Measuring the Mobile User Experience: Conceptualization and Empirical Assessment

User experience is commonly considered important for IT adoption and use. However, a formal measure that captures a user’s holistic experience obtained through the use of an IT artifact has not been developed. In this study, we propose a new measure of user experience and examine its validity using the data collected from over 240 smartphone mobile users in South Korea. Based on prior research on brand experience in marketing, we conceptualize user experience as a second order construct with four sub-dimensions. The convergent and discriminant validity of the measurement items of mobile user experience is examined along with the established measurement items of the cognitive absorption, which is similar to the proposed construct in that both capture what a user has experienced while interacting with an IT artifact. Further, we examine the effects of the proposed construct on perceived usefulness, satisfaction, and continuous intention

First-principles study of ternary fcc solution phases from special quasirandom structures

In the present work, ternary Special Quasirandom Structures (SQSs) for a fcc solid solution phase are generated at different compositions, $x_A=x_B=x_C=\tfrac{1}{3}$ and $x_A=\tfrac{1}{2}$, $x_B=x_C=\tfrac{1}{4}$, whose correlation functions are satisfactorily close to those of a random fcc solution. The generated SQSs are used to calculate the mixing enthalpy of the fcc phase in the Ca-Sr-Yb system. It is observed that first-principles calculations of all the binary and ternary SQSs in the Ca-Sr-Yb system exhibit very small local relaxation. It is concluded that the fcc ternary SQSs can provide valuable information about the mixing behavior of the fcc ternary solid solution phase. The SQSs presented in this work can be widely used to study the behavior of ternary fcc solid solutions.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figure

ABSTRACT Web Based Linkage

When a variety of names are used for the same real-world entity, the problem of detecting all such variants has been known as the (record) linkage or entity resolution problem. In this paper, toward this problem, we propose a novel approach that uses the Web as the collective knowledge source in addition to contents of entities. Our hypothesis is that if an entity e1 is a duplicate of another entity e2, and if e1 frequently appears together with information I on the Web, then e2 may appear frequently with I on the Web. By using search engines, we analyze the frequency, URLs, or contents of the returned web pages to capture the information I of an entity. Extensive experiments verify that our hypothesis holds in many real settings, and the idea of using the Web as the additional source for the linkage problem is promising. Our proposal shows 51 % (on average) and 193 % (at best) improvement in precision/recall compared to a baseline approach

An Exploration into Life, Body, Materials, Culture of Mediaeval East Asia: Focusing on of Koryŏ Dynasty

The Emergency Medicine Recipes in Local Medicinals (Hyang’yak Kugŭpbang) (c. 14th century) is known to be one of the oldest Korean medical textbooks that exists in its entirety. This study challenges conventional perceptions that have interpreted this text by using modern concepts, and it seeks to position the medical activities of the late Koryŏ Dynasty (918-1392) to the early Chosŏn Dynasty (1392-1910) in medical history with a focus on this text. According to existing studies, Emergency Medicine Recipes in Local Medicinals is a strategic compromise of the Korean elite in response to the influx of Chinese medical texts and thus a medical text from a “periphery” of the Sinitic world. Other studies have evaluated this text as a medieval publication demonstrating stages of transition to systematic and rational medicine and, as such, a formulary book that includes primitive elements. By examining past medicine practices through “modern” concepts based on a dichotomous framework of analysis — i.e., modernity vs. tradition, center vs. periphery, science vs. culture — such conventional perceptions have relegated Emergency Medicine Recipes in Local Medicinals to the position of a transitional medieval publication meaningful only for research on hyangchal (Chinese character-based writing system used to record Korean during the Silla Dynasty [57 BC-935 AD] to the Koryŏ Dynasty). It is necessary to overcome this dichotomous framework in order to understand the characteristics of East Asian medicine. As such, this study first defines “medicine”, an object of research on medical history, as a “special form of problem-solving activities” and seeks to highlight the problematics and independent medical activities of the relevant actors. Through this strategy (i.e., texts as solutions to problems), this study analyzes Emergency Medicine Recipes in Local Medicinals to determine its characteristics and significance. Ultimately, this study argues that Emergency Medicine Recipes in Local Medicinals was a problem-solving method for the scholar-gentry from the late Koryŏ Dynasty to the early Chosŏn Dynasty, who had adopted a new cultural identity, to perform certain roles on the level of medical governance and constitute medical praxis that reflected views of both the body and materials and an orientation distinguished from those of the socalled medicine of Confucian physicians, which was the mainstream medicine of the center. Intertwined at the cultural basis of the treatments and medical recipes included in Emergency Medicine Recipes in Local Medicinals were aspects such as correlative thinking, ecological circulation of life force, transformation of materiality through contact, appropriation of analogies, and reasoning of sympathy. Because “local medicinals” is understood in Emergency Medicine Recipes in Local Medicinals as referring to objects easily available from one’s surroundings, it signifies locality referring to the ease of acquisition in local areas rather than to the identity of the state of Koryŏ or Chosŏn. As for characteristics revealed by this text’s methods of implementing medicine, Korean medicine in terms of this text consisted largely of single-ingredient formulas using diverse medicinal ingredients easily obtainable from one’s surroundings rather than making use of general drugs as represented by materia medica or of multipleingredient formulas. In addition, accessible tools, full awareness of the procedures and processes of the guidelines, procedural rituals, and acts of emergency treatment (first aid) were more important than the study of the medical classics, moral cultivation, and coherent explanations emphasized in categorical medical texts. Though Emergency Medicine Recipes in Local Medicinals can be seen as an origin of the tradition of emergency medicine in Korea, it differs from medical texts that followed which specializing in emergency medicine to the extent that it places toxicosis before the six climatic factors in its classification of diseases

The recent avifauna of the central and eastern Civilian Control Zone near the Demilitarized Zone in Republic of Korea

Our survey of the avifauna in the eastern and central parts of the Civilian Control Zone (CCZ) in 2012 and 2013 found a total of 14,390 individuals of 159 species belonging to 17 orders, 44 families and 88 genera. The 159 species of birds found in the central and eastern CCZ constitute 29.4% of the 540 bird species recorded in the Korean Peninsula, showing considerable biodiversity in the bird species that inhabit the surveyed regions. In the central CCZ, we found 9,916 individuals of 117 bird species. And in the eastern CCZ, 4,474 individuals of 127 species were found. There were a particularly large number of Gruiformes and Anseriformes because much of the CCZ, with the exception of mountain land, has been developed as reservoirs and arable farmland. Species diversity appeared high in mountain regions, while regions that included the coast and farmlands showed low diversity

Pollock: Automatic Generation of Virtual Web Services from Web Sites

As the usage of Web Services proliferates dramatically, new tools to help quickly generate web services are needed. In this paper, we propose a methodology that helps to automatically generate Web Services from the FORMbased query interfaces of a web site. Since the majority of web data are rather “hidden ” behind such a FORM interface, we believe turning such a human-oriented query interface into machine-oriented web services is an important problem. Toward this goal, we adopt the Wrapper technology successfully developed and deployed in Database community, and demonstrate how to generate Web Services components (e.g., WSDL, UDDI, SOAP) automatically. We present the overall architecture of our developed prototype and a few showcases based on real web sites

Flow diagram of the present study.

KNHANES, Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey; AST, aspartate aminotransferase; ALT, alanine aminotransferase; HGS, hand grip strength; BMI, body mass index.</p