Soil Chemical Analysis

The authors examine the implications of electronic shopping for consumers, retailers, and manufacturers. They assume that near-term technological developments will offer consumers unparalleled opportunities to locate and compare product offerings. They examine these advantages as a function of typical consumer goals and the types of products and services being sought and offer conclusions regarding consumer incentives and disincentives to purchase through interactive home shopping vis-à-vis traditional retail formats. The authors discuss implications for industry structure as they pertain to competition among retailers, competition among manufacturers, and retailer-manufacturer relationships.

Interactive home shopping: Consumer, retailer, and manufacturer incentives to participate in

Skin plays an important role in mediating our interactions with the world. Recreating the properties of skin using electronic devices could have profound implications for prosthetics and medicine. The pursuit of artificial skin has inspired innovations in materials to imitate skin's unique characteristics, including mechanical durability and stretchability, biodegradability, and the ability to measure a diversity of complex sensations over large areas. New materials and fabrication strategies are being developed to make mechanically compliant and multifunctional skin-like electronics, and improve brain/machine interfaces that enable transmission of the skin's signals into the body. This Review will cover materials and devices designed for mimicking the skin's ability to sense and generate biomimetic signals.

Pursuing prosthetic electronic skin.

(1976). Nuclear Tracks in Solids (Principles and Applications) Nuclear Technology: Vol. 30, No. 1, pp. 91-92.

Nuclear Tracks in Solids (Principles and Applications)

The Market for Virtue: The Potential and Limits of Corporate Social Responsibility. By David Vogel. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institute, 2005. 222p. $28.95.Is there a “market for virtue”? If so, what can it do, and what can it not do to improve our world? In his incisive new book, David Vogel takes aim at these questions and the now-fashionable claim that there is a business case for corporate social responsibility (CSR). He concludes that there is no business case that can be generalized to all firms per se, but there is a political case for broadening what we mean by that much-used term.

The Market for Virtue: The Potential and Limits of Corporate Social Responsibility

A circuit which can be used as a driver for large multiplexed liquid-crystal displays is described. The electrical REQUIREMENTS FROM SUCH A CIRCUIT ARE DISCUSSED and a technology defined to meet these requirements. The technology is compatible with standard CMOS on SOS processing. The actual performance of this circuit is then described. The drain breakdown voltage of individual transistors exceeds 140 V. The rise and fall times in a 220 pF load are of the order of 2 /spl mu/s and 1 /spl mu/s, respectively.

A high-voltage circuit for driving liquid-crystal displays

Collaborative filtering based recommender systems (CF–RS) are widely used to recommend products based on consumers' preference similarity. Recommendations by CF–RS merely provide suggestions as “people who bought this also bought this” while, consumers are unaware about the source of these recommendations. By amalgamating CF–RS with consumers' social network information, e-commerce sites can offer recommendation from social networks of consumers. These social network embedded systems are known as social recommender systems (SRS). The extant literature has researched on the algorithms and implementation of these systems; however, SRS have not been understood from consumers' psychological perspective. This study aims to qualitatively explore consumers' motives to accept SRS in e-commerce websites.,This qualitative study is based on in-depth interviews of frequent online shoppers. SRS are currently not very widespread in the Indian e-commerce space; hence, a vignette was shown to respondents before they responded to the questions. Inductive qualitative content analysis method was used to analyse these interviews.,Three main themes (social-gratification, self-gratification and information-gratification) emerged from the analysis. Out of these, social-gratification acts as an enabler, while self-gratification along with some elements of information-gratification act as inhibitors towards acceptance of social recommendations. Based on these gratifications, we present a conceptual model on consumer's acceptance of social recommendations.,This study is an initial attempt to qualitatively understand consumers' attitudes and acceptance of social recommendations on e-commerce websites, which in itself is a fairly new phenomenon.

Consumer acceptance of social recommender systems in India

Background: Double-blind clinical trials comparing citalopram with amitriptyline or other tricyclic antidepressants are lacking in India. Aim: To evaluate the efficacy and safety of the newer antidepressant citalopram in the treatment of major depression. Methods: The clinical acceptability and safety profile of citalopram was assessed and compared with that of amitriptyline in 40 patients in an outpatient set-up. Patients aged 18 to 65 years who fulfilled the diagnostic criteria for a single or recurrent major depressive disorder (as defined by DSM-IV) for a minimum of 2 weeks were enrolled. Patient assessment was done at screening, baseline, end of week 1, week 2, week 3, week 4, week 5 and week 6 for efficacy and safety parameters such as Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HDRS), Clinical Global Impression (CGI) Scale, adverse event follow up, blood pressure and pulse. Three­level statistical analysis including ANOVA was performed on all efficacy measures. Results: On the HDRS the percentage reduction in the mean score for the citalopram group (Group 1) was 72.12%, while that for the amitriptyline group (Group 2) was 67.93%. On the CGI-Improvement Scale, the percentage reduction at the end of the study for the citalopram group was 56.79% while in the amitriptyline group it was 44.70%. Twenty per cent of patients in Group 1 reported adverse events compared to 75% in Group 2. Conclusions: Citalopram is effective in the treatment of major depression at the dosages range of 20-60 mg/ day and its efficacy is equivalent to that of standard tricyclic antidepressants such as amitriptyline, with a substantially better tolerability profile.

Efficacy and safety of citalopram versus amitriptyline in the treatment of major depression

Repeaterless low swing interconnects are potential candidates for high speed low power signaling over on-chip global wires. Capacitive pre-emphasis at the transmitter has been shown to improve the achievable data rate by increasing the relative power at high frequencies. This paper shows an improved transmitter with a 1-tap feed-forward equalizer in addition to capacitive pre-emphasis. A design method for finding the transmitter design parameters using scrupulously chosen bit vectors is also presented. Post layout simulations show that the proposed link achieves a data rate of 4 Gbps over a 10 mm long M8 line with energy consumption of 313 fJ/bit in 90 nm CMOS technology.

A Feed-Forward Equalizer for Capacitively Coupled On-Chip Interconnect

This paper explores drain extended MOS (DeMOS) device design guidelines for an area scaled, ESD robust integrated radio frequency power amplifier (RF PA) for advanced system-on-chip applications in 28nm node CMOS. Simultaneous improvement of device-circuit performance and ESD robustness is discussed for the first time. By device design optimization a 45% increase in gain and 25% in power-added efficiency of RF PA at 1GHz, and 5× improvements in ESD robustness are reported experimentally.

Dinesh K. Sharma

Papers

A high-voltage circuit for driving liquid-crystal displays

Consumer acceptance of social recommender systems in India

Efficacy and safety of citalopram versus amitriptyline in the treatment of major depression

A Feed-Forward Equalizer for Capacitively Coupled On-Chip Interconnect

Drain extended MOS device design for integrated RF PA in 28nm CMOS with optimized FoM and ESD robustness