As the Thai people have been more aware of the importance of volunteering, the structure of volunteer activities in the country’s hospitals has become more complicated. As a result, medical personnel and volunteer organizations have faced challenges in connecting people with the activities most relevant to concerns and needs. In order to assist the host parties as well as individual volunteers, a system that can match the personal characteristics of volunteers to the demands of the activities needs to be developed. As a starting point, multidimensional scaling was used in this study to reveal a working structure for volunteer activities by exploring major dimensions underlying the similarity and dissimilarity between these activities. Twenty-three volunteer activities proposed by a panel of experts and stakeholders were subject to an ordinal (non-metric) multidimensional scaling. All but one volunteer activity can be grouped along three dimensions: hospital-related, lecturing versus group leading, and empathic communication. These three dimensions can serve as a blueprint for identifying personal characteristics that may be essential to each activity and for designing a system for volunteer recruitment and placement.

The Sebatik Island is one of the main cocoa-producing regions in Indonesia, but its productivity has been reported to be below the potential production volume. Therefore, this study aims to evaluate the sustainability index for smallholder cocoa plantations on the Sebatik Island using the multidimensional scaling (MDS), known as the RAP- SEBATIK (rapid appraisal for cocoa on Sebatik Island) that adopts from the RAPFISH (Rapid Appraisal for Fisheries). The MDS was used to evaluate the sustainability status of cocoa across six dimensions, while the leverage analysis was applied to identify the status of the most influential attributes of each dimension. The results showed that the average sustainability index value for such dimensions as ecological, economic, sociocultural, infrastructural and technological, law and institutional, as well as defence and security was 46.23, 48.58, 75.20, 40.49, 36.39, and 36.39%, respectively, based on the current conditions. According to these findings, only the sociocultural dimension was sustainable in smallholder cocoa plantations on the Sebatik Island. The main attributes that need improvement for the sake of sustainability apply to the following dimensions: ecological, economic, sociocultural, infrastructure and technology, law and institutional, as well as defence and security. Attributes that need intervention are the average age of cocoa, the community’s level of formal education, fertilisers application for cocoa, the operation of a shop for agricultural production facilities, and defence and security facilities and infrastructure.

The paper is focused on the main problems of modern metrology in the context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution “Industry 4.0”, particularly in the field of qualimetry. The dominant issues of the methodology of qualimetrical measurement, as the interrelation between metrology and qualimetry, are considered. The following questions are raised and analysed: determination of the measurand in the qualimetrical measurement, creation of the virtual product quality pattern, determination of the product quality level by using the theory of multidimensional scaling, assurance of the metrological traceability of the qualimetrical measurement results. A procedure of performing the qualimetrical measurement is described.

Due to an increasing amount of music being made available in digital form in the Internet, an automatic organization of music is sought. The paper presents an approach to graphical representation of mood of songs based on Self-Organizing Maps. Parameters describing mood of music are proposed and calculated and then analyzed employing correlation with mood dimensions based on the Multidimensional Scaling. A map is created in which music excerpts with similar mood are organized next to each other on the two-dimensional display.

In Western music culture instruments have been developed according to unique instrument acoustical features based on types of excitation, resonance, and radiation. These include the woodwind, brass, bowed and plucked string, and percussion families of instruments. On the other hand, instrument performance depends on musical training, and music listening depends on perception of instrument output. Since musical signals are easier to understand in the frequency domain than the time domain, much effort has been made to perform spectral analysis and extract salient parameters, such as spectral centroids, in order to create simplified synthesis models for musical instrument sound synthesis. Moreover, perceptual tests have been made to determine the relative importance of various parameters, such as spectral centroid variation, spectral incoherence, and spectral irregularity. It turns out that the importance of particular parameters depends on both their strengths within musical sounds as well as the robustness of their effect on perception. Methods that the author and his colleagues have used to explore timbre perception are: 1) discrimination of parameter reduction or elimination; 2) dissimilarity judgments together with multidimensional scaling; 3) informal listening to sound morphing examples. This paper discusses ramifications of this work for sound synthesis and timbre transposition.