The problem of Divine Attributes had been one of the most central issues in the theological disuussions of the Muslims over which (along with other issues) the world of Islam was divided into numerous sects. In the present study we have tried to look at the problem through the discussions of al-Ghazali who is the most representative of orthodox Islam. Indeed, until the coming of al-Ghazâli in the 11th and l2th centuries no serious thinker after al-Ashtari was able to challenge the Muctazilah sect over the matters of creed. The core of this thesis is the translation of the part pertinent to the problems of Divine Attributes in his book Al-Iqtisad fil Iticad which he hlmself considered the most authoritative statement on the creed. While translating we showed the variations among the different manuscripts; thus our translation, we hope, also bears the characteristics of an edition critique. In order to make our rendering of al-Ghazâli intelligible, an attempt has been made to elucidate the method employed by al-Ghazâli. Our purpose, besides studying al-Ghazâli has been to show also the development of the theological thinking, both historically and philosophically, around the problem of Divine Attributes; thus we hope to have offered a better understanding of al-Ghazali, the philosopher-theologian, and also to have looked into the problem in a general and comprehensive way.

There is increasing pressure from animal rights organizations (AROs) on restaurant chains, food retailers, and meat processors to implement more stringent farm animal welfare (FAW) requirements for their suppliers. In the United States, AROs have recently initiated successful ballots to phase out confinement practices in several states. In Canada AROs have been pressuring both public and private sector stakeholders to improve FAW. Are FAW issues, however, paramount in the minds of Canadian consumers? Is the demand for more stringent FAW protocols primarily determined by a subset of consumers with very strong preferences or does it signal a more fundamental underlying change in consumer and societal preferences? Given the credence nature of FAW, who do consumers trust (i.e., government vs. private industry vs. independent third parties) in the market place for the provision of FAW quality assurances? What are the determinants of trust in these organizations for providing accurate information about animal welfare?<p> In order to answer these questions, a stated preference consumer survey encompassing FAW issues specific to the Canadian pork sector was tested on two samples of consumers in summer 2008, namely: a general population sample (GPS) across Canada and a sample of AROs members. Consumers participated in a purchase experiment where they had to chose between pork chops characterized by combinations of different levels of FAW attributes (i.e., housing system, gestation stalls, and use of antibiotics), quality verifying organization, and price. Multinomial Logit and Latent Class Logit Models were used to analyse the survey data.<p> Surprisingly, outdoor system does not seem to resonate well with Canadians, as both the GPS and the members of the AROs discounted this attribute. As expected, the AROs members have much stronger preferences for the other FAW attributes than have consumers in the GPS. Nevertheless, significant heterogeneity exists within consumer preferences. Five classes of consumers were identified in the GPS with respect to their preferences for FAW. At one end of the spectrum are the FAW sensitive consumers (12.3%) that have higher willingness-to-pay (WTP) for FAW, while at the other end of the spectrum Price Conscious consumers (18.3%) do not exhibit any WTP for FAW. The other three classes (69.4%) comprise respondents with mixed perceptions regarding FAW. Government and Third Party verification of FAW quality assurances had the strongest influence on consumers preferences in both samples. As well, scientific experts in FAW along with the above two organizations are the most credible in providing information about the welfare of pigs. The extent to which these organizations are knowledgeable about the welfare of pigs is the most important factor enhancing consumers trust. Results from this study suggest that there are potential marketing opportunities for pork chops sourced from pigs raised on farms where sows are kept in groups, and where credible quality assurances can be established, that private industry could consider. As well, the results suggest that consumers would derive benefits from the government taking a more active role with respect to validating FAW quality assurances.

To better study frequency related effects such as attenuation and tuning, we developed a frequency dependent seismic reflection analysis. Comprehensive tests on full waveform synthetics and observations from the Teal South ocean bottom seismic (OBS) data set confirmed that normal moveout (NMO) stretch could distort both frequency and amplitude information severely in shallow events and far offset traces. In synthetic tests, our algorithm recovered amplitude and frequency information ac-curately. This simple but robust target oriented NMO stretch correction scheme can be used on top of an existing seismic processing flow for further analyses. By combining the NMO stretch correction, spectral decomposition, and crossplots of am-plitude versus offset (AVO) attributes, we tested the frequency dependent workflow over Teal south and Ursa field data sets for improved reservoir characterization. As expected from NMO stretch characteristics, low frequencies have been less affected while mid and high frequency ranges were affected considerably. In seismic attribute analysis, the AVO crossplots from spectrally decomposed prestack data confirmed the improved accuracy and effectiveness of our workflow in mid and high frequency regions. To overcome poor spectral decomposition results due to low signal to noise ratio (S/N) in the Teal South application, we also implemented a substack scheme that stacks adjacent traces to increase S/N ratio while reducing the amount of data to process and increasing the accuracy of the spectral decomposition step. Synthetic tests verified the effectiveness of this additional step. An application to the Ursa, Gulf of Mexico, deep water data set showed significant improvement in high frequency data while correcting biased low frequency information.

Music services, media players and managers provide support for content classification and access based on filtering metadata values, statistics of access and user ratings. This approach fails to capture characteristics of mood and personal history that are often the deciding factors when creating personal playlists and collections in music. This dissertation work presents MusicWiz, a music management environment that combines traditional metadata with spatial hypertext-based expression and automatically extracted characteristics of music to generate personalized associations among songs. MusicWiz’s similarity inference engine combines the personal expression in the workspace with assessments of similarity based on the artists, other metadata, lyrics and the audio signal to make suggestions and to generate playlists. An evaluation of MusicWiz with and without the workspace and suggestion capabilities showed significant differences for organizing and playlist creation tasks. The workspace features were more valuable for organizing tasks, while the suggestion features had more value for playlist creation activities.

Classification, an important problem of data mining, is one of useful techniques for prediction. The goal of the classification problem is to construct a classifier from a given database for training, and to predict new data with the unknown class. Classification has been widely applied to many areas, such as medical diagnosis and weather prediction. The decision tree is the most popular model among classifiers, since it can generate understandable rules and perform classification without requiring any computation. However, a major drawback of the decision tree model is that it only examines a single attribute at a time. In the real world, attributes in some databases are dependent on each other. Thus, we may improve the accuracy of the decision tree by discovering the correlation between attributes. The CAM method applies the method of mining association rules, like the Apriori method, for discovering the attribute dependence. However, traditional methods for mining association rules are inefficient in the classification applications and could have five problems: (1) the combinatorial explosion problem, (2) invalid candidates, (3) unsuitable minimal support, (4) the ignored meaningful class values, and (5) itemsets without class data. The FP-growth avoids the first two problems. However, it is still suffered from the remaining three problems. Moreover, one more problem occurs: Unnecessary nodes for the classification problem which make the FP-tree incompact and huge. Furthermore, the workload of the CAM method is expensive due to too many times of database scanning, and the attribute combination problem causes some misclassification. Therefore, in this thesis, we present an efficient and accurate decision tree building method which resolves the above six problems and reduces the overhead of database scanning in the CAM method. We build a structure named class-rooted FP-tree which is a tree similar to the FP-tree, except the root of the tree is always a class item. Instead of using a static minimal support applied in the FP-growth method, we decide the minimal support dynamically, which can avoid some misjudgement of large itemsets used for the classification problem. In the decision tree building phase, we provide a pruning strategy that can reduce the times of database scanning. We also solve the attribute combination problem in the CAM method and improve the accuracy. From our simulation, we show that the performance of the proposed class-rooted FP-tree mining method is better than that of other mining association rule methods in terms of storage usage. Our simulation also shows the performance improvement of our method in terms of the times of database scanning and classification accuracy as compared with the CAM method. Therefore, the mining strategy of our proposed method is applicable to any method for building decision tree, and provides high accuracy in the real world.

Abstract Following the increase in living standard and manufacturing techniques and capacity in Taiwan in recent years, the production and the demands for special alloy materials are expanding from their industrial application into living uses. Among innovative merchandise of Titanium techniques application in daily life uses, the one with highest level of techniques and innovative value is aquatitan techniques. Modern technology and process techniques are renewing in extremely fast speed and the speed of developing new merchandise is much faster than the acceptance of consumers, however, many of the new products may be very creative, but not always meeting he needs of consumers and end up with supply of seemingly good products find no demand at all and failed the manufacturers¡¦ expectation of big sales. Further, with rapid change of market demand of new products, it resulted in greatly shortened life cycle of new products. Hence, when the needs of consumers is not understood properly and effectively, the market will wipe such product out mercilessly. If the factors affecting the willingness of consumer in purchasing aquatitan is clearly and correctly understood and incorporate the viewpoints of consumers into the process of research and development, there will certainly marketing strategies proposed effectively for the new products to increase the purchasing inclination of consumers. In the research, we have 2 motives: one is to find out factors affecting consumers¡¦ willingness in purchasing aquatitan products and the other one is to find out the difference among types of consumers adopting aquatitan products for making up effective marketing strategies to channel the aquatitan products effectively to the whole market. The purpose of this research is to find out the consumers characteristics of different product, the effect of new product attributes in the decision of consumers in purchasing aquatitan products, and in the meantime, finding out the difference of different consumer groups in consumers characteristics and new products attributed to provide assistance to companies in marketing practices and product research and development. This research takes aquatitan neck rings as the subject of practical research and 300 questionnaires were distributed among consumers who have purchased the products of subject company. It is found that each type of adopter and store-wise consumers are having different consumer characteristics, which may be provided for the reference of subject company in deciding their future marketing strategies. Key Words: Innovative Diffusion, Consumer Characteristics, New Product Attribute, Aquatitan, Marketing Strategy

Internal control plays a pivotal role in enhancing security operations and quality control in an organization. The process of evaluating internal auditors is a powerful tool for the management team. It does not only prevent frauds, but also boosts profitability. From the perspective of management, internal auditors work for ensuring effective operations and improving performance for all the management systems within the organization. They bear great responsibility and play a key role. Therefore, the study attempts to explore the personal attributes and work characteristics, to analyze job satisfactions among internal auditors and finally to finds a list of key factors effecting job satisfaction. This study is conducted in three parts. First, a preliminary conceptual framework is established via literature review. This conceptual framework goes through constant modifications before being introduced into the empirical research architecture of this study. Questionnaires are thus designed based on this architecture. In the process of questionnaire design, opinions from eight senior auditor executives serve as expert validity. Expert opinions are modified and incorporated into questionnaires to quantify the correlation of personal attributes, work characteristics and job satisfactions among internal auditors. This research selected samples of the internal auditors from domestic companies, i.e. members of the Institute of Internal Auditors, in Taipei, Hsinchu, Taichung, and Kaohsiung. A total of 567 questionnaires are issued and 376 questionnaires are collected with responding rate of 66%. After deleting 104 invalid questionnaires, the number of valid questionnaires is 272. Statistical analysis, such as variance, correlation and regression, is conducted with SPSS software. Empirical findings are as follows: 1. Significant difference exists between the demographic variables, such as job titles, the years of work experience, disciplined personal traits of internal auditors, certain dimensions of work properties and internal and external satisfactions in terms of job satisfaction. 2. There is significance difference between the ages and the competition dimension factors of achievement motivation. 3. General auditors are found to be significantly more satisfied with work than senior auditors or entry-level auditors. It is also apparent that the more senior the positions, the more job satisfactions. 4. The demographic variables, work characteristics, achievement motivations, and job satisfactions are partially correlated. At a closer look, we find that the friendliness as a personal attribute is significantly positive correlated with job satisfaction. Neuroticism as a personal attribute is significantly negative correlated with job satisfaction. 5. Personal attributes of internal auditors impose significant impacts to achievement motivations and job satisfactions. 6. Personal attributes are affected by achievement motivations and, in turn, they affect job satisfactions. Achievement motivations have intervening effects though the effects are mild.

This research aims to investigate three issues :(1) how the consumer needs of pop music and the product attributes of records affect consumer satisfaction, (2) this research also focuses on how the match between the consumer needs of pop music and the product attributes of records affect consumer satisfaction, and (3) how the consumer satisfaction contributes to the repurchase intention is also discussed. Our study shows that listening to music, acquiring the information about music and adoring idols are main consumer needs. When the CD products satisfy these consumer needs, the consumer satisfaction will be high. In addition, consumers identify three major product attributes: function, idolatry and fashion. The interaction between listening to music, acquiring music information and functional attributes will affect consumer satisfaction positively. Similarly, the interaction between the idolatry and symbol of idol will affect consumer satisfaction positively. Consumer satisfaction has also been found to affect the repurchase intention. Compare to consumer needs, the perceived value of CDs has a stronger effect on consumer satisfaction. Therefore, if business models may need to be developed to reform the compact discs industry.

<p>With the increased use of computers in every-day live, the demand for newer and better software is increasing day by day. This advancement has resulted in that many developers are searching for ways to decrease their development time. One approach is to use design patterns when designing applications. Design pattern are acknowledged solutions to known design problems that can be reused over and over again without ever doing the same thing twice. The most recent advancement of identifying design patterns has been within the domain of concurrent systems.</p><p>Design pattern within concurrent systems are of interest in this project because of its young age. Development of concurrent applications has often been compared to constant reinvention of the wheel, because code reuse is very low and solutions to design problems are being rediscovered over and over again. By using design pattern, an attempt is made to avoid that. The question is if design patterns are capable of standing under that load.</p><p>This project takes as a case study the problem of protecting a shared resource in a concurrent application, and implements two different solutions to that problem using a special design pattern. These two implementations are then evaluated, with consideration to certain software quality attributes, in a qualitative way.</p><p>This project shows how a pattern can be used to solve a common synchronization problem. It discusses the nature of design patterns, what needs to be considered when they are implemented and how a pattern language can affect the implementation.</p>

<p><font face="Times New Roman"> <p align="left">The results emanating from the study indicate that Work Environment variables played the most crucial role in retaining Black talent in the organisation at which the research was undertaken. There were significant relationships between some of the biographical variables and retention, and the four retention factors significantly explained the variance in retention. Recommendations based on the data were made to various stakeholders in order to address the existing problem, while simultaneously protecting the rights to confidentiality of the respondents.</p> </font></p>