Mehandi in the Marketplace

Henna has been an essential part of women’s traditional body art in many North Indian communities. In recent decades, professional henna artists have expanded their businesses to offer “walk-in” service along the sidewalks of urban market areas in addition to private at-home bookings. This study examines the skills acquisition and execution of Jaipur market henna artists in order to understand how they satisfy a large customer base that demands convenience, application speed, motif variety, and overall design excellence. In addition to conducting interviews with artists and customers, the author received training from and worked alongside a closed sample of artists. Collected market designs were compared to surveyed design booklets and magazines in order to identify elements of continuity and change in designs since 1948. The data revealed that customer demands require artist training that promotes constant innovation that in turn increases popular appeal and vitalizes the tradition of henna application.

Demand response power system optimization in presence of renewable energy sources

This paper optimizes the price-based demand response of a large customer in a power system with stochastic production and classical fuel-supplied power plants. The implemented method of optimization, under uncertainty, is helpful to model both the utility functions for the consumers and their technical limitations. The consumers exposed to price-based demand can reduce their cost for electricity procurement by modifying their behavior, possibly shifting their consumption during the day to periods with low electricity prices. The demand is considered elastic to electricity price if the consumer is willing and capable to buy various amounts of energy at different price levels, the demand function being represented as purchasing bidding blocks. The demand response is seen also by the scientific literature as a possible source of the needed flexibility of modern power systems, while the flexibility of conventional generation technologies is restricted by technical constraints, such as ramp rates. This paper shows how wind power generation affects short term operation of the electricity system. Fluctuations in the amount of wind power fed into the grid require, without storage capacities, compensating changes in the output of flexible generators or in the consumers’ behavior. In the presented case study, we show the minimization of the overall costs in presence of stochastic wind power production. For highlighting the variability degree of production from renewable sources, four scenarios of production were formulated, with different probabilities of occurrence. The contribution brought by the paper is represented by the optimization model for demand-response of a large customer in a power system with fossil fueled generators and intermittent renewable energy sources. The consumer can reduce the power system costs by modifying his demand. The demand function is represented as purchasing bidding blocks for the possible price forecasted realizations. The consumer benefit function is modelled as a piecewise linear function.

M-Commerce Payment Systems

With mobile operators having a large customer base and E-Payments getting popular, there is a shift of focus on the huge potential that M-Commerce market offers. Mobile payment service is the core for the success of M-commerce. Mobile payments allow customers to buy digital goods from anywhere and anytime using Internet and mobile environments. Ubiquity, reachability, localization, personalization and dissemination of information are the characteristics that favour mobile payments and encourage the consumers and merchants to use them. This chapter examines various aspects of mobile payments like architectures, limitations, security and trust issues. It also discusses and compares the existing payment procedures of several different companies providing mobile payment services. While exploring the advantages of shifting to mobile payments, the problems that have to be dealt with when adopting new solutions are discussed. Finally the chapter concludes by identifying a common set of requirements criteria for successful global mobile payments.