With the unprecedented growth of the Internet, business -to-consumer (B2C) commerce has grown to vast proportions. However, after years of practice, how to promote consumers’ trust towards their storefronts is still the most critical challenge for B2C online merchants (Hoffman and Novak 1996, Jarvenpaa et al. 2000, Kovar et al. 2000). Presently, the main strategy for online B2C merchants is to ...

We monitored the haul-out behavior of 68 radio-tagged harbor seals (Pbucu vittllina) during the molt season at two Alaskan haul-out sites (Grand Island, August-September 1994; Nanvak Bay, August-September 2000). For each site, we created a statistical model of the proportion of seals hauled out as a function of date, time of day, tide, and weather covariates. Using these models, we identified t...

Online privacy is an issue of increasing national importance, and voluntary privacy seals provided by third-party organizations such as TRUSTe and BBBOnline have been proposed as a means of assuring consumer privacy. Few studies have examined privacy seal effects. This study presents results of an online experiment that evaluated consumer response to privacy seals in a naturalistic exposure set...

Influenza A virus isolates of the H4N5 subtype (which has previously been detected only in birds) were recovered from harbor seals dying of viral pneumonia on the New England coast from June 1982 through March 1983. When these isolates were compared with other mammalian and avian viruses in serological assays and RNA-RNA competitive hybridization, it was found that the seal viruses were most cl...

In 1994 a novel Brucella sp., later named B. pinnipedialis, was identified in stranded harbor seals (Phoca vitulina). This Brucella sp. is a potential zoonotic pathogen and is capable of causing disease in domestic animals. Serologic, microbiologic, and pathologic data collected from live captured and stranded harbor seals were used to better describe the epizootiology of B. pinnipedialis in ha...

We developed a stochastic susceptible-exposed-infectious-removed (SEIR) model to simulate a range of plausible morbillivirus outbreak scenarios in a randomly mixing population of 170 endangered Hawaiian monk seals (Neomonachus schauinslandi). We then modeled realistic vaccination and quarantine measures to determine the potential efficacy of such mitigation efforts. Morbillivirus outbreaks repr...

Changing patterns of sea-ice distribution and extent have measurable effects on polar marine systems. Beyond the obvious impacts of key-habitat loss, it is unclear how such changes will influence ice-associated marine mammals in part because of the logistical difficulties of studying foraging behaviour or other aspects of the ecology of large, mobile animals at sea during the polar winter. This...

The effects of both external squeezing and internal pressure pulsations are studied on flow and heat transfer inside non-isothermal and incompressible thin films supported by soft seals. The laminar governing equations are non-dimensionalized and reduced to simpler forms. The upper plate displacement is related to the internal pressure through the elastic behavior of the supporting seals. The f...

A goal of animal movement analysis is to reveal behavioural mechanisms by which organisms utilize complex and variable environments. Statistical analysis of movement data is complicated by the fact that the data are multidimensional, autocorrelated and often marked by error and irregular measurement intervals or gappiness. Furthermore, movement data reflect behaviours that are themselves hetero...