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Robotic surgery is limited by the lack of haptic feedback to the surgeon. The addition of tactile information may enable surgeons to feel tissue characteristics, appropriately tension sutures, and identify pathologic conditions. Tactile feedback may also enable expansion of minimally invasive surgery to other surgical procedures and decrease the learning curve associated with robotic surgery. This paper aims to explore a system to provide tactile feedback.

A pneumatic balloon‐based system has been developed to provide tactile feedback to the fingers of the surgeon during robotic surgery. The system features a polydimethyl siloxane actuator with a thin‐film silicone balloon membrane and a compact pneumatic control system. The 1.0 × 1.8 × 0.4 cm actuators designed for the da Vinci system feature a 3 × 2 array of 3 mm inflatable balloons.

The low‐profile pneumatic system and actuator have been mounted directly onto the da Vinci surgical system. Human perceptual tests have indicated that pneumatic balloon‐based tactile input is an effective means to provide tactile information to the fingers of the surgeon.

Application of a complete tactile feedback system is limited by current force sensing technologies.

The actuators have been designed such that they can be mounted directly onto the hand controls of the da Vinci robotic system, and are scalable such that they can be applied to various robotic applications.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the following relationships in the Asian sports sponsorship context: first, the influence of self-congruity and perceived congruence on sponsor brand identification and sponsor credibility, respectively; second, the influence of sponsor brand identification and sponsor credibility on sponsor brand equity; and third, the mediating effect of sponsor brand identification and sponsor credibility on the relationship that self-congruity and perceived congruence each have with sponsor brand equity.

A field study was conducted in Taiwan, where 410 questionnaires were collected from baseball fans of the Chinese Professional Baseball League (the local professional baseball league).

The findings support all of the hypotheses and reveal that self-congruity and perceived congruence leverage sponsor brand equity through sponsor brand identification and sponsor credibility, respectively. Both sponsor brand identification and sponsor credibility partially mediate the relationship that self-congruity and perceived congruence each have with sponsor brand equity.

The findings of this study can assist sponsorship managers in realising how to leverage a sponsor brand equity.

The conceptual model investigated both direct and indirect (i.e. mediated) effects by providing different theoretical explanations to explore how self-congruity and perceived congruence leverage sponsor brand equity in the Asian sports sponsorship context.

Named Data Networking (NDN) is a content-centric network differing from the traditional IP-based network. It adopts the name prefix to identify, query and route the information content instead of IP-based addressing and routing. NDN provides a convenient way to access the content without knowing the originated location of the requested information. However, the length of name prefix varies. It is not like the fixed-length IP addresses that makes handling queries or searching the requested information in NDN easier. An efficient name lookup mechanism of name prefix will efficiently increase the performance of prefix identifying, name searching and content retrieving. Therefore, this paper aims to propose a partial name prefix merging and shortening scheme for enhancing the efficiency of name lookup in NDN.

To reduce the work involved in name prefix identifying, querying, storing and routing, this work adopts a cyclic redundancy check-based encoding scheme to shorten the variable length of the name prefix into a proper and fixed length of encoded numerical information. In fact, the structure of a name prefix is presented in a combination of word segments with the slash symbol. The shortening procedure of name prefix can also be applied to adjacent word segments forming fixed-length encoded data for further efficiently matching the name prefix for name lookup in NDN.

The experimental results show that the shorter length of encoded name prefix can effectively reduce the access time of name lookup and increasingly retrieve the corresponding named content in NDN. Through partial merging and shortening of name prefix, the length of encoded prefix name may be larger than the whole encoding of name prefix. It retains the information differences from different parts of various name prefixes. Thus, it can avoid collision problems with the same encoded information from various name prefixes.

From the experimental results, it is observed that partial merging and shortening of name prefix is useful for name look up in NDN. It can increase the efficiency of name prefix matching and retrieving in NDN. It can also save memory space to store the name prefix in an NDN node.

In the competitive global market, firms have to keep profit from innovation activities. A firm makes profits by offering products or services at a lower cost than its competitors or by offering differentiated products at premium prices that more than compensate for the extra cost of differentiation. The IC Package and Testing technology industries were the first high technological industry to build in Taiwan. The Package and Testing industries in Taiwan adopted competitive innovation activities to become stronger. In our study, we want to know how innovation activities influence a firm operating in the IC Package and Testing industries. Our study used a questionnaire and Likert five‐point scale to survey the innovation activities, customer and feedback in innovation performance in the IC Package and Testing industry. The wafer level chip size packing technology in our study indicates the innovation activities. Because we need to compare the difference between the wafer level chip size packing technology and wire bonding technology to recognize innovation and how the innovator and customer were influenced. Our conclusions are described below: (1) When the innovator adopts innovation activities that can be maintained using experiments and knowledge, using machine and decision variables more quickly will produce success; (2) Innovators should adopt innovation activities that focus on customers that use knowledge and experimentation, training time and cost. If an innovation forces customers to spend much time and cost to learn new technology or applications, the innovation will not be adopted; (3) Innovators that create innovation performance higher than his customers must also consider the impact upon their customers. We have to remind innovator to focus on why their customers have a different level of evolution in the same innovation activities.

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) aims to analyze possible impact upon manufacturing process and availability of products, and also study the environmental considerations and potential influence during entire life cycle ranging from procurement, production and utilization to treatment (namely, from cradle to tomb). Based on high‐density polyethylene (HDPE) pipe manufacturing of company A, this case study would involve evaluation of environmental influence during the production process. When the manufacturing process has been improved during “production process” and “forming cooling” stage, it is found that capital input on “electric power” and “water supply” could be reduced, thus helping to sharpen the competitive power of company A, and also ensure sustainable economic and industrial development in accordance with national policies on environmental protection.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the causal relationships among four components in corporate social responsibility (CSR) domain. This study posits that CSR is mainly influenced by: accountability, responsibility, transparency, and competitiveness.

A path analysis is employed to determine the relationships, while confirmatory factor analysis is applied to assess the construct validity of the model. The data presented in this study were collected from Taiwanese companies in the year 2009 using questionnaires. A total of 170 companies were analyzed.

The results show that both accountability and transparency provide statistically significant contributions to the prediction of competitiveness, which in turn has a significant effect on responsibility.

First, the paper encompasses four core factors influencing the measurement of CSR. Second, the sample size used to analyze the diversity of concepts may appear small and therefore the result may not be considered precise since the total number of companies in Taiwan is over one million. Large sample size may lead to different results and therefore needs to be further explored. Third, while the proposed model was only tested in Taiwan, a country with 97.8 percent SMEs, the outcome of the research may only be applicable to Taiwan rather than to other countries with different national systems of business‐society relations. Finally, this study only investigated the relationships among core components of CSR.

While developing business strategies, companies taking accountability and transparency as priority will strengthen their competitiveness and in turn generate responsibility and lead to CSR, a way to reach corporate sustainability.

The results provide business leaders with practical advice that implementing CSR is not only the smart and right thing to do from a business perspective, but also the right thing to do from a society perspective.

Applying for international standards could be a feasible and optimal way to show commitments to CSR implementation.

The purpose of this paper is to present a procedure for identifying a corporate social responsibility (CSR) model with best goodness‐of‐fit. This research constructed a model of which CSR was mainly influenced by four core components: accountability, transparency, competitiveness, and responsibility.

The data presented in this study were collected from companies in the year 2009 in Taiwan using questionnaires, and in total 185 companies were analyzed. Structural equation modeling was applied to assess the proposed CSR model containing four latent factors and 13 observation indicators.

The results of confirmatory factor analysis indicated that the correlation among four latent variables was significant, and the second‐order factor structure fit the observed data well.

The result supported the proposed model that four constructs played a dominant role toward CSR. Business leaders therefore could have clearer perspectives while facing challenges regarding CSR issues.

The paper shows that while developing business strategies, companies taking accountability and transparency as priority would strengthen their competitiveness and generate responsibility and in turn lead to CSR. Companies would obtain great advantages in the long run.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship of regulatory foci (promotion focus and prevention focus) to expatriate adjustments (general, interaction, and work adjustments) and explore whether mentoring functions (psychosocial support, role modeling, and career development) moderate the aforementioned relationship.

Using 141 questionnaired primary data (response rate 32.25 percent) gathered from at least six months experienced expatiates of multinational companies in six industries, this study adopts regression method to examine the moderating effect.

This study found that promotion focus was positively related to the interaction and work adjustment, respectively; prevention focus was positively related to the general, interaction, and work adjustment, respectively. Psychosocial support function moderates the relationship between promotion focus and general adjustment. Career development function moderates the relationships between promotion/prevention foci and work adjustment.

According to the interactionism perspective, behavior is a result of the interaction between personality and situational influences, has a long history in social and personality psychology. This study extends this perspective to the interactive effects of mentorship (situational factor) and expatriates’ regulatory foci (personality factor) on expatriate adjustment.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of brand associations and the formation of attitudes towards a new sponsor. Specifically, the paper evaluates the Under Armour brand and its anomalous position in the Barclay’s Premier League.

The research design is longitudinal, qualitative and interpretivistic, utilising 26 online focus groups with 213 participants over a 24-month period encompassing the 2012/2013 and 2013/2014 Premier League seasons.

The results indicate that Under Armour’s lack of football (soccer) presence in the context of the Premier League offered significant differentiation, as it diminished “common ground” with other fans, offered the opportunity to create personal identities beyond the club and the consumption of kit apparel, and was seen as positive given the articulation that brands such as Nike and Adidas were “forced” onto fans. Additionally, for the first time in the sports sponsorship literature, the findings reveal fans engaging with brands in a utilitarian manner, expressing concerns relating to cost, durability, functionality and value for money.

This study is exploratory in nature and highly contextualised, and a larger-scale study of the phenomenon is desirable. This study extends the literature on fans’ perceptions of sponsoring brands and shows that a new sponsor, without prior league or club associations, can generate significant brand interest and elicit consumption behaviours beyond team apparel.

The findings suggest that there are considerable opportunities for “outside” brands to garner a market share and instigate loyalty through sponsorship. Subsequently, kit manufacturers should consider strategies that encompass entry into new sporting areas.

The study reveals that fans seek uniqueness and differentiation in a sponsoring brand, with brand image paramount in relation to the club and to both social and personal identity.