An Exploratory Study on the Impact of Trust on Different E-Payment Gateways: Octopus Card Vs. Credit Card

The study of trust of consumer on Business-to-Consumer (B2C) E-commerce is one of the key research interests of Information Systems (IS) researchers. In this research, we investigate the impact of trust on two different E-payment gateways, viz. online credit card payment system and the hypothetical online Octopus card (a stored-value smart card) payment system. Based on the model developed by Gefen et al. (2003) and McKnight et al. (2002a), we synthesize our own research model by incorporating disposition to trust, and trust and its antecedents with the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). An online survey was conducted on the Government-to-Citizen (G2C) E-commerce portal of the Hong Kong Government and 2,481 usable responses were collected. The empirical result shows that consumers in Hong Kong are using different trust building processes to consider their adoption for E-payment gateways

The Impacts of Information Privacy, Monetary Reward, and Buyers’ Protection Excess on Consumers’ Utility Using E-payment Gateways: A Conjoint Analysis

This paper reports our findings on the impacts of information privacy, financial reward, and buyers’ protection excess on consumers’ utility using E-payment Gateways. We invited users of the G2C E-government Portal of Hong Kong to participate in an online experiment and collected data from 1,795 subjects. From our conjoint analysis, we find that monetary reward has the most significant impact on consumers’ utility among the six design attributes of E-payment Gateways investigated in this study, i.e. monetary reward, online transfer of information, acceptability, buyers’ protection excess, anonymity, and physical control. We also observe that there is a gender impact on the relative importance of these attributes

Unique Transcriptional Profile of Sustained Ligand-Activated Preconditioning in Pre- and Post-Ischemic Myocardium

BACKGROUND: Opioidergic SLP (sustained ligand-activated preconditioning) induced by 3–5 days of opioid receptor (OR) agonism induces persistent protection against ischemia-reperfusion (I-R) injury in young and aged hearts, and is mechanistically distinct from conventional preconditioning responses. We thus applied unbiased gene-array interrogation to identify molecular effects of SLP in pre- and post-ischemic myocardium. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Male C57Bl/6 mice were implanted with 75 mg morphine or placebo pellets for 5 days. Resultant SLP did not modify cardiac function, and markedly reduced dysfunction and injury in perfused hearts subjected to 25 min ischemia/45 min reperfusion. Microarray analysis identified 14 up- and 86 down-regulated genes in normoxic hearts from SLP mice (≥1.3-fold change, FDR≤5%). Induced genes encoded sarcomeric/contractile proteins (Myh7, Mybpc3,Myom2,Des), natriuretic peptides (Nppa,Nppb) and stress-signaling elements (Csda,Ptgds). Highly repressed genes primarily encoded chemokines (Ccl2,Ccl4,Ccl7,Ccl9,Ccl13,Ccl3l3,Cxcl3), cytokines (Il1b,Il6,Tnf) and other proteins involved in inflammation/immunity (C3,Cd74,Cd83, Cd86,Hla-dbq1,Hla-drb1,Saa1,Selp,Serpina3), together with endoplasmic stress proteins (known: Dnajb1,Herpud1,Socs3; putative: Il6, Gadd45g,Rcan1) and transcriptional controllers (Egr2,Egr3, Fos,Hmox1,Nfkbid). Biological themes modified thus related to inflammation/immunity, together with cellular/cardiovascular movement and development. SLP also modified the transcriptional response to I-R (46 genes uniquely altered post-ischemia), which may influence later infarction/remodeling. This included up-regulated determinants of cellular resistance to oxidant (Mgst3,Gstm1,Gstm2) and other forms of stress (Xirp1,Ankrd1,Clu), and repression of stress-response genes (Hspa1a,Hspd1,Hsp90aa,Hsph1,Serpinh1) and Txnip. CONCLUSIONS: Protection via SLP is associated with transcriptional repression of inflammation/immunity, up-regulation of sarcomeric elements and natriuretic peptides, and modulation of cell stress, growth and development, while conventional protective molecules are unaltered

Case Reports : Rheumatoid pleural effusions and trapped lung : An uncommon complication of rheumatoid arthritis

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a disease affecting approximately 1[percent] of the population. It is familiarly defined as "chronic, symmetric, debilitating and destructive inflammatory polyarthritis characterized by proliferative synovial tissue (pannus) formation in affected joints" (1). Pain symptoms are typically worse in the morning, thedisease affects females more than males, and ulnar deviation and swan neck deformities are common. Perhaps less well known is the extensive list of extra-articular manifestations (EAMs) that can occur at any time duringthe course of the disease. EAMs affect an estimated 18-41[percent] of patients with RA (1). Renal, pulmonary cardiovascular, nervous, and integumentary system manifestations have all been described. Our case is that of anRA patient with shortness of breath and pleural effusions

Consumer E-Service Evaluation in Hong Kong Online Music Subscription Service Industry

This study investigates into factors affecting the success of E-service using a research model grounded on the Updated DeLone and McLean Information System Success Model (DeLone & McLean, 2003). Fourteen factors originated from four constructs, i.e., system quality, information quality, service quality, and vendor dimensions, are included in our research model. Using the online music subscription industry in Hong Kong as the platform of our investigation, we examine the associations between these four constructs and customer preference in the online music subscription service industry in Hong Kong. We collected data from 135 college students from Hong Kong to test our model using the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). We show that each E-business success construct in our model has different levels of importance in E-service success in the online music subscription service industry. Our findings provide decision makers of E-business firms with useful insights to enhance their E-service quality

Regression modeling of longitudinal binary outcomes with outcome-dependent observation times

Conventional longitudinal data analysis methods assume that outcomes are independent of the data-collection schedule. However, the independence assumption may be violated, for example, when adverse events trigger additional physician visits in between prescheduled follow-ups. Observation times may therefore be associated with outcome values, which may introduce bias when estimating the eect of covariates on outcomes using standard longitudinal regression methods. Existing semi-parametric methods that accommodate outcome-dependent observation times are limited to the analysis of continuous outcomes. We develop new methods for the analysis of binary outcomes, while retaining the exibility of semi-parametric models. Our methods are based on counting process approaches, rather than relying on possibly intractable likelihood-based or pseudo-likelihood-based approaches, and provide marginal, population-level inference. In simulations, we evaluate the statistical properties of our proposed methods. Comparisons are made to \u27naive\u27 GEE approaches that either do not account for outcome-dependent observation times or incorporate weights based on the observation-time process. We illustrate the utility of our proposed methods using data from a randomized controlled trial of interventions designed to improve adherence to warfarin therapy. We show that our method performs well in the presence of outcome-dependent observation times, and provide identical inference to \u27naive\u27 approaches when observation times are not associated with outcomes

The Stripe 82 Massive Galaxy Project. I. Catalog Construction

The Stripe 82 Massive Galaxy Catalog (S82-MGC) is the largest-volume stellar mass-limited sample of galaxies beyond z ≈ 0.1 constructed to date. Spanning 139.4 deg2, the S82-MGC includes a mass-limited sample of 41,770 galaxies with log M*/M⊙ ≳ 11.2 to z ≈ 0.7, sampling a volume of 0.3 Gpc3, roughly equivalent to the volume of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-I/II (SDSS-I/II) z \u3c 0.15 main sample. The catalog is built on three pillars of survey data: the SDSS Stripe 82 Coadd photometry which reaches r-band magnitudes of ∼23.5 AB, Y JHK photometry at depths of 20th magnitude (AB) from the UK Infrared Deep Sky Survey Large Area Survey, and over 70,000 spectroscopic galaxy redshifts from the SDSS-I/II and the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey. We describe the catalog construction and verification, the production of 9-band matched aperture photometry, tests of existing and newly estimated photometric redshifts required to supplement spectroscopic redshifts for 55% of the log M*/M⊙ ≳ 11.2 sample, and geometric masking. We provide near-IR based stellar mass estimates and compare these to previous estimates. All catalog products are made publicly available. The S82-MGC not only addresses previous statistical limitations in high-mass galaxy evolution studies, but also begins tackling inherent data challenges in the coming era of wide-field imaging surveys

Sub-100 nm resolution microscopy based on proximity projection grating scheme

Structured illumination microscopy (SIM) has been widely used in life science imaging applications. The maximum resolution improvement of SIM, compared to conventional bright field system is a factor of 2. Here we present an approach to structured illumination microscopy using the proximity projection grating scheme (PPGS), which has the ability to further enhance the SIM resolution without invoking any nonlinearity response from the sample. With the PPGS-based SIM, sub-100 nm resolution has been obtained experimentally, and results corresponding to 2.4 times resolution improvement are presented. Furthermore, it will be shown that an improvement of greater than 3 times can be achieved