness of conflict resolution on the implementation efficiency and fulfillment of business objectives is studied through the lens of constructive controversy theories. A number of hypotheses are derived by tailoring the constructive conflict resolution concepts to IT context and making a comprehensive literature review to identify the mediator and dependent variables. A model is developed to consider the management of conflict across multiple projects combined into a single program. MethodA quantitative questionnaire related to the program environment was developed for five variables to include conflict resolution, cognition-based trust, interpersonal cooperation, business objectives and implementation efficiency. The hypotheses were tested by performing a survey study, where a number of well-established measures in the literature were used. 92 paired responses from program teams in 38 organizations located in India were obtained and represent a variety of individual characteristics, and program sizes. ResultsThis study identified the composite role of constructive conflict resolution and cognition-based trust in improving interpersonal cooperation. The impacts of constructive conflict resolution on business objectives were not fully mediated by cognition-based trust and interpersonal cooperation, although implementation efficiency is fully mediated. ConclusionThe management of conflict promotes trust and interpersonal cooperation necessary to improve the efficient completion of the program and benefits to the organization.

The study proposes a model showing how trust influences the IS Success Model.The proposed model was applied in the context of e-government.The proposed model was used to examine the Philippine online tax system.Trust is a significant influence towards IS Success.Information quality is most influential among the quality dimensions. This study examines citizens' propensity to use e-governmental website services through the lens of the IS Success Model in general, and in the context of the Philippine online tax filing system. Additionally, attributes such as trust in technology, trust in government, trust in e-government websites, and prior experience with government services which act as important antecedents to the model are analyzed in this study. The results show that trust in technology, trust in government, and prior experience directly affected the trust in e-government websites, which in turn directly influenced all three IS quality dimensions. Of these three dimensions, information quality was found to be the most consistently and significantly influence perceptions of usefulness and satisfaction, implying that this dimension is the most critical one beyond the service quality and system quality for taxpayers to use the system. Generally speaking, Philippine taxpayers do value the online system, indicating the fact that the current system does have some potential to elicit favorable perceptions on usefulness, satisfaction, and subsequent net benefits. Other theoretical and managerial implications are further discussed.

This study investigates the factors that affect e-loyalty in e-commerce websites. The e-loyalty model proposed in this study is based on DeLone and McLean's IS Success Model. E-loyalty is explained using three independent factors (information quality, system quality, and service quality), and two mediating factors (trust and customer satisfaction). The proposed model was tested with Thai and Taiwanese samples using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) data analysis. The study yielded different results when Thai and Taiwanese samples were tested using SEM multi-group moderation data analysis. This study incorporated the concepts of national identity (NATID) and Hofstede's five cultural dimensions to better explain cultural differences between the two countries and how culture can affect the e-commerce environment.

Perceived utility is among the many factors that influence a buyer's purchase intention in online auctions. In this study, the authors examined a model for the predictors of perceived utility and perceived product quality. The results show that the single most dominant predictor for perceived product quality is the perceived seller quality, followed by perceived price gap. Perceived price gap outweighs perceived product quality and seller quality as the most influential predictor for perceived utility. The role that product information sufficiency plays is not significant enough to impact perceived product quality. Nor does it have an effect on the final perceived utility. Several managerial implications are discussed.

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to propose two additions to the existing IS success model to influence usefulness and satisfaction, and ultimately customer loyalty. This study posits that process quality and collaboration quality will significantly influence perceptions on satisfaction, since both considerations are expected to improve interactions between the organization and its customers.Design/methodology/approachThe developed research model was tested in the context of B2B e‐commerce users, employing structural equation modelling‐partial least square to analyze and test the research hypotheses.FindingsResults show that adding process and collaboration quality to the model affects the way system, information, and service quality influences usefulness and satisfaction, suggesting a shift in perspectives and priorities when it comes to B2B e‐commerce transactions. Furthermore, results show that process and collaboration quality have significant effects on usefulness and satisfaction, reinforcing the objective of using B2B e‐commerce systems across supply chain members.Practical implicationsThis highlights the importance of improving business processes and enhancing collaboration activities, implying that managers should focus their efforts into enhancing customer service on top of system functionalities and features via B2B to better work with their supply chain partners. However, this study is limited in the context of a Taiwanese supply chain, suggesting that further research consider its applicability in different contexts, culturally and geographically, especially given the fact that B2B e‐commerce enables cross‐border business operations.Originality/valueThis study also extends the IS success model, especially in the context of B2B e‐commerce, by emphasizing behavioural considerations on top of the functional issues present in any information systems.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relations of information, organisation and environment on the supply chain partner’s commitment using data from the auto parts industries listed in the Taiwan External Trade Development Council. Low levels of environmental uncertainty within the context of supply chain relationships with higher levels of intraorganisational facilitators and interorganisational relationships will have influence on the level of information sharing, quality and availability. As expected, it was found that there is a positive relationship between the level of information sharing, quality and availability, and the level of trust. Additionally, it was also found that there is a positive relationship between levels of trust and commitment in supply chain relationships.

Visual conventions are perceptually efficient graphic agreements with common-sense like referents and are commonly used in what we interact with in daily life. It becomes a studying-worthy issue on whether such conventions can enhance performances and reduce cognitive load when we perceive and reason about new knowledge. Furthermore, whether the visual conventions can affect experts, who have prior knowledge and design experience about different visual encoding principles the same degree as novice who have no background knowledge in this area, is another research focus in this study. Our research is carried out according to action features when we read visualizations. Four task features are extracted, based on which behavioral and eye-tracking measurement were conducted, that is data localization, simple and complex data comparison, and knowledge inference. Both expert and novice participants were enrolled in our experiment. The result indicates that conventional elements in visualizations can hugely improve performances in more complex tasks involving higher-level cognition, like making comparisons and reasoning about new knowledge. The performance improvement can be seen from shorter response time on achieving conclusions and higher accuracy rates. Meanwhile, cognitive load, which can be measured from shorter total fixation duration and fewer fixation counts in AOIs, is reduced through applying visually conventional features. No statistically significant difference is found in comparing perceptual and inferential outputs of expert and novice group. We draw conclusions that visual conventions in visualizations can better performance in relatively complex activities, and it can be equally perceived and acquired regardless of the user’s knowledge background is. What we conclude in this study can be extended to areas of dynamic data visualization and layout design in the digital interface domain.

Radial visualization is an important technique to depict serial periodic data. Circle clock design is intuitive to encode 24-hour cyclical data. However, the biggest limitation of the design is the accuracy of reading time points on circle. Dodecagon is another way to represent time series data. We empirically evaluated the effectiveness of circle and dodecagon clock design in perceiving specific points in time. A post-testing interview was also conducted to understand participants’ strategies to read the times. Results show that dodecagon is more accurate than circle in terms of reading time points. Dodecagon was voted as a powerful approach to read the time points and circle was regarded as a better beautiful visualization method.

Web technology is changing rapidly every day and the internet has become a lifestyle for people all over the world. The power of the web has changed the way people communicate and do business. With the advance of the internet era, a successful website becomes a critical factor for the success of most businesses. Website design is not only about the look of the website. There are many other factors to consider. A well-designed site can induce users to engage in the website, help them find what they are looking for, and understand where exactly they are on the website. This study investigates the user's perception disorientation, engagement, and intent to use a website in the future by manipulating these three basic factors into eight different experimental conditions. With 2x2x2 experimental design with content familiarity, site breadth, and media richness in website systems, this study suggests that both the main effects and the interaction effects of the experiment factors are significant. This implies that one or more factors can compensate for the weakness of other factors. Furthermore different people have preferences for different factors; therefore website design should not solely focus on a single factor, but should address all of these factors in accordance with the objective of the business.

PurposeThis study seeks to synthesize theories from communication, psychology and criminology to examine the factors that influence the two most popular topics in industry – internet abuse and addiction at the workplace.Design/methodology/approachThe survey results of 351 responses were analyzed to test the proposed hypotheses and research model using structural equation modeling. Data were collected in Southern Science Park in Taiwan.FindingsIt was found that personality factors such as locus of control and self‐esteem significantly influence employees' internet addictions; and internet addiction significantly impacts employees' internet abuse at the workplace.Practical implicationsEmployers should pay special attention to employees' personalities because they play important roles in internet addiction and internet abuse. Also a good internet policy will be useful especially to a panoptic working environment, which is becoming popular.Originality/valueThis study provides a comprehensive theoretical foundation to better understand the two controversial issues in industry. The empirical study validates the important theories of locus of control, self‐esteem, use and gratification, control, and containment in workplace surveillance and deviant behavior research.

Many elderly people are living apart from their children. We want to develop a system that can reinforce the connection and emotional feelings between aged parents and their children by combing new digital technologies with soft and warm leather material. Through an iterative design process that includes user interview and observation, design exploration, low-fidelity and high-fidelity prototypes, and usability testing, we present a small digital screen attached to an existing leather wallet of the aged parent to receive and display pictures or videos sent from their adult children. By attaching LINK, the old leather wallet serves as an invisible channel, sharing and connecting beautiful family memories without interrupting the private life of either side.

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to investigate human motivations affecting an adoption decision for smartphone among medical doctors and nurses.Design/methodology/approachThis study investigates smartphone users' perception based on users' perceived adoption under the self‐efficacy, technology acceptance model (TAM) and innovation attributes leading to an adoption attitude under innovation diffusion theory by providing research constructs for the domain of medical doctors and nurses, testing them with reliability and validity, and demonstrating their distinctiveness with hypothesis testing.FindingsThe results indicate that behavioral intention to use was largely influenced by perceived usefulness (PU) and attitude toward using smartphone. PU and perceived ease of use positively determine attitude toward using smartphone.Research limitations/implicationsFor researchers, this study shows the possible and valuable adaptation of TAM constructs into the smartphone acceptance of doctors and nurses. The perceptions of smartphone adoption in this study are based on a one‐time survey. For better reliability a longitudinal study to show the measurement of attitudes will be needed.Practical implicationsOne of the important implications is that organizational factors become a significant predictor of users' attitude toward innovative technologies.Originality/valueThe domain of research, smartphone, is a new technology in some industries; thus smartphone adoption deserves investigation in its own right. Although academic research of smartphone adoption in healthcare is limited, this study contributes to the field by adding an important new investigation.

Individual differences such as personality and demographic factors have effects on how people react to Electronic Performance Monitoring (EPM), yet the literature on this aspect of electronic monitoring has been scattered. The present paper summarizes this body of empirical research and presents a framework for organizing current research findings based on two dimensions: the probability of successful work under the monitoring and the probability of accepting that the monitoring is of value. The framework also allows researchers to make predictions regarding additional individual difference variables. Managers may use this information to select employees who are likely to respond well to monitoring conditions and to structure monitoring procedures so that they are likely to be accepted by their employees with particular individual difference characteristics.

Drug combination has been widely used in treating the most debilitating diseases such as cancer. The ideal drug-drug combination will broaden and/or deepen therapeutic efficacy while overcoming resistance and unwanted off-target effects. We have developed a 384-well combination compound plating method in 8×7 format (8 dilutions of Drug A and 7 dilutions of Drug B), and screened a number of compound pairs that showed synergistic effect in inhibiting tumor cell growth in either suspension or solid tumor lines. Compound vehicle DMSO was used as negative control and puromycin treatment as positive control for calculating% inhibition, and both HSA and Bliss independence synergy models were applied for calculating synergy scores. As 384-well 8×7 format contains one compound pair per plate, we aimed to increase the throughput by developing 384-well 5×5 format (5 dilutions of Drug A and 5 dilutions of Drug B) which contains 3 drug pairs per plate, and 1536-well 8×7 and 5×5 format which contains 4 and 12 drug pairs per plate, respectively. We compared EC50s and synergy scores generated from 384-well and 1536-well with both 8×7 and 5×5 formats, single agent EC50s within combination pairs were generally within 3 fold difference and synergy scores are largely consistent. Therefore, we have validated and enabled higher throughput drug-drug combination screen by using 384-well 5×5, 1536-well 8×7, or 5×5 format. The high-throughput method presented here can be readily adopted for combination studies in other disease areas. Citation Format: Yvonne Li, Mike Ma, Julie Chan, Yang Tian, Nikos Pagratis, Derek Stonich, Victor Chen, Louis Zhang, Mark Kenney. Developing 384-well and 1536-well cell growth inhibition assay workflow for screening drug-drug combination in tumor cell lines. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 107th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research; 2016 Apr 16-20; New Orleans, LA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2016;76(14 Suppl):Abstract nr 1354.

In this chapter, the authors will briefly discuss some cross cultural concerns regarding Internet privacy. The authors believe that due to the cross cultural nature of the Internet itself, different cultures will tend to result in different concerns regarding Internet privacy. As such, there is no single system of protecting Internet privacy that may be suitable for all cultures. The authors also utilize focus groups from various countries spanning Asia and the United States to discover the differences between cultures. Hopefully an understanding of such differences will aid in future research on Internet privacy to take a more culture sensitive approach.

With the fast growth of the Web, users often suffer from the problem of information overload, since many existing search engines respond to queries with many nonrelevant documents containing query terms based on the conventional search mechanism of keyword matching. In fact, both users and search engine developers had anticipated that this mechanism would reduce information overload by understanding user goals clearly. In this chapter, we will introduce some past research in Web search, and current trends focusing on how to improve the search quality in different perspectives of “what”, “how”, “where”, “when”, and “why”. Additionally, we will also briefly introduce some effective search quality improvements using link-structure-based search algorithms, such as PageRank and HITS. At the end of this chapter, we will introduce the idea of our proposed approach to improving search quality, which employs syntactic structures (verb-object pairs) to automatically identify potential user goals from search-result snippets. We also believe that understanding user goals more clearly and reducing information overload will become one of the major developments in commercial search engines in the future, since the amounts of information and resources continue to increase rapidly, and user needs will become more and more diverse.

Distributed embedded sensor networks are now being successfully deployed in environmental monitoring of natural phenomena as well as for applications in commerce and physical security. While substantial progress in sensor network performance has appeared, new challenges have also emerged as these systems have been deployed in the natural environment. First, in order to achieve minimum sensing fidelity performance, the rapid spatiotemporal variation of environmental phenomena requires impractical deployment densities. The presence of obstacles in the environment introduces sensing uncertainty and degrades the performance of sensor fusion systems in particular for the many new applications of image sensing. The physical obstacles encountered by sensing may be circumvented by a new mobile sensing method or Networked Infomechanical Systems (NIMS). NIMS integrates distributed, embedded sensing and computing systems with infrastructure-supported mobility. NIMS now includes coordinated mobility methods that exploits adaptive articulation of sensor perspective and location as well as management of sensor population to provide the greatest certainty in sensor fusion results. The architecture, applications, and implementation of NIMS will be discussed here. In addition, results of environmentally-adaptive sampling, and direct measurement of sensing uncertainty will be described.

Trust and privacy have been widely recognized as important issues in the field of electronic commerce. We propose a research model with trust and privacy as two endogenous variables along with other exogenous variables like independent self-construal, interdependent self-construal, technological knowledge, and Web site quality, that are expected to effect Internet consumers' trust level and privacy concerns.

This paper describes a laboratory experiment that investigated whether or not three online mediation strategies – rapport building, pressing, and inaction – were effective in promoting agreement when the opponent was trustful vs. distrustful. Students served as negotiators. A 2×4 factorial design varied the level of trust (high vs. low) that a pre-programmed opponent communicated while offering moderately competitive bargaining proposals. Pre-programmed mediator strategy was also varied (pressing, inaction, reflexive rapport-building, and a control condition of no messages). Dependent variables included: the value of the subject's offers; the evaluations of the mediation procedure and mediator behaviour (according to procedural justice concepts), using a post-mediation questionnaire. While neither trust nor mediator strategy significantly affected the concessions that the subjects offered, the results revealed that mediator strategy significantly influenced subjects' evaluations of the procedure and of the mediator.

Building on a model of loyalty and mutual trust offered by Das (2005), the present paper proposes that different forms of communication media are most appropriate for different levels of trust in supply chains. Specifically, visually-based media (e.g., face-to-face, videoconferencing) are most appropriate when seeking to first establish trust. Audio-based media (e.g., telephone, Voice over Internet Protocol) are appropriate for semi-stable relationships where trust has been established. Text-based media (e.g., e-mail, discussion lists) should be reserved for those relationships that are well-established and where trust levels are high. The paper issues a call for research to test this framework.

In 1992, Georgia unveiled the HOPE (Helping Outstanding Pupils Educationally) program, a merit-based scholarship for state residents funded entirely through a state lottery. Since then, the immense popularity of the program has induced many states to try and capture Georgia's success with their own lottery-funded scholarship program. While billed a success, there remain several questions about the effectiveness of the HOPE program. This article examines HOPE's impact and asserts that the program may not prove to be the unqualified success that many proponents claim.

The wing muscles used in singing by the katydid, Neoconocephalus robustus, are extraordinarily fast. At 35 degrees C, the animal's thoracic temperature during singing, an isometric twitch lasts only five to eight msec (onset to 50% relaxation) and the fusion frequency of these muscles is greater than 400 Hz. Stimulating the motornerve to a singing muscle initiates a short (2.5 msec at 35 degrees C), sometimes overshooting depolarization of the muscle fibers. Despite their spike-like appearance, the electrical responses are largely synaptic potentials. The muscle membrane appears to be capable of only weak, electrically-excitable, depolarizing electrogenesis. The short synaptic potentials result in part from rapidly-developing delayed rectification, in part from a low resting membrane resistance (Rm = 162 omega cm2) and a concomitantly short membrane time constant (about 1.5 msec).