Conventional plastic products present a serious burden to the environment, especially during their end-of-life phase. To tackle rapid growth in production, use and pollution, it is desirable produce materials more sustainably. Amongst these which could be produced sustainably are Melamine Etherified Resin (MER) fibres, have wide range of potential uses, such as mobility, filtrations, for therma...

Among schools of thought in comparative research, Rational Choice Theory (RCT) is both the most systematic and the most contested. RCT lacks a “classical” foundation but offfers a clear internal theory structure. The rationality assumption contains an unquestioned heuristic aspect, although the determinants of choice (especially preferences) lack a universally accepted solution. The choice aspe...

Rank aggregation describes how one can derive a consensus from multiple preferences over a given set of alternatives. Alternatives could be candidates in an election, search results ranked by search engines or businesses which are ranked by users with services like Yelp3. There are different paradigms for how the consensus should be constructed. In this thesis we will concern ourselves with the...

We introduce a method for aggregation of experts’ opinions given in the form of comparative linguistic expression. An algorithmic form of technique for order preference is proposed for group decision making. A simple example is given by using this method for the selection of the best alternative as well as ranking the alternatives from the best to the worst.

Simultaneous externalization of design alternatives through multiple prototypes enables designers to see choices in context and facilitates comparative reasoning and discussion. This paper introduces two techniques for interactively manipulating multiple software alternatives. First, this work demonstrates a novel environment for constructing multiple design alternatives through (selectively) p...

Each of the food-sharing models that Gurven considers demands unique cognitive capacities. Reciprocal altruism, in particular, requires a suite of complex abilities not required by alternatives such as tolerated scrounging. Integrating cognitive constraints with comparative data from other species can illuminate the adaptive benefits of food sharing in