The Impact of Social Media on Consumers’ Acculturation and Purchase Intentions

Social media has emerged as a significant and effective means of assisting and endorsing activities and communications among peers, consumers and organizations that outdo the restrictions of time and space. While the previous studies acknowledge the role of agents of culture change, it largely remains silent on the role of social media in influencing acculturation outcomes and consumption choices. This study uses self-administered questionnaire to collect data from 514 Turkish-Dutch respondents and examines how their use of social media affects their acculturation and consumption choices. This research makes a significant contribution to consumer acculturation research by showing that social media is a vital means of culture change and a driver of acculturation strategies and consumption choices. This study is the first to investigate the role of social media as an agent of culture change in terms of how it impacts acculturation and consumption. The paper discusses implications for theory development and for practice.     

Design and simulation of pyroelectric detectors with nanometer size spider-web for low thermal conductance

We report the design and simulation of uncooled pyroelectric detectors which utilizes a nanometer sized mesh or truss to support the suspended detector. Pyroelectric detector is a class of thermal detector in which the change in temperature causes the change in the spontaneous polarization in the sensing material. Ca modified lead titanate (PCT) was selected as the thermometer in the detector because of its high pyroelectric figure of merit. The design and simulation of pyroelectric detectors have been conducted by simulating the structure with Intellisuite™. Finite element method (FEM) was used to simulate the structural and thermal properties of the device. The simulated detectors had a spider web-like structure with each of the strut (ring) of spider web had a width of 100 nm. In the design, the pyroelectric detectors utilized Ni_0.8Cr_0.2 absorber, PCT sensing layer, Ti electrodes, Al₂O₃ structural layer to obtain low thermal conductance between the detector and Si substrate. Three different types of pyroelectric detectors were designed and analyzed. The first design had linear electrode and simple spider web support. The value of the thermal conductance of this detector was found to be 3.98 × 10⁻⁸ W/K. The second design had a longer thermal path than the first one and the thermal conductivity of this device was found to be 2.41 × 10⁻⁸ W/K. High detectivity was obtained by reducing the thermal conductance between the sensing layer and the substrate or the heat sink in the third design. The design was optimized for the best result by modifying the shape, dimension and thickness of various layers namely absorber, electrodes, sensing layer, and struts. The thermal conductance between the sensor and the substrate using the third design was found to be as low as 4.57 × 10⁻⁹ W/K which is significantly lower than previously reported values. The thicknesses of the web structure, web support, electrodes, sensing layer, and absorber of the final structure were 2, 1, 0.5, 2, and 0.2 µm respectively for this value of thermal conductance. The absorber diameter was 50 µm and the diameter of the spider web was 200 µm. A total of 80 struts with 100 nm width were used in the design.

     

Network-aware heuristics for inter-domain meta-scheduling in Grids

Grid computing generally involves the aggregation of geographically distributed resources in the context of a particular application. As such resources can exist within different administrative domains, requirements on the communication network must also be taken into account when performing meta-scheduling, migration or monitoring of jobs. Similarly, coordinating efficient interaction between different domains should also be considered when performing such meta-scheduling of jobs. A strategy to perform peer-to-peer-inspired meta-scheduling in Grids is presented. This strategy has three main goals: (1) it takes the network characteristics into account when performing meta-scheduling; (2) communication and query referral between domains is considered, so that efficient meta-scheduling can be performed; and (3) the strategy demonstrates scalability, making it suitable for many scientific applications that require resources on a large scale. Simulation results are presented that demonstrate the usefulness of this approach, and it is compared with other proposals from literature.     

Analysis of nutritional transport through a capillary: Normal and stenosed

Presented herein are the studies of nutritional transport from capillary to tissues in normal and stenosed arteries. The model incorporates modified Casson's fluid representation for the blood and symmetric stenosis has been assumed at some distance from the entry. Assessment of the severity of the disease could be made possible through the variation of a parameter named as retention parameter. Nutritional flux at the capillary wall is affected by the growing stenosis and its variation has been observed through a decreasing trend of the retention parameter from 1 to 0. Results for local variation of viscosity contrary to Fahraeus-Lindquist effect have been explained. Symmetry of the distribution of the wall shearing stress and resistance to flow and their growth with the developing stenosis is another important feature of this analysis. Taylor diffusivity coefficient increases considerably with growing stenosis and the nutritional transport to the deeper cells of the tissue will naturally decrease.     

The software architecture of a distributed problem‐solving environment

This paper describes the functionality and software architecture of a generic problem‐solving environment (PSE) for collaborative computational science and engineering. A PSE is designed to provide transparent access to heterogeneous distributed computing resources, and is intended to enhance research productivity by making it easier to construct, run, and analyze the results of computer simulations. Although implementation details are not discussed in depth, the role of software technologies such as CORBA, Java, and XML is outlined. An XML‐based component model is presented. The main features of a Visual Component Composition Environment for software development, and an Intelligent Resource Management System for scheduling components, are described. Some prototype implementations of PSE applications are also presented. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Bayesian estimation of Dirichlet mixture model with variational inference

In statistical modeling, parameter estimation is an essential and challengeable task. Estimation of the parameters in the Dirichlet mixture model (DMM) is analytically intractable, due to the integral expressions of the gamma function and its corresponding derivatives. We introduce a Bayesian estimation strategy to estimate the posterior distribution of the parameters in DMM. By assuming the gamma distribution as the prior to each parameter, we approximate both the prior and the posterior distribution of the parameters with a product of several mutually independent gamma distributions. The extended factorized approximation method is applied to introduce a single lower-bound to the variational objective function and an analytically tractable estimation solution is derived. Moreover, there is only one function that is maximized during iterations and, therefore, the convergence of the proposed algorithm is theoretically guaranteed. With synthesized data, the proposed method shows the advantages over the EM-based method and the previously proposed Bayesian estimation method. With two important multimedia signal processing applications, the good performance of the proposed Bayesian estimation method is demonstrated.     

基于红旗linux DC的维、汉、英多语种操作系统的设计与实现

本文初步地介绍了红旗Linux DC的国际化,本地化的概念,并分析与研究了红旗Linux DC的国际化和本地化的方法和算法。