Abstract With the economic growth as well as the advent of the post-industry age in the 21st century, a variety of investment patterns for people to employ progressively appear. Moreover, there is a tendency in which people¡¦s traditional and conservative manners for investments gradually transform into aggressive ones with a preference of risks. For instance, it has been impossible nowadays for certain simple finance-managing mechanisms, such as the Certificate of Deposit, the Bond or even Stock Markets, to satisfy general investors¡¦ needs. Therefore, more and more financial products have become available, especially a lot of derivative securities like options, futures, or stock options. Furthermore, the activities of horseracing, dog racing or even lottery are no longer taboos in Taiwan. As far as the lotteries in most of the counties are concerned, the government is usually the main host, regarding them as additional effortless sources of tax revenue. During the earlier periods in Taiwan, the only lottery available was the national ¡§Ai-Guo¡¨ lottery issued by the government. Unfortunately, a lot of unlawful gambling gangs took advantage of the popularity of ¡§Ai-Guo¡¨ lottery by utilizing it as the sources of the so-called ¡§Da-Jia-Le¡¨ lottery, which was an illegal, yet popular underground gambling activity. The ¡§Da-Jia-Le¡¨ lottery not only corrupted the social values and caused a lot of criminal actions, but also made an acute and serious impact on regular economic operations. Consequently, the government resolutely called a halt on the ¡§Ai-Guo¡¨ lottery. Nevertheless, the prevailing gambling mania did decline; on the contrary, it further transformed into a covert and under-the-counter gambling operation attached to the Hong Kong lottery. The craze almost swept the entire country, resulting in more and more social problems and having troubled the authorities for a long period of time. To settle such a predicament, government decided to refer to the experiences of other countries, beginning to launch local lotteries in Taiwan, instead of prohibiting people from attending illicit gambling activities. On the one hand, the government would be able to set the lottery business back on right track and eliminate the root of the underground economic operations, which brought about many social problems. On the other hand, the local lottery would provide extra tax revenue for the administrations as well as more employment opportunities for handicapped people. Accordingly, Taiwanese Lottery was launched in the beginning of the year 2002. Until now, mainly due to the attraction of the surprisingly huge bonus shares offered by the lottery¡¦s highest prize, the public response is overwhelming. The social environment in which the stochastic investment actions become authorized and gradually prevail directly triggers the motivation of this research in further investigating the feasibility of the investment. The research takes Taiwan Public Welfare Lottery as an investment research case, exploring the game rules of lottery in an attempt to enhance the probability of winning prizes and further testing and evaluating the effectiveness of various simple biting tools adopted by the general public in order to obtain the most effective biting ways for individual investor¡¦s reference. The process of this study is as follows: 1. Testing the randomness of the winning prize numbers in Taiwan Public Welfare Lottery. 2. Estimating the possible distribution of the population via the statistical application. 3. Using the cluster analysis to induce the sub-cluster of the selected numbers according to the patterns of the historical prize numbers. 4. Making use of Markov Chain to select the sub-cluster, which is within an investor¡¦s upper limit of risks. And consequently, this study reveals the followings: 1. The winning prize numbers are random within study samples. 2. The statistic order of the winning prize numbers is £] distribution. 3. The cluster effect is slightly enhanced when the sub-cluster is chosen through the cluster analysis rather than random ways. 4. The application of Markov Chain has an obvious reinforcement on the selection of sub-cluster. 5. The so-called ¡§Smart Package Biting¡¨, which is adopted by the general public, cannot improve the winning possibility; however, depending on individual investor¡¦s needs, it could be a useful tool for risk management. Through a seemingly aimless random event, the research explores the possible development of the modeling process, so as to comprehend and experience a manager¡¦s mental course on decision making in a dynamic, capricious or even chaotic managerial environment.

Under the Clean Water Act (CWA) program the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) listed 110 stream segments with pathogenic bacteria impairment in 2000. The current study was conducted to characterize the watersheds associated with the impaired waterbodies. The main characteristics considered for the classification of waterbodies were designated use of the waterbody, land use distribution, density of stream network, average distance of a land of a particular use to the closest stream, household population, density of on-site sewage facilities (OSSF), bacterial loading due to the presence of different types of farm animals and wildlife, and average climatic conditions. The availability of observed in-stream fecal coliform bacteria concentration data was evaluated to obtain subgroups of data-rich and data-poor watersheds within a group. The climatic data and observed in-stream fecal coliform bacteria concentrations were analyzed to find out seasonal variability of the water quality. The watershed characteristics were analyzed using the multivariate statistical analysis techniques such as factor analysis/principal component analysis, cluster analysis, and discriminant analysis. Six groups of watersheds were formed as result of the statistical analysis. The main factors that differentiate the clusters were found to be bacterial contribution from farm animals and wildlife, density of OSSF, density of households connected to public sewers, and the land use distribution. Two watersheds were selected each from two groups of watersheds. Hydrological Simulation Program-FORTRAN (HSPF) model was calibrated for one watershed within each group and tested for the other watershed in the same group to study the similarity in the parameter sets due to the similarity in watershed characteristics. The study showed that the watersheds within a given cluster formed during the multivariate statistical analysis showed similar watershed characteristics and yielded similar model results for similar model input parameters. The effect of parameter uncertainty on the in-stream bacterial concentration predictions by HSPF was evaluated for the watershed of Salado Creek, in Bexar County. The parameters that control the HSPF model hydrology contributed the most variance in the in-stream fecal coliform bacterial concentrations corresponding to a simulation period between 1 January 1995 and 31 December 2000.

The past decade has seen a steady increase in wine consumption in Taiwan. With the increase comes the need to understand how consumers choose wine. Market segmentation is the principal concept in this study, and the aim is to find consumer behaviors of wine in different segments. A range of behavioral and demographic information was collected by the survey of questionnaire. In particular, participants were asked to indicate on average how many bottles of wine they purchased and how many hours they spent to acquire wine information per month. The above information forms the basis of segmenting, together with other behavioral information, combines to form profiles of consumers with high and low involvement of wine. In the process, cluster analysis was performed to divide the respondents into two groups, cross analysis and chi-square test were used to evaluate the significant differences on behavioral variables, and factor analysis and one-way ANOVA were applied to find which wine characteristics were important toward each segment. The result showed that significant differences were found between two groups on the choices of wine types and wine outlets, the way of acquiring wine information, the factors effecting to choose wines, and the characteristics of wine they emphasized.

Thesis (M.A.)--York University, 2000. Graduate Programme in Statistics. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 29-32). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pMQ56213.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 58-61).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 141-148).

The aim of this project is to study the level of paradigm development in the domain of social media studies. Based on the works of Kuhn (1970), Pfeffer (1993), and Thompson and Tuden (1959), the level of paradigm development was defined as the degree of consensus regarding: research topics, methods, and theories used in a given field of study. A sample of social media research articles was studied to analyze the level paradigm development within this domain of study. The sample consisted of a group of social media research articles that were published in the top ten journals of communication studies in the last five years. Content analysis methodology was used to analyze the research articles and clusters analysis was utilized in order to investigate the level of paradigm development in this field of study. The analysis confirmed the lack of consensus in the social sciences (Pfeffer, 1993). The level of agreement regarding research methods, theoretical concepts, and research topics used in social media studies was quite low. The lack of consensus in this new domain of study may be explained by two factors. Social media as an academic field is still in its infancy (Van Osch and Coursaris, 2014), and thus it lacks of a shared body of theoretical knowledge that can be used to analyze the phenomenon of social media (Van Osch and Coursaris, 2014; Chong and Xie, 2011; and Khang, Ki, and Ye, 2012). In conclusion, this project suggests that social media studies should aim to develop a high level of paradigm development, since academic fields with high levels of consensus are better organized, have fewer power conflicts, and get more funding (Beyer and Lodhl, 1976; Pfeffer, 1993).

In recent years, social commerce sites such as Groupon and LivingSocial have achieved great success in attracting new consumers and increasing store traffic for a growing number of businesses. However, it is still unclear how the information flow to reach new consumers is generated. Understanding this information flow is the key to the question of what lead to the success of these companies. In the online context, the key information disseminators can have both a large-scale network and a decisive influence on the nodes that are connected closely to them, indicating an important pattern of consumer purchase process. Here, we argue that one of the prominent advantages of social commerce is the information dissemination process, during which word of mouth (WOM) is generated to boost consumer traffic. In the present study, we conduct a cluster analysis to segment online shoppers according to their information dissemination contribution. Gatekeeping theory was used for conceptualizing consumers who tend to disseminate more commercial information and WOM in social commerce, providing us the theoretical basis for clustering consumers. Our findings suggest that a sizable proportion of consumers constituted the gatekeeper group (approximately 25%). Gatekeepers tend to be highly active in both finding the outside source of information and connecting it with inside social networks. In addition, different aspects of the potential to become gatekeepers divide the rest of the consumers into two groups. To date, the present research is the first to explore online consumer segmentations using the gatekeeping perspective. / text

Learning motivation plays a principal role in predicting desirable outcomes such as academic success and engagement in school (Elliot & Dweck, 2005; Spence & Helmreich, 1983). Among several relevant motivational variables, the achievement goal construct currently has received the most research attention in the area of competence-relevant motivation. Theorists are interested in studying achievement goals because goal orientation can influence cognitive processes through key motivational processes and eventually lead to improvement in learning achievement and attitudes (e.g., Ames, 1984; Elliot, 2005). Little is known, however, about regulations in achievement goals over time. In the present study, I want to address this oversight, focusing primarily on the foundational question of how students' achievement goals are changed and the relations between individual goals and perceptions of classroom structures. Based on previous literature, the current quasi-experimental study focused on the research hypothesis that instructional components of a course which are focused on competence (e.g., exam, in-class quiz, writing a paper, in-class activities) influence differentially the adoption or regulation of students' achievement goals in a real classroom. A total of 173 college students from an introductory educational psychology course participated in this study. I adopted five statistical approaches to investigate changes and stability in achievement goals and used multiple regression analyses to verify the relations between achievement goals and perceptions of class goals. Overall, the results of the current study provide clear and consistent evidence for the presence of both stability and change. All achievement goals had high stability for each instructional task through differential and ipsative continuity. Mean-level change analyses showed a considerable decline in the tendency in each individual goal pursuit. Interestingly, students' mastery goals toward an exam increased significantly whereas performance-avoidance goals decreased. Finally, cluster analysis suggested changes in cluster memberships between the pre- and post-measure of achievement goals toward each instructional task and participants' perceptions of classroom goals. The results and findings of the current study provide important implications for both research methodology used to investigate achievement goals and instructional design in the classroom. Limitations of the current investigation and suggestions for future studies are discussed. / text

A new ensemble method for cluster analysis is introduced, which can be interpreted in two different ways: As complexity-reducing preprocessing stage for hierarchical clustering and as combination procedure for several partitioning results. The basic idea is to locate and combine structurally stable cluster centers and/or prototypes. Random effects of the training set are reduced by repeatedly training on resampled sets (bootstrap samples). We discuss the algorithm both from a more theoretical and an applied point of view and demonstrate it on several data sets. (author's abstract) / Series: Working Papers SFB "Adaptive Information Systems and Modelling in Economics and Management Science"