The reliable delivery of services in service oriented architectures often entails the underlying basis of having well structured system and communication network models. With the rapid proliferation of ad-hoc mode of communication, such as Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), the reliable delivery of services increasingly encounters new communication and also network perturbation challenges. Empiri...

Recently, it is found that several pure e-tailers set up a customer service center where on-line shoppers can access a real person over the phone to answer their questions. However, there has been little systematic research examining how service encounter help to enhance customer satisfaction when a pure e-retail company set up a call center to provide additional services. This study conducted ...

This study examines the role of customer emotions in the context of service failure and recovery encounters. It investigates how customers’ emotional responses to service failures influence their satisfaction judgments after accounting for cognitive antecedents of satisfaction. The study also considers how customers’emotional responses to service failures influence how they evaluate an organiza...

Hey there! If you’re just joining us, we’ve been talking about seminars, good and bad. And that terrific movie, The Sting, directed by the inimitable George Roy Hill. The one with Robert Redford, Paul Newman, and Robert Shaw. Not the terrible sequel, which I don’t ever want to think about again. Ever. We’ve been using the chapters of The Sting to illustrate what makes up a good talk, one that w...

INTRODUCTION Arabic-speaking migrants have constituted a growing population in recent years. This entails major challenges to ensure good communication in the healthcare encounter in order to provide individual and holistic healthcare. One of the solutions to ensure good communication between patient and healthcare staff who do not share the same language is to use a professional interpreter. T...

We report the first demonstration of an intracavity side-pumped Ho:YAG slab laser, delivering 13W at 2.09μm and discuss the advantages of this scheme as an approach for power scaling.

In this talk, we will describe a dynamical mechanism called transverse ho-moclinic intersection. On one hand, the discovery of this mechanism proved to be very costly for a great mathematician. On the other hand, this mechanism provides the key idea to design very low energy paths that have been used to save millions of dollars for international spaceflight programs. We prove that, generically,...

BACKGROUND Evidence-based medicine (EBM) is maturing from its early focus on epidemiology to embrace a wider range of disciplines and methodologies. At the heart of EBM is the patient, whose informed choices have long been recognised as paramount. However, good evidence-based care is more than choices. DISCUSSION We discuss six potential 'biases' in EBM that may inadvertently devalue the pati...

The HO(aq) ion participates in myriad aqueous phase chemical processes of biological and chemical interest. A molecularly valid description of its hydration state, currently poorly understood, is a natural prerequisite to modeling chemical transformations involving HO(aq). Here it is shown that the statistical mechanical quasichemical theory of solutions predicts that HO · [H2O]3 − is the domin...