Search results for: forum selection clause

Authors: Yang Cui, Yong Qiang Chen

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An appropriate project delivery system (PDS) is crucial to the success of a construction project. Case-based reasoning (CBR) is a useful support for PDS selection. However, the traditional CBR approach represents cases as attribute-value vectors without taking relations among attributes into consideration, and could not calculate the similarity when the structures of cases are not strictly same. Therefore, this paper solves this problem by adopting the relational case-based reasoning (RCBR) approach for PDS selection, considering both the structural similarity and feature similarity. To develop the feature terms of the construction projects, the criteria and factors governing PDS selection process are first identified. Then, feature terms for the construction projects are developed. Finally, the mechanism of similarity calculation and a case study indicate how RCBR works for PDS selection. The adoption of RCBR in PDS selection expands the scope of application of traditional CBR method and improves the accuracy of the PDS selection system.

Keywords: relational cased-based reasoning, case-based reasoning, project delivery system, PDS selection

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Authors: Sung-Bok Choi, Hyun-Jun Shin, Hyoung-Kyu Song

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This paper proposes a single relay selection scheme in cooperative communication. Decode and forward scheme is considered when a source node wants to cooperate with a single relay for data transmission. To use the proposed single relay selection scheme, the source node make a little different pattern signal which is not complex pattern and broadcasts it. The proposed scheme does not require the channel state information between the source node and candidates of the relay during the relay selection. Therefore, it is able to be used in many fields.

Keywords: relay selection, cooperative communication, df, channel codes

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Authors: Zeynep Sener, Mehtap Dursun

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Supplier evaluation and selection is one of the most important components of an effective supply chain management system. Due to the expanding competition in healthcare, selecting the right medical device suppliers offers great potential for increasing quality while decreasing costs. This paper proposes a fuzzy decision making approach for medical supplier selection. A real-world medical device supplier selection problem is presented to illustrate the application of the proposed decision methodology.

Keywords: fuzzy decision making, fuzzy multiple objective programming, medical supply chain, supplier selection

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Authors: B. S. Harish, M. B. Revanasiddappa

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Due to rapid growth of text documents in digital form, automated text classification has become an important research in the last two decades. The major challenge of text document representations are high dimension, sparsity, volume and semantics. Since the terms are only features that can be found in documents, selection of good terms (features) plays an very important role. In text classification, feature selection is a strategy that can be used to improve classification effectiveness, computational efficiency and accuracy. In this paper, we present a quantitative analysis of most widely used feature selection (FS) methods, viz. Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (tf
idf ), Mutual Information (MI), Information Gain (IG), CHISquare (x2), Term Frequency-Relevance Frequency (tf
rf ), Term Strength (TS), Ambiguity Measure (AM) and Symbolic Feature Selection (SFS) to classify text documents. We evaluated all the feature selection methods on standard datasets like 20 Newsgroups, 4 University dataset and Reuters-21578.

Keywords: classifiers, feature selection, text classification

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Authors: Saleem Z. Ramadan

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The material selection problem is concerned with the determination of the right material for a certain product to optimize certain performance indices in that product such as mass, energy density, and power-to-weight ratio. This paper is concerned about optimizing the selection of the manufacturing process along with the material used in the product under performance indices and availability constraints. In this paper, the material selection problem is formulated using binary programming and solved by genetic algorithm. The objective function of the model is to minimize the total manufacturing cost under performance indices and material and manufacturing process availability constraints.

Keywords: optimization, material selection, process selection, genetic algorithm

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Authors: Benhamouda Sara, Guezouli Larbi

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Nowadays, the dissemination of information touches the distributed world, where selecting the relevant servers to a user request is an important problem in distributed information retrieval. During the last decade, several research studies on this issue have been launched to find optimal solutions and many approaches of collection selection have been proposed. In this paper, we propose a new collection selection approach that takes into consideration the number of documents in a collection that contains terms of the query and the weights of those terms in these documents. We tested our method and our studies show that this technique can compete with other state-of-the-art algorithms that we choose to test the performance of our approach.

Keywords: distributed information retrieval, relevance, server selection, collection selection

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Authors: Seyyedeh Faezeh Hassani Ziabari, Sadegh Eskandari, Maziar Salahi

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Infinite Feature Selection (IFS) algorithm is an efficient feature selection algorithm that selects a subset of features of all sizes (including infinity). In this paper, we present an improved version of it, called clustering IFS (CIFS), by clustering the dataset in advance. To do so, first, we apply the K-means algorithm to cluster the dataset, then we apply IFS. In the CIFS method, the spatial and temporal complexities are reduced compared to the IFS method. Experimental results on 6 datasets show the superiority of CIFS compared to IFS in terms of accuracy, running time, and memory consumption.

Keywords: feature selection, infinite feature selection, clustering, graph

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Authors: Christoph Köster

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Supplier selection is one of the key challenges in supply chain management and can be considered a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem. In the 1960s, it evolved from considering only economic criteria, such as price, quality, and performance, to including environmental and social criteria nowadays. Although receiving considerable attention from scholars and practitioners over the past decades, existing research has not considered governance criteria so far. This is, however, surprising, as ESG (environmental, social, and governance) criteria have gained considerable attention. In order to complement ESG criteria in the supplier selection process, this study investigates German DAX and MDAX companies and evaluates the impact of governance criteria along their supplier selection process. Moreover, it proposes a set of criteria for the respective process steps. Specifically, eleven criteria for the first process step and five criteria for the second process step are identified. This paper contributes to a better understanding of the supplier selection process by elucidating the relevance of governance criteria in the supplier selection process and providing a set of empirically developed governance criteria. These results can be applied by practitioners to complement the criteria set in the supplier selection process and thus balance economic, environmental, social, and governance targets.

Keywords: ESG, governance, sustainable supplier selection, sustainability

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Authors: Christoph Koester

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Supplier selection is one of the key issues in supply chain management with a growing emphasis on sustainability driven by increasing stakeholder expectations and proactivity. In addition, new regulations, such as the German Supply Chain Act, fostered the inclusion of sustainable incl. governance selection criteria in the selection process. In order to provide a systematic approach to select the most suitable sustainable suppliers, this study quantifies the importance and prioritizes the relevant selection criteria across 17 German industries using the Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process. Results show that economic criteria are still the most important in the selection decision averaging a global weight of 51%. However, environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria are combined, on average, almost equally important, with global weights of 22%, 16%, and 11%, respectively. While the type of industry influences criteria weights, other factors, such as type of purchasing or demographic factors, appear to have little impact.

Keywords: ESG, fuzzy analytical hierarchy process, sustainable supplier selection, sustainability

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Authors: Yusuf A. Bako, Olubunmi O. Kolawole

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This study sought to establish the effect of recruitment and selection on the employee performance in hospitality industries. The success of any organization in this modern business environment depends on the caliber of the manpower that steer the affairs of the organization. History has shown that recruitment and selection as a function of human resources management practices have a pivotal role in determining the level of employee performance in an organization. The hospitality industries have been faced with challenges of performance due to unconventional selection and placement practices in terms of poor policy in selecting candidate, inconsistency in selection process, sidetracking employment test and interview, godfatherism and regional selection process etc. The overall objective of the study was to determine how recruitment and selection affect employee performance in hospitality industry in Ogun State, Nigeria. This study adopts descriptive and inferential research design while population was drawn from leading hotels in Ogun State, Nigeria. The samples size was 100 employees and questionnaire was used to collect data while Cronbach alpha was used to test the instrument. The result of the study reveals that correlation between employee performance and recruitment and selection were highly significant.

Keywords: employee performance, human resources management, practices, recruitment, selection

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Authors: Ahmad. A. Kardan, Amir Narimani, Foozhan Ataiefard

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Recommender Systems have been developed to provide contents and services compatible to users based on their behaviors and interests. Due to information overload in online discussion forums and users diverse interests, recommending relative topics and threads is considered to be helpful for improving the ease of forum usage. In order to lead learners to find relevant information in educational forums, recommendations are even more needed. We present a hybrid thread recommender system for MOOC forums by applying social network analysis and association rule mining techniques. Initial results indicate that the proposed recommender system performs comparatively well with regard to limited available data from users' previous posts in the forum.

Keywords: association rule mining, hybrid recommender system, massive open online courses, MOOCs, social network analysis

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Authors: K. -H. Yang

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Supplier selection problem is one of the important issues of supply chain problems. Two categories of methodologies include qualitative and quantitative approaches which can be applied to supplier selection problems. However, due to the complexities of the problem and lacking of reliable and quantitative data, qualitative approaches are more than quantitative approaches. This study considers operational cost and supplier’s reliability factor and solves the problem by using a quantitative approach. A mixed integer programming model is the primary analytic tool. Analyses of different scenarios with variable cost and reliability structures show that the effectiveness of this approach to the supplier selection problem.

Keywords: mixed integer programming, quantitative approach, supplier’s reliability, supplier selection

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Authors: Mario Winkelhaus, Franz Vallée

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Many companies see horizontal cooperation as a promising possibility to increase their efficiency in outbound logistics. The selection of suitable partners has particular importance in the formation of horizontal cooperation. Up until now, literature mainly focused on general applicable methods for the identification of cooperation partners without a closer examination of the specific area where the cooperation takes place. Thus, specific criteria as a basis for the partner selection in the field of logistics cooperation are missing. To close this scientific gap, an explorative research approach is used to answer the open question of the article. To collect the needed criteria, a qualitative experiment with 20 participants from 16 companies was done. Within this workshop, general criteria, as well as sector-specific requirements, have been identified which were integrated in a partner selection model.

Keywords: horizontal cooperation, logistics cooperation partnering criteria, partner selection

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Authors: Imoh Philip

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Basà language is classified as belonging to Kainji family, under the sub-phylum Western-Kainji known as Rubasa (Basa Benue) (Croizier & Blench, 1992:32). Basà is an under-described language spoken in the North-Central Nigeria. The language is characterized by subject-verb-object (henceforth SVO) as its canonical word order. Data for this work is sourced from the researcher’s native intuition of the language corroborated with a careful observation of native speakers. This paper investigates the syntactic derivational strategy of information-structure encoding in Basà language. It emphasizes on a negative operator, as a strategy for focusing a constituent or clause that follows it and negativizes a whole proposition. For items that are not nouns, they have to undergo an obligatory nominalization process, either by affixation, modification or conversion before they are moved to the pre verbal position for these operations. The study discovers and provides evidence of the fact showing that deferent constituents in the sentence such as the subject, direct, indirect object, genitive, verb phrase, prepositional phrase, clause and idiophone, etc. can be focused with the same negativizing operator. The process is characterized by focusing the pre verbal NP constituent alone, whereas the whole proposition is negated. The study can stimulate similar study or be replicated in other languages.

Keywords: negation, focus, Basà, nominalization

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Authors: Seyed Esmail Seyedi Bariran, Laysheng Ewe, Amy Ling

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Since supplier selection appears as a vital decision, selecting supplier based on the best and most accurate ways has a lot of importance for enterprises. In this study, a new Artificial Intelligence approach is exerted to remove weaknesses of supplier selection. The paper has three parts. First part is choosing the appropriate criteria for assessing the suppliers’ performance. Next one is collecting the data set based on experts. Afterwards, the data set is divided into two parts, the training data set and the testing data set. By the training data set the best structure of GEP and ANN are selected and to evaluate the power of the mentioned methods the testing data set is used. The result obtained shows that the accuracy of GEP is more than ANN. Moreover, unlike ANN, a mathematical equation is presented by GEP for the supplier selection.

Keywords: supplier selection, automotive supply chains, ANN, GEP

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Authors: Phoenix W. Y. Lam

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As one of the most important service-oriented industries in contemporary society, tourism has increasingly seen the influence of the Internet on all aspects of travelling. Travellers nowadays habitually research online before making travel-related decisions. One platform on which such research is conducted is destination forums. The emergence of such online destination forums in the last decade has allowed tourists to share their travel experiences quickly and easily with a large number of online users around the world. As such, these destination forums also provide invaluable data for tourism bodies to better understand travellers’ views on their destinations. Collecting posts from the Hong Kong travel forum on the world’s largest travel website TripAdvisor®, the present study identifies the top questions asked by TripAdvisor users about Hong Kong through a corpus-based discourse analytic approach. Based on questions posted on the forum and their associated meta-data gathered in a one-year period, the study examines the top questions asked by travellers around the world to identify the key geographical locations in which users have shown the greatest interest in the city. Questions raised by travellers from different geographical locations are also compared to see if traveller communities by location vary in terms of their areas of interest. This analysis involves the study of key words and concordance of frequently-occurring items and a close reading of representative examples in context. Findings from the present study show that travellers who asked the most questions about Hong Kong are from North America and Asia, and that travellers from different locations have different concerns and interests, which are clearly reflected in the language of the questions asked on the travel forum. These findings can therefore provide tourism organisations with useful information about the key markets that should be targeted for promotional purposes, and can also allow such organisations to design advertising campaigns which better address the specific needs of such markets. The present study thus demonstrates the value of applying linguistic knowledge and methodologies to the domain of tourism to address practical issues.

Keywords: corpus, hong kong, online travel forum, tourism, TripAdvisor

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Authors: Laicheng Cao, Xiangqian Su, Youxiao Wu

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Feature selection is one of the important problems in network security, pattern recognition, data mining and other fields. In order to remove redundant features, effectively improve the detection speed of intrusion detection system, proposes a new feature selection method, which is based on the invasive weed optimization (IWO) algorithm and tabu search algorithm(TS). Use IWO as a global search, tabu search algorithm for local search, to improve the results of IWO algorithm. The experimental results show that the feature selection method can effectively remove the redundant features of network data information in feature selection, reduction time, and to guarantee accurate detection rate, effectively improve the speed of detection system.

Keywords: intrusion detection, feature selection, iwo, tabu search

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Authors: Varvara Tyurina

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In the age of globalization Internet communication as a new format of interactions have become an integral part of our daily routine. Internet environment allows for new conditions and provides participants to a communication act with extra communication tools which can be used on Internet forums or in chat rooms. As a result communicants tend to alternate their behavior patterns in contrast to those practiced in live communication. It is not yet clear which communication strategies participants to Internet communication abide by and what determines their choices. Given the continually changing environment of a forum or a chat the behavior of a communicant can be interpreted in terms of autopoiesis theory which sees adaptation as the major tool for coexistence between the living system and its niche. Each communication act is seen as interaction between the communicant (i.e. the living system) and the overall environment of the forum (i.e. the niche) rather than one particular interlocutor. When communicating via the Internet participants are believed to aim at reaching a balance between themselves and the environment of a forum or a chat. The research focuses on unveiling the adaptation strategies employed by a communicant in particular cases and looks into the reasons they are employed. There is a correlation between language faculty of the communicants and the strategies they opt for when communicating on Internet forums and in chat rooms. The research included an experiment with a sample of Russian-English asymmetric bilinguals aged 16-25. Respondents were given two texts of equivalent contents, but of different language complexity. They had to respond to the texts as if they were making a reciprocal comment at a forum. It has been revealed that when communicants realize that their language faculty is not sufficient to understand the initial text they tend to amend their communication strategy in order to maintain the balance with the niche (remain involved in the communication). Most common strategies for responding to a difficult-to-understand text were self-presentation, veiling poor language faculty and response evasion. The research has so far focused on a very narrow aspect of correlation between language faculty and communication behavior, namely the syntactic and lexicological complexity of initial texts. It is essential to conduct a series of experiments that dwell on other characteristics of the texts to determine the range of cases when language faculty determines the choice of adaptation strategy.

Keywords: adaptation, communication strategies, internet communication, verbal interaction, autopoiesis theory

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Authors: Zoltán Höhling, Sarah-Lu Oberschelp, Niklas Gilsdorf, Michael Wirsching, Andrea Kuhnert

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A majority of medical students at the University of Freiburg reported stress-related psychosomatic symptoms which are often associated with their studies. International research supports these findings, as medical students worldwide seem to be at special risk for mental health problems. In some countries and institutions, psychologically based interventions that assist medical students in coping with their stressors have been implemented. It turned out that anonymity is an important aspect here. Many students fear a potential damage of reputation when being associated with mental health problems, which may be due to a high level of competitiveness in classes. Therefore, we launched an online-platform where medical students could anonymously seek help and exchange their experiences with fellow students and experts. Medical students of all semesters have access to it through the university’s learning management system (called “ILIAS”). The informative part of the platform consists of exemplary videos showing medical students (actors) who act out scenes that demonstrate the antecedents of stress-related psychosomatic disorders. These videos are linked to different expert comments, describing the exhibited symptoms in an understandable and normalizing way. The (inter-)active part of the platform consists of self-help tools (such as meditation exercises or general tips for stress-coping) and an anonymous interactive forum where students can describe their stress-related problems and seek guidance from experts and/or share their experiences with fellow students. Besides creating an immediate proposal to help affected students, we expect that competitiveness between students might be diminished and bondage improved through mutual support between them. In the initial phase after the platform’s launch, it was accessed by a considerable number of medical students. On a closer look it appeared that platform sections like general information on psychosomatic-symptoms and self-treatment tools were accessed far more often than the online-forum during the first months after the platform launch. Although initial acceptance of the platform was relatively high, students showed a rather passive way of using our platform. While user statistics showed a clear demand for information on stress-related psychosomatic symptoms and its possible remedies, active engagement in the interactive online-forum was rare. We are currently advertising the platform intensively and trying to point out the assured anonymity of the platform and its interactive forum. Our plans, to assure students their anonymity through the use of an e-learning facility and promote active engagement in the online forum, did not (yet) turn out as expected. The reasons behind this may be manifold and based on either e-learning related issues or issues related to students’ individual needs. Students might, for example, question the assured anonymity due to a lack of trust in the technological functioning university’s learning management system. However, one may also conclude that reluctance to discuss stress-related psychosomatic symptoms with peer medical students may not be solely based on anonymity concerns, but could be rooted in more complex issues such as general mistrust between students.

Keywords: e-tutoring, stress-coping, student support, online forum

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Authors: Carlos Huertas, Reyes Juarez-Ramirez

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Public health is one of the most critical issues today; therefore, there is great interest to improve technologies in the area of diseases detection. With machine learning and feature selection, it has been possible to aid the diagnosis of several diseases such as cancer. In this work, we present an extension to the Heat Map Based Feature Selection algorithm, this modification allows automatic threshold parameter selection that helps to improve the generalization performance of high dimensional data such as mass spectrometry. We have performed a comparison analysis using multiple cancer datasets and compare against the well known Recursive Feature Elimination algorithm and our original proposal, the results show improved classification performance that is very competitive against current techniques.

Keywords: biomarker discovery, cancer, feature selection, mass spectrometry

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Authors: Gopinath Ganapathy, Chellammal Surianarayanan

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Services are growing rapidly and generally they are aggregated into a composite service to accomplish complex business processes. There may be several services that offer the same required function of a particular task in a composite service. Hence a choice has to be made for selecting suitable services from alternative functionally similar services. Quality of Service (QoS)plays as a discriminating factor in selecting which component services should be selected to satisfy the quality requirements of a user during service composition. There are two categories of approaches for QoS based service selection, namely global and local approaches. Global approaches are known to be Non-Polynomial (NP) hard in time and offer poor scalability in large scale composition. As an alternative to global methods, local selection methods which reduce the search space by breaking up the large/complex problem of selecting services for the workflow into independent sub problems of selecting services for individual tasks are coming up. In this paper, distributed architecture for selecting services based on QoS using local selection is presented with an overview of local selection methodology. The architecture describes the core components, namely, selection manager and QoS manager needed to implement the local approach and their functions. Selection manager consists of two components namely constraint decomposer which decomposes the given global or workflow level constraints in local or task level constraints and service selector which selects appropriate service for each task with maximum utility, satisfying the corresponding local constraints. QoS manager manages the QoS information at two levels namely, service class level and individual service level. The architecture serves as an implementation model for local selection.

Keywords: architecture of service selection, local method for service selection, QoS based service selection, approaches for QoS based service selection

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Authors: M. Pramila Devi, J. Praveena

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In today’s industrial scenario, the expectations and demand of customers are reaching great heights. In order to satisfy the customer requirements the users are increasingly turning towards fourth party logistics (4PL) service providers to manage their total supply chain operations. In this present research, initially, the criteria for the selection of integrated service providers have been identified and an integrated modal based on their inter-relationship has been developed with help of shippers, with this idea of what factors to be considered and their inter-relationships while selecting integrated service provider. Later, various methods deriving the priority weights viz. Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) have been employed for 4PL service provider selection. The derived priorities of 4PL alternatives using methods have been critically analyzed and compared for effective selection. The use of the modal indicates that the computed quantitative evaluation can be applied to improve the precision of the selection.

Keywords: analytical hierarchy process, fourth party logistics, priority weight, criteria selection

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Authors: I. Diamant, R. Srouji

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Applicant perceptions are attitudes, feelings, and cognitions which individuals have about selection procedures and have been mostly studied in the context of personnel selection. The main aim of the present study is to expand the understanding of applicant perceptions, using the framework of Organizational Justice Theory, in the domain of selection for higher education. The secondary aim is to explore the relationships between individual differences in social anxiety and applicants’ perceptions. The selection process is an accept/reject situation; it was hypothesized that applicants with higher social anxiety would experience negative perceptions and a lower success estimation, especially when subjected to social interaction elements in the process (interview and group simulation). Also, the effects of prior preparation and post-process explanations offered at the end of the selection process were explored. One hundred sixty psychology M.A. program applicants participated in this research, and following the selection process completed questionnaires measuring social anxiety, social exclusion, ratings on several justice dimensions for each of the methods in the selection process, feelings of success, and self-estimation of compatibility. About half of the applicants also received explanations regarding the significance and the aims of the selection process. Results provided support for most of our hypotheses: applicants with higher social anxiety experienced an increased level of social exclusion in the selection process, perceived the selection as less fair and ended with a lower feeling of success relative to those applicants without social anxiety. These relationships were especially salient in the selection procedures which included social interaction. Additionally, preparation for the selection process was positively related to the favorable perception of fairness in the selection process. Finally, contrary to our hypothesis, it was found that explanations did not affect the applicant’s perceptions. The results enhance our understanding of which factors affect applicant perceptions in applicants to higher education studies and contribute uniquely to the understanding of the effect of social anxiety on different aspects of selection experienced by applicants. The findings clearly show that some individuals may be predisposed to react unfavorably to certain selection situations. In an age of increasing awareness towards fairness in evaluation and selection and hiring procedures, these findings may be of relevance and may contribute to the design of future personnel selection methods in general and of higher education selection in particular.

Keywords: applicant perceptions, selection and assessment, organizational justice theory, social anxiety

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Authors: Sevde D. Karayel, Ediz Atmaca

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Supplier selection subject is vital because of development competitiveness and performance of firms which have right, rapid and with low cost procurement. Considering the fact that competition between firms is no longer on their supply chains, hence it is very clear that performance of the firms’ not only depend on their own success but also success of all departments in supply chain. For this purpose, firms want to work with suppliers which are cost effective, flexible in terms of demand and high quality level for customer satisfaction. However, diversification and redundancy of their expectations from suppliers, supplier selection problems need to be solved as a hard problem. In this study, supplier selection problem is discussed for critical piece, which is using almost all production of products in and has troubles with lead time from supplier, in a firm that produces medical devices. Analyzing policy in the current situation of the firm in the supplier selection indicates that supplier selection is made based on the purchasing department experience and other authorized persons’ general judgments. Because selection do not make based on the analytical methods, it is caused disruptions in production, lateness and extra cost. To solve the problem, AHP and TOPSIS which are multi-criteria decision making techniques, which are effective, easy to implement and can analyze many criteria simultaneously, are used to make a selection among alternative suppliers.

Keywords: AHP-TOPSIS methods, multi-criteria decision making, supplier selection problem, supply chain management

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Authors: Charisse H. Tay

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Background: Schizophrenia is a severe chronic mental disorder that can result in hallucinations, delusions, reduced social engagement, and lack of motivation. While antipsychotic medications often provide the basis for treatment, psychosocial strategies complement the benefit of medications and can result in meaningful improvements in symptoms and functioning. The aim of the study was to investigate psychosocial strategies used by internet self-help forum participants to effectively manage symptoms caused by schizophrenia. Internet self-help forums are a resource for medical and psychological problems and are commonly used to share information about experiences with symptom management. Method: Three international self-help internet forums on schizophrenia were identified using a search engine. 1,181 threads regarding non-pharmacological, psychosocial self-management of schizophrenia symptoms underwent screening, resulting in the final identification and coding of 91 threads and 191 posts from 134 unique forum users that contained details on psychosocial strategies endorsed personally by users that allowed them to effectively manage symptoms of schizophrenia, including positive symptoms (e.g., auditory/visual/tactile hallucinations, delusions, paranoia), negative symptoms (e.g.., avolition, apathy, anhedonia), symptoms of distress, and cognitive symptoms (e.g., memory loss). Results: Effective symptom management strategies personally endorsed by online forum users were psychological skills (e.g., re-focusing, mindfulness/meditation, reality checking; n = 94), engaging in activities (e.g., exercise, working/volunteering, hobbies; n = 84), social/familial support (n = 48), psychotherapy (n = 33), diet (n = 18), and religion/spirituality (n = 14). 44.4% of users reported using more than one strategy to manage their symptoms. The most common symptoms targeted and effectively managed, as specified by users, were positive symptoms (n = 113), negative symptoms (n = 17), distress (n = 8), and memory loss (n = 6). 10.5% of users reported more than one symptom effectively targeted. 70.2% of users with positive symptoms reported that psychological skills were effective for symptom relief. 88% of users with negative symptoms and 75% with distress symptoms reported that engaging in activities was effective. Discussion: Individuals with schizophrenia rely on a variety of different psychosocial methods to manage their symptoms. Different symptomology appears to be more effectively targeted by different types of psychosocial strategies. This may help to inform treatment strategy and tailored for individuals with schizophrenia.

Keywords: psychosocial treatment, qualitative methods, schizophrenia, symptom management

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Authors: Vicent Lwanga

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Issue: Communication between parent and child is important and necessary. Poor parenting and lack of openness and communication between parents and their children contribute to the increasing rate of HIV infection among young persons between the ages of 10-25. The young person, when left on their own are at the risk of misinformation from peers and from other sources. Description: Parent-Child Communication (PCC) was designed as a key component of a community-based HIV and AIDS intervention focused on young persons by Elderly Widows Orphans Family Support Organisation. Findings from the preliminary community-level process indicated that the lack of parent-child communication militates against young persons adopting and maintaining healthier sexual behaviors. An integrated youth strategy consisting of youth Peer Education/Facilitation and PCC was used to bridge this gap. The process involved an interactive parent-child forum, which allowed parents and children to meet and have open and frank discussions on the needs of young persons and the role of parents. This forum addressed all emerging issues from all parties and created better cordiality amongst them. Lessons Learnt: When young people feel unconnected to their parents, family, or home, they may become involved in activities that put their health at risk. Equally, when parents affirm the value of their children through open interaction, children are more likely to develop positive and healthy attitudes about themselves. Creating the opportunity for this interactive forum is paramount in any intervention program focused on young persons. Conclusion: HIV and AIDS-related programmes, especially those focusing on youth, should have PCC as an integral, essential component. Parents should be vehicles for information dissemination and need to be equipped with the capacity and skills to take on the onerous task of talking sexual reproductive health and sexuality with their children and wards.

Keywords: aids, communication, HIV, youth

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Authors: Hala Alshamlan, Ghada Badr, Yousef Alohali

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Cancer is one of the dreadful diseases, which causes considerable death rate in humans. DNA microarray-based gene expression profiling has been emerged as an efficient technique for cancer classification, as well as for diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment purposes. In recent years, a DNA microarray technique has gained more attraction in both scientific and in industrial fields. It is important to determine the informative genes that cause cancer to improve early cancer diagnosis and to give effective chemotherapy treatment. In order to gain deep insight into the cancer classification problem, it is necessary to take a closer look at the proposed gene selection methods. We believe that they should be an integral preprocessing step for cancer classification. Furthermore, finding an accurate gene selection method is a very significant issue in a cancer classification area because it reduces the dimensionality of microarray dataset and selects informative genes. In this paper, we classify and review the state-of-art gene selection methods. We proceed by evaluating the performance of each gene selection approach based on their classification accuracy and number of informative genes. In our evaluation, we will use four benchmark microarray datasets for the cancer diagnosis (leukemia, colon, lung, and prostate). In addition, we compare the performance of gene selection method to investigate the effective gene selection method that has the ability to identify a small set of marker genes, and ensure high cancer classification accuracy. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to compare gene selection approaches for cancer classification using microarray gene expression profile.

Keywords: gene selection, feature selection, cancer classification, microarray, gene expression profile

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Authors: Younies Saeed Hassan Mahmoud, Mai Mabrouk, Elsayed Sallam

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Analysing DNA microarray data sets is a great challenge, which faces the bioinformaticians due to the complication of using statistical and machine learning techniques. The challenge will be doubled if the microarray data sets contain missing data, which happens regularly because these techniques cannot deal with missing data. One of the most important data analysis process on the microarray data set is feature selection. This process finds the most important genes that affect certain disease. In this paper, we introduce a technique for imputing the missing data in microarray data sets while performing feature selection.

Keywords: DNA microarray, feature selection, missing data, bioinformatics

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Authors: Byung Lee, Charles Perschau

Abstract:

This study analyzes the development of a communication journal, the Journal of Advertising Education (JAE) over the past 20 years by examining citations of all research articles there. The purpose of a journal is to offer a stable and transparent forum for the presentation, scrutiny, and discussion of research in a targeted domain. This study asks whether JAE has fulfilled this purpose. The authors and readers who are involved in a journal need to have common research topics of their interest. In the case of the discipline of communication, scholars have a variety of backgrounds beyond communication itself since the social scientific study of communication is a relatively recent development, one that emerged after World War II, and the discipline has been heavily indebted to other social sciences, such as psychology, sociology, social psychology, and political science. When authors impart their findings and knowledge to others, their work is not done in isolation. They have to stand on previous studies, which are listed as sources in the bibliography. Since communication has heavily piggybacked on other disciplines, cited sources should be as diverse as the resources it taps into. This paper analyzes 4,244 articles that were cited by JAE articles in the past 36 issues. Since journal article authors reveal their intellectual linkage by using bibliographic citations, the analysis of citations in journal articles will reveal various networks of relationships among authors, journal types, and fields in an objective and quantitative manner. The study found that an easier access to information sources because of the development of electronic databases and the growing competition among scholars for publication seemed to influence authors to increase the number of articles cited even though some variations existed during the examined period. The types of articles cited have also changed. Authors have more often cited journal articles, periodicals (most of them available online), and web site sources, while decreased their dependence on books, conference papers, and reports. To provide a forum for discussion, a journal needs a common topic or theme. This can be realized when an author writes an article about a topic, and that article is cited and discussed in another article. Thus, the citation of articles in the same journal is vital for a journal to form a forum for discussion. JAE has gradually increased the citations of in-house articles with a few fluctuations over the years. The study also examines not only specific articles that are often cited, but also specific authors often cited. The analysis of citations in journal articles shows how JAE has developed into a full academic journal while offering a communal forum even though the speed of its formation is not as fast as desired probably because of its interdisciplinary nature.

Keywords: citation, co-citation, the Journal of Advertising Education, development of a journal

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Authors: Robert Long, Hiroaki Watanabe

Abstract:

This longitudinal study examines the grammatical errors of Japanese university students’ dialogues with a native speaker over an academic year. The L2 interactions of 15 Japanese speakers were taken from the JUSFC2018 corpus (April/May 2018) and the JUSFC2019 corpus (January/February). The corpora were based on a self-introduction monologue and a three-question dialogue; however, this study examines the grammatical accuracy found in the dialogues. Research questions focused on a possible significant difference in grammatical accuracy from the first interview session in 2018 and the second one the following year, specifically regarding errors in clauses per 100 words, global errors and local errors, and with specific errors related to parts of speech. The investigation also focused on which forms showed the least improvement or had worsened? Descriptive statistics showed that error-free clauses/errors per 100 words decreased slightly while clauses with errors/100 words increased by one clause. Global errors showed a significant decline, while local errors increased from 97 to 158 errors. For errors related to parts of speech, a t-test confirmed there was a significant difference between the two speech corpora with more error frequency occurring in the 2019 corpus. This data highlights the difficulty in having students self-edit themselves.

Keywords: clause analysis, global vs. local errors, grammatical accuracy, L2 output, longitudinal study

Procedia PDF Downloads 101