This thesis concerns stability analysis and robust H¡Û performance analysis for discrete-time systems with interval time-varying delay; moreover, the results are extended to the systems with norm-bounded uncertainties. By defining a novel Lyapunov functional and combining delay partition methods to improve the results in existing literature, we obtain a less conservative linear matrix inequality condition to guarantee the asymptotic stability for the discrete-time systems. There are examples to illustrate the advantage of our method in every chapter.

This study aims to address the organizational temporality issues based upon the theory of time, interaction, and performance and self-regulation perspective. This study demonstrates the multi-level main effects of both team-level temporal norm and individual temporal perception and also the cross level moderating effects of team temporal management practices. This study answers the calls of incorporating temporal constructs in explaining team members¡¦ performance and exploring these issues within the formal consideration of multilevel modeling. This study also links the needed flexibility and temporality in modern manufacturing context with employee adaptive performance and temporal characteristics of team members. Specifically, this study collects data from 132 teams and 488 employees from southern Taiwan¡¦s Export Process Zones. Results demonstrates that team level polychronicity and individual level perceived control of time act as significant antecedents of employee adaptive performance after controlling individual personality characteristics. Moreover, team temporal management practices consisted of temporal planning, temporal reminders, and temporal reflexivity as a bundle quadratically enhance the linkage between employees¡¦ perceived control of time and their adaptivity.

The purpose of this study was to gain an understanding of the structure and antecedents of travelers' behavioral intentions. Understanding travelers' behavioral intentions is an important goal of both destination marketing organizations and host destinations. However, little research has contributed to the theoretical development in this area, and the lack of a solid theoretical framework has negatively influenced the validity of existing research. Thus, this study attempted to explain travelers' behavioral intentions, using a model which was developed based on existing human behavior theories: the theory of reasoned action and the theory of planned behavior. Another major objective of the current study was to test the validity of the proposed model. Based on the theory of reasoned action and the theory of planned behavior, a conceptual framework was established to explain travelers' behavior intention in a tourism context. Attitude was conceptualized as destination image which is a two-dimensional construct including cognitive and affective components. Subjective norms were conceptualized as the combination of normative beliefs and motivation to comply. Perceived behavioral control was conceptualized as constraints which is a three-dimensional construct including intrapersonal, interpersonal, and structural components. An online panel survey was launched in September 2008 to collect data. Respondents were specially asked their perceived image about Texas, what were the barriers preventing them from traveling to Texas, and how their reference groups affected their travel decision to Texas. Totally, 1,448 completed surveys were received and utilized for analysis which included both visitors and non-visitors. The data analysis procedures included six major steps, from descriptive analysis and preliminary data analysis, to model and hypothesis testing. To do so, the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences 16.0 (SPSS) and Amos 16.0 were utilized. The structural relationships between all variables were tested with using structural equation modeling (SEM). Results of the study showed that destination image and subjective norm positively impacted behavioral intentions while constraints negatively affected behavioral intentions. Hence, this research provides important direction for the development of a more comprehensive theoretical framework to explain travelers' behavioral intentions, and presented a step toward offering practical as well as theoretical implications for future research.

Nowadays, the internet is an unseperatable part of human life and instant messaging software becomes an important role of communication channel. There are 40 million global IM registration popularity who use IM and billions of messages are sent everyday. In Taiwan, there are 6.5 million registration popularity and IM is the third important internet appilication, besides WWW and e-mail. As IM has become more and more important, there was few academic researchs published. We investigated consumer IM adoption behavior by focus group interview and structural equation model analysis. After holding a focus group interview, some antecedent of adopting IM was found out. Then we integrated technology acceptance model with media richness, computer self-efficacy and subjective norm as the antecedents of perceived usefulness(PU) and perceived ease of use(PEU) and analysised this structural equation model with LISREL. We found that subjective norm is an antecedent of PU, media richness and computer self-efficacy are PEU¡¦s antecedents. Finally, we made some suggestion for practice and other researchers base on the result.

Two significant differences were found between theoretical expectation and empirical results to budgetary slack in managerial accounting study. First, subjects under the slack-inducing pay schemes set their budgets well above zero regardless of their risk-neutral or risk-averse characteristics, although their maximum rewards arise from setting their budgets at zero (Waller, 1988; Chow, Cooper, and Waller, 1988; Chow, Cooper, and Haddad, 1991). Second, theoretically subjects operating under truth-inducing pay schemes set budgets at their best estimate performance, that is, no budgetary slack. But in violation of traditional economic theory, truth-inducing pay schemes have not been found to drive all slack out of the budget (Chow, Cooper, and Haddad, 1991). These results suggest that the existence of other non-pecuniary factors impacting slack, such as personal integrity and conscience, or social pressure (Chow, Cooper, and Waller, 1988). Moreover, the other potential causes in methodology may affect the congruence with theoretical expectation: (1) single-period experimental setting may limit the subjects¡¦ learning effect (Chow, Cooper, and Haddad, 1991), or (2) social pressure that was not controlled between subjects results in measurement errors. This study investigates the impacts of pay scheme, social pressure, internal norm and organizational commitment on budgetary slack in the participative budgeting setting. Specifically, this research executes an experimental test of the effects of a truth-inducing pay scheme, superior-generated social pressure, and subordinates¡¦ intern norm and their organizational commitment on the propensity to set their budgets below expected performance. In the experimental setting budgets were participatively set under three kinds of pay scheme and under the condition of either existence of social pressure or no social pressure. Pay schemes are categorized by three factors: truth-inducing pay scheme, fixed-pay-plus-bonus pay scheme, and fixed-pay-plus-bonus pay scheme with ratchet. The social pressure manipulation involved having subordinates either personally submit their budgets and performance to a superior, or enter their budgets into a computer with no personal interaction. Moreover, internal norm and organizational commitment are measured by questionnaires built in the personal computer. The experiment was conducted by computerizing the multi-period task on the screen of man-machine interactive personal computer. To eliminate the potential social pressure, subjects in the group with no social pressure executed the computerized procedure to create a ¡¨doubled-blinded¡¨ environment where there was inter-participant anonymity (anonymity between subjects) and experimenter-participant anonymity (anonymity between experimenter and subjects), hence the effects of internal norm and organizational commitment on budgetary slack were investigated. This study tested the following hypotheses with 120 production unit managers that sampled from one manufacturing company in Kaohsiung. (1) Managers will build the least slack into their budget under a truth-inducing pay scheme, the second slack under a fixed-pay-plus-bonus pay scheme with ratchet, and the most slack under a fixed-pay-plus-bonus pay scheme. (2) Managers will build less slack into their budget as social pressure from superior is increased. (3) The difference in budgetary slack between the truth-inducing pay scheme and fixed-pay-plus-bonus pay scheme with ratchet will be reduced as social pressure from superior is increased. That is, there is an interaction between pay scheme and social pressure. (4) The level of slack built into the budget will be negatively correlated with the managers¡¦ degree of internal norm in condition of no social pressure. (5) The level of slack built into the budget will be negatively correlated with the managers¡¦ degree of organizational commitment in condition of no social pressure. The test result verified the mentioned-above hypotheses except item (1) that is partially supported. This study not only extends the management accounting literature that investigates the effects of pay schemes, but also further examines the potential effects of social pressure from superior, subordinates¡¦ internal norm and organizational commitment on budgetary slack. Especially, the results that isolated the effects of internal norm from social pressure on budgetary slack have shown the implications of personnel recruitment and managerial style in the enterprises organization.

This thesis investigates both theoretical and implementation-level aspects of switching- feedback control strategies for the development of voltage-controlled oscillators. We use a modified sliding-mode compensation scheme based on various norms of the system state to achieve amplitude control for wide-tuning range oscillators. The proposed controller provides amplitude control at minimal cost in area and power consumption. Verification of our theory is achieved with the physical realization of an amplitude controlled negative-Gm LC oscillator. A wide-tuning range RF ring oscillator is developed and simulated, showing the effectiveness of our methods for high speed oscillators. The resulting ring oscillator produces an amplitude controlled sinusoidal signal operating at frequencies ranging from 170 MHz to 2.1 GHz. Total harmonic distortion is maintained below 0:8% for an oscillation amplitude of 2 Vpp over the entire tuning range. Phase noise is measured as -105.6 dBc/Hz at 1.135 GHz with a 1 MHz offset.

Der DIN-Fachbericht 13 „Bau- und Nutzungsplanung von wissenschaftlichen Bibliotheken“ zählt seit 1988 zu den wichtigsten Planungsinstrumenten für den Bibliotheksbau. Ein DIN-Fachbericht stellt keine verbindliche Norm dar. Seine Aussagen besitzen lediglich empfehlenden Charakter. Trotzdem wurden vor allem die quantitativen Kernaussagen zum Flächenbedarf von Beständen, Nutzerarbeitsplätzen und speziellen Funktionen im DIN-Fachbericht 13 von Trägern, Bauherren und Architekten als Grundlage für die Planung konkreter Projekte weitgehend anerkannt. Die Aussagen des DIN-Fachberichtes haben schon deshalb erheblichen Einfluss auf Bibliotheksplanungen in Deutschland – und sogar darüber hinaus, denn sie werden wegen ihrer Detailliertheit und Vollständigkeit in der internationalen Normenentwicklung geschätzt und als Vorbild betrachtet. Als ambitioniertes Ziel nahm sich das DIN diesmal nicht nur eine Aktualisierung, sondern auch eine Erweiterung um Belange von Öffentlichen Bibliotheken und Archiven vor.

A class of parametric optimal control problems for semilinear parabolic equations is considered. Using recent regularity results for solutions of such equations, sufficient conditions are derived under which the solutions to optimal control problems are locally Lipschitz continuous functions of the parameter in the L1-norm. It is shown that these conditions are also necessary, provided that the dependence of data on the parameter is sufficiently strong.

In this paper matrix compression techniques in the context of wavelet Galerkin schemes for boundary integral equations are developed and analyzed that exhibit optimal complexity in the following sense. The fully discrete scheme produces approximate solutions within discretization error accuracy offered by the underlying Galerkin method at a computational expense that is proven to stay proportional to the number of unknowns. Key issues are the second compression, that reduces the near field complexity significantly, and an additional a-posteriori compression. The latter one is based on a general result concerning an optimal work balance, that applies, in particular, to the quadrature used to compute the compressed stiffness matrix with sufficient accuracy in linear time. The theoretical results are illustrated by a 3D example on a nontrivial domain.

Studiens huvudsakliga syfte är att ur ett normkritiskt perspektiv analysera grundlärares utsagor om sex- och samlevnadsundervisning inom religionskunskapsämnet. För att fylla detta syfte har studien sökt ta reda på hur de intervjuade lärarna genomför sin undervisning om sex och samlevnad inom religionskunskapsämnet, samt vilken roll de ger undervisningsområdet, beträffande vilket utrymme de ger sex och samlevnad i sin religionskunskapsundervisning och vad de anser vara sex- och samlevnadsundervisningens syfte. Studien baseras på enskilda intervjuer med fyra lärare som undervisar i religionskunskap grundskolans årskurser 4-6. Studien visar att samtliga av lärarna som deltar i hög grad är medvetna om risken att deras sex- och samlevnadsundervisning är heteronormativ. De har alla också en uttalad ambition att försöka motverka att deras sex- och samlevadsundervisning blir alltför heteronormativ, emellertid saknar de specifik utbildning i att hantera sex- och samlevnadsfrågor. Detta skulle kunna utgöra ett skäl till att samtliga lärare ger sex- och samlevnadsfrågor ett relativt litet utrymme i sin religionskunskapsundervisning. / The overall aim of this study is to analyse primary school teachers’ testimonies regarding sexuality education in religious education through a norm critical perspective. To fulfil this aim, the study seeks to find out how the teachers carries out their sexuality education when teaching religious education, and furthermore, what part the participating teachers give sexuality education, as to how big a part of the subject it represents and the teachers’ understanding of the purpose of the field. The study is based on individual interviews with four teachers who work in years 4-6 in primary school and teach religious education. What becomes apparent is the awareness the participating teachers show regarding the possibility of their sexuality education being heteronormative. There is also an outspoken ambition among the teachers to make their sexuality education less normative, however, they all lack specific education in the subject matter. This might be one of the reasons why sexuality education is given a very small part in each of the interviewees’ religious education teaching.