Relationship between hypothesized behavior Essay Example for Free

Connection between theorized conduct Essay The point of the paper was to decide the connection between theorized conduct coming about because of a character test and real data conduct from a gathering based task. Customarily, data looking for conduct is subsumed under a solitary solid hypothetical system. The investigation looks to address the experimental order of such conduct. Around three intentional gatherings of ten library and data science understudies were seen during a task. The NEO-PI-R test was utilized to portray and characterize character attributes of members. The free factors are sexual orientation and test outcomes. The reliant variable is the alleged ‘differential data looking for behavior’ (between the populaces). The discoveries are as per the following: 1) some character qualities are identified with genuine data looking for conduct, 2) sexual orientation is definitely not a decent determinant of good conduct, and 3) character attributes are likewise identified with the general setting of gathering exercises. 2) Research Design. You need to find out about the social connection of preschoolers in the play area. Assume the quantity of preschoolers (accepting) is 30 or more, at that point we can direct a factual test. The autonomous variable is ‘time gone through playing with other preschoolers’-X-(accepting that we grow the playing time of the youngsters). The needy variable is ‘personal acceptability’ †Y (the degree wherein a youngster gets decidedly other kids). On the off chance that we see that an expansion in X is joined by an expansion in Y, at that point we can expect that the two are connected. To put it plainly, as the measure of time went through playing with different preschoolers is expanded, the level of individual adequacy increments. 3) A relationship estimation of 0. 89 implies that there exists a solid positive direct connection between the two factors. To put it plainly, the measure of time (in hours) spent in examining is emphatically identified with test scores. An understudy who invests more energy examining will liable to get high test scores. 4) The specialists oppressed ‘Albert’ to extraordinary mental conditions without his assent. The scientists were likewise not interested in the results of the analysis (which turned out awful for the kid). These two occurrences merit as moral blames in the investigation. 5) Neurotransmitters are synthetic concoctions which permit the transmission of signs starting with one neuron then onto the next across neurotransmitters. Synapses, it could be said, enact receptors of the sensory system. Hormones are likewise signal synthetic compounds however with various reason. They are synthetic substances that transport signal starting with one cell then onto the next, changing body digestion (which synapses can't do).

Choose from the book Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Look over the book - Assignment Example These new governments passed the prejudicial ‘Black Codes,’ which denied Blacks the option to affirm against whites, banned passage to juries and state civilian armies, denied them testimonial, ordered yearly work contracts, limited the occupations open to them and denied them property rights. At the point when Jackson vetoed the Civil Rights Bills, building up correspondence under the steady gaze of the law for all races, and the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill, the Republican Congress broke with him. Radical Republicans in Congress set out on their own changes, through sacred enactment, in a period called the Radical Reconstruction, reaching out from 1866-1877. The Fourteenth Amendment of 1868 ensured Blacks social equality and equity under the watchful eye of the law; the Fifteenth Amendment of 1870 ordered racially fair democratic rights; the Civil Rights Act of 1875 prohibited racial isolation. The Freedmen’s Bureau, whose forces were extended by Congress, help ed previous captives to affirm their privileges. A few previous slaves held authoritative office, and entered the Congress, the Senate and the legal executive. Equivalent common and political rights for African-Americans were guaranteed by such established changes. Previous slaves prevailing with regards to getting little family plots and an offer in income through sharecropping. Socially, the African-Americans could now appreciate open comforts, sanction their relationships and acquire trainings. Radical Reconstruction struck a blow against racial segregation, and established the framework for social incorporation of African Americans. With the appointment of 1876, and the Democratic predominance of Congress, the Reconstruction reached a conclusion. 5. Clarify the course of the Spanish-American War. (Page 663) The Spanish-American War was the branch of American expansionism, touched off by rising patriot assessment, and the precept of ‘Manifest Destiny’: it was the â⠂¬Ëœduty’ of the ‘superior’ Anglo-Saxon race to spread Christian and Democratic qualities to ‘backward’ individuals. The war started in the Cuban battle for autonomy from Spain that started in 1895. American open compassion toward the Cuban progressives was exacerbated by the ‘yellow press’, detailing outrages submitted by the Spanish on regular folks. American interests in Cuba, and the impression of the key significance of the island in Central America, drove President McKinley to dispatch the war vessel USS Maine to Havana, to pressurize Spain. The secretive blast of the Maine in February 1898, with the loss of almost 270 lives, was credited to Spain. At the point when Spain dismissed American requests for a truce and Cuban autonomy, McKinley proclaimed war on Spain in April 1898. â€Å"The mind blowing little war,† (Foner, 663), to cite Secretary of State John Hay, brought about just 400 American losses and finished in four mo nths. On May 1, the Spanish armada was crushed by the American naval force under Admiral George Dewey at Manila Bay in the Philippines. The charge at San Juan Hill, outside Santiago, was featured by the well known press, which made Theodore Roosevelt a national saint. American soldiers arrived in Cuba after another maritime triumph in July. American triumph was pronounced in August. In opposition to its pre-war proclamations, America set to secure an abroad domain. Under the accompanying harmony settlement, Cuba turned into an American Protectorate under the Platt Amendment of 1902, and

Essay Topics For All the Pretty Horses in the World

Essay Topics For All the Pretty Horses in the WorldFinding essay topics for all the pretty horses in the world doesn't have to be a headache. In fact, it's a quick and easy way to hone your writing skills so that you can easily generate engaging and inspiring essays on a variety of different topics.One good topic to work with is a gift horse. These are often the horses used as attractions at shows or other types of events. These aren't just any horses though, they're trained and groomed to stand out in their own special way.That makes this a perfect topic for an essay on horses. Since they're usually a bit older, the groom will have a better appreciation for their owners and their ability to look after them as well as they do for others. You'll find the groom to be exceptionally interested in all the great things about their horses and how these horses help improve the owner's life.And what about you, if you're a guest speaker? These are often the horses that perform at many of the s ame events as the one from the horses' point of view. Most of the time though, it's the groom who takes the reins in these cases. The guy with the horse knows how to manage them and he's often willing to put them to the test to see how well they manage him.Another good essay topic for this subject is working with horses. Of course, this could include riding lessons or showing at shows. It's not uncommon for the groom to be their eyes and ears when it comes to horses, and he often shares a strong bond with his charges that helps develop the relationship that he can with his charges in the future.Sometimes the subjects for essay topics for all the pretty horses in the world come from the actual horse itself. You might write about one of your own horses for all the experiences you've had with that horse. Or maybe you could share some stories from working with the animals you personally own.One thing to remember when working with essay topics for all the pretty horses in the world is th at they don't come in only one size. Many of the horses you see in circuses are actually very small and one of the best ways to get inside their minds is to write from the perspective of someone who isn't aware of how tiny they really are. No matter how small they might appear to be, their personalities are just as unique as the people who own them.The topics for essay topics for all the pretty horses in the world often begin with the owner. In these cases, it's important to remember that the horse is something special and is truly the crowning glory of the person who owns it. It's also a good idea to take a close look at all the owners' characteristics, the mannerisms, and the style of caring for the horse before writing about it.

Operations Management at McDonalds - 2472 Words

Operations Management at McDonalds: McDonalds Corporation is renowned across the globe as the leading and largest chain of fast-food restaurants. Since its inception in the 1940s by siblings Mac and Dick McDonald, the firm has continued to grow and develop to its current state. The corporation has adopted a number of operations that are linked to its overall strategy in all its restaurants across the globe. One of the major factors that have contributed to its success in the global fast foods industry is quality management. McDonalds employs computerized information systems and stringent corporate quality standards to maintain quality across all its restaurants. The overall goal of the firm is to make its customers happy, which helps the firm to promote and maintain its viability in the increasingly competitive market. The corporations entire business processes and operations management basically revolve around its overall goal of making customers happy. History and Background of McDonalds: As previously mentioned, McDonalds Corporation has a long history that stretches back to the 1940s when it was founded by the McDonald brothers. In 1948, Dick and Mac McDonald opened their burger stand in San Bernardino, California. McDonalds grew rapidly and swiftly under the guidance of Ray Kroc, a milkshake-mixer salesman amazed by the success of the restaurant (James, 2009). The rapid and swift growth of the firm in its initial years was evident in the fact that it hadShow MoreRelatedMcdonalds Production and Operations Management1038 Words   |  5 PagesMcdonald’s Use of Teams in Production and Operations Management Introduction Strategies are important for all businesses, regardless of the products or services that they offer. Through strategic management and operations, companies are able to integrate new and effective means of running their respective businesses. In turn, these strategies results in an increased profit of sales, stable market position and greater levels of customer loyalty. In the fast food industry, businesses such asRead MoreOperation Management and Productivity at McDonalds1004 Words   |  4 Pagesthe effective management of operations in any given firm cannot be overstated. In basic terms, operations management can be said to be that process in which inputs are transformed into outputs in an efficient way with an aim of satisfying consumers. With that in mind, operations management as a management function can be said to be the core of any given business. In this text, I concern myself with the nature of operations management and productivity with a special emphasis on McDonalds Cor porationRead MoreMcDonalds Production and Operations Management902 Words   |  4 PagesMcDonalds Production or Operations Management: Total Quality Management (TQM) is a combination of fourteen principles that were developed by Dr. W. Edwards Deming for production and operations management. One of these major principles is the need to work in teams through breaking down barriers between staff and department areas. The use of teams in production and operations management requires workers in different areas like maintenance, leasing, and administration must work in teams to deal withRead MoreMcdonalds Operations Management Essay1145 Words   |  5 Pagesand time in the operation management department of the business. This report will focus on the business, McDonald’s and what practices they have put in place to ensure that they are producing their products efficiently and sustainably. The business will also be compared and contrasted alongside the American fast-food restaurant chain famous for its fried chicken, providing recommendations on how McDonald’s could further improve their business in the ar ea of waste and time management.  Business BackgroundRead MoreAnalysis of McDonalds Operation Management606 Words   |  2 PagesMcDonalds Operations Management: McDonalds Corporation had developed to become the leading fast-food chain of restaurants since its inception to the extent that it serves more than 47 million customers across the globe on a daily basis. The corporation is the largest global food-service retailer since it has over 30,000 local restaurants that serve approximately 52 million people in over 100 countries every day. One of the critical factors attributed to the success of McDonalds global businessRead MoreScientific Management in Mcdonalds Operation1820 Words   |  8 Pagesabout scientific management in McDonald’s operation, I believe the largest fast food McDonald’s is the most successful model on scientific management. Scientific management is a branch of classical approach; Taylor said scientific management is standardisation which means people in organization should be uniformed by company rules or policy which are some written documents. Scientific management is a very important part in management a rea, since look at the history of management. People are livingRead MoreOperations Management - Planning Control in Mcdonalds Essay2386 Words   |  10 PagesOperations Management amp; Decision Making – Planning And Control Assignment The organisation I have chosen to examine from an operations management and decision making standpoint is McDonald’s, a worldwide chain of fast food restaurants, which are run either by a franchise, an affiliate or by the corporation itself. There are over 31,000 branches of McDonald’s worldwide1. It is estimated these restaurants serve a collective 47 million customers daily2. The restaurants mainly sell customers traditionalRead MoreOperations Management: McDonalds Supply Chain737 Words   |  3 Pagesto ensure quality and increased efficiency will help to ensure costs are controlled. In some cases the company may make loans or even take equity in upstream suppliers. A good example of supply chain collaboration was seen when the firm started operations in India. There were no local suppliers growing iceberg lettuces, the company worked with some supplier to create a year round supply, aiding with seeds, equipment and relevant agricultural knowledge. The tier 2 suppliers originate the inputsRead MoreEssay about Operations Management: McDonalds Competitive Advantage3016 Words   |  13 PagesAbout McDonald’s 4 Process of McDonalds 4 Operations management 5 Operations managers 5 Operation strategy of McDonald’s 5 Pricing strategies of McDonalds 6 Innovation at McDonalds to improve operations and services 7 Inventory management 8 The Just-in-Time (JIT) Approach 9 Just- in-Time (JIT) Approach in McDonald’s 9 Advantages and benefits of JIT approach 10 Capacity management 11 Capacity strategies 11 McDonalds capacity strategy 11 Quality management 12 Quality management strategiesRead MoreOperations Management: Improving McDonalds Burger Assembly Process786 Words   |  3 Pagesand shopping task through to the management of a sports team and the stages by which academic work is managed. It is the ability to access processes with a critical and logical eye, and understand the role of processes within the larger context that creates a transferable skill put of the improvement analysis process. References Mintzberg Henry, Ahlstrand Bruce, Lampel Joseph B. (2008), Strategy Safari: The Complete Guide Through the Wilds of Strategic Management, Financial Times/ Prentice Hall

We Have A Good Day - 1414 Words

They mean everything, but they mean nothing. When I say, â€Å"I hate you† they hold so much power, but when I say, â€Å"I’m sorry† they are powerless. They can be your best friend, or your worst enemy, your chance at happiness, or the door to Hell. There are no right words when you need them, but plenty when you should just shut up. They roll off your tongue like a roller coaster that just wont stop. Words are everything, words are everywhere. They are the â€Å"I love you† before bed. They are the â€Å"screw you† after a fight. They are the â€Å" drive slow† and the â€Å"wear your seatbelt†. They are the â€Å"leave me alone† and the â€Å"Is this ever going to stop?† They are the â€Å"give me a kiss† and â€Å"have a good day†. They are the voicemail when he won’t answer. They are the â€Å"hello† when he finally does. I hate words, but I need them. I love words, but I wish I didn’t. 10.23 War: War is everywhere, war is everything. Ready to take on whatever this world might bring. Our soldiers stand tall with their heads held high, They are willing and able to answer every call, every cry Leaving their mother, father, sister and brother, Sacrificing their freedom to proudly serve beside one another. Shipped to a strange place fighting a violent people. Seeing their angry faces. Wishing we could all be equal. Missing christenings and birthdays, Thinking of being home, dreading the day. Weddings and baby showers, Working constant and underpaid hours. Hoping to stay safe, wanting to get out of this place.Show MoreRelatedGood Friday and Lent1524 Words   |  7 PagesA:Historically, Lent is the forty day period before Easter, excluding Sundays, it began on Ash Wednesday and ended on Holy Saturday (the day before Easter Sunday). In recent years, this has been modified so that it now ends with evening Mass on Holy Thursday, to prepare the way for Triduum. Q: Why are Sundays excluded from the reckoning of the forty days? A: Because Sunday is the day on which Christ arose, making it an inappropriate day to fast and mourn our sins. On Sunday we must celebrate Christs resurrectionRead MoreDebate on Columbus Day Essay918 Words   |  4 Pageschange Columbus Day to no longer be a holiday would be turning a blind eye to a difficult history, yet still turning that eye away from a history with a side to be celebrated. I instead ask of you to celebrate Columbus Day, learn the full history, including the wrong doings of Columbus and his crew, and celebrate the good change brought about by this event that ultimately led to the lifestyle you lead today. If the wrongs of every event in history were to be scrutinized would we have a history leftRead MoreShould Druthers Forming Limited Be Given the Loan?1649 Words   |  7 Pagesbecome standard. ori Norm Sheppard have requested on July 30, 2007 an amount of $350,000 loan from Mr. Brad Mac Dougall, account manager at the Canadian Commercial Bank (CCB). To know whe ther or not this amount needs to be passed depends on several factors thus for this purpose there are several questions that are needed to be answered before this decision can be made, thus in this report we will find out the answers to Mr. Brad’s questions. To make any decision we first need to assess the past financialRead MoreVietnamese Traditional Holiday Tet825 Words   |  4 Pagesare happy and it looks colorful because people try to clean up and decorate everything such as street, house, and everything they have. However, the new year ‘s day of each country are difference. As we know that America and Europe have one New Year day is the first day of year, but Tet is the abbreviation of Tet Nguyen Dan which means the first morning of the first day of the new period. Tet marks the beginning of a new year on the lunar calendar, and the beginning of spring. So Viet Nam has sameRead MoreThe Good Old Days By The Band Twenty One Pilots1467 Words   |  6 PagesThe good old good old days, a time of peace and happiness and kind of a shady subject. First of all, when were these â€Å"good old days†? Is there a certain town somewhere in a distant corner of the world with a decrepit historical marker that plainly reads â€Å"Ho me of the Good Old Days†? The Merriam Webster dictionary online (2011) defines the phrase â€Å"the good old days† as â€Å"a period of time in the past that a person thinks were pleasant and better than the present time†. This mood of wishing to returnRead MorePersonal Life and Good Neighbor758 Words   |  4 PagesNeighbors are the people who live near us, and their behavior influences our daily life. Good neighbors can make us feel comfortable and give us many help, and everyone will benefits from a good relationship among neighbor. In my point of view, these are three conspicuous aspects of the qualities of good neighbor. One of the most important characteristics of good neighbors is that they have a good living habit and are friendly to others. A person with bad habit will affect your daily life. ForRead MoreBreakfast The Most Important Meal You Can Have During The Day1363 Words   |  6 Pagesâ€Å"Breakfast the most important meal you can have during the day† By Gretel Herrera Persuasive Speech Outline General Purpose: To persuade Specific Purpose: To persuade the audience that eating breakfast is really important to have good health and a healthy body and mind. Thesis: If we start our day with a good meal called: â€Å"breakfast†, this is going to help you to maintain a healthy body and a productive mind throughout the rest of your day. I. The Attention Step A. Attention: A. I want toRead MoreAre We Born Good or Evil Essay examples1395 Words   |  6 Pagesexistence has created a number of questions we cannot seem to forget nor answer. Where did we come from? How was the universe created? What is our purpose? Are we innately good or bad? Assumptions, theories, evidence, faith, and science have all been used to try to answer these questions accurately. Specifically the question whether we are born good or bad will be addressed. Locke says that we are born good with a blank slate. Whatever we learn and how we learn it from society is what fills theRead MoreArgumentative Essay Buy Nothing Day702 Words   |  3 PagesBuy Nothing Day The first ever Buy Nothing Day was held in Canada on 1992. Buy Nothing Day was organized as a day where no goods would be purchased, and as a result of this boycott of goods it would raise awareness of the ethical and environmental implications of overconsumption. This is a great and innovative idea that gives publicity to a neglected issue, which is the implications of overconsumption. Nowadays people do not realize how much damage overconsumption actually does to our world. TheyRead MoreLooking for a Job and Stories from Korcula Island 703 Words   |  3 Pagesthat moment it seems that I will have a job, but I was not feel some kind optimistic about them. Day by day I feel relaxed with the fact that I have some free time to enjoy before I start with the job and that was a pretty good for me. As the time was passing, of course no one of them still didnt call me as I expect, so it was obvious that I will need some alternative to earn some money, somehow. I start to search again but now it was to late, because everybody now have people to work for them. In one

What Are The Types Of Business Organizations ( Sole...

The Cardigans want to expand their business ventures. Cora and Caley have discussed the idea of operating a home dà ©cor store with the Cardigan family logo on the goods. The idea behind this type of business is to advertise goods that will make consumers feel that their homes represent a Cardigan lifestyle. The Cardigans would like decide what to name their new business, as it is so different from their usual business variations of clothing and sweaters. Some of the names they have come up with include Homigans Fine Home Furnishings and Cardihome Furnishings. Legal Questions 1. What are the pros and cons of three main types of business organizations (sole proprietorship, partnerships, and corporations) and which would be the best type to pursue? 2. Are the names that the Cardigans have suggested, wise choices for their proposed business? What issues may be present if they use either of these names? 3. According to California laws and the type of business you have recommended for the Cardigans, what type/s of filing requirements will Cora and Caley need to fulfill? Answers to Legal Questions What are the pros and cons of three main types of business organizations (sole proprietorship, partnerships, and corporations) and which would be the best type to pursue? Some sole proprietorship pros would be; owner is in complete control and receives all the profits, flexibility, ease of creation and maintenance. Some cons would be; the owner is personally liable for all torts andShow MoreRelatedFin 571 Business Structures Essay650 Words   |  3 PagesBusiness Structures Krista Harvell FINANCE 571 July 01, 2013 Mario Ducret Business Structures There are four main forms of business structures. The structures of business differentiate based on liability, tax implications, and what type of business is being evaluated when determining what structure to use. This paper will cover the advantages and disadvantages within the four types of business structures; Limited Liability Corporations, Corporations, Partnerships, and Sole ProprietorshipsRead MoreComparing Types Of Business Ownership1331 Words   |  6 PagesComparing Types of Businesses Name: Sabrina Bhinder Date: September 10th, 2014 In the space below, explain each of the following terms and provide an example. Forms of business ownership (5K marks) 1. Sole proprietorship †¢ A business that is just owned by only one person, who receives all the profit for everything. Example of a sole proprietorship can be a hairdresser that buys a chair for their business and can get customers directly for them. 2. Partnership †¢ When aRead MoreAnalyze Political, Social, Ethical, and Legal Differences Facing Both Organizations and Determine the1344 Words   |  6 PagesMy Business Type Decision for a Successful Company Ernst Dorval American Intercontinental University Abstract This paper will evaluate the advantages or disadvantages of each business type with the business issues facing. It will discuss the management decision to make concerning which legal form of business that will facilitate my firm to succeed. Key words: Management decision, advantages, disadvantages, legal form of business. My business Type Decision for a Successful Company MyRead MoreLegal Forms of Business1415 Words   |  6 PagesLegal forms of Business The process of starting a business can be a challenging one. From choosing a business name, identifying the product to sell and where all require thoughtful decisions. All these decisions also need legal and practical considerations. To understand more about the different forms of business, it is important to consider the right structure for the business (Legal Forms, 2006). Sole Proprietorship A sole proprietorship simply means a business with one owner. With many formsRead MorePrivate Business Form Comparison Essay1345 Words   |  6 PagesPrivate Business Form Comparison Introduction In the business world, many distinctions separate one firm from the next. Competition, products, services provided is not the only factors that differentiate businesses. Structure and type are another. This paper will discuss and compare the three major forms of businesses (sole proprietorship, Partnership, and C-Corporations) and provide a brief summary of these three forms. Sole Proprietorship. This form of private business ownership carries theRead MoreCreating a Business Idea and Types of Business Organizations1549 Words   |  7 PagesSmall-Business Idea Recently the United States government has released funds for creating small businesses. An opportunity to acquire government funding for a business venture is one to take advantage of and to put dreams into reality. The intent of this paper is to outline the three main forms of business organizations including the tax and legal implications as well as the accounting requirements for each structure. In addition, this paper proposes creating a small business of a women’s only gymRead MoreLimited Liability Companies1277 Words   |  5 PagesDevon’s business, me being their accountant, a type of business I would suggest them will be a Liability Limited corporation. Based on their needs LLC would be a perfect form of business for them. As their company was sole proprietorship ran by their dad, LLC offers some advantages of a corporation, as well as some advantages of a sole proprietorship. â€Å"A limited liability company, commonly called an LLC, is a business structure t hat combines the pass-through taxation of a partnership or sole proprietorshipRead MoreEssay Entrepreneurship1567 Words   |  7 Pagesthe term Entrepreneurship and the challenges of starting a small business Entrepreneurship is the dream of a lifetime for most individuals. The idea of being in control on ones financial future by establishing, owning, and operating their own business has driven most individuals in the direction of Sole Proprietorships. Most plunge in looking at the advantage and over looking the disadvantage and challenges of Sole Proprietorships. This first challenge that one might face on the road to EntrepreneurshipRead MoreForms Of Businesses By Edgar Llamas1474 Words   |  6 PagesEdgar Llamas Business 101-30D September, 21 2014 â€Æ' Opening a business might seem like a difficult task to achieve. With many different forms, how is one to decide which is the best? People cannot start any type of businesses without know the five basic forms of businesses in the world. Whether it is to be your own boss, or to partner up with another person. It is an essential to know all the facts about each type before opening up a business. It is critical knowing what each form of business is, theRead MoreThe Importance Of Business Structure1145 Words   |  5 PagesBusiness Structures Every business starts with an idea and evolves into something greater. During that evolution, the dreamers turned entrepreneurs are faced with many early choices that decide the fate of their business for years to come. Choosing the right business structure for the company is one of those important decisions. This paper aims to determine the right business entity for a restaurant, Harlequin and Brine. Harlequin and Brine will be a casual restaurant with fine-dining quality

Expansion Funds Sources And Hiring Processes In Lulu & Shopmore

Question: Discuss about theFunctional Areas Marketing Activities Expansion Funds Sources And Hiring Processes In Lulu Shopmore. Answer: Introduction This report`s goal is to look into the functional areas, marketing tasks, sources of expansion funds and recruitment procedures in a retail organization. The objectives include highlighting and demystifying four activities within four organizational, functional areas, elaborating two marketing activities employed in promotions, highlighting two internal and external finance sources for expansion and finally two internal and external hiring procedures within Lulu Group International. It opened its first supermarket during the early 90s in Abu Dhabi while its first hypermarket was opened in the year 2000 in Dubai. Currently, Lulu hypermarkets, department stores and supermarkets control 32% of the retail industry share with 134 stores spreading across the GCC. The main sources of data in this report are credible book materials and websites, a majority of which are most recent. The structure of the report follows the following format; a satisfactory discussion of the key points, conclusi ons based on the findings and a list of appropriate references. Information gathering Discussion Four activities within four functional areas A functional area depicts a logical division of an entity (Robert, 2013). He adds that every functional area is normally managed by a senior executive officer who is accountable for a given functionality which takes place within the entity. This means that such organizational divisions are headed by executives who oversee the activities within them and are responsible for them on a daily basis. Some of the common key functional areas include administration, research and development, finance, marketing, IT and human resource among others (Robert, 2013). According to (Rosemary, 2014), for a majority of centrally administrated retail organizations, product management is a chief functional area coupled with human resource, finance and systems management. When the entire functional areas of an entity work together, the business becomes more efficacious and effective (Ronald Perry, 2002). This means that the integration of all the functional areas is vital and beneficial to the entity. For instance, for Lulu Group International, incorporates its functional areas to facilitate its successful expansion.Today majority of firms incorporate them via databases (Ronald Perry, 2002). Such databases link the activities and monitor them concurrently. Human resources activities They include recruiting, compensation, training and development and performance appraisal (William, et al., 2009). Hiring entails luring job applicants while compensation involves rewarding well-performing employees via monetary rewards. Training and development involve teaching them modern skills and competences. In performance appraisal, there is evaluating workers present and potential delivery. The over 30,000 workers in Shopmore Group and the Lulu Group International experience the above HR activities. Marketing activities The marketing department has activities like discovering customer needs and demands, engineering products and services to meet needs, launching and promoting new goods and services among others (Robert, 2005). All these are based on market surveys. The quality products and services offered by Shopmore result from its efficient marketing activities. As such, it has an immense competitive merit in the market. This is partly why Shopmore Group controls about 20% of the retail sector share while Lulu Group currently enjoys 32% of the retail industry share. Additionally, that is why Shopmore`s yearly revenue is near $ 6.3 billion. Administrative activities Administrative tasks include organizing resources to accomplish goals and objectives, designing effective working procedures and communicating messages among others (Ferreira, et al., 2010). This implies that it is meant to oversee the overall organizational activities. It forms part of the crucial activities in any organization. This is because it is the steering force in the entity. For instance, in Shopmore Group, MA Ahmed Ali plays a key role in fostering its expansive growth as part of the administration. Finance activities Finance Department prepares annual fiscal accounts for the organization (Robert, 2005). This means that producing yearly financial reports for the entity is an essential task of any organizational finance section. It is responsible for projecting profits and losses. It also handles payment of salaries, invoices, and purchases among others. The about $ 6.3 billion annual revenue generated by Shopmore is prepared in the form of a statement by its finance department. Also, Lulu`s annual revenue reports are generated by the finance department. It forms an indispensable part of any entity globally. Two marketing activities employed in the entity`s promotions Marketing activities are normally so varied (Malcom Dennis, 2002). This implies that there exist different tasks in marketing within an organization. Such activities vary from one entity to another although a majority of them are universal to all firms. For instance, advertising is common to all businesses. Physical distribution of goods is one of the marketing activities in any business (John, 2014). This involves the transportation of products from the manufacturers to the retail entities for the consumer to purchase them. Other large array of marketing activities includes product modification, product procedure changes, modifications in packaging and advertising among others (Tapan, 2009). Additionally, according to (Teik, 2015), other marketing activities include special offers, sales, the launch of new products, customer relationship management, and others. This means that businesses have a wide pool of choice from which they can select the most suitable marketing activities wh ich best serve their marketing needs and in an affordable manner. Overall budget is needed to be allocated to the diverse marketing activities (Geoff Frank, 2006) However, for Lulu Group International and Shopmore Group, the focus will be on two most universal marketing activities and suitable for such large retail organizations namely advertising and special offer. The two normally yield remarkable returns when executed prudently and promptly. As such, most of the times they go hand in hand to produce the desired results, that is, increased sales for higher profits. Advertising Advertising is commonly done via the media and particularly in the electronic media such as the television, radio and the internet. The adverts are usually captive, alluring, appealing and persuasive to the targeted audience of the company who are heterogeneous and are located in diverse parts of the globe. As such, the adverts must appeal to the logic part of the consumer as well as the emotional part since the two works concurrently. The failure to appeal to either of the two leads to increased chances of futile advertising and that is not the outcome any organization would wish for. Every entity wants a fruitful advertisement. Lulu Group and Shopmore Group employ advertising as a marketing activity in their promotions. For example, Lulu`s popularity and the operation of 134 stores across the GCC and Shopmore`s placement among the globes 50 rapidly growing retailers is partly attributed to its advertising worldwide. Through this, it can reach many consumers. This is why these group s are popular in the GCC, and as such, they enjoy an immense customer base. Special offers Special offers refer to the products and services whose prices have been reduced from the normal prices. This means that they are being charged lower prices than normally. It is executed during specific times and seasons. Such special offers run for a short period after which the normal prices resume. Lulu and Shopmore usually launch special offers for their products and services during times of festive seasons, when they establish a new product or rebranded products among others. This is chiefly meant to promote their products and services and boost their revenue. That is why they have captivated the hearts of many customers via their high-quality products and services. Sources of expansion funds It is any firm`s desire to expand its operations. Reduced prices could be but a provisional short term plan meant to create expansion capital (Charles Patrick, 2011). This means that when the prices of commodities and services are lowered to increase sales and reduce storage costs, extra funds are generated. Such money can be channeled into the expansion activities of the organization. It is essential. Internal sources of expansion funds Internal sources of finance for companies include retained profits, reduced inventories, stricter credit control and delay paying trade payables (Students, 2013). The increasing costs of securing a loan capital is one of the reasons which makes internal financing much paramount for businesses (Burkhard Stefan, 2007). As such, a majority of businesses use the above sources to a greater extend. For Lulu, the emphasis will be on retained profits and lowered inventories. Entities may increase funds by retaining profits rather than disbursing them as dividends, and a majority of large organizations retain 50% of profits to finance expansion (Students, 2013). This implies that keeping profits is the most suitable and readily available finance source for expansion. Since Shopmore is a large entity, with yearly revenue of about $6.3 billion, it can plow in part of this revenue to expansion prospects. The reduced stock is another source. Acquisition and storage expenses use revenue which cou ld otherwise be employed to expand the organization (Students, 2013). This means that reducing the amount of stock purchased and stored translates into saved finances which can be in turn invested in the expansion of the firm. For instance, Lulu Group only purchases and stocks that which is needed by the customers. However, businesses need to be diligent when lowering stock to ensure they maintain the capacity to meet future demand (Students, 2013). External sources of expansion funds The external finance sources include shares, bank overdraft, term loans, finance and operating lease among others (Students, 2013). The above are some of the most commonly embraced sources of finances by a great number of firms. For Lulu Group, the focus will be on shares and bank overdraft. Companies normally create capital through the selling of shares, especially to the public. Since Lulu is a large retail organization, its main source of expansion capital is the sale of shares and especially the ordinary shares. That is why it can afford to open up 134 stores across the GCC. Bank overdraft is also a suitable source of expansion financing. Entities may get funds by keeping a negative balance in its bank account, and it is advantageous since it is flexible and competitive interest rates (Students, 2013). Lulu can access bank overdraft services based on its expansive nature, and as such, the organization finds it easy to expand with great ease. However, dependence on overdraft may have a negative impact because it is repayable on demand (Students, 2013). This means that it is indispensable for organizations to exercise prudence when operating on bank overdraft to avert such risks. Recruitment processes for the entity Recruitment process refers to the collection of activities involving planning and monitoring to find and attract fitting applicants for vacancies in the entity (Tapomoy, 2006). On the other hand, (Lawrence Carl, 2007) argues that recruitment describes the process of luring qualified individuals to create an applicant pool. Essentially, the two arguments point out that the hiring process is all about filling empty job posts. The vacant job positions could arise due to retirement, sacking, voluntary quitting and dismissals among other reasons. Such posts need to be filled by the most qualified persons available. They should possess the suitable skills, education levels, work experience, appropriate ethics, personal values, and competences. Internal hiring processes Internal recruitment depicts the filling of positions from within the organization (Jonathan Diana, 2008). This means that the present workers in the entity are the ones encouraged to apply for any emerging job vacancies. Promotions and transfers are internal sources of recruitment (Lewis, 2009). This means that existing workers can be selected to occupy vacant positions through promotions and transfers within the firm. Shopmore does the above-mentioned processes. Part of the organization`s over 30,000 workers have undergone that. This is because it is perceived to increase the employee morale, it is relatively cheap, workers need less training and orientation since they are conversant with the entity`s policies among others (Lewis, 2009). In cases where a junior worker is promoted to a higher rank which was previously vacant, such a worker feels appreciated and motivated to work harder and smarter. Again, Lulu and Shpmore will not incur extra expenses in training and orient the new occupiers of such positions since they are quite familiar with the way things work within the entity as well as the organizational policies. This further means that there will be a smooth transition of duties and responsibilities from the old position to the newly occupied one. External hiring processes External recruitment implies the filling of job vacancies using persons from outside the business (Jonathan Diana, 2008). This means getting new employees from without the firm and especially for new entry jobs. They add that external source processes include advertising and contracting an external recruitment agency. As such, the absorbed workers are purely new to the entity. Lulu partly does advertise some of its job openings via its website, other job search websites, the television and many others. Such job adverts are accessible to a wide array of job seekers who believe that they possess the required skills, experience and competences to take up such job positions. Additionally, the adverts usually reach the target audiences, which in this case are potential applicants on a timely manner and can apply within the stipulated deadlines. Consequently, external potential employees apply for such vacancies. On the other hand, Lulu can hire the services of an external hiring agency t o select suitable employees on their behalf. This is very useful especially when the business or organization wants to save on resourceful time. Conclusion The conclusion touches on a number of issues namely: functional areas of an organization need to work harmoniously, there are diverse human resource, marketing, administration, and finance activities, Shopmore heavily uses advertising and special offers as part of its marketing activities, there exist various sources of both internal and external expansion financing, and recruitment process can be delegated to an external recruitment agency or be conducted internally by the firm itself. References Burkhard, S. Stefan, B., 2007. `Making Growth Work: How Companies Can Expand and Become More Efficient`. S.l.: Springer Science Business Media. Charles, W. J. Patrick, M., 2011. Theoretical Developments in Marketing. S.l.: Marketing Classics Press. Ferreira, E., Erasmus, A. Groenewald, D., 2010. Administrative Management. S.l.: Juta and Company Ltd. Geoff, L. Frank, W., 2006. Marketing Fundamentals. S.l.: Routledge. John, A., 2014. The Marketing Environment ( RLE Marketing ). S.l.: Routledge. Jonathan, S. Diana, C., 2008. Essential Business Studies A Level: As Student Book for AQA. S.l.: Folens Limited. Lawrence, G. Carl, M., 2007. The Future of Business: The Essentials. 3 ed. s.l.: Cengage Learning. Lewis, B., 2009. Organization and Management Theories: an African Focus: Integrating Structure, People, Processes and the Environment for Human Happiness. S.l.: Cuvillier Verlag. Malcolm, S. Dennis, A., 2002. Retail Marketing. S.l.: Cengage Learning EMEA. Robert, C., 2013. Managing Computer Systems in the 21st Century. s.l.:Lulu.com. Robert, D., 2005. `GCE As Level Applied Business Double Award for OCR`. S.l.: Heinemann. Ronald, G. Perry, D., 2002. `Optimal Database Marketing: Strategy, Development, and Data Mining`. S.l.: Sage. Rosemary, V., 2014. Retail Product Management: Buying and Merchandising. S.l.: Routledge. Students, 2013. `Financing a Business: Internal and External Financing options/ Henley` [Online] Available at: https:// henleybusinessreview.wordpress.com/.../financing-a-buisness-internal-and-external... Tapan, K., 2009. Marketing Management: Text and Cases Indian Context. S.l.: Excel Books India. Tapomoy, D., 2006. Strategic Approach to Human Resource Management. S.l.: Atlantic Publishers Dist. Teik, P. O., 2015. The SMART Marketing Workbook. s.l.:Lulu.com. William, P., Robert, H. Jack, K., 2009. Business. 10 ed. s.l.: Cengage Learning.

The implementation of GSI bar codes in health care sectors

GSI barcodes are the printed series of lines running collimate to each other with changing widths. GSI barcodes inscribe information into computer systems to give an identity to a given product on which the code comes out. Different widths of the bars give a representation of binary information.Advertising We will write a custom research paper sample on The implementation of GSI bar codes in health care sectors specifically for you for only $16.05 $11/page Learn More Optical scanners read the binary information. The use of GSI barcodes in health care centers is of great importance though some shortcomings arise limiting their use (Corrigan 2004, p.43). The use of GSI systems in the healthcare centers has several advantages. The GSI systems help doctors to share data among themselves and hospitals in the healthcare system. This aspect helps in improving the quality and efficiency of clinical care. In addition, complete access of patient’s records r educes medical errors during the time of treatment. Furthermore, measurements of high quality are due to the streamlined data collection (Corrigan 2004, p.43). Moreover, GSI system acts as a common language and this aspect eases communication problems among the professionals. With effective communication, the safety of patients is improved coupled with product/supply logistics improvement. In addition, proper communication improves the material management coordination (Greater 2005, p.56). Furthermore, workers and patients get necessary and timely protection in the healthcare system. The protection is due to the unequaled designation and the effectual data carriers given that the systems are able to determine responsibilities and the information flow between the workers and the patients (Corrigan 2004, p.45). In addition, tracking and tracing of products with external supplies become easier due to the automatic capture of the information in the barcodes. Supplier’s recall pro cedures are improved. With the above connection, the administrator should have a quick response towards the needs of the customer. In this way, both parties get a competitive advantage (Kohn Corrigan 2000, p.34).Advertising Looking for research paper on other technology? Let's see if we can help you! Get your first paper with 15% OFF Learn More GSI systems manage risks. Proper identification and product traceability aid in managing any risk that might arise. The application of the GSI system in hospitals takes care of the patient’s safety efficiently. Use of this system in both product and people location and identification assists in avoiding recognition blunders and this facet results to increased security and time saving. Eradication of the strenuous processes that involve a lot of paper work saves time. With this connection, the medical staff pays much attention for the benefit of the patient (Corrigan 2004, p.47). GSI systems also play a very vital role in procurement by enabling different hospitals to coordinate their supplies. It helps in identifying each delivery points that are within the healthcare facilities. The delivery points include wards, clinics, and cost centers. During the time of placing orders, the supplier gets instructions of the locations and products to be supplied thus enhancing direct delivery. In this manner, the efficiency of the procurement process is improved through the elimination of the costly and time-consuming practice of delivery to the warehouses (â€Å"The Global Language of Business† 2011). Finally, GSI data structure enhances product authentication; for instance, packing of products in their respective packets enhances authentication. As far as the use of GSI barcodes is concerned, there are no real limitations observed. The concerned personnel should observe the security and verity of data fed into the system. Security and accuracy of data help in avoiding dangers that might arise during di agnosing a patient (Arcarese 2005, p.47). In conclusion, the GSI barcode system, when applied to the healthcare system, is of great importance. The GSI barcode systems help in saving time, cost, and resources. In addition, proper identification of risks aids in managing them adequately. However, a lot of care should be taken into consideration when inputting data for accurate results. References Arcarese, J., 2005.Report on meeting to discuss unique device identification. Journal of  Medical Device regulation, 2(3), pp.47.Advertising We will write a custom research paper sample on The implementation of GSI bar codes in health care sectors specifically for you for only $16.05 $11/page Learn More Greater, B., 2005. Guidelines for application of EAN UCC markings to animal health Products. International federation for animal health, 67(4), pp.56. Corrigan, D., 2004. Bar code label requirements for human drug products and biological Products. Federal regis ter, 69(38), pp.43-47. Kohn, J., Corrigan, D., 2000. Medical device regulations: global overview and guiding  Principles, 78(4), pp.34-36. â€Å"The Global Language of Business†, 2011. Adoption and implementation of GS1  BarCodes and GS1 EPCglobal Web. Available at https://www.gs1.org/ . This research paper on The implementation of GSI bar codes in health care sectors was written and submitted by user Leighton Shaw to help you with your own studies. You are free to use it for research and reference purposes in order to write your own paper; however, you must cite it accordingly. You can donate your paper here.

ObamaCare essays

ObamaCare essays The arguments for/against ObamaCare health care are extensive. This giant law has so many parts that the average American does not even know what is really in this bill. The main supporters argue the bill is constitutional. They believe it is constitutional on three different "powers" of congress under commerce/interstate activity, the necessary and proper clause and the taxing and general welfare clause. The health care industry is a two trillion dollar per year industry. People who support the bill for being constitutional believe that this bill is part of commerce. How could two trillion dollars not be commerce? It is an interstate activity that makes a lot of money. There is also another part of government that could also make this bill constitutional and that is under necessary and proper clause. Necessary and proper clause states that Congress can make laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the forgoing powers. So supporters believe this bill for national health care is necessary and proper. It's nothing outlandish they believe. The third argument for the ObamaCare being constitution is under congresses Taxing and General Welfare Clause. Supports find this a no brainer. Congress has the right to protect the general welfare of the people. So ObamaCare is helping the general welfare of the people. After all is that not what government is put in plac e to do? The bigger question is will that make government to strong and powerful? Most people who believe ObamaCare is unconstitutional would say yes. From the disagreeing side most would say if ObamaCare is not struck down it will give the government more power and the main question raised is, "What will congress also force us to do?" If they can force us to make decisions on our own health under commerce what else can they make us do and justify it under "commerce." People believe that congress has no constitutional right to force people to enter a ...

IMC and Customer Satisfaction Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

IMC and Customer Satisfaction - Assignment Example Thirdly the advertising strategy must align to the marketing goals by ensuring that the advertising spends results in the expected revenue and marketing goals and thus ensuring that the resources spent on advertising are not wasted or spent in markets where little revenue is expected. There are different ways to measure the effectiveness of advertising but these vary from type of advertising that is being looked at and also in their accuracy. There isn’t a really scientific way of accurately measuring advertising per se but there are many ways of looking at the impacts of advertising and from that being able to get a measure of the effectiveness of a particular advertising strategy or campaign. The most important aspects of advertising that are measured include recall, recognition and revenue. Recall essentially measures how well a particular target of an advertising campaign or strategy can recall the messages that were advertised about a particular brand of good or service. Recognition is more to do with how well the targeted consumers are able to relate a particular advertising spot in whatever media it may be with either the product that is being advertised or the good and service that that advertisement is targeting (Olson, n.d). These two measures can both be done through conducting surveys of other scientific procedures such as focus group discussions. The third measurement of how effective an advertising campaign has been is the nature and types of income revenue that have resulted from that particular campaign. The change – increase or decrease – in the sales revenues prior to and after the advertising campaign will be a good indicator of the effectiveness of a particular advertising strategy or campaign. Promotion is essentially a two-way communication that deals directly with the consumer to enhance the marketing strategy and appeal to the consumers. There are nowadays a lot of promotional strategies which can be employed in addi tion to advertising to draw customers to a particular product or service. In addition to the promotional strategies there are also various ways in which these promotion strategies can be implemented, with the latest and the one that is now catching on being promotion through social media and other online contact. Some of the promotional strategies that can be employed include the use of contests with winners receiving various prizes. Such contests, especially those that encourage the purchase of a product or the use of a particular service are also quite effective in ensuring repeat customers and can encourage previously skeptical potential customers to try out a service or a good and if followed up with a clear and targeted advertising, can result in increasing the market pull of a product. Another promotional strategy that can be used is the offer of discounts and special prices to targeted members of the market in order to encourage them to either shift from a competing product o r make

Orientalism in America and Terrorism Movie Review

Orientalism in America and Terrorism - Movie Review Example The media and other organizations do not, therefore, carry out any investigations, but rather report on the government views of these nations. This, in turn, shapes the views of the people towards the Arab nations as rogue nations who permeate violence in their everyday lives through their hatred of the western nations. On orientalism and empire, Edward Said argues that most of the European states were just aiming to exert influence and political mileage in the Islamic states of the Middle East. He bases this argument on the fact that throughout the period of history and colonization every empire told itself that it was not like the other empires (Orientalism). That its territorial occupation was based on noble ideas of education, enlightenment, and liberation, rather than political control and plunder. However, as time passes the true intention of the occupiers become evident. In this respect, Orientalism is a tool for colonialism and political dominance. On American orientalism, Edward Said gives the distinction between the American Orientalism and other European Orientalism. Unlike the French or the British, America did not have direct colonial experience in the Orient. American Orientalism was thus more indirect and abstract. As a result of this abstraction, American orientalism is very much politicized by the presence of Israel as their main ally. The view of Israel that all Arab states are its enemies is thus imported into the American orientalism, which plays a significant role in portraying all Arab states as enemies (Orientalism). Whereas the terrorism exists in the middle east as a result of the violence and the political problems there, much of the images portrayed by the media only serve as to demonize the Arab nations and do not tell the whole story behind the problems in the Middle East.

Describe an Experience That Influenced Your Career Choice. Essay Example for Free

Describe an Experience That Influenced Your Career Choice. Essay Having grown up in a country where the prevalence of the shadow economy is on par with the continual political problems due to the mismanagement by autocrats. Public administration has surrounded me for as long as I can remember. On graduating ,i went to possess insight into many issues such as the way people and businesses react to the development and management of government programs by public administrators. I had some practical experience working at a hospital in Nigeria with sometime spent in the accounting department, this enabled me gain a practical experience of how the laws/duties/decisions made by public administrators affects people/individuals in real life situations such as explaining why people in less developed countries are prepared to pay for healthcare with private hospitals rather than using the national institutions which usually have worse service and deplorable equipments mainly due to mismanagement, wrong fiscal policies and corruption. The issues of customer satisfaction and equity were studied first hand and when comparing with the UK system, one would only praise the NHS(National Health Service) for its equitable approach unlike many other countries were only those than can afford treatment get it. During my university years, I was a part of the committee through whom student members voiced their opinion in reviving the Osun State Student Association at Bowen university ,which had lost his finesse. I was appointed the Financial Secretary and was indeed a challenge, as we had to work hard as a team creating and implementing programs and reforms, managing and allocating our own time and finances to ensure success, I was also part of the team that assisted the students to get there bursary from the State Government, and trust me it wasn’t easy in the sense that we had to keep writing letters and going out of our way to ensure the students get paid because its part of their civil right. During my National Youth Service Corps(NYSC) as a member of the Sports Community Development Group. Having acquired the silver award after the torment of hiking over double figure mileage distances to raise funds for  the homeless children in Enugu State of Nigeria, it has enabled me to be more organized and helped me develop my ability to make quick, accurate and appropriate decisions in peril. Currently I am an accountant and a Guardian counselor in a primary and nursery school in Nigeria which goes by the name Macro Nursery and Primary school, I assist the younger generations in making right,responsibe,reputable and reasonable decisions in life. Leadership is also an important quality at succeeding in most areas, hence my appointment as one of the prefects in my secondary school has definitely helped me develop as a young adult. These duties are very rewarding and will be vital skills in preparing for life after public administration, studying this course in your university will enable me furthe

Plastic Not Paper -- essays research papers

Plastic Not Paper Walking through the grocery store I always try to look for the best buy. I always buy what's on sale, I guess you could say I'm cheep. Then I get to the check out lane, preferably the one with fewer people. I empty my wallet and pay. Then I wait. I think it's going to happen but I am not sure. Then it does, the baggier says, "Would you like paper or plastic?" I look that person right in the eye and I tell him, "I want the one that's better for the environment, I want the one that will help prevent pollution, I want the one that cost less, I want plastic." Plastic bags save money, they conserve energy, they are practical and they are better for the environment. That's why plastic bags are the best choice at the check out line. Of course your wondering how plastic bags save money, well just think 2,000 paper bags stacked on each other reaches a height of about 7.25 inches, while paper reaches a soaring height of 7.5 feet. This means it takes seven trucks to deliver the same amount of paper as one plastic delivering truck. Talk about a big waste of gas. Plastic bags cost about  ¼ of a cent to make, while paper cost close to 3 cents. This is money we save as well as the store owner. This is a lot of money that is going to waste considering that plastic bags are so much more practical then paper. You can use them for lots of other things. You can take on trips to the grocery store, your can protect dry clothing ...

User Authentication Through Mouse Dynamics

16 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION FORENSICS AND SECURITY, VOL. 8, NO. 1, JANUARY 2013 User Authentication Through Mouse Dynamics Chao Shen, Student Member, IEEE, Zhongmin Cai, Member, IEEE, Xiaohong Guan, Fellow, IEEE, Youtian Du, Member, IEEE, and Roy A. Maxion, Fellow, IEEE Abstract—Behavior-based user authentication with pointing devices, such as mice or touchpads, has been gaining attention. As an emerging behavioral biometric, mouse dynamics aims to address the authentication problem by verifying computer users on the basis of their mouse operating styles.This paper presents a simple and ef? cient user authentication approach based on a ? xed mouse-operation task. For each sample of the mouse-operation task, both traditional holistic features and newly de? ned procedural features are extracted for accurate and ? ne-grained characterization of a user’s unique mouse behavior. Distance-measurement and eigenspace-transformation techniques are applied to obtain featur e components for ef? ciently representing the original mouse feature space.Then a one-class learning algorithm is employed in the distance-based feature eigenspace for the authentication task. The approach is evaluated on a dataset of 5550 mouse-operation samples from 37 subjects. Extensive experimental results are included to demonstrate the ef? cacy of the proposed approach, which achieves a false-acceptance rate of 8. 74%, and a false-rejection rate of 7. 69% with a corresponding authentication time of 11. 8 seconds. Two additional experiments are provided to compare the current approach with other approaches in the literature.Our dataset is publicly available to facilitate future research. Index Terms—Biometric, mouse dynamics, authentication, eigenspace transformation, one-class learning. I. INTRODUCTION T HE quest for a reliable and convenient security mechanism to authenticate a computer user has existed since the inadequacy of conventional password mechanism was reali zed, ? rst by the security community, and then gradually by the Manuscript received March 28, 2012; revised July 16, 2012; accepted September 06, 2012. Date of publication October 09, 2012; date of current version December 26, 2012.This work was supported in part by the NSFC (61175039, 61103240, 60921003, 60905018), in part by the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars (60825202), in part by 863 High Tech Development Plan (2007AA01Z464), in part by the Research Fund for Doctoral Program of Higher Education of China (20090201120032), and in part by Fundamental Research Funds for Central Universities (2012jdhz08). The work of R. A. Maxion was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant CNS-0716677. Any opinions, ? dings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors, and do not necessarily re? ect the views of the National Science Foundation. The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Dr. Sviatoslav Voloshynovskiy. C. Shen, Z. Cai, X. Guan, and Y. Du are with the MOE Key Laboratory for Intelligent Networks and Network Security, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, Shaanxi, 710049, China (e-mail: [email  protected] xjtu. edu. cn; [email  protected] xjtu. edn. cn; [email  protected] xjtu. edu. cn; [email  protected] jtu. edu. cn). R. A. Maxion is with the Dependable Systems Laboratory, Computer Science Department, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213 USA (e-mail: [email  protected] cmu. edu). Color versions of one or more of the ? gures in this paper are available online at http://ieeexplore. ieee. org. Digital Object Identi? er 10. 1109/TIFS. 2012. 2223677 public [31]. As data are moved from traditional localized computing environments to the new Cloud Computing paradigm (e. g. , Box. net and Dropbox), the need for better authentication has become more pressing.Recently, several large-scale password leakages exposed users to an unprecedented risk of disclosure and abuse of their information [47], [48]. These incidents seriously shook public con? dence in the security of the current information infrastructure; the inadequacy of password-based authentication mechanisms is becoming a major concern for the entire information society. Of various potential solutions to this problem, a particularly promising technique is mouse dynamics. Mouse dynamics measures and assesses a user’s mouse-behavior characteristics for use as a biometric.Compared with other biometrics such as face, ? ngerprint and voice [20], mouse dynamics is less intrusive, and requires no specialized hardware to capture biometric information. Hence it is suitable for the current Internet environment. When a user tries to log into a computer system, mouse dynamics only requires her to provide the login name and to perform a certain sequence of mouse operations. Extracted behavioral features, based on mouse movements and clicks, are compared to a legitimate user’s pro? le. A match authenticates the user; otherwise her access is denied.Furthermore, a user’s mouse-behavior characteristics can be continually analyzed during her subsequent usage of a computer system for identity monitoring or intrusion detection. Yampolskiy et al. provide a review of the ? eld [45]. Mouse dynamics has attracted more and more research interest over the last decade [2]–[4], [8], [14]–[17], [19], [21], [22], [33], [34], [39]–[41], [45], [46]. Although previous research has shown promising results, mouse dynamics is still a newly emerging technique, and has not reached an acceptable level of performance (e. . , European standard for commercial biometric technology, which requires 0. 001% false-acceptance rate and 1% false-rejection rate [10]). Most existing approaches for mouse-dynamics-based user authentication result in a low authentication accuracy or an unreasonably long authenticatio n time. Either of these may limit applicability in real-world systems, because few users are willing to use an unreliable authentication mechanism, or to wait for several minutes to log into a system.Moreover, previous studies have favored using data from real-world environments over experimentally controlled environments, but this realism may cause unintended side-effects by introducing confounding factors (e. g. , effects due to different mouse devices) that may affect experimental results. Such confounds can make it dif? cult to attribute experimental outcomes solely to user behavior, and not to other factors along the long path of mouse behavior, from hand to computing environment [21], [41]. 1556-6013/$31. 00  © 2012 IEEE SHEN et al. : USER AUTHENTICATION THROUGH MOUSE DYNAMICS 17It should be also noted that most mouse-dynamics research used data from both the impostors and the legitimate user to train the classi? cation or detection model. However, in the scenario of mouse-d ynamics-based user authentication, usually only the data from the legitimate user are readily available, since the user would choose her speci? c sequence of mouse operations and would not share it with others. In addition, no datasets are published in previous research, which makes it dif? cult for third-party veri? cation of previous work and precludes objective comparisons between different approaches.A. Overview of Approach Faced with the above challenges, our study aims to develop a mouse-dynamics-based user authentication approach, which can perform user authentication in a short period of time while maintaining high accuracy. By using a controlled experimental environment, we have isolated inherent behavioral characteristics as the primary factors for mouse-behavior analysis. The overview of the proposed approach is shown in Fig. 1. It consists of three major modules: (1) mouse-behavior capture, (2) feature construction, and (3) training/classi? cation. The ? st module serves to create a mouse-operation task, and to capture and interpret mouse-behavior data. The second module is used to extract holistic and procedural features to characterize mouse behavior, and to map the raw features into distance-based features by using various distance metrics. The third module, in the training phase, applies kernel PCA on the distance-based feature vectors to compute the predominant feature components, and then builds the user’s pro? le using a one-class classi? er. In the classi? cation phase, it determines the user’s identity using the trained classi? r in the distance-based feature eigenspace. B. Purpose and Contributions of This Paper This paper is a signi? cant extension of an earlier and much shorter version [40]. The main purpose and major contributions of this paper are summarized as follows: †¢ We address the problem of unintended side-effects of inconsistent experimental conditions and environmental variables by restricting usersâ€℠¢ mouse operations to a tightly-controlled environment. This isolates inherent behavioral characteristics as the principal factors in mouse behavior analysis, and substantially reduces the effects of external confounding factors. Instead of the descriptive statistics of mouse behaviors usually adopted in existing work, we propose newly-de? ned procedural features, such as movement speed curves, to characterize a user’s unique mouse-behavior characteristics in an accurate and ? ne-grained manner. These features could lead to a performance boost both in authentication accuracy and authentication time. †¢ We apply distance metrics and kernel PCA to obtain a distance-based eigenspace for ef? ciently representing the original mouse feature space.These techniques partially handle behavioral variability, and make our proposed approach stable and robust to variability in behavior data. †¢ We employ one-class learning methods to perform the user authentication task, so that the detection model is Fig. 1. Overview of approach. built solely on the data from the legitimate user. One-class methods are more suitable for mouse-dynamics-based user authentication in real-world applications. †¢ We present a repeatable and objective evaluation procedure to investigate the effectiveness of our proposed approach through a series of experiments.As far as we know, no earlier work made informed comparisons between different features and results, due to the lack of a standard test protocol. Here we provide comparative experiments to further examine the validity of the proposed approach. †¢ A public mouse-behavior dataset is established (see Section III for availability), not only for this study but also to foster future research. This dataset contains high-quality mouse-behavior data from 37 subjects. To our knowledge, this study is the ? rst to publish a shared mouse-behavior dataset in this ? eld. This study develops a mouse-dynamics-based user authenticat ion approach that performs user authentication in a short time while maintaining high accuracy. It has several desirable properties: 1. it is easy to comprehend and implement; 2. it requires no specialized hardware or equipment to capture the biometric data; 3. it requires only about 12 seconds of mouse-behavior data to provide good, steady performance. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: Section II describes related work. Section III presents a data-collection process. Section IV describes the feature-construction process.Section V discusses the classi? cation techniques for mouse dynamics. Section VI presents the evaluation methodology. Section VII presents and analyzes experimental results. Section VIII offers a discussion and possible extensions of the current work. Finally, Section IX concludes. 18 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION FORENSICS AND SECURITY, VOL. 8, NO. 1, JANUARY 2013 II. BACKGROUND AND RELATED WORK In this section, we provide background on mouse- dynamics research, and various applications for mouse dynamics (e. g. , authentication versus intrusion detection).Then we focus on applying mouse dynamics to user authentication. A. Background of Mouse Dynamics Mouse dynamics, a behavioral biometric for analyzing behavior data from pointing devices (e. g. , mouse or touchpad), provides user authentication in an accessible and convenient manner [2]–[4], [8], [14]–[17], [19], [21], [22], [33], [34], [39]–[41], [45], [46]. Since Everitt and McOwan [14] ? rst investigated in 2003 whether users could be distinguished by the use of a signature written by mouse, several different techniques and uses for mouse dynamics have been proposed.Most researchers focus on the use of mouse dynamics for intrusion detection (sometimes called identity monitoring or reauthentication), which analyzes mouse-behavior characteristics throughout the course of interaction. Pusara and Brodley [33] proposed a reauthentication scheme using m ouse dynamics for user veri? cation. This study presented positive ? ndings, but cautioned that their results were only preliminary. Gamboa and Fred [15], [16] were some of the earliest researchers to study identity monitoring based on mouse movements.Later on, Ahmed and Traore [3] proposed an approach combining keystroke dynamics with mouse dynamics for intrusion detection. Then they considered mouse dynamics as a standalone biometric for intrusion detection [2]. Recently, Zheng et al. [46] proposed angle-based metrics of mouse movements for reauthentication systems, and explored the effects of environmental factors (e. g. , different machines). Yet only recently have researchers come to the use of mouse dynamics for user authentication (sometimes called static authentication), which analyzes mouse-behavior characteristics at particular moments.In 2007, Gamboa et al. [17] extended their approaches in identity monitoring [15], [16] into web-based authentication. Later on, Kaminsky e t al. [22] presented an authentication scheme using mouse dynamics for identifying online game players. Then, Bours and Fullu [8] proposed an authentication approach by requiring users to make use of the mouse for tracing a maze-like path. Most recently, a full survey of the existing work in mouse dynamics pointed out that mouse-dynamics research should focus on reducing authentication time and taking the effect of environmental variables into account [21]. B.User Authentication Based on Mouse Dynamics The primary focus of previous research has been on the use of mouse dynamics for intrusion detection or identity monitoring. It is dif? cult to transfer previous work directly from intrusion detection to authentication, however, because a rather long authentication period is typically required to collect suf? cient mouse-behavior data to enable reasonably accurate veri? cation. To our knowledge, few papers have targeted the use of mouse dynamics for user authentication, which will be the central concern of this paper. Hashia et al. [19] and Bours et al. 8] presented some preliminary results on mouse dynamics for user authentication. They both asked participants to perform ? xed sequences of mouse operations, and they analyzed behavioral characteristics of mouse movements to authenticate a user during the login stage. Distance-based classi? ers were established to compare the veri? cation data with the enrollment data. Hashia et al. collected data from 15 participants using the same computer, while Bours et al. collected data from 28 subjects using different computers; they achieved equal-error rates of 15% and 28% respectively.Gamboa et al. [17] presented a web-based user authentication system based on mouse dynamics. The system displayed an on-screen virtual keyboard, and required users to use the mouse to enter a paired username and pin-number. The extracted feature space was reduced to a best subspace through a greedy search process. A statistical model based on the Weibull distribution was built on training data from both legitimate and impostor users. Based on data collected from 50 subjects, the researchers reported an equal-error rate of 6. 2%, without explicitly reporting authentication time.The test data were also used for feature selection, which may lead to an overly optimistic estimate of authentication performance [18]. Recently, Revett et al. [34] proposed a user authentication system requiring users to use the mouse to operate a graphical, combination-lock-like GUI interface. A small-scale evaluation involving 6 subjects yielded an average false-acceptance rate and false-rejection rate of around 3. 5% and 4% respectively, using a distance-based classi? er. However, experimental details such as experimental apparatus and testing procedures were not explicitly reported. Aksari et al. 4] presented an authentication framework for verifying users based on a ? xed sequence of mouse movements. Features were extracted from nine move ments among seven squares displayed consecutively on the screen. They built a classi? er based on scaled Euclidean distance using data from both legitimate users and impostors. The researchers reported an equal-error rate of 5. 9% over 10 users’ data collected from the same computer, but authentication time was not reported. It should be noted that the above two studies were performed on a small number of users—only 6 users in [34], and 10 users in [4]—which may be insuf? ient to evaluate de? nitively the performance of these approaches. The results of the above studies have been mixed, possibly due to the realism of the experiments, possibly due to a lack of real differences among users, or possibly due to experimental errors or faulty data. A careful reading of the literature suggests that (1) most approaches have resulted in low performance, or have used a small number of users, but since these studies do not tend to be replicated, it is hard to pin the discr epancies on any one thing; (2) no research group provided a shared dataset.In our study, we control the experimental environment to increase the likelihood that our results will be free from experimental confounding factors, and we attempt to develop a simple and ef? cient user authentication approach based on mouse dynamics. We also make our data available publicly. III. MOUSE DATA ACQUISITION In this study, we collect mouse-behavior data in a controlled environment, so as to isolate behavioral characteristics as the principal factors in mouse behavior analysis. We offer here SHEN et al. USER AUTHENTICATION THROUGH MOUSE DYNAMICS 19 considerable detail regarding the conduct of data collection, because these particulars can best reveal potential biases and threats to experimental validity [27]. Our data set is available 1. A. Controlled Environment In this study, we set up a desktop computer and developed a Windows application as a uniform hardware and software platform for the coll ection of mouse-behavior data. The desktop was an HP workstation with a Core 2 Duo 3. 0 GHz processor and 2 GB of RAM.It was equipped with a 17 HP LCD monitor (set at 1280 1024 resolution) and a USB optical mouse, and ran the Windows XP operating system. Most importantly, all system parameters relating to the mouse, such as speed and sensitivity con? gurations, were ? xed. The Windows application, written in C#, prompted a user to conduct a mouse-operation task. During data collection, the application displayed the task in a full-screen window on the monitor, and recorded (1) the corresponding mouse operations (e. g. , mouse-single-click), (2) the positions at which the operations occurred, and (3) the timestamps of the operations.The Windows-event clock was used to timestamp mouse operations [28]; it has a resolution of 15. 625 milliseconds, corresponding to 64 updates per second. When collecting data, each subject was invited to perform a mouse-operations task on the same desktop computer free of other subjects; data collection was performed one by one on the same data-collection platform. These conditions make hardware and software factors consistent throughout the process of data collection over all subjects, thus removing unintended side-effects of unrelated hardware and software factors. B.Mouse-Operation Task Design To reduce behavioral variations due to different mouse-operation sequences, all subjects were required to perform the same sequence of mouse operations. We designed a mouse-operation task, consisting of a ? xed sequence of mouse operations, and made these operations representative of a typical and diverse combination of mouse operations. The operations were selected according to (1) two elementary operations of mouse clicks: single click and double click; and (2) two basic properties of mouse movements: movement direction and movement distance [2], [39].As shown in Fig. 2, movement directions are numbered from 1 to 8, and each of them is sel ected to represent one of eight 45-degree ranges over 360 degrees. In addition, three distance intervals are considered to represent short-, middle- and long-distance mouse movements. Table I shows the directions and distances of the mouse movements used in this study. During data collection, every two adjacent movements were separated by either a single click or a double click. As a whole, the designed task consists of 16 mouse movements, 8 single clicks, and 8 double clicks.It should be noted that our task may not be unique. However, the task was carefully chosen to induce users to perform a wide variety of mouse movements and clicks that were both typical and diverse in an individual’s repertoire of daily mouse behaviors. 1The mouse-behavior dataset is available from: http://nskeylab. xjtu. edu. cn/ projects/mousedynamics/behavior-data-set/. Fig. 2. Mouse movement directions: sector 1 covers all operations performed degrees and degrees. with angles between TABLE I MOUSE MO VEMENTS IN THE DESIGNED MOUSE-OPERATION TASK C.Subjects We recruited 37 subjects, many from within our lab, but some from the university at large. Our sample of subjects consisted of 30 males and 7 females. All of them were right-handed users, and had been using a mouse for a minimum of two years. D. Data-Collection Process All subjects were required to participate in two rounds of data collection per day, and waited at least 24 hours between collections (ensuring that some day-to-day variation existed within the data). In each round, each subject was invited, one by one, to perform the same mouse-operation task 10 times.A mouse-operation sample was obtained when a subject performed the task one time, in which she ? rst clicked a start button on the screen, then moved the mouse to click subsequent buttons prompted by the data-collection application. Additionally, subjects were instructed to use only the external mouse device, and they were advised that no keyboard would be needed. S ubjects were told that if they needed a break or needed to stretch their hands, they were to do so after they had accomplished a full round. This was intended to prevent arti? cially anomalous mouse operations in the middle of a task.Subjects were admonished to focus on the task, as if they were logging into their own accounts, and to avoid distractions, such as talking with the experimenter, while the task was in progress. Any error in the operating process (e. g. , single-clicking a button when requiring double-clicking it) caused the current task to be reset, requiring the subject to redo it. 20 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION FORENSICS AND SECURITY, VOL. 8, NO. 1, JANUARY 2013 TABLE II MOUSE DYNAMICS FEATURES Subjects took between 15 days and 60 days to complete data collection.Each subject accomplished 150 error-free repetitions of the same mouse-operation task. The task took between 6. 2 seconds and 21. 3 seconds, with an average of 11. 8 seconds over all subjects. The ? nal dataset contained 5550 samples from 37 subjects. IV. FEATURE CONSTRUCTION In this section, we ? rst extract a set of mouse-dynamics features, and then we use distance-measurement methods to obtain feature-distance vectors for reducing behavioral variability. Next, we utilize an eigenspace transformation to extract principal feature components as classi? er input. A.Feature Extraction The data collected in Section III are sequences of mouse operations, including left-single-clicks, left-double-clicks, and mouse-movements. Mouse features were extracted from these operations, and were typically organized into a vector to represent the sequence of mouse operations in one execution of the mouse-operation task. Table II summarizes the derived features in this study. We characterized mouse behavior based on two basic types of mouse operations—mouse click and mouse movement. Each mouse operation was then analyzed individually, and translated into several mouse features.Our study divi ded these features into two categories: †¢ Holistic features: features that characterize the overall properties of mouse behaviors during interactions, such as single-click and double-click statistics; †¢ Procedural features: features that depict the detailed dynamic processes of mouse behaviors, such as the movement speed and acceleration curves. Most traditional features are holistic features, which suf? ce to obtain a statistical description of mouse behavior, such as the mean value of click times. They are easy to compute and comprehend, but they only characterize general attributes of mouse behavior.In our study, the procedural features characterize in-depth procedural details of mouse behavior. This information more accurately re? ects the ef? ciency, agility and motion habits of individual mouse users, and thus may lead to a performance boost for authentication. Experimental results in Section VII demonstrate the effectiveness of these newly-de? ned features. B. Dis tance Measurement The raw mouse features cannot be used directly by a classi? er, because of high dimensionality and behavioral variability. Therefore, distance-measurement methods were applied to obtain feature-distance vectors and to mitigate the effects of these issues.In the calculation of distance measurement, we ? rst used the Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) distance [6] to compute the distance vector of procedural features. The reasons for this choice are that (1) procedural features (e. g. , movement speed curve) of two data samples are not likely to consist of the exactly same number of points, whether these samples are generated by the same or by different subjects; (2) DTW distance can be applied directly to measure the distance between the procedural features of two samples without deforming either or both of the two sequences in order to get an equal number of points.Next, we applied Manhattan distance to calculate the distance vector of holistic features. The reasons for th is choice are that (1) this distance is independent between dimensions, and can preserve physical interpretation of the features since its computation is the absolute value of cumulative difference; (2) previous research in related ? elds (e. g. , keystroke dynamics) reported that the use of Manhattan distance for statistical features could lead to a better performance [23]. ) Reference Feature Vector Generation: We established the reference feature vector for each subject from her training feature vectors. Let , be the training set of feature vectors for one subject, where is a -dimensional mouse feature vector extracted from the th training sample, and is the number of training samples. Consider how the reference feature vector is generated for each subject: Step 1: we computed the pairwise distance vector of procedural features and holistic features between all pairs of training feature vectors and .We used DTW distance to calculate the distance vector of procedural features for measuring the similarity between the procedural components of the two feature vectors, and we applied Manhattan distance to calculate the distance vector of holistic features . (1) where , and represents the procedural components of represents the holistic components. SHEN et al. : USER AUTHENTICATION THROUGH MOUSE DYNAMICS 21 Step 2: we concatenated the distance vectors of holistic features and procedural features together to obtain a distance vector for the training feature vectors and by (2) Step 3: we normalized vector: to get a scale-invariant feature nd sample covariance . Then we can obtain the mean of such a training set by (5) (6) (3) is the mean of all where pairwise distance vectors from the training set, and is the corresponding standard deviation. Step 4: for each training feature vector, we calculated the arithmetic mean distance between this vector and the remaining training vectors, and found the reference feature vector with minimum mean distance. (4) 2) Feature-Dis tance Vector Calculation: Given the reference feature vector for each subject, we then computed the feature-distance vector between a new mouse feature vector and the reference vector.Let be the reference feature vector for one subject; then for any new feature vector (either from the legitimate user or an impostor), we can compute the corresponding distance vector by (1), (2) and (3). In this paper, we used all mouse features in Table II to generate the feature-distance vector. There are 10 click-related features, 16 distance-related features, 16 time-related features, 16 speed-related features, and 16 acceleration-related features, which were taken together and then transformed to a 74-dimensional feature-distance vector that represents each mouse-operation sample. C.Eigenspace Computation: Training and Projection It is usually undesirable to use all components in the feature vector as input for the classi? er, because much of data will not provide a signi? cant degree of uniquene ss or consistency. We therefore applied an eigenspace-transformation technique to extract the principal components as classi? er input. 1) Kernel PCA Training: Kernel principal component analysis (KPCA) [37] is one approach to generalizing linear PCA to nonlinear cases using kernel methods. In this study, the purpose of KPCA is to obtain the principal components of the original feature-distance vectors.The calculation process is illustrated as follows: For each subject, the training set represents a set of feature-distance vectors drawn from her own data. Let be the th feature-distance vector in the training set, and be the number of such vectors. We ? rst mapped the measured vectors into the hyperdimensional feature space by the nonlinear mapping Here we centered the mapped point with the corresponding mean as . The principal components were then computed by solving the eigenvalue problem: (7) where and . Then, by de? ning a kernel matrix (8) we computed an eigenvalue problem for t he coef? ients is now solely dependent on the kernel function , that (9) For details, readers can refer to B. Scholkopf et al. [37]. Generally speaking, the ? rst few eigenvectors correspond to large eigenvalues and most information in the training samples. Therefore, for the sake of providing the principal components to represent mouse behavior in a low-dimensional eigenspace, and for memory ef? ciency, we ignored small eigenvalues and their corresponding eigenvectors, using a threshold value (10) is the accumulated variance of the ? st largest eigenwhere values with respect to all eigenvalues. In this study, was chosen as 0. 95 for all subjects, with a range from 0 to 1. Note that we used the same for different subjects, so may be different from one subject to another. Speci? cally, in our experiments, we observed that the number of principal components for different subjects varied from 12 to 20, and for an average level, 17 principal components are identi? ed under the threshold of 0. 95. 2) Kernel PCA Projection: For the selected subject, taking the largest eigenvalues and he associated eigenvectors, the transform matrix can be constructed to project an original feature-distance vector into a point in the -dimensional eigenspace: (11) As a result, each subject’s mouse behavior can be mapped into a manifold trajectory in such a parametric eigenspace. It is wellknown that is usually much smaller than the dimensionality of the original feature space. That is to say, eigenspace analysis can dramatically reduce the dimensionality of input samples. In this way, we used the extracted principal components of the feature-distance vectors as input for subsequent classi? ers. 22IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION FORENSICS AND SECURITY, VOL. 8, NO. 1, JANUARY 2013 V. CLASSIFIER IMPLEMENTATION This section explains the classi? er that we used, and introduces two other widely-used classi? ers. Each classi? er analyzes mouse-behavior data, and discriminates between a legitimate user and impostors. A. One-Class Classi? er Overview User authentication is still a challenging task from the pattern-classi? cation perspective. It is a two-class (legitimate user versus impostors) problem. In the scenario of mouse-dynamicsbased user authentication, a login user is required to provide the user name and to perform a speci? mouse-operation task which would be secret, like a password. Each user would choose her own mouse-operations task, and would not share that task with others. Thus, when building a model for a legitimate user, the only behavioral samples of her speci? c task are her own; other users’ (considered as impostors in our scenario) samples of this task are not readily available. In this scenario, therefore, an appropriate solution is to build a model based only on the legitimate user’s data samples, and use that model to detect impostors. This type of problem is known as one-class classi? ation [43] or novelty/anomaly detection [25], [26]. We thus focused our attention on this type of problem, especially because in a real-world situation we would not have impostor renditions of a legitimate user’s mouse operations anyway. B. Our Classi? er—One-Class Support Vector Machine Traditional one-class classi? cation methods are often unsatisfying, frequently missing some true positives and producing too many false positives. In this study, we used a one-class Support Vector Machine (SVM) classi? er, introduced by Scholkopf et al. [36], [38]. One-class SVMs have been successfully applied to a number of real-life classi? ation problems, e. g. , face authentication, signature veri? cation and keystroke authentication [1], [23]. In our context, given training samples belonging to one subject, , each sample has features (corresponding to the principal components of the feature-distance vector for that subject). The aim is to ? nd a hyperplane that separates the data points by the largest margin. To separ ate the data points from the origin, one needs to solve the following dual quadratic programming problem [36], [38]: the origin, and is the kernel function. We allow for nonlinear decision boundaries. Then the decision function 13) will be positive for the examples from the training set, where is the offset of the decision function. In essence, we viewed the user authentication problem as a one-class classi? cation problem. In the training phase, the learning task was to build a classi? er based on the legitimate subject’s feature samples. In the testing phase, the test feature sample was projected into the same high-dimensional space, and the output of the decision function was recorded. We used a radial basis function (RBF) in our evaluation, after comparative studies of linear, polynomial, and sigmoid kernels based on classi? ation accuracy. The SVM parameter and kernel parameter (using LibSVM [11]) were set to 0. 06 and 0. 004 respectively. The decision function would gen erate â€Å" † if the authorized user’s test set is input; otherwise it is a false rejection case. On the contrary, â€Å" † should be obtained if the impostors’ test set is the input; otherwise a false acceptance case occurs. C. Other Classi? ers—Nearest Neighbor and Neural Network In addition, we compared our classi? er with two other widely-used classi? ers, KNN and neural network [12]. For KNN, in the training phase, the nearest neighbor classi? r estimated the covariance matrix of the training feature samples, and saved each feature sample. In the testing phase, the nearest neighbor classi? er calculated Mahalanobis distance from the new feature sample to each of the samples in the training data. The average distance, from the new sample to the nearest feature samples from the training data, was used as the anomaly score. After multiple tests with ranging from 1 to 5, we obtained the best results with , detailed in Section VII. For the neural network, in the training phase a network was built with input nodes, one output node, and hidden nodes.The network weights were randomly initialized between 0 and 1. The classi? er was trained to produce a 1. 0 on the output node for every training feature sample. We trained for 1000 epochs using a learning rate of 0. 001. In the testing phase, the test sample was run through the network, and the output of the network was recorded. Denote to be the output of the network; intuitively, if is close to 1. 0, the test sample is similar to the training samples, and with close to 0. 0, it is dissimilar. VI. EVALUATION METHODOLOGY This section explains the evaluation methodology for mouse behavior analysis.First, we summarize the dataset collected in Section III. Next, we set up the training and testing procedure for our one-class classi? ers. Then, we show how classi? er performance was calculated. Finally, we introduce a statistical testing method to further analyze experimental results. (12) where is the vector of nonnegative Lagrangian multipliers to be determined, is a parameter that controls the trade-off between maximizing the number of data points contained by the hyperplane and the distance of the hyperplane from SHEN et al. : USER AUTHENTICATION THROUGH MOUSE DYNAMICS 23A. Dataset As discussed in Section III, samples of mouse-behavior data were collected when subjects performed the designed mouseoperation task in a tightly-controlled environment. All 37 subjects produced a total of 5550 mouse-operation samples. We then calculated feature-distance vectors, and extracted principal components from each vector as input for the classi? ers. B. Training and Testing Procedure Consider a scenario as mentioned in Section V-A. We started by designating one of our 37 subjects as the legitimate user, and the rest as impostors. We trained the classi? er and ested its ability to recognize the legitimate user and impostors as follows: Step 1: We trained the classi? er to b uild a pro? le of the legitimate user on a randomly-selected half of the samples (75 out of 150 samples) from that user. Step 2: We tested the ability of the classi? er to recognize the legitimate user by calculating anomaly scores for the remaining samples generated by the user. We designated the scores assigned to each sample as genuine scores. Step 3: We tested the ability of the classi? er to recognize impostors by calculating anomaly scores for all the samples generated by the impostors.We designated the scores assigned to each sample as impostor scores. This process was then repeated, designating each of the other subjects as the legitimate user in turn. In the training phase, 10-fold cross validation [24] was employed to choose parameters of the classi? ers. Since we used a random sampling method to divide the data into training and testing sets, and we wanted to account for the effect of this randomness, we repeated the above procedure 50 times, each time with independently selected samples drawn from the entire dataset. C. Calculating Classi? r Performance To convert these sets of classi? cation scores of the legitimate user and impostors into aggregate measures of classi? er performance, we computed the false-acceptance rate (FAR) and false-rejection rate (FRR), and used them to generate an ROC curve [42]. In our evaluation, for each user, the FAR is calculated as the ratio between the number of false acceptances and the number of test samples of impostors; the FRR is calculated as the ratio between the number of false rejections and the number of test samples of legitimate users.Then we computed the average FAR and FRR over all subjects. Whether or not a mouse-operation sample generates an alarm depends on the threshold for the anomaly scores. An anomaly score over the threshold indicates an impostor, while a score under the threshold indicates a legitimate user. In many cases, to make a user authentication scheme deployable in practice, minimizing the possibility of rejecting a true user (lower FRR) is sometimes more important than lowering the probability of accepting an impostor [46]. Thus we adjusted the threshold according to the FRR for the training data.Since calculation of the FRR requires only the legitimate user’s data, no impostor data was used for determining the threshold. Speci? cally, the threshold is set to be a variable ranging from , and will be chosen with a relatively low FRR using 10-fold cross validation on the training data. After multiple tests, we observe that setting the threshold to a value of 0. 1 yields a low FRR on average2. Thus, we show results with a threshold value of 0. 1 throughout this study. D. Statistical Analysis of the Results To evaluate the performance of our approach, we developed a statistical test using the half total error rate (HTER) and con? ence-interval (CI) evaluation [5]. The HTER test aims to statistically evaluate the performance for user authentication, which is de ? ned by combining false-acceptance rate (FAR) and falserejection rate (FRR): (14) Con? dence intervals are computed around the HTER as , and and are computed by [5]: (15) % % % (16) where NG is the total number of genuine scores, and NI is the total number of impostor scores. VII. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS AND ANALYSIS Extensive experiments were carried out to verify the effectiveness of our approach. First, we performed the authentication task using our approach, and compared it with two widely-used classi? rs. Second, we examined our primary results concerning the effect of eigenspace transformation methods on classi? er performance. Third, we explored the effect of sample length on classi? er performance, to investigate the trade-off between security and usability. Two additional experiments are provided to compare our method with other approaches in the literature. A. Experiment 1: User Authentication In this section, we conducted a user authentication experiment, and compared our c lassi? er with two widely-used ones as mentioned in Section V-C. The data used in this experiment consisted of 5550 samples from 37 subjects.Fig. 3 and Table III show the ROC curves and average FARs and FRRs of the authentication experiment for each of three classi? ers, with standard deviations in parentheses. Table III also includes the average authentication time, which is the sum of the average time needed to collect the data and the average time needed to make the authentication decision (note that since the latter of these two times is always less than 0. 003 seconds in our classi? ers, we ignore it in this study). Our ? rst observation is that the best performance has a FAR of 8. 74% and a FRR of 7. 96%, obtained by our approach (one-class SVM).This result is promising and competitive, and the behavioral samples are captured over a much shorter period of time 2Note that for different classi? ers, there are different threshold intervals. For instance, the threshold interval fo r neural network detector is [0, 1], and for one. For uniform presentation, we mapped all of intervals class SVM, it is . to 24 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION FORENSICS AND SECURITY, VOL. 8, NO. 1, JANUARY 2013 TABLE IV HTER PERFORMANCE AND CONFIDENCE INTERVAL AT CONFIDENCE LEVELS DIFFERENT Fig. 3. ROC curves for the three different classi? rs used in this study: oneclass SVM, neural network, and nearest neighbor. TABLE III FARs AND FRRs OF USER AUTHENTICATION EXPERIMENT (WITH STANDARD DEVIATIONS IN PARENTHESES) information about mouse behavior, which could enhance performance. Finally, we conducted a statistical test, using the HTER and CI evaluation as mentioned in Section VI-D, to statistically evaluate the performance of our approach. Table IV summarizes the results of this statistical evaluation at different con? dence levels. The result shows that the proposed approach provides the lowest HTER in comparison with the other two classi? ers used in our study; the 95% con? ence interval lies at % %. B. Experiment 2: Effect of Eigenspace Transformation This experiment examined the effect of eigenspace-transformation methods on classi? er performance. The data used were the same as in Experiment 1. We applied a one-class SVM classi? er in three evaluations, with the inputs respectively set to be the original feature-distance vectors (without any transformations), the projection of feature-distance vectors by PCA, and the projection of feature-distance vectors by KPCA. Fig. 4 and Table V show the ROC curves and average FARs and FRRs for each of three feature spaces, with standard deviations in parentheses.As shown in Fig. 4 and Table V, the authentication accuracy for the feature space transformed by KPCA is the best, followed by the accuracies for feature spaces by PCA and the original one. Speci? cally, direct classi? cation in the original feature space (without transformations) produces a FAR of 15. 45% and FRR of 15. 98%. This result is not encouraging c ompared to results previously reported in the literature. However, as mentioned in Experiment 1, the samples may be subject to more behavioral variability compared with previous work, because previous work analyzed mouse behaviors over a longer period of observation.Moreover, we observe that the authentication results of % % by PCA, and % % by KPCA are much better than for direct classi? cation. This result is a demonstration of the effectiveness of the eigenspace transformation in dealing with variable behavior data. Furthermore, we ? nd that the performance of KPCA is slightly superior to that of PCA. This may be due to the nonlinear variability (or noise) existing in mouse behaviors, and KPCA can reduce this variability (or noise) by using kernel transformations [29].It is also of note that the standard deviations of FAR and FRR based on the feature space transformed by KPCA and PCA are smaller than those of the original feature space (without transformations), indicating that th e eigenspace-transformation technique enhances the stability and robustness of our approach. compared with previous work. It should be noted that our result does not yet meet the European standard for commercial biometric technology, which requires near-perfect accuracy of 0. 001% FAR and 1% FRR [10]. But it does demonstrate that mouse dynamics could provide valuable information in user authentication tasks.Moreover, with a series of incremental improvements and investigations (e. g. , outlier handling), it seems possible that mouse dynamics could be used as, at least, an auxiliary authentication technique, such as an enhancement for conventional password mechanisms. Our second observation is that our approach has substantially better performance than all other classi? ers considered in our study. This may be due to the fact that SVMs can convert the problem of classi? cation into quadratic optimization in the case of relative insuf? ciency of prior knowledge, and still maintain hig h accuracy and stability.In addition, the standard deviations of the FAR and FRR for our approach are much smaller than those for other classi? ers, indicating that our approach may be more robust to variable behavior data and different parameter selection procedures. Our third observation is that the average authentication time in our study is 11. 8 seconds, which is impressive and achieves an acceptable level of performance for a practical application. Some previous approaches may lead to low availability due to a relatively-long authentication time. However, an authentication time of 11. seconds in our study shows that we can perform mouse-dynamics analysis quickly enough to make it applicable to authentication for most login processes. We conjecture that the signi? cant decrease of authentication time is due to procedural features providing more detailed and ? ne-grained SHEN et al. : USER AUTHENTICATION THROUGH MOUSE DYNAMICS 25 TABLE VI FARs AND FRRs OF DIFFERENT SAMPLE LENGTH S Fig. 4. ROC curves for three different feature spaces: the original feature space, the projected feature space by PCA, and the projected feature space by KPCA.TABLE V FARs AND FARs FOR THREE DIFFERENT FEATURE SPACES (WITH STANDARD DEVIATIONS IN PARENTHESES) the needs of the European Standard for commercial biometric technology [10]. We ? nd that after observing 800 mouse operations, our approach can obtain a FAR of 0. 87% and a FRR of 0. 69%, which is very close to the European standard, but with a corresponding authentication time of about 10 minutes. This long authentication time may limit applicability in real systems. Thus, a trade-off must be made between security and user acceptability, and more nvestigations and improvements should be performed to secure a place for mouse dynamics in more pragmatic settings. D. Comparison User authentication through mouse dynamics has attracted growing interest in the research community. However, there is no shared dataset or baseline algor ithm for measuring and determining what factors affect performance. The unavailability of an accredited common dataset (such as the FERET database in face recognition [32]) and standard evaluation methodology has been a limitation in the development of mouse dynamics.Most researchers trained their models on different feature sets and datasets, but none of them made informed comparisons among different mouse feature sets and different results. Thus two additional experiments are offered here to compare our approach with those in the literature. 1) Comparison 1: Comparison With Traditional Features: As stated above, we constructed the feature space based on mouse clicks and mouse movements, consisting of holistic features and procedural features. To further examine the effectiveness of the features constructed in this study, we provide a comparative experiment. We chose the features used by Gamboa et al. 17], Aksari and Artuner [4], Hashia et al. [19], Bours and Fullu [8], and Ahmed a nd Traore [2], because they were among the most frequently cited, and they represented a relatively diverse set of mouse-dynamics features. We then used a one-class SVM classi? er to conduct the authentication experiment again on our same dataset with both the feature set de? ned in our study, and the feature sets used in other studies. Hence, the authentication accuracies of different feature sets can be compared. Fig. 5 and Table VII show the ROC curves and average FARs and FRRs for each of six feature sets, with standard deviations in parentheses.We can see that the average error rates for the feature set from our approach are much lower than those of the feature sets from the literature. We conjecture that this may be due to the procedural features providing ? ne-grained information about mouse behavior, but they may also be due, in part, to: (1) partial adoption of features de? ned in previous approaches C. Experiment 3: Effect of Sample Length This experiment explored the effe ct of sample length on classi? er performance, to investigate the trade-off between security (authentication accuracy) and usability (authentication time).In this study, the sample length corresponds to the number of mouse operations needed to form one data sample. Each original sample consists of 32 mouse operations. To explore the effect of sample length on the performance of our approach, we derived new datasets with different sample lengths by applying bootstrap sampling techniques [13] to the original dataset, to make derived datasets containing the same numbers of samples as the original dataset. The new data samples were generated in the form of multiple consecutive mouse samples from the original dataset. In this way, we considered classi? r performance as a function of the sample length using all bootstrap samples derived from the original dataset. We conducted the authentication experiment again (using one-class SVM) on six derived datasets, with and 800 operations. Table VI shows the FARs and FRRs at varying sample lengths, using a one-class SVM classi? er. The table also includes the authentication time in seconds. The FAR and FRR obtained using a sample length of 32 mouse operations are 8. 74% and 7. 96% respectively, with an authentication time of 11. 8 seconds. As the number of operations increases, the FAR and FRR drop to 6. 7% and 6. 68% for the a data sample comprised of 80 mouse operations, corresponding to an authentication time of 29. 88 seconds. Therefore, we may conclude that classi? er performance almost certainly gets better as the sample length increases. Note that 60 seconds may be an upper bound for authentication time, but the corresponding FAR of 4. 69% and FRR of 4. 46% are still not low enough to meet 26 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INFORMATION FORENSICS AND SECURITY, VOL. 8, NO. 1, JANUARY 2013 Fig. 5. ROC curves for six different feature sets: the feature set in our study, and the features sets in other studies.RESULTS OF TABLE VII CO MPARISON WITH SOME TRADITIONAL FEATURES (WITH STANDARD DEVIATIONS IN PARENTHESES) Note that this approach [2] is initially applied to intrusion detection, and we extracted parts of features closely related to mouse operations in our dataset. The reason for this decision is that we want to examine whether the features employed in intrusion detection can be used in user authentication. because of different data-collection environments; (2) using different types of thresholds on the anomaly scores; (3) using less enrollment data than was used in previous experiments.The improved performance based on using our features also indicates that our features may allow more accurate and detailed characterization of a user’s unique mouse behavior than was possible with previously used features. Another thing to note from Table VII is that the standard deviations of error rates for features in our study are smaller than those for traditional features, suggesting that our features might be more stable and robust to variability in behavior data. One may also wonder how much of the authentication accuracy of our approach is due to the use of procedural features or holistic features.We tested our method using procedural features and holistic features separately, and the set of procedural features was the choice that proved to perform better. Specifically, we observe that the authentication accuracy of % % by using the set of procedural features is much better than for the set of holistic features, which have a FAR of 19. 58% and a FRR of 17. 96%. In combination with the result when using all features, it appears that procedural features may be more stable and discriminative than holistic features, which suggests that the procedural features contribute more to the authentication accuracy.The results here only provide preliminary comparative results and should not be used to conclude that a certain set of mouse features is always better than others. Each feature set has it s own unique advantages and disadvantages under different conditions and applications, so further evaluations and comparisons on more realistic and challenging datasets are needed. 2) Comparison 2: Comparison With Previous Work: Most previous approaches have either resulted in poor performance (in terms of authentication accuracy or time), or have used data of limited size.In this section, we show a qualitative comparison of our experimental results and settings against results of previous work (listed in Table VIII). Revett et al. [34] and Aksari and Artuner [4] considered mouse dynamics as a standalone biometric, and obtained an authentication accuracy of ERR around 4% and 5. 9% respectively, with a relatively-short authentication time or small number of mouse operations. But their results were based on a small pool of users (6 users in [34] and 10 users in [4]), which may be insuf? ient to obtain a good, steady result. Our study relies on an improved user authentication methodolo gy and far more users, leading us to achieve a good and robust authentication performance. Ahmed and Traore [2] achieved a high authentication accuracy, but as we mentioned before, it might be dif? cult to use such a method for user authentication since the authentication time or the number of mouse operations needed to verify a user’s identity is too high to be practical for real systems. Additionally, Hashia et al. 19] and Bours and Fulla [8] could perform user authentication in a relatively-short time, but they reported unacceptably high error rates (EER of 15% in [19], and EER of 26. 8% in [8]). In our approach we can make an authentication decision with a reasonably short authentication time while maintaining high accuracy. We employ a one-class classi? er, which is more appropriate for mouse-dynamics-based user authentication. As mentioned in Experiment 3, we can make an authentication decision in less than 60 seconds, with corresponding error rates are FAR of 4. 9% and FRR of 4. 46%. Although this result could be improved, we believe that, at our current performance level, mouse dynamics suf? ce to be a practical auxiliary authentication mechanism. In summary, Comparison 1 shows that our proposed features outperform some traditional features used in previous studies, and may be more stable and robust to variable behavior data. Comparison 2 indicates that our approach is competitive with existing approaches in authentication time while maintaining high accuracy.More detailed statistical studies on larger and more realistic datasets are desirable for further evaluations. VIII. DISCUSSION AND EXTENSION FOR FUTURE WORK Based on the ? ndings from this study, we take away some messages, each of which may suggest a trajectory for future work. Additionally, our work highlights the need for shared data and resources. A. Success Factors of Our Approach The presented approach achieved a short authentication time and relatively-high accuracy for mouse-dynami cs-based user SHEN et al. : USER AUTHENTICATION THROUGH MOUSE DYNAMICS 27 TABLE VIII COMPARISON WITH PREVIOUS WORKAuthentication time was not explicitly reported in [4], [8], [17]; instead, they required the user to accomplish a number of mouse operations for each authentication (15 clicks and 15 movements for [17]; 10 clicks and 9 movements for [4]; 18 short movements without pauses for [8]). Authentication time was not explicitly stated in [2]; however, it can be assumed by data-collection progress. For example, it is stated in [2] that an average of 12 hours 55 minutes of data were captured from each subject, representing an average of 45 sessions. We therefore assume that average session length is 12. 5 60/45 17. 22 minutes 1033 seconds. authentication. However, it is quite hard to point out one or two things that may have made our results better than those of previous work, because (1) past work favored realism over experimental control, (2) evaluation methodologies were incons istent among previous work, and (3) there have been no public datasets on which to perform comparative evaluations. Experimental control, however, is likely to be responsible for much of our success. Most previous work does not reveal any particulars in controlling experiments, while our work is tightly controlled.We made every effort to control experimental confounding factors to prevent them from having unintended in? uence on the subject’s recorded mouse behavior. For example, the same desktop computer was used for data collection for all subjects, and all system parameters relating to the mouse were ? xed. In addition, every subject was provided with the same instructions. These settings suggest strongly that the differences in subjects were due to individually detectable mouse-behavior differences among subjects, and not to environmental variables or experimental conditions.We strongly advocate the control of potential confounding factors in future experiments. The reaso n is that controlled experiments are necessary to reveal causal connections among experimental factors and classi? er performance, while realistic but uncontrolled experiments may introduce confounding factors that could in? uence experimental outcomes, which would make it hard to tell whether the results of those evaluations actually re? ect detectable differences in mouse behavior among test subjects, or differences among computing environments.We had more subjects (37), more repetitions of the operation task (150), and more comprehensive mouse operations (2 types of mouse clicks, 8 movement directions, and 3 movement distance ranges) than most studies did. Larger subject pools, however, sometimes make things harder; when there are more subjects there is a higher possibility that two subjects will have similar mouse behaviors, resulting in more classi? cation errors. We proposed the use of procedural features, such as the movement speed curve and acceleration curve, to provide mor e ? egrained information about mouse behavior than some traditional features. This may allow one to accurately describe a user’s unique mouse behavior, thus leading to a performance improvement for mouse-dynamics-based user authentication. We adopted methods for distance measurement and eigenspace transformation for obtaining principal feature components to ef? ciently represent the original mouse feature space. These methods not only overcome within-class variability of mouse behavior, but also preserve between-class differences of mouse behavior. The improved authentication accuracies demonstrate the ef? acy of these methods. Finally, we used a one-class learning algorithm to perform the authentication task, which is more appropriate for mousedynamics-based user authentication in real applications. In general, until there is a comparative study that stabilizes these factors, it will be hard to be de? nitive about the precise elements that made this work successful. B. Oppor tunities for Improvement While previous studies showed promising results in mouse dynamics, none of them have been able to meet the requirement of the European standard for commercial biometric technology.In this work, we determined that mouse dynamics may achieve a pragmatically useful level of accuracy, but with an impractically long authentic