The Kim Dynasty and North-East Asian security:breaking the cycle of crises

This article considers North Korea and the notion of crisis, by linking historical development over the Korean peninsula to the conflict resolution literature, and investigates why despite a large number of destabilising events, a war involving Pyongyang has yet to erupt. The paper considers historical data and uses a framework developed by Aggarwal et al. in order to highlight patterns of interaction between states such as the United States, North Korea and South Korea, organisations such as the United Nations, as well as processes such as the Six-Party Talk and the Agreed Framework. The paper then develops a crisis framework based on conflict resolution and negotiation literature, and applies it to three North Korean administrations. Findings suggests that an elastic understanding of time (for all parties involved on the peninsula) leads to an impossibility to reach a threshold where full-scale war would be triggered, thus leaving parties in a stable state of crisis for which escalating moves and de-escalating techniques might become irrelevant.

Direct sequence spread spectrum based PWM strategy for harmonic reduction and communication

Switched mode power supplies (SMPSs) are essential components in many applications, and electromagnetic interference is an important consideration in the SMPS design. Spread spectrum based PWM strategies have been used in SMPS designs to reduce the switching harmonics. This paper proposes a novel method to integrate a communication function into spread spectrum based PWM strategy without extra hardware costs. Direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) and phase shift keying (PSK) data modulation are employed to the PWM of the SMPS, so that it has reduced switching harmonics and the input and output power line voltage ripples contain data. A data demodulation algorithm has been developed for receivers, and code division multiple access (CDMA) concept is employed as communication method for a system with multiple SMPSs. The proposed method has been implemented in both Buck and Boost converters. The experimental results validated the proposed DSSS based PWM strategy for both harmonic reduction and communication.

Acceptance of smartphone-based mobile shopping:mobile benefits, customer characteristics, perceived risk and the impact of application context

Despite their generally increasing use, the adoption of mobile shopping applications often differs across purchase contexts. In order to advance our understanding of smartphone-based mobile shopping acceptance, this study integrates and extends existing approaches from technology acceptance literature by examining two previously underexplored aspects. Firstly, the study examines the impact of different mobile and personal benefits (instant connectivity, contextual value and hedonic motivation), customer characteristics (habit) and risk facets (financial, performance, and security risk) as antecedents of mobile shopping acceptance. Secondly, it is assumed that several acceptance drivers differ in relevance subject to the perception of three mobile shopping characteristics (location sensitivity, time criticality, and extent of control), while other drivers are assumed to matter independent of the context. Based on a dataset of 410 smartphone shoppers, empirical results demonstrate that several acceptance predictors are associated with ease of use and usefulness, which in turn affect intentional and behavioral outcomes. Furthermore, the extent to which risks and benefits impact ease of use and usefulness is influenced by the three contextual characteristics. From a managerial perspective, results show which factors to consider in the development of mobile shopping applications and in which different application contexts they matter.