Effects of user experience on user resistance to change to the voice user interface of an in‑vehicle infotainment system: Implications for platform and standards competition

This study examines the effects of user experience on user resistance to change—particularly, on the relationship between user resistance to change and its antecedents (i.e. switching costs and perceived value) in the context of the voice user interface of an in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) system. This research offers several salient findings. First, it shows that user experience positively moderates the relationship between uncertainty costs (one type of switching cost) and user resistance. It also negatively moderates the association between perceived value and user resistance. Second, the research test results demonstrate that users with a high degree of prior experience with the voice user interface of other smart devices exhibit low user resistance to change to the voice user interface in an IVI system. Third, we show that three types of switching costs (transition costs, in particular) may directly influence users to resist a change to the voice user interface. Fourth, our test results empirically demonstrate that both switching costs and perceived value affect user resistance to change in the context of an IVI system, which differs from the traditional IS research setting (i.e. enterprise systems). These findings may guide not only platform leaders in designing user interfaces, user experiences, and marketing strategies, but also firms that want to defend themselves from platform envelopment while devising defensive strategies in platform and standards competition

Private Education as De Facto Language Policy in South Korea

South Korea is well known for its distinctive, sometimes excessive, enthusiasm for education. This education fever is derived from South Koreans’ concern with the pursuit of education as a way of achieving socioeconomic status and power, and thus, competitions to score well on tests have been valorized in South Korea. Now that English has become the language of power and opportunity in South Korea, this paper aims to examine how education fever has promoted de facto English language policy over top-down English language policy. By referring to Cooper’s (1989) and Kaplan and Baldauf’s (1997) frameworks, this paper interprets private education in South Korea as de facto policy, which exercises greater influence on how language policy is developed in practice than a top-down statement can

Challenges of neuropsychological testing with Asian American adults: a critical review of the literature

The present study is a critical analysis of literature surrounding the challenges faced during neuropsychological testing with Asian American adults. This dissertation will provide a comprehensive overview and critically analyze what is known with regards to neuropsychological assessment of Asian individuals, challenges that psychologists face in conducting culturally competent neuropsychological assessment of this population, and recommendations for conducting such assessments. Current literature reveals how confounds such as culture, acculturation, language, and the inappropriate use of tests and normative data can impact scores and subsequent treatment recommendations. Given these confounds, recommendations will be made regarding the neuropsychological test selection, test administration, and normative data to discuss ways that testing with Asian Americans can be improved

Military band musicians on the border: crossing over musical genres in the transnational space of the Korean War

This dissertation examines Korean War period music and explains the musical encounters and developments that resulted from the military collaboration between South Korea (the Republic of Korea) and the United States in the initial stage of the Cold War. In particular, this dissertation looks closely at South Korean military band musicians who played a wide range of music for both military and civilian audiences, crossing over the national and cultural borders between the two countries. Locating their experiences within the South Korean and US military music systems and more broadly within their socio-cultural, historical, and transnational context, I demonstrate that military agents played a significant role as cultural agents in initiating and accelerating transnational musical flow and travels and in shaping musicultural developments in South Korea. These discussions are based on data collected through in-depth interviews with musicians who were active during the Korean War and through archival research both in South Korea and in the US. The analyses of this data are combined with analyses of selected military marches and popular songs written or played in South Korea from 1950 to 1961; they are further interpreted within a conceptual framework based on theories of transnationalism and hybridization and in relation to Korean nationalism. During the Korean War, South Korean military musicians composed and performed Korean military marches as part of the musical nationalism of the South Korean state, while still embracing transnational march forms and practices. During this initial stage of South Korean military march development, the military musicians frequently played John Philip Sousa’s marches rather than their own. Despite their different points of origin both the limited Korean marches and the readily available Sousa marches were remarkably flexible in their ideological functions, able to be employed for both nationalist and transnational politics within the Cold War context. Simultaneously, a dynamic hybridization process in South Korean popular music developed during the Korean War period through encounters with the US military and their music, spurred by the preference for diverse musical expressions and grounded on the compatibility with the historical dimensions of the transnational musicultural formations in Korea and with the ideological and socio-cultural dimensions of 1950s South Korean society

Korean Efl Learners’ Morpheme Developmental Order: Embracing Semantic Aspects And The Poststructuralist Perspective

This study revisited L2 morpheme development order among Korean young learners of English. Taking into account the spirit of the current English curriculum in South Korea, the current study examined L2 morpheme development from two different perspectives: accuracy and fluency aspects. In the field of second language development, many studies have claimed the L1 effect in the acquisition of English morphemes, opining that the absence or presence of the corresponding morphemes in L1 affects the advancement or delay of the L2 morphemes. However, L1 effect appeared to be morpheme-specific in these previous studies, which raised a question if L1 alone is truly a definitive factor to explain the variability in L2 morpheme development. Thus, semantic aspects of morphemes, specifically semantic interpretability at LF, was additionally considered as part of factors in order to explicate the interlanguage variability. The Interpretability Hypothesis and Levinson’s Mapping problem inspired this model testing. Investigating the fluency aspect, the current study adopted a poststructuralist perspective in interpreting learners’ interlanguage, in order to understand their language use as processes of meaning making and communication from a more emic approach. Wug test is widely used to measure first language learners’ morphological metalinguistic knowledge, but has not been adopted much for EFL learners. As the current study focused on morphemes, the applicability of this test among EFL learners was also tested to discuss its appropriateness for EFL contexts. The present study revealed semantic interpretability affects learners’ morpheme development even more than L1 effect alone does, and when interpretability was combined with L1 effect as an independent factor, it was found to explain morpheme developmental patterns considerably. The poststructuralist analyses uncovered many cases where linguistic strategies/tools were appropriated to negotiate with the gap between the learners’ L2 linguistic knowledge and conventional use of L2. However, when quantitatively approached, even the poststructuralist perspective was found not to reduce the potential of misunderstanding caused by the incorrect morpheme uses by far. Wug test demonstrated a reliable predictability on how precisely EFL learners produced morphemes in the natural speech data. Based on these findings, the present study suggested some theoretical and pedagogical implications

Metabolic engineering of yeast strains for renewable biomass utilization and valuable chemical production

The overall goal of this thesis study is to use metabolic engineering and biotechnology tools for developing optimal yeast strains capable of utilizing various sugars derived from renewable biomass and produce valuable chemicals. Sugars derived from lignocellulosic biomass, mainly cellobiose and xylose, cannot be assimilated by the industrial microorganisms, such as yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. To utilize cellobiose or xylose for the fuels and chemicals production by S. cerevisiae strains, heterologous expression of cellobiose or xylose metabolizing genes are required. The first part of this dissertation focuses on developing optimal yeast strains for utilizing renewable sugars, cellobiose, xylose and galactose, and understanding underlying mechanism for improvement on lignocellulosic sugar utilization. Initially, cellobiose fermenting S. cerevisiae was developed by expressing Neurospora crassa cellodextrin transporters (CDT-1 and CDT-2) and β-glucosidase (BGL) or cellobiose phosphorylase (CBP) to breakdown cellobiose into hexose units. In various cellobiose fermentation conditions, the strains expressing CDT-1 showed efficient fermentation compared to the strains expressing CDT-2. Also, strains expressing BGL had better cellobiose fermentation compared to CBP. However, I hypothesized expressing CDT-2 and CBP might have a beneficial effect under energy-limiting conditions (such as industrial fermentation environment) due to minimal ATP requirement compare to pairing with/or CDT-1 and BGL. Because the rate of cellobiose fermentation with CDT-2 and CBP were very inefficient, laboratory evolution approach was employed to enhance cellobiose utilization. I isolated an evolved strain that harbored one SNP change in CDT-2 that is responsible for enhanced cellobiose utilization. With evolved CDT-2 and CBP, cellobiose fermentation rate improved drastically. Previous studies successfully developed xylose-utilizing S. cerevisiae strain. However, the overall fermentation efficiency of the strain is relatively poor. Additionally, using different strain backgrounds resulted in various patterns of the xylose utilization. This variation is presumably caused by the genotype differences among the strains. Thus, I hypothesized the xylose-utilizing trait is a complex trait which phenotypes result from a multiple genes interaction. Quantitative Trait Locus (QTL) mapping strategy was used to identify ‘hotspots’ in the genome responsible for enhanced xylose utilization. The identified QTLs reveal that enhanced xylose fermentations are likely very complex due to many detected QTL. Also, previously reported gene targets that may improve xylose fermentation was not detected. This result indicates complex genetic interactions are responsible for xylose fermentation. Although specific genetic targets were not identified, our results show genome shuffling of two highly variable strains is a very effective methodology to obtain an efficient xylose-fermenting strain with minimal genetic engineering. Galactose is abundantly found in marine biomass and hemicellulose from plant cell wall. Although yeast can naturally metabolize galactose, consumption rate and overall ethanol yield are usually lower compared to glucose. While screening various gene targets related glucose sensing, regulation and metabolism, TPS1 deletion expressed with mutant HXK2 allowed enhanced glucose or galactose fermentation. Because HXK2 also has a role in glucose signaling and repression, a mutation caused a change in this property. By deleting TPS1 and expressing mutant HXK2, yeast effectively utilized glucose and galactose under mixed sugar condition whereas wild-type strain could not consume galactose in the presence of glucose. Following renewable sugar utilization by engineered strain, the second part of this dissertation investigates on chemical production by engineered yeast. To replace current chemical production system, diversification of product formation by the microbial system is necessary. I identified 2-isopropylmalate (2-IPM), and intermediate of leucine biosynthesis, as a target chemical production in yeast. The dicarboxylic organic acids are favorable for production due to possible bio-based polymer synthesis. I observed 2-IPM accumulation by deleting LEU1 and further optimized the strain by removing nitrogen catabolite repression (∆URE2), leucine feedback inhibition (mutant LEU4) and increase pyruvate flux to leucine biosynthetic pathway (Bacillus subtilis AlsS). Also, fermentation media optimization was performed. From no accumulation of 2-IPM by wildtype yeast, 0.033 g/g yield was achieved by optimizing strain and fermentation condition. At scale-up fermentation, 2-IPM titer reached 25 g/L by glucose-limited fed-batch strategy. After 2-IPM overproduction had been achieved, various prospective applications were explored. First, polymer synthesis derived from 2-IPM was investigated. By converting 2-IPM to anhydride form then reaction with epoxide yielded biodegradable elastomer. Also, taking advantage of the organic acid identity of 2-IPM and skin-whitening effect by inhibiting melanin formation was investigated. In summary, this research demonstrates effective metabolic strategy employed for developing yeast strains capable of fermenting lignocellulosic sugars and diversified chemical production by discovering new target chemical with many projected applications

Comparison of WiBro and TD-LTE deployment networks: implications for standards competition

It has been an enigma for the communities of practice and academia in the field of standards as to why, when the capabilities of a technology are not much different or even superior to those of their competitors, only some standards lead to commercial success. Previous literature indicates that a standard needs organisational support and legitimacy amongst audiences, including distributors, influenced by network connectivity and configuration. Using a social network analysis, this paper visualises and compares the networks of wireless broadband and time domain-long-term evolution deployment in the global market. The results show that the presence of a few key sponsors with financial resources and a large installed base is more important than the size of the network. Consequently, we draw some implications for sustainable deployment of future standards

Standards as a driving force that influences emerging technological trajectories in the converging world of the Internet and things: An investigation of the M2M/IoT patent network

While standards are said to create windows of opportunity in facilitation of technological convergence, it is not clear how they affect technological trajectories and strategic choices of firms in the face of convergence and in the process of catch-up. There is little research on the relationship between standards and technological trajectories, particularly in the age of convergence. This paper investigates how standards shape the emerging M2M/IoT technological trajectory and influence convergence in terms of technological importance and diversity. We, firstly, found that standards are a driving force of technological convergence. The second finding is that 3GPP standards assume a crucial role in setting the boundary conditions of the M2M/IoT technological systems. Third, we identified strategic groups and strategic patents that centered around the M2M/IoT trajectory. Forth, standards serve as an important factor in the process of creating a new path for catch-up firms (e.g. Huawei). These findings make contributions to innovation and standards studies by empirically examining the relationship between technological trajectories and standards. Furthermore, they clearly cast light on ongoing cooperation and competition along the M2M/IoT trajectory, and offer practical implications for catch-up strategies