The moderating influence of device characteristics and usage on user acceptance of smart mobile devices

This study seeks to develop a comprehensive model of consumer acceptance in the context of Smart Mobile Device (SMDs). This paper proposes an adaptation of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT2) model that can be employed to explain and predict the acceptance of SMDs. Also included in the model are a number of external and new moderating variables that can be used to explain user intentions and subsequent usage behaviour. The model holds that Activity-based Usage and Device Characteristics are posited to moderate the impact of the constructs empirically validated in the UTAUT2 model. Through an important cluster of antecedents the proposed model aims to enhance our understanding of consumer motivations for using SMDs and aid efforts to promote the adoption and diffusion of these devices

Innovative Strategies to Help Affordable Consumer Operated and Oriented Plans (CO-OPs) Compete in New Insurance Marketplaces

Outlines provisions in the federal health reform law for CO-OPs, or innovative nonprofit health insurance and care plans designed for individuals and small businesses, challenges, and strategies for long-term sustainability and financial success

The exploded self of a South African poet: the case of Wopko Jensma

Paper presented at the Wits History Workshop: Structure and Experience in the Making of Apartheid, 6-10 February, 1990

Eco-catastrophe, arithmetic patriotism, and the Thatcherite promise of nature

This essay describes how the renovated 1970s liberalism that would become a major thread of Thatcherism grew on the back of public perceptions of crisis, and adapted worries about ecology to worries about ‘financial ecology’, or money supply. The natural conditions of money movement have a particular place in the British constitution as the original basis of authority for the 1688 state, when Newtonian ideas of eternal laws of physics were ‘financialised’ by John Locke. In this thinking, the property basis of citizenship itself is nature, and must be underwired by universal terms of exchange following natural rules. Although Thatcherism has often been described as an alien credo, it was largely enabled by this promise of a return to a financial natural law. In the terms borrowed from Luc Boltanski by William Davies, it returns to a ‘political physics’ which now takes on a moral role preventing catastrophe, or an ‘economic patriotism’ seen to protect the constitution from political force. The 1970s return to Locke’s understanding of nature builds on and repurposes visions of the catastrophic in popular culture, fiction, children’s books and TV, which I describe here. It begins with those eco-catastrophes that describe a ‘disaster of nature’, which it sees as also including the disaster of the property-producing role of labour, in the ‘despotic’ role of trade unions, and the perceived threat to money as a universal measure, a disaster that would increasingly be given an arithmetic measure in inflation. For key liberal or neo-Lockean think-tanks of the mid­1970s, the attack on natural law by despotic power, measured in inflation, could be seen as a mass erosion of individual responsibility, as dystopian, and as always calling for a restoration of the balances of nature. The result is a permanent and quotidian vigilance over threats to nature that sees their solution, paradoxically, as the creation of more property. Understanding this binding between nature and property in the constitution that gave rise to Anglophone capitalist modernity also helps give a fix on the way stories of ecological disaster can, as Frederick Buell has described, themselves be given values and repurposed for increased consumption

Nuclear deficit : why nuclear weapons are natural, but Scotland doesn’t need nature

This article argues that millennial Scottish culture has been animated in large part by a push to overcome a historiographical compulsion built into the modern British state’s understanding of nature. This understanding of nature became the foundational principle of government during the Financial Revolution and British unification in the 1690s−1710, then was made the subject of a universal history by the Scottish Enlightenment of the later eighteenth century, and has remained in place to be extended by neoliberalism. The article argues more specifically that the British association of progress with dominion over the world as nature demands a temporal abstraction, or automation, reducing the determinability of the present, and that correspondingly this idea of nature ‘softens’ conflict in a way that points to weapons carrying perfectly abstracted violence. Nuclear weapons become an inevitable corollary of the nature of British authority. Against this, twenty-first century Scottish cultures, particularly a growing mainstream surrounding independence or stressing national specificity, have noticeably turned against both nuclear weapons and the understanding of nature these weapons protect. These cultures draw from a 1980s moment in which anti-nuclear action came both to be understood as ‘national’, and to stand in relief to the British liberal firmament. These cultures are ‘activist’ in the literal sense that they tend to interrupt an assumption of the eternal that stands behind both nuclear terror and its capture of nature as dominion over the world. A dual interruption, nuclear and counter-natural, can be read in pro-independence cultural projects including online projects like Bella Caledonia and National Collective, which might be described as undertaking a thorough ‘denaturing’. But if the question of nature as resources for dominion has been a topic for debate in the environmental humanities, little attention has been paid to this specifically British ‘worlding’ of nature, or to how later constitutional pressures on the UK also mean pressures on this worlding. Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital (2016), for example, a powerful account of the automation of production in the British industrial revolution, might be related to the automation of ideas of progress pressed during the Scottish Enlightenment, and entrenching a dualism of owning subject and nature as object-world that would drive extraction in empire. Finally, this article suggests that this dualism, and the nature holding it in place, have also been a major target of the ‘wilderness encounters’ that form a large sub-genre in twenty-first century Scottish writing. Such ‘denaturing’ encounters can be read in writers like Alec Finlay, Linda Cracknell, Thomas A. Clark, and Gerry Loose, often disrupting the subject standing over nature, and sometimes explicitly linking this to a disruption of nuclear realism

Liberating language: people's English for the future

Paper presented at the Wits History Workshop: The Making of Class, 9-14 February, 198

The Constitution of English Literature

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. In this extended essay, Michael Gardiner examines the ideology of the discipline of English Literature in the light of the serious redefining work on England and Englishness that has been conducted in Political Studies in the last decade. He argues that English Literature emerges from the development of the state and that consequently it has suppressed the idea of the nation. His claim is that English Literature has lost its form since its methodology and canonicity depended so heavily on a constitutional form which can no longer be defended. He calls upon those working in English Literature to recognise that they are not really participating in the same discipline, defined by the Burkean constitutional settlement, even if they think of themselves as writing 'within the canon'. His view is that a lack of appreciation of 'hard-edged' political factors have led to a 'continuant' and regressive form of English Literature which tends to hang on to stifling methodologies. In its place, he appeals for the creation of a more open-ended, inclusive, internationalist, and comparative 'literature of England'

New synthetic strategies towards cephalotaxus alkaloids

Michael alkylation, with methyl acrylate, of nitrocyclohexenes bearing functionalized aromatic substituents at the 2-position, was found to be highly stereo selective. Subsequent dissolving metal reductive cyclization was highly efficient, and these two steps thus provided a stereo specific entry to a substituted 1-azaspirocyclic system, related to the cephalotaxine skeleton. Application of this methodology to trans-4-(3,4-dimethoxy-6-carbo- methoxyraethylphenyl)-5-nitrocyclohexene afforded spirolactam ester 6-(3,4-dimethoxy-6-carboraethoxymethylphenyl)-2-oxo-l-azaspiro[4.5]dec-8-ene. On reduction with DIBAL-H at -78ºC, this cyclized in high yield, with high stereoselectivity to the corresponding 3-benzazepine-2-ol system.Similar methodology with trans-4-(3,4-methylenedioxy-6-nitrophenyl) -5-nitrocyclohexene, allowed for a formaldehyde insertion reaction to provide a 1,3-benzodiazepine analogue. Preliminary studies hold promise for allowing modification of the cyclohexene ring to known pre-targets of cephalotaxine. These findings bring the synthetic strategy towards providing a competitive route to (±) cephalotaxine, and also a range of analogues, including the unknown 11-aza and 10-hydroxy-8-oxo systems