Proactive Privacy Practices In The Trend Of Ubiquitous Services: An Integrative Social Contracts Perspective

Privacy is a strategic issue that deserves great attention from enterprises because the convergence of customer information and advanced technologies that they engage in diverse business processes in response to competitive pressure, particularly when businesses promote their traditional e-services to ubiquitous services (u-services). The underlying vision of u-services is to overcome spatial and temporal boundaries in traditional services, such as m-services and e-services. U-services will be the next wave and can be recognized as a logical extension of traditional e-services because u-services are initiated by e-services based on current potential customer pool and further propagated by m-services. In the context of u-services, customers are always connected seamlessly in context-awareness networks so that a higher degree of customized and personalized services can be timely provided. While people are served with more convenience and efficiency, they may also well be aware of privacy threats behind that. Hence, privacy concerns have been recognized as a critical impediment for boosting u-services. Drawing upon integrative social contracts theory, this study undertakes to explore a proactive privacy practices framework that embraces technical and non-technical elements such as human, legal, and economic relevant perspectives. The results of this study are expected to shed light on privacy practices

The First Protocol Of Reaching Consensus Under Unreliable Mobile Edge Computing Paradigm

Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is an emerging technology that enables computing directly at the edge of the cloud computing network. Therefore, it is important that MEC is applied with reliable transmission. The problem of reaching consensus in the distributed system is one of the most important issues in designing a reliable transmission network. However, all previous protocols for the consensus problem are not suitable for an MEC paradigm. It is the first time an optimal protocol of reaching consensus is pro- posed for MEC paradigm. The protocol makes all fault-free nodes communicate with each other and collect the exchanged messages to decide a common value. Based on the common value, the protocol ensures all fault-free nodes reach consensus without the influence of unreliable transmission. Finally, we proved theoretically that the proposed protocol can tolerate the maximum number of faulty components and using only two rounds of message exchanges

Holistic Assessment of Counseling Self-Efficacy Development among Counselors in Training from a Regression Model

Supervision is an essential component in counselor education and training. Supervision helps Counselors-in-Training (CITs) evolve to fully functional counseling professionals. CITs start to receive supervision in practicum and internship. Throughout this experience, both clinical mental health and school counseling students work as a professional counselor with real clients, and their clinical practice will be supervised by a supervisor. After graduation, the graduates of clinical mental health counseling will receive years of post-graduate supervision, as required by state licensing boards, in order to obtain licensure. While the importance of supervision is irreplaceable in counseling, the factors that contribute to successful supervision outcomes, such as CIT self-efficacy is a prominent topic in the research of clinical supervision. Supervisor competency plays a vital role in the supervision relationship, which is associated closely with the success of supervision and the development of CITs’ counseling self-efficacy. Self-efficacy comes from Bandura’s social learning theory and has become an important measure for learning or counseling outcomes. CITs’ training progress in supervision can be assessed through their counseling self-efficacy. Therefore, this study was designed to explore the relationship between supervisor competency and the counseling self-efficacy of CITs. An instrument, Psychotherapy Supervision Development Survey-Supervisee (PSDS-S), was revised to collect CITs’ perceived supervisor competency and measure how much this perception contributes to their development of counseling self-efficacy. The outcomes revealed that the direct client contact hours and perceived supervisor competency contributed to 21.2% of the variance in counseling self-efficacy. The results indicate that CITs’ counseling self-efficacy can be influenced by their perceived supervisor competency of their clinical supervisor. Counselor educators are informed by the results of the study, and it is critical for counselor educators to re-consider strategies of collaborating with competent site supervisors to ensure ideal development of CITs’ counseling self-efficacy

A Network Stability Monitoring Mechanism of Cluster-Oriented Wireless Sensor Network

In wireless sensor network (WSN), every sensor node could active dynamically. Therefore, those sensor nodes will affect the stability of network topology because of clustering and de-clustering, and continuously make reconfiguration for the clusters of wireless sensor network, all that will influence the overall function of network. It is an important issue that how to elect a cluster manager (CM) to keep the stability of network topology. In addition, large amount of events maybe flood suddenly in a local area. Such the case might raise the overload of CM, even lead CM to fail or crash and the WSN topology maybe self-organized. However, a mechanism needs to be considered that allows coping with the additional loads and can balance the workload of CM. In this study, a preventable and supportable monitor mechanism to avoid CM overload cause network unstable and to reduce load imbalance problem is proposed. Hence, it can prolong lifetime of network and raise performance of network efficiently

Why Do Players Stick to a Specific Online Game? The Users and Gratifications Perspective

Driven by the dominant Internet usage and the prospective profits from the game industry, especially from the thriving and robust free-to-play model of online games, there is a need to realize players’ behaviors. Playing online games is experienceoriented but rare studies further explore what reactions of initial (trial) experiences in game playing are and how they will further influence players’ behaviors. Uses and gratification theory can be seen in cases such as online games selection. Players select an online game not only to fit particular interests but also to attempt to show empowerment or other socially conscience motives. This study, therefore, seeks to explore the important antecedents (i.e. gratifications, presence, service mechanisms, and continuance motivation) of stickiness intention on the online game and examine the associated relationships among them. The implications of findings to both researchers and practitioners are also discussed

The Effect of Affordance on Ubiquitous Commerce Consumption

The rapid development of ubiquitous technologies and mobile devices has made ubiquitous commerce (U-commerce) the next business wave. U-commerce enabled merchants with new opportunities to provide personalized services and novel shopping experiences to customers. Applying affordance theory, this study builds a research model that explains the consumer cognitive assimilation process in U-commerce and explores hedonic and impulsive consumption. This study played the U-commerce video for participants before they answered the questionnaires. The empirical results show that context-aware facilitation and social facilitation contribute equally in explaining cognitive assimilation. Meanwhile, cognitive assimilation significantly influences both hedonic consumption and impulsive consumption. This study sheds light on the two important facilitations derived from the U-commerce environment and also reveals the determinants for two types of interesting purchase behaviors in the U-commerce context

Goal-Programming-Driven Genetic Algorithm Model for Wireless Access Point Deployment Optimization

Appropriate wireless access point deployment (APD) is essential for ensuring seamless user communication. Optimal APD enables good telecommunication quality, balanced capacity loading, and optimal deployment costs. APD is a typical NP-complex problem because improving wireless networking infrastructure has multiple objectives (MOs). This paper proposes a method that integrates a goal-programming-driven model (PM) and a genetic algorithm (GA) to resolve the MO-APD problem. The PM identifies the target deployment subject of four constraints: budget, coverage, capacity, and interference. The PM also calculates dynamic capacity requirements to replicate real wireless communication. Three experiments validate the feasibility of the PM. The results demonstrate the utility and stability of the proposed method. Decision makers can easily refer to the PM-identified target deployment before allocating APs

Nonsurjective zero product preservers between matrices over an arbitrary field

In this paper, we give concrete descriptions of additive or linear disjointness preservers between matrix algebras over an arbitrary field $\mathbb{F}$ of different sizes. In particular, we show that a linear map $\Phi: M_n(\mathbb{F}) \rightarrow M_r(\mathbb{F})$ preserving zero products carries the form $$\Phi(A)= S\begin{pmatrix} R\otimes A & 0 \cr 0 & \Phi_0(A)\end{pmatrix} S^{-1},$$ for some invertible matrices $R$ in $M_k(\mathbb{F})$, $S$ in $M_r(\mathbb{F})$ and a zero product preserving linear map $\Phi_0: M_n(\mathbb{F}) \rightarrow M_{r-nk}(\mathbb{F})$ with range consisting of nilpotent matrices. Here, either $R$ or $\Phi_0$ can be vacuous. The structure of $\Phi_0$ could be quite arbitrary. We classify $\Phi_0$ with some additional assumption. When $\Phi(I_n)$ has a zero nilpotent part, especially when $\Phi(I_n)$ is diagonalizable, we have $\Phi_0(X)\Phi_0(Y) = 0$ for all $X, Y$ in $M_n(\mathbb{F})$, and we give more information about $\Phi_0$ in this case. Similar results for double zero product preservers and orthogonality preservers are obtained.Comment: 29 page