It has been claimed that the biggest threat to an e-commerce provider’s ability to gain new customers has been the website’s general usability. The premises of equatricism presented in this research paper have shown that successful website participation is achieved through the owners reducing the amount of discomfort an actor will experience and maximizing the gratification the actor will experience. It is possible for a website to pass criteria for general usability, as with Google’s Gmail service, but for the personal usability criteria to not be met. Based on an autoethnographic approach, the authors of this research paper show how the use of ecological cognition and the participation continuum can explain behaviour change in e-commerce sites to assist in designing Internet environments.

In this paper, we propose a new computer aided diagnosis method of pulmonary nodules in X-ray CT images to reduce false positive (FP) rate under high true positive (TP) rate conditions. An essential core of the method is to extract and combine two novel and effective features from the raw CT images: One is orientation features of nodules in a region of interest (ROI) extracted by a Gabor filter, while the other is variation of CT values of the ROI in the direction along body axis. By using the extracted features, a principal component analysis technic and any pattern recognition technics such as neural network approaches can then used to discriminate between nodule and non-nodule images. Simulation results show that discrimination performance using the proposed features is extremely improved compared to that of the conventional method.

A hybrid fuzzy knowledge-based system was developed for ensuring network operational constraints are not violated during reconfiguration of a power distribution system. This intelligent system includes both fuzzy and crisp rules as well as a coupling with numerical methods, thus utilizing the benefits of each in specific aspects of the distribution system reconfiguration problem. Rules are included for constraints related to acceptable fault current levels, line section and equipment capacity, transformer aging, a satisfactory voltage profile throughout the network, and service priority. Extensive validation and simulations showed that operational constraints are never violated and system performance is improved.