More than "just shopping:" personalization, privacy and the (ab)use of data

Working draft of the Personalization/Customization GroupEmerging technologies often produce unexpected consequences that existing institutions and policies are unable to deal with effectively. Because predicting the consequences of technological change is difficult, responses to emerging technologies tend to be reactive (if not passive), rather than proactive. Improved understanding of the potential consequences of a particular technology would enable policymakers and analysts to implement appropriate measures more quickly and perhaps even act prospectively. This paper proposes a general approach that can be used to identify potential sources of disruption from emerging technologies in order to enable proactive policy actions to limit the negative consequences of these disruptions. New technologies are often characterized through the use of metaphors and/or comparisons to existing technologies. While such comparisons provide an easy way to generate understanding of a new technology they often also neglect important aspects of that technology. As a result, the use of metaphors and comparisons creates a disconnect between what the metaphor suggests is happening and what is actually taking place. The incompleteness of the metaphors leads to a disparity in the appreciation of the benefits, opportunities, and pitfalls of a new technology. This disparity allows certain aspects of the technology to be ignored and/or exploited, with potentially disruptive social consequences. An analysis of the mismatch between metaphorical characterizations and the actual attributes of a new technology can help identify otherwise overlooked issues and determine if existing institutions and policies can adequately respond. This paper uses a study of personalization technologies by online retailers to demonstrate the potential for disruption caused by failures of metaphor to adequately describe new technologies. Online retailing technologies have equipped firms with tools that allow them to move closer to the ``mass market of one" --- satisfying the demands of a mass market through individually-targeted sales strategies (i.e., personalization). While the metaphors of ``shopping" and ``catalog" have been used to describe online retail ``stores," these metaphors fail to capture several key aspects of online retail technologies such as aggregation, replication, persistence, and analysis of the personal data easily collected by such businesses. As a result, the institutions that exist to protect consumers when dealing with traditional, physical stores may no longer be sufficient. Furthermore, the pervasiveness of the metaphor undermines the ability of consumers to understand or debate the negative consequences of personalization, especially in the areas of privacy and identity.National Science Foundatio

Emulating and evaluating hybrid memory for managed languages on NUMA hardware

Non-volatile memory (NVM) has the potential to become a mainstream memory technology and challenge DRAM. Researchers evaluating the speed, endurance, and abstractions of hybrid memories with DRAM and NVM typically use simulation, making it easy to evaluate the impact of different hardware technologies and parameters. Simulation is, however, extremely slow, limiting the applications and datasets in the evaluation. Simulation also precludes critical workloads, especially those written in managed languages such as Java and C#. Good methodology embraces a variety of techniques for evaluating new ideas, expanding the experimental scope, and uncovering new insights. This paper introduces a platform to emulate hybrid memory for managed languages using commodity NUMA servers. Emulation complements simulation but offers richer software experimentation. We use a thread-local socket to emulate DRAM and a remote socket to emulate NVM. We use standard C library routines to allocate heap memory on the DRAM and NVM sockets for use with explicit memory management or garbage collection. We evaluate the emulator using various configurations of write-rationing garbage collectors that improve NVM lifetimes by limiting writes to NVM, using 15 applications and various datasets and workload configurations. We show emulation and simulation confirm each other's trends in terms of writes to NVM for different software configurations, increasing our confidence in predicting future system effects. Emulation brings novel insights, such as the non-linear effects of multi-programmed workloads on NVM writes, and that Java applications write significantly more than their C++ equivalents. We make our software infrastructure publicly available to advance the evaluation of novel memory management schemes on hybrid memories

Would You Marry Me?: The Effects of Marriage on German Couples' Allocation of Time

We evaluate the effects of the transition from cohabitation to marriage on household domestic and market work hours using a sample of working couples. For this purpose we use the 21 first waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSEOP). We adapt the estimator introduced by Semykina and Wooldridge (2005) to system GMM estimation to account for selection bias in the presence of endogenous regressors. Our results indicate that marriage increases women's specialization in home-based activities and that marriage decreases women's leisure. These effects are robust across specifications.Labour, family and networks, econometrics

Would you want to know? Public attitudes on early diagnostic testing for Alzheimer's disease

INTRODUCTION: Research is underway to develop an early medical test for Alzheimer's disease (AD). METHODS: To evaluate potential demand for such a test, we conducted a cross-sectional telephone survey of 2,678 randomly selected adults across the United States and four European countries. RESULTS: Most surveyed adults (67%) reported that they are "somewhat" or "very likely" to get an early medical test if one becomes available in the future. Interest was higher among those worried about developing AD, those with an immediate blood relative with AD, and those who have served as caregivers for AD patients. Older respondents and those living in Spain and Poland also exhibited greater interest in testing. Knowing AD is a fatal condition did not influence demand for testing, except among those with an immediate blood relative with the disease. CONCLUSIONS: Potential demand for early medical testing for AD could be high. A predictive test could not only advance medical research, it could transform political and legal landscapes by creating a large constituency of asymptomatic, diagnosed adults

Consumer adoption of new technologies : the role of perceived risk

Driven by perceived Internet technology advantage and significant market potential, this study focuses on the impacts of Perceived Risk and Trust Belief on Behavioural Intention to use hotel e-booking services in Saudi Arabia. The study employs the UTAUT2 (Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology ІІ). The objective is to establish and assess a new model that can be used to determine the various elements, which impact usage behaviour among customers of hotel e-booking services. This study places special emphasis on the unique role of trust belief, and the perception of risk.The data were collected from a cross-sectional survey of 465 respondents. Partial Least Squares-Structured Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) was employed in analysing the data. Our study adds to the current literature by proposing new variables linking ‘Perceived Risk’ and ‘Trust Belief’ to the UTAUT2. Furthermore, this study provides a response to appeals for further examination and use of aspects, which enlarge the tools, and usage of UTAUT2. The research model represents a pioneering study integrating perceived risk from consumer adoption of new technology literature, employing the UTAUT2 model to assist in initiating the integration of multi-disciplinary research in electronic marketing. In this research, Trust Belief (TR) was hypothesized, for first time, as a mediator that mediates the influence of Perceived Risk (PR) toward Behavioural Intention (BI). It was found that trust belief completely mediates the negative relationship between perceived risk and behavioural intention.Within the context of electronic booking in the hospitality industry in Saudi Arabia, this research provides the first attempt in which the UTAUT2 model is employed to identify the various factors that impact a consumer’s choice to embrace and utilise hotel e-booking services. All constructs within the UTAUT2 model exhibited a significant and sufficient extent of discriminant and convergent validity and reliability, except for the construct of facilitating conditions. The results provide backing for utilising the UTAUT2 model for predicting consumers’ intention to adopt and utilise e-booking hotel services within the context of Saudi Arabia. Therefore, this study offers valuable contributions to the existing body of literature, by investigating the validity and reliability of the UTAUT model, originally developed for the Western world, to clarify parallel behaviours in a non-Western context

The Illusion of the Perpetual Money Machine

We argue that the present crisis and stalling economy continuing since 2007 are rooted in the delusionary belief in policies based on a "perpetual money machine" type of thinking. We document strong evidence that, since the early 1980s, consumption has been increasingly funded by smaller savings, booming financial profits, wealth extracted from house price appreciation and explosive debt. This is in stark contrast with the productivity-fueled growth that was seen in the 1950s and 1960s. This transition, starting in the early 1980s, was further supported by a climate of deregulation and a massive growth in financial derivatives designed to spread and diversify the risks globally. The result has been a succession of bubbles and crashes, including the worldwide stock market bubble and great crash of October 1987, the savings and loans crisis of the 1980s, the burst in 1991 of the enormous Japanese real estate and stock market bubbles, the emerging markets bubbles and crashes in 1994 and 1997, the LTCM crisis of 1998, the dotcom bubble bursting in 2000, the recent house price bubbles, the financialization bubble via special investment vehicles, the stock market bubble, the commodity and oil bubbles and the debt bubbles, all developing jointly and feeding on each other. Rather than still hoping that real wealth will come out of money creation, we need fundamentally new ways of thinking. In uncertain times, it is essential, more than ever, to think in scenarios: what can happen in the future, and, what would be the effect on your wealth and capital? How can you protect against adverse scenarios? We thus end by examining the question "what can we do?" from the macro level, discussing the fundamental issue of incentives and of constructing and predicting scenarios as well as developing investment insights.Comment: 27 pages, 18 figures (Notenstein Academy White Paper Series

The doctoral research abstracts. Vol:7 2015 / Institute of Graduate Studies, UiTM

Foreword: The Seventh Issue of The Doctoral Research Abstracts captures the novelty of 65 doctorates receiving their scrolls in UiTM’s 82nd Convocation in the field of Science and Technology, Business and Administration, and Social Science and Humanities. To the recipients I would like to say that you have most certainly done UiTM proud by journeying through the scholastic path with its endless challenges and impediments, and persevering right till the very end. This convocation should not be regarded as the end of your highest scholarly achievement and contribution to the body of knowledge but rather as the beginning of embarking into high impact innovative research for the community and country from knowledge gained during this academic journey. As alumni of UiTM, we will always hold you dear to our hearts. A new ‘handshake’ is about to take place between you and UiTM as joint collaborators in future research undertakings. I envisioned a strong research pact between you as our alumni and UiTM in breaking the frontier of knowledge through research. I wish you all the best in your endeavour and may I offer my congratulations to all the graduands. ‘UiTM sentiasa dihati ku’ / Tan Sri Dato’ Sri Prof Ir Dr Sahol Hamid Abu Bakar , FASc, PEng Vice Chancellor Universiti Teknologi MAR

Would you Marry me? The Effects of Marriage on German Couples’ Allocation of Time

Living arrangements have undergone considerable change in recent decades. In most Western countries marriage is no longer the exclusive context of family formation. These demographic trends challenge the microeconomic literature in which couples living in consensual unions are implicitly assumed to act exactly as married couples. A closer look at the literature reveals, however, growing evidence of the link between marital status and household behavior with respect to many outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the shift from cohabitation to marriage is associated with a significant change in household market and non-market labor supply. More specifically, we use a long German panel (GSOEP) to test whether the transition from cohabitation to marriage reinforces the degree of specialization among couples. We estimate a model that relates married life to the female-to-male domestic and market work hours log ratios. Other regressors of the log ratios are the female relative earnings, the number of children and the duration of the relationship. Our results suggest that marriage increases female specialization in home-based activities. Importantly, marriage leads to a fall in women's leisure, particularly for couples with pre-school children. The results also exhibit a fall in married men's leisure coming from either a rise in market hours or an increase in domestic hours depending on the specification

ANSER : five years of global academic collaboration building evidence for sexual and reproductive health and rights policies

The ANSER publication 'Five years of global academic collaboration building evidence for sexual and reproductive health and rights policies' has been published. As a network, we consider it our duty to bridge the gap between research and policymaking, as we strongly believe sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) policies should be based on scientific evidence. In this publication you will find a glimpse of what we have achieved so far. May it inspire you to keep advocating sexual and reproductive health and rights worldwide. You can find the PDF version attached to this message. If you would like a copy of the publication, you can send an email to [email protected]. Thanks to Ghent University for the support and all our colleagues for their contributions