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A Semiotic Analysis Of Unified Modeling Language Graphical Notations, Keng Siau, Yuhong Tian Jan 2009

A Semiotic Analysis Of Unified Modeling Language Graphical Notations, Keng Siau, Yuhong Tian

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Unified modeling language (UML) is the standard modeling language for object-oriented system development. Despite its status as a standard, UML has a fuzzy formal specification and a weak theoretical foundation. Semiotics, the study of signs, provides a good theoretical foundation for UML research because graphical notations (or visual signs) of UML are subjected to the principles of signs. In our research, we use semiotics to study the effectiveness of graphical notations in UML. We hypothesized that the use of iconic signs as UML graphical notations leads to representation that is more accurately interpreted and that arouses fewer connotations than the …


Ontology-Based Business Process Customization For Composite Web Services, Qianhui (Althea) Liang, Xindong Wu, E. K. Park, T. Khoshgoftaar, C. Chi Jan 2009

Ontology-Based Business Process Customization For Composite Web Services, Qianhui (Althea) Liang, Xindong Wu, E. K. Park, T. Khoshgoftaar, C. Chi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A key goal of the Semantic Web is to shift social interaction patterns from a producer-centric paradigm to a consumer-centric one. Treating customers as the most valuable assets and making the business models work better for them are at the core of building successful consumer-centric business models. It follows that customizing business processes constitutes a major concern in the realm of a knowledge-pull-based human semantic Web. This paper conceptualizes the customization of service-based business processes leveraging the existing knowledge of Web services and business processes. We represent this conceptualization as a new Extensible Markup Language (XML) markup language Web Ontology …


Quality-Aware Collaborative Question Answering: Methods And Evaluation, Maggy Anastasia Suryanto, Ee Peng Lim, Aixin Sun, Roger Hsiang-Li Chiang Jan 2009

Quality-Aware Collaborative Question Answering: Methods And Evaluation, Maggy Anastasia Suryanto, Ee Peng Lim, Aixin Sun, Roger Hsiang-Li Chiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Community Question Answering (QA) portals contain questions and answers contributed by hundreds of millions of users. These databases of questions and answers are of great value if they can be used directly to answer questions from any user. In this research, we address this collaborative QA task by drawing knowledge from the crowds in community QA portals such as Yahoo! Answers. Despite their popularity, it is well known that answers in community QA portals have unequal quality. We therefore propose a quality-aware framework to design methods that select answers from a community QA portal considering answer quality in addition to …


Venture Capital Firm's Reputation Effect On Its Start-Up Company's Long Term Operating Performance And Survivorship, Huei Siang Yap Jan 2009

Venture Capital Firm's Reputation Effect On Its Start-Up Company's Long Term Operating Performance And Survivorship, Huei Siang Yap

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

In this paper, I tested the effects of three proxies for venture capitalist(VC) reputation on its invested company's long term industry-djusted operating performances (ROA , ROE), market-to-book ratio and survival time (time to delisting) in the aftermarket. VC's market share and VC's IPO share have strong and positive association with the post-IPO long-term performance metrics, and the effects are statistically significant even after accounting for self-selection bias. For long term survivorship of start-up companies, I applied hazard analysis to the IPO company's time to delisting with accelerated failure time (AFT) model as the baseline hazard function, and found that start …


The Nature Of Torrens Indefeasibility: Understanding The Limits Of Personal Equities, Kelvin F. K. Low Jan 2009

The Nature Of Torrens Indefeasibility: Understanding The Limits Of Personal Equities, Kelvin F. K. Low

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Torrens registration has revolutionised land law, in particular the law of conveyancing. However, the precise scope of Torrens indefeasibility — which lies at the heart of the system — remains poorly understood, especially in respect of its relationship to the so-called ‘personal equities’ exception. The key to disentangling this web of confusion lies in accepting that personal equities, properly understood, do not actually form an exception to indefeasibility at all. The two concepts operate on completely different planes. In practical terms, this means that three crucial points must be understood. First, the Torrens system is intended to prevent adverse claims …


Stakeholder Influences On Diversification: Implications For Shareholders And Stakeholders, Partiban David, Jonathan P. O’Brien, Toru Yoshikawa, Andrew Delios Jan 2009

Stakeholder Influences On Diversification: Implications For Shareholders And Stakeholders, Partiban David, Jonathan P. O’Brien, Toru Yoshikawa, Andrew Delios

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The article presents the results of research into the relative influence of stakeholders and shareholders on corporate strategic planning in terms of diversification and performance, focusing on concepts such as opportunity cost and rent appropriation. An overview of related previous studies is provided, along with details of the research protocol, which involved data analysis drawn from a sample of Japanese firms and their corporate profits from the years 1990 through 2004. A distinction between transactional and relational ownership is described, which can lead to different priorities in terms of profit and growth.


Corporate Tax, Capital Structure, And The Accessibility Of Bank Loans: Evidence From China, Liansheng Wu, Heng Yue Jan 2009

Corporate Tax, Capital Structure, And The Accessibility Of Bank Loans: Evidence From China, Liansheng Wu, Heng Yue

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

In this paper, we investigate whether listed firms in China adjust their capital structure in response to an increase in the corporate taxrate. Although theories of capital structure suggest that corporate tax is an important determinant of capital structure, how exogenouschanges of the tax rate affect firms’ leverage decisions has not been fully explored. We examine a unique circumstance in which the Chinesegovernment increased the corporate tax rate of firms that had previously received local government tax rebates. The evidence indicatesthat these firms increased their leverage when the corporate tax rate increased. Further investigation suggests that the adjustment ofleverage was …


"I Know What You Want To Know": The Impact Of Interviewees' Ability To Identify Criteria On Interview Performance And Construct-Related Validity, Klaus G. Melchers, Ute Christine Klehe, Gerald M. Richter, Martin Kleinmann, Cornelius J. Konig, Filip Lievens Jan 2009

"I Know What You Want To Know": The Impact Of Interviewees' Ability To Identify Criteria On Interview Performance And Construct-Related Validity, Klaus G. Melchers, Ute Christine Klehe, Gerald M. Richter, Martin Kleinmann, Cornelius J. Konig, Filip Lievens

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The current study tested whether candidates' ability to identify the targeted interview dimensions fosters their interview success as well as the interviews' convergent and discriminant validity. Ninety-two interviewees participated in a simulated structured interview developed to measure three different dimensions. In line with the hypotheses, interviewees who were more proficient at identifying the targeted dimensions received better evaluations. Furthermore, interviewees' ability to identify these evaluation criteria accounted for substantial variance in predicting their performance even after controlling for cognitive ability. Finally, the interviewer ratings showed poor discriminant and convergent validity. However, we found some support for the hypothesis that the …


Continuous Monitoring Of Spatial Queries, Kyriakos Mouratidis Jan 2009

Continuous Monitoring Of Spatial Queries, Kyriakos Mouratidis

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

No abstract provided.


Efficient Valid Scope Computation For Location-Dependent Spatial Queries In Mobile And Wireless Environments, Ken C. K. Lee, Wang-Chien Lee, Hong Va Leong, Brandon Unger, Baihua Zheng Jan 2009

Efficient Valid Scope Computation For Location-Dependent Spatial Queries In Mobile And Wireless Environments, Ken C. K. Lee, Wang-Chien Lee, Hong Va Leong, Brandon Unger, Baihua Zheng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In mobile and wireless environments, mobile clients can access information with respect to their locations by submitting Location-Dependent Spatial Queries (LDSQs) to Location-Based Service (LBS) servers. Owing to scarce wireless channel bandwidth and limited client battery life, frequent LDSQ submission from clients must be avoided. Observing that LDSQs issued from similar client positions would normally return the same results, we explore the idea of valid scope, that represents a spatial area in which a set of LDSQs will retrieve exactly the same query results. With a valid scope derived and an LDSQ result cached at the client side, a client …


Signal Detection With Criterion Noise: Applications To Recognition Memory, Aaron S. Benjamin, Michael Diaz, Wee, Serena Jan 2009

Signal Detection With Criterion Noise: Applications To Recognition Memory, Aaron S. Benjamin, Michael Diaz, Wee, Serena

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

A tacit but fundamental assumption of the theory of signal detection is that criterion placement is a noise-free process. This article challenges that assumption on theoretical and empirical grounds and presents the noisy decision theory of signal detection (ND-TSD). Generalized equations for the isosensitivity function and for measures of discrimination incorporating criterion variability are derived, and the model's relationship with extant models of decision making in discrimination tasks is examined, An experiment evaluating recognition memory for ensembles of word stimuli revealed that criterion noise is not trivial in magnitude and contributes substantially to variance in the slope of the isosensitivity …


Traditions Of Philanthropic Order, Christine Dunn Henderson Jan 2009

Traditions Of Philanthropic Order, Christine Dunn Henderson

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Individuals act more or less simultaneously as economic agents, citizens, and participants in civil society. Their interactions and their ways of fulfilling these roles take many forms. Not all of them can be said to be self-organizing, yet in several instances patterns of organization emerge spontaneously without being deliberately designed. Of course, the market economy—or “catallaxy,” as F. A. Hayek called it—remains the best example of such “spontaneous orders.” But there are others. Gus diZerega (2000), for example, has identified science and democracy as being similarly constituted by self-referential, self-organizing (some authors prefer the term autopoietic) processes. In this paper …


Making Sustainable Creative/Cultural Space In Shanghai And Singapore, Lily Kong Jan 2009

Making Sustainable Creative/Cultural Space In Shanghai And Singapore, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Shanghai and Singapore are two economically vibrant Asian cities that have recently adopted creative/cultural economy strategies. In this article I examine new spatial expressions of cultural and economic interests in the two cities: state-vaunted cultural edifices and organically evolved cultural spaces. I discuss the simultaneous precariousness and sustainability of these spaces, focusing on Shanghai's Grand Theatre and Moganshan Lu and on Singapore's Esplanade-Theatres by the Bay and Wessex Estate. Their cultural sustainability is understood as their ability to support the development of indigenous content and local idioms in artistic work. Their social sustainability is examined in terms of the social …


If We Seek, Do We Learn?: Predicting Knowledge Of Global Warming, Leeann Kahlor, Sonny Rosenthal Jan 2009

If We Seek, Do We Learn?: Predicting Knowledge Of Global Warming, Leeann Kahlor, Sonny Rosenthal

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Derived from the risk information seeking and processing model (RISP), this study sought to isolate predictors of the public's knowledge of global warming. Using a national sample ( N = 805), multiple regression yielded a number of significant relationships among 13 moderators. Notably, the number of media sources used for information about global warming, information seeking effort, and general education were relatively strong predictors of knowledge. Counter to expectations, informational subjective norms were inversely related to knowledge.


The Magic Of Chinese Theatre: Theatre As A Ritual Of Sacral Transmogrification, Margaret Chan Jan 2009

The Magic Of Chinese Theatre: Theatre As A Ritual Of Sacral Transmogrification, Margaret Chan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Social and Staged dramas, entertainment and ritual; Chinese theatre and religion share a dialectical relationship. Ancient exorcistic rituals became dramatized to awe and inspire the audience of devotees. Eventually, exorcistic troupes had to compete among themselves to attract audiences, so that an element of entertainment came into ritual theatre. Travelling story-tellers and drama troupes went from place to place entrancing their audiences with stories of gods and heroes. The actors used costumes, props and masks, and soon the characters from these entertaining theatre shows formed a cast of gods and folk heroes in the minds of the people. A dialectical …


Cosmopolitanism, Freedom And Indifference: A Levinasian View, Eduard Jordaan Jan 2009

Cosmopolitanism, Freedom And Indifference: A Levinasian View, Eduard Jordaan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Despite cosmopolitanism's concern for the world's poor and its concomitant heavy moral demands, cosmopolitans establish a limit to the self's responsibility for the global poor. This contrasts with Emmanuel Levinas's view that the self has an infinite responsibility for the other, a responsibility that derives from the self's questioning of the impact of his freedom on others. From a Levinasian perspective, cosmopolitanism's restriction of the self's responsibility for others creates a sphere of rightful indifference to the needs of the other; lends legitimacy to a disregard of the other; forestalls an ethical awakening to the other; constrains the achievement of …


Distributed Utility-Based Rate Adaptation Protocols For Prioritized, Quasi-Elastic Flows, Sharanya Eswaran, Matthew P. Johnson, Archan Misra, Thomas La Porta Jan 2009

Distributed Utility-Based Rate Adaptation Protocols For Prioritized, Quasi-Elastic Flows, Sharanya Eswaran, Matthew P. Johnson, Archan Misra, Thomas La Porta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper considers rate adaptation for streaming multimedia data in a wireless sensor network (WSN) consisting of multiple missions, where each mission subscribes to data streams from multiple sensors, and each sensor's data is utilized by multiple heterogenous missions. We specifically consider the application of the distributed network utility maximization (NUM) framework to a previously unconsidered scenario where the different missions have different priorities, as well as minimum utility demands. When all the utility demands are feasible, we first show that the addition of a penalty for failing to reach the minimum utility demand to the base NUM protocol leads …


Keeping Dictators Honest: The Role Of Population, Quoc-Anh Do, Filipe R. Campante Jan 2009

Keeping Dictators Honest: The Role Of Population, Quoc-Anh Do, Filipe R. Campante

Research Collection School Of Economics

In order to explain the apparently paradoxical presence of acceptable governance in many non-democratic regimes, economists and political scientists have focused mostly on institutions acting as de facto checks and balances. In this paper, we propose that population plays a similar role in guaranteeing the quality of governance and redistribution. We argue and demonstrate with historical evidence that the concentration of population around the policy making center serves as an insurgency threat to a dictatorship, inducing it to yield to more redistribution and better governance. We bring this centered concept of population concentration to the data through the Centered Index …


A Robust Lm Test For Spatial Error Components, Zhenlin Yang Jan 2009

A Robust Lm Test For Spatial Error Components, Zhenlin Yang

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper presents a modified LM test of spatial error components, which is shown to be robust against distributional misspecifications and spatial layouts. The proposed test differs from the LM test of Anselin (2001) by a term in the denominators of the test statistics. This term disappears when either the errors are normal, or the variance of the diagonal elements of the product of spatial weights matrix and its transpose is zero or approaches to zero as sample size goes large. When neither is true, as is often the case in practice, the effect of this term can be significant …


What Do We Expect From Our Friends?, Stephen Leider, Markus M. Mobius, Tanya S. Rosenblat, Quoc-Anh Do Jan 2009

What Do We Expect From Our Friends?, Stephen Leider, Markus M. Mobius, Tanya S. Rosenblat, Quoc-Anh Do

Research Collection School Of Economics

We conduct a field experiment in a large real-world social network to examine how subjects expect to be treated by their friends and by strangers who make allocation decisions in modified dictator games. While recipients’ beliefs accurately account for the extent to which friends will choose more generous allocations than strangers (i.e. directed altruism), recipients are not able to anticipate individual differences in the baseline altruism of allocators (measured by giving to an unnamed recipient, which is predictive of generosity towards named recipients). Recipients who are direct friends with the allocator, or even recipients with many common friends, are no …


Semiparametric Prevalence Estimation From A Two-Phase Survey, Denis H. Y. Leung, J Qin Jan 2009

Semiparametric Prevalence Estimation From A Two-Phase Survey, Denis H. Y. Leung, J Qin

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper studies a semi-parametric method for estimating the prevalence of a binary outcome using a two-phase survey. The motivation for a two-phase survey is, due to time, money and ethical considerations, it is impossible to carry out comprehensive evaluation on all subjects in a large random sample of the population. Rather, a relatively inexpensive "screening test" is given to all subjects in the random sample and only individuals more likely to have a positive outcome (cases) will be selected for a further "gold standard" test to verify the outcome. Therefore, individuals with verified outcome form a non-random sample from …


Modelling Situation Awareness For Context‐Aware Decision Support, Yu-Hong Feng, Teck-Hou Teng, Ah-Hwee Tan Jan 2009

Modelling Situation Awareness For Context‐Aware Decision Support, Yu-Hong Feng, Teck-Hou Teng, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Situation awareness modelling is popularly used in the command and control domain for situation assessment and decision support. However, situation models in real-world applications are typically complex and not easy to use. This paper presents a Context-aware Decision Support (CaDS) system, which consists of a situation model for shared situation awareness modelling and a group of entity agents, one for each individual user, for focused and customized decision support. By incorporating a rule-based inference engine, the entity agents provide functions including event classification, action recommendation, and proactive decision making. The implementation and the performance of the proposed system are demonstrated …


Control-Theoretic, Mission-Driven, Optimization Techniques For Wireless Sensor Networks, Archan Misra, Sharanya Eswaran, Thomas La Porta Jan 2009

Control-Theoretic, Mission-Driven, Optimization Techniques For Wireless Sensor Networks, Archan Misra, Sharanya Eswaran, Thomas La Porta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Network Utility Maximization (NUM) techniques, which cast resource sharing problems as one of distributed utility maximization, have been investigated for a variety of optimization problems in wireless and wired networks. Our recent work has extended the NUM framework to consider the case of resource sharing by multiple competing missions in a military-centric wireless sensor network (WSN) environment. Our enhanced NUM-based protocols provide rapid and dynamic mission-based adaptation of tactical wireless networks to support the transport of sensor data streams with very small control overhead. In particular, we focus specifically on mechanisms that capture the joint nature of mission utilities and …


Tuning On-Air Signatures For Balancing Performance And Confidentiality, Baihua Zheng, Wang-Chien Lee, Peng Liu, Dik Lun Lee, Xuhua Ding Jan 2009

Tuning On-Air Signatures For Balancing Performance And Confidentiality, Baihua Zheng, Wang-Chien Lee, Peng Liu, Dik Lun Lee, Xuhua Ding

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we investigate the trade off between performance and confidentiality in signature-based air indexing schemes for wireless data broadcast. Two metrics, namely, false drop probability and false guess probability, are defined to quantify the filtering efficiency and confidentiality loss of a signature scheme. Our analysis reveals that false drop probability and false guess probability share a similar trend as the tuning parameters of a signature scheme change and it is impossible to achieve a low false drop probability and a high false guess probability simultaneously. In order to balance the performance and confidentiality, we perform an analysis to …


Dynamic Web Service Selection For Reliable Web Service Composition, San-Yih Hwang, Ee Peng Lim, Chien-Hsiang Lee, Cheng-Hung Chen Jan 2009

Dynamic Web Service Selection For Reliable Web Service Composition, San-Yih Hwang, Ee Peng Lim, Chien-Hsiang Lee, Cheng-Hung Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper studies the dynamic web service selection problem in a failure-prone environment, which aims to determine a subset of Web services to be invoked at run-time so as to successfully orchestrate a composite web service. We observe that both the composite and constituent web services often constrain the sequences of invoking their operations and therefore propose to use finite state machine to model the permitted invocation sequences of Web service operations. We assign each state of execution an aggregated reliability to measure the probability that the given state will lead to successful execution in the context where each web …


Does Size Matter In The Hedge Fund Industry?, Song Wee Melvyn Teo Jan 2009

Does Size Matter In The Hedge Fund Industry?, Song Wee Melvyn Teo

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We document a negative and convex relationship between hedge fund size and future risk-adjusted returns. Small hedge funds outperform large hedge funds by 3.65 percent per year after adjusting for risk. This over performance is not driven by fund age, leverage, serial correlation, or self-selection biases. The capacity constraints manifest across various investment styles and regions. In particular, they are strongest for funds managed by multiple principals who trade small, illiquid securities, suggesting that the observed diseconomies can be traced to price impact and hierarchy costs (Stein, 2002). While investors direct disproportionately more capital to smaller funds, they do not …


Doctrine And Fairness In The Law Of Contract, Andrew B.L. Phang Jan 2009

Doctrine And Fairness In The Law Of Contract, Andrew B.L. Phang

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

This paper explores, through illustrations from the law of contract, the important centraltheme to the effect that the rules and principles, which constitute thedoctrineof the law,are not ends in themselves but are, rather, the means through which the courts arrive atsubstantively fairoutcomes in the cases before them. The paper focuses on the concept of‘radicalism’, which relates to the point at which the courts decide that it is legallypermissible to hold that a contract should come to an end because a radical or funda-mental ‘legal tipping point’ has not only been arrived at but has, in fact, been crossed. Itexplores the …


Assessment Centres: A Tale About Dimensions, Exercises, And Dancing Bears, Filip Lievens Jan 2009

Assessment Centres: A Tale About Dimensions, Exercises, And Dancing Bears, Filip Lievens

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This study reviews prior construct-related validity research in assessment centres. Special focus is placed on disentangling possible explanations for the construct-related validity findings. The conclusion is that we now have a much better picture of the reasons behind the construct-related validity findings. Careful assessment centre design and high interrater reliability among assessors seem necessary albeit insufficient conditions to establish assessment centre construct-related validity. The nature of candidate performances is another key factor. This study next discusses how these empirical findings have changed how assessment centres are conceptualized (theoretical advancements framed in the application of trait activation theory), analysed (methodological advancements), …


Assessment Centers At The Crossroads: Toward A Reconceptualization Of Assessment Center Exercises, Filip Lievens, Robert P. Tett, Deidra J. Schleicher Jan 2009

Assessment Centers At The Crossroads: Toward A Reconceptualization Of Assessment Center Exercises, Filip Lievens, Robert P. Tett, Deidra J. Schleicher

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Exercises are key components of assessment centers (ACs). However, little is known about the nature and determinants of AC exercise performance. The traditional exercise paradigm primarily emphasizes the need to simulate task, social, and organizational demands in AC exercises. This chapter draws on trait activation theory in proposing a new AC exercise paradigm. First, we develop a theoretical framework that addresses the complexity of situational characteristics of AC exercises as determinants of AC performance. Second, we argue for planting multiple stimuli within exercises as a structured means of eliciting candidate behavior. Third, we show how the new paradigm also has …


Decision Aids For Addressing The Validity-Adverse Impact Trade-Off, Paul R. Sackett, Wilfried De Corte, Filip Lievens Jan 2009

Decision Aids For Addressing The Validity-Adverse Impact Trade-Off, Paul R. Sackett, Wilfried De Corte, Filip Lievens

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Typically, adverse impact (AI) is an after-the-fact analysis: Once predictor scores for a pool of applicants are available, AI is evaluated. Sometimes the analysis is made in real time, as predictor scores are obtained on a set of applicants, and AI calculations are done on a “what if” basis as input to decisions about features such as where to set a cutoff score. The focus of this chapter, however, is on attempts to estimate in advance the likely impact of a given selection system. Here, estimates are made based on available information about the features such as the expected magnitude …