Mainland China is an emerging market. The labor cost is very cheap in the market, and the growth rate of market is high. For saving manufacturing cost and expanding business, many companies, including those from Taiwan, invest in Mainland China. For fulfilling a great amount of demand in IC and encouraged by China government, SMIC has established a foundry in China. TSMC and UMC also plan to set up their foundries there in 2002. What is the best strategy and how to compete are the most things the Taiwan companies concerned, since the foundry industry in Mainland China is developing. This study is based on the Diamond Model (Porter, 1990) and foreign invest theories, and tries to analyze the foundry industrial structure in Taiwan and China. This study also finds out the strategic considerations, which can explain why Taiwan foundry companies invest in China. Then this study predicts the situation of the development of foundry industry in Mainland China in the future. Finally, the study tries to suggest better strategies to Taiwan foundry companies. This study finds out the strategic considerations of Taiwan foundry companies when they invest in Mainland China. They are: 1.Ownership advantage of technology, capacity and service; 2.Location advantage of the market potential in China and reward offered by China government; 3.Internalization advantage of setting up a wholly owned subsidiary; 4.Competitive pressure in foundry industry. The strategic suggestions are: 1.Being the leading company in Mainland China; 2.Using the resources of China market; 3.Focusing on foundry; 4.Cross-Strait joint production. Making use of these four suggestions, Taiwan foundry companies will enlarge the market share in the worldwide foundry market.

Today, many enterprises set up their offices globally to go with the stream of time. Globalization makes it difficult for enterprises to provide their employees on-site trainings. By developing Web and information technology, e-Learning becomes a new training tool for the enterprises to reduce time and cost, and solve the training problems caused by difference of locations. The users¡¦ acceptance becomes one of the key factors for the enterprises in implementing e-Learning program. As the e-Learning is a kind of information service system, the system quality plays an important part in the employees¡¦ adoption of e-Learning. The well-known Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) is generally used in evaluating users¡¦ acceptance in many studies. To set up an integrated model, this paper applies the TAM as a framework to study the acceptance of employees on e-Learning and further introduces perceived factors of a sound information system as the external variables to evaluate employees¡¦ acceptance. Based on the experimental research on an e-Learning program of a large domestic company, this paper firstly indicates that, among the factors of a sound information system, only service quality and information quality have a significant influence on the employees¡¦ acceptance. Secondly, different education levels have a significant influence on the perceived service quality and information quality. This empirically integrated TAM would be useful for the researchers in developing e-Learning systems, as well as for the enterprises in implementing successful e-Learning systems.

The diffusion of the Internet is the interest of many firms or individuals who see the Internet as an opportunity, a threat, or both. Huge amount of intellectual and real capital are invested on Internet. The more people understand the dynamics of Internet diffusion, the better they will manage the efforts put on it. The purpose of this study is to explore the extent to which the diffusion of the Internet-related innovation could be adequately described by the diffusion models and the effect of internal influence versus external influence described in the models. Two hypotheses of the Internet innovation diffusion are proposed. First, the number of potential adopters of the Internet innovation diffusion is dynamic, not constant. Second, in contrast to the traditional innovations, the diffusion of Internet innovation has stronger interpersonal communication influence than the promotional activity effect. Twelve Internet innovations are estimated in both the Bass model and the Dynamic model. The first hypothesis is fully supported, and the second hypothesis is partially supported. Based on the evidence, Internet innovations can be categorized into web-based versus non-web. The non-web Internet innovation of connection and communication like Internet, ADSL, and Skype has no significant difference of the ratio of the internal influence and the external influence effects to the traditional innovations. The segment-focused niche website, such as Amazon, eBay, and PayPal, has the strong internal influence effect. Understanding the various effects of Internet innovation diffusion can provide advantages in terms of enhancing functions and planning marketing strategies and tactics.

Cognitive diagnostic assessment (CDA) is a new theoretical framework that is designed to integrate cognitive psychology into measurement theories. The main purpose of CDA is to provide examinees with diagnostic information while traditional psychometric approaches focus on how latent variables are accurately measured. Many cognitive diagnostic models (CDM) have been developed for CDA. Three cognitive diagnostic models- namely the rule space method (RSM), the high-order deterministic inputs, noisy ‘and’ gate (HO-DINA) model, and the multidimensional latent trait model for diagnosis (MLTM-D) model were compared using simulated data and empirical data. For the simulation study, three methods of data generation are proposed. Each method was designed based on one of the three models. A total of 12 conditions was involved in the simulation study: 2 item designs X 2 level of test X 3 methods of data generation. The diagnostic results were compared by level of test difficulty, level of ability estimates, and level of dimensionality. The effect of number of attributes on accurate classification was also investigated. For the empirical study, a mathematics test data was used and the diagnostic results were compared.

The objective of the study is to analyze the effect of remittances on socio-economic conditions of rural families in Peshawar, and how remittances change the decision-making process of families. This study examines the effects of remittances on local population in three towns of Peshawar, i.e. Hayatabad, Faqir-Abad and Gulberg-area. The study is basically conducted to see how remittances bring changes in the life of the recipients. The research is quantitative, data was collected through questionnaires. For the research, a sample of 300 respondents was selected from three towns in Peshawar District. The results of the research were interpreted through statistical tools, regression model. The Ordinary least square method (OLS) was used to find out the effect of remittances on health sector and investment made by respondents in the form of purchased property and investment made in establishing their own businesses. Along with that, the simple Logit Model was also used. The result is generalized on linear model with link logit and binomial response. Findings stated that the literacy level of the emigrant’s household positively impacted on children’s probability to move to private education. The results reveals that the recipient invest 4% of their income on investment as a form of business and purchasing property while educated people appears not to be interested in investing money in businesses as they want to continue their jobs. Respondent are not using a large portion of their remittances for health perhaps mostly people are entitled to free services from the government. Remittances changed their standard of living and socio economic affairs of the remittances receiving respondents. According to my demographic information about respondents life, the remittances mostly brings changes in the physical part of people life such as Private Education, Personal transport, new houses, investment in buying properties, more electric appliances, bank balance etc., but culturally people are still conservative and believe in cultural values that have been practices by local population for centuries. Following are some main recommendations that this research has identified, Foreign remittances are improving the socio-economic conditions and decision making of rural families, however, their consumption behavior is not inclined towards investment, they rather prefer to enjoy luxurious household’s equipment. Therefore, it is recommended that these families should utilize their resources in more efficient way, and should go for short and long term investment avenues. Government must design policies in order to educate these families and create awareness among them that will enable them to look for sustainable domestic income, which would help the families in the long run. These families follow the norms and traditions, and they prefer sending their children abroad for earning purposes, which in turn is comparatively less profitable idea as compared to sending these children for higher education purpose.

This thesis presents a comparison for modeling and forecasting Chinese futures market of copper and aluminum with single time series and multivariate time series under linear restrictions. For single time series, data transformation for stationary purpose has been tested and performed before ARIMA model was built. For multivariate time series, co-integration rank test has been performed and included before VECM model was built. Based on selected models, the forecasting shows multivariate time series analysis has a better result than single time series, which indicates utilizing the relationships among the series can improve the accuracy of time series forecasting.

The use of rollback is a fundamental flaw in some existing distributed control systems because the advance in time and in external world situations means that what had been a correct state in the past may no longer be a correct state in real time and distributed systems. In such systems rollback is not restoring to a state that is consistent with the current external environment. Forward error recovery provides a potential solution to such a situation to handle exception rather than backward recovery. A contingency is an unusual but anticipated situation for which the normal flow of instructions would not produce the appropriate results that should be expected. We will discuss how to handle contingencies and exceptions in a SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) system using resumption and termination models of exception handling.

Clustering is a technique used to partition unlabelled data into meaningful groups. This thesis will focus on the area of clustering called model-based clustering, where it is assumed that data arise from a finite number of subpopulations, each of which follows a known statistical distribution. The number of groups and shape of each group is unknown in advance, and thus one of the most challenging aspects of clustering is selecting these features. Cross-validation is a model selection technique which is often used in regression and classification, because it tends to choose models that predict well, and are not over-fit to the data. However, it has rarely been applied in a clustering framework. Herein, cross-validation is applied to select the number of groups and covariance structure within a family of Gaussian mixture models. Results are presented for both real and simulated data. / Ontario Graduate Scholarship Program

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Finding a common language in describing and interpreting multivariate data associated with rehabilitation and disturbance ecology, has became a major challenge. The main objective of this study is to find and evaluate mathematical models to describe ecosystem change based on selected indicators of change. Existing data from a previous rehabilitation project on Hendrina Power Station (Mpumalanga, South Africa) was used as a database for this study and this study aims to report on the development of models concentrating on radar graphs and a model based on matrix mathematics. The main groups of organisms selected for the construction of models, were vegetation, soil mesofauna and ant species. The datasets were limited to some indicative species and their mean abundances were determined. The grids that were used were randomly chosen and the models were constructed. Radar graphs were constructed to model the suite of species identified, through a sensitivity analysis, to indicate possible rehabilitation success over time and was applied to the different rehabilitation ages. The surface areas under the radar graphs were determined and compared for the different rehabilitation ages in the same year of survey. Correlation graphs were drawn between the surface area and the rehabilitation ages. These graphs did not indicate much relevance in indicating rehabilitation success, but the radar graphs proved to be good indicators of change in abundance of the selected species over time. iv The vegetation species, Eragrostis curvula, was the only species that showed a strong significant positive relationship with rehabilitation age and could be considered a good rehabilitation species and indicator of rehabilitation success. After the evaluation of this model, Eragrostis curvula, and two additional ant species, Tetramorium setigerum and Lepisiota laevis, were added. These species that were added, showed an increase in abundance over time, as found in a previous study. These radar graphs also did not indicate much relevance and it can be concluded that the radar graphs can only be used for a visual representation of the changes in abundance of the relevant species over time. This study also refers to a matrix model. This model focused on the interactions between the different variables selected. The percentage carbon in the soil were also added to the list of species. Model fitting graphs were constructed and correlations were drawn between the species that had significant values in the interaction table. This model could be useful for future studies, but more data and replication is necessary, over a longer period of time. This will serve to eliminate possible shortcomings of the model. / Thesis (M. Environmental Science (Biodiversity and Conservation Biology))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2007.