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According to the context theory of classification, the document-clustering behaviors of individuals not only involve the attributes (including contents) of documents but also depend on who is doing the task and in what context. Thus, effective document-clustering techniques need to be able to take into account users¡¦ categorization preferences and thus can generate document clusters from different preferential perspectives. The Preference-Anchored Document Clustering (PAC) technique was proposed for supporting preference-based document-clustering. Specifically, PAC takes a user¡¦s categorization preference into consideration and subsequently generates a set of document clusters from this specific preferential perspective. In this study, we attempt to investigate two research questions concerning the PAC technique. The first research question investigates ¡§whether the incorporation of the broader-term expansion (i.e., the proposed PAC2 technique in this study) will improve the effectiveness of preference-based document-clustering, whereas the second research question is ¡§whether the use of a statistical-based thesaurus constructed from a larger document corpus will improve the effectiveness of preference-based document-clustering.¡¨ Compared with the effectiveness achieved by PAC, our empirical results show that the proposed PAC2 technique neither improves nor deteriorates the effectiveness of preference-based document-clustering when the complete set of anchoring terms is used. However, when only a partial set of anchoring terms is provided, PAC2 cannot improve and even deteriorate the effectiveness of preference-based document-clustering. As to the second research question, our empirical results suggest the use of a statistical-based thesaurus constructed from a larger document corpus (i.e., the ACM corpus consisting of 14,729 documents) does not improve the effectiveness of PAC and PAC2 for preference-based document-clustering.

Contents of Thesis and Abstract: In a highly democratic nation, a majority of the national affairs are determined by the opinions of civilians. All public departments work their utmost to pursue ¡§public satisfaction.¡¨ As one of the control bodies of the society, the police organization not only performs intervening and banning acts, but also has to pay attention to the quality of its service to the public. Between the roles the police should play, there exists an extremely great conflict. Undoubtedly, there creates additional burden to the work of the police, which was originally under high working pressure and high degree of tiredness. According to Clause 2 of the Police Act of Taiwan, ¡§The duties of the police are to maintain public order, protect social safety, prevent all the dangers and harms, and facilitate the welfare of people according to laws.¡¨ However, in practice, the complicatedness of duties of the police in Taiwan and the multiplicity of businesses the police involves can be considered of the highest level in the world. The district on-duty police officers, who always stand on the frontline and have frequent contacts with citizens, are just the most basic-level police officers implementing different kinds of administrative work of the police. In view of this, this paper finds out the factors affecting the working pressure and job satisfaction of district on-duty police officers as well as their extents, hoping to understand whether they have strong preference for the change of duties in turn. It is hoped that the study can help improve the quality of both the district on-duty police officers and the administrative work of the police. The study took 1,202 district on-duty police officers subordinating to the Police Bureau of Kaohsiung City Government as the research targets, and employed the way of questionnaire survey to carry out the research. There were 430 questionnaires sent out, and 405 valid questionnaires were returned. After using the statistical software, SPSS to undergo descriptive analysis, t-test, one-way ANOVA, related and regressive statistical analysis, the study acquires the following results: 1. Part of the facets of working pressure, job satisfaction and the preference for the change of duties in turn has significant difference if there is a difference in the statistical variables of part of the attributes of individuals. 2. Working pressure has significant negative relativity and significant negative effects on job satisfaction. 3. Job satisfaction has significant negative relativity to the preference for the change of duties in turn. The facet of ¡§internal satisfaction¡¨ has significant negative effects on the facet of ¡§preference for the change of duties in turn,¡¨ but has significant positive effects on the facet of ¡§perception for the change of duties in turn.¡¨ The facet of ¡§external satisfaction¡¨ has significant positive effects on the facet of ¡§perception for the change of duties in turn.¡¨ 4. Working pressure has significant positive relativity to the preference for the change of duties in turn. The ¡§personal factor of pressure¡¨ has significant positive effects on the preference for the change of duties in turn. ¡§External environmental pressure¡¨ has significant positive effects on the facet of ¡§preference for the change of duties in turn.¡¨ 5. When both working pressure and job satisfaction at the same time perform regressive statistics on the preference for the change of duties in turn, the results show that job satisfaction really has mediating effect. Keywords: district on-duty police officers, working pressure, job satisfaction, preference for the change of duties in turn

In this study,we develop an elitist multiobjective evolutionary algorithm for approximating the Pareto-optimal frontiers of multiobjective optimization problems. The algorithm converges the true Pareto-optimal frontier while keeping the solutions in the population well-spread over the frontier. Diversity of the solutions is maintained by the territory de&amp / #64257 / ning property of the algorithm rather than using an explicit diversity preservation mechanism. This leads to substantial computational e&amp / #64259 / ciency. We test the algorithm on commonly used test problems and compare its performance against well-known benchmark algorithms. In addition to approximating the entire Pareto-optimal frontier,we develop a preference incorporation mechanism to guide the search towards the decision maker&amp / #8217 / s regions of interest. Based on this mechanism, we implement two variants of the algorithm. The &amp / #64257 / rst gathers all preference information before the optimization stage to &amp / #64257 / nd approximations of the desired regions. The second one is an interactive algorithm that focuses on the desired region by interacting with the decision maker during the solution process. Based on tests on 2- and 3-objective problems, we observe that both algorithms converge to the preferred regions.

The aim of this study is to investigate differences in peer preference, gender and temperamental characteristics of 5 and 6 year old children on their social competence and behavioral problems. More specifically, the present study examined whether being boy or girl, being more preferred peer or less preferred and different temperamental characteristics differentiates children&rsquo / s social competence, anger- aggression and anxiety withdrawal related behaviors. Peer preference was determined by the &ldquo / Picture Sociometry Scale&rdquo / which was an implementation conducted with children. Teachers were asked to fill the &ldquo / Social Competence and Behavior Evaluation Scale&rdquo / for each child participated in the study in their classrooms. Moreover, parents of children participated in the study were requested to complete &ldquo / Short Temperament Scale for Children&rdquo / . The participants of this study consisted of 42 5- 6 year old children from one private pre- school in Ankara. Results of this study revealed that, children with higher peer preference showed more social competence. Moreover, children with higher persistence and approach as temperamental characteristics revealed higher social competence while children with higher reactivity as a temperamental characteristic had also higher anger- aggression behavioral problems. However, gender of children did not differentiate children&rsquo / s social competence, anger- aggression and anxiety withdrawal related behaviors.

This dissertation presents three experiments to investigate the general distribution of hand preference across a reachable working space, as well as the effect of sensory information about the reaching hand, and if this distribution is affected by long term practice. In addition, the underlying mechanisms of hand preference behavior were investigated with the obtained kinematic data. Experiment 1 explored the distribution of hand preferences across the workspace among non-athlete right-handed participants, as well as the role that visual feedback might play in this distribution. Experiment 2 tested the hypothesis, if occlusion of visual feedback influences hand preference, accordingly interlimb differences. The third final experiment examined the effect of long term practice on hand preference among right-handed elite fencers. The first study showed that the choice of arms is related to the energetic cost and dynamic efficiency of the movements. The results of the second experiment displayed that the choice of hands changes under no visual feedback condition, demonstrating that the choice is active and not habitual, depending on sensorimotor performance asymmetries. The final experiment demonstrated that elite athletes have different patterns of limb selection than non- athletes. Athletes, specifically fencers, show improved coordination in their non-dominant arms, which apparently increases the selection of this arm for reaching. Overall, it was concluded that hand preference depends on sensorimotor performance asymmetries and influenced by the long term practice.

We propose an interactive preference-based evolutionary algorithm for the clustering problem. The problem is highly combinatorial and referred to as NP-Hard in the literature. The goal of the problem is putting similar items in the same cluster and dissimilar items into different clusters according to a certain similarity measure, while maintaining some internal objectives such as compactness, connectivity or spatial separation. However, using one of these objectives is often not sufficient to detect different underlying structures in different data sets with clusters having arbitrary shapes and density variations. Thus, the current trend in the clustering literature is growing into the use of multiple objectives as the inadequacy of using a single objective is understood better. The problem is also difficult because the optimal solution is not well defined. To the best of our knowledge, all the multiobjective evolutionary algorithms for the clustering problem try to generate the whole Pareto optimal set. This may not be very useful since majority of the solutions in this set may be uninteresting when presented to the decision maker. In this study, we incorporate the preferences of the decision maker into a well known multiobjective evolutionary algorithm, namely SPEA-2, in the optimization process using reference points and achievement scalarizing functions to find the target clusters.

The budget system is one of the important tools in the management accounting control system. However, in the budget goal setting process, budgeting managers may insert slack into their budgets. Budget slack will erode the effectiveness of the budget system. Agency researchers recognize that well-designed contracts can be used to solve this incentive problem. Therefore, truth-inducing schemes are widely discussed and analyzed. However, many empirical studies report that such schemes can decrease, but not eliminate slack completely. In the meanwhile, they can not increase performance. This study points out that the parameters of the schemes are not well-designed, therefore, the effectiveness to induce subordinates to disclose private information and increase performance is of failure. This paper analyses the relationship among parameters of the truth-inducing pay scheme, risk preference and budget slack by Minimax law under uncertainty, and points that this scheme will lose its effectiveness under some condition. At the meanwhile, this thesis also explains how to design a compensation contract to provide a reference for practical application.

Recommendation is not a new phenomenon arising from the digital era, but an existing social behavior in real life. Recommendation systems facilitate such natural social recommendation behavior and alleviate information overload facing individuals. Among different recommendation techniques proposed in the literature, the collaborative filtering approach is the most successful and widely adopted recommendation technique to date. However, the traditional collaborative filtering recommendation approach ignores proximities between items. That is, all user ratings on items are deemed identically important and given an equal weight in neighborhood formation process. In this study, we proposed a cluster-based collaborative filtering recommendation approach that takes into account the content similarities of items in the collaborative filtering process. Our empirical evaluation results show that the cluster-based collaborative filtering approach improves the prediction accuracy without sacrificing the prediction coverage, using those achieved by the traditional collaborative filtering approach as performance benchmarks. Due to the sparsity problem, when a prediction is made based on few neighbors, the cluster average method could achieve a better prediction accuracy than the proposed approach. Thus, we further proposed an enhanced cluster-based collaborative filtering approach that combines our approach and the cluster average method. The empirical results suggest that the enhanced approach could result in a prediction accuracy comparable to or even better than that accomplished by the cluster average method.

ABSTRACT While in the developed countries, flowers are living necessity and enjoy a sizable market, the Council of Agriculture Executive Yuan R.O.C points out that cultivation and sales of flowers are important items in the prospecting dedicated agriculture industries of Taiwan. Besides the enjoyment and appreciation the beauty of blooming by oneself , in social life flowers can perform the instrumental function of expressing wishes in the occasion of marriage, birthday, promotion, house moving, and consolation in the sickness or sadness. The study of flower preference schemata is one of the importance concepts for flower product design and development. The current research figured out different patterns of flower preference among people¡¦s mind ,through pictures of moth orchid and rose designed by the three factors of flower beauty: color, volume, and package. The distinctive flower buying behaviors of the different groups were studied consequently. In our valid sample are 696 teachers from senior high and junior high schools and elementary schools in the Kaohsiung area in Taiwan. In addition to the description and analysis on people¡¦s flower buying behavior about flower type preference, shop choice, purchase frequency, and flower-as-present purchase behavior, the major findings of the current research are as the following: (1) Confirming that there exist distinctive flower preference schemata in people mind; (2) Flower preference affect the purchase behavior; (3) Demographic variables moderate the effect of flower preference on the purchase behavior; (4) Flower attitude and demographic variables affect flower consumption behavior.