The perceptual sensitivity of touch to orientation differences in adjacent segments of textures with different configurations was measured in two experiments. We found that sensitivity to the orientation difference was not only a function of the magnitude of that difference but of the reference orientation. In Experiment 1, we examined the exploratory patterns that were used to make these judgm...

introduction: in the past 2 decades, research findings established achievement goal theory as a powerful framework for conceptualizing difference in the quality of student’s engagement, persistence on task, and academic resilience. so the present study examined the relationship between achievement goal orientations and academic resilience. method: participants were 606 students (307 girls and 2...

In this paper, I will have a look at the interference of ethical reflection and the provisional and perhaps futuristic nature of its subject in such recent questions like human enhancement at the interface between society, technology, and ethics. This interface brings up more complex challenges to adequately dealing with normative and epistemic aspects of providing orientation. Taking the progr...

Repurposive appropriation is a creative everyday act in which a user invents a novel use for information technology (IT) and adopts it.This study is the first to address its prevalence and predictability in the consumer IT context. In all, 2,379 respondents filled in an online questionnaire on creative uses of digital cameras, such as using them as scanners, periscopes, and storage media. The d...

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology already plays a major role in many areas. In business applications, for example, the idea of smart shelves or tables equipped with RFID technology has been around for some time now, especially for retailing. Current solutions, however, are designed to only identify objects in range, which is sufficient for most of the envisioned shop applications...

With the growing reliance on computerized systems and increasing rapidity of the introduction of new technologies, user acceptance of technology continues to be an important issue. Drawing upon recent findings in information systems, human computer interaction, and social psychology, the present research extends the technology acceptance model by incorporating the motivation variables of self-e...

The purpose of this paper is to describe two successful programs, SMIL (Sweden) and Spinno (Finland) that have been developed to support the start-up, growth, and consolidation of small technology-based firms. Over the years, it has been recognized that the physical facility alone, combined with institutional embeddedness, does not guarantee success. Active hands-on development programs and oth...

Agent orientation is currently pursued primarily as a software paradigm. Software with characteristics such as autonomy, sociality, reactivity and proactivity, and communicative and cooperative abilities are expected to offer greater functionality and higher quality, in comparison to earlier paradigms such as object orientation. Agent models and languages are thus intended as abstractions of co...