Thesis--Columbia University. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves [353]-372).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--York University, 2001. Graduate Programme in Political Science. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 498-521). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pNQ66364.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Alberta, 2009. / Title from pdf file main screen (viewed on July 15, 2009). "Fall 2009." At head of title: University of Alberta. "A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Finance, Faculty of Business." Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--North Carolina State University, 2004. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 103-109). Also issued online.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1969. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

A study was made of the attitudes of pure and applied science, economics and commerce students toward the acceptability of commercial goals for scientific research. A significant amount of discrimination was obtained amongst such groups of students on a battery of attitude statements and a scale was constructed from sixteen of the statements which gave the highest discrimination between commerce students and a combined group of pure and applied science students. The discrimination between the two groups on this scale was at the .001 level. The commerce students were significantly less homogeneous as a group and gave responses which were less internally consistent than those of the science students. In the second phase of the research, scientific originality was rated on the results of a test called "Problems and Solutions" which called for the production of ideas in an industrial and a non-industrial context. The within- and between-rater reliabilities of this test were .88 and .58 when degrees of originality were assessed, whereas the latter was .85 when only the presence or absence of originality was assessed. The results of the second study showed that scientific originality was significantly less in the industrial context, and that the ideas produced in that context were significantly-more often of a commercial nature. In the sample as a whole these two effects of the problem context were unrelated. Detailed examination of the results revealed the probable existence of three types of subject, designated the 'uncreative pure scientist', the 'creative applied scientist' and the 'creative pure scientist'. The first was characterized by zero scores for originality in both context, by the production of more, commercial ideas in the industrial contexts, and by a more pure-science orientation as measured by the attitude, scale. The second type was characterized by the production of more commercial ideas and a higher originality score in the industrial context. The third type was characterized by a lower originality score in the industrial context and the production of fewer scientific ideas in that context, rather than (at least in comparison to the other two types of subject) the production of more commercial ideas. The results did not support the hypothesis i) that the adverse effect of an environmental value system is positively related to the degree of dissonance between its values and those of an individual in that environment; ii) that the reduced originality of scientists in an industrial test context is a result of their conforming to an image of industrial research ideas having to be both commercial and conventional in order to be acceptable; iii) that the more creative the individual, the greater the adverse effect of a possible constraint perceived in the industrial value system, as considered here. There was limited support for the hypothesis that the least creative individuals are most likely to produce ideas of a commercial type in an industrial context. / Arts, Faculty of / Anthropology, Department of / Graduate

In many segments of the chemical industry, emphasis is nowadays placed upon meeting customer needs. This imposes new requirements in terms of various product quality specifications as well as due dates for deliveries, and provides an important incentive for the development of comprehensive procedures for the design and scheduling of multiproduct batch processes. Previous studies fail to address many of the specific issues involved in batch processing, such as distinct due dates, inventory costs, changeover costs, the choice between existing and new equipment, and the many potential alternatives in the synthesis of batch networks. In this thesis, flexible procedures based on the simulated algorithm have been developed to provide a global treatment of scheduling, design, synthesis, and retrofit, with special emphasis on the issues most relevant to batch processes. The flexibility of simulated annealing allows the optimization of complete economic objectives including capital, operating, labor, inventory, and changeover costs as well as penalties for early and late production. The simulated annealing algorithm has been adapted to handle the complex problem structures that arise in design and synthesis. The choice of economic objectives, the effect of uncertainties on the scheduling of flowshops, and the planning of multiplants have been investigated. Optimal scheduling and planning have been incorporated in a design and synthesis procedure to generate processes that are both economical, and capable of meeting a fluctuating demand. This procedure has been extended to retrofit design, to allow the choice between existing and new equipment, and develop a unified treatment of planning, retrofit, and design. Finally, the choice of operating conditions together with design, synthesis, and scheduling has been examined and applied to the batch production of chain growth polymers. The robustness of the optimization procedures has been checked by solving a variety of previously published examples. Significant extensions of these problems have also been developed to explore new issues and the interactions between the different decisions levels. These procedures allow a comprehensive and flexible treatment of a wide class of problems in batch design and scheduling.

The primary focus of this research is on the distributed allocation of dynamically arriving interdependent tasks to the agents of a heterogeneous multi-agent system in an uncertain environment. This dissertation consists of three parts. First, we develop a centralized task allocation model which explicitly considers the communication between the agents in coordinated problem solving. The tasks enter the system with certain payment and specific processing requirements. The agents are grouped into different types based on their processing capabilities. A task can only be processed by an appropriate agent. Processing of the tasks incurs certain operational cost on the multi-agent system resulting from processing and communication costs. The performance of an agent system is defined as the discounted sum of rewards over an infinite time horizon. We formulate the task assignment problem as a Markov decision problem and show that a stationary policy exists. An action elimination procedure is proposed that decreases the action space for each state. Moreover, a heuristic policy is proposed based on certain structural properties and is shown to perform close to 1% of the policy obtained from computational methods. The second part of the dissertation studies different distributed task allocation models and shows that distributed task allocation may be preferable over centralized task allocation despite their lower performance for the agent system. Each of these decision methods are evaluated based on the computational costs incurred in the decision making and the information exchange cost between the agents. The task allocation methods are classified into different scopes such as system level, group level, and individual level. For each level of scope, we consider both off-line and on-line decision procedures. The composite performance of each model is computed in order to evaluate cost effectiveness of a decision method. We show that centralized methods may not be preferred due to excessive decision costs involved. We also investigate the performance of multi-agent systems under partial information about other agents in the system. The third and final part of the dissertation investigates the effect of organizational structures on the performance of multi-agent systems. We study different organizational structures resulting from coalition formation between individual agents in the multi-agent systems. The coalitions are formed between agents to benefit from the increased state information. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

Critically ill patients suffering from either closed head trauma or septic shock were studied retrospectively to see if the mathematical programming technique of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) could be used to develop models to assess an individual patient's progress in an Intensive Care Unit (ICU). Unlike current logistic regression models that focus on the mean values for groups of patients, the DEA models evaluate each patient individually by calculating an “efficiency” score based on a patient's ability to maximize output for a given set of physiologic inputs. Patients with high efficiency scores were found to have a better chance of making a full recovery than similarly injured patients that were inefficient, even when the latter had more “normal” values for their variables. New hybrid models that combine DEA with discriminant analysis and correspondence analysis were also developed and their potential role in the ICU is explored. DEA models in the ICU need further study before implementation but appear to offer physicians a deeper understanding of their patients and a better opportunity to improve patient outcome than presently used models based on regression.

Chan Gabriel. / "Architecture Department, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Master of Architecture Programme 1998-99, design report." / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 73-74). / ACKNOWLEDGMENTS --- p.1 / INTRODUCTION / PROGRAMMING SUMMARY --- p.2 / PROJECT OBJECTIVES --- p.3 / HK RESEARCH & TECHNOLOGY CENTRE --- p.3 / BACKGROUND / PROGRAMME DEVELOPMENT --- p.4 / SITE SELECTION --- p.5 / PRECEDENTS --- p.6 / PROJECT BRIEF / CLIENT PROFILE --- p.7 / SITE & CONSTRAINTS --- p.7 / SPACE PROGRAMME --- p.8 / DESIGN GUIDELINES --- p.9 / DESIGN CONCEPTUALIZATION / STAGE ONE --- p.10-12 / STAGE TWO --- p.13-14 / STAGE THREE --- p.15-18 / STAGE FOUR --- p.19-24 / FINAL STAGE --- p.25-44