Now the motel industry in Taiwan is increasingly sophisticated, and even some motels are positioning themselves as the boutique hotels,so the business model has been out of the previous framework, like the hotel, with the high texture, on the other hand, beyond the hotel, with rich diversity. Now the motels are no longer set up near highway ramp to pursue convenience and privacy, but to find good location near department stores, metro, and science-based Industrial Park. Now the motel industry places more emphasis on the freshness and characteristics of the product, so in addition to the pursuit of convenience and practicality, motels now focus more on entertainment features. On the other hand, the motels are almost everywhere in high competition status, it is not difficult to find many cluster regions all over Taiwan. In the circumstances, consumers have clear and close impression to link the image between these cluster regions and the motels inside the regions. However the reason why motels usually were gathered and formed to be a cluster.What motivations resulted in industry cluster? What characteristics are shaped inside? How the cluster effect be developed and influence the relations of motels in the same cluster region. These questions are be researched in this thesis. In this study,I selected three major and representative motel clusters in Taiwan: Dazhi Land Consolidation of Taipei City, 7th Land Consolidation of Taichung, 16th agricultural Land Consideration of Kaohsiung City, mainly by interviewing with executives of the motel industry in order to understand the causes of industrial clusters,the competition and cooperation relation in motel clusters, and cluster effect in the industry. And exploring and analyzing the environment of these three cluster regions through observation method, in order to understand the correlation of regional environmental and development of clusters. Finally, the results of this study found that: (1) the main cause of motel cluster, is not because of being attracted by the cluster effect, but the similar needs for location. (2) There are seldomly cooperative behaviors in the motel industry, because the motel industry is very secretive and motels in the same cluster tend to imitate each other, so these results deepen the intensity of competition. (3) The causes of motel cluster are hoping for attracting more customers and finding the appropriate operating environment. (4) Because the industry become saturated and sophisticated, it is very important to make prudent cost-benefit assessment. Besides, it is better to reassess influences of the cluster and try to be aware of the direction of government policy to evaluate the future and the development. (5) Consumer loyalty in motel industry is low, therefore, the latecomers usually have more competitive advantage, and the cluster effects are positive. (6) Although the surroundings are important to all the motels, but there are some different connotations, meanings, and expectations for different motels. (7) The quality of the cluster effect, can not only be evaluated from the perspective of cluster itself, but also be judged from the consideration of the motel itself in one cluster with relative strengths or weaknesses.

Generalized estimating equations (GEEs) are commonly used in the modelling of correlated data. However, in the presence of informative cluster sizes, estimates obtained using GEEs may be biased. In order to correct for this bias a weighted GEE may be used. Previous research has extended the use of weighted GEEs to a longitudinal setting but requires that cluster sizes remain constant over time. In this thesis, two new weighting schemes are investigated to allow for valid parameter estimation in a longitudinal setting where cluster sizes are informative and may change over time. Specifically, this thesis considers weighting by the inverse of the time-dependent cluster size, and by the total number of observations for a given cluster. Through Monte Carlo simulation, the performance of traditional GEEs, GEEs under previously proposed weighting schemes, and these two new models are compared. Results of these studies show that weighting by the total number of observations results in unbiased parameter estimates with excellent coverage.

新加坡共和國(以下簡稱新加坡)長期以來致力推動該國金融產業的自主性發展，並強化該產業成為國家經濟動能的要角。 本論文擬深度剖析新加坡獨特的銀行與金融法規，並分析新加坡在金融業經營管理人才的教育培訓、伊斯蘭金融體系的崛起、人民幣國際化等政策面向所做的努力，以彌補現有學術領域對該國金融業研究的不足和缺口。 本文所採用的分析期間從新加坡啟動金融業自由化開始的1999年，截至2014年為止；而在分析架構方面，我們採用Michael Porter的產業鑽石模型來勾勒出新加坡金融業的產業競爭優勢。 此外，我們藉由檢驗已取得的原始資料與當地市場的條件分析，進一步評估存在於新加坡金融體系的潛在風險和成功要素。 從本文分析結果顯示，新加坡金融業仍缺乏於其競爭對手-香港所擁有的關鍵性經濟規模；此外，該國在金融業經營管理人才的培訓成效上仍然不足。 儘管新加坡政府宣稱將推動該國成為人民幣的境外金融中心，然而該政策僅著重在中華人民共和國的市場開發，並非擴展及整個東南亞區域。 / The Republic of Singapore has long had a voluntary policy of developing its financial sector, and making it an essential part of its economy. This thesis aims at filling in the gaps of the current knowledge about Singapore’s financial cluster, through an in-depth analysis of Singapore’s unique set of banking and financial regulations, and recent developments that include the education of financial managers, the rise of Islamic finance, and the internationalization of the Renminbi. The time frame used to analyze it spans from the liberalization of Singapore’s financial and banking sector, which started in 1999, till 2014. The framework of Porter’s ‘Diamond model’ has been used to outline the strength, and weaknesses of the financial cluster. Shortcomings and successes of Singapore’s financial cluster have been evaluated by analyzing primary sources available, and by examining the local environment. Singapore’s financial cluster still lacks critical mass in comparison to that of its rival, Hong Kong. Furthermore, weaknesses remain in regards to the educational level of financial and banking managers. The recent developments to set Singapore as an offshore Renminbi center can only be acclaimed, however its main focus on the People’s Republic of China, needs to be broadened, to include the overall Southeast Asian region.

In a meta-analysis of articles employing clustering methods, we find that little attention is paid to remaining within-cluster heterogeneity and that average values are relatively high. We suggest addressing this potentially problematic "dark side" of cluster analysis by providing two coefficients as standard information in any cluster analysis findings: a goodness-of-fit measure and a measure which relates explained variation of analysed empirical data to explained variation of simulated random data. The second coefficient is referred to as the Index of Clustering Appropriateness (ICA). Finally, we develop a classification scheme depicting acceptable levels of remaining within-cluster heterogeneity. (authors' abstract)

In this thesis I examine clustering evaluation, with a subfocus on text clusterings specifically. The principal work of this thesis is the development, analysis, and testing of a new internal clustering quality measure called informativeness. I begin by reviewing clustering in general. I then review current clustering quality measures, accompanying this with an in-depth discussion of many of the important properties one needs to understand about such measures. This is followed by extensive document clustering experiments that show problems with standard clustering evaluation practices. I then develop informativeness, my new internal clustering quality measure for estimating the clarity of clusterings. I show that informativeness, which uses classification accuracy as a proxy for human assessment of clusterings, is both theoretically sensible and works empirically. I present a generalization of informativeness that leverages external clustering quality measures. I also show its use in a realistic application: email spam filtering. I show that informativeness can be used to select clusterings which lead to superior spam filters when few true labels are available. I conclude this thesis with a discussion of clustering evaluation in general, informativeness, and the directions I believe clustering evaluation research should take in the future.

Expressed sequence tag database is a rich and fast growing source of data for gene expression analysis and drug discovery. Clustering of raw EST data is a necessary step for further analysis and one of the most challenging problems of modem computational biology.

No description available.

Increasingly, online computer applications rely on large-scale data analyses to offer personalised and improved products. These large-scale analyses are performed on distributed data processing execution engines that run on thousands of networked machines housed within an individual data centre. These execution engines provide, to the programmer, the illusion of running data analysis workflows on a single machine, and offer programming interfaces that shield developers from the intricacies of implementing parallel, fault-tolerant computations. Many such execution engines exist, but they embed assumptions about the computations they execute, or only target certain types of computations. Understanding these assumptions involves substantial study and experimentation. Thus, developers find it difficult to determine which execution engine is best, and even if they did, they become “locked in” because engineering effort is required to port workflows. In this dissertation, I first argue that in order to execute data analysis computations efficiently, and to flexibly choose the best engines, the way we specify data analysis computations should be decoupled from the execution engines that run the computations. I propose an architecture for decoupling data processing, together with Musketeer, my proof-of-concept implementation of this architecture. In Musketeer, developers express data analysis computations using their preferred programming interface. These are translated into a common intermediate representation from which code is generated and executed on the most appropriate execution engine. I show that Musketeer can be used to write data analysis computations directly, and these can execute on many execution engines because Musketeer automatically generates code that is competitive with optimised hand-written implementations. The diverse execution engines cause different workflow types to coexist within a data centre, opening up both opportunities for sharing and potential pitfalls for co-location interference. However, in practice, workflows are either placed by high-quality schedulers that avoid co-location interference, but choose placements slowly, or schedulers that choose placements quickly, but with unpredictable workflow run time due to co-location interference. In this dissertation, I show that schedulers can choose high-quality placements with low latency. I develop several techniques to improve Firmament, a high-quality min-cost flow-based scheduler, to choose placements quickly in large data centres. Finally, I demonstrate that Firmament chooses placements at least as good as other sophisticated schedulers, but at the speeds associated with simple schedulers. These contributions enable more efficient and effective use of data centres for large-scale computation than current solutions.

p. 1 - 89 / Submitted by Santiago Fabio (fabio.ssantiago@hotmail.com) on 2013-01-22T18:31:01Z No. of bitstreams: 2 Textual - Ufba.pdf: 456287 bytes, checksum: 7eb3c235b387fcc373c085a5c8a48a2c (MD5) Pre Textual - Ufba.pdf: 34407 bytes, checksum: c14da7f6841d0188a012189d150a30c6 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2013-01-22T18:31:01Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 Textual - Ufba.pdf: 456287 bytes, checksum: 7eb3c235b387fcc373c085a5c8a48a2c (MD5) Pre Textual - Ufba.pdf: 34407 bytes, checksum: c14da7f6841d0188a012189d150a30c6 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2007 / Este estudo se propõe a analisar o nível de competitividade do Cluster de fertilizantes da Região Metropolitana de Salvador. Especificamente pretende-se analisar a evolução da indústria internacional, brasileira e baiana, identificar e discutir suas principais limitações, identificar e discutir suas principais competências, avaliar as estratégias das indústrias de fertilizantes e recomendar ações que aumentem o grau de competitividade das indústrias que compõem o Cluster. Para analisar a competitividade, considerou-se o modelo proposto no Estudo da Competitividade da Indústria Brasileira (ECIB). O Modelo ECIB avalia Fatores Empresariais - aqueles sobre os quais a empresa detém o poder de decisão, Estruturais – aqueles sobre os quais a empresa possui limitado poder de intervenção e Sistêmicos – aqueles sobre os quais a empresa detém escasso ou nenhum poder de intervir. O estudo também apresenta conceitos básicos sobre fertilidade do solo, com as principais funções fisiológicas dos macronutrientes. A história da indústria de fertilizantes no Brasil é apresentada em cinco fases, com os eventos mais relevantes de cada fase. A pesquisa de campo foi realizada através de análise de dados secundários e entrevistas com especialistas de todas as empresas de fertilizantes do Cluster, incluindo misturadoras de adubos e fábricas produtoras de fertilizantes intermediários. O trabalho finaliza com a identificação e análise dos principais fatores de competitividade, destacando suas fragilidades e os pontos onde o cluster é competitivo. A expectativa é que o trabalho tenha contribuído para um maior conhecimento dos problemas que influenciam a competitividade do Cluster, bem como estimular uma reflexão sobre o desenvolvimento do setor de fertilizantes na Bahia. / Salvador

Nous proposons une approche de structuration des activités d’un cluster d’innovation. Nos apports se font à deux niveaux : une aide à la gouvernance et à la structuration des activités, et une méthodologie de sélection et d’accompagnement des projets innovants potentiellement les plus créateurs de valeur de ce cluster. Une application est présentée dans le cadre du développement de la grappe d’entreprises SOLIAGE pour favoriser l’innovation en gérontechnologie. Notre premier apport, d’ordre organisationnel, consiste à structurer le passage d’une phase d’émergence à celle de développement d’une grappe d’entreprises. L’objectif est de permettre à cette organisation participative de se doter d’une vision et de valeurs, d’objectifs, d’une gouvernance, d’un plan d’action qui soient pleinement partagés par ses membres. Ceci est rendu possible par le développement d’une dynamique de coopération et de confiance entre les membres. Ainsi, nous appliquons la méthode PAT-Miroir® qui a permis de structurer l’ensemble des axes d’actions stratégiques du cluster. Notre second apport consiste à structurer et professionnaliser un fond d’innovation finançant et/ou accompagnant des projets les plus créateurs de valeurs dès l’émergence d’une idée, d’un nouveau produit et/ou service. Sur les principes de la méthodologie Radical Innovation Design®, nous avons conçu un système de sélection de projets d’innovation en gérontechnologie, nommé SAPIGE®, qui présente des éléments de preuve suffisants de valeur, d’innovation et de concept. Nous proposons ensuite une logique de financement et/ou d’accompagnement. L’accompagnement vise à renforcer les preuves de valeur, d’innovation et de concept en faisant appel à l’expertise des membres de la grappe d’entreprises. / An approach for structuring the activities of an innovation cluster is proposed. Our main contributions are made at two levels: a governance and activities structuring support, and a system for selecting and supporting innovative projects, which are potentially the most value creating within this cluster. An application is presented on the SOLIAGE cluster development. This innovation cluster encourages the development of products and/or services in the gerontechnology market. Our first contribution is organizational, when the innovation cluster moves from the emergence phase to the development one. The main objective consists in developing common vision, values, goals, governance and action plan fully shared by the members of the innovation cluster. This is made possible by the development of a dynamic of cooperation and trust between members. Thus, we apply the PAT Miroir® Method to structure strategic actions in the cluster. Our second result is to organize and professionalize an innovation fund. This fund allows to finance and/or support innovative projects, which are the most value creating at the earlier stage of development of a new product or service. On the principles of the Radical Innovation Design® methodology, we propose a system, which selects of gerontechnology innovative projects with sufficient evidences of value, innovation and concept. Next, we propose a funding and coaching approach. The coaching, based on the expertise of members of the cluster, aims at strengthen in the proofs of value, innovation and concept.