The trend towards Information Systems (IS) Outsourcing has become an important trend in recent years. With the prevalence of the Internet, international-based, as well as integration of, up-downstream outsourced IS is no longer independently contracted by single contractor units. This has seen relationships between contractor and customer - and between large contractors and small contractors - become increasingly complicated. This is further complicated by the dual pressures on the contractor of offering both a better customer service and controlling cost and quality issues while re-outsourcing to other end contractors. Conflicts can often occur between the members of any outsourcing project because acknowledgement diversities will result in different points of view. The purpose of this research is to identify the possible acknowledgement diversities that may occur between the three types of outsource (Customer, Contractor, End Contractor) during the four key stages of outsourcing (public bidding, contract signing, project development, checking before acceptance). The research basic of the dissertation will be structured by technology frame theories and interviewing will occur in several cases in order to obtain pointed theoretical and practical values for other researchers' reference.

The Purpose of this study is try to discussion the social meaning, when the Starbucks Coffee Chain Stores into the Kaohsiung city has been made the great accomplishment in the two years recently. The core of the issue is ¡uwhy consumer into the Starbucks Coffee Chain stores¡v,we expand the consumer¡¦s experience ¡Bfeeling and their viewpoint to understand consumption content. Besides, we distinction the consumer type to show the consumption phenomena, and search the ¡uglobal-local¡vpresent meaning in the sociology. We finding that consumers not only attempt to build the social interaction in their everyday life, but also the commodity and human social relationships, through the frame analysis¡]including the expression¡Bpresentation¡Bimagination¡^, the consumers experience a way of life. On the other hand, they also make display or flaunt. The Starbucks Coffee Shop using the brand in the globalization development in the world to build the one¡¦s own fix position. So that, we may infer people¡¦s consumption identification has been formatted. According to the investigation of consumers at branch stores of Starbucks coffee chain stores with 3 branch stores in kaohsiung city, we finding the main consumers is female, single, 21~30 age, the education level is university, profession administrative staff, income between the $3,0001~$5,0001.We conjecture that female have the higher consumption identification than male. Deserve to be mentioned that consumers invisible or sedulously is imitated the city of Taipei to build the consumption identification effect in their consumption activities in the Starbucks coffee chain stores in kaohsiung city, we have merit to the objective or the impartial discourse in the field of the consumption research in the future.

Many construction companies today utilize webcams on their jobsites to monitor and record construction operations. Jobsite monitoring is often limited to outdoor construction operations due to lack of mobility of wired webcams. A wireless webcam may help monitor indoor construction operations with enhanced mobility. The transfer time of sending a photograph from the wireless webcam, however, is slower than that of a wired webcam. It is expected that professionals may have to analyze indoor construction operations with longer interval time-lapse photographs if they want to use a wireless webcam. This research aimed to determine the maximum time interval for time-lapse photos that enables professionals to interpret construction operations and productivity. In order to accomplish the research goal, brickwork of five different construction sites was videotaped. Various interval time-lapse photographs were generated from each video. Worker?s activity in these photographs was examined and graded. The grades in one-second interval photographs were compared with the grades of the same in longer time interval photographs. Error rates in observing longer time-lapse photographs were then obtained and analyzed to find the maximum time interval of time-lapse photography for monitoring construction operations. Research has discovered that the observation error rate increased rapidly until the 60-second interval and its increasing ratio remained constant. This finding can be used to predict a reasonable amount of error rate when observing time-lapse photographs less than 60-second interval. The observation error rate with longer than 60-second interval did not show a constant trend. Thus, the 60-second interval could be considered as the maximum time interval for professionals to interpret construction operations and productivity.

Support verb constructions (henceforth: SVCs) are constructions consisting of a verb with a reduced meaning (when compared to the full verb) and a noun. Previous analyses (e.g. von Polenz 1963, Winhart 2002) provide a detailed account of the function of the verb in SVCs. However, neither of the two approaches fully explains why certain verb-noun combinations are unacceptable. Geraten ('to get into') can combine with Brand ('fire') in but not with Feuer ('fire') even though the two nouns are synonyms. This dissertation proposes a novel approach towards identifying selectional restrictions in German support verb constructions by applying insights from Frame Semantics (Fillmore 1985) and Construction Grammar. It differs from syntactic-centric and lexical-conceptual structure approaches in that frame-semantic information is shown to directly influence a verb's and a noun's ability to combine with each other. I argue that the nominalization Feuer cannot combine with the support verb because the frame- semantic information evoked by Feuer is incompatible with the frame semantics of geraten. Thus, either the verb and/or the noun blocks the formation of a support verb construction. My analysis demonstrates that in order for the support verb and the noun to be able to combine, their frame-semantic information needs to be compatible. However, in some circumstances SVCs need to be listed as idioms in the lexicon because there do not seem to be any compositional restrictions that allow geraten to combine with Brand ('fire'), but not Feuer ('fire'). Based on a corpus of more than 1000 SVCs with geraten, I show that there are different patterns of productivity and idomaticity. Some SVCs, such as ins Rollen geraten ('to start rolling'), allow widespread replacement of the noun with near-synonyms. Other SVCs, such as in Brand geraten ('starting to burn'), do not allow such replacement. In this view, both the abstract meaning of an SVC (e.g., in X geraten 'to get into X') and item-specific knowledge needs to be captured to be able to account for the full range of SVCs headed by geraten. Therefore, I posit a new construction that captures all the meanings expressed by SVCs with geraten. / text

In this report, I discuss the re-contextualization of a working-class Jamaican speaker’s discourse in the media and the new meanings his speech acquires in the process. The series of re-contextualizations starts out with an interview on Jamaican television, which is in turn remixed into an electronic dance song and accompanying music video. The song entextualizes individual stretches of the speaker’s original dis­course into readily identifiable quotes that turn into Jamaican slang items. In the process, linguistic disorderliness is foregrounded in the utterances in question while their propositional content is virtually erased. In a further instance of re-contextualization, the speaker encounters his by now entextualized utterances in an interview on Jamaican breakfast television and struggles to re-establish his originally intended framing of it. His success in the specific interaction is very limited, but viewers’ comments reveal that the interview does effect a change in the meta-linguistic discourse surrounding the incident. I analyze the data as a case in point of ‘speaky spoky,’ a Jamaican label for un­successful attempts to emulate foreign prestige accents, resulting in linguistic dis­orderliness. By considering aspects of performance, entextualization and the keying of different frames, I demonstrate the interactional work that goes into the construc­tion of speaky spoky as a label, as well as the ideological work that label is put to in turn and its political effects. Based on these observations, I argue that speaky spoky is best understood as a multivalent construct resource for sustaining and influencing lan­guage ideologies. Its interactional versatility renders its relationship to authenticity in the Jamaican speech community complicated and potentially ambiguous. / text

Timber has been a widely used construction material throughout the history of human development and it is still popular to this day. Timber frames are a common structural form used in historical and modern day structures. An effective means to connect timber members together is via bolts or dowels due to their high strength, ductile behaviour and flexibility in application. Such joints are, however, vulnerable and prone to damage especially during seismic attacks. In order to improve the performance and longevity of timber framed structures, it is necessary to develop simple but effective strengthening schemes for dowel-type timber joints. Additionally, strategies to repair and reinstate damaged joints are also required. The main objectives of this program of doctoral research are to (1) develop strengthening and repair schemes for bolted timber joints using advanced composite materials (i.e. carbon fibre reinforced polymer, CFRP) as well as traditional materials (i.e. steel plates, epoxies and mortars), and (2) investigate the effectiveness of the schemes in improving the seismic performance of timber frames. The strengthening and repair schemes are applied to single-bolt joints and tested under monotonic load. Optimal strengthening and repair schemes are then applied to moment resisting joints and the joints are subjected to monotonic and cyclic loading. Finite element models are then assembled for the latter joint tests. The calibrated joint models are then used in finite element models of timber frames with varying number of storeys and support conditions. The seismic performances of the timber frames are investigated by conducting both nonlinear static and nonlinear time history analyses. The results of the experimental investigations and the finite element analyses show that the strengthening schemes can enhance the strength and stiffness of joints. Optimum strengthening schemes can also improve the seismic performance of timber frames. Based on the work arising from the program of research, future research needs are finally identified. / published_or_final_version / Civil Engineering / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

This dissertation is a study of how various German narratives from the nineteenth century to the present tell stories that are interrupted or framed by discourse on storytelling itself. More specifically, I examine the various means by which authors in different periods have sought to address and undermine the idea that a story must be believable. The classic frame narrative is one example of how the problem of credibility has been confronted, and yet I suggest that frames are often employed by authors for the very reason that contrary to their perceived function, they are inherently unstable. Frame narratives, interwoven stories, unbelievable occurrences, or less than credible storytellers are all ways by which the texts examined here reflect on their own production and create ambiguity about levels of reality and the connections between different story levels.

Realism is a mode of representation that purports to depict contemporary society objectively and in its entirety. By contrast, modernist artists are often regarded as having turned away from external reality to represent subjective states and to emphasize the artistic (versus mimetic) qualities of art. Building on recent scholarship that has demonstrated that Spanish realist authors were mindful of the limitations of the realist project, this study examines frames as devices through which both realist and modernist authors and artists working in fin-de-siècle Spain signal the limits of perception and representation. / Romance Languages and Literatures

As the data rates supported by the physical layer increase, overheads increasingly dominate the throughput of wireless networks. A promising approach for reducing overheads is to group a number of frames together into one transmission. This can reduce the impact of overheads by sharing headers and the time spent waiting to gain access to the transmission floor. Traditional aggregation schemes require that frames that are aggregated all be destined to the same receiver. These approaches neglect the fact that transmissions are broadcast and a single transmission will potentially be received by many receivers. Thus, by taking advantage of the broadcast nature of wireless transmissions, overheads can be amortized over more data and achieve more performance gain. To show this, we design a series of MAC-based aggregation protocols that take advantage of rate adaptation and the broadcast nature of wireless transmissions. We first show the design of a system that can aggregate both unicast and broadcast frames. Further, the system can classify TCP ACK segments so that they can be aggregated with TCP data flowing in the opposite direction. Second, we develop a rate-adaptive frame aggregation scheme that allows us to find the best aggregation size by tracking the size based on received data frames and the data rate chosen by rate adaptation. Third, we develop a multi-destination frame aggregation scheme to aggregate broadcast frames and unicast frames that are destined for different receivers using delayed ACKs. Using a delayed ACK scheme allows multiple receivers to control transmission time of the ACKs. Finally, we extend multi-destination rate-adaptive frame aggregation to allow piggybacking of various types of metadata with user packets. This promises to lower the impact of metadata-based control protocols on data transport. A novel aspect of our work is that we implement and validate the designs not through simulation, but rather using our wireless node prototype, Hydra, which supports a high performance PHY based on 802.11n. To validate our designs, we conduct extensive experiments both on real and emulator-based channels and measure system performance. / text

published_or_final_version / Civil and Structural Engineering / Master / Master of Philosophy