The International Monetary Fund points out that four kinds of financial crisis in the world financial markets currency crisis, external debt crisis, bank crisis and systematic crisis . Taiwan could be happened in bank crisis and could have potentially impaired the economies of Taiwan. That was reason why Government protected banking industry avoiding collapse and bankruptcy. This paper details why Private Equity Fund M&A Taiwan domestic bank and the effects on financial markets. Since 2006 Carlyle Group one of a global private equity investment firm takeover bid for Advanced Semiconductor Engineering Inc (¤é¤ë¥ú¥b¾ÉÅé)--the world's top chip packager for US$5.45 billion- Private Equity Firm had known for Taiwan financial markets. The Government refused the plan due to that takeover bid may weakening the local capital market and leading to an outflow of investment into China. Foreign investment in Taiwan's banking industry is not new, but the acquisition of domestic banks has only become available to Private Equity Fund recently. The domestic banking industry has become a lucrative target for foreign investors not only of the Government has a policy of limiting the quantity of banking branches but also lower P/B in Asia region. Since 1997s, a striking feature in the development of Taiwan banking industry structure is the significant decline in the performance of banks while the steadily increase in the number of bank branches and caused by overbanking in Taiwan. As Taiwan slowly opens its banking industry after second round banking reformation in 2001, global M&A trends also had impacts on Taiwan, foreign financial institutions are increasingly looking to make strategic and financial investments. This paper gives a brief description of the development in the past 10 years, analyzes the driving forces on the merger of financial institutions From this research, we could come to the conclusions as follows: 1. A financial investment in domestic banks is a win-win for the various parties Private equity fund M&A of domestic commercial banks not only a very good source of capital in Taiwan, but also, through the competition of foreign banks, stimulates domestic financial institutions to upgrade operational skills and management, and improve operational efficiency and competitiveness, thus contributing to the upgrading of the financial system. 2. This paper using threshold regression model to find an adequate branch numbers of Commercial Banks industry in Taiwan. We found significant evidence good for the shareholders equity only when the branch numbers are larger than 88. 3. On the view of bank branch, the next target acquired company is Far Eastern International Bank(35 branches) ,Jih Sun Bank(36 branches) , King¡¥s Town Bank(62 branches) ,Taichung Commercial Bank(78 branches).ABN AMRO Bank(Taiwan)M&A Taitung Business Bank, the branches from 5 to 37, not to meet the bank's need for scale economics in Taiwan markets and should be M&A again 4. Private Equity Fund aims to pursue long term total return primarily through investment in equities and equity-related securities but had unique niche in resolving banking risk and corporate governance. also capitalized on the recovery of financial markets after the financial crisis in Taiwan banking indusdry According to experience of Private-Equity Firm to merge to banking industry in Korea Private Equity Fund exit their investments at last within 5-7 years after turned the bank successfully around 5. It's difference type of entering the Taiwan market through the acquisitions of banks, one is strategic investment (e.g.,Citigroup and Standard Chartered) and financial players (e.g., Newbridge Capital, The Carlyle Group).Strategic investment made a goal to construct a plateform to link Taiwan and China

Background: Globally tuberculosis (TB) is one of the leading causes of mortality. There is scientific evidence of sociodemographic, behavioral and health risk factors associated with TB infection and TB disease. In the United States (US), there is a low endemicity of TB and a goal of TB elimination. Objective: The primary objective of the study was to examine the correlation of TB risk factors at the state level in the US to obtain insights specific to the state of TB in the US. The risk factors examined were diabetes rates, smoking rates, alcohol abuse rates, AIDS rates, foreign-born vs. US-born, poverty as expressed by GINI and per capita income and race/ethnicity. Methods: Secondary data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and US Census Bureau on line databases were used. Simple linear regression, bivariate correlation and multiple linear regression were carried out. Results: Significant correlations were found at the state level between TB disease rates and being non-Hispanic White (r=-0.856, p<0.001), foreign-born (r=0.649, p<0.001), GINI (r=0.588, p<0.001) and AIDS diagnosis rates (r=0.579, p<0.001). No significant associations were found between TB disease rates and diabetes rates, smoking rates and alcohol abuse rates. Conclusion: The focus of the fight against TB in the US should be on minority communities, those populated by the foreign-born and those with high rates of AIDS particularly where a large degree of income inequality is present.

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This thesis is concerned with analytical and technical capability in using Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and spatial analysis as relevant to the policy challenge of urban fringe management, taking as a case study the Seoul Metropolitan Region Perimeter. The primary purpose of this study is to analyse land use change using the tools of GIS and Spatial Analysis as a spatial decision support system for the task of managing the fragmented development of the urban fringe caused by the policy changes introduced by the Korean government in 1994. The case study analysed in this research shows whether GIS and spatial analysis can be applied to manage and monitor land use change in the urban fringe area at a very detailed level using municipal parcel data which occupies about 80% of administrative affairs, especially at the local government level in Korea. The major determinants of land use change in the study area have been investigated in an attempt to enhance the knowledge of how to provide decision support information for local government in Korea using GIS and spatial analysis. The results of the analysis represent the distribution of land use change from 1994 to 1998, the distribution of parcels with more than 50% of their neighbours in urban use and the transition probability of land use within a GIS, etc. The analysis using GIS and spatial analysis proved to be effective ones when providing the information base for modelling land use change in the urban fringe of the Seoul Metropolitan Region in Korea, to enable informed decisions to be made about land management policies in such areas. The lesson which could be drawn from this study is that a GIS and spatial analysis capacity is quite useful for local government to understand where and why land use change is concentrated, how the pattern of land use has changed, and which areas are susceptible to land use change. This study represented the results of analysis as a map, showed the significant patterns of land use change in the study area, displayed the relationship between neighbouring land use and the pattern of land use change, and suggested the transition probability of land use in the urban fringe in the future. Better understanding of the results may enhance the capability of local government to predict future land use change dynamics and devise more effective land use management strategies. This study brings a new approach to understanding the evolution of development patterns using the methods of combining spatial statistical analysis techniques with GIS application at site level.

This research conducts a spatial and temporal analysis of the distribution of fecal coliform throughout the Capital Regional District (CRD) of southern Vancouver Island. The research is based on 17 years of historical data of stormwater samplings from 1995 to 2011 in the nearshore region. ArcGIS is used to map the fecal coliform data collected within and adjacent to nearshore areas to identify peaks above a regulated threshold. Heavily polluted areas are in Victoria downtown, Esquimalt and the southeastern shore of Oak Bay. Land-use data and drainage patterns are used to determine relationships between fecal coliform levels and land-use by considering relevant, temporally dependent factors. Temperature is positively correlated with FC level and precipitation is negatively correlated. The residential land use is identified as the main source of bacterial contamination. This analysis leads to a regression model that indicates two peaks (July and October) of FC level occur in a 12-month period and positively related to minimum temperature and cloud cover ratio. / Graduate

The trustworthiness of the blood pressure (BP) readings acquired by oscillometric home-based monitoring systems is a challenging issue that requires patients to see the doctor for trusted measurements, especially those who are obese or have cardiovascular diseases such as hypertension or atrial fibrillation. Even with the most accurate monitors one may get different readings if BP is repeatedly measured. Trusted BP readings are those measured with accurate devices at proper measurement conditions. The accurate monitors need an indicator to assure the trustworthiness of the measured BP. In this work, a novel algorithm called the Dynamic Threshold Algorithm (DTA) is proposed that calculates trusted boundaries of the measured systolic and diastolic pressures from the recorded oscillometric waveforms. The DTA determines a threshold from the heart rate of subjects to locate the oscillometric pulse at the mean arterial pressure (PULSEMAP) and uses the peak, trough, and pressure of the located pulse to calculate the trusted boundaries. In terms of accuracy, a modeling approach is employed to estimate BP from the arterial lumen area oscillations model in the diastolic region (ALA-based). The model requires compliance parameter ‘c’ to estimate BP. To this end, a pre-developed linear regression model between ‘c’ and the corresponding amplitude ratio of the PULSEMAP is employed to evaluate ‘c’. The proposed method uses ‘c’ and estimates BP by minimizing differences between peak and trough amplitudes of the actual and corresponding simulated waveforms. The proposed DTA and ALA-based methods were tested on two datasets of healthy subjects and one dataset of sick subjects with cardiovascular diseases, and results were validated against corresponding references and compared with two popular maximum amplitude and maximum/minimum slope algorithms. Mean absolute error (MAE) and standard deviation of errors (STDE) are used to evaluate and compare the results. For healthy subjects, the MAE of the estimated systolic (SBP) and diastolic (DBP) blood pressures was improved up to 57% and 57% with an STDE of 55% and 62%, respectively. For sick subjects, the MAE was improved up to 40% and 29% with an STDE of 36% and 20% for SBP and DBP, respectively.

The bypassing of rural hospitals increased in Colorado's rural communities during the 1990s. To understand this phenomenon, this study explores why rural Medicare patients in Colorado bypassed their local rural hospitals when they could have received health care services at their nearest local hospital. To identify both individual factors and institutional variables associated with hospital choice behavior, the conditional logistic regression model analyzes 4,099 rural Medicare patients who received heart failure and shock procedures. This study determines that both institutional variables (ownership type, number of beds, number of services, accreditation, and distance between the hospital and a patient's residence) and patient variables (age, length of stay, race, and total charge) are significant in patients' hospital choice. This study suggests that rural hospitals could build cooperative relationships with other large rural and urban hospitals.

The forest ecosystem is a dominant landscape in the Gulf of Mexico (GOM) coastal region. Currently, many studies have been carried out to identify factors that drive forest dynamics. Changes in meteorological conditions have been considered as the main factors affecting the forest dynamics. For this study, the statistical regression analysis was used for modeling forest dynamics. Meteorological impact analysis was driven by observed data from PRISM (parameter-elevation regressions on independent slopes model) climate dataset. The forest dynamics was characterized by an indicator, the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). The objectives of this study are to 1) to specify and estimate statistical regression models that account for forest dynamics in the Golf of Mexico coastal region, 2) to assess which model used to capture the relationship between forest dynamics and its explanatory variables with the best explanatory power, and 3) to use the best fitted regression model to explain forest dynamics. By using fixed-effects regression methods: ordinary least squares (OLS) and geographically weighted regression (GWR), the sample-point-based regression analysis showed that meteorological factors could generally explain more than half of variation in forest dynamics. In respect of the unexplained variation of forest dynamics, the necessity of using soil to explain forest dynamics was then discussed. The result suggested that the forest dynamics could be explained by both meteorological parameters and soil texture. One of the basic considerations in this study is to include the spatiotemporal heterogeneity caused by seasonality and forest types. The model explanatory power was found differ among forest types (spatially) and seasons (temporally). By constructing regression models with randomly varying intercepts and varying slopes, the linear mixed-effects model (LMM) was fitted on composite county-based data (e.g., precipitation, temperature and NDVI). The use of LMMs was proved to be appropriate for describing forest dynamics to mixed-effects induced by meteorological changes. Based on this finding, I concluded that meteorological changes could play a significant role in forest dynamics through both fixed-effects and random-effects.

Binary response data is often modeled using the logistic regression model, a well known nonlinear model. Designing an optimal experiment for this nonlinear situation poses some problems not encountered with a linear model. The application of several optimality design criteria to the logistic regression model is explored, and many resulting optimal designs are given. The implementation of these optimal designs requires the parameters of the model to be known. However, the model parameters are not known. If they were, there would be no need to design an experiment. Consequently the parameters must be estimated prior to implementing a design. Standard one-stage optimal designs are quite sensitive to parameter misspecification and are therefore unsatisfactory in practice. A two-stage Bayesian design procedure is developed which effectively deals with poor parameter knowledge while maintaining high efficiency. The first stage makes use of Bayesian design as well as Bayesian estimation in order to cope with parameter misspecification. Using the parameter estimates from the first stage, the second stage conditionally optimizes a chosen design optimality criterion. Asymptotically, the two-stage design procedure is considerably more efficient than the one-stage design when the parameters are misspecified and only slightly less efficient when the parameters are known. The superiority of the two-stage procedure over the one-stage is even more evident for small samples. / Ph. D.

<p> Factors affecting cottage site desirability are investigated two ways. A step-wise compilation of the regression model is used to rank the cottage site desirability variables, and determine the proportion of variation that the variables contribute in explaining cottage land values. The simple regression and correlation technique is used to determine the existence of possible relationships. between distance measures, and measures of both cottage land values and cottage road values. </p> / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)