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Based on the Information Integration Theory, the current study investigates whether students¡¦ integration model of ticket fare and total travelling time difference will change when facing different safety conditions after they join the trials held by the Kaohsiung Rapid Transit Company (KRTC). The result indicates that the students¡¦ integration model of ticket fare and total travelling time difference is the ¬Û¥[ model. By using a different model of discussion, the result of my questionnaire shows that the linear transportation behavior found by traditional Mode Choice Model can be maintained. The result of data analysis suggests that KRTC has to adopt different strategies to enhance students¡¦ willingfulness to change their vehicles for transportation. It is shown that students add the scale values of ticket fare and total travelling time difference to motivate them to change their vehicles for transportation. Therefore, if we want to enhance the willingness to change their transporting vehicles, it is more effective to provide a solution with a higher scale value. In this study, students' scale value of total travelling time difference was higher than ticket price. Hence, if KRTC wants to enhance their willingfulness to change transporting vehicles, it is a more effective strategy to devise a way to decrease total travelling time.

Nonprofit Organization¡]NPO¡^is a important part for civic society. This paper tries to review the relation between NPO and social development, and try to find some way to develop and help the economic of Kaohsiung. It will be a start point for social and NPO¡¦s development. ¡§An integrated public affairs management framework¡¨ is adopted to describe and analyze the social condition in society. To doing this, we try to present a broad overview of developmental issue in Kaohsiung. And we uses IIT¡]Information Integration Theory¡^and IM¡]Interactive Management¡^to help us to understand what people think about NPO and what can NPO do about the economic of Kaohsiung. The conclusion is that, (1) the result of IIT and IM is not significant between pre-test and post-test; it means it is not change the cognition of participants. (2) The social condition of Kaohsiung is declining gradually, including behavioral and cognitive aspect. (3) Economy is the core driver in that society and political evolve and better thrive when the material or economic aspect is strong or well address.The key point is the relation between cross-strait for the development of Kaohsiung. So NPO need to promote the cooperative between cross-strait and to find solution for both China and Taiwan.

Abstract In order to understand whether the public improves their faith in justice after 15-year reforms, and whether the result of verdict meets the expectations of the public, this research regards the sentences from the Judge as a decision-making to discuss whether there is any difference in the integration models of sentencing factors and seriousness among the role in the Court. The research analyzes the functions of justice from the viewpoints of Integrated Reference Framework for Public Affairs Management (PAM), and anatomizes the phenomena presenting by Society Develop Matrix (SDM) in every development stage. The research adopts the experimental methods of Information Integration Theory (IIT), and divides the subjects into five roles: Judges, Prosecutors, Lawyers, Inmates and the General Public. The research selects the subjects from Kaohsiung, Tainan and Pingtung, and offers the two cases of ¡§Traffic¡¨ and ¡§Waste Disposal¡¨ to acquire the integration modes of ¡§the Damage from Criminal¡¨ and ¡§the Attitudes after committing crimes ¡¨ in the measurement of punishment. Here are the research findings: 1. Individual subject from the five roles mostly uses ¡§Equal-Weight Averaging Model¡¨ to combine the two factors of the damages from committing crimes and the attitudes after committing crimes. 2. The types of case influence sentences and the waste disposal cases are obviously much more serious than the traffic cases. 3. The order of cases has no influence on sentences. 4. There is no significant difference in penalty measurement in traffic court cases among the five roles. However, there are significant variations in waste disposal cases, especially between the attorneys and the general public, while the attorneys expect lighter penalty measurement than the general public. 5. After the justice reformation, there have been slight differences in cognitive models of sentences. Keywords: Public Affairs Management, Information Integration Theory, justice reforms, sentencing

How to properly aggregate indirect information is more and more important. In this dissertation, we will present two aspects of the issue: indirect comparison of treatment effects and aggregation of ordered-based rank data. / Statistics

ABB Corporation is a swedish-swiss international company, specializing in power and automation technologies. The company is a joint-venture between ASEA and Brown Bouveri, merging into one company in 1988. ABB has five business unit, where the products and services mainly comes from research and development work within the company. Each business unit performs R&D initiatives and investments within respective area of reach, in order to achieve competitive products and services. ABB Corporate Research is responsible for research and development within the company where R&D initiative takes place. During autumn 2013 ABB Corporate Research will launch an improvement study, which will be the basis for subsequent major project. Information is a key factor within ABB Corporate Research, where each stakeholder in a specific project has access for specific information. The question is, how accessible/searchable is the information, and also how user-friendly is the current information system within the unit.   The mission of the conducted study is to examine what the employees of ABB Corporate Research think about the existing information distribution system for technical reports and publications, also propose overview improvements within the particular area. Delimitation has been established to conduct the study within the department of Software Architecture & Usability (SARU) in Västerås, which is a part of Automation Technology (AT) department, in order to deliver on the required time frame.   Theories regarding Innovation management, Lean thinking, Change management, Information distribution, Integration of information system and Ishikawa was studied thoroughly within the project. A qualitative research methodology was used, based on performing interviews with key personnel within SARU. The interviews converted into key factors (findings), which resulted into correlations to all key factors. A root cause analysis (Ishikawa) was performed, in order to examine and visualize which challenges appear within the current information system.   The result from the conducted analysis and correlations indicates that: the database is not user-friendly enough, it is difficult to acquire correct information, information is not in detail level due to limitation of information, it is time consuming to search in the databases in order to acquire correct information, Usually rely on internal networking instead of searching into the information system, restricted internal security and person based information dependence.   With the help of theories within the project, in combination with the conducted results from the analysis and correlations, improvements have been proposed. Due to the time frame of the project, further analysis should be performed for respective improvement proposals. The improvement proposals could be a starting point for the upcoming project. The improvements proposals are:   RSS Feeds solution for usability efficiency Standardized Work Methodology Integrated Database Interface Internal Information Transparency   The authors recommend implementing all improvement proposals, in order to further achieve productivity and efficiency within the organization.

Enterprise Information Integration (EII) is rapidly becoming one of the pillars of modern corporate information systems. Given the spread and diversity of information sources in an enterprise, it has become increasingly difficult for decision makers to have access to relevant and accurate information at the opportune time. It has therefore become critical to seamlessly integrate the diverse information stores found in an organization into a single coherent data source. This is the job of EII and one of the key components to making it work is harnessing the implied meaning or semantics hidden within data sources. Modern EII systems are capable of harnessing semantic information and ontologies to make integration across data stores possible. These systems do not, however, allow a consumer of the integration service to build queries with semantic meaning. This is due to the fact that most EII systems make use of XQuery, SQL, or both, as query languages, neither of which has the capability to build semantically rich queries. In this thesis Semantos (from the Greek word sema for “sign or token”) is proposed as a viable alternative: an information query language based in XML, which is capable of exploiting ontologies, enabling consumers to build semantically enriched queries. An exploration is made into the characteristics or requirements that Semantos needs to satisfy as a semantically smart information query language. From these requirements we design and develop a software implementation. The benefit of Semantos is that it possesses a query structure that allows automated processes to decompose and restructure the queries without human intervention. We demonstrate the applicability of Semantos using two realistic examples: a query enhancement- and a query translation service. Both expound the ability of a Semantos query to be manipulated by automated services to achieve Information Integration goals. / Dissertation (MSc)--University of Pretoria, 2009. / Computer Science / unrestricted

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / With the rise of big data and the demands for leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), healthcare requires more knowledge sharing that offers machine-readable semantic formalization. Even though some applications allow shared data interoperability, they still lack formal machine-readable semantics in ICD9/10 and LOINC. With ontology, the further ability to represent the shared conceptualizations is possible, similar to SNOMED-CT. Nevertheless, SNOMED-CT mainly focuses on electronic health record (EHR) documenting and evidence-based practice. Moreover, due to its independence on data quality, the ontology enhances advanced AI technologies, such as machine learning (ML), by providing a reusable knowledge framework. Developing a machine-readable and sharable semantic knowledge model incorporating external evidence and individual practice’s values will create a new revolution for best practice medicine. The purpose of this research is to implement a sharable ontology for the best practice in healthcare, with anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction (ACLR) as a case study. The ontology represents knowledge derived from both evidence-based practice (EBP) and practice-based evidence (PBE). First, the study presents how the domain-specific knowledge model is built using a combination of Toronto Virtual Enterprise (TOVE) and a bottom-up approach. Then, I propose a top-down approach using Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology (OBO) Foundry ontologies that adheres to the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO)’s framework. In this step, the EBP, PBE, and statistic ontologies are developed independently. Next, the study integrates these individual ontologies into the final ACLR Ontology (ACLRO) as a more meaningful model that endorses the reusability and the ease of the model-expansion process since the classes can grow independently from one another. Finally, the study employs a use case and DL queries for model validation. The study's innovation is to present the ontology implementation for best-practice medicine and demonstrate how it can be applied to a real-world setup with semantic information. The ACLRO simultaneously emphasizes knowledge representation in health-intervention, statistics, research design, and external research evidence, while constructing the classes of data-driven and patient-focus processes that allow knowledge sharing explicit of technology. Additionally, the model synthesizes multiple related ontologies, which leads to the successful application of best-practice medicine.

Cognitive dissonance is one of the most frequently cited theories in social psychology (Cooper, 2007) and has been studied in many communication contexts. Although there are many situations in which people need to repeatedly reduce dissonance concerning the same focal belief or behavior, the vast majority of dissonance studies have focused on single instances of dissonance (McGrath, 2017). This dissertation addresses the question of how beliefs and affect change in response to sequentially induced cognitive dissonance. Belief change is frequently studied as a mode of dissonance reduction (Vaidis & Bran, 2018). Information integration theory states that belief change is a function of the scale value (valence) and weight of each piece of information in a message, and that belief change in response to multiple pieces of information is a weighted sum of the valence of the pieces of information (Anderson, 1971; Anderson & Farkas, 1973). Using the sequential information integration model (SIIM; Chung & Fink, 2016; Chung, Fink, Waks, Meffert, & Xie, 2012), this 2 (statement type: justification vs. vote recall) x 2 (evaluation order: evaluation/affect vs. affect/evaluation) within- and between-subjects online experiment tested the effect of sequential induction of dissonance, via repeated exposure to incongruent information, on evaluations of candidates in a hypothetical congressional election. This study, which included 227 participants based in the U.S., replicated key findings from previous studies on belief trajectories, lending further support to the SIIM and illustrating the strength of decision justification as a mechanism for resisting belief change over time. It also found that people respond to negatively valenced messages, compared to positively valenced messages, with greater psychological discomfort and less positive affect even when both types of messages are counterattitudinal. Finally, this research found that people may continue to experience psychological discomfort until finding an effective way to reduce their dissonance. This dissertation replicates, in part, previous SIIM studies and offers insight into the question of how beliefs and affect change in response to sequentially induced cognitive dissonance. / Media & Communication

No / Due to the advance of modern computing technology, decisions can be made based on all the existing related data instances scattered across multiple data storages, such that available information has been entirely taken into consideration. Particularly in the predictive toxicology domain, because of the heterogeneity of data sources, multiple data instances with respect to the same endpoint are usually inconsistent, and the quality (or reliability) of the data instances is typically different. Also, the quantity of data instances is often not sufficient to conduct a study using conventional statistics-based methods. This paper presents a novel risk analysis approach for chemical toxicity assessment which considers all the available heterogeneous data instances in the same time, assisted by their quality (or reliability) values. The system is developed on the basis of possibility-probability distribution, where the uncertainty of the approximated probability values based on traditional statistics methods is represented by possibility. The uncertainty considered herein is led not only by the statistics on limited small number of data instances, but also by the poor quality (or reliability) of data instances. The possibility-probability distribution is automatically computed from available data instances by employing a modified diffused-interior-outer-set model (where the reliability of data is considered) based on information diffusion theory. Toxicity value for a given chemical compound is then estimated as the fuzzy expected value based on the resulted possibility-probability distribution. Toxicity risk with respect to regulatory threshold is also introduced, in order to evaluate the probability of which the toxicity may be classified into a certain regulatory range. The proposed approach is applied to a real-world dataset to illustrate the utility and the potential of the approach in risk assessment of chemical toxicity.