Quality Dimensions for B2C E-Commerce

Organizations have still not realized the full potential of e-commerce. One factor that is likely to influence the further adoption of e-commerce is the quality of the e-commerce system as system quality impacts user satisfaction and hence use of the system. However, in order to improve the quality of any systems, one first needs to identify measures to assess quality. Although other researchers have recognized the need for such measures, they have primarily focused on a single specific aspect of e-commerce systems, typically the user interface. In this paper we identify the key components of e-commerce systems and synthesize existing research related to quality of these components to arrive at a comprehensive list of quality dimensions, which in turn provide measures to assess the quality of e-commerce systems

An Implementation of the IT Fundamentals Knowledge Area in an Introductory IT Course

The recently promulgated IT model curriculum contains IT fundamentals (ITF) as one of its knowledge areas. It is intended to give students a broad understanding of (1) the IT profession and the skills that students must develop to become successful IT professionals and (2) the academic discipline of IT and its relationship to other disciplines. The model curriculum recommends 33 lecture hours to complete the IT fundamentals knowledge. The model curriculum also recommends that the material relevant to the IT fundamentals knowledge area be offered early in the curriculum, for example in an Introduction to IT course; however, many institutions will have to include additional material in an introductory IT course. For example, the Introduction to IT course at Georgia Southern University is used to introduce students to the available second disciplines (an important part of the Georgia Southern IT curriculum aimed at providing students with in-depth knowledge of an IT application domain), some productivity tools, and SQL in addition to an introduction to the discipline of IT. For many programs there may be too much material in an introductory IT course. This paper describes how Georgia Southern University resolved this problem by describing the structure of the introductory course at Georgia Southern, its assessment methods, and the relationship between the course and the ITF knowledge area and how those aspects of the ITF knowledge area that are not covered in the introductory course are covered elsewhere in the program

The topographic evolution of the Tibetan Region as revealed by palaeontology

The Tibetan Plateau was built through a succession of Gondwanan terranes colliding with Asia during the Mesozoic. These accretions produced a complex Paleogene topography of several predominantly east–west trending mountain ranges separated by deep valleys. Despite this piecemeal assembly and resultant complex relief, Tibet has traditionally been thought of as a coherent entity rising as one unit. This has led to the widely used phrase ‘the uplift of the Tibetan Plateau’, which is a false concept borne of simplistic modelling and confounds understanding the complex interactions between topography climate and biodiversity. Here, using the rich palaeontological record of the Tibetan region, we review what is known about the past topography of the Tibetan region using a combination of quantitative isotope and fossil palaeoaltimetric proxies, and present a new synthesis of the orography of Tibet throughout the Paleogene. We show why ‘the uplift of the Tibetan Plateau’ never occurred, and quantify a new pattern of topographic and landscape evolution that contributed to the development of today’s extraordinary Asian biodiversity

Neural networks in the study of the brain.

Neural networks are models of the brain and have been used within Artificial Intelligence to provide alternative explanations to the symbolic explanations of cognition in which one assumes that an intelligent system has certain explicit representations of some aspect of the world and uses these in intelligent behavior. Obviously, if neural networks are indeed good models of the brain, and give a satisfactory account of cognition, then they could be a valuable tool to neuroscientists. This article gives a brief overview of the various neural network models, and critically reviews their status as models of the brain and of cognition

Knowledge Representation

Knowledge Representatio