消费者特征对其网络购物态度和行为意向的影响

In recent years, global online shopping grows rapidly, China's growth rate is far greater than the average level of the world. Online shopping as a new type of shopping patterns gradually drew the researcher's attention. There were so many existing researches on the relationship between consumer characteristic and online shopping attitude and intention, but few togethered the different abstract levels of consumer characteristic in one research. In this study, 3M Model was introduced as theory guide of whole research work, the Chinese consumers who knew about the online shopping was the research object, questionnaire survey was used to collect the data, different abstract levels of consumer characteristic were togethered in a hierarchical model, tried to establish a model to explain the relationship between different abstract levels of consumer characteristic and online shopping attitude and intention. In addition, the study also compared the models posed by data from different consumer groups. The results showed that: First, consumers’ openness, need for arousal, assessment of online shopping experience, perceived risk of online shopping would affect their online shopping attitude and online shopping intention. Second, openness, need for arousal indirectly influenced the online shopping intention through the perceived risk of online shopping. Third, the perceived risk of online shopping indirectly influenced the online shopping intention through online shopping attitude. Fourth, assessment of online shopping experience indirectly influenced the online shopping intention through the perceived risk of online shopping and online shopping attitude. Fifth, only online shopping attitude would directly affect online shopping intention. It also worked as a mediator variable in the final model. Sixth, network age, risk propensity did not significantly affect the online shopping attitude and online shopping intention. Seventh, freight fluctuation can affect student more than in-service on online shopping intention.

Repairing Learned Knowledge Using Experience

Explanation-based learning occurs when something useful is retained from an explanation, usually an account of how some particular problem can be solved given a sound theory. Many real-world explanations are not based on sound theory, however, and wrong things may be learned accidentally, as subsequent failures will likely demonstrate. In this paper, we describe ways to isolate the facts that cause failures, ways to explain why those facts cause problems, and ways to repair learning mistakes. In particular, our program learns to distinguish pails from cups after making a few mistakes.

Partial Evaluation for Scientific Computing: The Supercomputer Toolkit Experience

We describe the key role played by partial evaluation in the Supercomputer Toolkit, a parallel computing system for scientific applications that effectively exploits the vast amount of parallelism exposed by partial evaluation. The Supercomputer Toolkit parallel processor and its associated partial evaluation-based compiler have been used extensively by scientists at M.I.T., and have made possible recent results in astrophysics showing that the motion of the planets in our solar system is chaotically unstable.

Adapting Home Service Robot Behaviours by Experience Reuse and Interaction with Humans

Meng, Q., Lee, M. (2003). Adapting Home Service Robot Behaviours by Experience Reuse and Interaction with Humans. 673-678. Paper presented at IEEE/ASME International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Mechatronics (AIM 2003), Port Island, Kobe, Japan

Learning and Reuse of Experience in Behavior-Based Service Robots

M.H.Lee, Q. Meng and H. Holstein, ?Learning and Reuse of Experience in Behavior-Based Service Robots?, Seventh International Conference on Control, Automation, Robotics and Vision (ICARCV2002), pp1019-24, December 2002, Singapore

Automatic Error Recovery in Behaviour-Based Assistive Robots with Learning from Experience

Meng Q. and Lee M.H., Automatic Error Recovery in Behaviour-Based Assistive Robots with Learning from Experience, in Proc. INES 2001, 5th IEEE Int. Conf. on Intelligent Engineering Systems, Helsinki, Finland, Sept 2001, pp291-296.

Listening to children in the field of education: experience in Wales

Listening to children in the field of education: experience in Wales, (2007) 19 Child and Family Law Quarterly 161-182 pp.161-182 RAE2008

What's 'Novel' About It? Substantial Equivalence, Precaution and Consumer Protection 1997-2004

Salmon, Naomi, 'What's 'Novel' About It? Substantial Equivalence, Precaution and Consumer Protection 1997-2004', Environmental Law Review, (2005), 7(2) pp.138-149 RAE2008

Form, fi gure, and the experience of time in seven southern composers of the 1950s-60s

After the 1980s it is diffi cult, following stylistic criteria, to draw a map of contemporary academic music. All styles are compossible, and all are practiced. In this context, the geographical entity “South of Italy” does not stand out for a musical identity with special technical-stylistic features. Rather, at a socio-cultural level, the South remains today – in music no less than in all areas where there is a gap between top development and stagnation – a land of emigrants: six out of the seven composers treated (Ivan Fedele, Giuseppe Colardo, Rosario Mirigliano, Giuseppe Soccio, Nicola Cisternino, Biagio Putignano, Paolo Aralla) live in the North of Italy. The positive aspect of this is the affi nity of the South with the transnational and superstructural community of contemporary music, which from European and Western has now become almost global. The composers under consideration belong to the generation of the ‘50s, rooted in the serial and post-serial movements (from which Franco Donatoni, Luciano Berio, Luigi Nono, Salvatore Sciarrino, Giacinto Scelsi, are the principals models, to mention only the Italians), dipped in the general phenomenon of timbrism (particularly spectralism), and acquainted with electronics. They draw from these sources various instruments of compositional technique and aspects of their poetics. In particular these composers, active from the ‘80s, develop new ways of construction of the temporal form of music. They share the goal to establish a new continuity, different from the tonal one but at the same time transcending the serial and post-serial disintegration and fragmentation. The primary means to this end is a new enhancement of the category of fi gure, as a clear and distinct, recognizable aggregate of pitches, intervals, register, durations, timbre, articulation, dynamics, and texture. Each composer elaborates the atonal fi gural material in different ways, emphasizing one aspect or another. For example, Fedele (1953) is a master in the management of form per se, Colardo (1953) in the activation of disturbed harmonic effects, Mirigliano (1950) in the creation of a slight tension from the smallest vibrations of sound, Soccio (1950) in the set up of movement by means of accumulations and discharges of energy, Cisternino (1957) in a Cagean-Scelsian emphasis on sound as such, Putignano (1960) in the suspension of time through the succession and transformation of images, Aralla (1960) in the foundation of form from below, from the concreteness of sound.

O comportamento do consumidor de software de gestão e contabilidade das PMEs em Portugal, França e Espanha

Dissertação de Mestrado apresentada à Universidade Fernando Pessoa como parte dos requisitos para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Ciências Empresariais.

At sea and in port, or, Life and experience of William S. Fletcher : for thirty years seaman's missionary in Portland, Oregon / compiled from his journal and other authentic sources by H.K. Hines ; with an introduction by Earl Cranston.

http://www.archive.org/details/atseandinportorl00hineiala

The Barretstown experience

The thesis was prompted by a simple clinical observation. Seriously ill children returning from Barretstown Holiday Camp appeared changed. Barretstown ‘magic’ confuses the issue but indicates real and clinically evident transformations. The project sought to understand the experience and place it in a recognisable framework. The data was collected by interviews, observations as camp Paediatrician, memberships of the Child Advisory Committee and the Association’s criteria assessment team, participation in volunteer training and visits to international camps. The research presents evidence that the concepts of rite of passage, graceful mimesis and salutogenesis clarify operative social processes. The passage stages of separation, transition and reaggregation can be identified. Passage rites reorder personal and social upsets to fresh arrangements that facilitate change. Interviews confirm the reordering impact of achievements in play activities. These are challenging experiences closely guided by their Masters of Ceremonies – the Caras. The Cara/camper relationship is crucial and compatible with Girard’s theory of external mimesis. Visits to four camps confirm an inspirational process in contrast to a reported camp with a predetermined formative influence. Charismatic Caras/Councillors inspire playful mimesis and salutogenic transformations. Health is more than correction of pathogenic deficits and restoration of homeostasis. Salutogenic health promotes heterostasis – a desire for optimal experiences underpinned by a sense of coherence and adequate resources. Some evidence is presented that children have an improved sense of coherence after camp, which enables them to cope better with the demands of ill health. The camps enable sick children to up regulate risk taking towards more heterostatic experiences rather than down regulate their expectations. The heterostatic impulse can explain the disability paradox of good quality of life in the presence of severe disability. The salutogenic power of Barretstown can trump the pathogenic effects of childhood cancer and other serious illnesses.

Conversion as transformative experience: a sociological study of identity formation and transformation processes

This thesis contributes to the understanding of the processes involved in the formation and transformation of identities. It achieves this goal by establishing the critical importance of ‘background’ and ‘liminality’ in the shaping of identity. Drawing mainly from the work of cultural anthropology and philosophical hermeneutics a theoretical framework is constructed from which transformative experiences can be analysed. The particular experience at the heart of this study is the phenomenon of conversion and the dynamics involved in the construction of that process. Establishing the axial age as the horizon from which the process of conversion emerged will be the main theme of the first part of the study. Identifying the ‘birth’ of conversion allows a deeper understanding of the historical dynamics that make up the process. From these fundamental dynamics a theoretical framework is constructed in order to analyse the conversion process. Applying this theoretical framework to a number of case-studies will be the central focus of this study. The transformative experiences of Saint Augustine, the fourteenth century nun Margaret Ebner, the communist revolutionary Karl Marx and the literary figure of Arthur Koestler will provide the material onto which the theoretical framework can be applied. A synthesis of the Judaic religious and the Greek philosophical traditions will be the main findings for the shaping of Augustine’s conversion experience. The dissolution of political order coupled with the institutionalisation of the conversion process will illuminate the mystical experiences of Margaret Ebner at a time when empathetic conversion reached its fullest expression. The final case-studies examine two modern ‘conversions’ that seem to have an ideological rather than a religious basis to them. On closer examination it will be found that the German tradition of Biblical Criticism played a most influential role in the ‘conversion’ of Marx and mythology the best medium to understand the experiences of Koestler. The main ideas emerging from this study highlight the fluidity of identity and the important role of ‘background’ in its transformation. The theoretical framework, as constructed for this study, is found to be a useful methodological tool that can offer insights into experiences, such as conversion, that otherwise would remain hidden from our enquiries.

The lived experience of Irish diocesan priests. A qualitative study of clerical identity, obedience and celibacy.

The main aim of this thesis is to document and explore the lived experience of Irish diocesan priests and former priests, in order to explore the reality of diocesan priesthood in contemporary Ireland, and to investigate how, if at all, diocesan priesthood has changed in Ireland during the past fifty years. It sought to do this by interrogating the stories of thirty-three diocesan priests and former priests, and by placing their individual stories within the broader context of Irish society and the Catholic Church, during the fifty-year period, 1962–2012. The research focused on three core areas of priesthood – identity, obedience, and celibacy – and it addressed the following questions. First, how do Irish diocesan priests understand their priesthood and how has this understanding changed over time, if at all? I will argue that three paradigms of priesthood co-exist in the contemporary Irish Church, and that each of these models corresponds with a distinct period in contemporary Irish Church history. I will also demonstrate the existence of underlying similarities in the cultural practice of priesthood that transcend the different generations of priests. Second, how do Irish diocesan priests negotiate their priesthood within a large and complex institution? My study suggests that Irish diocesan priests are typically loyal and obedient. However, they are not necessarily subservient. Third, how do Irish diocesan priests understand and experience celibacy in their day-to-day lives? My study demonstrates that celibacy is typically understood and experienced along a continuum, ranging from total acceptance to total rejection, with most priests somewhere in between. Fourth, I will argue that while priests are experiencing many difficulties in their lives, there is insufficient evidence from the present study to indicate they are experiencing a crisis.

Work experience in transition year: a mixed methods study of subject and career choices

Transition Year (TY) has been a feature of the Irish Education landscape for 39 years. Work experience (WE) has become a key component of TY. WE is defined as a module of between five and fifteen days duration where students engage in a work placement in the broader community. It places a major emphasis on building relationships between schools and their external communities and concomitantly between students and their potential future employers. Yet, the idea that participation in a TY work experience programme could facilitate an increased awareness of potential careers has drawn little attention from the research community. This research examines the influence WE has on the subsequent subjects choices made by students along with the effects of that experience on the students’ identities and emerging vocational identities. Socio-cultural Learning Theory and Occupational Choice Theory frame the overall study. A mixed methods approach to data collection was adopted through the administration of 323 quantitative questionnaires and 32 individual semi-structured interviews in three secondary schools. The analysis of the data was conducted using a grounded theory approach. The findings from the research show that WE makes a significant contribution to the students’ sense of agency in their own lives. It facilitates the otherwise complex process of subject choice, motivates students to work harder in their senior cycle, introduces them to the concepts of active, experience-based and self-directed learning, while boosting their self-confidence and nurturing the emergence of their personal and vocational identities. This research is a gateway to further study in this field. It also has wide reaching implications for students, teachers, school authorities, parents and policy makers regarding teaching and learning in our schools and the value of learning beyond the walls of the classroom.