This thesis concerns selective attention in the context of the Stroop task (identify the colour) and Reverse Stroop task (identify the word). When a person is asked to select and identify one dimension of a bidimensional stimulus (e. g. , the word RED printed in green) the typical finding is that the word influences colour identification (i. e. , the Stroop effect) but the colour does not influence word identification (i. e. , no Reverse Stroop effect). A major account of performance in these tasks posits that one dimension interferes with the other only when a translation occurs (e. g. , Roelofs, <i>Psychological Review, 2003</i>; Sugg & McDonald, <i>Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, 1994</i>; Virzi & Egeth, <i>Memory & Cognition, 1985</i>). This translation assumption is implicit in virtually all work in the field. The first part of this thesis completely undermines the translation assumption. In a series of four experiments (two unique paradigms), I demonstrate that interference from the colour in a Reverse Stroop task occurs in the absence of a translation. The second part of this thesis contains two additional experiments designed to discriminate between translation effects and response conflict effects. The results of these experiments confirm that a translation was not required because no stimulus conflict effect, the most likely locus of a translation effect, was observed. However, response conflict effects were observed. The third part of this thesis implements a computational model based on the principle that the strength of association (Cohen, Dunbar, & McClelland, <i>Psychological Review, 1990</i>) between a specific stimulus and its response (Logan, </i>Psychological Review, 1988</i>) is important in determining the influence of the irrelevant dimension. This model has no translation mechanism. A final experiment was conducted to test this model; the model accounted for over 98% of the variance in RTs and 92% of the variance in interference and facilitation scores in both the Stroop and Reverse Stroop tasks independent of whether a translation was required.

Software maintenance is considered to be among the most difficult, lengthy and costly parts of a software application's life-cycle. Regardless of the nature of the software application and the software engineering efforts to reduce component coupling to minimum, dependencies between software components in applications will always exist and initiate software maintenance operations as they tend to threaten the "health" of the software system during the evolution of particular components. The situation is more serious with modern technologies and development paradigms, such as Service Oriented Architecture Systems and Cloud Computing that introduce larger software systems that consist of a substantial number of components which demonstrate numerous types of dependencies with each other. This work proposes a reference architecture and a corresponding software framework that can be used to model the dependencies between components in software systems and can support the verification of a set of policies that are derived from system dependencies and are relative to the software maintenance operations being applied. Dependency modelling is performed using configuration information from the system, as well as information harvested from component interface descriptions. The proposed approach has been applied to a medium scale SOA system, namely the SCA Travel Sample from Apache Software Foundation, and has been evaluated for performance in a configuration specification related to a simulated SOA system consisting to up to a thousand web services offered in a few hundred components.

With growing demand for cardiovascular implants, improving the performance of artificial blood-contacting devices is a task that deserves close attention. Current prostheses made of fluorocarbon polymers such as expanded polytetrafluoroethylene (ePTFE) suffer from early thrombosis and require periodic replacement. A great number of attempts have already been made to improve blood compatibility of artificial surfaces, but only few of them found commercial implementation. One of the surfaces under intensive research for cardiovascular use is amorphous carbon-based coatings produced by means of the plasma-assisted deposition. However, this class of coatings can be produced using various techniques leading to a number of coatings with different properties. Carbon coatings produced in different plasmas may be of hard diamond-like type or soft graphite-like type, doping with different elements also changes the surface structure and properties. Taking this into account, the search for blood-compatible coating requires the understanding of surface composition and structure and its influence on blood-compatibility. This work attempts to advance our knowledge of this field. Here, commercial PTFE thin film was used as a working material, which composition corresponds to the composition of modern ePTFE vascular grafts and which compatibility with blood we tried to improve by deposition of nitrogenated amorphous carbon (a-CN) coatings in the plasma. Biocompatibility was assessed by a number of tests including the interaction with whole blood and various cells such as platelets, endothelial cells, neutrophils, and fibroblasts. Most of tests showed the blood compatibility of coated surface is better than that of untreated PTFE. Physico-chemical and morphological properties of coated surfaces were studied in parallel using x-ray photoemission spectroscopy (XPS), electron energy loss spectroscopy (EELS), x-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS), Raman spectroscopy, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), atomic force microscopy (AFM). Some correlation between the structure of coatings and blood compatibility was inferred. It was found that at first nitrogen incorporation into amorphous carbon film stimulates blood compatibility. However, when nitrogen fraction increases over 23-25 %, no further improvement but reduction of blood compatibility was observed. Conclusion is made that for best biomedical performance, nitrogen percentage in a-CN coatings must be adjusted to the optimum value.

In this dissertation, not only the antenna and antenna array design techniques for fourth-generation mobile communication system are proposed, but also the specifications related to antenna bio-compatibility are studied. At first, two dual-wideband design techniques suitable to be applied for laptop computer applications for LTE/WWAN and LTE MIMO operations are proposed. The techniques can also be applied to internal tablet computer antennas. The isolation issues of MIMO antenna array of different mobile communication devices, such as laptop computer, tablet computer, and mobile phone, are then discussed. Finally, an analysis of body SAR for tablet computer applications are given and discussed.

In this thesis, two novel broadband slot mobile phone antenna designs respectively for penta-band WWAN operation and eight-band LTE/WWAN operation are presented. The antennas are suitable to be mounted near the bottom edge of the system ground plane of the mobile phone. Good radiation characteristics for the antennas are obtained, and the two antennas respectively occupy a small printed area of 50 ¡Ñ 4 mm2 and 53 ¡Ñ 4 mm2. The first design uses a C-shaped strip connected to the bottom edge of the system ground plane to make the structure of the system ground plane close to a symmetric shorted dipole antenna. This makes it promising to excite a chassis mode to enhance the operating bandwidth of the antenna. The second one uses a microstrip feedline having a chip-inductor-loaded branch. The novel microstrip feedline can lead to more uniform distribution of the electric fields excited in the slot such that enhanced bandwidth of the antenna¡¦s lower band is obtained. Further, since the chip inductor performs like a low-pass filter, the original bandwidth of the antenna¡¦s upper band is not affected. Additionaly, the impedance matching of the lower frequencies of the upper band can be improved, which enhances the upper-band bandwidth of the antenna. Effects of the user¡¦s head and hand on the proposed antenna are also studied, and the simulated SAR and HAC issues are also analyzed in this thesis.

In recent years, Web services had been widely used on the Internet. Thanks to the convenient communication technologies and their inexpensive cost, communications between organizations is much easier, and Web services have become a de-facto standard for organizations to provide information and services. There are two different perspectives to describe Web service composition: orchestration and choreography. Works that verify a choreography model so as to alleviating some correctness problem such as deadlock have also been proposed. However the verification of implementations based on a choreography model has not be addressed. In this thesis, we propose an approach to verify the conformance of a set of Web services to a given choreography model and prune some candidate Web services which do not comply with the choreography model to avoid discordance with the choreography model and run-time errors. The proposed approach is evaluated by simulating 10,000 execution sequences of composite Web services. The experimental results show that our proposed method improves the performance of success rate and space usage by pruning the unsuitable candidate Web services.

Along with the rapid and continuing evolution of enterprise computerization, enterprise establishes Enterprise Information Portal (EIP) gradually. The function and property of EIP changing with complicated environment and technology. Thus, the way enterprise adopt and use the EIP will influence enterprise operating and users satisfaction of EIP and the faithfulness of appropriation of information system will influencing user satisfaction. The goal of this research is to find the significant factors that link between the user satisfaction of EIP and faithfulness of appropriation by using diamond model and contingency theory. We combine with three distinct factors of compatibility, including (1) Technology¡VTask Compatibility (2) Technology¡VPeople Compatibility (3) Technology¡VOrganization Compatibility, to build an integrated model. An empirical survey methodology is applied to test the research model and six hypotheses are developed in this study, and then we use PLS to analysis it. The results reveal that Technology¡VTask Compatibility contributes most to the use of EIP. It implies that EIP should fulfill the task needs of users to promote user satisfaction. Moreover, Technology¡VPeople Compatibility implies that it will enhance the user satisfaction if the EIP is more compatible with user past experience and value. We also found that as EIP is more compatible with enterprise needs of tasks, and people, and the way user use EIP is more faithful with the purpose of the designer will promote user satisfaction of EIP.

According to the regulation announced by Bureau of Standard, Metrology & Inspection (BSMI) of Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA), lamp fixtures must follow safety and electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) standards. However, the self-ballasted fluorescent lamps in the fixture should only be approved by the safety test but not regulated by EMC standard. Obviously, fixtures without light bulbs do not generate any electromagnetic noise. Electromagnetic interference (EMI) comes from the fluorescent light bulb embedded with an electronic ballast which included an inverter with high-frequency switching. A variety of tests demonstrate evidently that a fixture with different self-ballasted compact fluorescent lamps may possibly violate the EMC standard, revealing the absurdity of the regulation. In fact, self-ballasted fluorescent lamps use mostly self-excited electronic ballasts. The operating frequencies for this kind of electronic ballasts can not be precisely controlled due to the influence of many factors. They are not operated at a specified frequency but in a frequency range. This means that the generated EMI spectrum is hardly predicted, especially when a fixture is fitted by light bulbs from several manufacturers. This research inducts the worst cases from numerous measurements on a fixture with 1 piece to 8 pieces of light bulbs, and then attempts to design an EMI filter for all cases. As a result, a lamp fixture with the filter at the line input terminal can suppress the EMI. As long as the consumer buys the lamp fixture which are installed with the EMI filter together with any bulb in use, EMI noise can comply with standard limits.

Because of the fast development of mobile computing in recent years, this study attempt to research the acceptance of mobile computing for employees on business. Different from the past studies based on people-determined and system-determined to verify technology acceptance, we base on interaction theory viewpoint and diamond model to create four technology compatibilities. We treat these four compatibilities as external variables of technology acceptance model (TAM), and hypothesize each of the compatibility influencing perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use. According to the analysis result of this study, we focus on these hypotheses to discuss. Final, we also discuss the implications for theory and practice and point out the importance of technology compatibility to mobile computing acceptance.

In the recent years, the mobile phone from analog era to the 2G era and more to 3G, mobile phones is not only a single kind of communication products, but also it became an integral part in daily life. Advances in hardware and the popularity of telecommunications providers to provide 3G network service, makes smart phones became convenience and functional. It brings consumers a new experience. In June 2007, Apple led the launch of the iPhone. Its intuitive touch interface, multi-application software, and humanness designs, coupled with value-added services to mobile carrier model, and combined Internet community effect, creates a leading mobile company. Consumers still demand for the smart phones, and drive to the multi-function in the compound-oriented. Thus, a powerful portable devices become a must need. However, in varied mobile phone manufacturers, the most representative product is iPhone. In order to understand the niche market, we have to study the customer loyalty. And, we create literature related subject and conceptual framework for the iPhone users. In the study, the main structures are how customer satisfaction, brand identity and customer lock-in affect the customer loyalty. And, we will discover the co-related factors of the main frame. However, the point of view for the iPhone user will be also considered if the customer satisfaction (affection) will influence in customer loyalty. The affection factors will be considered as perceived usefulness, ease of use, compatibility and enjoyment. Last, w will reveal the analysis result and implication management.