Trust between service provider and customer in online environments

Nowadays online shopping is getting more and more popular in China. However, opportunities and challenges are coexisting, and the growth of e-commerce is also inevitable. In e-commerce online, trust has become a significant factor hindering development. A New Zealand organisation faces a lot of competitors. In order to increase its market share and remain competitive in the market, the organisation needs to have more loyal customers who repeatedly purchase their products. Therefore, the organisation should find an appropriate way to form or create trust with customers, to retain them. This research investigates how trust has been created in an online environment between an organisation and its customers. A qualitative method was adopted in this research and data collected using semi-structured interviews. The collected data was analysed adopting a thematic analysis method. The research findings show that a two-way communication system is the core factor in forming trust in the online environment. This research suggests that the organisation should consider two-way communication seriously, and develop that as a useful tool to build trust between them and customers; not just as a communication tool but as a tool for trust formation

Modeling the impact of climate change on tick population dynamics and tick-borne disease spread

There is increasing evidence that Lyme disease is an emerging threat for public health in Canada. In this dissertation, we study the impact of climate change on establishment/extinction of the Lyme disease tick vector Ixodes scapularis and Lyme pathogen Borrelia burgdorferi in the Canadian landscape by utilizing mathematical techniques and computer simulations. We develop principal mathematical frameworks using ordinary differential equations with periodic coefficients, partial differential equations with seasonality and a periodic system of delay differential equations with periodic delay. We develop analysis and tools to predict the long-term status of Lyme disease transmission dynamics in the vector population. We determine factors, which are of interest to public health policy makers, for Lyme disease prevention and control in Canada in varying environmental conditions. We provide the theoretical foundation of a risk map of Lyme disease in Canada

High Frequency, All-Optical Ultrasound Transducer for Biomedical Applications

High-frequency (\u3e 30 MHz), high-resolution (μm) ultrasonic imaging has been increasingly demanded in applications that include dermatology, ophthalmology, intravascular imaging, and small animal imaging. It is also a valuable imaging tool for non-invasive studies of disease progression and regression. The conventional approach that relies on piezoelectric transducers is difficult to design at high frequencies. An all-optical photoacoustic transducer, which can operate above 50 MHz, can circumvent this problem. It converts pulsed laser energy exerted onto a thin photoabsorptive film into thermoelastic waves. The center frequency and bandwidth of the generated ultrasound are determined by the incident laser pulse. In addition, the size and spacing of each generation/receiving element, which are defined by the focal point of a laser beam, can be easily reduced to several microns. This poster presents a novel fiber-optic ultrasound transducer based on optical generation and detection approaches. The ultimate goal of the project is to integrate generation and detection functions onto a single optical fiber and to achieve ultrasound beam steering via phased array technique. The ultrasound transducer presented in this poster has great potential in biomedical applications including intravascular ultrasound imaging and noncontact characterization of biological tissues. The high-frequency of the transducer gives it the capability to achieve high axial resolution (\u3c 100 μm) and the compact size (125 μm in diameter) makes it a perfect candidate for intravascular applications