Discovery & effective use of quality association rules in multi-level datasets

In today’s electronic world vast amounts of knowledge is stored within many datasets and databases. Often the default format of this data means that the knowledge within is not immediately accessible, but rather has to be mined and extracted. This requires automated tools and they need to be effective and efficient. Association rule mining is one approach to obtaining knowledge stored with datasets / databases which includes frequent patterns and association rules between the items / attributes of a dataset with varying levels of strength. However, this is also association rule mining’s downside; the number of rules that can be found is usually very big. In order to effectively use the association rules (and the knowledge within) the number of rules needs to be kept manageable, thus it is necessary to have a method to reduce the number of association rules. However, we do not want to lose knowledge through this process. Thus the idea of non-redundant association rule mining was born. A second issue with association rule mining is determining which ones are interesting. The standard approach has been to use support and confidence. But they have their limitations. Approaches which use information about the dataset’s structure to measure association rules are limited, but could yield useful association rules if tapped. Finally, while it is important to be able to get interesting association rules from a dataset in a manageable size, it is equally as important to be able to apply them in a practical way, where the knowledge they contain can be taken advantage of. Association rules show items / attributes that appear together frequently. Recommendation systems also look at patterns and items / attributes that occur together frequently in order to make a recommendation to a person. It should therefore be possible to bring the two together. In this thesis we look at these three issues and propose approaches to help. For discovering non-redundant rules we propose enhanced approaches to rule mining in multi-level datasets that will allow hierarchically redundant association rules to be identified and removed, without information loss. When it comes to discovering interesting association rules based on the dataset’s structure we propose three measures for use in multi-level datasets. Lastly, we propose and demonstrate an approach that allows for association rules to be practically and effectively used in a recommender system, while at the same time improving the recommender system’s performance. This especially becomes evident when looking at the user cold-start problem for a recommender system. In fact our proposal helps to solve this serious problem facing recommender systems.

Online environmental information systems

In today’s information society, electronic tools, such as computer networks for the rapid transfer of data and composite databases for information storage and management, are critical in ensuring effective environmental management. In particular environmental policies and programs for federal, state, and local governments need a large volume of up-to-date information on the quality of water, air, and soil in order to conserve and protect natural resources and to carry out meteorology. In line with this, the utilization of information and communication technologies (ICTs) is crucial to preserve and improve the quality of life. In handling tasks in the field of environmental protection a range of environmental and technical information is often required for a complex and mutual decision making in a multidisciplinary team environment. In this regard e-government provides a foundation of the transformative ICT initiative which can lead to better environmental governance, better services, and increased public participation in environmental decision- making process.

The lived experience of being a sole mother in Taiwan

Aim: To explore the lived experience of being a sole mother in Taiwan Background: The number of sole mothers in Taiwan has increased by 55 % in the last decade due to changes in the social and economic status of women (e.g. earlier divorce, the development of national policies for the protection of women, the rise of feminism, and changing work practices which have seen an increase in the number of women in the workforce) (Taiwan Department of Statistics, 2010). Issues confronting sole mothers as part of daily living involve inability to cope with daily life stressors, little social support, experiencing feelings of helplessness and hopelessness, and lack of self-confidence to assume responsibility for the physical and mental health needs of themselves and their children (Cairney, 2007; Loxton, Mooney & Young, 2006; Samuels-Dennis, 2006; Waldron et al., 1996). Although there have been a number of studies conducted concerning what it means to be a sole mother, few Taiwanese studies have been undertaken. In light of the absence of research on this topic from a Taiwanese perspective, this study was undertaken. Design:A descriptive phenomenological approach was used for this study. Methods: In-depth audio-taped interviews were conducted with 15 sole Taiwanese mothers. The audiotapes were later transcribed, translated into English, and then back translated into Chinese to ensure accuracy of participants‘ information. Colaizzi‘s phenomenological approach to analysis with one additional step (eight steps in all) informed the analytical process. Findings: The process of analysis identified six central themes: 1. Enduring the burdensome, 2. Survival means living day-by-day, 3. Living in the shadows of insomnia, depression and suicidal thoughts, 4. Living with rejection and social isolation, 5. Living with uncertainty, and 6. Transcending difficult times through being resilient. Conclusion: For the participants of this study, the lived world of Taiwanese sole mothers was replete with daily difficulties marked by isolation, loneliness, social disapproval and rejection. Feelings of sadness and dejection were their daily companions. However, amid their myriad hardships, the participants found strength and solace in their children and close friends. Rather than succumb to the pressures of being a sole mother, the participants forged new paths spurred on by their own hopes and dreams for a better future. The findings of this study have the potential to make significant contributions to extant knowledge concerning the lived experiences of sole mothers in Taiwan.

Does pornography harm young people?

In recent debates about the regulation of technologies that deliver pornographic content, the greatest concerns have been about the increasing ease with which young people can access such material. Because of the ethical difficulties in researching this topic, little data has been available on the potential harm done to young people by exposure to pornography. This paper gathers a number of data sources that address this issue indirectly—including the results of our own survey of over 1000 consumers of pornography—to explore this issue. Research shows that healthy sexual development includes natural curiosity about sexuality. Retrospective studies show that accidental exposure to real-life scenes of sexuality does not harm children. Our survey shows that age of first exposure to pornography does not correlate with negative attitudes towards women. Studies with non-explicit representations of sexuality show that young people who seek out sexualised representations tend to be those with a pre-existing interest in sexuality. These studies also suggest that current generations of children are no more sexualised than previous generations, that they are not innocent about sexuality, and that a key negative effect of this knowledge is the requirement for them to feign ignorance in order to satisfy adults’ expectations of them. Research also suggests important differences between pre- and post-pubescent attitudes towards pornography, and that pornography is not addictive.

Everything is child abuse

In 2008, the Australian federal Senate held an Inquiry into the Sexualisation of Children in the Contemporary Media Environment. I made a submission to this Inquiry, noting that in public debate about this topic a number of quite distinct issues, with distinct aetiologies, were collapsed together. These included: child pornography; children being targeted by any form of marketing; young people becoming sexually active; sexual abuse of children; raunch culture; protecting children from any sexualised material in the media; and body image disorders. I suggested that commentators had collapsed these issues together because the image of the helpless child is a powerful one for critics to challenge undesirable aspects of contemporary culture. The result of many different ideological viewpoints all using the same argument - that the forms of culture they didn't like were damaging children - gives the impression that there is no element of culture today that isn't (somebody claims) causing harm to children: everything is child abuse. The danger of such discourses is that they draw attention away from the real harm that is being caused to children by sexual and other forms of maltreatment - which overwhelmingly occur within families, and for reasons ignored in these debates.

User profiling based on folksonomy information in Web 2.0 for personalized recommender systems

Information overload has become a serious issue for web users. Personalisation can provide effective solutions to overcome this problem. Recommender systems are one popular personalisation tool to help users deal with this issue. As the base of personalisation, the accuracy and efficiency of web user profiling affects the performances of recommender systems and other personalisation systems greatly. In Web 2.0, the emerging user information provides new possible solutions to profile users. Folksonomy or tag information is a kind of typical Web 2.0 information. Folksonomy implies the users‘ topic interests and opinion information. It becomes another source of important user information to profile users and to make recommendations. However, since tags are arbitrary words given by users, folksonomy contains a lot of noise such as tag synonyms, semantic ambiguities and personal tags. Such noise makes it difficult to profile users accurately or to make quality recommendations. This thesis investigates the distinctive features and multiple relationships of folksonomy and explores novel approaches to solve the tag quality problem and profile users accurately. Harvesting the wisdom of crowds and experts, three new user profiling approaches are proposed: folksonomy based user profiling approach, taxonomy based user profiling approach, hybrid user profiling approach based on folksonomy and taxonomy. The proposed user profiling approaches are applied to recommender systems to improve their performances. Based on the generated user profiles, the user and item based collaborative filtering approaches, combined with the content filtering methods, are proposed to make recommendations. The proposed new user profiling and recommendation approaches have been evaluated through extensive experiments. The effectiveness evaluation experiments were conducted on two real world datasets collected from Amazon.com and CiteULike websites. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed user profiling and recommendation approaches outperform those related state-of-the-art approaches. In addition, this thesis proposes a parallel, scalable user profiling implementation approach based on advanced cloud computing techniques such as Hadoop, MapReduce and Cascading. The scalability evaluation experiments were conducted on a large scaled dataset collected from Del.icio.us website. This thesis contributes to effectively use the wisdom of crowds and expert to help users solve information overload issues through providing more accurate, effective and efficient user profiling and recommendation approaches. It also contributes to better usages of taxonomy information given by experts and folksonomy information contributed by users in Web 2.0.

Connecting users and items with weighted tags for personalized item recommendations

Social tags are an important information source in Web 2.0. They can be used to describe users’ topic preferences as well as the content of items to make personalized recommendations. However, since tags are arbitrary words given by users, they contain a lot of noise such as tag synonyms, semantic ambiguities and personal tags. Such noise brings difficulties to improve the accuracy of item recommendations. To eliminate the noise of tags, in this paper we propose to use the multiple relationships among users, items and tags to find the semantic meaning of each tag for each user individually. With the proposed approach, the relevant tags of each item and the tag preferences of each user are determined. In addition, the user and item-based collaborative filtering combined with the content filtering approach are explored. The effectiveness of the proposed approaches is demonstrated in the experiments conducted on real world datasets collected from Amazon.com and citeULike website.

A hybrid recommender systems based on weighted tags

Social tags in web 2.0 are becoming another important information source to describe the content of items as well as to profile users’ topic preferences. However, as arbitrary words given by users, tags contains a lot of noise such as tag synonym and semantic ambiguity a large number personal tags that only used by one user, which brings challenges to effectively use tags to make item recommendations. To solve these problems, this paper proposes to use a set of related tags along with their weights to represent semantic meaning of each tag for each user individually. A hybrid recommendation generation approaches that based on the weighted tags are proposed. We have conducted experiments using the real world dataset obtained from Amazon.com. The experimental results show that the proposed approaches outperform the other state of the art approaches.

Empirical analysis of freeway traffic oscillation : its safety impact and evolution

Traffic oscillations are typical features of congested traffic flow that are characterized by recurring decelerations followed by accelerations. However, people have limited knowledge on this complex topic. In this research, 1) the impact of traffic oscillations on freeway crash occurrences has been measured using the matched case-control design. The results consistently reveal that oscillations have a more significant impact on freeway safety than the average traffic states. 2) Wavelet Transform has been adopted to locate oscillations' origins and measure their characteristics along their propagation paths using vehicle trajectory data. 3) Lane changing maneuver's impact on the immediate follower is measured and modeled. The knowledge and the new models generated from this study could provide better understanding on fundamentals of congested traffic; enable improvements to existing traffic control strategies and freeway crash countermeasures; and instigate people to develop new operational strategies with the objective of reducing the negative effects of oscillatory driving.

Information sharing with key suppliers : a transaction cost theory perspective

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explain variations in discretionary information shared between buyers and key suppliers. The paper also aims to examine how the extent of information shared affects buyers’ performance in terms of resource usage, output, and flexibility. ----- ----- Design/methodology/approach: The data for the paper comprise 221 Finnish and Swedish non-service companies obtained through a mail survey. The hypothesized relationships were tested using partial least squares modelling with reflective and formative constructs.----- ----- Findings: The results of the study suggest that (environmental and demand) uncertainty and interdependency can to some degree explain the extent of information shared between a buyer and key supplier. Furthermore, information sharing improves buyers’ performance with respect to resource usage, output, and flexibility.----- ----- Research limitations/implications: A limitation to the paper relates to the data, which only included buyers.Abetter approach would have been to collect data from both, buyers and key suppliers. Practical implications – Companies face a wide range of supply chain solutions that enable and encourage collaboration across organizations. This paper suggests a more selective and balanced approach toward adopting the solutions offered as the benefits are contingent on a number of factors such as uncertainty. Also, the risks of information sharing are far too high for a one size fits all approach.----- ----- Originality/value: The paper illustrates the applicability of transaction cost theory to the contemporary era of e-commerce. With this finding, transaction cost economics can provide a valuable lens with which to view and interpret interorganizational information sharing, a topic that has received much attention in the recent years.

Introduction : bringing back theory

In a report in the New York Times about a public symposium on the future of theory held at University of Chicago in 2002, staff writer Emily Eakin suggests that theory appears to have taken a back seat to more pressing current affairs – the Bush Administration, Al Qaeda, Iraq. Further, she reports that the symposium’s panel of high-profile theorists and scholars, including Homi Bhabha, Stanley Fish, Fredric Jameson, seemed reticent to offer their views on what is often touted as the demise or irrelevance of theory. The symposium and other commentaries on the topic of theory have prompted the view that the ‘Golden Age of Theory’ has passed and we are now in a ‘Post-Theory Age’. Given these pronouncements, we need to ask – Does theory matter any longer? Is it time for the obituary? Or are reports of the death of theory greatly exaggerated? The question remains whether to mourn or celebrate the demise of theory, and whether the body has in fact breathed its last. The title of this Introduction – ‘Bringing back theory’ – suggests a resurrection, or perhaps a haunting, as if the funeral has passed and, like Banquo’s ghost, theory returns to unsettle or disturb the celebration. It also suggests an entreaty, or perhaps a return performance. Rather than settle on one meaning, one interpretation, we are happy for all possibilities to coexist. The coexistence of different theories, different approaches, different interpretations also reflects the state of literary and cultural studies generally and children’s literature criticism in particular. No single theory or viewpoint predominates or vies for hegemony. Yet, one further question lingers – what is theory?

Effective pattern discovery for text mining

Many data mining techniques have been proposed for mining useful patterns in text documents. However, how to effectively use and update discovered patterns is still an open research issue, especially in the domain of text mining. Since most existing text mining methods adopted term-based approaches, they all suffer from the problems of polysemy and synonymy. Over the years, people have often held the hypothesis that pattern (or phrase) based approaches should perform better than the term-based ones, but many experiments did not support this hypothesis. This paper presents an innovative technique, effective pattern discovery which includes the processes of pattern deploying and pattern evolving, to improve the effectiveness of using and updating discovered patterns for finding relevant and interesting information. Substantial experiments on RCV1 data collection and TREC topics demonstrate that the proposed solution achieves encouraging performance.

A control and surveillance ITS location model to improve safety

Traffic safety in rural highways can be considered as a constant source of concern in many countries. Nowadays, transportation professionals widely use Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) to address safety issues. However, compared to metropolitan applications, the rural highway (non-urban) ITS applications are still not well defined. This paper provides a comprehensive review on the existing ITS safety solutions for rural highways. This research is mainly focused on the infrastructure-based control and surveillance ITS technology, such as Crash Prevention and Safety, Road Weather Management and other applications, that is directly related to the reduction of frequency and severity of accidents. The main outcome of this research is the development of a ‘ITS control and surveillance device locating model’ to achieve the maximum safety benefit for rural highways. Using cost and benefits databases of ITS, an integer linear programming method is utilized as an optimization technique to choose the most suitable set of ITS devices. Finally, computational analysis is performed on an existing highway in Iran, to validate the effectiveness of the proposed locating model.

Gender and municipal politics : problems, perspectives and possibilities

Scholars of local government have repeatedly lamented the lack of literature on the subject (e.g., Mowbray 1997; Pini, Previte, Haslam & McKenzie 2007). As Dollery, Marshall and Worthington (2003: 1) have commented, local government has often been the ‘poor cousin of its more exalted relatives in terms of the attention it attracts from the research community.’ The exalted relatives Dollery et al. (2003) refer to are national political environments, where women’s participation has elicited significant attention. However, the dearth of research on the specific subject of women’s representation in local government is rarely acknowledged (Neyland & Tucker 1996; Whip & Fletcher 1999). This edited book attempts to redress this situation. Each chapter applies an explicit gender analysis to their specific topic of focus, making ‘gender visible in social phenomenon; [and] asking if, how, and why social processes, standards, and opportunities differ systematically for women and men’ (Howard, Risman & Sprague 2003: 1). These analyses in the local government context are critical for understanding the extent and nature of balanced representation at all levels of government. Furthermore, some women start their elective careers serving on school boards, city or town councils or as mayors, before progressing to state and national legislative offices. Hence, the experiences of women in local government illustrate broader notions of democracy and may for some individual women, shape their opportunities further along the political pipeline.

Parents’ views about child sexual abuse prevention education : a systematic review

This paper presents the results of a systematic review of literature on the topic of parents’ views about child sexual abuse prevention education. It describes: i) what parents know about child sexual abuse prevention education; ii) what child sexual abuse prevention messages parents provide to their children and what topics they discuss; iii) what parents’ attitudes are towards child sexual abuse prevention education in schools; and iv) their preferences for content. Electronic database searches were conducted to identify relevant literature published in English relating to child sexual abuse prevention programs and parent’s views. A total of 429 papers were evaluated with 13 studies identified as meeting the study’s inclusion criteria. Worldwide, empirical research on parents’ views about child sexual abuse prevention programs is limited and more research is needed in Australia. Implications for future research and practice are outlined.