An Empirical Investigation of Smart Product Adoption

The advance of information technologies and the Internet have been enabling the transformation of physical products into smart products by embedding information technologies into the products and thereby making them intelligent. The movement to the ‘Internet of Things’ is accelerating connection of the products to the net. While those changes could enhance value propositions of products, they might also cause consumer privacy concerns, which might hinder smart product adoption, because the smartness of the product mainly takes advantage of personal information about the users. This study aims to investigate consumers’ intention to adopt smart products. Building on previous studies on smart products and privacy literature, we propose a research model that explains factors influencing consumers’ intention to adopt smart products. The proposed research model is empirically tested using data from an online survey of consumers. The overall results validate the proposed research model of smart product adoption. Specifically, perceived personalization is found to positively affect consumers’ intention to adopt smart products, whereas information privacy risk decreases the intention. We also find that the attributes of personal information are critical antecedents of consumers’ risk-benefit assessment. The sensitivity of information increases information privacy risk while the congruency of information enhances perceived personalization. Based on the results, theoretical and managerial implications are discussed

Transient receptor potential canonical type 3 channels control the vascular contractility of mouse mesenteric arteries

Transient receptor potential canonical type 3 (TRPC3) channels are non-selective cation channels and regulate intracellular Ca2+ concentration. We examined the role of TRPC3 channels in agonist-, membrane depolarization (high K+)-, and mechanical (pressure)-induced vasoconstriction and vasorelaxation in mouse mesenteric arteries. Vasoconstriction and vasorelaxation of endothelial cells intact mesenteric arteries were measured in TRPC3 wild-type (WT) and knockout (KO) mice. Calcium concentration ([Ca2+]) was measured in isolated arteries from TRPC3 WT and KO mice as well as in the mouse endothelial cell line bEnd.3. Nitric oxide (NO) production and nitrate/nitrite concentrations were also measured in TRPC3 WT and KO mice. Phenylephrine-induced vasoconstriction was reduced in TRPC3 KO mice when compared to that of WT mice, but neither high K+- nor pressure-induced vasoconstriction was altered in TRPC3 KO mice. Acetylcholine-induced vasorelaxation was inhibited in TRPC3 KO mice and by the selective TRPC3 blocker pyrazole-3. Acetylcholine blocked the phenylephrine-induced increase in Ca2+ ratio and then relaxation in TRPC3 WT mice but had little effect on those outcomes in KO mice. Acetylcholine evoked a Ca2+ increase in endothelial cells, which was inhibited by pyrazole-3. Acetylcholine induced increased NO release in TRPC3 WT mice, but not in KO mice. Acetylcholine also increased the nitrate/nitrite concentration in TRPC3 WT mice, but not in KO mice. The present study directly demonstrated that the TRPC3 channel is involved in agonist-induced vasoconstriction and plays important role in NO-mediated vasorelaxation of intact mesenteric arteries.Fil: Yeon, Soo-In. Yonsei University College of Medicine; Corea del SurFil: Kim, Joo Young. Yonsei University College Of Medicine; . Yonsei University College of Medicine; Corea del SurFil: Yeon, Dong-Soo. Kwandong University College of Medicine; Corea del SurFil: Abramowitz, Joel. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences; Estados UnidosFil: Birnbaumer, Lutz. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences; Estados UnidosFil: Muallem, Shmuel. National Institutes of Health; Estados UnidosFil: Lee, Young-Ho. Yonsei University College of Medicine; Corea del Su

Volume Management in SAN Environment

Logical volume managers have long been key components of a storage system. Their key features are creation of logical or virtual views of physical storage devices and support for various software RAID levels. These make it possible to overcome the limits to capacity, availability and performance of a physical storage device. Most logical volume managers are operated in a single system environment. They are not adequate for SAN (storage area network) environments where several hosts share and access a logical volume at the same time. Some recent logical volume managers are run in a multi-host environment. However, they cannot support the enterprise computing environments in which the system must support 24*7*365 uptime operations such as online resizing and online backup. We propose a logical volume manager called \u27SANtopia Volume Manager\u27 that supports multihost environments and provides various volume management features to support enterprise computing. Also it is a cluster enabled logical volume manager that maximizes the parallelism for high performance, and provides high scalability and high availability

Expression and Identification of HERV-W Family in Japanese Monkeys (Macaca fuscata)

We investigated structural genes (gag, pol, env) of HERV-W family in the Macaca fuscata (Japanese monkey). Those genes are expressed in various tissues (testis, prostate, kidney, cerebellum, thymus, pancreas, intestine, stomach, ovary) of the Japanese monkey in RT-PCR and sequencing analyses. Nine clones for gag, thirty-one clones for pol and thirty-four clones for env fragments of the HERVW family in monkey tissues were identified and analyzed. These clones showed a high degree of sequence similarity, 82.2-84.7% for gag, 88.4-91.7% for pol, and 90.8-95.4% for env, to those of HERV-W family. Translation to amino acids in all clones derived from the monkey indicated that they showed multiple interruptions of frameshifts and termination codons by deletion/insertion or point mutation. Identical sequences from different tissues of the monkey were found in env and pol clones of the HERV-W family

Understanding telemedicine service users’ perceptions: A text mining analysis on social media discussion

Telemedicine has drawn noticeable attention due to the advancement of information technology, and it saw a surge in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study is aimed at understanding telemedicine users’ perceptions on their care services, as well as identifying the aspects of telemedicine that can be improved to enhance users’ experience and satisfaction. Specifically, we utilized a topic modeling approach with Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to analyze telemedicine-related discussion posts on Reddit to discover the topics and themes that telemedicine service users are interested in, as well as the perceptions that users have of those topics and themes. 11 topics and 6 themes were discovered by the LDA algorithm. Lastly, we provide our suggestions and insights on how telemedicine services and practitioners can implement the themes, as well as directions for future study

Synchrotron study of the garnet-type oxide Li6CaSm2Ta2O12

Hexalithium calcium disamarium(III) ditantalum(V) dodeca­oxide, Li6CaSm2Ta2O12, crystallizes in a cubic garnet-type structure. In the crystal structure, disordered Li atoms occupy two crystallographic sites. One Li has a tetra­hedral coordination environment in the oxide lattice, whereas the other Li atom occupies a significantly distorted octa­hedral site, with site occupancies for the two Li atoms of 0.26 (7) and 0.44 (2), respectively. Ca and Sm atoms are statistically distributed over the same crystallographic position with a occupancy of 2/3 for Sm and of 1/3 for Ca, and are eightfold coordinated by O atoms. The TaO6 octa­hedron is joined to six others via corner-sharing LiO4 tetra­hedra. One Li and the O atoms lie on general positions, while the other atoms are situated on special positions. The Sm/Ca position has 222, Ta has , and the tetra­hedrally coordinated Li atom has site symmetry

What Information Propagates among the Public when an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) is Initiated? A theory-driven approach

Since the popularity of blockchain-based cryptocurrency investments has increased among the public, people have directly purchased cryptocurrency through the cryptocurrency market or joined initial coin offering (ICO) projects. This research explores what informational cues are captured before, during, and after ICO projects that can be considered as signals and a fulfillment of information asymmetry. We adopted two theoretical underpinnings to achieve our research goal - agency and signaling theory. Using information from Twitter, we selected the best-performing ICO project based on the highest return on investment (ROI). Then, we extracted 5,085 tweets related to the selected ICO project. Tweets are categorized by pre-ICO, during and post-ICO, by topic, and dispersion. Analyzing the tweets, we found multiple categories of informational cues for each ICO project. Implications and limitations are discussed