With the rapid increasing popularity of the WWW, Websites are playing a crucial role to convey knowledge to the end users. Every request of Web site or a transaction on the server is stored in a file called server log file. Providing Web administrator with meaningful information about user access behavior (also called click stream data) has become a necessity to improve the quality of Web infor...

Virtual idea communities (VICs) such as Dell’s ‘Ideastorm’ are very popular in practice. In VICs, customers of firms can submit ideas to support product innovation. This customer-based ideation is not new. Customers have been brought together in lead-user-workshops or focus-groups since the 1980s to support product innovation. However, VICs represents a new form of ITmediated ideation with cust...

Concurrent engineering has been generally accepted as an important approach to reduce time to market. For years, the focus of concurrency has been design and manufacturing. With customers’ inputs becoming more crucial for product development, incorporating customers’ preferences into the design process has become significant in the continuing quest for reducing time to market. Because customers...

Decomposability of an algebraic structure into the union of its sub-structures goes back to G. Scorza's Theorem of 1926 for groups. An analogue of this theorem for rings has been recently studied by A. Lucchini in 2012. On the study of this problem for non-group semigroups, the first attempt is due to Clifford's work of 1961 for the regular semigroups. Since then, N.P. Mukherjee in 1972 studied...

found that models with a categorized exposure variable removed only 67% of the confounding controlled when the continuous version was used. Categorizing continuous variables may not only miss the message, it can also get it wrong. Under some circumstances, categorizing continuous variables can give biased results. In a simulation study, Taylor and Yu [6] found that categorizing one continuous v...