How purchase intention consummates purchase behaviour: the stochastic nature of product valuation in electronic commerce

This study challenges the conventional assumption that online customers with high purchase intention routinely move to the purchase stage. To this end, the process of how online customers form purchase intention and behaviour is examined. On the basis of product value distribution (PVD), we propose that the hypothetically expected product value (i.e. PVD average) determines purchase intention, whereas the actual probability of attaining the expected product value (i.e. PVD variance) moderates purchase behaviour. This proposal indicates that the expected product value has significance only when repeated purchase is assumed given that most consumers do not repeatedly purchase the same product in reality. Thus, the actual probability of attaining the expected product value more critically affects customer behaviour than does its expected value. The effectiveness of the research model is verified by conducting a survey on 300 online mall shoppers in Korea. The results confirm model effectiveness.     

A timing controller embedded driver IC with 3.24‐Gbps eDP interface for chip‐on‐glass TFT‐LCD applications

This paper presents a timing controller embedded driver (TED) IC with 3.24‐Gbps embedded display port (eDP), which is implemented using a 45‐nm high‐voltage CMOS process for the chip‐on‐glass (COG) TFT‐LCD applications. The proposed TED‐IC employs the input offset calibration scheme, the zero‐adjustable equalizer, and the phase locked loop‐based bang‐bang clock and data recovery to enhance the maximum data rate. Also, the proposed TED‐IC provides efficient power management by supporting advanced link power management feature of eDP standard v1.4. Additionally, the smart charge sharing is proposed to reduce the dynamic power consumption of output buffers. Measured result demonstrates the maximum data rate of 3.24 Gbps from a 1.1 V supply voltage with a 7.9‐inch QXGA 60‐Hz COG‐LCD prototype panel and 44% power saving from the display system.     

Page segmentation using minimum homogeneity algorithm and adaptive mathematical morphology

Document layout analysis or page segmentation is the task of decomposing document images into many different regions such as texts, images, separators, and tables. It is still a challenging problem due to the variety of document layouts. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid method, which includes three main stages to deal with this problem. In the first stage, the text and non-text elements are classified by using minimum homogeneity algorithm. This method is the combination of connected component analysis and multilevel homogeneity structure. Then, in the second stage, a new homogeneity structure is combined with an adaptive mathematical morphology in the text document to get a set of text regions. Besides, on the non-text document, further classification of non-text elements is applied to get separator regions, table regions, image regions, etc. The final stage, in refinement region and noise detection process, all regions both in the text document and non-text document are refined to eliminate noises and get the geometric layout of each region. The proposed method has been tested with the dataset of ICDAR2009 page segmentation competition and many other databases with different languages. The results of these tests showed that our proposed method achieves a higher accuracy compared to other methods. This proves the effectiveness and superiority of our method.     

Retracted: Antecedents and Consequences of Gender Swapping in Online Games

This study examines the reasons underlying gender swapping and its impacts on online gaming behavior. While previous studies considered gender swapping to be an abnormal or rare exception in one's self‐presentation, this study hypothesized that people swap genders as a rational choice based on practical benefits. An online survey was conducted with 318 male players of MMORPGs in Korea. Players swapped gender in games to gain benefits from other players under the condition of anonymity rather than to represent their own gender identity. Men playing female avatars displayed more socially amiable behaviors conventionally characterized as more feminine. Moreover, players were more willing to purchase virtual goods to decorate their gender swapped avatars, mediated by their emotional attachment to their avatar.     

Analysis of TRIPS Agreement and the justification of international IP rights protection in the WTO's multilateral trading system,with particular reference to pharmaceutical patents

The entry of the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement has seen the developing countries and the least developed countries (LDCs) suffer from the excessive burden of obligations imposed under the Agreement to embrace and implement a higher standard of intellectual property (IP) protection. One of the areas where the impact of the measures is most felt is on accessibility to affordable medicines for frontline treatment of diseases in developing countries and LDCs, where the majority of the HIV/AIDS sufferers come from. This inevitable plight, although well known, and posited by the developing countries and LDCs during the Uruguay round of negotiations, was overlooked. This also necessitated the Doha Deceleration, which does not seem to have addressed the problem. The developed countries have also successfully utilised the TRIPS Agreement's IP rights protection criteria as a benchmark, to develop a much higher IP rights protection agenda through the introduction of TRIPS-plus provisions in bilateral and other multilateral agreements entered into with developing countries. The winners in the game are the patent-holding pharmaceutical corporations, software corporations, media corporations, and the developed countries where they are incorporated. The ones at the receiving end are the developing countries and the LDCs who were promised technology transfer to build a modern economy by the developed countries, but are faced with multiple problems of non-availability of affordable medicines for health care, besides others. This article seeks to study the justification for an extended IP rights protection under the TRIPS Agreement through an analysis of the philosophical underpinnings of the IP rights and the patent regime. It will be argued that the TRIPS Agreement is a major obstacle that the developing countries and the LDCs have been made to face as Members of the WTO (World Trade Organisation), with no end in sight for their miseries, and that the only possible solution is a review or an amendment of the TRIPS Agreement.     

Distinct element method analysis of a retaining wall using a steel frame and fill materials

A technique is developed to clearly establish the shear resistance of a cellular structure, retaining wall composed of a steel frame and fill materials with both continuous and discontinuous characteristics. To overcome the limitation of the existing analysis approach based on continuum mechanics, in which the shear behavior and interaction between the frames and fill material of this type of structure are difficult to describe, this paper introduces displacement incremental analysis into the distinct element method. The results obtained by using the proposed approach are compared with experimental results to verify its accuracy. The results show an internal friction angle of fill materials and overburdening load are major factor determining the shear resistance of a retaining wall with a cellular structure type. From the results of the parametric study on the shear behavior of this type of structure, this paper also proposes a shear resistance moment-shear displacement formula for designing a retaining wall with a cellular structure type.     

An online fault tolerant actor-critic neuro-control for a class of nonlinear systems using neural network HJB approach

In this paper, we propose an actor-critic neuro-control for a class of continuous-time nonlinear systems under nonlinear abrupt faults, which is combined with an adaptive fault diagnosis observer (AFDO). Together with its estimation laws, an AFDO scheme, which estimates the faults in real time, is designed based on Lyapunov analysis. Then, based on the designed AFDO, a fault tolerant actor- critic control scheme is proposed where the critic neural network (NN) is used to approximate the value function and the actor NN updates the fault tolerant policy based on the approximated value function in the critic NN. The weight update laws for critic NN and actor NN are designed using the gradient descent method. By Lyapunov analysis, we prove the uniform ultimately boundedness (UUB) of all the states, their estimation errors, and NN weights of the fault tolerant system under the unpredictable faults. Finally, we verify the effectiveness of the proposed method through numerical simulations.     

Move blocking strategy applied to re-entrant manufacturing line scheduling

Model predictive control (MPC)-based approach to fab-wide scheduling has been suggested to solve constraint-aware production optimization and in-process inventory level control simultaneously at each scheduling instance. However, application of this approach to real fab suffers from computational difficulties brought by the need to solve a huge optimization problem on-line as real fab scheduling problems are characterized by long cycle times, multiple product types, hundreds of machines/processing steps and re-entrant product flows. This study explores the use of an offset-blocking strategy combined with a modified recursive least square (RLS) estimation in the fab-wide scheduler, in order to alleviate the difficulty. The strategy is tested on a modified version of published case study called Intel Mini-Fab (IMF) problem. Despite its simplicity, the blocking strategy showed excellent performance in the face of realistic demand changes and plant/model mismatch.