Search

Applying competency models to identify and develop capabilities of civil servants is now a leading strategy for every government. However, an ideal competency model usually contains too many intended competencies, impeding implementation. Recently, some scholars and experts argued that there is a maximum of eight competencies for effective assessment. Hence, how to simplify a set of competencies becomes an important issue. This study is presented as a test case to extend practical applications of rough set theory (RST) in the human resource field of Government. A well-known data mining technique, RST is a relatively new approach to this problem and is good at data reduction in qualitative analysis. Hence, the rough set approach is suitable for dealing with the qualitative problem in simplifying a set of competencies. This paper slimmed a set of competencies using RST, thus helping the Taiwan Government to better understand the perceived competency levels of its civil servants. Using the rough set analysis, this paper successfully reduced the numerous essential competencies into a more compact set, by omitting low-consensus competencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report a first-principles study, which predicts that a single yttrium atom decorated on B80 fullerenes can maximally hold up six H2 molecules with an average binding energy of . The analysis with 12 Y atoms placed at the pentagons of B80 fullerenes showed no clustering effect, and the resulting B80Y12 complex can remarkably bind up to 71 H2 molecules, yielding a gravimetric storage capacity of 6.85 wt%. The interaction between hydrogen molecules and B80Y12 complex is attributed to the Dewar-Kubas mechanism involving the empty orbitals, orbitals and antibonding orbitals. Our work suggests a new route to better hydrogen storage material and advances our fundamental understanding of reversible hydrogen adsorption in nanostructures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]