<p>Performance measurement is the buzzword in today’s business world. This mechanism has become an essential tool in online marketplace to identify victors and losers. Apparently, virtual stores are searching for decision-oriented performance measures to aid them in addition to identifying strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities make sound strategic and operational decisions as they compete with their peers. In that paradigm this study attempt to measure performance of virtual stores using decision-making associated variables sternly to evaluate the impact of the variables or indicators on strategic and operational decisions.</p><p>To achieve this purpose, the study used an evaluation framework to identify drivers which have a significant and positive effect on strategic and operational decisions. The study surveyed 100 internet users in Goteborg of a randomly selected four virtual store (EBay Amazon.com, Yahoo and Buy.com). </p><p>The results identified three major dimensions: website, product and services and promotion. These dimensions share many common aspects with decision making determinants derived within the context of online market industry. Conversely, these dimensions have unique characteristics inherent in the online marketing environment. The study revealed a significantly positive relationship between the variables on operational and strategic decisions. The conclusion is that the fact that performance measures are assessed to firms’ business activities both operational and strategic decisions initiatives begin with defining users’ needs and preferences, and their related performance variable. If the virtual store understands what dimensions users use to judge quality, they can take appropriate actions to monitor and enhance performance on those dimensions and remedy service failures.</p><p> </p><p>Keywords: Virtual store, Strategic and operational decisions, Decision-oriented performance variables, variable dimensions, Website, product and service and Promotion</p>

Wind speed data were taken at a weather station on the coast and horizontal wind speed energy spectra were computed. The shape of an average spectrum obtained in marine environment is compared with an average land spectrum and the presence of a spectral gap is observed in the shoreline spectrum. Wave number domain spectra are compared with frequency domain spectra. Strong similarity between the spectra is found for short periods, but at longer periods the f-space spectrum localizes most of the energy at specific frequencies, while the k-space spectrum spreads the energy over many wave numbers. When the wind speed is fairly constant, Taylor's hypothesis is found to be a reasonable approximation up to periods of tens of minutes. A preliminary investigation of the dependence of the value of the drag coefficient on the period over which the average wind is measured was made. A line of the form C[subscript Dx]/C[subscript D₁₀]= .89 + .1 log X fits the graphed points quite well with a correlation of .98, where X is the averaging distance in miles. Differences of 20% in the value of the drag coefficient over averaging distances between 10 and 1600 miles are observed. From this preliminary study, it appears that a more detailed study of this effect would be worthwhile. / Graduation date: 1972

The wind field measured during Project JASIN 1972, a joint British-American venture during September 1972, was analyzed. These measurements were done, with equipment manufactured by Ivar Aanderaa of Bergen, Norway, on large, anchored toroid buoys. The results of the analysis of the wind field, which included divergence and vorticity estimates and spectral analysis, compared favorably with results from previous studies by other investigators. The spectral analysis of the wind field at different locations showed some differences indicating that ocean wind fields are less homogeneous than had been expected. Basic statistics of the wind speed and direction at the same locations also confirmed this conclusion. An apparent diurnal cycle in the u and v components of the wind was studied. It was shown that the total wind vector for the study period was quite different at different horizontal locations while hourly deviations around these means during a day showed remarkable similarities. A curious eight-hour period found in the divergence estimates on a 100 km grid is possibly related to an eight-hour air pressure wave studied many years ago by Von Hann (1918) and Bartels (1932). It was concluded that the wind field over the ocean is not entirely homogeneous and some rather large differences are found over a scale as small as 100 kilometers. / Graduation date: 1974

The data recorded between March 3, 1969, and October 31, 1969, by a wind gauge installed at the South Jetty, Newport, Oregon, were analyzed. The components of each observation were treated as if they were an independent, normal, bivariate distribution and standard statistical procedures were applied. It was found that the wind gauge is obscured by the land to the southeast and that the adjacent land has the effect of channeling the wind so that it comes from the north, the east, and the south. The seasonal and diurnal wind shifts were observed and described. It was noted that the orientation of the diurnal shift changed with time; it rotated clockwise from March to July and counterclockwise from July to October. / Graduation date: 1971

Techniques for computing gravity anomalies by multipole expansions obtained from surface integrals and volume integrals are derived together with a vertical line element method. The results are compared with exact calculation for right rectangular prisms and right circular cylinders and the effects of block size and separation between the field point and source body are evaluated. For sources near field points, the multipole expansion of volume integrals consistantly yielded more accurate approximations of the gravity field than either vertical line element or surface integrals. For a given source, the surface integral method compared to vertical line elements gives a better approximation of the field. As distance increases, all three techniques yield accurate gravity values. Improved estimates of the gravity field can be obtained by subdividing the source body into small elements and summing the effect of the elements. The 2nd-order or quadrupole term of the expansions is dominant for near sources while the 0th-order or monopole term becomes increasingly important with increasing separation of the source and field point. / Graduation date: 1971

A method of calculating surface evapotranspiration by separately including the effects of vegetation and atmospheric evaporative demand under the condition of nonlimiting soil moisture is presented. A literature survey is conducted to determine the effects of plants on evapotranspiration. To represent the atmospheric evaporative demand, the original potential evaporation equation of Penman (1948) is utilized and then modified to include the effect of atmospheric stability using turbulent exchange coefficients formulated by Louis et al. (1982). The original and modified Penman expressions are compared for different asymptotic cases. Using boundary layer data from the Wangara experiment (Clarke et al., 1971), the diurnal variations of the original and modified Penman equations are compared. The daily total potential evaporation using linearized and integrated forms of the original and modified expressions are also compared. Finally, the nonlinear effects of averaging both the original and modified expressions are examined. It is found that including the diurnal variations of stability in the modified expression causes large hourly differences with the original expression under non-neutral conditions, while daily averages of the two compared fairly well. The diurnal variation of the surface moisture flux appears to be much larger than predicted by the original Penman expression. However, the original Penman expression remains a reasonable estimate of the 24-hour total potential evaporation. / Graduation date: 1983

The Risø data were analyzed for variations in the surface roughness lengths. The method of analysis was tested on the Wangara data and proved satisfactory at this homogeneous site. Annual mean surface roughness lengths were determined for three wind speed categories and three stability categories. The decrease in surface roughness length with increasing wind speed and decreasing stability was large but not generally statistically significant because of the large dispersion in the data. The annual mean roughness length varied over several orders of magnitude. These results and also the ten year mean profiles were compared with those of previous investigators. It was found that the standard deviation determined from mean annual profiles over a ten year period was greater than one order of magnitude. / Graduation date: 1975

Graduation date: 1979

Performance measurement is the buzzword in today’s business world. This mechanism has become an essential tool in online marketplace to identify victors and losers. Apparently, virtual stores are searching for decision-oriented performance measures to aid them in addition to identifying strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities make sound strategic and operational decisions as they compete with their peers. In that paradigm this study attempt to measure performance of virtual stores using decision-making associated variables sternly to evaluate the impact of the variables or indicators on strategic and operational decisions. To achieve this purpose, the study used an evaluation framework to identify drivers which have a significant and positive effect on strategic and operational decisions. The study surveyed 100 internet users in Goteborg of a randomly selected four virtual store (EBay Amazon.com, Yahoo and Buy.com). The results identified three major dimensions: website, product and services and promotion. These dimensions share many common aspects with decision making determinants derived within the context of online market industry. Conversely, these dimensions have unique characteristics inherent in the online marketing environment. The study revealed a significantly positive relationship between the variables on operational and strategic decisions. The conclusion is that the fact that performance measures are assessed to firms’ business activities both operational and strategic decisions initiatives begin with defining users’ needs and preferences, and their related performance variable. If the virtual store understands what dimensions users use to judge quality, they can take appropriate actions to monitor and enhance performance on those dimensions and remedy service failures. Keywords: Virtual store, Strategic and operational decisions, Decision-oriented performance variables, variable dimensions, Website, product and service and Promotion

This thesis shares our experience in designing web crawlers that scale to billions of pages and models their performance. We show that with the quadratically increasing complexity of verifying URL uniqueness, breadth-first search (BFS) crawl order, and fixed per-host rate-limiting, current crawling algorithms cannot effectively cope with the sheer volume of URLs generated in large crawls, highly-branching spam, legitimate multi-million-page blog sites, and infinite loops created by server-side scripts. We offer a set of techniques for dealing with these issues and test their performance in an implementation we call IRLbot. In our recent experiment that lasted 41 days, IRLbot running on a single server successfully crawled 6:3 billion valid HTML pages (7:6 billion connection requests) and sustained an average download rate of 319 mb/s (1,789 pages/s). Unlike our prior experiments with algorithms proposed in related work, this version of IRLbot did not experience any bottlenecks and successfully handled content from over 117 million hosts, parsed out 394 billion links, and discovered a subset of the web graph with 41 billion unique nodes.