The adoption of retail electronic commerce: an empirical investigation

The purpose of this study was to empirically investigate the adoption of retail electronic commerce (REC). REC is a business transaction which takes place over the Internet between a casual consumer and a firm. The consumer has no long-term relationship with the firm, orders a good or service, and pays with a credit card. To date, most REC applications have not been profitable. To build profitable REC applications a better understanding of the system's users is required. The research model hypothesizes that the level of REC buying is dependent upon the Buying Characteristics of Internet Use and Search Experience plus the Channel Characteristics of Beliefs About Internet Vendors and Beliefs About Internet Security. The effect of these factors is modified by Time. Additional research questions ask about the different types of REC buyers, the differences between these groups, and how these groups evolved over time. To answer these research questions I analyzed publically available data collected over a three-year period by the Georgia Institute of Technology Graphics and Visualization Unit over the Internet. Findings indicate the model best predicts Number of Purchases in a future period, and that Buyer Characteristics are most important to this determination. Further, this model is evolving over Time making Buyer Characteristics predict Number of Purchases better in more recent survey administrations. Buyers clustered into five groups based on level of buying and move through various levels and buy increasing Number of Purchases over time. This is the first large scale research project to investigate the evolution of REC. This implications are significant. Practitioners with casual consumer customers need to deploy a finely tuned REC strategy, understand their buyers, capitalize on the company reputation on the Internet, install an Internet-compatible infrastructure, and web-enable order-entry/inventory/fulfillment/ shipping applications. Researchers might wish to expand on the Buyer Characteristics of the model and/or explore alternative dependent variables. Further, alternative theories such as Population Ecology or Transaction Cost Economics might further illuminate this new I.S. research domain.

A Cross-Generational Analysis of Spanish-to-English Lexico-Semantic Phenomena in Emerging Miami English

Sociolinguists have documented the substrate influence of various languages on the formation of dialects in numerous ethnic-regional setting throughout the United States. This literature shows that while phonological and grammatical influences from other languages may be instantiated as durable dialect features, lexical phenomena often fade over time as ethnolinguistic communities assimilate with contiguous dialect groups. In preliminary investigations of emerging Miami Latino English, we have observed that lexical forms based on Spanish lexical forms are not only ubiquitous among the speech of the first generation Cuban Americans but also of the second. Examples, observed in field work, casual observation, and studied formally in an experimental context include the following: “get down from the car,” which derives from the Spanish equivalent, bajar del carro instead of “get out of the car”. The translation task administered to thirty-one participants showed a variety lexical phenomena are still maintained at equal or higher frequencies.

3D navigation with six degrees-of-freedom using a multi-touch display

With the introduction of new input devices, such as multi-touch surface displays, the Nintendo WiiMote, the Microsoft Kinect, and the Leap Motion sensor, among others, the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) finds itself at an important crossroads that requires solving new challenges. Given the amount of three-dimensional (3D) data available today, 3D navigation plays an important role in 3D User Interfaces (3DUI). This dissertation deals with multi-touch, 3D navigation, and how users can explore 3D virtual worlds using a multi-touch, non-stereo, desktop display. ^ The contributions of this dissertation include a feature-extraction algorithm for multi-touch displays (FETOUCH), a multi-touch and gyroscope interaction technique (GyroTouch), a theoretical model for multi-touch interaction using high-level Petri Nets (PeNTa), an algorithm to resolve ambiguities in the multi-touch gesture classification process (Yield), a proposed technique for navigational experiments (FaNS), a proposed gesture (Hold-and-Roll), and an experiment prototype for 3D navigation (3DNav). The verification experiment for 3DNav was conducted with 30 human-subjects of both genders. The experiment used the 3DNav prototype to present a pseudo-universe, where each user was required to find five objects using the multi-touch display and five objects using a game controller (GamePad). For the multi-touch display, 3DNav used a commercial library called GestureWorks in conjunction with Yield to resolve the ambiguity posed by the multiplicity of gestures reported by the initial classification. The experiment compared both devices. The task completion time with multi-touch was slightly shorter, but the difference was not statistically significant. The design of experiment also included an equation that determined the level of video game console expertise of the subjects, which was used to break down users into two groups: casual users and experienced users. The study found that experienced gamers performed significantly faster with the GamePad than casual users. When looking at the groups separately, casual gamers performed significantly better using the multi-touch display, compared to the GamePad. Additional results are found in this dissertation.^

Relationship between a middle school band director's attire and incidences of student off-task behaviors in the classroom

The purpose of this study was to examine whether a middle school band director's attire had an effect on off-task student behaviors in his classroom. One male middle school band director participated and three of his classes were observed. The study lasted twenty days and consisted of three treatments (casual attire, business casual attire, and formal business attire). A tally sheet was used to determine the number of off-task behaviors per student per minute. The results indicated that in this classroom, the students (of all three classes) were off-task less often when the band director wore business casual attire. This was the clothing that he wore consistently from the beginning of the school year. Straying from this consistency made off-task behaviors in the classroom rise. The most off-task behaviors occurred when the band director wore casual clothing. Off-task behaviors also rose when the band director wore business formal attire.

3D Navigation with Six Degrees-of-Freedom using a Multi-Touch Display

With the introduction of new input devices, such as multi-touch surface displays, the Nintendo WiiMote, the Microsoft Kinect, and the Leap Motion sensor, among others, the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) finds itself at an important crossroads that requires solving new challenges. Given the amount of three-dimensional (3D) data available today, 3D navigation plays an important role in 3D User Interfaces (3DUI). This dissertation deals with multi-touch, 3D navigation, and how users can explore 3D virtual worlds using a multi-touch, non-stereo, desktop display. The contributions of this dissertation include a feature-extraction algorithm for multi-touch displays (FETOUCH), a multi-touch and gyroscope interaction technique (GyroTouch), a theoretical model for multi-touch interaction using high-level Petri Nets (PeNTa), an algorithm to resolve ambiguities in the multi-touch gesture classification process (Yield), a proposed technique for navigational experiments (FaNS), a proposed gesture (Hold-and-Roll), and an experiment prototype for 3D navigation (3DNav). The verification experiment for 3DNav was conducted with 30 human-subjects of both genders. The experiment used the 3DNav prototype to present a pseudo-universe, where each user was required to find five objects using the multi-touch display and five objects using a game controller (GamePad). For the multi-touch display, 3DNav used a commercial library called GestureWorks in conjunction with Yield to resolve the ambiguity posed by the multiplicity of gestures reported by the initial classification. The experiment compared both devices. The task completion time with multi-touch was slightly shorter, but the difference was not statistically significant. The design of experiment also included an equation that determined the level of video game console expertise of the subjects, which was used to break down users into two groups: casual users and experienced users. The study found that experienced gamers performed significantly faster with the GamePad than casual users. When looking at the groups separately, casual gamers performed significantly better using the multi-touch display, compared to the GamePad. Additional results are found in this dissertation.