In the last decade omics technologies enabled detailed and system-wide analysis of complex biological samples. Genomics, transcriptomics and metabolomics all benefited tremendously from technological advances in their respective fields. Proteomics was revolutionised by mass spectrometry, which allowed simultaneous identification of thousands of proteins in cells, tissues and organisms. And this mainly qualitative revolution, quickly turned quantitative. This work had two main objectives. Firstly, to apply the state of the art instrumentation, data analysis and bioinformatics methods to better our understanding of basic cell biology in a model organism Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Specifically, to quantitatively describe the effects of perturbations, such as adverse environmental conditions or chaperone gene deletions, on protein abundances in the cell. Additionally, it was aimed to demonstrate and evaluate the ability of a new timeof-flight mass spectrometer to perform large-scale absolute quantification. First, it was found that yeast cells are remarkably robust to deletions of major chaperone hub proteins (Ssa1p or Ssb1p deletions). This ability was attributed to network structure and redistribution of folding workload among other related chaperones rather than simple functional redundancy. Second, to build on the first set of results, a detailed time resolved description of yeast proteome dynamics in response to heat stress was provided for the wild type and Ssb1p chaperone mutant strains. In this study, for the first time in the literature, temporal expression patterns of many hallmark heat shock proteins were elucidated. Globally, a slow and sustained proteome remodelling or 'buffering' was revealed in both strains. However, it was also shown that the cells knocked out for the Ssb1p chaperone respond to heat in a distinctly different manner to the wild type strain. Finally, consistent and reproducible absolute quantification of multiple yeast proteomes was demonstrated using a new commercial time-of-flight mass spectrometer with ion mobility separation capabilities. The data obtained revealed global differences in cellular protein content between various chaperone prefoldin mutants as well as differential expression of a set of proteins promising to be interesting targets for further investigations.

Background and Problem: Consumer behavior has become a topic of great interest in today’s society. Considering todays competitive markets it is imperative that companies understand the needs and actions of their customers. There are many influences behind consumers’ decisions of choosing one brand over another. This thesis investigates Swedish consumers and why some private label products succeed, while others fail within different product categories. Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to investigate how the nature of the good influences Swedish consumers in their decision between private label and national brand goods. Frame of reference: Three theories are applied in order to understand consumer choices: brand loyalty, perceived risk factor and social risk factor. Method: Both a quantitative survey and qualitative interviews have been carried out and applied to the three theories. Coding of interviews was used to understand how the level of influence varies amongst different product types. In order to respond to the research questions, these findings were compared to sales statistics received from Swedish supermarkets. Conclusion: It can be concluded that the three influences affect consumer choices differently,depending on the type of good. Private label brands succeed in low loyalty, low social risk, and low perceived risk goods, while national brands take the lead in high brand loyalty, high social pressure and high associated risk good categories.

Research Question: How eco-label can influence on consumer buying behavior by focusing on bakery industry. Purpose: The main objective of this research is to identify and analyze how eco-label on bread can influence on consumer buying behavior. Furthermore, the thesis will propose suggestions for the food markets future improvements. Method: In this paper the literature review has based on the secondary data and telephone interview, e-survey and interview as the primary data has been carried out. Conclusion: Ecological labels do influence on buyer behavior, however it is difficult to make this statement about organic bread because of lack of supply and advertisement that makes it hard for people to get information about existence of such bread.

The proportion that the retailer develops the own brand grows to even greater heights, domestic large retailers develop the own brand one after another and private labels (PBs) invade and occupy the market badly. The retailer develops the own brand challenging the leading brand of the market directly and under the situation with limited shelve space, the relationship between them changes and becomes rival meaning from the original cooperation. How should the retailer obtain an equalization point when make the competitive rivalry for the growth of its own brand from originally act manufacturers' consumer role? For manufacturers, how to protect the negotiation price space with shelve to the retailer, and how to keep making a profit in their consumers¡¦ brand loyalty? This research by interviewing both two sides to explore the future trend of PBs, what strategies will manufacturers take to avoid PBs¡¦ threats , what market size will be the PBs¡¦ limit and which two sides achive their balance point. Through summarizing the papers , developing the research process of this thesis and using the research method of case study to combine theory and experiment.By interviewing the leading brands of consumer goods and food industry and experienced retailer on PBs, after analyzing and comparing, to draw a conclusion to collect above objectives.

In recent years, there are more and more private label products in Taiwan¡¦s retailing channel. It is easy for consumer to purchase those products though supermarkets, hypermarkets, or convenience stores. Retailers have developed and sold private label products widely in the United State and Europe for past three decades, and high proportions of the consumers had such good impression for those products. Private label can create big profit for retailing channel especially in hypermarket in Taiwan, but the actual profit remains small for years. That¡¦s why we want to know what causes the result. In this article we hope to find some important facts and to provide suggestions for the future strategies. Private label products can have different performance through different categories, and many articles find that private label in some specific categories bring more profits than others. In this article, we choose ten different products to understand how product characteristics affect consumer behavior. We use convenience sampling in Taipei and Kaohsiung. By means of the questionnaire survey, we try to learn more about the effect of consumer behavior and product characteristics on hypermarket's private label¡¦s attitude and purchasing behavior. Both quality and price are key factors which can affect purchasing. The quality difference between national brands and private labels cause the lower purchasing intentions in private label. We also find that private label performs better in daily use products and stationery. It is shown that through different categories, the acceptance and attitude toward private label will be different. We suggest adding more factors of consumer behavior and product characteristics to understand the purchasing behavior and the attitude toward private label products in the future study.

Revised; Originally published: 12/2008 / Food labels are designed to help consumers to make healthy food choices. Yet the Nutrition Facts label is not always easy to understand, due to a lot of technical information. The step-by-step approach in this publication is easy to follow, and may help consumers to build skills how to read and use the information on a Nutrition Facts label more easily and effectively for their needs. This two page information sheet is useful, especially when a nutrition educator teaches a lay person those tricky foods labeling terms and recommends healthy alternative in his/her diet.

This study aimed to examine how variants in diagnostic labels might alter stigma toward Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) sufferers and secondly, to evaluate an existing scale (GASS) designed to measure that stigma. Data was collected from Swedish university students (N=447) where the impact of labeling upon stigma was measured by manipulating the presence and content of a label. Psychometric properties of the GASS were investigated and compared to the properties reported by the developers of the scale. Due to conflicting findings, further examination appears necessary. Results revealed that the presence of a general label (diagnosis cluster) reduced stigma opposed to the absence of a label. Conclusion was drawn that GAD sufferers should specify their problems with a general label to reduce stigma held toward them. / Syftet med denna studie var att undersöka hur skillnader av framställd diagnosetikett påverkar stigma mot personer med Generaliserat Ångestsyndrom, samt att utvärdera ett befintligt mätinstrument (GASS) vilken mäter detta stigma. Data samlades in från svenska universitetsstudenter (N=447) och stigmats påverkan av etiketter mättes genom manipulation av närvarande, samt typ, av etikett. Mätinstrumentet utvärderades genom jämförelse med tidigare resultat vilka presenterats av mätinstrumentets utvecklare. Med hänvisning till motstridiga resultat behövs ytterligare utvärdering av mätinstrumentet. Resultat visade att en generell etikett (diagnosens kluster) minskade stigma i jämförelse med frånvaro av en etikett. Slutsats drogs att de som lider av GAD, bör specificera sina problem på generell nivå för att minska stigma mot sig.

One of the key features driving the growth and success of the Social Web is large-scale participation through user-contributed content – often through short text in social media. Unlike traditional long-form documents – e.g., Web pages, blog posts – these short text resources are typically quite brief (on the order of 100s of characters), often of a personal nature (reflecting opinions and reactions of users), and being generated at an explosive rate. Coupled with this explosion of short text in social media is the need for new methods to organize, monitor, and distill relevant information from these large-scale social systems, even in the face of the inherent “messiness” of short text, considering the wide variability in quality, style, and substance of short text generated by a legion of Social Web participants. Hence, this dissertation seeks to develop new algorithms and methods to ensure the continued growth of the Social Web by enhancing how users engage with short text in social media. Concretely, this dissertation takes a three-fold approach: First, this dissertation develops a learning-based algorithm to automatically rank short text comments associated with a Social Web object (e.g., Web document, image, video) based on the expressed preferences of the community itself, so that low-quality short text may be filtered and user attention may be focused on highly-ranked short text. Second, this dissertation organizes short text through labeling, via a graph- based framework for automatically assigning relevant labels to short text. In this way meaningful semantic descriptors may be assigned to short text for improved classification, browsing, and visualization. Third, this dissertation presents a cluster-based summarization approach for extracting high-quality viewpoints expressed in a collection of short text, while maintaining diverse viewpoints. By summarizing short text, user attention may quickly assess the aggregate viewpoints expressed in a collection of short text, without the need to scan each of possibly thousands of short text items.

This study used vital bone markers to investigate mineralized tissue adaptation in the periodontium of rats after a hypothermic insult to their maxillary first molars. This hypothermic insult has been shown in previous studies to induce aseptic root resorption with variable effects on ankylosis. A secondary objective was to assess the pulpal changes that occurred concurrent with the changes in the periodontium. Four groups of 7, eight-week old male Sprague Dawley rats were assigned to be euthanased at the day 7, 14, 21 and 28 observation periods. At day 0, 4 groups of 6 rats were subject to a single 20 minute application of dry ice on their maxillary right first molar. The remaining 1 rat within each group did not receive the dry ice. All rats were given 2 sequential bone labels, calcein 5mg/kg and alizarin red 30mg/kg, administered intraperitoneally 8 days apart. The timing of the labels was such that all rats were euthanased 2 days after the last label. The rat maxillae were fixed in ethanol and embedded undecalcified in methylmethacrylate. Ten micrometre coronal sections were obtained through the furcation of the first molars with three of each group of ten consecutive sections being unstained, stained with von Kossa/ hematoxylin and eosin counterstain, or decalcified and stained with hematoxylin and eosin, respectively. Unstained sections were viewed under fluorescence, while transmitted light microscopy was used for the other sections. Mineral apposition rates along the bone, root and pulpal surfaces as well as periodontal ligament width were measured using histomorphometry. Semiquantitative measurements of the resorptive surfaces within the periodontium were also noted. Multivariate and negative binomial regression statistical analyses were used to identify influencing variables. A focal pattern of ankylosis was observed at days 14 and 21 in 3 rats and was not seen at day 28. In both the treated and control teeth, appositional activity was greatest along bone and least along the root surface. Mineral tissue apposition rates along the bone and root surface displayed an initial spike during day 14 but declined to levels of the control teeth by day 28. A longer time lag was observed with appositional activity in the pulp which also displayed a declining trend towards the control teeth values by day 28. Resorption levels along the root surface continued to remain significantly (p<0.0001) elevated. The significantly (p<0.0001) wider periodontal ligament width in the treated molars showed a declining trend towards that of the control teeth by day 28. There was a temporary disturbance of mineralized tissue adaptation on the bone and root surfaces with a recovery of cellular vitality within the periodontium and pulp and a trend towards homeostasis of the periodontal ligament width. The null hypotheses that a single prolonged thermal insult on a rat has no effect on mineralized tissue adaptation within the periodontium and pulp chamber and that the periodontal ligament width within the interradicular region does not change in response to thermal trauma induced by the present study were rejected. / http://proxy.library.adelaide.edu.au/login?url= http://library.adelaide.edu.au/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=1345386 / Thesis (D.Clin.Dent) - University of Adelaide, School of Dentistry, 2008

In "decomposition/reconstruction" strategy, we can solve a complex problem by 1) decomposing the problem into simpler sub-problems, 2) solving sub-problems with simpler systems (sub-systems) and 3) combining the results of sub-systems to solve the original problem. In a classification task we may have "label complexity" which is due to high number of possible classes, "function complexity" which means the existence of complex input-output relationship, and "input complexity" which is due to requirement of a huge feature set to represent patterns. Error Correcting Output Code (ECOC) is a technique to reduce the label complexity in which a multi-class problem will be decomposed into a set of binary sub-problems, based oil the sequence of "0"s and "1"s of the columns of a decomposition (code) matrix. Then a given pattern can be assigned to the class having minimum distance to the results of sub-problems. The lack of knowledge about the relationship between distance measurement and class score (like posterior probabilities) has caused some essential shortcomings to answering questions about "source of effectiveness", "error analysis", " code selecting ", and " alternative reconstruction methods" in previous works. Proposing a theoretical framework in this thesis to specify this relationship, our main contributions in this subject are to: 1) explain the theoretical reasons for code selection conditions 2) suggest new conditions for code generation (equidistance code)which minimise reconstruction error and address a search technique for code selection 3) provide an analysis to show the effect of different kinds of error on final performance 4) suggest a novel combining method to reduce the effect of code word selection in non-optimum codes 5) suggest novel reconstruction frameworks to combine the component outputs. Some experiments on artificial and real benchmarks demonstrate significant improvement achieved in multi-class problems when simple feed forward neural networks are arranged based on suggested framework To solve the problem of function complexity we considered AdaBoost, as a technique which can be fused with ECOC to overcome its shortcoming for binary problems. And to handle the problems of huge feature sets, we have suggested a multi-net structure with local back propagation. To demonstrate these improvements on realistic problems a face recognition application is considered. Key words: decomposition/ reconstruction, reconstruction error, error correcting output codes, bias-variance decomposition.