A wound- and insect-inducible expression system for transgenic plants was developed. Specifically, I demonstrate wound- and insect-inducible, localized gene expression driven by the potato proteinase inhibitor II (pinII)-promoter in transformed Arabidopsis, tobacco and white spruce. As reporter and target genes driven by the pinII-promoter, I used the GUS gene and a terpenoid synthase gene, respectively. In addition, I found that the pinII-promoter drives trichome-specific, systemically-induced gene expression in tobacco and Arabidopsis. Finally, I demonstrate that the pinII–promoter, when transformed into Arabidopsis, is extremely sensitive to subtle, low-impact stress treatment. This latter finding prompted me to use, in the second part of my thesis, the pinII-promoter in conjunction with GUS reporter gene expression to test if intact Arabidopsis plants can respond to exposure to monoterpene volatiles. My experiments using the pinII–promoter GUS reporter system clearly established that Arabidopsis plants respond to the exposure of the monoterpene volatiles tested. It is thought that monoterpenes and other volatiles can act as airborne signals between plants under stress or between distant parts of the same plant. At the outset of my thesis research, and to some extent still today, the concept of plant-plant signalling with volatiles has been met with scepticism. After establishing that Arabidopsis plants do respond in a laboratory setting to certain monoterpene volatiles, I further tested the extent of the response at the transcriptome level using a 30 K microarray platform. The gene expression analysis revealed several hundred transcripts that respond with a change of abundance in response to treatment of intact Arabidopsis plants with the monoterpenes ocimene or myrcene. Many of these transcripts were annotated as stress and defense genes including genes involved in octadecanoid signaling. Real-time PCR analyses of octadecanoid mutants confirmed a role for octadecanoid signaling in the response to the monoterpene ocimene. In addition, treatment with ocimene or myrcene caused increased levels of methyl jasmonate (MeJA) in Arabidopsis rosette leaves. However, plants treated with monoterpene prior to wounding or feeding by cabbage looper did not reveal any significant priming effect for these pre-treatments.

Recently, some authors point to value creation from the structure and behaviours associated with competition and collaboration inside the organisation (Helfat and Eisenhardt, 2004; Birkinshaw and Lingblad, 2005). While both competition and collaboration have been studied extensively between organisations, less attention has been focused on them and their interaction between units inside the organisation, particularly within complex and heterogeneous multinational corporations. The question is how to achieve the coordination and collaboration that is necessary for a multinational organisation to reap the benefits that international expansion has to offer and yet balance the propensity for competition that exists as business units struggle for scarce resources or new opportunities. In order to answer this question, the aim of this review is to first of all know what the factors and mechanisms are that influence competition and collaboration between organisational units within multinational organisations. Methodology: This study has been conducted using a systematic review methodology with the aim of producing a search of extant literature which can be trusted by others as being thorough, transparent, replicable and clear. Both quantitative and qualitative techniques have been used to achieve this. Findings: This review finds that the there is minimal extant literature that addresses competition and collaboration between business units within the multinational corporation and that it also fails to provide a comprehensive understanding of the factors and mechanisms that influence the co-existence of intraorganisational competition and collaboration. They are typically viewed as mutually exclusive or at opposite ends of a continuum. While there has been some recent research attention given to intraorganisational collaboration and competition, each in their own right, there has not been an extensive review of the factors and mechanisms when looking at their coexistence within the multinational corporate environment. By bringing the two literatures into view and investigating the paradoxical nature of the influences on andthe interactions between competition and collaboration, insights into an optimal mix based on the corporations strategy and value creation logic can be gained for both academics and business unit leaders.

Managers and organizational stakeholders are confronted by a range of stimuli, emotions, events, data, paradoxes and ambiguities in endeavouring to understand and make sense of change and the performance of their organizations. However, there is virtually no literature available on sensemaking within organizational performance. Historically sensemaking literature has focused on unusual events, disasters and high reliability settings but there is now a sizeable body addressing sensemaking in strategic organizational change. This literature has been systematically reviewed because of its proximity to organizational performance and in order to assess how sensemaking in organizational performance could be in investigated. Sensemaking in individuals is triggered by the unusual and confounding and is concerned with how people construct meaning from this. While sensegiving is about the role played by leaders, or stakeholders, in generating, articulating and “selling” a construction or interpretation of events emerging from their own sensemaking process. “Mindfulness” can be thought of as how sensemaking is realised and is about responding rather than reacting while using information, attentiveness and clues to make sense of what is happening. The sensemaking studies reviewed are dominated by work with middle managers who are seen by the authors as key organizational change agents. Organizational actors come to sensemaking through mental maps, or schemata that can be re-configured through the sensemaking process often as a way of addressing paradox or equivocation. The view of sensemaking as inter-subjective, discursive and narrative dominates giving scope to managers to facilitate the process. Sensegiving and sensemaking intertwine dialectically in a process which sees sensemaking informing sensegiving and vice versa. There is insufficient information on mindfulness and change to be able to assess it. In conclusion there are sufficient similarities between the processes of organizational change and organizational performance management to warrant its investigation from an inter-subjective, discursive and narrative sensemaking perspective.

Recently, with the relocation of major international trades fromEuro-America to Asia, all Asia-Pacific countries have been building moreand more harbors to compete for trade opportunities. Among them, Chinais an outstanding case. In this wave of harbor booming, the number ofcontainers in Kaohsiung grows stagnantly. As a neighboring country to those developing area, we should feel threatened. There are various keys to the successful management of harbor. Efficiency of operation is the major concern of most shipping companies. Aside from facilities and equipments, efficiency of ports operation must also depend on management. In this thesis, I propose that the electronification of operation procedures and information exchange is the key to efficient management and the building of a new business model. In this paper, I use Kaohsiung Port as my case of study. Employing Inter-Organizational system structure analysis, I will first analyze the business challenges Kaohsiung faces as well as providepossible response strategies. Through methods of management and support of information technology, how can we create a more competitive organization? Secondly, through interviewing different shipping companies, I will know to what degree the management and information exchange has been electronified.I propose that a new information platform must be built up to fasten operation and improve ports logistic issues. In this thesis, I will show that single service platform of ports operation, electronification of management and the establishment of new e-business model of operation can help to make ports operation more efficient and therefore enhance capacity for competition. Based on this model of management, I will conclude that this strategy can also be applied to ports with similar structure.

Microsystem and integrated circuitry components are mostly manufactured using semiconductor technologies. Fabrication using high strength metals, for demanding aerospace, mechanical, or biomedical applications, requires novel technologies which are different from those for silicon. A promising mass production method for micro/meso scale components is electrochemical micromachining. The complex system, however, requires high precision mechanical fixtures and sophisticated instrumentation for proper process control. This study presents an electrochemical micromachining system with a closed-loop feedback control programmed using a conditional binary logic approach. The closed-loop control is realized using electrical current as the dynamic feedback signal. The control system improves material removal rate by 250% through optimizing inter electrode gap and provides robust automation reducing machining variation by 88%. The new system evokes production of higher quality microcomponents. Workpiece damage is reduced by 97% and increased feature sharpness is observed.

In current chip multi-processors (CMPs), the on-chip network is a major factor affecting overall system performance. Different kinds of communication protocols vary from different communication architectures of current SOC designs. For example, the AMBA is master-slave architecture, which transacts and communicates the data of between the two CORE (Master) through the Memory (Slave). The architecture cost long time for load and store with memory. Hence, this paper design and implement a Rendezvous protocol on AMBA architecture, which is called Rendezvous of Advanced High performance Bus (RAHB), to let two processors can communicate with each other without memory reference overheads. The RAHB is compatible with the AHB architecture, and add Rendezvous communication protocol in the AMBA architecture to perform the direct transmission of data. Without referring the memory, the RAHB can improve the efficiency of communication in multi-core. For experimental evaluation, we evaluate the performance between RAHB and AHB, RAHB speedup (B/s) is average up to 50% for different data length and performance up 30% to 40% for executing test program.

In this thesis, a high-efficient integrated pixel compensator architecture for the H.264/AVC standard has been proposed which can provide both inter and intra prediction functions for luma and chroma components of pixels. By decomposing the algorithms used for both prediction methods into small micro-operation steps, the fundamental arithmetic processing unit architecture capable for performing these operations can be first determined. Next, by considering the possible reference sample transfer issue, the overall compensator architecture will be built by using parallel processing units with some input and intermediate buffers which can be dynamically configured to perform proper computation schedules of different modes suitable for the nature input order of reference samples. The proposed design not only can avoid the additional data transposition buffer, but most importantly the data transfer time spent to fetch the reference samples can be overlapped with the data computation time. Since both arithmetic units and the intermediate data buffer for both inter and intra prediction processes have been shared, our integrated design can achieve more than 30% reduction of gate count compared with the sum of the separate designs. Our design can also lead to more than 38% saving of gate count compared with the previous designs. In addition to the data-path design, this thesis also addresses the memory bandwidth optimization issue which is especially important for the luma interpolation process. A new data-reuse buffer design based on a two-dimensional cache architecture to explore the possible data reuse among the inter and intra partitions will be proposed. The proposed design can be easily integrated with the H.264 interpolator to reduce the enormous demand of memory access. Our experimental results shows that our saving of memory bandwidth can be 20% more than what the best design can achieve by exploring the intra-partition data reuse only. Besides, our compensator can decode the videos up to HDTV resolution, and be applied for the dedicated H.264 hardware codec for various consumer devices.

As refresher courses are getting popular in Taiwan, it is good news for those who want to continue their studies at the same time of working. However, an individual social role will be getting more complicated during this situation of inter-role conflicts. While a full-time worker also needs to act as a student after work, will he encounter the inter-role conflicts of learning and working? This study aims on students who are taking refresher courses at public or private two-year junior college, two-year college, and university in Kaohsiung. We try to discuss the relationship between inter-role conflicts, social support and learning burnout of students who are taking refresher courses. We indicate the relationship between inter-role conflicts, social support and learning burnout due to different background characteristics of respondents. The study result is supported by empirical data and provides some suggestions for those who want to take refresher courses and further researchers. We send out 800 questionnaires and get 602 returned ones. The final valid questionnaires are 589 and the return rate is 76.62%. The result is indicated as below: 1. Most of respondents in this study are female, single, and study in national two-year junior college right now. Their tenure in current company is 1-5 years. Most of them have strong motivation of self actualization even they all play different social roles now. The age of most respondents is between 31-40 and most of them work in manufacturing industries and would prefer to study at school in short distance. 2. The result indicates the inter-role conflicts that learning interferes working or learning and working interfere each other have strong impact on learning attitude. Besides, the inter-role conflicts that learning interferes working or learning and working interfere each other have strong impact on interpersonal relationship alienation. The three kinds of inter-role conflicts all have strong impact on low learning emotion. Furthermore, the inter-role conflicts which learning and working interfere each other have strong impact on emotion burnout. 3. The moderation effects of families¡¦ support, managers¡¦ support, colleagues¡¦ support and classmates¡¦ support are partially supported in this study.

In considering the global power generation industry, fossil fuel power plants still dominates where LNG presents one of the major clean fuel source. Although Taiwan remains as one of the main importers of LNG in the world, the cold energy was not utilized effectively which only accounts for 8% of total. Especially, the hot and humid local climates caused the Gas turbines to work under low efficiency which presents significant room for improvement when inlet cooling technology was imposed. In this research, the inlet cooling process using mechanical chillers, absorption chillers, and LNG cold reclaim technology were simulated using the Thermoflex software in a tpical combined cycle environment. The waste heat from the power plant was further utilized for Sea water desalination purposes under MED process. Simulation result indicated that , in using 2% of the waste heat from the plant, and produce 60 tons per hour of fresh water , at the cost of power output reduction of 1 %. Further simulation result also validated the economic feasibility which warranted engineering application potentials.

Thesis (D. Min.)--Trinity International University, 2003. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 163-169).