This paper examines the shifting role of perceived value and satisfaction in the formation of loyalty over the duration of a relationship life cycle. Drawing on a sample of online shoppers in Taiwan, the results show that the association between loyalty intention and shopping experiences conforms to an S-shaped growth curve. Customers’ intentions to stay with a website appear to be influenced b...

Personalized games should provide a better player experience than one-size-fits-all games. As a method for personalization, player type models have been discussed recently. Player type models would be useful tools in the personalization of games, if they have a relationship to the players’ experience of specific game mechanics. However, this relationship has never been empirically investigated....

original article   introduction: wind-turbine noise emission and its environmental impact are considerable issues nowadays. considering the importance of the issue, the purpose of this study was to prepare noise map and wind turbines sound characteristics on the largest wind farm of iran. method: this study was carried out in two phases:1) in order to prepare the daytime sound level (ld) noise ...

This paper describes Seeker, a platform for large-scale text analytics, and SemTag, an application written on the platform to perform automated semantic tagging of large corpora. We apply SemTag to a collection of approximately 264 million web pages, and generate approximately 434 million automatically disambiguated semantic tags, published to the web as a label bureau providing metadata regard...

Swarm intelligence algorithms have been succesfully applied to hard optimization problems. Seeker optimization algorithm is one of the latest members of that class of metaheuristics and it has not yet been thorougly researched. Since the early versions of this algorithm were less succesful with multimodal functions, we propose in this paper hybridization of the seeker optimization algorithm wit...

The hide-and-seek game has many interesting aspects for studying cognitive functions in robots and the interactions between mobile robots and humans. Some MOMDP (Mixed Observable Markovian Decision Processes) models and a heuristic-based method are proposed and evaluated as an automated seeker. MOMDPs are used because the hider’s position is not always known (partially observable), and the seek...

Sustainable design aims to reduce the negative impacts either on people (e.g., create healthy) or on planet (e.g., minimize waste). In other words, sustainable design is the philosophy that tends to improve design performance by incorporating health and safety attributes (for people), and environmental attributes (for planet) into products. In this paper, we develop an analytical model to exami...

IR active jammers or the directed infrared countermeasures(DIRCM)generate IR signals which attack the guidance signals passed to the sensors in IR-guided weapons. They provide IR signals with appropriate frequency, phase and intensity which will be superposed on those produced by the IR energy of the target passing through the reticle. When both the jamming signal and the modulated target energ...

air pollutants from iron and steel making operations have historically been an environmental concern. the factory located at ahwaz, iran, has two production lines namely, 630 and 650, which produce iron parallel edge. the objective of the study is to determine indoor respiratory particulate matter (rpm) and feo concentrations and their comparison with niosh standards. this is a cross–sectiona...

soil samples were collected from seven sites in and around the metropolitan area of mexicocity. the locations were chosen as possible sources of fugitive dusts which contribute to suspended particulate matter in the atmosphere of mexico city. x-ray fluorescence (xrf) was used to determine the concentrations of several major elements (si, k, ca, ti, mn, and fe), as well as of other trace element...