Adoption of internet banking theory of the diffusion of innovation

The innovation diffusion theory (IDT) could be considered as one of the earliest theories that attempts to explore factors that influence an individual to adopt an innovation or a new technology. The theory suggests five key beliefs that influence the adoption of any innovation: relative advantage, complexity, compatibility, trialability, and observability. The purpose of this study was to test part of IDT’s attributes empirically. We used Internet banking as the innovation or the targeted technology. We surveyed 1164 business and MBA students in four public universities in Malaysia. Structural equation modelling was used to analyse the data. The results showed that relative advantage, compatibility, and trialability have a significant effect on att itude. Consequently, attitude significantly aff ects the intention to use Internet banking. Based on the findings, implications to practice are offere

The crossover from collective motion to periphery diffusion for 2D adatom-islands on Cu(111)

The diffusion of two dimensional adatom islands (up to 100 atoms) on Cu(111) has been studied, using the self-learning Kinetic Monte Carlo (SLKMC) method [1]. A variety of multiple- and single-atom processes are revealed in the simulations, and the size dependence of the diffusion coefficients and effective diffusion barriers are calculated for each. From the tabulated frequencies of events found in the simulation, we show a crossover from diffusion due to the collective motion of the island to a regime in which the island diffuses through periphery-dominated mass transport. This crossover occurs for island sizes between 13 and 19 atoms. For islands containing 19 to 100 atoms the scaling exponent is 1.5, which is in good agreement with previous work. The diffusion of islands containing 2 to 13 atoms can be explained primarily on the basis of a linear increase of the barrier for the collective motion with the size of the island

Impact evaluation of structural adjustment program: a case of Pakistan

We analyzed the effect of Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) on macroeconomic variables of Pakistan using annual time series data for the years 1981-2001. The impact of four policy instruments of SAP, i.e. reduction in budget deficit, increase in indirect taxes,adjusting the exchange rate and sliding down of subsidies, on employment, income distribution, per-capita income and inflation has been analyzed. It is found that the first policy instrument, i.e. decrease in budget deficit has affected employment, income distribution and inflation adversely. The second policy instrument of imposition of indirect tax negatively affected the employment, income distribution, per capita income and positively affected the inflation. The third policy instrument of SAP was adjustment of exchange rate. It is estimated that adjusting exchange rate has resulted into increased unemployment and inflation. The fourth policy instrument of shrink in subsidies augmented the unemployment, unequal distribution of income and inflation and dwindled the percapita income. It appears that SAP has adversely affected the major socioeconomic variables of the economy. Currently the government is considering for loan from IMF, so it is proposed to avoid such type of policy directives from IMF.Structural Adjustment Program, Budget deficit, Indirect taxes, Exchange rate, Subsidies, Employment, Income distribution, Per-capita income, Inflation,Pakistan

Magnetic monolayer Li2_{2}N: Density Functional Theory Calculations

Density functional theory (DFT) calculations are used to investigate the electronic and magnetic structures of a two-dimensional (2D) monolayer Li$_{2}$N. It is shown that bulk Li$_{3}$N is a non-magnetic semiconductor. The non-spinpolarized DFT calculations show that $p$ electrons of N in 2D Li$_{2}$N form a narrow band at the Fermi energy $E_{\rm{F}}$ due to a low coordination number, and the density of states at the Fermi energy ($g(E_{\rm{F}}$)) is increased as compared with bulk Li$_{3}$N. The large $g(E_{\rm{F}}$) shows instability towards magnetism in Stoner's mean field model. The spin-polarized calculations reveal that 2D Li$_{2}$N is magnetic without intrinsic or impurity defects. The magnetic moment of 1.0\,$\mu_{\rm{B}}$ in 2D Li$_{2}$N is mainly contributed by the $p_{z}$ electrons of N, and the band structure shows half-metallic behavior. {Dynamic instability in planar Li$_{2}$N monolayer is observed, but a buckled Li$_{2}$N monolayer is found to be dynamically stable.} The ferromagnetic (FM) and antiferromagnetic (AFM) coupling between the N atoms is also investigated to access the exchange field strength. {We found that planar (buckled) 2D Li$_{2}$N is a ferromagnetic material with Curie temperature $T_{c}$ of 161 (572) K.}Comment: Euro Phys. Lett. 2017 (Accepted

Comparative Analysis of Unipolar and Bipolar Control of Modular Battery for Thermal and State-of-Charge Balancing

Thermal and state-of-charge imbalance is a well known issue to cause nonuniform ageing in batteries. The modular battery based on cascaded converters is a potential solution to this problem. This paper presents bipolar control (BPC) of a modular battery and compares it with previously proposed unipolar control (UPC) mode in terms of thermal/SOC balancing performance and energy efficiency. The BPC needs four-quadrant operation of full-bridge converter using bipolar pulse-width modulation (PWM) inside each module, whereas UPC only needs half-bridge converter with unipolar PWM. The BPC, unlike UPC, enables charging of some cells while discharging others. An averaged state-space electro-thermal battery model is derived for a convex formulation of the balancing control problem. The control problem is formulated on a constrained LQ form and solved in a model predictive control framework using one-step ahead prediction. The simulation results show that BPC, without even requiring load current variations, gives better balancing performance than UPC, but at the cost of reduced efficiency. The UPC requires at least current direction reversal for acceptable balancing performance. In short, the UPC is a more cost and energy efficient solution for EV and PHEV applications whereas the BPC can be beneficial in applications involving load cycles with high current pulses of long duration

Building a foundation of HPSG-based treebank on Bangla language

Includes bibliographical references (page 6).Now a day, the importance of a large annotated corpus for NLP researchers is widely known. In this paper, we describe an initial phase of developing a linguistically annotated corpus for non-configurational ‘Bangla’ language. Since, the formalism differs from those posited for configurational languages; several features have been added for constraint based parsing through HPSG-based formalism. We propose an outline of a semi-automated process by applying both case marking approach and some morphological analysis to constraint the parsing of a relatively free word order language for creating a linguistically rich, highly-lexicalized annotated corpus