Do Degradation of Urban Greenery and Increasing Land Prices Often Come along with Urbanization?

In the wake of urbanization, driven by a variety of individual and socio-economic merits, human’s basic residential needs and standard of living may be compromised in the urban areas, as the population agglomerates. However, the knowledge of the associations of urbanization with urban greenery and residential land prices is still in the pursuing process. This empirical research aims to contribute whether the degradation of essential living conditions is a trade-off for the pursued urban life. Hence, Taiwan is selected as the case to analyze the associated relations primarily between 1976 and 2016. The research methods involve descriptive statistics, the panel data analysis, and the cluster analysis. The panel data analysis demonstrates that degraded urban greenery and increasing residential land prices came along with the urbanization in Taiwan between 2001 and 2016. Policy implications include rethinking of the building coverage rate for renewed buildings for more plant-friendly ground, the adoption of building setback policy for more accessible mid-air mini-parks, and avoiding residential units as an investment commodity

Overcoming the far-field diffraction limit via absorbance modulation

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2011.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 241-251).Diffraction limits the resolution of far-field lithography and imaging to about half of the wavelength, which greatly limits the capability of optical techniques. The proposed technique with absorbance modulation aims to get around the diffraction limit by using wavelength-selective chemistry to confine light to nanoscale dimension. Absorbance modulation lithography and imaging is a near-field technique that does not require scanning of a tip in close proximity or fabrication of a physically small aperture. Near-field apertures are dynamically generated in the photochromic absorbance modulation layer (AML) with only far-field illuminations. In this thesis, the concept of absorbance modulation is explained and in-house simulation models are discussed in detail. One-dimensional experimental demonstrations of absorbance modulation lithography achieved line exposures with widths of about one tenth of the exposure wavelength. In order to extend absorbance modulation to two-dimension, a binary diffractive-optical element that generates a focused round spot at one wavelength, aligned with the central node of a ring-shaped spot at another wavelength was designed and fabricated. Lithography and imaging results applying this diffractive optical element showed evidence of point-spread function compression in lithography and contrast enhancement in imaging.by Hsin-Yu Sidney Tsai.Ph.D

AMOL

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2007.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Includes bibliographical references (p. 91-94).In this thesis, the concept of absorbance-modulation optical lithography (AMOL) is described, and the feasibility experimentally verified. AMOL is an implementation of nodal lithography, which is not bounded by the diffraction limit of incident lights. Experimental results showed promising capability of AMOL and matched well with simulation. Several key elements of the AMOL system are discussed: the material systems of AMOL, limitations on the material and optical systems presented, and the design and fabrication of spiral phase elements that generate ring-shaped beams required by AMOL.by Hsin-Yu Sidney Tsai.S.M

Hotel restaurant experiences - a Taiwanese perspective

This thesis examines hotel dining experiences from a Taiwanese perspective. Current conceptualisation and measurement of customer satisfaction and service quality have been generally developed within an American and European context where socio-demographic variables were used to examine both expectations and perceptions. It is argued that in cultures (e.g. Taiwanese) very different from that of the West, the applicability of current models of service quality is questionable. Therefore, this thesis looks at the customer evaluation of hotel dining within a Chinese cultural framework. A mix of qualitative and quantitative methods is utilised to 1) identify characteristics of hotel dining in a hotel complex in Taiwan, 2) determine dimensions of service excellence, 3) analyse perceptual differences between guests, waiting staff and restaurant management, 4) identify factors influencing the evaluation of restaurant services and 5) examine the influence of culture on hotel dining. The contribution of this thesis is the development of the customer satisfaction framework in the Taiwanese hospitality setting. The thesis concludes the evaluation of hotel restaurant experiences is operationalised within Chinese cultural norms. The findings also provide implications for developing service strategies for hospitality practitioners, as well as understanding Taiwanese customers' decision making process

Discovering important factors of intangible firm value by association rules

It is very important for investors to understand the critical factors affecting the value of firms before making investments. In knowledge-based economy, the method for creating firm value transfers from traditional physical assets to intangible knowledge. As intangible assets value is an important part of firm value, valuation of intangible assets becomes a widespread topic of interest in the future of economy. This paper applies association rules, one data mining technique, to discover critical factors affecting firm value in Taiwan and to provide a more flexible model than the traditional regression method. Based on collecting related factors found in literature, the results indicate that R&D intensity, family, participation in management, pyramids, profitability, and dividend are the six important factors, in which some are consistent with significant important variables in prior literature, but most of them are unique for Taiwan, one emerging economy

A Temporal Usage Pattern-based Tag Recommendation Approach

While social tagging can benefit Internet users managing their resources, it suffers the problems such as diverse and/or unchecked vocabulary and unwillingness to tag. Use of freely new tags and/or reuse of frequent tags have degraded coherence of corresponding resources of each tag that further frustrates people in retrieving information due to cognitive dissonance. Tag recommender systems can recommend users the most relevant tags to the resource they intend to annotate, and drastically transfer the tagging process from generation to recognition to reduce user’s cognitive effort and time. Prior research on tag recommendation has addressed the time-dependence issues of tags by applying a time decaying measure to determine the recurrence probability of a tag according to its recency instead of its usage pattern. In response, this study intends to propose the temporal usage pattern-based tag recommendation technique to consider the usage patterns and temporal characteristic of tags for making recommendations

Associations among systemic blood pressure, microalbuminuria and albuminuria in dogs affected with pituitary- and adrenal-dependent hyperadrenocorticism

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Hypertension and proteinuria are medical complications associated with the multisystemic effects of long-term hypercortisolism in dogs with hyperadrenocorticism (HAC).</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>This study investigated the relationships among adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH)-stimulation test results, systemic blood pressure, and microalbuminuria in clinically-healthy dogs (n = 100), in dogs affected with naturally occurring pituitary-dependent (PDH; n = 40), or adrenal-dependent hyperadrenocorticism (ADH; n = 30).</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Mean systemic blood pressure was similar between clinically healthy dogs and dogs with HAC (<it>p </it>= 0.803). However the incidence of hypertension was highest in dogs with ADH (<it>p = 0.017</it>), followed by dogs with PDH, with the lowest levels in clinically healthy dogs (<it>p = 0.019</it>). Presence of microalbuminuria and albuminuria in clinically healthy dogs and dogs affected with HAC was significantly different (<it>p </it>< 0.001); incidences of albuminuria followed the same pattern of hypertension; highest incidence in dogs with ADH, and lowest level in clinically healthy dogs; but microalbuminuria showed a different pattern: clinically healthy dogs had highest incidences and dogs with ADH had lowest incidence. The presence of albuminuria was not associated with blood pressure values, regardless of whether dogs were clinically healthy or affected with ADH or PDH (<it>p </it>= 0.306).</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Higher incidence of hypertension and albuminuria, not microalbuminuria was seen in dogs affected with HAC compared to clinically healthy dogs; incidence of hypertension and albuminuria was significantly higher in dogs affected with ADH compared to PDH. However, presence of albuminuria was not correlated with systemic blood pressure.</p