Thwarting unlawful redistribution of information sold electronically is a major problem of information-based electronic commerce. Anonymous fingerprinting has appeared as a technique for copyright protection which is compatible with buyer anonymity in electronic transactions. However, the complexity of known algorithms for anonymous fingerprinting is too high for practical implementation on sta...

Motivated by a biased diffusion of molecular motors with the bias dependent on the state of the substrate, we investigate a random walk on a one-dimensional lattice that contains weak links (called "bridges") which are affected by the walker. Namely, a bridge is destroyed with probability when p the walker crosses it; the walker is not allowed to cross it again and this leads to a directed moti...

Textile user interfaces for smart homes offer novel intuitive input gestures and may lower acceptance barrier for technophobic or elderly people. To understand the users’ requirements of smart textile input devices, an Adaptive Conjoint Analysis with the attributes wearability, functionality, haptic, location, and components was carried out with 100 participants. The attributes were rated with ...

The Internet has been experienced as the means for deliberation, for free social expression, for knowledge exchange, for enabling entrepreneurship. etc., while it has been capitalized by communities around the world for applications’ development and for e-service deployment. In this paper Internet is considered as a supporting tool for communities’ growth and wealth, and in this context the loc...

The “pancake problem” is a well-known open combinatorial problem that recently has been shown to have applications to parallel processing. Given a stack of n pancakes in arbitrary order, all of different sizes, the goal is to sort them into the size-ordered configuration having the largest pancake on the bottom and the smallest on top. The allowed sorting operation is a “spatula flip”, in which...

Phospholipid fatty acid (PLFA) analysis was used to characterise the microbial communities in the soil under long-term pre-harvest burning of sugarcane and several other land uses, and on a long-term experiment comparing sugarcane burnt before harvest and sugarcane harvested green with retention of a trash blanket. Trends in total PLFAs (total microbial biomass) followed the order: kikuyu pastu...

What drives the behaviors of banks and their customers in time of profound changes? The modern economic crisis has significantly affected consumers’ willingness to invest and made them more price sensitive, more rational in their decision making, and thus more challenging for banks to serve. Considering these relevant changes, banks have pursued projects to improve their internal processes and ...

This chapter discusses various roles of smart information in Supply Chains (SC) of digital age and tries to answer an important question What types of collaborative arrangements facilitate smart operations to improve planning, production and timely replenishment? We have conducted longitudinal case studies with firms practicing SC collaborations and also using smart information for operations. ...

Contemporary and future cities are often labeled as “smart cities,” “digital cities” or “ubiquitous cities,” “knowledge cities,” and “creative cities.” Informational urbanism includes all aspects of information and (tacit as well as explicit) knowledge with regard to urban regions. “Informational city” (or “smart city” in a broader sense) is an umbrella term uniting the divergent trends of info...