Exploring Impact of Consumer and Product Characteristics on E-Commerce Adoption: A Study of Consumers in India

The paper aims at examining the impact of various consumer and product characteristics on adoption of e-commerce among consumers in India. The study is based on primary data collected through survey of consumers residing in and around Delhi. A structured non- disguised questionnaire has been employed for collecting the information from the respondents about their demographics, shopping orientations, security and privacy concerns, technological familiarity, past online shopping experiences and intentions to buy various types of products through internet in future. Past online shopping satisfaction, recreational shopping orientation, education and income emerge as significant factors affecting consumer past online purchases. In respect of future online shopping intentions, only three consumer-related factors viz., past online shopping satisfaction, past online shopping frequency and education, are found as significant predictors. Amongst product characteristics, product expensiveness is found to be negatively related to consumer future online purchase intentions. While consumers appear quite willing to buy services online that are high in their intangible value proposition, they appear somewhat ambivalent in their intentions to buy online the 'frequently purchased products'. Some of the consumer and product characteristics do influence consumer adoption of e-commerce. Study findings entail interesting implications for the marketers. They need to give adequate attention to consumer and product characteristics while designing their e-marketing strategies. As compared to goods, the surveyed respondents have expressed greater willingness to buy services online in future. Services thus appear to be more promising product category for sale through internet channel in future

A Review Paper on Various Search Engines (Google, Yahoo, Altavista, Ask and Bing)

Search engines are used in the web as a tool for information retrieval. As the web is a huge repository of heterogeneous and unstructured data so to filter out relevant information from unnecessary ones search engines are needed. Search engines usually consists of crawling module, page repository, indexing module, querying module and ranking module. The inter communication between these modules describes the working methodology of a search engine. This paper aims to focus on the comparative analysis of five major search engines i.e Google, Yahoo, Altavista, Ask and Bing in a tabular form based on some features. The features include search operator, search web, search images, search videos, search news, search maps, search books, advance search, change background, change search settings, display number of results, shopping, translation services, multi-language support, questions/answers, directory, advertising programs, business services, themes, case sensitive, finance, safe search, search pad, career and preferences. Google stands out as the best search engine amongst all search engines, which works on Page Rank algorithm. Page Rank is a numeric value which determines the importance of a web page by calculating the number of backlinks

Lipid Raft in Cardiac Health and Disease

Lipid rafts are sphingolipid and cholesterol rich micro-domains of the plasma membrane that coordinate and regulate varieties of signaling processes. Lipid rafts are also present in cardiac myocytes and are enriched in signaling molecules and ion channel regulatory proteins. Lipid rafts are receiving increasing attention as cellular organelles contributing to the pathogenesis of several structural and functional processes including cardiac hypertrophy and heart failure. At present, very little is known about the role of lipid rafts in cardiac function and dysfunction. This review will discuss the possible role of lipid rafts in cardiac health and disease

Integration Of TRMM Rainfall In Numerical Model For Pesticide Prediction In Subtropical Climate

Rain gauge data in developing countries are usually very limited, which constrains most of the hydrological modelling applications. The satellite based rainfall estimates could be a promising choice and hence can be used as a surrogate to ground-based rainfall. However, the usefulness of these products needs to be evaluated for hydrological application such as for pesticide predictions. The present study compares the contaminant transport simulation with the utilization of Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) rainfall compared with rain gauge data from the field site. Through this study, transport trends of the pesticide, Thiram, a dithiocarbamate, at different time and depth in the fields under real field conditions for the wheat crop were compared to the numerical simulations using HYDRUS- 1D with the input of daily rainfall from the TRMM. The daily rainfall from TRMM has been utilized to simulate the pesticide concentration up to 60 cm vertical soil profile with the intervals of 15 cm. The simulated soil moisture content using ground based rainfall and TRMM derived rainfall measurements indicate an agreeable goodness of fit between the both. The overall analysis reveals that TRMM rainfall is promising for soil pesticide prediction in absence of ground based measurements of soil pesticide. Further, comparison of the model to measured field data of pesticides movement indicates that the modelling approach can provide reliable and useful estimates of the mass flux of water and non-volatile pesticide in vadose zone. Thus, the satellite-based rainfall products could also be useful for policy makers and planners while controlling inappropriate pesticide application under saturated and deficit soil moisture conditions

An introduction to factor analysis for radio frequency interference detection on satellite observations

A novel radio frequency interference (RFI) detection method is introduced for satellite-borne passive microwave radiometer observations. This method is based on factor analysis, in which variability among observed and correlated variables is described in terms of factors. In the present study, this method is applied to the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM)/TRMM Microwave Imager (TMI) and Aqua/Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer – Earth Observing System (AMSR-E) satellite measurements over the land surface to detect the RFI signals, respectively, in 10 and 6 GHz channels. The RFI detection results are compared with other traditional methods, such as spectral difference method and principal component analysis (PCA) method. It has been found that the newly proposed method is able to detect RFI signals in the C- and X-band radiometer channels as effectively as the conventional PCA method