An implementation framework has been developed in this thesis for a well-known APX-hard combinatorial optimization problem known as Block Sorting. The motivation for the study of this problem comes from applications such as computational biology and optical character recognition. While existing Block Sorting research has been theoretically focused on the development and analysis of several approximation algorithms for Block Sorting, little or no work has been carried out thus far on the implementation of the proposed approximation algorithms. The conceptualization of an implementation framework and illustrating its use by experimenting with the existing approximation algorithms will provide means for discovering newer approaches to handling this important problem. As the main contribution, the research in this thesis provides a new greedy algorithm for Block Sorting in which each block move either reduces the number of blocks by two or three blocks, or reduces by one the number of reversals or inversions in the orig- inal permutation. Experimental results for all algorithms are also provided along with a comparison of their performance using the number of block moves and approximation ratios as performance metrics when sorting permutations of a given order, and as the order of permutations is varied. Preliminary results from the experimentation were shared at the 2017 IEEE 17th International Conference on Bioinformatics and Bioengineering (BIBE) [1]. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that has been focused on the implementation and experimental performance analysis of any algorithm for Block Sorting. We believe the results presented in this thesis will be useful for researchers and practitioners working in this area.

台灣地區在2010年的行政區域調整中，有三個區域進行縣市合併，合併後的縣市其選區必須重新劃分，而進行劃分時有三個因素可以做為縣市合併後衍生之選區劃分原則，分別是縣市融合、大市效應與優勢現象。這三個因素在以往的選區劃分中甚少被提及，因此本論文特別討論考慮這三個因素的選區劃分。 由於大市效應或優勢現象產生的原因是單一選區中有太多的選舉人口來自縣市合併前的同一行政區，因此我們在劃分前處理中，先對人口過多的行政區進行分割，然後進行選區劃分。為促進縣市融合，我們優先考慮將原縣市交界區域的行政區域劃分至選區，然後才考慮非交界區的行政區域。劃分的過程中，我們參考最多限制優先的原則，透過貪婪演算法進行劃分，劃分結束後再進行選區調整，以求能滿足中選會對選區人口數等相關的規定。 我們在論文中提出了選區評估的指標，可以對縣市融合、大市效應與優勢現象進行衡量與評估，以便作為劃分結果的比較與參考。 最後我們透過對合併後的高雄縣市進行選區劃分，以說明我們整體的概念與方法。根據我們的劃分原則與方法，我們的劃分結果產生6個縣市融合的選區，而中選會所公布的選區劃分結果，沒有任何符合縣市融合精神的選區。同時，相較於中選會的結果，我們的劃分方式有較好的大市效應指標與優勢現象指標。 / During the administrative district adjustment of Taiwan in 2010, three regions conducted the city and county merges. The electoral districts must be redistricted after these merges. There are new issues, related to the merge of city and county, which have seldom being discussed before, namely, the city-county integration, the overpopulation-region effect, and the dominance phenomenon. In this thesis, we will consider these issues as the new principles to be included in electoral districting. The reason that causes overpopulation-region effect or dominance phenomenon is due to too much of population comes from the same administrative district in the city of county prior to the merge. One could avoid these by dividing the overpopulation borough before carrying out the electoral districting. In order to promote the city and county integration, we give priority to these administrative districts on the junction regions of the original city and county configurations before considering the administrative districts on the non-junction regions. The most constraint principles and greedy algorithms are employed in the actual electoral districting processes. After the first districting, we conduct a region adjustment to comply with the regulations of the Central Election Commission (CEC). We also proposed the assessment indices that can be used to evaluate the possible effects due to the city-county integration, the overpopulation-region effect, and the dominance phenomenon. Using these indices, one can compare the results of various districting outcomes. Finally, we illustrated our idea and methods by actually districting the merged region of Kaohsiung city and county. According to our mechanism, we produced six city-county integrated electoral districts where no city-county integrated electoral district was found in the CEC’s districting results. In addition, the districting results produced by our method have better overpopulation-region effect index and better dominance phenomenon index than that announced by CEC.

受到全球化的影響，人類的生活環境和模式與過往出現了很大的不同，國與國之間無論是文化、經濟、資源的交流方便且頻繁。在商場上，企業要面對的不再只是國內的競爭對手，而是來自全球各地的挑戰。彼此的競爭和合作不再受時空條件限制，規模也不可同日而語。對此，企業要擁有能夠幫助自己建立優勢地位的關鍵性資源，打造出自己的核心競爭能力和差異性，才能脫穎而出，而「品牌」是當前產、官、學界公認有力的武器之一，是企業重要的無形資產。 　　代工製造利潤式微，兩岸目前在整體產業環境和政府政策上，都出現產業轉型、建立自有品牌、打造國際品牌的產業升級意識，但品牌自創難度和成本極高，是一段漫長且有風險的道路。加上亞洲國家在品牌行銷能力上相對較弱，以及國際對亞洲國家的刻板印象等劣勢因素，亦不利兩岸自創之本土品牌的建立與國際推廣。故近幾年，向外併購歐美知名品牌逐漸形成趨勢。 　　本研究試圖觀察以併購作為經營發展策略的兩岸企業，在併購活動中所帶有的品牌佈局策略性思維，探討以品牌資產之取得作為併購動機與標的。並以個案研究方式，選擇「安邦保險收購紐約華爾道夫酒店」與「晶華酒店併購麗晶品牌」進行個案分析，從中瞭解併購後如何整合運用該品牌資產，讓品牌權益得以發揮並提升主併企業之核心競爭力，幫助主併企業立足全球市場、永續經營。最後根據分析結果，給予企業關於品牌併購及品牌經營的相關建議。 　　研究顯示，被併購標的的品牌權益確實會成為主併企業的優勢競爭資源，甚至帶動主併企業本身價值和企業品牌之權益增值。而要收併購綜效，最重要的是必須擁有與經營核心目標相符的品牌策略，並以此帶領整個品牌併購活動的規畫到執行，才能借力使力獲得市場力量。同時，也建議有意發展品牌之企業，除了有品牌專責經營團隊，也要將品牌策略傳遞組織各部門，落實到產品或服務提供的每個環節，以打造成功而強勢的品牌。

Thèse numérisée par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

Managing a project is multitasking. For making this easier, a project mangaer has a lot of tools. Two of the tools that are often used are a project management model and a virtual project room. These two can be of different types in different compaies and in different culutres. In this thesis, we investigate it there is any neeed for these two tools to be combined. If there is a need, how should the combination be done?

The master's thesis focuses on the issue of consolidated financial statements and the evaluation of the impact of the widening of the consolidated group on its economic situation. The first part of the thesis includes theoretical knowledge that are crucial for the consolidated financial statement. Afterwards, the current economic situation of the consolidated group is analyzed together with the valuation of the newly acquired business share. Finally, there are a new consolidated financial statements proposed and then the original state is compared with the newly extended consolidated group.

This thesis is about visualizing a kind of data that is trivial to process by computers but difficult to imagine by humans because nature does not allow for intuition with this type of information: high-dimensional data. Such data often result from representing observations of objects under various aspects or with different properties. In many applications, a typical, laborious task is to find related objects or to group those that are similar to each other. One classic solution for this task is to imagine the data as vectors in a Euclidean space with object variables as dimensions. Utilizing Euclidean distance as a measure of similarity, objects with similar properties and values accumulate to groups, so-called clusters, that are exposed by cluster analysis on the high-dimensional point cloud. Because similar vectors can be thought of as objects that are alike in terms of their attributes, the point cloud\''s structure and individual cluster properties, like their size or compactness, summarize data categories and their relative importance. The contribution of this thesis is a novel analysis approach for visual exploration of high-dimensional point clouds without suffering from structural occlusion. The work is based on implementing two key concepts: The first idea is to discard those geometric properties that cannot be preserved and, thus, lead to the typical artifacts. Topological concepts are used instead to shift away the focus from a point-centered view on the data to a more structure-centered perspective. The advantage is that topology-driven clustering information can be extracted in the data\''s original domain and be preserved without loss in low dimensions. The second idea is to split the analysis into a topology-based global overview and a subsequent geometric local refinement. The occlusion-free overview enables the analyst to identify features and to link them to other visualizations that permit analysis of those properties not captured by the topological abstraction, e.g. cluster shape or value distributions in particular dimensions or subspaces. The advantage of separating structure from data point analysis is that restricting local analysis only to data subsets significantly reduces artifacts and the visual complexity of standard techniques. That is, the additional topological layer enables the analyst to identify structure that was hidden before and to focus on particular features by suppressing irrelevant points during local feature analysis. This thesis addresses the topology-based visual analysis of high-dimensional point clouds for both the time-invariant and the time-varying case. Time-invariant means that the points do not change in their number or positions. That is, the analyst explores the clustering of a fixed and constant set of points. The extension to the time-varying case implies the analysis of a varying clustering, where clusters appear as new, merge or split, or vanish. Especially for high-dimensional data, both tracking---which means to relate features over time---but also visualizing changing structure are difficult problems to solve.

unregelmäßig erscheinende Zeitschrift über aktuelle Themen der TU Chemnitz

In this work we use a graph-theoretic representation of secondary RNA structure found in the database RAG: RNA-As-Graphs. We model the bonding of two RNA secondary structures to form a larger structure with a graph operation called merge. The resulting data from each tree merge operation is summarized and represented by a vector. We use these vectors as input values for a neural network and train the network to recognize a tree as RNA-like or not based on the merge data vector. The network correctly assigned a high probability of RNA-likeness to trees identified as RNA-like in the RAG database, and a low probability of RNA-likeness to those classified as not RNA-like in the RAG database. We then used the neural network to predict the RNA-likeness of all the trees of order 9. The use of a graph operation to theoretically describe the bonding of secondary RNA is novel.

L'étude de la Faculté des langues (FL), telle que définie par la grammaire générative, a été principalement entreprise à travers l'examen des langues adultes, l'acquisition de la langue première, l'acquisition des langues secondes et l'acquisition bilingue. Peu de travaux ont abordé la FL à partir d'une situation d'acquisition atypique, communément appelée Trouble développemental du langage (TDL). Cette thèse est consacrée à l'étude de la façon dont FL est affectée par cette condition malheureuse. Le TDL est manifesté par certains jeunes enfants et adultes et peut être la cause de limitations importantes dans le développement du langage. La production et la compréhension langagières de ce groupe d'enfants sont atypiques par rapport au comportement linguistique d'autres enfants du même âge. Leur atypicité consiste en une grammaire non-cible en ce qui concerne ce qui est autorisé et ce qui est interdit dans la/les langue(s) à laquelle/auxquelles ils sont exposés. Les symptômes les plus communs, d'un point de vue morpho-syntaxique, sont (a) l'omission de morphèmes et de mots, (b) les commissions, c'est-à-dire la présence inadéquate de certains mots ou le remplacement inapproprié de morphèmes et (c) les redoublements, c'est-à-dire, l'apparition de mots ou de morphèmes dans plus de positions que celles autorisées dans la langue cible. Ces symptômes ont été pris comme l’indication que la FL est déficiente. Le résultat de cette défaillance est une grammaire développée par les enfants ayant le TDL qui est qualitativement différente de celle développée par leurs pairs typiques. Cette thèse examinera si la compétence linguistique sous-jacente des enfants DLD est déterminée par les mêmes traits, opérations et principes qui régissent le langage naturel en général. Extraites de la littérature expérimentale sur le TDL, les données pour l’analyse incluent la compréhension et la production par les enfants du TDL et concernent les domaines nominal, temporel/verbal et propositionnel. Les propositionsiii avancées pour rendre compte de ce disorder seront évaluées. Toutes proposent explicitement ou implicitement que la grammaire universelle (GU), c'est-à-dire l'ensemble des traits et opérations phonologiques, sémantiques et syntaxiques qui sous-tendent FL, est défectueuse: certains traits peuvent être absents, ou des opérations peuvent être inactives ou fonctionner par intermittence. Contrairement à ces propositions, l'hypothèse défendue ici est que la GU n'est pas affectée chez les enfants TDL. C'est-à-dire que malgré les nombreuses différences entre le TDL et l'acquisition typique du langage, la GU se révèle être similaire à un certain niveau dans les deux situations d'acquisition. Si la GU était altérée chez les enfants TDL, on s'attendrait à ce que les enfants affectés par cette condition produisent des phrases remarquablement différentes de celles produites par des enfants typiques. Plusieurs études ont révélé que les enfants DLD et leurs pairs typiques peuvent montrer des performances linguistiques similaires en termes de quantité et de type d'erreurs. De plus, les données révèlent que les énoncés TDL ne sont pas toujours erronés; lorsque tous les éléments et les mécanismes linguistiques sont présents, ils sont correctement utilisés. Ceci est considéré comme un signe que les traits syntaxiques, bien qu'ils ne soient pas toujours réalisés morpho-phonologiquement, sont présents dans les dérivations syntaxiques des enfants TDL, et que les opérations syntaxiques Fusion et Accord sont actives, tout comme dans les grammaires typiques. Enfin, l'analyse des énoncés non-cibles par les enfants TDL met en évidence une grammaire syntaxiquement normale et même une ressemblance avec des langues auxquelles ces enfants n'ont pas été exposés. La conclusion est que, malgré la non-convergence entre le TDL et la langue cible, la GU dans cette situation d'acquisition est intacte. / The study of the Faculty of Language (FL), as defined by generative grammar, has been mainly undertaken through the examination of adult language, first language acquisition, second language acquisition and bilingual acquisition. Few works have approached the FL from an atypical acquisitional situation, standardly called Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). This dissertation is devoted to the study of how FL is affected by this unfortunate condition. DLD is displayed by some young children and adults and can be the cause of significant limitations in language development. The linguistic production and comprehension by this group of children is atypical compared to the linguistic behaviour of other children of the same age. Their atypicality consists in a non-target-like grammar with regard to both what is allowed and what is disallowed in the language(s) to which they are exposed. The most common symptoms, from a morpho-syntactic point of view, are (a) omission of morphemes and words, (b) commissions, i.e., the inadequate presence of certain words or the inappropriate replacement of morphemes and (c) doublings, i.e., the appearance of words or morphemes in more positions than are allowed in the target language. These symptoms have been taken to indicate that the FL is deficient. The result of this deficiency is a grammar developed by children with DLD that is qualitatively different from that developed by their typical peers. This dissertation will consider whether or not the underlying linguistic competence of children with DLD is determined by the same features, operations and principles that regulate natural language in general. Drawn from the experimental literature on DLD, the data for analysis include comprehension and production by children with DLD and concern the nominal, the temporal/verbal and the propositional domains. The proposals that have been put forth to account for this impairment will be evaluated. All of them explicitly or implicitly propose that Universal Grammar (UG), i.e., the set of phonological, semantic and syntactic features and operations that underlie FL, is faulty: Some features can be absent, or operations can be inactive or function intermittently. Contrary to these proposals, the hypothesis defended here is that UG is not affected in DLD children. That is to say, despite the many differences between DLD and typical language acquisition, UG is revealed to be similar at a certain level in both acquisitional situations. If UG were impaired in DLD, children affected by this condition would be expected to produce sentences remarkably different from those produced by typical children. Several studies have shown that children with DLD and their typical peers can display similar linguistic performance in terms of both quantity and type of errors. Moreover, the data reveal that DLD utterances are not always erroneous; when all linguistic elements and mechanisms are present, they are correctly used. This is taken as a sign that syntactic features, while not always realized morpho-phonologically, are present in DLD syntactic derivations, and that the syntactic operations Merge and Agree are active, just as in typical grammars. Finally, the analysis of non-target utterances by children with DLD evinces a syntactically normal grammar and even a resemblance with languages to which these children have not been exposed. The conclusion is that, despite the non-convergence of DLD and the target language, UG in this acquisitional situation is intact.