Moderating effects of cross-cultural dimensions on the relationship between persuasive smartphone application's design and acceptance-loyalty

Applying persuasive system design to different cultures has been a focus of many researchers as the global medium of communication has been centered within Smartphone via applications (apps). This is due to the vast proliferation of the Smartphone and the personal attachment of users to this device in various cultures. This led designers to search for ultimate ways to target users in specific regions of the world. The basic purpose of this study was to determine the relevance of cross-cultural factors to persuasive technologies, and the acceptance and loyalty of Smartphone apps. This was achieved by examining the moderating effects of Hofstede’s six cross-cultural dimensions on the relationship between Oinas-Kukkonen and Harjumaa’s Persuasive System Design (PSD), and acceptance and loyalty. By evaluating elements of persuasive systems design and cross-cultural dimensions, from user’s perspective, against a globally popular application like WhatsApp, an instrument was devised to investigate the cross-cultural adoption and continued use of Smartphone apps. Using this instrument, surveys were conducted for this research study to identify the influencing factors that have motivated the users from Malaysia, Netherlands, Germany, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to adopt and continue using this application on a daily basis. These surveys, which included responses from 488 participants, further investigated if there is one cross-cultural dimension that has more moderating effects per country. The findings indicate an agreement among WhatsApp users from all four countries about their reasons for adopting and using this app, namely: social influence (93.7 percent), reliability (83.4 percent), dialog-support via feedback (76.4 percent), ease of use (90.5 percent) and small cost (87.7 percent). The results put new perspective that the gap among cultures is narrowing. Persuasive design strategies are particularly relevant to cultures across the globe. This study can aid the research community in investing efforts into enhancing the persuasive design framework for Smartphone apps

Entangling credit and funding shocks in interbank markets

Credit and liquidity risks represent main channels of financial contagion for interbank lending markets. On one hand, banks face potential losses whenever their counterparties are under distress and thus unable to fulfill their obligations. On the other hand, solvency constraints may force banks to recover lost fundings by selling their illiquid assets, resulting in effective losses in the presence of fire sales - that is, when funding shortcomings are widespread over the market. Because of the complex structure of the network of interbank exposures, these losses reverberate among banks and eventually get amplified, with potentially catastrophic consequences for the whole financial system. Building on Debt Rank [Battiston et al., 2012], in this work we define a systemic risk metric that estimates the potential amplification of losses in interbank markets accounting for both credit and liquidity contagion channels: the Debt-Solvency Rank. We implement this framework on a dataset of 183 European banks that were publicly traded between 2004 and 2013, showing indeed that liquidity spillovers substantially increase systemic risk, and thus cannot be neglected in stress-test scenarios. We also provide additional evidence that the interbank market was extremely fragile up to the 2008 financial crisis, becoming slightly more robust only afterwards

Can Congressional Foreign Affairs Power Justify A Juvenile Death Penalty Prohibition In The United States?

In the United States federalist model, constituent states haven\u27t much opportunity to irritate foreign nations

Comment: An Examination of the Impact of Malpractice Law on Telepsychiatry Clinicians & Clients with Suicidal Ideations

It has been said numerous times that the law runs five years behind technology. Although this lag frequently causes numerous difficulties in all aspects of law, this delay is even more impactful in telemedicine. While all fields of telemedicine are expanding rapidly across the United States, the majority of states and the federal government have not yet implemented proper laws and procedures to protect both providers of telemedicine and their patients. The dearth of needed protocols and protections is even more pronounced when examining the subfield of telepsychiatry. In particular, the malpractice law surrounding telepsychiatry when dealing with patients with suicidal ideations is dramatically underdeveloped, if not entirely absent. To address at least some of these concerns, this comment proposes a solution that will resolve questions of malpractice standards and malpractice liability for practitioners of telepsychiatry. This comment suggests that, because telepsychiatrists who treat suicidal patients deliver care in a setting that varies greatly from standard treatment settings and because they are less capable of deploying protective measures should patients pose a serious risk of harm to themselves or to others, telepsychiatrists should be held to a higher standard of care than traditional psychiatrists. There is an epidemic of suicides in the United States and mental health professionals need clear guidelines as to how to properly conduct telepsychiatric care—for both practitioner and patient safety. The law makers of the country would be well advised to address these issues before it is too late

A short predictive Model Predictive Control (MPC) approach for hybrid characteristics analysis in DC-DC converter

Historically, the MPC has been successfully applied in drives system for over a decade. Furthermore, the DC-DC converter naturally deals with high switching phenomenon that contributes to the challenging in control approach. Its operation conventionally associated with PI/PID controller in order to meet the desired output. However, the PI/PID controller lacking in getting a good transient response since this controller highly depends on the controller gains. Recently, an advanced controller has been proposed in the literature for the purpose to enhance the DC-DC converter performance. Hence, in this thesis, the short prediction horizon of MPC using search tree optimization that generates low switching states phenomenon is proposed. The MPC algorithm is developed based on the hybrid characteristic signals from the DC-DC converter. The load changes due to the increasing or decreasing the loads (could be happened of heating effect) will affect the tracking of the output voltage. The Kalman Filter (KF) is used for load estimation for smoothing and tracking the output voltage. The performance of short prediction horizons is being compared to PI controller in terms of transient response during the start-up scenario. The results show that the proposed controller has a better response than PI controller, which is the overshoot has been reduced to more than 50% and the settling time more faster about 25% than PI controller during start-up scenario. Therefore, this control approach for DC-DC buck converter has produced the promising output transient performance when compared with the conventional PI controller while also minimizing the switching sequence phenomenon

The Cassa Integrazione Guadagni, unemployment welfare and industrial conflict in post-war Italy, 1941-1987

This PhD thesis tracks the history of the Italian unemployment welfare during the second half of the twentieth century, offering an account of why the Italian system of social security never established a universal safety net against unemployment, choosing instead a social policy system targeted on the core industrial workforce. During the post-war period, Italian unemployment insurance remained severely lacking compared to other European countries. To compensate, the country relied on the Cassa Integrazione Guadagni (CIG), a short time work scheme providing a wage replacement allowance to compensate employees in the industrial sector for a temporary reduction of their working time. Starting from the late 1960s, the scope and duration of the CIG were progressively expanded to tackle manpower redundancies, catering for the weakness of other forms of support. During the 1970s and the 1980s, short time emerged as the chief instrument to cushion the economic and social consequences of the industrial crisis of the country. This thesis explains the peculiar characteristics of the Italian unemployment welfare model as a consequence of the country’s pattern of labour conflict, showing how industrial relations and social policy influenced one another. In the early postwar decades, while the unions were organisationally weak, the CIG emerged as a less expensive alternative to general unemployment insurance. This engendered a path dependent effect. Following the rise of industrial unrest and the strengthening of organised labour in the early 1970s, unions and employers favoured the increasing use of the CIG so as to protect their respective interests for job security and manpower flexibility, at the expense of the weaker strata of the labour market. Far from being a simple instrument of income maintenance, the CIG played a key role in shaping social relations of production at the work-place level and was used to diffuse industrial conflict on the shop floor. With the onset of deindustrialisation, during the 1980s, the CIG became a powerful tool for the demobilisation of organised labour.ESRC studentship 2015-2017 Ellen McArthur studentship 2015-2016 Faculty of History research fund 2015-201

The Posse Is Coming To Town…Maybe: The Role Of United States Non-Governmental Organizations In Software Anti-Piracy Initiatives As China Seeks WTO Accession

In 1999, worldwide financial losses to business software piracy were estimated at $12 billion

Il business plan in un'impresa start-up: il caso Biospire S.r.L

Il lavoro si propone di analizzare lo strumento del business plan ai fini del processo valutativo nelle aziende in fase di start up, attraverso i quattro step della valutazione della fattibilità imprenditoriale,della fattibilità in relazione all'ambiente esterno, della fattibilità in relazione all'ambiente interno e della fattibilità patrimoniale, economica e finanziaria. Si presnta l'elaborazione del business plan per la start up "Biospire S.r.L" con l'intenzione che questo possa costituire per l'azienda la chiave per un futuro di successi e che, contemporaneamente, possa fornire un caso reale e facilmente comprensibile al fine di ripercorrere i momenti fondamentali individuati dalla letteratura riguardo al tema dell’elaborazione del Business Plan per le aziende in fase di start-up

The World of the United States Foreign Policy Elite: A Case Study of the U.S. Foreign Policy Think Tanks\u27 Debates in the General Elections of 2004, 2008, and 2012

American foreign policy think tanks are an important part of the American foreign policy elite. By gathering data, publishing research, and reaching out to the public and government, think tanks help set the public debate agenda. The question I asked was whether these American foreign policy think tanks exhibited a shared worldview during the past three election cycles. I analyzed 7,000 documents (half a million verbs) published by the seven American foreign policy think tanks active in the three general elections of 2004, 2008, and 2012: the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Cato Institute, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Heritage Foundation, and the RAND Corporation. To measure the collective and individual worldviews of these seven think tanks, I used the Profiler Plus software, which answered Alexander George’s operational code questions based on the transitive verbs for the Self and the Other. My research showed that the collectivity of the seven think tanks had three separate worlds of action with three different worldviews. It also showed that the worldview of the American collective Self was very stable across time. Another empirical finding was that from the perspective of the seven think tanks, the United States’ actions were the most similar to the actions of other great powers: Europe, China, and Russia. It was also shown that from the perspective of the seven think tanks, China was the most cooperative nation and Terrorists were the most conflictual actors in the world

Why Millennials Continue to Use WhatsApp? A Focus on Culture and Computer–Human Dialogue

© 2024 Kamaal Allil et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Continuous usage behavior among millennials is crucial, yet factors influencing this behavior are not well understood. This study integrates human-computer interaction and marketing research to investigate the relationship between persuasive dialogue support (PDS), attitudinal loyalty (AL), and continuous-use intention (CI) in the context of WhatsApp. The study also examines the moderating role of four cultural dimensions: uncertainty avoidance (UA), power distance (PD), masculinity (MAS), and individualism (IND) in these relationships. Data was collected from 287 WhatsApp users in four countries, and the proposed theoretical model was tested using structural equation modelling (SEM-PLS). The results indicate that PDS has a direct positive impact on AL, which in turn leads to CI. The study also found that cultural differences can moderate the relationship between PDS and AL and between AL and CI. Therefore, app developers need to consider cultural differences when designing their products and implement persuasive design aspects to boost user loyalty and intention to use. To ensure optimal app performance in diverse cultural settings, developers should strike an appropriate balance between universal design principles and culturally sensitive adaptation. However, the study’s limitations, such as reliance on self-reported data and a relatively small sample size, suggest the need for future research to expand its scope to include participants from a broader range of cultural backgrounds.Peer reviewe