The development of genetically modified (GM) food has been a matter of considerable interest and worldwide public controversy. As a result ‘uncertainties’, ‘risks’ and ‘benefits’ that such new technologies portray to the food industry and consumers have been widely disseminated. However, there is limited understanding of what lies behind “demand side effects” to the introduction of these ‘poten...

Metrics on the space of sets of trajectories are important for scientists in the field of computer vision, machine learning, robotics, and general artificial intelligence. However, existing notions of closeness between sets of trajectories are either mathematically inconsistent or of limited practical use. In this paper, we outline the limitations in the current mathematicallyconsistent metrics...

In this paper, we consider the analysis and modelling of trust in distributed information systems. We review the relations of trust relationships in our previous work. We discuss trust layers and hierarchy based on formal definition of trust relationship. We provide a set of definitions to describe the properties of trust direction and trust symmetry under our taxonomy framework. In order to an...

The paper deals with the technical background and the pedagogical issues of a specific implementation for the collection, assessment and archiving of the students' assignments written in Java. The implemented system automatically applies objectoriented metrics on the collected works in order to measure the characteristic features of the assignments. Tutors use these results for the detection of...

GM technologies challenge our understanding of what it means to be human, and of what role we play in the natural world. These technologies arise out of particular contexts. Our experiences and understanding of events in our own lives and of events observed and reported in other places around the world, inform our understanding, giving rise to fears about the risk of genetic modification. What ...

The Internet has made a wealth of new tools available to the industrial buyer. However, researchers have suggested that computer mediated interaction with suppliers may not be conducive to strong supplier relationships in general and to trust in particular. This paper compares two computer-mediated sourcing tools (email negotiation and Internet reverse auctions) with face-to-face negotiation. I...

Trust is expected to reduce transaction costs and agency costs and thus influence the cost of credit for small businesses. Assessments of trustworthiness are based on the ability, benevolence and integrity of the owner manager. The study examines whether lending managers’ assessments of the trustworthiness of SME owner managers are associated with the interest rate charged. Data were obtained f...

Trust is expected to reduce transaction costs and agency costs and thus influence the cost of credit for small businesses. Assessments of trustworthiness are based on the ability, benevolence and integrity of the owner manager. The study examines whether lending managers’ assessments of the trustworthiness of SME owner managers are associated with the interest rate charged. Data were obtained f...

Trust is expected to reduce transaction costs and agency costs and thus influence the cost of credit for small businesses. Assessments of trustworthiness are based on the ability, benevolence and integrity of the owner manager. The study examines whether lending managers’ assessments of the trustworthiness of SME owner managers are associated with the interest rate charged. Data were obtained f...

In today's Internet economy, new business models emerge to respond to business opportunities that one organization alone can not exploit. Virtual organizations (VOs) are a prominent example for such models currently investigated in, e.g., collaborative engineering and aggregated services provisioning. The partner selection process is a problem that needs to be swiftly performed for a VO to beco...