Factors Influencing Green Product Purchase Behavior among University Putra Malaysia Students

The issue of the environment such as increasing sea levels, air pollution, water pollution, and climate change, are affecting people all over. Since early times, human beings have been experiencing environmental degradation due to the development activities due to the rise of civilizations. A green product is designed to have as little environmental impact as possible over its entire life cycle, including after it is no longer being used. This study examines the factors influencing green product purchase behaviour among University Putra Malaysia (UPM) students. A total of 260 respondents were selected from the University of Putra Malaysia by using simple random sampling. The data was collected by using the administered questionnaire. The results of multiple linear regressions showed that the adjusted R2 is 0.438, indicating that the variance of the dependent variable was explained by the knowledge, attitude, social appeal and emotional value. The result also showed only three variables were influencing; emotional value (ß =.333, p ? 0.01) was the most influential factor, followed by knowledge (ß =.303, p ? 0.01) and attitude (ß =.160, p ? 0.01) among UPM students towards the green product purchase behaviour. This study concluded that emotional value, knowledge, and attitude were among the factors influencing green product purchase behaviour. Future research is recommended to conduct this study on other University students in Malaysia with larger samples and also can focus on the other factors which influence the students on green product purchase behaviou

Enabling and Understanding Failure of Engineering Structures Using the Technique of Cohesive Elements

In this paper, we describe a cohesive zone model for the prediction of failure of engineering solids and/or structures. A damage evolution law is incorporated into a three-dimensional, exponential cohesive law to account for material degradation under the influence of cyclic loading. This cohesive zone model is implemented in the finite element software ABAQUS through a user defined subroutine. The irreversibility of the cohesive zone model is first verified and subsequently applied for studying cyclic crack growth in specimens experiencing different modes of fracture and/or failure. The crack growth behavior to include both crack initiation and crack propagation becomes a natural outcome of the numerical simulation. Numerical examples suggest that the irreversible cohesive zone model can serve as an efficient tool to predict fatigue crack growth. Key issues such as crack path deviation, convergence and mesh dependency are also discussed

Identity Harm

In September 2015, the world learned that Volkswagen had rigged millions of its clean diesel vehicles with illegal software designed to cheat emissions tests. Contrary to what had been advertised, the vehicles are anything but clean. When affected owners learned that their cars were toxic, what were they most upset about? Was it that their cars were now worth fewer dollars? Or that they had been deceived into being hyperpolluting drivers, when they thought they were being green? Coverage of the emissions scandal strongly suggests that affected car owners experienced both kinds of disappointment, economic and noneconomic, and in heavy doses at that. But while the first kind of harm is relatively easy to recognize and address, this Article shows that our protective regime is ill-equipped to shield consumers from the second, a kind of identity harm. Identity harm refers to the anguish experienced by a consumer who learns that her efforts to consume in line with her personal values have been undermined by a business\u27s exaggerated or false promises about its wares. While a range of (broken) promises can elicit identity harm, this Article focuses on a particularly important and fast-growing category of promises pertaining to environmental and social sustainability. As the first in a series on the subject, this Article introduces identity harm and argues for its deeper legal recognition

Assessment of TV advertisement effectiveness through audience eye movements

The evaluation of advertisement effectiveness during the advertisement design phase and pre-launch phase is critical for the advertisement’s success in the targeted market. This evaluation should predict advertisement’s final performance as accurately as possible. In today’s advertisement business, questionnaire-based evaluation methods, such as attitude and opinion rating are widely used. To obtain good survey results, high quality questionnaires and proper interviewing procedures have to be developed with the support of the competent execution and supervision. These activities are usually costly even though some of them can be conducted online. We study the feasibility and effectiveness of assessing ad through capturing and analyzing the audiences’ eye movements. We assume that some attributes of audiences’ eye movements are correlated to their visual attention defined in the context of TV ad effectiveness. To validate our research hypotheses, experiments were conducted. In the experiments, subjects were required to watch several TV ads in sequence and the subjects’ eye movement data were collected simultaneously. By analyzing the data patterns and comparing them with the effectiveness evaluation obtained from questionnaire-based method, we found that the proposed method produces similar evaluations to those resulted from the traditional attitude and opinion rating method

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Boosting graduates' confidence in statistics

Recent research points to a lack of statistics knowledge in today’s graduate students

An agent-­‐based simulation system to support an approach to brand perception measurement

Abstract. A theoretical approach for measuring the brand perception of a single organisation in a heterogeneous group of persons of arbitrary size and supported by an intelligent agent based system is presented. The system is based on the interaction of two types of agents: on one side, groups of acquiescent agents modelled after a given brand’s potential customers and aware of environmental disturbances produced by an organisation in form of influencing agents on the other. The relation is based on the perspective that a person may define an organisational value by returning her own perception to the environment, an organizational value that in some way has been interiorised. Once her perspective finds a way to the environment again, it gains new life and is able to influence other people. The aim of the mentioned system is to evaluate the effect of the discriminated marketing investment made to expose different values of the organisation. Management aspires people to interiorise these values and to return them untouched to their peers to interiorise them later too. By making the investment aspect clear, the management may become aware of which resources are being well spent and which ones need a to be redirected to really reach their desired target in accordance to the people’s response, an aspect clearly presented by the simulation process. So, differences among the customer groups were modelled by determining their members’ sensibility towards influences and the capacity to produce an active response to such stimuli. An active response in terms of the system was modelled in two ways: (i) is to return the influences back to the environment or (ii) to terminate them abruptly. Influencing agents are also gathered by common given objectives to form groups but maintain a certain degree of independence by being more or less prone to survive in the environment. This last feature was modelled after the investment effort made by an organisation towards the penetration of own values to be perceived by the public.Maestrí