Knowledge Adoption in Virtual Community: Exploring The Moderating Effect of Learning Orientation

This study aims to investigate the evaluation determinants of online knowledge adoption. Knowledge transfer in online context has been debated by many researchers but mainly addressed the knowledge sharing aspect. Knowledge recipient, however, is also a critical role in knowledge transfer. Thus, dual process theory is rooted as the theoretical foundation to investigate the persuasiveness of knowledge from virtual communities. A theoretical model of knowledge adoption suggests argument quality and source credibility would be moderated by the knowledge seekers’ learning orientation. The results of this study will be helpful to understanding the individuals how to evaluate and learn online knowledge. Furthermore, the moderator’s effect of the learning orientation may indicate how the personal learning characteristic affects the online learning behavior

Taking Shopping Advice from Virtual Communities

As the proliferation of Internet, people getting used to search information online, consumers who need decision support for purchase also looking for advice through Internet, or ask for advice within virtual communities. In order to understanding the advice taking behavior provided by community members, this study tries to identify the antecedents of advice taking by normative social influence that is suitable in the context of virtual communities. The mediation layer, the informational influence utilizes to predict the consumers’ advice taking intention. Based on these two kinds of social influence, the investigation would be conducted by testing two factors in each kind of social influence: advice rating and consistency conceive as normative factors whereas advice quality and advisor credibility represent the informational influence. According to the results the factors of social influence both exert significant effects on the informational factors. In addition, the informational factors also have salient impacts on the advice taking

A Visual Analytic Study of Articles in Entrepreneurship Research

The entrepreneurship research grows continuously in this century; this study utilized the visual analytic method to depict literature characteristics of entrepreneurship research, including publication countries, subject area, most cited references and so on. The analytical data was collected from database of Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) of ISI Web of knowledge. This study provided the several findings to describe the academic trend in entrepreneurship research

モバイルバンキングへの利用意欲に影響する要因に関する一考察

Although millions of dollars have been spend on building mobile banking systems, report on mobile banking systems has shown that potential users may not use the systems in spite of their availability. There is a need for research to identify the factors that determine users\u27 acceptance of mobile banking. According to the technology acceptance model (TAM), perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness constructs are believed to be fundamental in determining the acceptance and use of various IT. These beliefs, however, may not fully explain the user\u27s behavior toward the newly emerging mobile banking. Using the technology acceptance model (TAM) as a theoretical framework, this study introduces "perceived credibility" as a new factor that reflects the user\u27s security and privacy concern in the acceptance of mobile banking, and examines the effect of computer self-efficacy on intention to use mobile banking. Data collected from 267 users in Taiwan were tested against the extended TAM using the structural equation modeling approach. The results strongly support the extended TAM in predicting users\u27 intention to adopt mobile banking systems, and demonstrate the significant effect of computer self-efficacy on behavioral intention through perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, and perceived credibility

Fifteen new risk loci for coronary artery disease highlight arterial-wall-specific mechanisms

Coronary artery disease (CAD) is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Although 58 genomic regions have been associated with CAD thus far, most of the heritability is unexplained, indicating that additional susceptibility loci await identification. An efficient discovery strategy may be larger-scale evaluation of promising associations suggested by genome-wide association studies (GWAS). Hence, we genotyped 56,309 participants using a targeted gene array derived from earlier GWAS results and performed meta-analysis of results with 194,427 participants previously genotyped, totaling 88,192 CAD cases and 162,544 controls. We identified 25 new SNP-CAD associations (P < 5 × 10(-8), in fixed-effects meta-analysis) from 15 genomic regions, including SNPs in or near genes involved in cellular adhesion, leukocyte migration and atherosclerosis (PECAM1, rs1867624), coagulation and inflammation (PROCR, rs867186 (p.Ser219Gly)) and vascular smooth muscle cell differentiation (LMOD1, rs2820315). Correlation of these regions with cell-type-specific gene expression and plasma protein levels sheds light on potential disease mechanisms

Meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies in East Asian-ancestry populations identifies four new loci for body mass index

Recent genetic association studies have identified 55 genetic loci associated with obesity or body mass index (BMI). The vast majority, 51 loci, however, were identified in European-ancestry populations. We conducted a meta-analysis of associations between BMI and ∼2.5 million genotyped or imputed single nucleotide polymorphisms among 86 757 individuals of Asian ancestry, followed by in silico and de novo replication among 7488–47 352 additional Asian-ancestry individuals. We identified four novel BMI-associated loci near the KCNQ1 (rs2237892, P = 9.29 × 10−13), ALDH2/MYL2 (rs671, P = 3.40 × 10−11; rs12229654, P = 4.56 × 10−9), ITIH4 (rs2535633, P = 1.77 × 10−10) and NT5C2 (rs11191580, P = 3.83 × 10−8) genes. The association of BMI with rs2237892, rs671 and rs12229654 was significantly stronger among men than among women. Of the 51 BMI-associated loci initially identified in European-ancestry populations, we confirmed eight loci at the genome-wide significance level (P < 5.0 × 10−8) and an additional 14 at P < 1.0 × 10−3 with the same direction of effect as reported previously. Findings from this analysis expand our knowledge of the genetic basis of obesity

FUZZY MCDM APPROACH FOR EVALUATION OF EXPATRIATE ASSIGNMENTS

As international corporate activities increase, the staffing of their operations involves more strategic concerns. However, foreign assignments have many differences, and dissatisfaction with host country is a known cause of expatriate failure. This study distinguishes from previous studies, which focused on the expatriate selection process from the viewpoint of the human resource managers. From the view of expatriate candidate's points, this paper describes a fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (fuzzy AHP) to determine the weighting of subjective judgments. When the expatriate assignments are evaluated from various aspects, such as employee personal factors, employee competencies, job characteristics, family factors, environmental factors and organization relocation support activities, it can be regarded as an fuzzy multiple criteria decision making (FMCDM) problem. Since expatriate candidates cannot clearly estimate the relative importance of each considered criterion in terms of numerical values, fuzziness is applicable. Consequently, this paper uses triangular fuzzy numbers by fuzzy AHP to establish weights for expatriate candidates, thus determining the relative importance for criteria of expatriate assignments. From the insights of this study, this article addresses this expatriate problem and offers guidelines for managers concerned with a successful expatriate assignment program.Expatriate assignments, human resources management, FMCDM, fuzzy AHP, fuzzy set theory