The final implementation of Mandatory Country-of-Origin Labeling has caused some U.S. packing plants and finishing operations to discontinue using Canadian live hogs and feeder pigs in their operations thereby reducing trade. Using a system of simultaneous equations representing U.S. import demand and U.S. price, this thesis estimates the reduction in trade and any possible price effects in both live hogs and feeder pigs associated with the implementation of the final rule of Mandatory Country of Origin Labeling in the United States. It was found that the implementation of Mandatory Country of Origin Labeling reduced the trade of live hogs between the United States and Canada by 37.8 percent. The reduction in feeder pigs was 24.1 percent. It was also found that the implementation of Mandatory Country of Origin Labeling had no effect on the price of both live hogs and feeder pigs in the U.S. market.

Apply Internet technology to online live videoconferencing activities will overcome the restriction in face-to-face meeting. By using this way not only can help us to meet with one another in any time, but also saves us large amount of cost on communication and transportation. However, this is not easy for many users of virtual community to use it as an innate instinct, it still have many perplexitys for users to use of online live videoconferencing activities through Internet. The study of this thesis will pick five discrete organizations from the NSYSU Cyber University, and use questionnaire, focusing group interviewing and studying audio-video files as combined data. Then, researcher will use Qualitative Research method to analyse those data to extract all the situations including the phenomena, processes, and events which our subjects have experienced during the internet online live videoconferencing activities. We wanted to discover the sequences and relations among them and to reconstruct the online activity processes and find out the possible solutions. Finally, we proposed the Concrete processes, and feasible recommendations about guidelines and management of online live videoconferencing activities in this thesis. We hope these outcomes will be helpful to those people that will participate in online live videoconferencing activities.

Structural analysis of highway bridges using complicated 3-D FEMs to determine live load effects in bridge components is possible due to the readily available computational tools in design offices. However, building such complicated 3-D FEMs is tedious and time consuming. Accordingly, most design engineers prefer using simplified 2-D structural models of the bridge and live load distribution equations (LLDEs) available in current bridge design codes to determine live load effects in bridge components. Basically, the live load effect obtained from a 2-D model is multiplied by a factor obtained from the LLDE to calculate the actual live load effect in a 3-D structure. The LLDE available in current bridge design codes for jointed bridges were also used for the design of straight and skewed integral bridges by bridge engineers. As a result, these bridges are either designed conservatively leading to additional construction cost or unconservatively leading to unsafe bridge designs. Recently, LLDEs for integral bridges (IBs) with no skew are developed. To use these equations for skewed integral bridges (SIBs) a correction factor is needed to multiply these equations to include the effect of skew. Consequently, in this research study, skew correction factors for SIBs are developed. For this purpose, finite element models of 231 different three dimensional and corresponding two dimensional structural models of SIBs are built and analyzed under live load. The analyses results reveal that the effect of skew on the distribution of live load moment and shear is significant. It is also observed that skew generally tends to decrease live load effects in girders and substructure components of SIBs. Using the analyses results, analytical equations are developed via nonlinear regression techniques to include skew effects in the LLDEs developed for straight IBs. The developed skew correction factors are compared with FEAs results. This comparison revealed that the developed skew correction factors yield a reasonably good estimate of the reduction in live load effects due to the effect of skew.

Integral bridges (IBs) are defined as a class of rigid frame bridges with a single row of piles at the abutments cast monolithically with the superstructure. In the last decade, IBs have become very popular in North America and Europe as they provide many economical and functional advantages. However, standard design methods for IBs have not been established yet. Therefore, most bridge engineers depend on the knowledge acquired from performance of previously constructed IBs and the design codes developed for conventional jointed bridges to design these types of bridges. This include the live load distribution factors used to account for the effect of truck loads on bridge components in the design as well as issues related to the seismic design of such bridges. Accordingly in this study issues related to live load effects as well as seismic effects on IB components are addressed in two separate parts. In the first part of this study, live load distribution formulae for IB components are developed and verified. For this purpose, numerous there dimensional and corresponding two dimensional finite element models (FEMs) of IBs are built and analyzed under live load. The results from the analyses of two and three dimensional FEMs are then used to calculate the live load distribution factors (LLDFs) for the components of IBs (girders, abutments and piles) as a function of some substructure, superstructure and soil properties. Then, live load distribution formulae for the determination of LLDFs are developed to estimate to the live load moments and shears in the girders, abutments and piles of IBs. It is observed that the developed formulae yield a reasonably good estimate of live load effects in IB girders, abutments and piles. In the second part of this study, seismic performance of IBs in comparison to that of conventional bridges is studied. In addition, the effect of several structural and geotechnical parameters on the performance of IBs is assessed. For this purpose, three existing IBs and conventional bridges with similar properties are considered. FEMs of these IBs are built to perform nonlinear time history analyses of these bridges. The analyses results revealed that IBs have a better overall seismic performance compared to that of conventional bridges. Moreover, IBs with thick, stub abutments supported by steel H piles oriented to bend about their strong axis driven in loose to medium dense sand are observed to have better seismic performance. The level of backfill compaction is found to have no influence on the seismic performance of IBs.

This paper studies the integrated mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) and Internet network which the Mobile IP and AODV routing protocols are integrated to offer MANET nodes to set up multi-hop routes to the Internet. Gateways act as bridges for forwarding data packets between integrated MANETs and the Internet. Mobile nodes in MANETs must discover available gateways to gain access to the Internet. This study presents an adaptive gateway discovery scheme that balances efficiency and overhead by limiting the flooding scope of gateway advertisement messages. The proposed scheme dynamically adjusts the ADV_TTL according to the average delay time of network. The simulation results showed that the proposed scheme obtains the shortest average delay time while keeping the network a relatively lower overhead.

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<p>The aim of this essay is to study and show the contents of the music repertoire that is used in live action role plays in Sweden and study how this repertoire is spread between participants in the culture of live action role playing.</p><p>Four informants have been chosen and interviewed, three men and one woman of different ages from different places in Sweden. They have all been practicing live action role playing for some years.</p><p>Some of the conclusions that can be drawn from this study is that the participants of this hobby culture value music that feels old and contribute to the illusion of another world and time. The music repertoire of the live action role playing culture is filled with this music that gives the participants associations in line with the illusion. That is more important than the real age of the music. Another interesting conclusion is that the participants learn and spread the melodies verbally to each other and only the texts spread on the internet.</p>

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität, Köln, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [147]-156) and index.

Not available / text

Recent image quality assessment (IQA) metrics achieve high correlation with human perception of image quality. Naturally, it is of interest to produce even better results. One promising method is to weight image quality measurements by visual importance. To this end, we describe three strategies - visual fixation-based weighting, quality-based weighting and weighting based on distribution of local quality scores about the mean. By contrast with some prior studies we find that these strategies can improve the correlations with subjective judgment significantly. We demonstrate improvements on the SSIM index in both its multi-scale and single-scale versions, using the LIVE database as a test-bed. / text