Donation via Mobile Applications: A Study of the Factors Affecting Mobile Donation Application Use

As smartphones are now widely used, new types of mobile donation applications have emerged. These new types of mobile donation applications transform giving into easy and convenient activities without interfering in users’ daily schedules, and they enable users to keep donating. However, there is still a lack of research on these new types of mobile donation applications as a new venue of technology-mediated civic engagement. The purpose of this article is to investigate the important factors that affect people’s continuance intention to use mobile donation applications. Based on previous studies of cause-related marketing, this study identifies four attributes—type-cause fit, name-cause fit, cause involvement, and perceived effectiveness—that play an important role in mobile donation applications. Our survey results show that all four attributes have significant positive impacts on users’ willingness to use mobile donation applications. The results of this study contribute to mobile application and donation research and provide guidelines for practitioners on the design and creation of mobile donation applications.     

Interacting Socially with the Internet of Things (IoT): Effects of Source Attribution and Specialization in Human–IoT Interaction

This study investigates the theoretical mechanisms by which the variations in source attribution (multiple sources vs. single source) and specialization (multifunctionality vs. single functionality) of Internet of Things (IoT) devices influence the quality of human–IoT interaction. Results from a between‐subjects experiment (N = 100) indicate that IoT devices that elicit the sense of multiple agencies and are specialized in a single function induce greater social presence and perceived expertise, which, in turn, lead individuals to show a more positive attitude toward the devices and to ascribe greater quality to the information transmitted by them. The results also reveal that the effect of multiple source attribution is more pronounced for individuals for whom the content of the information has low personal relevance.     

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.     

Frequent Interaction and Fast Feedback Predict Perceived Social Support: Using Crawled and Self‐Reported Data of Facebook Users

The present study examines if Facebooking can contribute to psychological well‐being and if so, which aspects of Facebook use could play a significant role. Matching crawled data with self‐reported data from mobile Facebook users, we found that more social interactions with Facebook friends and faster friends' reactions to a user's post contributed toFacebook user's perceived social support and ultimately alleviated loneliness. We also found that the association between frequency as well as speed of Facebook social interactions and psychological well‐being were more significant among those who were sensitive to other's behaviors and feelings than those who were not. The theoretical and practical implications of the findings, particularly regarding mobile communication context, are also discussed.     

Managing a Very Connected World: A Report on APNOMS2015

This article presents a report on APNOMS2015, which was held August 19–21, 2015 in Busan, Korea. The theme of APNOMS2015 was “Managing a Very Connected World.”     

Rendering of HDR images to improve brightness discrimination

The impression of quality of images can be enhanced on a high dynamic range (HDR) displays. Generally, a conventional 8‐bit image can be processed to an HDR image by inverse tone mapping operators. Among the operators, brightness discrimination mapping by applying brightness adaptation model attempted to mimic the human visual system. In this paper, we use a brightness adaptation model to derive a brightness discrimination mapping algorithm for HDR displays. The proposed algorithm maximizes a function, which represents the local and global brightness discrimination range by exploiting characteristics of the human visual system. Enhancement of details is verified by visualizing HDR images from dark to bright regions. Improvement of dynamic range is quantified by measuring increased discrimination ratio.     

User Satisfaction with Tablet PC Features

Previous studies of tablet personal computers have concentrated on their use in education and healthcare. The current study focused instead on personal usage, investigating how satisfied users are with their own tablets after having used them in their daily lives. The objective was to identify the major features for tablets and to investigate how form factors affect the preference of functions by performing a comparison of iPad1 and Galaxy Tab. Also, gender and ethnicity were analyzed to determine whether they influence satisfaction with the devices. For e‐mail and web browsing functions, users’ ratings showed more satisfaction with the iPad1 since it has a larger display; for the e‐book reader function, users indicated higher satisfaction with the Galaxy Tab. Male users evaluated their devices by the function itself, whereas female users were mainly concerned with aesthetic aspects. Koreans indicated that they were less satisfied with their tablets than were other ethnic groups.     

Ergonomic Analysis of Mobile Cart–Assisted Stocking Activities Using Electromyography

Workers in grocery stores are exposed to numerous musculoskeletal risks that can be reduced using assistive devices while performing stocking tasks. A regional grocery store has recently deployed a mobile cart without comprehension of its ergonomic impact on workers, which this article investigates using normalized electromyography data (%MVC). This article studies not only ergonomic impact based on %MVC values but also work performance represented by a muscle force metric (MFM). The results from this study showed highest muscle groups in %MVC and MFM were the erector spinae and triceps. Interestingly, muscle activations on erector spinae were reduced when mobile cart is used. %MVC and MFM distribution for value‐added‐ and non‐value‐added subtasks were slightly different, with larger differences observed for non‐value‐added tasks. Video recordings revealed higher work performance when the mobile cart is used. In future research, the number of participants will be increased to further validate the results from this study.     

Object-aware image thumbnailing using image classification and enhanced detection of ROI

Thumbnail images are used to display a large collection of photos in various digital devices. It aims for people to browse and search the image collection effectively. The provided thumbnail images are expressed in a much lower resolution compared to the resolution of the original image. Thus, it faces a significant problem of how to represent the content of a given image effectively in a tiny thumbnail image. Many image thumbnailing methods have been presented in literature for this purpose. However, the existing thumbnailing methods are designed to use a single method to all kinds of images, regardless of image contents. On the other hand, the proposed method employs two different thumbnail generation methods either of which is applied according to corresponding image context. To achieve this, we first classify images into two groups by detecting the object existence. Then, an ROI cropping method using a saliency map is presented for images with objects, in order to represent the important region of images in the thumbnail. Images without any interesting objects, such as landscape images, are considered to be resized by using a simple scaling method to maintain the whole image context. Experimental results show that the proposed method yields comparable performance on a variety of datasets.