Class of 2016 Abstract / Objectives: To promote Alzheimer’s disease (AD) awareness in older adults and caregivers by creating and implementing an interactive educational program in several Southern Arizona senior centers, evaluate the helpfulness of the intervention, the confidence and the motivation of the participants. Methods: A 30-minute educational program consisting of a PowerPoint presentation with various interactive learning methods and a 10-minute question and answer session was delivered to those 55 years of age and older at senior centers across Southern Arizona. An anonymous questionnaire was conducted after each educational program to assess the helpfulness of the program, the subject’s familiarity with AD and their motivation to create a personal action plan after participation, and demographic information. Responses from the participants were compared with a priori alpha at 0.05. Results: A majority of participants in the study were female (69.9%) the median age was 75. One hundred (98%) of the participants strongly agreed or agreed that the interactive educational program was helpful in understanding AD, and 95 (96.9%) stated they were more motivated to create a personal care plan. There was no difference between the males or females’ self-reported familiarity with dementia (p = 0.25) or AD (p = 0.75) after program participation, but >50% of overall participants who were not already very familiar with Alzheimer’s disease increased in familiarity. Conclusions: An interactive approach to educating community-dwelling older adults and their caregivers on AD was helpful to the participants, and they were more motivated to create personal care plans.

No description available.

Globalization has among other tendencies led to the emergence of new ways of doing business. One of the ways for organizations to meet the demands of a new competitive landscape has been through management accounting change, a field which has become increasingly popular in research. This paper builds on that research and seeks to investigate the case of the implementation of a new management accounting system in a Swedish company which was triggered by strategic change. Commonality through the interactive approach is by some researchers seen as a key to successful change. This approach is contrasted to the importance of symbolic constructs and change recipients’ cognitive effort to understand the meaning of change for which Framing theory is applied. The paper comes to the conclusion that both approaches are necessary in a change process, and shows further that their usage will depend on the process’ timeframe and change recipients’ position in the organization.

There is a growing interest in electronic auctions in the literature. Many researchers work on the single attribute version of the problem. Multi-attribute version of the problem is more realistic. However, this brings a substantial difficulty in solving the problem. In order to overcome the computational difficulties, we develop an Evolutionary Algorithm (EA) for the case of multi-attribute multi-item reverse auctions. We generate the whole Pareto front using the EA. We also develop heuristic procedures to find several good initial solutions and insert those in the initial population of the EA. We test the EA on a number of randomly generated problems and compare the results with the true Pareto optimal front obtained by solving a series of integer programs. We also develop an exact interactive approach that provides aid both to the buyer and the sellers for a multi-attribute single item multi round reverse auction. The buyer decides on the provisional winner at each round. Then the approach provides support in terms of all attributes to each seller to be competitive in the next round of the auction.

We aim to classify alternatives evaluated in multiple criteria among preference ordered classes assuming an underlying additive utility function. We develop a probabilistic classification method by calculating the probability of an alternative being in each class. We assign alternatives to classes based on threshold probabilities. We require the decision maker to place an alternative to a class when no alternatives satisfy the required thresholds. We find new probabilities for unassigned alternatives in the light of new information and repeat the procedure until all alternatives are classified. We implemented our algorithm to classify MBA programs among preference ordered groups. We evaluate our algorithm based on the number of misclassified alternatives and the number of alternatives placed by the decision maker.

In this thesis, single undesirable and semi-desirable facility location problems are analyzed in a continuous planar region considering the interaction between the facility and the existing demand points. In both problems, the distance between the facility and the demand points is measured with the rectilinear metric. The aim in the first part where the location of a pure undesirable facility is considered, is to maximize the distance of the facility from the closest demand point. In the second part, where the location of a semi-desirable facility is considered, a conflicting objective measuring the service cost of the facility is added to the problem of the first part. For the solution of the first problem, a mixed integer programming model is used. In order to increase the solution efficiency of the model, new branch and bound strategies and bounding schemes are suggested. In addition, a geometrical method is presented which is based on upper and lower bounds. For the biobjective problem, a three-phase interactive geometrical branch and bound algorithm is suggested to find the most preferred efficient solution.

Computer simulation is a popular method that is often used as a decision support tool in industry to estimate the performance of systems too complex for analytical solutions. It is a tool that assists decision-makers to improve organizational performance and achieve performance objectives in which simulated conditions can be randomly varied so that critical situations can be investigated without real-world risk. Due to the stochastic nature of many of the input process variables in simulation models, the output from the simulation model experiments are random. Thus, experimental runs of computer simulations yield only estimates of the values of performance objectives, where these estimates are themselves random variables. Most real-world decisions involve the simultaneous optimization of multiple, and often conflicting, objectives. Researchers and practitioners use various approaches to solve these multiobjective problems. Many of the approaches that integrate the simulation models with stochastic multiple objective optimization algorithms have been proposed, many of which use the Pareto-based approaches that generate a finite set of compromise, or tradeoff, solutions. Nevertheless, identification of the most preferred solution can be a daunting task to the decisionmaker and is an order of magnitude harder in the presence of stochastic objectives. However, to the best of this researcher’s knowledge, there has been no focused efforts and existing work that attempts to reduce the number of tradeoff solutions while considering the stochastic nature of a set of objective functions. In this research, two approaches that consider multiple stochastic objectives when reducing the set of the tradeoff solutions are designed and proposed. The first proposed approach is an a posteriori approach, which uses a given set of Pareto optima as input. The second iv approach is an interactive-based approach that articulates decision-maker preferences during the optimization process. A detailed description of both approaches is given, and computational studies are conducted to evaluate the efficacy of the two approaches. The computational results show the promise of the proposed approaches, in that each approach effectively reduces the set of compromise solutions to a reasonably manageable size for the decision-maker. This is a significant step beyond current applications of decision-making process in the presence of multiple stochastic objectives and should serve as an effective approach to support decisionmaking under uncertainty

Background: Joint attention (JA) is selectively and pervasively impaired in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and has been found to link to later outcomes in language, theory of mind, play and social development. This study investigated the effectiveness of a social interactive intervention to improve initiating JA skills in children with ASD. The intervention was based on the mirror neuron hypothesis, in that techniques used encouraged the children to take on their communication partners’ perspective through a process of embodied simulation. Method: Three participants diagnosed with ASD, under the age of 5, were recruited as well as 3 typically developing children for the setting of training criteria. A multiple-baseline design across participants was implemented. Results: All three participants displayed improvements in their ability to initiate JA. Skills generalized to other settings and communication partners. Improvements were observed by both trained and naïve observers. Conclusions: A social interactive model, based on the mirror neuron hypothesis, utilizing specific techniques which follow the child’s lead may be used to effectively improve initiating joint attention (IJA) in some children with ASD.

In this study, we propose two biobjective mathematical models based on PROMETHEE V method for project selection problems. We develop an interactive approach (ib-PROMETHEE V) including data mining techniques to solve the first proposed mathematical model. For the second model, we propose NSGA-II with constraint handling method. We also develop a Preference Based Interactive Multiobjective Genetic Algorithm (IMGA) to solve the second proposed mathematical model. We test the performance of NSGA-II with constraint handling method and IMGA on randomly generated test problems.

The focus of this study is on South Africa's transition to democracy. It is argued in this thesis, that an analysis of the transition to democracy in South Africa and the transformation of the con ict that prevailed in this divided society could generate new avenues for theorising about transitions to democracy in divided societies amidst con ict. The aim with this thesis is to contribute towards a more comprehensive understanding of the complex nature of the process of transition to democracy, and the relevant theory involved, particularly with regard to transitions in divided societies. One consequence of the deep divisions within South African society has been the increase in violence, which followed liberalisation. The transition to democracy in South Africa, as a result, was characterised by continuing and escalating violence. In South Africa, the authoritarian regime deteriorated mainly because of internal factors, but external factors also played an important role. The analysis of the transition has been guided by the hypothesis that the democratisation of South Africa was accomplished through a compromise that was negotiated between the major political actors and which re ected the intra-, as well as the inter-dynamics in the domains of, state - political society - civil society. Thus, the main theme of this thesis is, that in the analysis of the dynamics of the tran- sition to democracy in South Africa, a basic framework in which the domains of, state - political society - civil society, are the domains where structural variables (such as culture, economic development, class structures, increased education and the international environ- ment) and behavioural variables (such as major political actors, elite factions, organisations from civil society) interact. Thus, in the diachronic analysis of South Africa's transition, an interactive approach, that seeks to relate structural constraints to the shaping of contingent choice, is followed. At the same time, the institutional substitution of a new democratic political dispensation is examined. In conclusion, democracies are complex phenomena, and they are caused by many di er- ent forces and synthesizing the relevant theoretical approaches to political change provides a more cogent and comprehensive explanation of democratic transition in South Africa. / (D. Litt. et Phil. (International Politics))