Information system development (ISD) has long been treated as the process that system developers craft an artifact to support business operation based on their special expertise. However, a significant portion of projects still have failed because the developed outcome cannot fit users¡¦ needs. An emerging internal service concept indicates that, by treating ISD as one type of service, the requirement definition can be viewed as a knowledge integration process in which users and developers integrate their own knowledge to develop the new knowledge to counter problems faced by business. By incorporating this concept into research design and taking intellectual capital perspective into account, this study proposed a model to examine the antecedents and consequences of knowledge integration between users and developers. An empirical survey methodology is applied and we use PLS to test the research model. The results showed that user-IS developer knowledge integration can benefit project performance, and human capital, relational capital and structural capital increase the effectiveness of knowledge integration, indicating the important mediating role of knowledge integration. Furthermore, the result also found that the relational capital plays a moderating role between human capital and knowledge integration. In sum, differing form prior research that focused on separate and different perspective on user-IS developer knowledge integration, this study proposed a comprehensive model to explore the antecedents of knowledge integration. The implications toward academic and practitioner are also provided.

This work is aimed at development of systematic approaches to the design of multiscale systems. Specifically four problems are addressed: environmental impact assessment (EIA) of new and retrofitted industrial processes, integration of process effluents with the macroscopic environmental systems, eco-industrial parks (EIP), and advanced life support (ALS) systems for planetary habitation. While design metrics and specific natures of each problem poses different challenges, there are common themes in the devised solution strategies: a. An integrated approach provides insights unseen by addressing the individual components of the system and, therefore, better understanding and superior results. b. Instead of dealing with multiple scales simultaneously, the design problem is addressed through interconnected stages without infringing upon the optimization degrees of freedom in each stage. This is possible through the concept of targeting. c. Mathematical programming techniques can be used effectively to systematize the integration concepts, the target identification, and the design of multi-scale systems. The dissertation also introduces the following specific contributions: i. For EIA, a new procedure is developed to overcome the limitations of conventional approaches. The introduced procedure is based on three concepts: process synthesis for systematic generation of alternatives and targeting for benchmarking environmental impact ahead of detailed design, integration of alternative with rest of the process, and reverse problem formulation for targeting. ii. For integrating process effluents with macroscopic environmental systems, focus is given to the impact of wastewater discharges on macroscopic watersheds and drainage systems. A reverse problem formulation is introduced to determine maximum allowable process discharges that will meet overall environmental requirements of the watershed. iii. For EIPs, a new design procedure is developed to allow multiple processes to share a common environmental infrastructure, exchange materials, and jointly utilize interception systems that treat waste materials and byproducts. A source-interception-sink representation is developed and modeled through an optimization formulation. Optimal interactions among the various processes and shared infrastructure to be installed are identified. iv. A computational metric is introduced to compare various alternatives in ALS and planetary habitation systems. A selection criterion identifies the alternative which contributes to the maximum reduction of the total ESM of the system.

Integration of two or more genomic maps provides a higher density of markers and greater genome coverage than can be obtained with the resources available for a single mapping study. Map integration is important in any species for which an annotated complete genome sequence is not available. For organisms currently being sequenced, a pre-sequence integrated map is essential to provide the "backbone" for assembly of the sequence. Map integration also facilitates the identification and resolution of discrepancies among different maps; mapping of QTLs, ESTs, and BACs; and positioning of candidate genes. However, the inconsistencies in markers and populations used in individual mapping studies limit our ability to fully integrate the available data. By concentrating on marker orders rather than marker distances, one can join together published map data to include a majority of markers with the best estimate of their order in the genome. In this study, a comprehensive reference map was constructed from 28 published cotton AD genome maps. The output reference map contains 7,424 markers and represents over 93% of the combined mapping information from the 28 individual AD genome genetic maps. This study applied the use of bioinformatics and computational biology in cotton genome mapping integration. The output will be stored and displayed through CottonDB (http://www.cottondb.org), a public cotton genome database.

¡@The economic reform and the Open Door Policy undertaken in Mainland China has been carried out for more than 20 years since 1978 by Deng Xiaoping. Mainland China has been advocating herself to the rest of the world, and the development of domestic regional integration is also taking place. The differences between the provinces and regions in China is basically very huge. And in the process of economic reform, decentralisation, the gradural withdraw of the central government from certain functions, all accelerate the cleavage of different regions. ¡@How do the provinces cooperate with each other? What is the key features in the process of economic integration? We distinguish two models in this article. One is regionalization, which refers to bottom-up process where the most important driving forces for economic regionalization come from markets, from private trade and investment flows, and from the policies and decesions of companies, rather than resulting from predetermined plans of national or local government. Here we exaime the triangle territory of Guangdong Province and Hong Kong and Macao. Conversely, regionalism is used here to refer to top-down process- the concious and deliberate attempts by national state to create formal mechanism for their economic good. Such regionalism is defined as political and intergovernmental project, and here we exaime the south-west provinces in Mainland Chind, thus the forces of intergration is mainly from the local government. Through the two cases, we highlight the uneven nature of regional economy, and the cases suggest that attempts to forster regional integration have been most successful when governments facilitate, rather than control.

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Throughout the process industry, the conservation and allocation of mass and energy resources plays a pivotal role in the site wide optimization of a plant. Typically, raw materials are transformed into products, byproducts and wastes through pathways involving heating/cooling, pressure changes, mixing, reactions and separations. These pathways often require the addition or removal of energy from the system. The optimal management of such a system therefore requires conserving resources through the appropriate allocation of materials and energy. In a typical plant, there are both mass and energy objectives that require optimization. This dissertation will focus on optimizing the mass and energy resources present in a utility system. This will entail developing a novel framework of techniques to: target and design steam cogeneration networks while minimizing fuel requirements, identifying and utilizing sources of waste heat and incorporating heat pipes to enhance heat exchange networks. Additionally, a specific case of waste recovery will be examined when properties are the primary concern.

A bio-refinery is a processing facility that produces liquid transportation fuels and/or value-added chemicals and other products. Because of the dwindling resources and escalating prices of fossil fuels, there are emerging situations in which the economic performance of fossil-based facilities can be enhanced by retrofitting and incorporation of bio-mass feedstocks. These systems can be regarded as bio-refineries or integrated fossilbio- refineries. This work presents a retrofitting analysis to integrated bio-refineries. Focus is given to the problem of process modification to an existing plant by considering capacity expansion and material substitution with biomass feedstocks. Process integration studies were conducted to determine cost-effective strategies for enhancing production and for incorporating biomass into the process. Energy and mass integration approaches were used to induce synergism and to reduce cost by exchanging heat, material utilities, and by sharing equipment. Cost-benefit analysis was used to guide the decision-making process and to compare various production routes. Ethanol production from two routes was used as a case study to illustrate the applicability of the proposed approach and the results were bio-refinery has become more attractive then fossil-refinery.

The overall purpose of this work is to develop systematic methodology for the simultaneous design and selection of processes and molecules (materials). A propertybased approach is used to develop an interface between process and molecular design/selection. In particular, we focus on the problem of designing/selecting materials that are used in the context of a recycle/reuse system of process streams and for energy applications. Fresh and recycled resources (e.g., process streams, biomass, solvents, etc.) are integrated with the process to satisfy property-based constraints for the process units and to optimize the usage of the resources and the design of the process. For molecular design, property operators for mixing streams and group contribution methods (GCM) are used to consistently represent process sources, sinks, and different functional groups on the same property-base. For material selection, property based criteria (e.g., heat rate, high heating value, etc.) are used to bridge the process with material. This consistent representation enables the definition of the optimization problem formulation for product design while taking into consideration the recycle/reuse of process streams. In particular, this dissertation addresses four integrated topics. First, a new graphical approach for material targeting and substitution is presented. This graphical approach offers initial solutions and valuable insights that can be effectively used for conceptual design and for initializing mathematical programming techniques. Second, a mathematical optimization approach is developed along with a decomposition-based global solution procedure for material targeting and substitution using property integration. Third, an implementation approach is developed to synthesize the details of a recycle/reuse process network design based on the targets identified through the graphical and/or the mathematical approaches. Finally, property integration techniques are extended to a broader scope which deals with the lifecycle analysis of biomass utilization for energy generation. A generic model is developed to optimize the types and quantities of the feedstocks used to optimize power generation with biomass-fossil fuel co-fed system. Important issues of biomass growth, harvesting, transportation, processing, and disposal are included. Property-based tracking and constraints are included in the analysis. Also, the issues associated with greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are incorporated in the analysis. Case studies are solved throughout the dissertation to demonstrate the applicability of the developed procedures.

This study examines Levels of Technology Implementation (LoTi) teacher selfratings and Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS) scores. The LoTi instrument is explained comprehensively in the study. Using a series of survey questions about classroom instruction and technology use, the instrument measures a teacher's level of technology implementation in terms of that teacher's perception of classroom practices. The study assesses the relationship between LoTi ratings and TAKS scores of 9th, 10th, and 11th grade students as reported in student records at Alamo Heights Independent School District, San Antonio, Texas. The study determined the degree to which teacher LoTi ratings were a predictor of success on TAKS exam scores as reported in student records at Alamo Heights Independent School District, San Antonio, Texas. In addition, the study ascertained the existence of differences among the variable of student economic status. For the purposes of this study, school and student performance analysis included only Alamo Heights High School in the Alamo Heights Independent School District (AHISD). The student data in the study came from approximately 359 9th graders, 372 10th graders, and 309 11th graders (1040 total students). A total of 11 English teachers, 14 math teachers, 9 science teachers, and 10 social studies teachers (44 total teachers) from this campus made up the population under study. The research findings of this study included: 1. A positive relationship exists between the level of technology implementation in the classroom and student performance on the TAKS test in math, English Language Arts/Reading, science, and social studies. 2. Further, the findings showed that this relationship impacts economically disadvantaged students the most in English Language Arts/Reading and math.