Introduction

In this technological era, various ICT tools are used to help students’ learning. In case of collegiate mathematics education, the typical tools are Computer Algebra Systems (CAS) and Dynamic Geometry Software (DGS). By using them, students can have rich experiences concerning mathematical facts and mechanisms. Some of these systems are usable not only on PCs but also on iPads or tablets, which seems to make students’ learning much more effective. The following picture shows one scene of using Cinderella, one of the most popular DGS, in mathematics classroom.

Figure 1. Use of Cinderella in mathematics classroom

Though the experimental and interactive learning with these systems should enable students to learn by experience, it is also necessary to prepare some facilities to ensure close linkage to paper and pencil based learning in order to convert the students’ findings into their established knowledge (as shown in the above picture). Since TeX is one of the most popular tools to edit printed teaching materials in collegiate mathematics education [1], we developed KETpic, a macro package for some CASs (Maple, Mathematica, Scilab, etc.), and KETCindy, a macro package for Cinderella, to convert the graphical outputs of these software into TeX graphics code. They are freely downloadable at http://ketpic.com. In this presentation, we will show some effective samples produced with KETCindy and the procedure to generate them.

Methods and Results

The procedure to generate final TeX (PDF) output with high-quality graphics is summarized in the diagram of Figure 2 (KETCindy cycle).

Figure 2. KETCindy cycle

Once KETCindy is loaded, users are requested simply to execute commands in Cindyscript (the scripting language for Cinderella) in order to plot mathematical data. Cinderella-embedded KETCindy commands generate additional TeX source code and files (with the aid of Scilab-KETpic procedure), which are subsequently compiled in TeX in the usual manner. These Scilab and TeX procedures can be executed through simple batch processing (as shown with dashed arrow). If you find any points to be corrected in the final PDF output, you only need to modify the commands in the Cindyscript file.

For example, materials in Figure 3 were used to explain the background of some formula in the integration of quadratic functions.

Figure 3. Material generated with KETCindy

When the former figure on Cinderella screen is displayed, the functions f(x) and g(x) can be modified interactively. Through such “experiments”, students can understand that the background mechanism of the formula is valid in any case. Also by using the latter figure on PDF printed output, students can deduce the precise formula through paper and pencil based calculations. The important points are that

1. The figure on Cinderella screen and that on PDF output are completely the same.
2. The modification of the former figure can be directly reflected to the latter figure.
3. Students can use the printed material containing the process of their calculations and deductions in classroom also after school repeatedly.
4. Though some facilities to make effective linkage between algebraic computation capabilities and interactive graphics capabilities on PCs or tablets have been developed [2], there still remain some risks that students’ understandings become only transient, especially in case of collegiate education. KETCindy should serve as a powerful tool to convert their findings into their established knowledge. Because only half a year has passed since the development of KETCindy started, there were not so many opportunities that its products are used in real classrooms. The authors are planning to execute many experimental lessons using KETCindy outputs in near future.

Conclusions

Using interactive graphics capabilities of DGS, many attractive teaching materials have been produced [3]. It seems that the aim of using those materials is to inspire students’ interest to mathematical facts and mechanisms through experimental approaches. Static graphics generated on printed teaching materials should play another role in mathematics education. They help students to convert the information they obtained through various channels into their established knowledge by paper and pencil based activities. The materials produced by using KETCindy enable students to access both types of resources simultaneously. Therefore, KETCindy should have a great possibility to provide completely new type of teaching materials. The authors will try to provide such new kind of materials and share them with wide range of educational researchers and teachers through many channels as listed in [3].

Acknowledgments

This work is supported by Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C) 24501075.

References and Notes

1. Kaneko M.; Takato S. The effective use of LaTeX drawing in linear algebra. The Electronic Journal of Mathematics and Technology 2011, Volume 5-2, 1-20.
2. Kllogjeri P. GeoGebra: A global platform for teaching and learning math together and using the synergy of mathematics. Comm. in Computer and Information Science 2010; Springer; Volume 73, pp. 681-687.
3. Kortenkamp U. Interoperable interactive geometry for Europe. The Electronic Journal of Mathematics and Technology 2011, Volume 5-1, 1-14.

© 2015 by the authors; licensee MDPI and ISIS. This abstract is distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license.

Customer service includes a series of activities that enhance customer satisfaction (Turban and Efraim, 2002). Customer service includes pre-transaction service, transaction service and post-transaction service (Van Riel, 2004). The previous study shows that the enterprise which build excellent customer relationship may increase their profits more than 60% (Reichheld, 1990). Lots of scholars research in online service quality which focuses on online bank, website design (website service), online library, online shopping, online service, virtual community, online clothing, online travel etc. They develop e-service quality scale dimensions from 3 to 15(each includes several items.)

Online customer service system has become an important tool of online marketing. At the same time, it has also become a basic part to exhibit the enterprise and to interact with visitors. It's a hot topic to find the key factors which influence perceived online customer service quality. Dangdang is one of the most popular websites to buy books. This study lists many factors which influence online service quality and customer satisfaction from previous literature, then explores the key factors which influence perceived online customer service quality in online customer services.

The purpose of this paper is to present the results of an empirical study that analyzed how the 6 factors 1.accessibility, 2.reliability, 3.ease-of-use/usefulness, 4.interactivity, 5. responsibility/efficiency, and 6. safety/privacy influence the perceived service quality as for online customers. Accessibility refers that the site can provide a series of entrance (menus, buttons, links etc.) to solve problem during the process of pre-transactions, transaction and post-transaction. Reliability is one of dimensions of SERVQUAL, which refers the ability to reliably, accurately perform the service commitment. Reliability includes two aspects: one means that the website functions such as search engine, payment instruments etc. are reliable. The other means that the service commitment, financial information, product information and other relevant information provided by the website are reliable. Ease of Use/Availability(EOU) refers a friendly interface, especially when users search for useful information. EOU is an important factor for users to make a choice in which website to purchase. The perception of EOU is a key reason for the users to make a decision whether or not to accept the customer services. Interaction means a kind of two-way transmission between webpage and information browser. "Interaction” is a big advantage of Internet media. The real "interactive" web site should show "interactivity" according to people’s communication each other freely. Responsiveness is the willing to help customers and rapidly improve the service level. The response speed of customer services provided will greatly affect the evaluation result of service quality. The faster and more accurate of the response of online customer services, the more satisfaction which the customer perceived. The security dimension originates from the Assurance dimension of SERVQUAL which refers employees’ knowledge, etiquette and ability to express confidence and reliability. When transactions come to network, security is very important to build trust of customers because of no face-to-face contact between customers and company (and its employee). Security/privacy is very important to protect customers’ privacy information and financial information. According to these factors, this paper put forward a series of online service quality related assumptions.

The applied methodology combines factor analysis and regression analysis to a novel data set which comes from actual buyers of Dangdang.com. The questionnaire is divided into four parts: basic demographic information, introduction of background knowledge, perceived online customer service quality, factors which influence perceived online customer service quality. This questionnaire is designed with series closed questions which can select only one answer from several choices except for basic personal information. The scale of perceived online customer service quality and its influence factors is designed with 5-likert scale.

Through sampling, the reliability and validity analysis of questionnaires, factor analysis, regression analysis, this paper draws a conclusion. The results demonstrate that the 6 factors have significant positive influence on the perceived service quality for online customers. The insights impart an important set of guidelines for service providers interested in enhancing the quality of their online customers' experience.

Most operators of online shopping web site think that, online customer services, especially Pre-Transaction service and Post-Transaction service are not essential, or just a means of personalized customer service package to attract customers. But we believe that the Accessibility, Reliability, Ease of Use/Availability, Interactivity, Responsiveness/Efficiency, Security/Privacy during the whole transaction process will significantly influence the perceived customer service quality. In fact, real-time online customer services can improve the interactivity and responsiveness, and increase the ease-of-use to a certain extent, so it will significantly improve perception level of customer service quality.

So the operators should strengthen them to pave the way for customers’ repurchase. On the one hand, improving customer service quality, can help enterprises to establish good market image, cultivate brand loyalty of customers. On the other hand, market image of service enterprises has a significant impact on the actual experience of customer service quality. Secondly, with the development of technology, real-time online customer services has no technical barriers, online shopping site that launches real-time online customer services, may have a big Competitive Advantage to attract customers.

Business models of news media organisations are currently undergoing profound transformations as the ability of traditional news media to effectively monetise their audiences is eroding (Napoli 2011). Since the beginning of the global economic crisis the news industry is facing not only problems of trust in journalism, but also of increasing financial difficulties resulting from declining numbers of readers, listeners and viewers, lower advertising revenues and failed technological innovations in the sphere of journalistic production (e. g. Jones and Salter 2012; Grieskin et al 2012). While online news production has often been studied from the perspective of audience participation in the creation and distribution of news or the impact of digital technology on newsgathering routines, it has less frequently been examined how business models of news organisations are being transformed in the digital age. Different authors (e.g. Napoli 2011; Fuchs 2011; Turow 2012; Allmer 2012) emphasize that digital technologies enable increased surveillance of internet users; it remains to be answered to what degree media industries (beyond biggest Internet corporations) in fact utilize these possibilities in their daily business and in what ways “economic surveillance” influences their decisions. It is therefore of key importance to study the changes in these industries that occurred in the recent years because of technological developments and the economic squeeze. In short, these transformations must be analysed from a critical political-economic perspective as well.

While Slovenia has been especially hit by the global capitalist crisis (e.g. Vobič et al 2014) and Slovenian media industries have undergone transformations similar to other capitalist countries, Slovene media have also been under pressure from holders of social power during the last 20 years in the form of unstable ownerships, unstable management and frequent changes of editors, making it hard to balance journalistic and business goals. (Vobič 2012) The transition to online has in part because of this troubled history been quite problematic. In Slovenia detailed analysis of business models of digital media are available only for online editions of newspapers (e. g. Vobič 2013) and they find they are adapting to deteriorating financial circumstances mainly by reducing production costs, especially the costs of labour.

Using the methods of content analysis, document analysis and in-depth interviews with journalists, editors, and advertisers, the authors analyse the three most visited Slovene news sites (24ur.com, Planet Siol and MMC RTV SLO) to examine: a) how these organisations are adapting to changing circumstances (particularly decreasing advertising revenues); b) how relationships between media organisations and advertisers are being transformed; and c) how is the availability of online audience metrics impacting the work process in newsrooms, relationships between different parts of news organisations (particularly the editorial and marketing of advertising space) and relationships between news organisations and advertisers.

The digital technology has changed the efficiency of communication and affected people’s communication pattern as well. In the early days of internet usage, the concerns of academic research of interpersonal communication from the past face to face communication, change to the evolution of the computer-mediated communication (CMC). Nowadays, the popularity of smart phones generates a new interpersonal communication pattern - mobil-mediated communication (MMC). This change involves not only different communication device, but also function expansion, contact efficiency and economy. The communication relationship and social interaction, along with the technology transition result new models.

Mobil-mediated communication in the academic field is still a new topic, relevant researches mainly focus on the technic innovation of communication technology or message properties. However, there are more and more studies direct to the social relations of communication. Yuan (2012) studied mobile phones for social relations in Chinese society which provide many practical observations of communication behavior. On indirect and high-context patterns of Chinese social interaction, mobile phones play an important role and develop relation-oriented cultural norms. Communication through mobile phones are used to define and mediate group members, maintain social cohesion and harmony.

Chinese society highly values social relationship. In this study, mobile phone is regarded as intermediary vehicle which links people’s social relationship netwok. On one hand, people interaction through moble phone, the social media, can establish contact and strengthen each others’ affection connection. On the other hand, instead of face to face communication, smart phone’s mediated effect omit the social context clues so that interpersonal relationship possess the flexibility of avoidance. Therefore, this study analyze the characteristics of social reaction in the mobile-mediated situation. There are two research questions developed . First, how people use mobile phone to proceed interpersonal communication and establish positive effect of warm feeling? Second, , how people use mobile phone to take the avoid effect for buffering emotional conflict? The research adopts quality method of focus group interview to examine communication exerperience of smart phone usage. There are six business professionals as focus group interviewers. The discussion focuses on the phenomenas of positive and advoid effect in mobile-mediated situation.

The research found that smart phone offers many communication convenience, allowing users able to have a positive emotional warming effect, then bring a better interactive experience. Common experiences of respondents believe that smart phones not only provide basic voice calls, but also have important advantages to facilitate communication. For example, all users installed Line or FB community communication APP, which can replace the voice dialoge so that the contact become more economical and convenient. Some APP stickers even improve the texts communication to a more lively type and increase the pleasure of communication behavior. Respondents also reveal mobile-mediated communication can lower the interpersonal relation stress and avoid psychological burden. Precisely the avoid effects come from smartphone’s powerful functions. For example, response time has considerable flexibility when phone call. Receiver does not have to bear the direct communication of pressure, and take easy to read message.

In conclusion, mobile-mediated communication provides a convenient channel for interpersonal contact. It towards a very positive impact on the development of social relationship. Especially mobile phones with a variety of affiliated functions, users can adopt it for different situations and communication purposes. It contributes to human interaction with a positive and conflict avoidance effect. Without physical contact like face to face interaction, mobile-mediated communication create a new social relation pattern and helps to strengthen the development of the collective consciousness and social cohesion.

Investigation of the relationships between information, reality and cognition targets the structural-procedural properties of organisms as living systems. Nature tends towards hierarchical forms of both structure and process, and consequently any study of information in this context must of necessity take account of the characteristics of existing scales and their interfaces. The situation is complicated by the pragmatic tendency of evolution to scavenge prior existing features in creating new ones, and consequently biology does not uniquely exhibit hierarchical configurations. This paper addresses the nature of hierarchical organization and the origin of information in a biological context; although the ideas presented here can be applied almost equally well to non-biological entities where hierarchy is less-well defined or extant.

We have previously published [1, 2] extensive details of the relationships between different scales or levels of organization in living systems, and here we will only refer to those characteristics which are relevant to our present purpose. Dodig-Crnkovic and Giovagnoli [3] have described Nature as a hierarchically-organized network of networks, which corresponds well to our own viewpoint. Multi-scalar systems are by their very nature unified, and this unification is a real characteristic of any system [4], which integrates all of the system’s scales into a scale-free hyperscalar representation in which simplified replicas of the ‘real’ scales are ‘objectively’ (more-than-subjectively) accessible, in the sense that Havel [5] has (socially) defined ‘objective’ as a ‘group subjective’. The transition from multiple scales to their integration in hyperscale is an example of the one-out-of-many interpretation of information referred to by Schroeder [6].

Natural hierarchy decomposes into two partial hierarchies, one corresponding to the entity under consideration, the other corresponding to its context. Consequently, there are two partial integrations leading to hyperscale, and two (partial) hyperscales. These make up a ubiquitous duality in system representation. Ultimately, these two partial hyperscales re-integrate to give a singular metascalar representamen of the entire system. Peircian semiotics [7] treats all interactions as interpretations of signs. In the (biosemiotic) context of organismic system unification, individual scales, their hyperscalar representations and the metascalar outcome all appear as signs. We hypothesize that hyperscalar representations correspond to secondness in Peirce’s scheme of things, and that metascale corresponds to Peirce’s thirdness.

Salthe has published extensively on the concept of hierarchy [see, for example, 8]. His position has consistently been that hierarchy is a human mental construct, devoid of any other reality. We beg to differ. Hierarchy permits the generation of simple representations of complex informational domains, thus supporting faster survival-promoting reactions to environmental stimuli, and as such it is a primary cognitive mechanism used by all living systems, not just humans. This, of course, raises the question of the validity of representation in information theory. Our own position is clearly that representation is a necessary ‘computational’ device for survival and therefore for evolution itself. Any other position would negate the importance of hierarchy in Nature. As Dodig-Crnkovic and Giovagnoli [3] comment in their discussion of connectionist approaches, “… it is correct that there is ‘no computation without representation’”.

We hypothesize that the reality of a singular metascale corresponds to information per se: as Schroeder [9] points out, “…information has been formulated as identification of a variety, where identification is understood as that which either selects, distinguishes one out of many, or that which makes the many into one (a whole).” This high-level metascalar formulation incorporates the properties of all of a living system’s scalar properties in such a unified form that individual selection is also possible: it combines Schroeder’s [6] “two complementary manifestations of information.”

References

1     Cottam, R.; Ranson, W.; Vounckx, R. Autocreative hierarchy II: dynamics - self-organization, emergence and level-changing. In International Conference on Integration of Knowledge Intensive Multi-Agent Systems; Hexmoor, H., Ed.; IEEE: Piscataway, NJ, USA, 2003, pp. 766-773.
2     Cottam, R.; Ranson, W.; Vounckx, R. A framework for computing like Nature. In Computing Nature; Dodig-Crnkovic, G., Giovagnoli, R., Eds.; Springer SAPERE series: Berlin, Germany, 2013; pp. 23-60.
3     Dodig-Crnkovic, G.; Giovagnoli, R. Computing nature – a network of networks of concurrent information processes. In Computing Nature; Dodig-Crnkovic, G., Giovagnoli, R., Eds.; Springer SAPERE series: Berlin, Germany, 2013; pp. 1-22.
4     Cottam R.; Ranson W.; Vounckx R. A biosemiotic view on consciousness derived from system hierarchy. In The Unity of Mind, Brain and World: Current Perspectives on a Science of Consciousness; Pereira Jr, A., Lehmann, D., Eds.; Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK, pp. 77-112.
5     Havel, I.M. Scale dimensions in nature. International Journal of General Systems 1995, 23, 303-332.
6     Schroeder, M.J. From philosophy to theory of information. Information Theories and Applications 2011, 18, 56-68.
7     Peirce, C. S. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce; Hartshorne, C., Weiss, P., Eds., Volumes 1-6; Burks, A., Ed., Volumes 7-8, Belknap Press: Cambridge, MA, USA, 1931-1958.
8     Salthe, S.N. Hierarchical structures. Axiomathes 2012, 22, 355-383.
9     Schroeder, M.J. Foundations for science of information: reflection on the method of inquiry. tripleC 2011, 9, 377-384.