CONSUMER PREFERENCES AND EVALUATIONS OF A PROCESSED MEAT PRODUCT

Consumer/Household Economics,

A Comparative Study of Two Combinatorial Reverse Auction Models

Online group-buying is one of the most innovative business models employed by many companies. From the perspective of buyers, quantity based discounts provide a huge incentive to form coalitions and take advantage of lower prices without ordering more than their actual demand. Traditional group-buying mechanisms are usually based on a single item and uniform cost sharing. One way to reduce the cost for acquiring the required items is to take into account the complementarities between items provided by the sellers. By holding a combinatorial reverse auction, the total cost to acquire the required items will be significantly reduced due to complementarities between items. However, combinatorial reverse auctions suffer from high computational complexity. If there are multiple buyers, there are two different business models for procurement based on combinatorial reverse auctions: (1) independent combinatorial reverse auctions: each buyer may hold a combinatorial reverse auction independently and (2) combinatorial reverse auctions based on group buying: multiple buyers delegate the auction to a group buyer and the group buyer holds only one combinatorial reverse auction for all the buyers. In developing an effective tool to support the decision of multiple buyers’ procurement, a comparative study on the performance and efficiency of these two different business models is needed. In this paper, we compare the performance as well as the computational efficiency for these two combinatorial reverse auction models. Our analysis indicates that group buying combinatorial reverse auction outperforms multiple separate combinatorial reverse auctions not only in performance but also in efficiency

Theoretic Analysis and Extremely Easy Algorithms for Domain Adaptive Feature Learning

Domain adaptation problems arise in a variety of applications, where a training dataset from the \textit{source} domain and a test dataset from the \textit{target} domain typically follow different distributions. The primary difficulty in designing effective learning models to solve such problems lies in how to bridge the gap between the source and target distributions. In this paper, we provide comprehensive analysis of feature learning algorithms used in conjunction with linear classifiers for domain adaptation. Our analysis shows that in order to achieve good adaptation performance, the second moments of the source domain distribution and target domain distribution should be similar. Based on our new analysis, a novel extremely easy feature learning algorithm for domain adaptation is proposed. Furthermore, our algorithm is extended by leveraging multiple layers, leading to a deep linear model. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms in terms of domain adaptation tasks on the Amazon review dataset and the spam dataset from the ECML/PKDD 2006 discovery challenge.Comment: ijca

THE INFLUENCE OF TAI-CHI EXERCISE ON DYNAMICS OF LOWER EXTREMITY FOR THE ELDERLY DURING SIT-TO-STAND

The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of Tai Chi exercise on sit-tostand in the elderly. Ten healthy female elders (normal group) and nine healthy Tai-Chi female practitioner (Tai-Chi group) participated in this study. The results indicated: (1) During the forward flexion phase, normal group showed significantly greater hip flexion angle and moment than Tai-Chi group (

ANGULAR ANALYSIS OF THE INDEX AND MIDDLE FINGERS DURING FASTBALL AND CURVEBALL PITCHING – A CASE STUDY

The purpose of this study was to expand the knowledge by quantifying and comparing finger angle between curveball (CB) and fastball (FB) pitching. One division II college pitcher was participated in present study. A VICON Motion capture system were used to collect 3-D kinematic data (500Hz). Three successful trials for each FB and CB were collected. The metacarpal phalangeal joint (MCP), proximal interphalangeal joint (PIP) and distal interphalangeal joint (DIP) angle was analysed. There were several differences in MCP, PIP and DIP angle for CB and FB. But similar patterns were found between index finger and middle finger. This information may beneficial to conduct thefurther study to explore the mechanics of pitching

BIOMECHANICS OF ACCURATE INSTEP KICK IN FUTSAL

The purpose of this study was to investigate the biomechanical parameters of instep kicking towards specific targets of the goal in Futsal. Twelve females from national soccer team in Taiwan were recruited in this study. Each subject was asked to perform instep kick of a stationary ball (size 4) toward targets in the four corners of the goal in Futsal. VICON motion analysis system and Kistler force plateform were used to collect the kinematics of the lower limb and the ground reaction forces and moments, respectively. The results showed that kicks towards the bottom targets demonstrated significantly greater ball velocity than towards the top targets (p= 0.00). In addition, the hip joint moment of supporting leg was significantly greater when kicking towards top targets of the goal (p= 0.01). The results of this study could provide training guidelines for coaches and players

Development of a Small Intelligent Weather Station for Agricultural Applications

It is known that climate change causes a decrease in the profit gained from agricultural production. This work designs and establishes weather boxes equipped with functions of rainfall prediction, frosting forecast, and lightning detection. With the wireless connection and the build-in decision mode, weather boxes can deliver early-warning by sending texting messages to the users and actuating the corresponding action to response the extreme climate. To implement rainfall and frosting prognostication, two different datasets are analyzed by the technology of data mining. One of the datasets is acquired from the Central Weather Bureau, and the other is from the proposed weather box monitoring the agricultural environment. From the experimental results, the prediction model constructed from the data which is collected by the proposed weather box exhibits a higher accuracy in rainfall forecasting than those based on the Central Weather Bureau

Eyeglasses-free display: towards correcting visual aberrations with computational light field displays

Millions of people worldwide need glasses or contact lenses to see or read properly. We introduce a computational display technology that predistorts the presented content for an observer, so that the target image is perceived without the need for eyewear. By designing optics in concert with prefiltering algorithms, the proposed display architecture achieves significantly higher resolution and contrast than prior approaches to vision-correcting image display. We demonstrate that inexpensive light field displays driven by efficient implementations of 4D prefiltering algorithms can produce the desired vision-corrected imagery, even for higher-order aberrations that are difficult to be corrected with glasses. The proposed computational display architecture is evaluated in simulation and with a low-cost prototype device.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (grant number IIS-1219241)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (grant number IIS-1116718)Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship