Recent interest in identifying and measuring health outcomes represents an advance in our understanding of how health care for individuals should be evaluated. However, the concept of health outcomes has mainly focussed on improvements in health status. Non-health outcomes of health care may also be important to patients. In this thesis, four tasks were undertaken with the aim of identifying non-health outcomes and establishing the extent of their relevance and importance to patients. First, the illness experience literature was reviewed to identify potential non-health outcomes. Seven categories of non-health outcomes were identified: information, being treated with dignity, being able to trust the health care provider, having distress recognised and supported, participating in decision making, legitimation and reassurance. Second, to gain an in-depth understanding of these concepts, topic-specific literature was reviewed and synthesised. Third, in order to confirm how relevant and important the concepts were to patients, a qualitative study was conducted with each of two different groups of health service users. Broadly, patients considered that all the non-health concepts were relevant, although the extent to which they were important varied. Fourth, to test the relative importance of the seven concepts, a Stated Preference Discrete Choice experiment in the context of general practice was conducted. This study showed that most people thought their GP demonstrated behaviour likely to result in the production of non-health outcomes. The results showed that although all the non-health outcomes were, to some extent, preferred by respondents, trust was most important, followed by legitimation and recognition of and support for emotional distress. Once again, these results point to the importance of context in the evaluation of health care from the patient's perspective. While still being perceived as positive aspects of health care, the provision of information and acting autonomously or participating in decisions about their health care were the non-health outcomes considered least important by patients

The work of this Master of Science thesis project is an analysis of salinity effects on nearshore epifauna along the western shore of Biscayne Bay in southeast Florida, USA. Field collection surveys have found a high probability of occurrence of bigeye mojarra (Eucinostomus havana) in salinities near 25 ppt. In a salinity gradient observation experiment test subjects of the same species and size class were also observed more frequently at 24 ppt. In this analysis presence and abundance patterns found in field surveys were compared with behavioral results obtained in the observation tank. This apparatus provided insight into distribution patterns of the bigeye mojarra (Eucinostomus havana) and possible changes in distribution that may result from habitat changes in the future. Historically, the western shore of Biscayne Bay was more freshwater marsh than the mangrove dominated marine environment that prevails today. Changes to fresh water inputs into the Bay are planned through projects of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP). CERP is a joint Florida state and U.S. federal effort to redesign surface water flow through the canal system of South Florida, replenish the Everglades ecosystem, and restore a more natural quantity, timing, and distribution of flow into Biscayne and Florida Bays. Approved by the U.S. Congress as part of the Water Resources Development Act of 2000, CERP will be implemented by the South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE). This plan is designed to restore the ecosystem from its freshwater core to the coastal wetlands recreating a condition close to that existing before the current system of flood control drainage canals was begun in 1903 and continued by the federal Central and Southern Florida Project in 1948 (www.evergladesplan.org). Changes are planned to divert a portion of canal flows to Biscayne Bay into coastal wetlands as sheet flow and surface runoff. Planned changes to freshwater delivery may change the habitat along the shoreline and thus the distribution of prey organisms living in this habitat. This may in turn affect predator fish important to local recreational and commercial fisheries as well as other predators such as wading birds. The analysis and prediction provided in this thesis work is important for better understanding the effects of restoration efforts on the Bay nearshore habitat and its condition as essential fish habitat, which is federally regulated by the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (Magnuson-Stevens, 1996). The distribution of small fish and invertebrate inhabitants of the nearshore environment and habitat environmental qualities have been recorded over the past five years from throw-trap surveys of the western shoreline of Biscayne Bay as part of a CERP-sponsored monitoring program. This pattern is correlated with salinity, but there may be other factors affecting the distribution of this species.

Color has a large impact on our psychological and physiological responses. This study examines the value of color as a component in a healing environment for pediatric patient rooms by measuring color preferences among healthy children, pediatric patients, and design professionals. Environmental satisfaction is a significant mediator between the physical environment and children’s health. Previous color preference studies have typically been done with small color chips or papers, which are very different from seeing a color applied on wall surfaces. A simulation method allowed for investigating the value of color in real contexts and controlling confounding variables. The findings of this study demonstrated that blue and green are the most preferred, and white the least preferred color, by both children and design professionals. Children’s gender differences were found in that boys prefer red and purple less than girls. Pediatric patients reported lower preference scores for yellow than did healthy children. These findings lead to color application guidelines for designers to understand color more and eventually to create better environments for children and their families.

One of the most important challenges facing us today is to personalize services based on user preferences. In order to achieve this objective, the design of Recommender Systems (RSs), which are systems designed to aid the users through different decision-making processes by providing recommendations to them, have been an active area of research. RSs may produce personalized and non-personalized recommendations. Non-personalized RSs provide general suggestions to a user, based on the number of times an item has been selected in the past. Personalized RSs, on the other hand, aim to predict the most suitable items for a specific user, based on the user’s preferences and constraints. The latter are the focus of this thesis. While Recommender Systems have been successful in many domains, a number of challenges remain. For example, most implementations consider only single criteria ratings, and consequently are unable to identify why a user prefers an item over others. Many systems classify the user into one single group or cluster which is an unrealistic approach, since in real world users share commonalities in different degrees with diverse types of users. Others require a large amount of previously gathered data about users’ interactions and preferences, in order to be successfully applied. In this study, we introduce a methodology for the creation of Personalized Multi Criteria Context Aware Recommender Systems that aims to overcome these shortcomings. Our methodology incorporates the user’s current context information, and techniques from the Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) field of study to analyze and model the user preferences. To this end, we create a multi criteria user preference model to assess the utility of each item for a specific user, to then recommend the items with the highest utility. The criteria considered when creating the user preference model are the user’s location, mobility level and user profile. The latter is obtained by considering the user specific needs, and generalizing the user data from a large scale demographic database. We present a case study where we applied our methodology into PeRS, a personal Recommender System to recommend events that will take place within the Ottawa/Gatineau Region. Furthermore, we conduct an offline experiment performed to evaluate our methodology, as implemented in our case study. From the experimental results we conclude that our RS is capable to accurately narrow down, and identify, the groups from a demographic database where a user may belong, and subsequently generate highly accurate recommendation lists of items that match with his/her preferences. This means that the system has the ability to understand and typify the user. Moreover, the results show that the obtained system accuracy doesn’t depend on the user profile. Therefore, the system is potentially capable to produce equally accurate recommendations for a wide range of the population.

Knowledge of how animals utilize their space can be important when they are held in captivity. This is especially true for animals that are on the edge of extinction as such knowledge can possibly help to improve their captive breeding programs. One of these animals is the dhole, Cuon alpinus. The aim for this study was to assess how the dholes at Kolmården zoo utilize their space, if they share space and if they prefer to use specific pathways. The study took place at Kolmården zoo during 12 days and included a total of 72 hours of visual observation. A summarized map, with subdivision into 14 zones, of the dholes’ enclosure was used when recording the dholes’ location. For location recordings scan sampling was used. The dholes showed marked differences in utilization of zones ranging from the most popular zone with 1341 markings to the least popular zone with 71 markings. There was a clear preference for three zones during the whole observation period. No marked differences for utilization of zones were found between feeding vs. non-feeding days and morning vs. afternoon. Furthermore, the dholes showed a tendency for sharing space and utilization of two pathways. This project makes it evident that the dholes at Kolmården zoo prefer certain zones within their enclosure. This is probably due to that the zones preferred provides locations with access to resting, lookout possibilities etc that is important for the dholes to express a natural behavior.

Issues related to global warming and weather changes have forced people start to pay attention to energy saving. We expect that Smart Home Energy Management (SHEM) would be an important development over the next decade. In some environments cost is important, in other environments living quality is important and in other environments a tradeoff between cost and living quality is important. SHEM means being able to manage electrical loads so as to meet different purposes in homes. In this thesis, we develop a SHEM to curtail some electrical loads at peak time to meet predefined circuit level demand limits while minimizing the effect on users¡¦ living quality. The core of our SHEM is an electrical control loop which is developed based on heuristic modifications through lots of case studies and trials. To this end, we study several utilization characteristics of household loads including air conditioning, water heaters clothes dryers, and electric vehicles and model their behaviors through computer simulations. Finally, we implement the whole ideal of our SHEM in LabVIEW (Laboratory Virtual Instrument Engineering Workbench). Several simulations are conducted to verify the robustness and efficiency of our SHEM. keyword : Quick Charge,Load Priority,Convience Preference,Severity Indices,Duration Indices.

Color has a large impact on our psychological and physiological responses. This study examines the value of color as a component in a healing environment for pediatric patient rooms by measuring color preferences among healthy children, pediatric patients, and design professionals. Environmental satisfaction is a significant mediator between the physical environment and children’s health. Previous color preference studies have typically been done with small color chips or papers, which are very different from seeing a color applied on wall surfaces. A simulation method allowed for investigating the value of color in real contexts and controlling confounding variables. The findings of this study demonstrated that blue and green are the most preferred, and white the least preferred color, by both children and design professionals. Children’s gender differences were found in that boys prefer red and purple less than girls. Pediatric patients reported lower preference scores for yellow than did healthy children. These findings lead to color application guidelines for designers to understand color more and eventually to create better environments for children and their families.

Large-scale socially-generated metadata is one of the key features driving the growth and success of the emerging Social Web. Recently there have been many research efforts to study the quality of this metadata - like user-contributed tags, comments, and ratings - and its potential impact on new opportunities for intelligent information access. However, much existing research relies on quality assessments made by human experts external to a Social Web community. In the present study, we are interested in understanding how an online community itself perceives the relative quality of its own user-contributed content, which has important implications for the successful selfregulation and growth of the Social Web in the presence of increasing spam and a flood of Social Web metadata. We propose and evaluate a machine learning-based approach for ranking comments on the Social Web based on the community's expressed preferences, which can be used to promote high-quality comments and filter out low-quality comments. We study several factors impacting community preference, including the contributor's reputation and community activity level, as well as the complexity and richness of the comment. Through experiments, we find that the proposed approach results in significant improvement in ranking quality versus alternative approaches.

Black-naped Oriole (Oriolus chinensis), Oriolidae, Passeriformes, is a member of old world songbirds. It has a wide distribution all over the eastern Asia, and is divided into 18 to 20 subspecies by differences in breeding sites, residents or migrants, morphological characters and songs. The populations breeding in Taiwan are classified as subspecies Oriolus chinensis diffusus. Black-naped Orioles inhabit in wooded habitats with a preference for tall secondary forests and disturbed wooded habitats and the staple foods of Black-naped Orioles are fruits, larvae, pupae and imagines of insects. This study was intented to understand the habitat preference and to explore the fundamental ecological data of Black-naped Oriole in Taiwan. Breeding seasons of Black-naped Oriole started from March and ended in July, and reached its peak from April to June. Most of the birds had two broods each year. Females built nests and incubated for 17-21 days alone, and males shared feeding and protecting juveniles after hatching. The birds of Pingtung population often built their nests on tall Albizia falcate and those of Fenglin population on Pachira macrocarpa. The breeding success was 23.3% in Pingtung and 18.2% in Fenglin. The breeding failure were due to human disturbance, climate, and poaching. The materials used for nest were bark, grass, leaves, and some artificial materials. Black-naped Orioles prefer to build nests at the same tree but on different branches. The nests were often closed to nests of Dicrurus macrocercus. Cooperative defenses between these two birds were observed.

It is a common phenomenon that experiences and educational background will take into account first. When high technology industrial corporations select engineers, they apply mental test or interview them in order to realize their personal characters which make clear and bright whether personal characters would collocate to work or not. In all, they want to make sure to choose the appropriate engineers. The paper attempts to study through different points of view to analyze the working attitudes and manners of engineers. In order to discover some useful messages and to help high technology industry, the study plans recruits and retaining strategy which can consolidate the manpower and core essence of this field. In this study, there are 323 engineers selected from 17 high technology corporations ( 11 of them are integrated circuit industry, 2 of them are electro- optical industry, 3 of them are computer and peripherals industry, 1 of them is communication industry ) for an empirical study. Their background information were collected to explore how the 4 variables (money ethic¡Bwork preference¡Bworkaholism and perfectionism) effect professional commitment . Thus, we hope the study can allow us to get the better knowledge of professional commitment of engineers. The following 4 main points were found in this study ¡G 1. Money ethic would influence on some professional commitment of engineers. While work preference¡Bworkaholism and perfectionism are considerable, the influence of money ethic would decrease. 2.The different motive levels in cognition and attitude would influence on achievements and learning manners of engineers. Thus, the diverse demand to intrinsic-extrinsic motive would effect the professional commitment of engineers. So if the engineers ask for higher demand of intrinsic than of extrinsic, they would have higher professional commitment. 3.The variable of workaholism dose not effect professional commitment obviously. The result could make engineers who are compelled to obey the norms from organization or team under an involuntary deed. 4.The perfectionism is the most explanatory to the professional commitment of engineers . So the Perfectionism¡¦s characters are more obvious and the working attitudes of engineers would be higher professional commitment. At last, this study would focus on the limitation of this study, the future study, and management meanings to present brief explanation.