The interplay of online shopping motivations and experiential factors on personalized e-commerce: A complexity theory approach

The present study aims to examine purchase behavior in personalized online shopping by employing complexity theory, based on customers’ online shopping experience and online shopping motivations. To address its objectives, a conceptual model is proposed along with research propositions. The research propositions are validated through a survey on 401 customers’ experience with online shopping, by using the data analysis tool fsQCA (fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis). The results, indicate nine configurations of online shopping experience and online shopping motivations that lead to high purchase intentions. This study takes a step further the literature of online shopping and the theoretical ground of how customers’ online shopping experience combines with their online shopping motivations in order to predict and explain increased intention to purchase. The findings offer implications for both researchers and online retailers, regarding the development of new theories in personalized e-commerce and the provision of personalized services.     

Über die Berechnung der instationären Erwärmung von supraleitenden Bauelementen

Zusammenfassung Mit Hilfe der Laplace-Transformation wird die nichtstation?re Erw?rmung berechnet, die beim Schalten von Bauelementen mit einem überzug aus supraleitendem Stoff auf einer festen Unterlage in elektronischen Rechenmaschinen entsteht. Aus einer numerischen Auswertung verschiedener Beispiele (Zinnüberzug auf Glas, Quarz und Saphir) geht hervor, da? die Schaltimpulse bei Unterlagen aus Quarz die kleinsten Temperaturschwankungen bewirken.     

Mialostatin,a Novel Midgut Cystatin from Ixodes ricinus Ticks: Crystal Structure and Regulation of Host Blood Digestion

The hard tick Ixodes ricinus is a vector of Lyme disease and tick-borne encephalitis. Host blood protein digestion, essential for tick development and reproduction, occurs in tick midgut digestive cells driven by cathepsin proteases. Little is known about the regulation of the digestive proteolytic machinery of I. ricinus. Here we characterize a novel cystatin-type protease inhibitor, mialostatin, from the I. ricinus midgut. Blood feeding rapidly induced mialostatin expression in the gut, which continued after tick detachment. Recombinant mialostatin inhibited a number of I. ricinus digestive cysteine cathepsins, with the greatest potency observed against cathepsin L isoforms, with which it co-localized in midgut digestive cells. The crystal structure of mialostatin was determined at 1.55 Å to explain its unique inhibitory specificity. Finally, mialostatin effectively blocked in vitro proteolysis of blood proteins by midgut cysteine cathepsins. Mialostatin is likely to be involved in the regulation of gut-associated proteolytic pathways, making midgut cystatins promising targets for tick control strategies.     

Ti3SiC2-Cu composites by mechanical milling and spark plasma sintering: Possible microstructure formation scenarios

We present several possible microstructure development scenarios in Ti₃SiC₂-Cu composites during mechanical milling and Spark Plasma Sintering (SPS). We have studied the effect of in situ consolidation during milling of Ti₃SiC₂ and Cu powders and melting of the Cu matrix during the SPS on the hardness and electrical conductivity of the sintered materials. Under low-energy milling, (3–5) vol.%Ti₃SiC₂-Cu composite particles of platelet morphology formed, which could be easily SPS-ed to 92–95% relative density. Under high-energy milling, millimeter-scale (3–5) vol.%Ti₃SiC₂-Cu granules formed as a result of in situ consolidation and presented a challenge to be sintered into a bulk fully dense sample; the corresponding SPS-ed compacts demonstrated a finer-grained Cu matrix and more significant levels of hardening compared to composites of the same composition processed by low-energy milling. The 3 vol.% Ti₃SiC₂-Cu in situ consolidated and Spark Plasma Sintered granules showed an extremely high hardness of 227 HV. High electrical conductivity of the Ti₃SiC₂-Cu composites sintered from the granules was an indication of efficient sintering of the granules to each other. Partial melting of the Cu matrix, if induced during the SPS, compromised the phase stability and uniformity of the microstructure of the Ti₃SiC₂-Cu composites and thus it is not to be suggested as a pathway to enhanced densification in this system.     

Information content of data measured with a multiple-field-of-view lidar

Lidars with multiple fields of view (MFOVs) are promising tools for gaining information on cloud particle size. We perform a study of the information content of MFOV lidar data with the use of eigenvalue analysis. The approach we have developed permits an understanding of the main features of MFOV lidars and provides a way to relate the accuracy of particle size estimation with the measurement uncertainty and the scattering geometry such as the cloud-base height and the lidar sounding depth. Second-order scattering computations are performed for an extended range of particle sizes and for a wide range of lidar fields of view (FOVs). The results obtained allow us to specify the areas of possible applications of these lidars in cloud studies. Comparison of results obtained with polarized and cross-polarized scattered components demonstrate that the cross-polarized signal should provide a more stable retrieval and is preferable when double scattering is highly dominant. Our analysis allows for the estimation of the optimal number of FOVs in the system and their angular distribution, so this work can be a useful tool for practical MFOV lidar design.     

Synthesis, structure, thermal and mechanical properties of nanocomposites based on linear polymers and layered silicates modified by polymeric quaternary ammonium salts (ionenes)

Polymer–clay composites has been prepared by melt blending an organo-bentonite with linear polymers (polyamide, polysterene and polypropylene) in a disk-screw extruder. In first time organo-clay was prepared by surface treatment of Na-forms bentonite with polymeric quaternary ammonium salts (PQAS). XRD indicated that organo-bentonite layers were exfoliated and dispersed into polyamide and polystyrene. Addition of 2 wt% organo-bentonites (optimal concentration) to polyamide increased tensile strength by 53% and Sharpy impact by 140%. With the incorporation of 2 wt% organo-bentonites (optimal concentration) into polystyrene the tensile strength increased to 28% and the Sharpy impact increased to 25%. For polypropylyne–organo-bentonites composites we did not observe delamination of layered structure, and as result absence of reinforcements. TGA showed that the polyamide and polystyrene nanocomposites have higher decomposition temperature in comparison with the original polymers.     

Cache-Integrated Network Interfaces: Flexible On-Chip Communication and Synchronization for Large-Scale CMPs

Per-core scratchpad memories (or local stores) allow direct inter-core communication, with latency and energy advantages over coherent cache-based communication, especially as CMP architectures become more distributed. We have designed cache-integrated network interfaces, appropriate for scalable multicores, that combine the best of two worlds – the flexibility of caches and the efficiency of scratchpad memories: on-chip SRAM is configurably shared among caching, scratchpad, and virtualized network interface (NI) functions. This paper presents our architecture, which provides local and remote scratchpad access, to either individual words or multiword blocks through RDMA copy. Furthermore, we introduce event responses, as a technique that enables software configurable communication and synchronization primitives. We present three event response mechanisms that expose NI functionality to software, for multiword transfer initiation, completion notifications for software selected sets of arbitrary size transfers, and multi-party synchronization queues. We implemented these mechanisms in a four-core FPGA prototype, and measure the logic overhead over a cache-only design for basic NI functionality to be less than 20%. We also evaluate the on-chip communication performance on the prototype, as well as the performance of synchronization functions with simulation of CMPs with up to 128 cores. We demonstrate efficient synchronization, low-overhead communication, and amortized-overhead bulk transfers, which allow parallelization gains for fine-grain tasks, and efficient exploitation of the hardware bandwidth.