Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 110-113).

Attitude estimation of unmanned aerial vehicles is of great importance as it enables propercontrol of the vehicles. Attitude estimation is typically done by an attitude-heading refer-ence system (ahrs) which utilises different kind of sensors. In this thesis these include agyroscope providing angular rates measurements which can be integrated to describe the at-titude as well as an accelerometer and a magnetometer, both of which can be compared withknown reference vectors to determine the attitude. The sensor measurements are fused usinga gps augmented 7-state Extended Kalman filter (ekf) with a quaternion and gyroscope bi-ases as state variables. It uses differentiated gps velocity measurements to estimate externalaccelerations as reference vector to the accelerometer, which significantly raises robustnessof the solution. The filter is implemented in MatlabTM and in c on an ARM microprocessor.It is compared with an explicit complementary filter solution and is evaluated with flightsusing a fixed-wing uav with satisfactory results.

Todays’ consumer society has forced companies to work towards a sustainable society. Consumers consider a company’s work with Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as necessary and expect companies to work ethically. However, fast fashion consumers’ also demand a low price and rapid changes in trends. Therefore, the purpose of this thesis is to understand fast fashion consumers’ attitude towards, and the importance of, companies working with CSR. By conducting a questionnaire on Cubus’ customers in Uppsala, information has been gained in order to investigate this phenomenon. The results show that the majority of the respondents have a positive attitude towards CSR, but were not a deciding factor when shopping at Cubus. From this study, we can draw the conclusions that even though the majority of the respondents had a positive attitude towards CSR, other factors were of greater importance. This validates the phenomenon about fast fashion customers’ demand for a low price and fast changing trends.

Organic food has drawn attention of more and more consumers. As a result, many researchers have attempted to explain the motivations and marketing issues relevant to the topic. The previous studies provide some conflicting results and could not produce a comprehensive understanding of organic food consumers in China. Given the present research, this paper attempts to conduct a comprehensive study of organic food consumption by examining a variety of factors influencing the consumption of organic food and provide some marketing implications through a survey of young consumers in a large metropolitan area in China. The results have shown that the revised TRA model has been successfully applied in this study. The research has concluded that “food safety”, “nutrition”, and “environmental friendly” are significant factors to impact the purchase of organic food while considering the demographical variables. In addition, the study found that consumers prefer vegetables, fruits, grain and beans, milk, meat and eggs to be organic, which are ranked according to the degree of preference. Moreover, the research suggests that the main barriers bringing about the gap between attitudes and behaviors are price, the distrust on certifications of organic food, and unavailability. These findings have implications for marketing communications to consumers and potentially for organic product development.

The primary objective of this study is to provide a comprehensive understanding of consumers’ acceptance of mobile advertising. Specifically, this research explored how the persuasive communication process works via mobile advertising. In order to accomplish this research objective, the relationships among various factors identified from earlier studies were tested. Based on previous literature regarding consumer attitudes, media use, and innovation adoption, a conceptual framework was developed to understand consumer acceptance of mobile advertising. For this reason, the current study employed an online survey with 514 online participants. The results suggest that consumers’ attitudes toward mobile advertising are closely related with all three factors used in this study (e.g., mobile device, message, consumer factors). Furthermore, consumers’ attitudes toward mobile advertising are strongly influenced by message factors (e.g. entertainment, credibility, irritation, message interactivity) and consumer factors (e.g. social influence, compatibility). Thus, careful considerations in message strategy and thoughtful consumer research are needed to increase the effectiveness of mobile advertising. Additionally, the sizable and significant impact of consumer attitude on behavioral intention further supports findings from previous research. / text

The current study addresses the overarching issue of the role that different types of involvement play in cognitive and behavioral processes and attitude formation by investigating 1) if and how SI and EI function jointly to form the level of AMI, 2) how SI, EI and AMI are interwoven to affect the level of RI, 3) the joint role of SI and EI on the routes to attitude formation. The findings suggest that SI and EI additively influence the level of AMI with stronger role of EI on the formation of AMI. Moreover, while SI and/or EI may affect AMI and subsequent cognitive and behavioral processes such as attention, comprehension, elaboration and information search intention their influences on such cognitive processes are only observed indirectly via the mediating role of AMI. No direct influence of SI and/or EI is observed when AMI is included in the models tested. In addition, AMI appears to be a robust indicator to the level of attention and information search intention regardless of the types of situational source of personal relevance and product types used, while SI and/or EI provide somewhat mixed results depending on the type of situational source of personal relevance and the type of products considered. With regard to joint function of SI, EI and AMI on the information search intention, there is an initial evidence of direct interactive influence of SI and EI on information search intention beyond the mediating role of AMI. However, this interactive function is only found via moderated regression analyses rather than ANOVA with a median-split of EI. Concerning attitude formation via dual-route theories of ELM and HSM, the current study suggests that systematic (central) vs. heuristic (peripheral) processing based on SI is inadequate to account for the two qualitatively different processes in advertising context dealing with laptop computer and digital camera ad. / text

To satisfy the requirements of small satellites with attitude control requirements, a guidance, navigation, and control module was designed at the Texas Spacecraft Laboratory. However, these small satellites tend to have attitude constraints in the form of keep-in and keep-out cones. Two methods for autonomous constrained attitude guidance are presented. The first satisfies the problem of guiding a single axis through keep-out constraints while satisfying a second keep-in constraint through an adjoined optimization routine. The method leverages methods for discretizing the attitude shell combined with the graph pathfinding algorithm A*. The second approach generalizes the problem to any number of attitude constraints in the body and inertial frame by discretizing the quaternion space using a series of concentric discretized shells. An approach for discretized attitude optimization is created to allow the vehicle to identify which attitude mode to operate under while simultaneously optimizing the solar power input. The discretized constrained attitude guidance and attitude optimization techniques are tied together in the flight software architecture and tested in a hardware-in-the-loop simulation environment. / text

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Social media is developing rapidly and China has become the largest market of social media usage. Due to numerous international social media platforms being unavailable in China, Chinese consumers have different usage and attitude of social media from those in other countries. According to previous studies, consumers’ usage and attitude of social media can be different due to their gender. Due to these two factors, it is interesting to study gender differences in attitudes toward social media in a Chinese context. By using questionnaires, data are collected from students in Shanghai, China. By applying SPSS, analysis of the results shows that Chinese online consumers basically have positive attitude toward using social media and positively think social media influence them. Most of Chinese respondents spend more than 1 hour on social media daily. Generally speaking, Chinese consumers use social media in order to communicate with others and search for different events. As to gender difference, Chinese women are more likely to follow a famous person by using social media than men. Both men and women use Wechat and Weibo the most frequently.

Weight-based stigmatization refers to negative beliefs and weight-related attitudes that are demonstrated through rejection, bias, stereotypes, and prejudice towards individuals because they are overweight or obese. With weight stigma prevalent and on the rise, assessment of factors associated with weight stigma is important in developing effective interventions for children. The goal of this study was to investigate weight stigma in relation to perspective taking skills and executive function (EF). Sixty-two 4- to 7-year-olds were administered measures of weight stigma (explicit and a Weight Implicit Association Test; Weight IAT), perspective taking skills, and EF. As expected, most children demonstrated the stereotype that fat was bad on explicit and implicit measures. Results showed that explicit weight stigma increases with age, and perspective taking skills and EF were not associated with weight stigma. The findings suggest that weight stigma increases with age and that early intervention is needed to reduce weight stigma. / Graduate