500 research outputs found
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Disruption and Strategic Outsourcing to the Competitor in the Common Market
No full textThere are circumstances that one firm will outsource (purchase) products to its competitor in the common market when experiencing an unexpected supply disruption. Such strategies to hedge against the unexpected supply disruption commonly suffers from the higher wholesale price charged by its competitor although it helps maintain its presence on the market. Its competitor also is concerned about encroachment to sell the products to the firm as a rival in the common market. Mathematical models are formulated to maximize each party's profit in both cases of outsourcing and not outsourcing under decentralization and centralization. The results show that both parties benefit from the strategy of outsourcing at the time of disruption. More interestingly, the results also show that the competitor's centralized decision-making is preferred
A Fuzzy Integer Programming Model to Locate Temporary Medical Facilities as Part of Pre-Disaster Management
No full textThe number and the scale of natural disasters have drastically increased over the last decades. One of the most vital stages of disaster preparedness is disaster response planning, and it plays an important role in limiting material and immaterial consequences, such as those caused by large scale earthquakes. In order to minimize human suffering and death, the aim of establishing a well-designed humanitarian relief chain must be to provide medicine, water, shelter, emergency food and supplies to the affected areas. From a holistic perspective, providing timely first aid and rapid transfer of injured victims to a medical facility is one of the most essential component of such chain. Thus, the location of first aid hospitals must be determined following a careful thought and planning process. This study presents a fuzzy integer programming model to determine the best location of the temporary hospitals which are expected to support extant state hospitals after a major earthquake. This study applies the proposed fuzzy model to the Üsküdar province of Istanbul and identifies optimum number and locations of field hospitals for a severe earthquake scenario
Benefits and Challenges of Collaborative Learning in Online Teacher Education
No full textDemand for online learning is increasing in US colleges and universities. Learning does not occur in a vacuum; students learn independently and collaboratively. But, is there room for collaborative learning in online courses? This chapter presents information on how a teacher educator designed and implemented collaborative learning in a developmental reading online course for preservice and inservice educators in grades P-12. The author presents details on course design issues, instructional practices, benefits, and challenges associated with collaborative learning in this online course, and implications for further development and evaluation of collaborative learning in teacher preparation programs. The author also provides recommendations from lessons learned for promoting collaboration in online teacher education courses
Fuzzy Based Parameter Adaptation in ACO for Solving VRP
No full textAnt Colony Optimization, a popular class of metaheuristics, have been widely applied for solving optimization problems like Vehicle Routing Problem. The performance of ACO is affected by the values of parameters used. However, in literature, few methods are proposed for parameter adaptation of ACO. In this article, a fuzzy-based parameter control mechanism for ACO has been developed. Three adaptive strategies FACO-1, FACO-2, FACO-3 are proposed for determining values of parameters alpha and beta, and evaporation factor separately as well as for all three parameters simultaneously. The performance of proposed strategies is compared with standard ACS on TSP and VRP benchmarks. Computational results on standard benchmark problems shows the effectiveness of the strategies
The Impact of Technology Platform Change on the Information Seeking Behavior of Academicians in Amhara
No full textThis study empirically measures the information seeking behavior of academician on the rapid technology platform change environment in the technology institutes found in Amhara Region, Ethiopia. The questionnaire was prepared and distributed to the academicians of technology institutes to collect information about the medium which was used for seeking information. The questions were how devices helped to seek information, the purpose of the information, and challenges faced while seeking information and measure of satisfaction level for the digital library in the institutes. Hence, the study reveals that users used portable devices to seek information from the internet and the digital library rather than using printed copies of information for their academic, research and community service activities. The results show that the information dissemination medium should be changed to electronic information due to the rapid growth of information and communication technology that impacts the information seeking behavior of users, and provide continuous support and training to use the electronic resources
Considerations for Setting Up Play Therapy Training Clinics: Recommended Play Therapy Toys, Materials, and Other Professional Considerations
No full textWhen setting up a play therapy training clinic, there are many considerations to explore regarding designing a therapeutic space, selecting toys and other materials, exploring the rationale for the toy selection and examining the cultural considerations in play therapy settings. This chapter will review the different types of play therapy clinics and the specific toys recommended based on the fourteen primary play therapy theoretical orientations. General considerations will be reviewed when utilizing art media and other materials, books and bibliotherapy, puppets and puppet theaters, sandtrays and miniatures, and psychotherapeutic games. Recommendations will be made for establishing community and university-based play therapy training sites offering clinical and mock play therapy services. Suggestions will be made regarding the importance of establishing play therapy laboratories in the classroom setting when providing graduate play therapy instruction. Additional recommendations will be made for the 2019 Play Therapy Best Practices published by the Association for Play Therapy
Does E-Government Raise Effectiveness and Efficiency?: Examining the Cross-National Effect
No full textThis article examines the influence of e-government maturity on government effectiveness and efficiency with a cross-country view. To that end, it uses two-stage least square regression, considering the endogeneity of e-government. The regression-based analysis on various global indicators finds that e-government significantly contributes to enhancing government effectiveness but fails to substantially raise government efficiency. Political, economic, and cultural disparities across countries affect the variation in the impact of e-government on government effectiveness and efficiency. The level of democracy has a curvilinear relationship with government efficiency, and thus this study identifies non-democracies with well-performing governments
Effects of Volumetric Augmented Reality Displays on Human Depth Judgments: Implications for Heads-Up Displays in Transportation
No full textMany driving scenarios involve correctly perceiving road elements in depth and manually responding as appropriate. Of late, augmented reality (AR) head-up displays (HUDs) have been explored to assist drivers in identifying road elements, by using a myriad of AR interface designs that include world-fixed graphics perceptually placed in the forward driving scene. Volumetric AR HUDs purportedly offer increased accuracy of distance perception through natural presentation of oculomotor cues as compared to traditional HUDs. In this article, the authors quantify participant performance matching virtual objects to real-world counterparts at egocentric distances of 7-12 meters while using both volumetric and fixed-focal plane AR HUDs. The authors found the volumetric HUD to be associated with faster and more accurate depth judgements at far distance, and that participants performed depth judgements more quickly as the experiment progressed. The authors observed no differences between the two displays in terms of reported simulator sickness or eye strain
I Think We Should… : Investigating Lexical Bundle Use in the Speech of English Learners Across Proficiency Levels
No full textHigh-frequency recurrent word combinations known as lexical bundles are an essential component in the second language development. However, existing research on second language lexical bundle use has focused on writing proficiency, while oral proficiency has not received adequate attention. This study adopts a corpus-driven approach to the investigation of the speech of second language learners, comparing lexical bundle use across proficiency levels in several areas of interest including frequency, functional distribution and bundle fixedness. Results show that low-proficiency students tend to use significantly more context-dependent bundles than high-proficiency students, but do not differ in overall lexical bundle use. The patterning of lexical bundle use in non-native speech exhibits features that are typical in the register of classroom teaching. Additionally, the frequency and functional distributions of non-native speech share many similarities with those of non-native writing. Implications of the author's findings are discussed in relation to previous studies
Detection of Shotgun Surgery and Message Chain Code Smells using Machine Learning Techniques
No full textCode smell is an inherent property of software that results in design problems which makes the software hard to extend, understand, and maintain. In the literature, several tools are used to detect code smell that are informally defined or subjective in nature due to varying results of the code smell. To resolve this, machine leaning (ML) techniques are proposed and learn to distinguish the characteristics of smelly and non-smelly code elements (classes or methods). However, the dataset constructed by the ML techniques are based on the tools and manually validated code smell samples. In this article, instead of using tools and manual validation, the authors considered detection rules for identifying the smell then applied unsupervised learning for validation to construct two smell datasets. Then, applied classification algorithms are used on the datasets to detect the code smells. The researchers found that all algorithms have achieved high performance in terms of accuracy, F-measure and area under ROC, yet the tree-based classifiers are performing better than other classifiers