Game-space presents the development of a student game-hall on the campus of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia. The architectural theory that guided the development asserts that an intelligent translation of a building's physical and conceptual needs into a matrix of well defined layers provides a strong foundation for the creation of a cultivated space. / Master of Architecture

Date of final Seminar: June 8th, 2012 Title: Success factors of entrepreneurial small and medium sized enterprises in Gnosjö municipality Authors:    Johan Eriksson and Muyu Li Group Number: 2898 Supervisor: Michaël Le Duc Examiner: Ole Liljefors Research Question: What important factors affect the success of entrepreneurial SMEs in the Gnosjö municipality? Background: With the economic crisis and recession, the world has begun to take notice of SMEs (small and medium sized enterprises). With an unemployment rate of just 1% and about 1500 companies - most of them successful by almost any definition and with a population of 9500, if there is such a thing as an SME region in Sweden, the Gnosjö municipality is it. Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to describe and analyze some of the factors that influence the success of companies with a special focus on entrepreneurial SMEs in the Gnosjö municipality. Method: The main method of this study is to use primary data in the form of interviews with local company owners or executives, with the interview questions being based on theories generated from the critical literature review. The authors are able to distinguish successful SMEs with an entrepreneurial focus among companies located in the Gnosjö municipality. By utilizing the method of semi-structured interviews, the authors gathered data from a sample of 20 top performing companies. With the theory generated from literature, the authors analyze the primary data, thus being able to find the answer to the research question. Conclusion: There is a relationship between general company success factors and factors driving success for companies in Gnosjö. However, compared to best-in-class, there is definite room for improvement, with regards to company operations as well as to the external factors that affect companies in Gnosjö. Keywords: Gnosjö, definition of entrepreneur, definition of success, success factors. / <p><strong>Acknowledgements</strong></p><p>The authors would like to thank our kind and dedicated supervisor Michaël Le Duc for his aid and assistance in the process of authoring this thesis.</p><p>The authors would also like to thank not only our thesis group colleagues who have provided us with valuable insights and good advice but also the participating companies in the Gnosjö municipality for their kind contributions to the interviews that form the basis of this thesis.</p><p>Finally, the authors would like to thank our beloved family members for their great support throughout the creation of this thesis.</p><p>Without all of you, this thesis could not have been done.</p><p>Thank you all very much!</p><p>Johan Eriksson and Muyu Li</p><p>June 20, 2012</p>

Bullying is something that is often times talked about in relation to school, in spite of that it's still something that is a very common problem. It is also rarely ever clearly defined, and is subject to a heap of different definitions. In order to prevent something, we must first understand it, and therefore define it. With that the purpose of this study is to examine swedish preschool-teachers definitions of bullying. How do they define bullying? Do their definitions differ from one another? The investigation was qualitative and used qualitative interview methods to interview four pre-school teachers about their deifnitions of bullying. These interviews were analyzed through conceptual history and hermeneutics. The conclusion of the study was that the interviewed pre-school teachers definitions were quite weak and rather poorly defined. Their definitions also differed quite a bit from each other, concluding that there's no clear definition of what bullying is in pre-school.

Major activity and interest has focused upon High and Enhanced Definition Television systems, for at least the past few decades. From the initial analogue approaches, which concentrated on purely television enhancements, the focus continues to fade more towards fully digital multi-program distribution and ultimately to multimedia solutions. The actual activities throughout Europe and America in launching the Digital Video Broadcasting, DVB and the Advanced Television System Committee, ATSC system, clearly identify that television enhancements are still alive. In parallel, discussions upon data broadcasting, predominantly within the current analogue television systems also have taken place. The underlying premise of the work presented, is based upon the objective to transmit a compatible enhanced definition television signal within the PALplus standard. A conceptual system is proposed as the framework for this research, containing both a pre-processing and data modulation block, which are coupled via suitable data compression methods. The preprocessing and the additional digital modulation technique has been identified as providing the potential of innovation from which the modulation provides generic digital sub-channels either for multimedia or enhanced resolution extensions. The originality of the pre-processing techniques is based upon the design of a dual channel sub-band system, which employs two dimensional diagonal filtering together with a Quadrature Mirror Filter bank. From a high definition input, this processing block produces only two sub-bands, rather than the usual four, from which the low pass element represents the compatible component. The high pass element conveys the residual in such a way that full horizontal and vertical resolution can be reconstructed during decoding. The proposed embedded data modulation strategy is based upon a double occupation of the colour subcarrier. This exploitation is possible due to the inherent phase alternation of the PAL systems so that an additional quadrature modulation of the two colour sub-carriers is feasible. Both, the pre-processing and modulation blocks introduce crosstalk distortions which compromise the overall efficiency and further encroach on the sensitive issue of compatibility. The thesis provides a complete analysis both theoretical and practical of the implications of these distortions and subsequently proposes solutions which either eliminate or suppress them to a level below a perceptual threshold.

No description available.

Disease is ubiquitous. Disease afflicts humans. It afflicts animals. It afflicts plants. People refer to disease in their everyday conversation. Newspapers comment upon it. Parliaments enact legislation regarding it. Novelists write about it. Artists depict it. Physicians, veterinary surgeons and agriculturalists seek to combat it. Insurance companies offer reimbursement against it. Anthropologists study it. Philosophers debate its nature, and dictionaries define it. Disease looms large in human consciousness. One might presume that, since disease is so important in daily life, human beings would know exactly what they mean by it. Most people seem to believe instinctively that they understand the nature of disease, and that their ideas about it coincide with other people�s ideas. The definition of disease therefore arouses little controversy in everyday conversation. People use the word disease as readily as they use the words spade, or table or nose. They suggest, when they joke that somebody calls a spade a spade, that the nature of the implement used to dig the garden is so obvious that it requires no further definition. Similarly with a table or a nose. They might debate how many legs a table must have, but�regardless of the answer�rarely deny that it is a table; whilst every human must surely know what a nose is. This high level of agreement about so many commonly used terms perhaps creates an assumption that the meaning of disease is equally obvious and requires no further analysis. Is this, however, really the case? Disease is a somewhat less concrete phenomenon than is a spade or a table or a nose. Its existence, most would agree, is incontrovertible, but its nature is less clear. It is something that seems to befall people and animals and plants. It rarely serves any useful purpose. It often carries dire implications. It is something that most of us would prefer not to have, but rarely succeed in avoiding. It commonly comes unannounced and at inconvenient times. It usually causes distress, but not always. It can have a fatal outcome. Some people appear more prone to it that others. It sometimes sweeps through whole populations producing social devastation, but its manifestations vary. Some diseases affect a person�s whole body, others merely a part of the body; some affect some parts of the body, others other parts. Some diseases only affect humans, whereas others affect both humans and animals. Some spread from animals to humans, others from humans to humans, and others still do not appear to spread at all. Some diseases affect plants, and few that affect plants seem to affect humans, but some humans can acquire diseases when they come into contact with plants that appear to have no diseases. Any reasonable analysis of the nature of disease must account for all these aspects and many others also. The nature of disease is a topic that has attracted the attention of physicians, scientists and philosophers over millennia. The close association that existed between medicine and philosophy in the classical Egyptian, Palestinian and Greek eras ensured that scholars who flourished in those societies examined the nature of disease. Comparable developments occurred in classical Indian and Chinese civilizations. The natural philosophers of Renaissance and post-Renaissance Europe divided into competing schools of thought over the nature of disease. More recent years have witnessed an enormous flourishing of physicians, pathologists, and agriculturalists who study aspects of disease that relate to their individual disciplines. Most of these researchers have, however, examined ever-narrower aspects of specific diseases�such as manifestations, mechanisms and causes�rather than the generic nature of the phenomenon. Some contemporary philosophers, on the other hand, have become interested in general aspects of the topic. They have proposed a number of novel ideas and reached some stimulating conclusions, although they can hardly yet claim to have reached a consensus. This lack of unanimity presumably implies that the issues involved require closer analysis if a formulation is to emerge that most of them can accept. The object of the present thesis is to undertake such an analysis. It will start by outlining in this introduction the general background to the topic. It will then detail the more noteworthy of previously proposed theories about the nature of this phenomenon, classifying them according to their most prominent components, and assessing their several strengths and weaknesses. It will next discuss the specific philosophical issues of definition, causation, and explication in the biomedical context, before suggesting a comprehensive, but succinct, definition that acknowledges many older views about disease, encompasses current usage, and provides a theoretical base from which to work into the future. It will finally test the strengths and weaknesses of that definition to account for observed phenomena and to accommodate some former definitions.

Quality of life (QOL) has been chosen as an outcome measure by various agencies of the United States federal government and has been employed to an increasing extent by healthcare researchers when evaluating various courses of treatment or health promotion interventions. In light of the increasing ubiquitousness of QOL, one can conclude there exists a commonly employed and accepted conceptual understanding of its meaning. A systematic review of the literature focusing on quality of life published between January 1990 and January 2004 was conducted in an effort to discover this definition. Based on inclusion and exclusion criteria outlined in the study, a population of 503 articles was identified for potential inclusion. From this population a random sample of 50 articles was selected for further review, with an emphasis placed on the conceptual and operational definitions of quality of life employed in the various studies. Twenty of the articles contained some conceptual discussion of quality of life and 38 contained some operational discussion. Although many articles contained some discussion of the term, little agreement with regard to its meaning and measurement was found. The only acknowledged fact in the majority of the articles concerns the subjective, multi-faceted nature of quality of life and its inherent measurement difficulties. As a result of this work, and because of this lack of cohesion in the understanding of the conceptual issues involved, the following conceptual definition has been proposed. Quality of life is a measure of an individual??s ability to function physically, emotionally and socially within his/her environment at a level consistent with his/her own expectations.

Begreppet slöjdprocess har idag en central plats i relation till svensk grundskolas slöjdverksamhet, men har hittills genom bådestyrdokument och i forskning definierats och förklarats på olika sätt, vilket gjort att begreppet kunnat uppfattas tvetydigt.Denna uppsats består av en kvalitativ litteraturstudie, inspirerad från en fenomenografisk forskningsansats, med syftet att försökabesvara frågan om vad begreppet slöjdprocess står för relaterat till svensk grundskolas slöjdverksamhet; hur begreppet definieras,tolkas och förklaras inom slöjdforskningsfältet. Studien bygger på en sammanställning och jämförelser av sex forskare frånSverige, Danmark och Finland utifrån deras definitioner och tolkningar av begreppet slöjdprocess.Resultatet visar att det saknas en tydlig definition av begreppet slöjdprocess, istället finns det flera sätt att både definiera ochförklara begreppet. Studiens resultat visar också både beskrivningar av flera parallellt pågående processer inom en slöjdprocessoch beskrivningar av flera parallellt pågående processer som inte bör ses som delprocesser inom en slöjdprocess. Som centraladelar i beskrivningar av begreppet slöjdprocess i relation till svensk grundskolas slöjdverksamhet, omnämns främst Socialaprocesser &amp; Interaktion, Kommunikation – verbal &amp; icke-verbal, Problemlösning &amp; Intellektuella utmaningar, Psykiska &amp;Sinnliga processer samt Fysiska &amp; Kroppsliga processer. Kunskap i relation till elevens slöjdprocess kan utifrån studiens resultatöversiktligt indelas i slöjdspecifika kunskaper och allmänbildande kunskaper och där de allmänbildande kunskaperna framhävssom starkt kopplade till elevens slöjdprocess och det processorienterade arbetssättet i svensk grundskolas slöjdverksamhet.Utifrån studiens resultat blir det sammanfattningsvis tydligt att begreppet slöjdprocess har uttjänat sin förmåga att utgöra etttydligt begrepp. Det kan vidare ses som otillräckligt då den komplexitet som det processorienterade arbetssättet utgör, svårligenkan sammanfattas under ett begrepp; delarna försvinner lätt i helheten och därmed förståelsen för det processorienteradearbetssättet i svensk grundskolas slöjdverksamhet.

This thesis examines the policy problem of economic unit definition from the perspective of the regional economist. The regional economist faces the challenge of disaggregating macroeconomic activity into subparts that accurately reflect the actual economic organization of a country or region. Such an exercise is important because the Governments of many developed countries rely on it to allocate scarce public resources. In the United States, the Bureau of Economic Analysis of the U.S. Department of Commerce is responsible for regional economic unit definition. To meet its mandate, the BEA has developed a complex assignment system based principally on commuting flows between regions of the Country. This assignment system works well for the centralized population centers that characterize the majority of the U.S. economy. However, the BEA system is less effective at reflecting the economic organization of rural areas, where there is little interregional commuting. To address this problem, the BEA has developed a practice of using newspaper circulation data as a proxy for economic organization. In this thesis I develop a partial set model of regional economic organization based on the mathematics of fuzzy logic and propose it as a superior alternative to the BEAs method.

Quality of life (QOL) has been chosen as an outcome measure by various agencies of the United States federal government and has been employed to an increasing extent by healthcare researchers when evaluating various courses of treatment or health promotion interventions. In light of the increasing ubiquitousness of QOL, one can conclude there exists a commonly employed and accepted conceptual understanding of its meaning. A systematic review of the literature focusing on quality of life published between January 1990 and January 2004 was conducted in an effort to discover this definition. Based on inclusion and exclusion criteria outlined in the study, a population of 503 articles was identified for potential inclusion. From this population a random sample of 50 articles was selected for further review, with an emphasis placed on the conceptual and operational definitions of quality of life employed in the various studies. Twenty of the articles contained some conceptual discussion of quality of life and 38 contained some operational discussion. Although many articles contained some discussion of the term, little agreement with regard to its meaning and measurement was found. The only acknowledged fact in the majority of the articles concerns the subjective, multi-faceted nature of quality of life and its inherent measurement difficulties. As a result of this work, and because of this lack of cohesion in the understanding of the conceptual issues involved, the following conceptual definition has been proposed. Quality of life is a measure of an individual??s ability to function physically, emotionally and socially within his/her environment at a level consistent with his/her own expectations.