The present study was conducted to examine the process of consolidation when learning a difficult bimanual coordination pattern. There are two phenomena associated with the process of consolidation, an enhancement in performance without additional practice and the stabilization observed as resistance to interference from a similar task after acquisition of a novel skill. Both phenomena have been widely examined in sequence skill learning studies. However, few studies have examined the consolidation effect after training of a continuous and rhythmic bimanual coordination pattern. The first goal of this study was to determine if sleep enhances the performance of a minimally trained 1:2 pattern of bimanual coordination in a manner that has been observed with sequencing skills, that is, performance significantly improves after an overnight sleep. A recent study by Buchanan & Wang (in-press) showed that by manipulating the position of a visual-augmented-feedback cursor, either behind or to-the-side of a 1:2 bimanual coordination template, an advantage of the side cursor position was found in the no-feedback retention test after a fifteen-minute break. The second goal was to test whether an overnight sleep may reduce the guidance effect associated with the behind cursor position as reported in Buchanan & Wang (in-press). In the present experiment, the effect of an overnight sleep on learning a 1:2 pattern of bimanual coordination was accessed with six test trials presented immediately (IMM group) or 24 hours (SLEEP group) after 5 minutes of practice. The test trials included three trials with feedback and three trials with feedback removed. For either the IMM or SLEEP group, half of the participants practiced with the behind cursor position and the other half practiced with the side cursor position. The results indicated that the SLEEP group showed an improvement in performance from the acquisition trials to the feedback test trials whereas the IMM group did not. The advantage of the side cursor position at the no-feedback retention test was not evident in the current study. These results are consistent with our two predictions and provide evidence of enhancement in learning a 1:2 pattern bimanual coordination skill.

From The Perspective of Continuous Development To Discuss Ocean Environmental Education in Taiwan Abstract Taiwan is an island country. Our daily live is greatly influenced by ocean environment. However, there is only slight attention on the issue of ocean environment, especially, on the textbook of elementary school. Therefore, the major purposes of this study are to discuss: 1. The proportion of issue of ocean environment in elementary textbook. 2. The editing context regarding the concepts of ocean environment in elementary textbook. 3. The potential of building a primary ocean-oriented experimental school in Liuqiu Shiang, Pingtung County in Taiwan. To conduct an enough analysis, this research has reviewed the related literature in Taiwan and other countries with additional survey to execute the research purposes. In conclusion, the result of this study can be summarized as the following three points: 1. In textbook, the percentage of ocean environment issue is distributed as: A. Among the publishers, the textbook from Nan-Yi publisher accounts for 2.96 percent, major concentrating on natural science and technology. B. Among the publishers, the textbook from Kang-Shiuan publisher accounts for 3.01 percent, major concentrating on natural science and technology. By looking at these numbers, the proportion of ocean environmental issue is way too low. Taiwanese government didn¡¦t pay much attention on the natural science and technology of ocean environment. We need to raise the attention on the issue of ocean environment to better educate our posterities to be more careful and to appreciate the precious ocean. 2. The most updated ocean environment concepts in textbook are mostly incomplete and very scattered distributed in different subjects. Therefore, students can only learn fragment of knowledge. 3. The ¡§ocean-oriented¡¨ school is a special system in Penghu County. The teachers and parents have been very supported this educational development. However, the situation in Liuqiu Shiang is very different from that of the Penghu County. The main reason is that all the teachers were frequently moved around in different schools . Such that the research cycle can¡¦t be completed before the teachers got transferred. Another reason is the instruction material is not well developed ¡§ocean-oriented school¡¨ as which have set up in Liuqin Shiang, Pingtung County. Keywords¡GContinuous Development ,Ocean-oriented school

Since Taiwan¡¦s building industry started declining in 1994, the government tried several times to save the industry by laws or policies, but the effect was not obvious. There have been hundreds of relative firms closing or downsizing by now. Under this severe recession, how the firms of building industry in Taiwan run business for continuous operation is just the topic of our research. This thesis studies the strategies by theories and industrial-cases collection. After analyzing the building industry in Taiwan (life-cycle, value-chain, and development trend), we develop theoretical strategies for the industry, and then we collect industrial cases to compare. We find that the real strategies of the firms match the theoretical ones we develop very well. Basically, the strategies of the firms of building industry in Taiwan can classify into four types: 1.Market-penetration strategy 2.Product-development strategy 3.Market-development strategy 4.Diversification strategy. Besides, we provide the experience of Tonyan building Ltd. Co.for case study. By studying its target-marketing and win-win system, we share the precious experience with everyone. As a member of Taiwan¡¦s building industry, we hope to contribute ourselves to the continuous survival of Taiwan¡¦s building industry by theory and practical experience.

The shape of drift function in continuous time interest rate models has been investigated by many authors during the past decade. The main concerns have been whether the drift function is linear or nonlinear, but no convincing conclusions have been seen. In this dissertation, we investigate the reason for this problem and test several models of the drift function using a nonparametric test. Furthermore, we study some related problems, including the empirical properties of the nonparametric test. First, we propose regression models for the estimation of the drift function in some continuous time models. The limiting distribution of the parameter estimator in the proposed regression model is derived under certain conditions. Based on our analyses, we conclude that the effect of drift function for some U.S. Treasury Bill yields data is negligible. Therefore, neither linear nor nonlinear modeling has a significant effect. Second, parametric linear and nonlinear proposed regression models are applied and the correctness of those models is examined using the consistent nonparametric model specification test introduced by Li (1994) and Zheng (1996), henceforth the Jn test. The test results indicate that there is no strong statistical evidence against the assumed drift models. Furthermore, the constant drift model is not rejected either. Third, we compare the Jn and generalized likelihood ratio (GLR) tests through Monte Carlo simulation studies concerning whether the sizes of tests are stable over a range of bandwidth values, which is an important indicator to measure the usefulness of nonparametric tests. The GLR test was applied to testing the linear drift function in continuous time models by Fan and Zhang (2003). Our simulation study shows that the GLR test does not provide stable sizes over a grid of bandwidth values in testing the drift function of some continuous time models, whereas the Jn test usually does.

Akademische Abhandlung--Helsinki. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [38]).

Zugl.: Kassel, University, Diss., 2009.

The sensitivity of the important inputs and the savings prediction function reliability for the WinAM 4.3 software is studied in this research. WinAM was developed by the Continuous Commissioning (CC) group in the Energy Systems Laboratory at Texas A&M University. For the sensitivity analysis task, fourteen inputs are studied by adjusting one input at a time within ± 30% compared with its baseline. The Single Duct Variable Air Volume (SDVAV) system with and without the economizer has been applied to the square zone model. Mean Bias Error (MBE) and Influence Coefficient (IC) have been selected as the statistical methods to analyze the outputs that are obtained from WinAM 4.3. For the saving prediction reliability analysis task, eleven Continuous Commissioning projects have been selected. After reviewing each project, seven of the eleven have been chosen. The measured energy consumption data for the seven projects is compared with the simulated energy consumption data that has been obtained from WinAM 4.3. Normalization Mean Bias Error (NMBE) and Coefficient of Variation of the Root Mean Squared Error (CV (RMSE)) statistical methods have been used to analyze the results from real measured data and simulated data. Highly sensitive parameters for each energy resource of the system with the economizer and the system without the economizer have been generated in the sensitivity analysis task. The main result of the savings prediction reliability analysis is that calibration improves the model’s quality. It also improves the predicted energy savings results compared with the results generated from the uncalibrated model.

Being one of the most active research topics in the computer vision field, automatic human gesture recognition is receiving increasing attention driven by its promising applications, ranging from surveillance and human monitoring, human-computer interface (HCI), and motion analysis, etc. Segmentation and recognition of human dynamic gestures from continuous video streams is considered to be a highly challenging task due to the spatio-temporal variation and endpoint localization issues. In this thesis, we propose a Motion Signature, which is a 3D spatio-temporal surface based upon the evolution of a contour over time, to reliably represent dynamic motion. A Gesture Model, is then constructed by a set of mean and variance images of Motion Signatures in a multi-scale manner, which not only is able to accommodate a wide range of spatio-temporal variation, but also has the advantage of requiring only a small amount of training data. Three approaches have been proposed to simultaneously segment and recognize gestures from continuous streams, which mainly differ in the way that the endpoints of gestures are located. While the first approach adopts an explicit multi-scale search strategy to find the endpoints of the gestures, the other two employ Dynamic Programming (DP) to handle this issue. All the three methods are rooted in the idea that segmentation and recognition are actually the two aspects of the same problem, and that the solution to either one of them will lead to the solution of the other. This is novel to most methods in the literature, which separate segmentation and recognition into two phases, and perform segmentation before recognition by looking into abrupt motion feature changes. The performance of the methods has been evaluated and compared on two types of gestures: two arms movement and a single hand movement. Experimental results have shown that all three methods achieved high recognition rates, ranging from 88% to 96% for upper body gestures, with the last one outperforming the other two. The single hand experiment also suggested that the proposed method has the potential to be applied to the application of continuous sign language recognition. / Thesis (Ph.D, Electrical & Computer Engineering) -- Queen's University, 2010-09-24 19:27:43.316

No description available.

No description available.