Title: Prevalence of asymmetric lateral disability on musculoskeletal apparatus in the neonatal age and infancy. Objective: The purpose of this research thesis was to compile issues of possible types of asymmetric musculoskeletal impairment observed in neonates and infants, identify potential causes of these asymmetries and lateral predilection for reported types of asymmetries. The main subject of discussion are just found lateral predilection of asymmetries and relationship of their causes with prenatal, perinatal or postnatal period. Methods: This thesis is structured in the form of literary research and has descriptively- analytical character. Results: On the basis of the analysis of available sources about the asymmetric musculoskeletal impairment in neonates and infants a comprehensive picture of possible types of these impairment, their causes and lateral predilections was made. The vast majority of reported asymmetric impairment seems related to prenatal or perinatal period. Key words: asymmetry in infancy, birth injuries, congenital defects, positional preference

Il y a une forte croissance, à nos jours, de «services» intelligents proposés aux clients sur les plates-formes de commerce électronique, destinés à une assistance personnalisée. L'étude de préférences a suscité un grand intérêt dans ce contexte, grâce à leur utilisation dans la résolution de problèmes liés à la prise de décision. En effet, la recherche sur les préférences en intelligence artificielle (IA) propose différentes manières d'aborder ce problème : de l'acquisition des préférences à leur représentation formelle et, éventuellement, à leur gestion suivant plusieurs méthodes de raisonnement. Dans cette thèse, nous adressons la problématique de la mise en œuvre de préférences comparatives pour l'aide à la décision par le développement d'un système interactif «intelligent» de recommandations personnalisées. Nous suivons une tendance récente, et le concevons sur une base de considérations psychologiques, linguistiques et personnelles. Nous contribuons ainsi aux domaines suivants de préférences en IA : (1) leur acquisition, (2) leur représentation, et (3) leur mise en œuvre. Nous examinons d'abord un goulot d'étranglement dans l'acquisition de préférences et proposons une méthode d'acquisition de préférences exprimées en langage naturel (LN), qui permet leur représentation formelle en tant que préférences comparatives. Nous étudions ensuite les aspects théoriques de la représentation et du raisonnement avec les préférences comparatives pour aide à la décision. Finalement, nous décrivons notre outil de recommandations qui utilise : (1) une base de données de produits qualifiée par une analyse de critiques d'utilisateurs, (2) une approche interactive pour guider les utilisateurs à exprimer leurs préférences comparatives, et (3) un moteur de raisonnement qui manipule ces préférences afin de proposer une recommandation basée sur les préférences de l'utilisateur. / Intelligent ‘services’ are increasingly used on e-commerce platforms to provide assistance to customers. In this context, preferences have gained rapid interest for their utility in solving problems related with decision making. Research on preferences in AI has shed light on various ways of tackling this problem, ranging from the acquisition of preferences to their formal representation and eventually their proper manipulation. Following a recent trend of stepping back and looking at decision-support systems from the user’s point of view, i.e. designing them on the basis of psychological, linguistic and personal considerations, we take up the task of developing an “intelligent” tool which uses comparative preference statements for personalised decision support. We tackle and contribute to different branches of research on preferences in AI: (1) their acquisition (2) their formal representation and manipulation (3) their implementation. We first address a bottleneck in preference acquisition by proposing a method of acquiring user preferences, expressed in natural language (NL), which favours their formal representation and further manipulation. We then focus on the theoretical aspects of handling comparative preference statements for decision support. We finally describe our tool for product recommendation that uses: (1) a review-based analysis to generate a product database, (2) an interactive preference elicitation unit to guide users to express their preferences, and (3) a reasoning engine that manipulates comparative preference statements to generate a preference-based ordering on outcomes as recommendations.

This research examined if travelers are paying for travel on managed lanes (MLs) as they indicated that they would in a 2008 survey. The other objectives of this research included estimating travelers’ value of travel time savings (VTTS) and their value of travel time reliability (VOR), and examining the multiple survey designs used in a 2008 survey to identify which survey design better predicted ML traveler behavior. To achieve the objectives, an Internet-based follow-up stated preference (SP) survey of Houston’s Katy Freeway travelers was conducted in 2010. Three survey design methodologies—Db-efficient, random level generation, and adaptive random—were tested in this survey. A total of 3,325 responses were gathered from the survey, and of those, 869 responses were from those who likely also responded to the previous 2008 survey. Mixed logit models were developed for those 869 previous survey respondents to estimate and compare the VTTS to the 2008 survey estimates. It was found that the 2008 survey estimates of the VTTS were very close to the 2010 survey estimates. In addition, separate mixed logit models were developed from the responses obtained from the three different design strategies in the 2010 survey. The implied mean VTTS varied across the design-specific models. Only the Db-efficient design was able to estimate a VOR. Based on this and several other metrics, the Db-efficient design outperformed the other designs. A mixed logit model including all the responses from all three designs was also developed; the implied mean VTTS was estimated as 65 percent ($22/hr) of the mean hourly wage rate, and the implied mean VOR was estimated as 108 percent ($37/hr) of the mean hourly wage rate. Data on actual usage of the MLs were also collected. Based on actual usage, the average VTTS was calculated as $51/hr. However, the $51/hr travelers are paying likely also includes the value travelers place on travel time reliability of the MLs. The total (VTTS+VOR) amount estimated from the all-inclusive model from the survey was $59/hr, which is close to the value estimated from the actual usage. The Db-efficient design estimated this total as $50/hr. This research also shows that travelers have a difficulty in estimating the time they save while using a ML. They greatly overestimate the amount of time saved. It may well be that even though travelers are saving a small amount of time they value that time savings (and avoiding congestion) much higher – possibly similar to their amount of perceived travel time savings. The initial findings from this study, reported here, are consistent with the hypothesis that travelers are paying for their travel on MLs, much as they said that they would in our previous survey. This supports the use of data on intended behavior in policy analysis.

L’utilisation de préférences suscite un intérêt croissant pour personnaliser des réponses aux requêtes et effectuer des recommandations ciblées. Pourtant, la construction manuelle de profils de préférences reste à la fois complexe et consommatrice de temps. Dans ce contexte, nous présentons dans cette thèse une nouvelle méthode automatique d’extraction de préférences basée sur des techniques de fouille de données. L’approche que nous proposons est constituée de deux phases : (1) une phase d’extraction de toutes les règles de préférences contextuelles intéressantes et (2) une phase de construction du profil utilisateur. A la fin de la première phase, nous constatons qu’il y a des règles redondantes voir superflues ; la seconde phase permet d’éliminer les règles superflues afin d’avoir un profil concis et consistant. Dans notre approche, un profil utilisateur est constitué de cet ensemble de règles de préférences contextuelles résultats de la seconde phase. La consistance garantit que les règles de préférences spécifiant les profils sont en accord avec un grand nombre de préférences utilisateur et contredisent un petit nombre d’entre elles. D’autre part, la concision implique que les profils sont constitués d’un petit nombre de règles de préférences. Nous avons aussi proposé quatre méthodes de prédiction qui utilisent les profils construits. Nous avons validé notre approche sur une base de données de films construite à partir de MovieLens et IMDB. La base de données contient 3 881 films notés par 6 040 utilisateurs. Ces derniers ont attribué 800 156 notes. Les résultats de ces expériences démontrent que la concision des profils utilisateurs est contrôlée par le seuil d’accord minimal et que même avec une forte réduction du nombre de règles, les qualités de prédiction des profils restent à un niveau acceptable. En plus des expérimentations montrant la qualité de prédiction de notre approche, nous avons montré également que les performances de notre approche peuvent rivaliser avec les qualités de prédiction de certaines méthodes de l’état de l’art, en particulier SVMRank. / The use of preferences arouses a growing interest to personalize response to requests and making targeted recommandations. Nevertheless, manual construction of preferences profiles remains complex and time-consuming. In this context, we present in this thesis a new automatic method for preferences elicitation based on data mining techniques. Our proposal is a two phase algorithm : (1) Extracting all contextual preferences rules from a set of user preferences and (2) Building user profile. At the end of the first phase, we notice that there is to much preference rules which satisfy the fixed constraints then in the second phase we eliminate the superfluous preferences rules. In our approach a user profile is constituted by the set of contextual preferences rules resulting of the second phase. A user profile must satisfy conciseness and soundness properties. The soundness property guarantees that the preference rules specifying the profiles are in agreement with a large set of the user preferences, and contradict a small number of them. On the other hand, conciseness implies that profiles are small sets of preference rules. We also proposed four predictions methods which use the extracted profiles. We validated our approach on a set of real-world movie rating datasets built from MovieLens and IMDB. The whole movie rating database consists of 800,156 votes from 6,040 users about 3,881 movies. The results of these experiments demonstrates that the conciseness of user profiles is controlled by the minimal agreement threshold and that even with strong reduction, the soundness of the profile remains at an acceptable level. These experiment also show that predictive qualities of some of our ranking strategies outperform SVMRank in several situations.

Food preference of small rodents to consume the roots of wild plants with the emphasize on their impact to bulbs of orchid Dactylorhiza majalis has been studied on three localities during years 2002 - 2007. There were selected ten couples of plants in each plots, one individual of couple plants was protected by tin triangle. Indicated plants have been measured in the beginning (high, length and wide of the leaves and flower number) and at the end of growing period (number of capsules). Small mammals were snaptrapped for three nights in the autumn. On each locality four rows of 25 snap traps were situated, two rows through orchid plots and two without orchids. In years 2004 {--} 2007 the food preference was ascertained on studied sites. Roots of Daucus carota (as a control in year 2004) and roots of Selinum carvifolia (as control in years 2005 - 2007) and roots of tested plant were put into one rectangle "bait" of size 15 x 6 centimeters from gauze. These 50 "baits" were placed among 100 traps on each locality, every other trap, during snaptrapped of small mammals. Browsing was classified by six number scale. During years 2005 - 2007 food preference of Microtus arvalis under laboratory conditions of Science Faculty of South Bohemia University was achieved with the roots of the same species as we used during food preference on plots. During years 2006 -2007 bulbs of Dactylorhiza majalis from laboratory condition and a few idividuals from endengered meadows by revitalization of pond were added. During yeas 2006 and 2007 the contain of stomach from Microtus arvalis and Microtus agrestis, catched during autumn, was studied. Bulb destruction by small rodents during years 2002 - 2007 was not confirmed. But Microtus arvalis preferred bulbs of Dactylorhiza majalis under laboratory conditions and roots of Selinium carvifolium and Lysimachia vulgaris boths in laboratory and wet meadows. Destruction of orchid bulbs and more preferred roots of wild plants by small rodents could occur probably only in outbreaks of their population cycle. I did not observe this on studied plots. In mount of stomach from Microtus arvalis only 3% underground supply organs of plants; rest of stomach contain was consisted of aboveground green part of plants. This result was expexted, because small rodents prefere during vegetation period green part of plants.

In recent years, due to the development of molecular methods, a great level of cryptic diversity across multiple taxa was discovered. One of these groups are freshwater amphipods. Amphipods due to lower dispersal and recolonization abilities present a suitable model system for studying potential ecological interactions among genetically distant lineages during their secondary contact. In this thesis, I studied the cryptic species complex Gammarus fossarum in a contact zone of several genetically divergent lineages known from the previous research in the Vsetin region. I focused on two main questions: Firstly, whether there are preferences among individuals from different lineages for sexual partners from the same lineage rather than from the different one (i.e., I test for the potential existence of prezygotic reproduction barrier between the lineages). I tested this hypothesis by collecting pairs from natural contact zone and also (in a limited extent) by an aquarium experiment. Secondly, I tested whether these lineages differ in mesohabitat (pool versus riffle) distribution in syntopy, which may indicate competition among lineages and potential diversification of their ecological niches. Animals from nine localities (with expected contact of two lineages per locality) were examined. In more than...

Mate choice decisions have long-term effects on both party's well-being as well as reproductive outcomes. Consequently, evolutionary biology and psychology devoted a large body of research on investigating human mate choice. The evolutionary psychology of human partner selection can be perceived as inter-connected processes, such as mating strategy, mate preferences, and mate choice. This dissertation thesis consists of two larger segments. The first segment is an Introduction to my four original research papers in the second segment. In the Introduction, I discuss heterosexual partner selection in two parts. First, I describe how mating strategies affect mate preferences, what the key mate preference dimensions are - both positive and negative factors of partner evaluations -, how stable they are, and how they change over time within a person. Further, I review the concept of mate value and how mate preference factors are weighing in the overall perception of mate value on the mating market. In the second part, I discuss how partner preferences are integrated into mate choice, also known as the mate choice integration models. The Additive and Threshold models of mate choice, the Euclidean distance model, and Assortative mating will be discussed in detail since they are the most commonly applied...

ABCTRACT This master's thesis is focused on Finnish intensification expressions in the form of the genitive case of adjectives and on adjectives intensified by them. Research is carried out in the form of corpus-based analysis for the purpose of seeing if semantics of intensification expressions affect the possibility of their combination with intensified adjectives. The first chapters of the thesis are dedicated to the theoretical study of semantic relationships and intensification. First of all, the corpus analysis attention focuses on what semantic features intensification expressions themselves have. Intensification expressions are categorized into groups on the basis of these features. Three of the groups are a subject of a more detailed analysis. Each group is represented by three intensification enpressions whose adjective collocations and wider context are examined. The purpose of this part of the analysis is to find out if different groups of intensification expressions appear in different contexts and if expressions belonging to the same group prefer a combination with the same adjectives. Key words: Finnish, intensification expressions, semantic preference and prosody, adjectives, corpus-based analysis

As the effects of climate change worsen, the role and importance of forests in climate mitigation strategies seem to be growing. However, key actors have different views of how the forests should be used in order to curb the consequences of climate change. The future use of forest will therefore depend on these actors’ ability to realize their visions in the political arena. This thesis sets out to investigate how and to what extent a certain type of actor, in this case interest groups, influences forest policy. This is accomplished through a qualitative content analysis of the process toward Sweden’s first national forest program, using preference attainment as the theoretical approach to measure the influence of each interest group. The main finding is that interest groups representing economic values had a larger amount of influence on the policy-making process than interest groups representing environmental values. The study’s primary contribution to the interest group research field is hence empirical.

Breeding compexes of poeciliid fishes with a bisexual and two unisexual species were studied for mechanisms permitting Sympatric coexistence. The unisexuals are gynogenetic and thereby sexually dependent on the males of the bisexual species for sperm to initiate development, but inheritance is entirely maternal. Bisexual females are more abundant in headwater localities; unisexuals increase in downstream localities. Males were 10 - 18% of the total poeciliid population, regardless of the relative proportions of bisexual to unisexual females. Downstream localities were typified by greater habitat diversity, including a variety of backwater pools. The unisexuals showed a marked preference for such pools. Both field and laboratory studies showed that all three types of females as well as males preferred shaded areas with a gravel substrate. Although the four types of fish were found together, nearest neighbour data indicated that each type of female preferred its own kind. Males courted throughout the year and were indiscriminate in their choice of mates. Despite the skewed sex ratio, males were not in short supply because only a few females were sexually receptive at a given time. No significant differences existed between bisexuals and unisexuals in their relative reproductive outputs, but they were asynchronous.