Autonomous Car Acceptance: Safety vs. Personal Driving Enjoyment

Due to the passiveness of the passengers, autonomous cars promise benefits in terms of traffic safety, but also drawbacks in terms of the enjoyment people experience when driving a car themselves. We postulate that both Perceived Traffic Safety and Personal Driving Enjoyment play an important role in people’s acceptance of autonomous cars. After collecting 100 questionnaires and applying a SEM approach, our findings indicate that Personal Driving Enjoyment has a negative influence on the Perceived Enjoyment of autonomous cars and that Perceived Traffic Safety has a positive influence on both their Perceived Usefulness and Perceived Enjoyment. Additionally, both Perceived Usefulness and Perceived Enjoyment were confirmed to positively influence autonomous car acceptance. These findings suggest that autonomous cars should optionally enable people to act as drivers, that manufacturers need to actively manage people’s safety perceptions, and that they also need to emphasize the alternative hedonic benefits that the driverless experience offers

Factors Driving Prosocial Online Behavior

In this article, we draw from the Social Identity Theory and the Theory of Reasoned Action to propose a research model that postulates Social Similarity, Perceived Status Enhancement, and Social Norm to be important drivers of people’s prosocial online behavior. We also provide an outlook on three experiments that we plan to use to evaluate our hypotheses. Overall, our study promises important practical implications for multiple parties such as non-governmental organizations and nonprofit organizations. More specifically, if successful, our study would emphasize the importance of several factors that would help drive prosocial online behavior: (1) matching beneficiaries with benefactors’ demographic background, (2) providing a functionality that enables benefactors to share their prosocial actions with others, and (3) displaying information about other benefactors

Potenzielle Erfolgsfaktoren von SaaS-Unternehmen

Aufgrund des Mangels an spezifischen SaaS-Erfolgsfaktorstudien identifiziert der Beitrag zunächst potenzielle Erfolgsfaktoren aus Unternehmenssicht in der verwandten Literatur. So werden allgemeinen Faktoren des Unternehmenserfolgs, Erfolgsfaktoren von Outsourcing- und Dienstleistungsunternehmen sowie Erfolgsfaktoren von Unternehmen, deren Kerngeschäft über das Internet abgewickelt wird, identifiziert. Nach einer Verdichtung erfolgen theoretische Überlegungen, welche Faktoren tatsächlich sinnvoll in einen Zusammenhang mit SaaS gebracht werden können. Schließlich wird ein potenziell erheblicher Erfolgseinfluss durch die Faktoren Produkt, Vertragsgestaltung, Kundennähe, Mitarbeiter, Know-how, Partnerschaften/Netzwerke, Kapitalausstattung und Innovationen postuliert

25th annual computational neuroscience meeting: CNS-2016

The same neuron may play different functional roles in the neural circuits to which it belongs. For example, neurons in the Tritonia pedal ganglia may participate in variable phases of the swim motor rhythms [1]. While such neuronal functional variability is likely to play a major role the delivery of the functionality of neural systems, it is difficult to study it in most nervous systems. We work on the pyloric rhythm network of the crustacean stomatogastric ganglion (STG) [2]. Typically network models of the STG treat neurons of the same functional type as a single model neuron (e.g. PD neurons), assuming the same conductance parameters for these neurons and implying their synchronous firing [3, 4]. However, simultaneous recording of PD neurons shows differences between the timings of spikes of these neurons. This may indicate functional variability of these neurons. Here we modelled separately the two PD neurons of the STG in a multi-neuron model of the pyloric network. Our neuron models comply with known correlations between conductance parameters of ionic currents. Our results reproduce the experimental finding of increasing spike time distance between spikes originating from the two model PD neurons during their synchronised burst phase. The PD neuron with the larger calcium conductance generates its spikes before the other PD neuron. Larger potassium conductance values in the follower neuron imply longer delays between spikes, see Fig. 17.Neuromodulators change the conductance parameters of neurons and maintain the ratios of these parameters [5]. Our results show that such changes may shift the individual contribution of two PD neurons to the PD-phase of the pyloric rhythm altering their functionality within this rhythm. Our work paves the way towards an accessible experimental and computational framework for the analysis of the mechanisms and impact of functional variability of neurons within the neural circuits to which they belong