The present study aimed to apply the framing effects in prospect theory to examine college students¡¦ risk tendencies under the context of educational marketing. Prospect theory proposes that framing effects result in a preference for risk-averse choices in gain situations and risk-seeking choices in loss situations. Frame in this research was treated as a between-subjects factor. Participants were randomly assigned to either the gain or loss condition with the counter-balanced method. The decision tasks consisted of four domains of marketing mix, i.e., product, price, place, and promotion. The results showed that participants¡¦ risk tendencies were in accordance with the predictions from the perspective of framing effects. Reference points were employed by participants to determine gain or loss framing. Specifically, risk-averse tendencies were more prominent in gain situations than those in loss situations, whereas risk-seeking tendencies were more pronounced in loss situations than those in gain situations. Hence, in order to produce desirable outcomes of marketing mix in educational marketing, marketers in higher education should take the influences of reference point and framing effects on decision-making into consideration.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2009. / Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 109-114).

Progress in multimedia technologies has resulted in a plethora of services and devices that capture, compress, transmit and display audiovisual stimuli. Humans -- the ultimate receivers of such stimuli -- now have access to visual entertainment at their homes, their workplaces as well as on mobile devices. With increasing visual signals being received by human observers, in the face of degradations that occur to due the capture, compression and transmission processes, an important aspect of the quality of experience of such stimuli is the \emph{perceived visual quality}. This dissertation focuses on algorithm development for assessing such visual quality of natural images, without need for the `pristine' reference image, i.e., we develop computational models for no-reference image quality assessment (NR IQA). Our NR IQA model stems from the theory that natural images have certain statistical properties that are violated in the presence of degradations, and quantifying such deviations from \emph{naturalness} leads to a blind estimate of quality. The proposed modular and easily extensible framework is distortion-agnostic, in that it does not need to have knowledge of the distortion afflicting the image (contrary to most present-day NR IQA algorithms) and is not only capable of quality assessment with high correlation with human perception, but also is capable of identifying the distortion afflicting the image. This additional distortion-identification, coupled with blind quality assessment leads to a framework that allows for blind general-purpose image repair, which is the second major contribution of this dissertation. The blind general-purpose image repair framework, and its exemplar algorithm described here stem from a revolutionary perspective on image repair, where the framework does not simply attempt to ameliorate the distortion in the image, but to ameliorate the distortion, so that visual quality at the output is maximized. Lastly, this dissertation describes a large-scale human subjective study that was conducted at UT to assess human behavior and opinion on visual quality of videos when viewed on mobile devices. The study lead to a database of 200 distorted videos, which incorporates previously studied distortions such as compression and wireless packet-loss, and also dynamically varying distortions that change as a function of time, such as frame-freezes and temporally varying compression rates. This study -- the first of its kind -- involved over 50 human subjects and resulted in 5,300 summary subjective scores and time-sampled subjective traces of quality for multiple displays. The last part of this dissertation analyzes human behavior and opinion on time-varying video quality, opening up an extremely interesting and relevant field for future research in the area of quality assessment and human behavior. / text

An Instructable Software Agent (ISA) is a software agent that humans can teach through Natural Instruction Methods (NIMs)—methods humans naturally use to teach one another. Some examples of NIMs include giving demonstrations, guided practice sessions, and definitions of concepts. If software agents were instructable, humans would be able to impart knowledge to software systems though a more natural interface. In this dissertation, I address generating benchmarks for evaluating the learning ability of ISAs despite the important differences that may exist between human learners and ISAs. I first present three years of case studies uncovering the challenges of such a comparison and then make recommendations for future studies. The main contributions of this dissertation are 1. a theory of using humans to evaluate the learning ability of Instructable Software Agents (ISAs), 2. a refined method for developing curricula and benchmarks for evaluating ISAs, including a scalable lab configuration for performing human benchmarking and a suite of accompanying software tools, and 3. the case studies themselves, amounting to an in-depth ethnographic study of the issues involved in using humans to develop curricula and benchmarks for ISAs. / text

This dissertation focuses on the investigation of human perception of stereoscopic 3D image quality and the development of automatic stereoscopic 3D image quality assessment frameworks. In order to assess human perception of visual quality, a human study was conducted and interactions between image quality, depth quality, visual comfort, and 3D viewing quality were inferred. The results indicate that the overall 3D viewing quality can be well predicted from only image quality and depth quality. Between image and depth quality, image quality seems to be the main factor that enables accurate prediction of overall 3D viewing quality. Two other human studies were conducted to study the effect of masking on stereoscopic distortions. Binocular suppression was observed in the stereo images which were distorted by blur, JPEG compression, or JPEG2K compression, however, no such suppression was observed for stereo images distorted by white noise. Further, a facilitation effect was also observed against disparity variation for blur and JPEG2K distorted stereo images while no depth masking effect was observed. Based on these results, I proposed an automatic full-reference (FR) 3D quality assessment framework. In this framework, I used Gabor filterbank responses to model stimulus strength and then synthesize a Cyclopean image from a stereo image pair. Because the quality of this synthesized view is similar to that of a Cyclopean image, which the human visual system recreates from the stereoscopic stimuli, performing the task of 3D quality assessment on synthesized views can deliver better performance. I verified the performance of this FR framework on the LIVE 3D Image Quality Database and the results indicate that applying the proposed framework improves the performance of FR 2D quality assessment algorithms when applied to stereo 3D images. Further, I proposed a no-reference (NR) 3D quality assessment (QA) algorithm based on natural scene statistics in both the spatial and the depth domain. Experiments indicate that the proposed NR algorithm outperforms all 2D FR QA algorithms and most 3D FR QA models in predicting 3D quality of stereo images. Finally, a fourth subjective study was conducted to understand depth quality when stereo content is free from visual discomfort. The result suggests that human perception of depth quality is correlated with the content of the stereo image and the stereoacuity function of human visual system. / text

Marlene Dumas is known for her portraits and figurative paintings and drawings. This study focuses on three paintings by Dumas that reference male icons of art: Stern (2004), Ryman's Brides (1997), and Reinhardt's Daughter (1994). In referencing Ad Reinhardt, Robert Ryman and in the case of Stern, Gerhard Richter, Dumas engages with each artist and the history of painting in specific ways. As this thesis title indicates, I argue that Dumas uses artistic allusion pervasively throughout her oeuvre to conduct an intervention in painting. I propose that this interposition is a way to navigate and question the canon, while strengthening her agency as an artist. Concurrently, this practice by Dumas provides insights concerning the status of painting in a contemporary art scene where new media is progressively dominant. By unpacking this artistic referencing through titling, concept, and the process of painting, I will demonstrate the significance of it to her production. This analysis also functions as a commentary on the current state of painting and key aspects of its evolution over the last fifty years. I suggest that her use of incisive artistic reference interrogates power structures of the canon by disrupting boundaries, categories, and frames of enclosure. Her dialogue with art history ranges from homage and quotation to contestation and humorous exegesis. Dumas relies on photography including personal snapshots and images from news media as source material, but her painting process is transformative rather than mimetic. Her evocative and often provocative work is frequently discussed in terms of race, gender, and sexuality. I consider how Dumas explores socio-historical issues while creating a dialogue with art history. Dumas investigates the problem of how to paint and claim new territory in our high-tech age when painting is often deemed obsolete. This thesis topic is understudied in any depth and merits further inquiry. By examining how these paintings engage with specific artists within Modern and contemporary painting, I seek to make a new contribution to the literature on Marlene Dumas.

Forecasting capital expenditures in early stages of an offshore wind power project is aproblematic process. The process can be affected by optimism bias and strategicmisrepresentation which may result in cost overruns. This thesis is a response to issuesregarding cost overruns in offshore wind power projects. The aim of this thesis is tocreate a cost forecasting method which can estimate the necessary capital budget in awind power project. The author presents a two-step model which both applies the inside view and outsideview. The inside view contains equations related to investment and installation costs.The outside view applies reference class forecasting in order to adjust the necessary costcontingency budget. The combined model will therefore forecast capital expenditures fora specific site and adjust the cost calculations with regard to previous similar projects. The results illustrate that the model is well correlated with normalized cost estimationsin other projects. A hypothetical 150MW offshore wind farm is estimated to costbetween 2.9 million €/MW and 3.5 million €/MW depending on the location of the windfarm.

Tutorials, Webinars, and Explanations of PubMed Features for Reference Librarians in Public Libraries

The intent of this article is to describe how the social science data library responds to requests for particular data when the data are not cataloged in the data library's collection. The author defines those activities undertaken to locate a potential resource as the pre-acquisition process. The pre-acquisition process begins when the library staff and client have been unable to locate relevant data in the library. Depending upon the nature of the request, time constraints imposed on the client (to produce an analysis based upon these data), and status of the client in the university setting, both staff and client undertake a search to locate the data the client needs. Together they examine the library's reference collection and literature in the field, seek information from experts in the field, and correspond with libraries and institutions which might potentially hold the data or be able to provide assistance in locating the data. The decision to undertake these activities during the preacquisition process depends upon a number of factors. They include the library's mandate regarding the nature of the collection and of its clientele, the level of flexibility in its policies, the quality of the staff, the degree to which the staff is committed to providing user services. the quality of its reference collection and services, and constraints on library resources. Although constraints on the library's resources may indeed be a major factor in determining whether to undertake a search and at what level and to what extent the services shall be provided, the first part of this article presents a brief description of only five factors: the nature of the collection, the impact of an acquisitions policy upon the preacquisition process, staff, the interaction between staff and client, and reference services." The second part describes the preacquisition process carried out at the Social Science Data and Program Library Service (DPLS) at the University of Wisconsin Madison as an illustration of locating data to meet a special client request. The author believes that a description of these activities should have utility not only for data libraries, but for other libraries for formalizing the process of meeting special requests.

Report on a study tour of public library services in the US who are providing first class, cutting edge service to their virtual clients. The study tour was made possible by the award of a Ramsay Reid scholarship from the State Library of Victoria in 2006.