Guest Editorial Anh-Vu Pham
IEEE transactions on microwave theory and techniques,
01/2018, Volume:
66, Issue:
9
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The 2017 Asia-Pacific Microwave Conference (APMC 2017) was held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on November 13, 2017–November 16, 2017. The conference was sponsored by the IEEE Microwave Theory and ...Techniques (MTT) Society, organized by the Malaysian IEEE AP/MTT/EMC Joint Chapter, and technically co-sponsored by the European Microwave Association and the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society. Out of ~537 papers submitted, ~360 papers were accepted for presentation in the conference and publication in the 2017 APMC proceedings. These papers have also been published online on the IEEE Xplore website. The technical program involved 430 authors coming from 40 different countries.
An online retailer's website acts as a focal point for a company's online identity, not only encompassing the products and services offered but also presenting the aesthetic image and values of the ...company. Cultivating a strong company online identity helps differentiate one online retailer from another, attracts and retains customers to strengthen competitive advantage, and enhances brand, product, or service distinctions. Our study proposes that an online retailer's website cultivates a particular identity that consumers may identify with to varying degrees. This identification with an online retailer's web presence may generate repeat purchases from committed consumers, or even extra-role behaviors such as the creation and distribution of written, audio, and video content online. Website identification is proposed to be a representation of a consumer's identification with his/her perception of an online retailer's identity. Website identification is theorized to act as a mediating factor that unifies online purchase research streams with information systems, consumer behavior, and marketing, presenting new strategies for online retailers to assess and build a strong customer base. This study demonstrates that website identification provides a new theoretical perspective to understand online shopping behavior of committed customers. We recommend that online retailers promote website identification to attract and retain repeat customers by focusing on the attractiveness of the website and product offerings while maintaining a high degree of trust.
Purpose - This research extends Mehrabian and Russell's Stimulus-Organism-Response model to include both external (i.e. reputation) and internal source of information (i.e. website quality) as ...stimuli which affect consumers' response systems. The purpose of this paper is to test a more comprehensive model consisting of reputation and website quality (stimuli), cognition and emotion (organism) and purchase intention (response). Design/methodology/approach - In total, 219 usable questionnaires were obtained at a large Midwestern university through online survey. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was employed for data analyses. Findings - Reputation had a significant positive effect on consumers' emotion and significant negative effect on perceived risk. All four website quality dimensions had significant negative effects on perceived risk and significant positive effects on emotion, except for customer service. Perceived risk had a significant negative effect on consumers' emotion, and both perceived risk and emotion had a significant impact on purchase intention. Research limitations/implications - This research employed convenience sampling, which resulted in a majority of female respondents. The results may be generalized to a limited extent. Originality/value - This study allows for empirical examination of the different effects of various components of retail websites on emotion, perceived risk and behavioral intentions. This research will add value to the related literature by filling the void of previous research and also will provide practical implications for online retailers on designing and maintaining positive consumer response. Strength of the research lies in its ecological validity, since respondents were not simply all reacting to the same single stimulus.
This study uses the web traffic volume data of a destination marketing organization (DMO) to predict hotel demand for the destination. The results show a significant improvement in the error ...reduction of ARMAX models, compared with their ARMA counterparts, for short-run forecasts of room nights sold by incorporating web traffic data as an explanatory variable.These empirical results demonstrate the significant value of website traffic data in predicting demand for hotel rooms at a destination, and potentially even local businesses’ future revenue and performance. The implications for future research on using big data for forecasting hotel demand is also discussed.
We investigate the presence (and the influence) of disinformation spreading on online social networks in Italy, in the 5-month period preceding the 2019 European Parliament elections. To this aim we ...collected a large-scale dataset of tweets associated to thousands of news articles published on Italian disinformation websites. In the observation period, a few outlets accounted for most of the deceptive information circulating on Twitter, which focused on controversial and polarizing topics of debate such as immigration, national safety and (Italian) nationalism. We found evidence of connections between Italian disinformation sources and different disinformation outlets across Europe, U.S. and Russia, featuring similar, even translated, articles in the period before the elections. Overall, the spread of disinformation on Twitter was confined in a limited community, strongly (and explicitly) related to the Italian conservative and far-right political environment, who had a limited impact on online discussions on the up-coming elections.
Drawing on Online Social Network (OSN) Framework (Brown, Boderick, & Lee, 2007), this study examines the role of electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) in consumer review websites by investigating its ...effects on the decision-making process of consumers. OSN framework postulates that individuals consider the websites to be primary “actors” and develop social relationships with the websites themselves rather than the other online participants. This study proposes and empirically tests an integrative model of three social network constructs associated with the website (i.e., tie strength, homophily, and source credibility) and their relationship to consumers' evaluations associated with attitudes and perceived influence of eWOM effectiveness. An online survey with a sample size of 793 respondents revealed that the homophily and tie strength between a website and a consumer are important drivers of source credibility, which in turn influence attitude toward the reviews as well as the website. The attitudes formed through the perceptions of tie-strength, homophily and source credibility ultimately determines the influence of eWOM consumers' purchase decisions.
•There is a lack of social presence in review websites.•There is an increasing skepticism about the credibility of eWOM information.•Consumers consider the websites to be primary actors and develop social relationships with the websites.•Homophily and tie strength between a website and a consumer are important drivers of source credibility.
With the rapid growth of social networks and microblogging websites, communication between people from different cultural and psychological backgrounds has become more direct, resulting in more and ...more "cyber" conflicts between these people. Consequently, hate speech is used more and more, to the point where it has become a serious problem invading these open spaces. Hate speech refers to the use of aggressive, violent or offensive language, targeting a specific group of people sharing a common property, whether this property is their gender (i.e., sexism), their ethnic group or race (i.e., racism) or their believes and religion. While most of the online social networks and microblogging websites forbid the use of hate speech, the size of these networks and websites makes it almost impossible to control all of their content. Therefore, arises the necessity to detect such speech automatically and filter any content that presents hateful language or language inciting to hatred. In this paper, we propose an approach to detect hate expressions on Twitter. Our approach is based on unigrams and patterns that are automatically collected from the training set. These patterns and unigrams are later used, among others, as features to train a machine learning algorithm. Our experiments on a test set composed of 2010 tweets show that our approach reaches an accuracy equal to 87.4% on detecting whether a tweet is offensive or not (binary classification), and an accuracy equal to 78.4% on detecting whether a tweet is hateful, offensive, or clean (ternary classification).
Despite the long-term use and evidence-based efficacy of meditation and mindfulness-based interventions, there is still a lack of data about the possible unwanted effects (UEs) of these practices. ...The aim of this study was to evaluate the occurrence of UEs among meditation practitioners, considering moderating factors such as the type, frequency, and lifetime duration of the meditation practices.
An online survey was developed and disseminated through several websites, such as Spanish-, English- and Portuguese-language scientific research portals related to mindfulness and meditation. After excluding people who did not answer the survey correctly or completely and those who had less than two months of meditation experience, a total of 342 people participated in the study. However, only 87 reported information about UEs.
The majority of the practitioners were women from Spain who were married and had a University education level. Practices were more frequently informal, performed on a daily basis, and followed by focused attention (FA). Among the participants, 25.4% reported UEs, showing that severity varies considerably. The information requested indicated that most of the UEs were transitory and did not lead to discontinuing meditation practice or the need for medical assistance. They were more frequently reported in relation to individual practice, during focused attention meditation, and when practising for more than 20 minutes and alone. The practice of body awareness was associated with UEs to a lesser extent, whereas focused attention was associated more with UEs.
This is the first large-scale, multi-cultural study on the UEs of meditation. Despite its limitations, this study suggests that UEs are prevalent and transitory and should be further studied. We recommend the use of standardized questionnaires to assess the UEs of meditation practices.
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