Digital Commons Network^™

Impact Of Sanctions And Isolation Measurement With North Korea, Burma/Myanmar, Iran And Zimbabwe As Case Studies, Clara Portela

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The present study explores how the introduction of targeted sanctions has transformed the practice of international organisations, looking at the examples of North Korea, Burma/Myanmar, Iran and Zimbabwe.

Although the ultimate effectiveness of the individual sanctions measures can hardly be ascertained, not least due to their co-existence with unilateral sanctions proactively enforced by the US, the analysis demonstrates that the character of sanctions measures, and the changing nature of the international system, has put the use of sanctions and isolation measures in different terms than was the case just a couple of decades ago.

While it is beyond the scope …

Touching A Teddy Bear Mitigates The Negative Effects Of Social Exclusion, Kenneth Tai, Xue Zheng, Jayanth Narayanan

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

There is little empirical research to date that looks at how the deleterious effects of social exclusion can be mitigated. We examined how touching an inanimate object—a teddy bear—might impact the effect of social exclusion on prosocial behavior. Across two studies, we found that socially excluded individuals who touched a teddy bear acted more prosocially as compared to socially excluded individuals who just viewed the teddy bear from a distance. This effect was only observed for socially excluded participants and not for socially included (or control) participants. Overall, the findings suggest that touching a teddy bear mitigates the negative effects …

The Mandatory Death Penalty And A Sparsely Worded Constitution, Jack Tsen-Ta Lee

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

It was not unexpected that the Singapore Court of Appeal would reaffirm the constitutionality of the mandatory death penalty for certain forms of drug trafficking in Yong Vui Kong v Public Prosecutor [2010] 3 S.L.R 489. ... The appellant made submissions based on Articles 9(1) and 12(1) of the Constitution, which respectively guarantee rights to life and personal liberty, and to equality before the law and equal protection of the law. This note examines aspects of the Article 9(1) arguments.

Formulaic Writing Advice: A False Panacea, James Edward Martin

Research Collection Centre for English Communication

Over the past decade, as the long institutionalized process writing pedagogy has been increasingly questioned, many teachers have found it a challenge to create viable classroom teaching philosophies and practices. As Richard Fulkerson (2005) has noted, there is currently a wide lack of consensus about how to teach writing. In this environment, it is not surprising that teachers sometimes tend to rely on commonsensical formulae to ground their instruction. In fact, this tendency toward formulaic teaching has been common in the field of writing instruction for a very long time, although it may have taken different forms. To give an …

The Politics Of Identity In Indonesia: Results From Political Campaign Advertisements, Colm A. Fox, Jeremy Menchik

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Despite the many benefits of democracy, a number of scholars have cited the dangers of introducing democratic elections in ethnically divided states. One of the biggest fears is the politicization of identity. However, very little research has systematically studied the particular conditions that compel politicians to make identity appeals. Taking the case of an ethnically diverse new democracy, Indonesia, this paper attempts just that. To measure identity appeals it takes the novel approach of drawing on political campaign posters. Between 2009 and 2011 over 4,000 political campaign posters were gathered from legislative and executive elections across hundreds of electoral districts …

Collective Intelligence Ratio: Measurement Of Real-Time Multimodal Interactions In Team Projects, Paul Kim, Donghwan Lee, Youngjo Lee, Chuan Huang, Tamas Makany

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

PurposeWith a team interaction analysis model, the authors sought to identify a varying range of individual and collective intellectual behaviors in a series of communicative intents particularly expressed with multimodal interaction methods. In this paper, the authors aim to present a new construct (i.e. collective intelligence ratio (CIR)) which refers to a numeric indicator representing the degree of intelligence of a team in which each team member demonstrates an individual intelligence ratio (IR) specific to a team goal.Design/methodology/approachThe authors analyzed multimodal team interaction data linked to communicative intents with a Poisson‐hierarchical generalized linear model (HGLM).FindingsThe study found evidence of a …

Scaling Policy Preferences From Coded Political Texts, Will Lowe, Kenneth Benoit, Slava Mikhaylov, Michael Laver

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Scholars estimating policy positions from political texts typically code words or sentences and then build left-right policy scales based on the relative frequencies of text units coded into different categories. Here we reexamine such scales and propose a theoretically and linguistically superior alternative based on the logarithm of odds-ratios. We contrast this scale with the current approach of the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP), showing that our proposed logit scale avoids widely acknowledged flaws in previous approaches. We validate the new scale using independent expert surveys. Using existing CMP data, we show how to estimate more distinct policy dimensions, for more …

Development Of An Instrument To Measure The Adoption Of Mobile Services, Shang Gao, John Krogstie, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Currently, there is no standard instrument for measuring user adoption of mobile services. Based on the mobile service acceptance model, this paper reports on the development of a survey instrument designed to measure user perception on mobile services acceptance. A survey instrument was developed by using some existing scales from prior instruments and by creating additional items which might appear to fit the construct definitions. In addition, a pilot study was conducted by distributing the survey to 25 users of a mobile service called Mobile Student Information Systems. As a result, a survey instrument containing 22 items were retained. Furthermore, …

Enhancing Bag-Of-Words Models By Efficient Semantics-Preserving Metric Learning, Lei Wu, Steven C. H. Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The authors present an online semantics preserving, metric learning technique for improving the bag-of-words model and addressing the semantic-gap issue. This article investigates the challenge of reducing the semantic gap for building BoW models for image representation; propose a novel OSPML algorithm for enhancing BoW by minimizing the semantic loss, which is efficient and scalable for enhancing BoW models for large-scale applications; apply the proposed technique for large-scale image annotation and object recognition; and compare it to the state of the art.

Concept-Driven Multi-Modality Fusion For Video Search, Xiao-Yong Wei, Yu-Gang Jiang, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As it is true for human perception that we gather information from different sources in natural and multi-modality forms, learning from multi-modalities has become an effective scheme for various information retrieval problems. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-modality fusion approach for video search, where the search modalities are derived from a diverse set of knowledge sources, such as text transcript from speech recognition, low-level visual features from video frames, and high-level semantic visual concepts from supervised learning. Since the effectiveness of each search modality greatly depends on specific user queries, prompt determination of the importance of a modality …

Automobile Exhaust Gas Detection Based On Fuzzy Temperature Compensation System, Zhiyong Wang, Hao Ding, Fufei Hao, Zhaoxia Wang, Zhen Sun, Shujin Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A temperature compensation scheme of detecting automobile exhaust gas based on fuzzy logic inference is presented in this paper. The principles of the infrared automobile exhaust gas analyzer and the influence of the environmental temperature on analyzer are discussed. A fuzzy inference system is designed to improve the measurement accuracy of the measurement equipment by reducing the measurement errors caused by environmental temperature. The case studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The fuzzy compensation scheme is promising as demonstrated by the simulation results in this paper.

Trade And Divergence In Education Systems, Pao Li Chang, Fali Huang

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper presents a theory on the endogenous choice of a country's education policy and the two-way causal relationship between trade and education systems. The setting of a country's education system determines its talent distribution and comparative advantage in trade; the possibility of trade by raising the returns to the sector of comparative advantage in turn induces countries to further diferentiate their education systems and reinforces the initial pattern of comparative advantage. Specifically, the Nash equilibrium choice of education systems by two countries interacting strategically are necessarily more divergent than their autarky choices, although the difference is still less than …

Smu-Sis At Tac 2010 - Kbp Track Entity Linking, Swapna Gottipati, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Entity linking task is a process of linking the named entity within the unstructured text to the entity in the Knowledge Base. Entity liking to the relevant knowledge is useful in various information extraction and natural language processing applications that improve the user experiences such as search, summarization and so on. We propose the two way entity linking approach to reformulate query, disambiguate the entity and link to the relevant KB repository. This paper describes the details of our participation in TAC 2010 - Knowledge Base Population track. We provided an innovative approach to disambiguate the entity by query reformulation …

Unpacking Sources Of Comparative Advantage: A Quantitative Approach, Davin Chor

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper develops an approach for quantifying the importance of different sources of comparative advantage, by extending the Eaton and Kortum (2002) model to predict industry trade flows. In this framework, comparative advantage is determined by the interaction of country and industry characteristics, with countries specializing in industries whose production needs they can best meet with their factor endowments and institutional strengths. I estimate the model parameters using: (i) OLS; and (ii) a simulated method of moments procedure that accounts for the prevalence of zeros in the bilateral trade data. I apply the model to explore various quantitative questions, such …

Making A Cantonese-Christian Family: Quotidian Habits Of Language And Background In A Transnational Hongkonger Church, Justin K. H. Tse

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Studies of the Hong Kong‐Vancouver transnational migration network seldom pay close attention to religion in the everyday lives of Hongkonger migrants. Based on 9 months of ethnographic fieldwork at St. Matthew's Church, a Hong Kong church in Metro Vancouver, this paper examines the tacit assumptions and taken‐for‐granted quotidian practices through which a Hongkonger church is made. I argue that St. Matthew's Church has been constructed as a Hong Kong Cantonese‐Christian family space through the everyday use of language and invocations of a common educational background. This argument extends the literature on Hongkonger migration to Metro Vancouver by grounding it in …

Youth Olympic Village Co-Space, Zin-Yan Chua, Yilin Kang, Xing Jiang, Kah-Hoe Pang, Andrew C. Gregory, Chi-Yun Tan, Wai-Lun Wong, Ah-Hwee Tan, Yew-Soon Ong, Chunyan Miao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We have designed and implemented a 3D virtual world based on the Co-Space concept encompasses the Youth Olympic Village (YOV) and several sports competition venues. It is a massively multiplayer online (MMO) virtual world built according to the actual, physical locations of the YOV and sports competition venues. On top of that, the Co-Space is being populated with human-like avatars, which are created according to the actual human size and appearance; they perform their activities and interact with the users in realworld context. In addition, autonomous intelligent agents are integrated into the Co-Space to provide context-aware and personalized services to …

Moore’S Paradox, Truth And Accuracy, Mitchell S. Green, John N. Williams

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

G. E. Moore famously observed that to assert ‘I went to the pictures last Tuesday but I do not believe that I did’ would be ‘absurd’. Moore calls it a ‘paradox’ that this absurdity persists despite the fact that what I say about myself might be true. Krista Lawlor and John Perry have proposed an explanation of the absurdity that confines itself to semantic notions while eschewing pragmatic ones. We argue that this explanation faces four objections. We give a better explanation of the absurdity both in assertion and in belief that avoids our four objections.

Learning To Belong, Lyn Parker, Raihani Raihani, Chang Yau Hoon

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Educational efforts are being made around the country to enable minorities to feel they belong and to teach majorities that they should value the diversity of Indonesia. The cultural, linguistic and ethnic diversity of Indonesia is famed around the world and accepted within Indonesia. The national motto of ‘Unity in Diversity’ places diversity at the centre of the nation-state. But despite significant progress in democratisation, decentralisation and regional autonomy in post-Suharto Indonesia, old fears of federalism, separatism and disunity remain. Multiculturalism and pluralism are still often viewed with suspicion and paranoia is spread by extremists for their own ends.

Jointly Modeling Aspects And Opinions With A Maxent-Lda Hybrid, Xin Zhao, Jing Jiang, Hongfei Yan, Xiaoming Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Discovering and summarizing opinions from online reviews is an important and challenging task. A commonly-adopted framework generates structured review summaries with aspects and opinions. Recently topic models have been used to identify meaningful review aspects, but existing topic models do not identify aspect-specific opinion words. In this paper, we propose a MaxEnt-LDA hybrid model to jointly discover both aspects and aspect-specific opinion words. We show that with a relatively small amount of training data, our model can effectively identify aspect and opinion words simultaneously. We also demonstrate the domain adaptability of our model.

Moore's Paradox, Defective Interpretation, Justified Belief And Conscious Belief, John N. Williams

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In this journal, Hamid Vahid argues against three families of explanation of Moore-paradoxicality. The first is the Wittgensteinian approach; I assert that p just in case I assert that I believe that p. So making a Moore-paradoxical assertion involves contradictory assertions. The second is the epistemic approach, one committed to: if I am justified in believing that p then I am justified in believing that I believe that p. So it is impossible to have a justified omissive Moore-paradoxical belief. The third is the conscious belief approach, being committed to: if I consciously believe that p then I believe that …

On Challenges In Evaluating Malware Clustering, Peng Li, Limin Liu, Debin Gao, Michael K Reiter

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Malware clustering and classification are important tools that enable analysts to prioritize their malware analysis efforts. The recent emergence of fully automated methods for malware clustering and classification that report high accuracy suggests that this problem may largely be solved. In this paper, we report the results of our attempt to confirm our conjecture that the method of selecting ground-truth data in prior evaluations biases their results toward high accuracy. To examine this conjecture, we apply clustering algorithms from a different domain (plagiarism detection), first to the dataset used in a prior work's evaluation and then to a wholly new …

China And Geography In The 21st Century: A Cultural (Geographical) Revolution?, Lily Kong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

A noted Singapore-based cultural geographer and specialist on Asia reviews the recent emergence of cultural geographic research on and within China and the implications of China's rise for the study of 21st century cultural geography more broadly. She identifies six major issues modern China is confronting that, when addressed from a cultural geographical perspective, may both enhance an understanding of the country and reshape the practice of cultural geography as a subdiscipline: agricultural reform, economic reform, urban change, rural-urban migration and related social inequalities, the changing family structure, and environmental change. The author argues that if China's cultural geography is …

Self And Other: Continental And Classical Chinese Thought, Steven Burik

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Traditionally, metaphysical notions of self and other presuppose a dualism that underlies much of Western philosophy. This dualism is opposed by accounts of self and other in recent continental philosophy and classical Chinese philosophy, which I compare. I argue that the self is seen in continental and Chinese thought as embedded in (ethical) relations and language, and not as transcendent or prior in the metaphysical sense to them. I argue for this by focussing on three themes: self and language, self as relational and embedded in the world or contextual environment, and self and the particular other. These three themes …

Automatic Generation Of Semantic Fields For Annotating Web Images, Gang Wang, Tat Seng Chua, Chong-Wah Ngo, Yong Cheng Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The overwhelming amounts of multimedia contents have triggered the need for automatically detecting the semantic concepts within the media contents. With the development of photo sharing websites such as Flickr, we are able to obtain millions of images with usersupplied tags. However, user tags tend to be noisy, ambiguous and incomplete. In order to improve the quality of tags to annotate web images, we propose an approach to build Semantic Fields for annotating the web images. The main idea is that the images are more likely to be relevant to a given concept, if several tags to the image belong …

Hybrid Time-Frequency Domain Analysis For Inverter-Fed Induction Motor Fault Detection, T. W. Chua, W. W. Tan, Zhaoxia Wang, C. S. Chang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The detection of faults in an induction motor is important as a part of preventive maintenance. Stator current is one of the most popular signals used for utility-supplied induction motor fault detection as a current sensor can be installed nonintrusively. In variable speeds operation, the use of an inverter to drive the induction motor introduces noise into the stator current so stator current based fault detection techniques become less reliable. This paper presents a hybrid algorithm, which combines time and frequency domain analysis, for broken rotor bar and bearing fault detection. Cluster information obtained by using Independent Component Analysis (ICA) …

Hybrid Time-Frequency Domain Analysis For Inverter-Fed Induction Motor Fault Detection, T. W. Chua, W. W. Tan, Zhaoxia Wang, C. S. Chang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The detection of faults in an induction motor is important as a part of preventive maintenance. Stator current is one of the most popular signals used for utility-supplied induction motor fault detection as a current sensor can be installed nonintrusively. In variable speeds operation, the use of an inverter to drive the induction motor introduces noise into the stator current so stator current based fault detection techniques become less reliable. This paper presents a hybrid algorithm, which combines time and frequency domain analysis, for broken rotor bar and bearing fault detection. Cluster information obtained by using Independent Component Analysis (ICA) …

Extracting Common Emotions From Blogs Based On Fine-Grained Sentiment Clustering, Shi Feng, Daling Wang, Ge Yu, Wei Gao, Kam-Fai Wong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recently, blogs have emerged as the major platform for people to express their feelings and sentiments in the age of Web 2.0. The common emotions, which reflect people’s collective and overall sentiments, are becoming the major concern for governments, business companies and individual users. Different from previous literatures on sentiment classification and summarization, the major issue of common emotion extraction is to find out people’s collective sentiments and their corresponding distributions on the Web. Most existing blog clustering methods take into account keywords, stories or timelines but neglect the embedded sentiments, which are considered very important features of blogs. In …

Generating Templates Of Entity Summaries With An Entity-Aspect Model And Pattern Mining, Peng Li, Jing Jiang, Yinglin Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to automatic generation of summary templates from given collections of summary articles. This kind of summary templates can be useful in various applications. We first develop an entity-aspect LDA model to simultaneously cluster both sentences and words into aspects. We then apply frequent subtree pattern mining on the dependency parse trees of the clustered and labeled sentences to discover sentence patterns that well represent the aspects. Key features of our method include automatic grouping of semantically related sentence patterns and automatic identification of template slots that need to be filled in. We …

The (Ir)Relevance Of Harmonization And Legal Diversity To European Contract Law - A Perspective From Psychology, Gary Low

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Differences between contract laws of Member States are often said to impose costs on and deter cross-border trade, and in order to increase cross-border trade, these contract laws ought to be harmonized. This article promises a paradigm shift in considering whether there is a need for harmonization; and if so, what form it ought to take. A behavioural approach is adopted to answer two underlying questions: how do actors think about these differences when they decide to contract? How does the form of harmonization influence such decisions? Insights from disciplines like cognitive and social psychology are identified and applied to …

From Collective Memory To Commemoration, Hiro Saito

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

To have “memory” of an event, humans have to experience it themselves. Learning of an event secondhand, humans acquire knowledge, but not memory. Yet, when sociologists speak of “collective memory,” they routinely include as agents of memory those who do not have firsthand experience of a past event. This inclusion has been taken for granted ever since Maurice Halbwachs (1992) formulated his Durkheimian theory of the relationship between collective memory and commemoration in terms of group solidarity and identity: collective memory emerges when those without firsthand experience of an event identify with those who have such experience, defining …