Empowered by information and communication technologies (ICTs), e-commerce has radically transformed the global economic landscape over the past decade. The diffusion of e-commerce so far has mostly been limited to developed countries and has been relatively slow in the rest of the world. To alleviate the digital divide, the United Nations has sponsored research results and given financial support to help developing countries. This dissertation applies growth theory from developmental economics and macroeconomics to analyze B2C e-commerce growth and diffusion across countries. There are two empirical studies in this dissertation. An initial exploratory study proposes three models for the growth of e-commerce revenues for European countries. An endogenous growth model proposes that e-commerce growth in a country is primary driven by internal factors. A contrasting exogenous growth model argues that e-commerce growth in a country is externally driven by leading countries. A third model, a mixed endogenous and exogenous growth model, argues that e-commerce growth is both internally and externally driven. This study tests data for 17 European countries from 2000 to 2004. The findings demonstrate that B2C e-commerce growth is driven by internal factors and external factors from a leading country, in support of the proposed explanatory growth theories. The second empirical study further proposes a hybrid growth-theoretic embedded technology infrastructure theory to investigate the role of Internet-based technology infrastructure in affecting e-commerce growth in a country. Its main purpose is to investigate whether there are simultaneous effects between Internet-based selling technology infrastructure and e-commerce growth. The findings show that there are two-way interactions between e-commerce growth and technology infrastructure. The overall objective of this dissertation is to open up a dialogue about the efficacy of alternative theoretical perspectives that will help to align IS and e-commerce research with theoretical and methodological developments from economic research.

Abstract Competition is the leading role for traditional concept, telecommunication industry also take competition as the thinking aspect in early days. In the time of digit convergence, competition is not only found in local but in global and technology is not belonged to single company any more. The thinking of competition has not coped with the market in the future and should take the thinking of co-opetition for the strategy development. The technology of 3rd Generation mobile communication can bring telecommunication industry new opportunities by providing customers the multiple services with higher speed such as data transmission, mobile business and multimedia A/V. This research discusses the strategy management of the industry for mobile communication in the time of digit convergence by studies of competitive strategy, value-chain of industry, co-opetition theory and analysis of industry status. After summarizing the related documents, literatures and the result of interviewing the specialists in this field, we have some conclusions listed as below: 1.To have the synergy, the technology between mobile wideband and wireless wideband must operate complementarily. 2.To adapt the uncertainty of digit convergence, the service providers of mobile communication should develop co-opetition strategy. 3.Should actively take the predomination for the technology standard of the industry. 4.The thinking of building the network for mobile communication should focus on the total solution of long-term evolution for network equipments. 5.The strategy of differential service is the essential strategy for the tendency of integrating fixed mobile convergence.

Recent advancements in iterative processing have allowed communication systems to perform close to capacity limits withmanageable complexity.For manychannels such as the AWGN and flat fading channels, codes that perform only a fraction of a dB from the capacity have been designed in the literature. In this dissertation, we will focus on the design and analysis of near-capacity achieving codes for another important class of channels, namely inter-symbol interference (ISI)channels. We propose various coding schemes such as low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes, parallel and serial concatenations for ISI channels when there is no spectral shaping used at the transmitter. The design and analysis techniques use the idea of extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) function matching and provide insights into the performance of different codes and receiver structures. We then present a coding scheme which is the concatenation of an LDPC code with a spectral shaping block code designed to be matched to the channel??s spectrum. We will discuss how to design the shaping code and the outer LDPC code. We will show that spectral shaping matched codes can be used for the parallel concatenation to achieve near capacity performance. We will also discuss the capacity of multiple antenna ISI channels. We study the effects of transmitter and receiver diversities and noisy channel state information on channel capacity.

The use of Creative Problem Solving (CPS) as an instructional strategy to increase the creativity levels of students across all levels of the curriculum is currently a popular topic of investigation. Curriculum content and the underlying objectives that are presented to students in public schools have been the subject of close scrutiny since school accountability became a hot topic during the 1980's. However, despite all the efforts to improve student productivity through a well defined curriculum, and possibly because of the increased emphasis on student accountability to reflect that student improvement, concern for the apparent declining creativity levels among students appears to be growing. The purpose of this dissertation was to compare conventional instructional methodologies with those of creative problem solving. It was hypothesized that students' low, high, and total cognition levels, overall creativity levels, and satisfaction with instructional methodologies, improve as a result of instruction through creative problem solving strategies. By improving the levels of creativity within students, they will be better equipped to deal with the complex types of problems the future will present. This study utilized an experimental, posttest only, control group design. Participants were ninth grade students (n=20) who were enrolled in an Introduction to World Agricultural and Science Technology I course. Posttests were administered to measure low, high, and total levels cognition at the conclusion of the course. For this measure of the dependent variable, a forty question (10 true/false, 25 multiple choice, and 5 short answer) test was administered. Pretests and posttests were administered to measure student creativity. A standardized Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT) was used as the measure of the dependent variable of creativity. Pretests, mid-tests, and posttests were used to measure student satisfaction. A satisfaction instrument developed by Brashears (2004) was used for the measurement of clarity, delivery, content, and total satisfaction as the dependent measure of satisfaction. These instruments were used to measure the five research hypotheses of the study. Results of the study did not support the hypotheses that significant differences exist between creative problem solving and traditional instructional strategies, as they pertain to student cognition, creativity, and satisfaction. However, although not significant, possibly due to the small sample size, upon closer examination of group means, one can detect definite patterns of greater mean score gains among the CPS group over the traditional group in cognition, creativity, and satisfaction. Based on these findings, this researcher suggests that replications of this study be performed with larger sample sizes in different curriculum areas to further perpetuate the integration of creative problem solving strategies as an effective instructional strategy for all age groups and in all areas of the curriculum.

Digital technology, network compression technology and Internet technology universal utilization, causes the communication market inherent in the increasingly blurred boundaries and a convergence of the phenomenon. Under this background, the industry unceasingly promotes the service more and more, or provides triple play (voice, data and video service) to change the industrial competition situation. This research union "Grounded Theory" and "Importance-Performance Analysis " to Taiwan's telecommunications market to explore the theme through telecommunications technology and innovation as the main shaft, supported by the world's major countries in Europe, the United States and Japan's market performance. An analysis of the trends of digital convergence, policies and the evolution of the telecommunications industry. The research results are as follows: 1. The government unit: Will grasp the future industry tendency to develop the appropriate regulation system from the recent communication industrial structure by the industrial change. 2. The communications industry: To develop digital convergence in the competition strategy by factors on telecommunication environment, market analysis, technical development situation and government policy.

<p>This report has been compiled to document the thesis work carried out by Anton Andersson for Coresonic AB. The task was to develop an accelerator that could generate complex numbers suitable for fast fourier transforms (FFT) and tuning the phase of complex signals (NCO). Of many ways to achieve this, the CORDIC algorithm was chosen. It is very well suited since the basic implementation allows rotation of 2D-vectors using only shift and add operations. Error bounds and proof of convergence are derived carefully The accelerator was implemented in VHDL in such a way that all critical parameters were easy to change. Performance measures were extracted by simulating realistic test cases and then compare the output with reference data precomputed with high precision. Hardware costs were estimated by synthesizing a set of different configurations. Utilizing graphs of performance versus cost makes it possible to choose an optimal configuration. Maximum errors were extracted from simulations and seemed rather large for some configurations. The maximum error distribution was then plotted in histograms revealing that the typical error is often much smaller than the largest one. Even after trouble-shooting, the errors still seem to be somewhat larger than what other implementations of CORDIC achieve. However, precision was concluded to be sufficient for targeted applications.</p> / <p>Den här rapporten dokumenterar det examensarbete som utförts av AntonAndersson för Coresonic AB. Uppgiften bestod i att utveckla enaccelerator som kan generera komplexa tal som är lämpliga att använda försnabba fouriertransformer (FFT) och till fasvridning av komplexasignaler (NCO). Det finns en mängd sätt att göra detta men valet föllpå en algoritm kallad CORDIC. Den är mycket lämplig då den kan rotera2D-vektorer godtycklig vinkel med enkla operationer som bitskift ochaddition. Felgränser och konvergens härleds noggrannt. Acceleratorn implementerades i språket VHDL med målet att kritiskaparametrar enkelt skall kunna förändras. Därefter simuleradesmodellen i realistiska testfall och resulteten jämfördes medreferensdata som förberäknats med mycket hög precision. Dessutomsyntetiserades en mängd olika konfigurationer så att prestanda enkeltkan viktas mot kostnad.Ur de koefficienter som erhölls genom simuleringar beräknades detstörsta erhållna felet för en mängd olika konfigurationer. Felenverkade till en början onormalt stora vilket krävde vidareundersökning. Samtliga fel från en konfiguration ritades ihistogramform, vilket visade att det typiska felet oftast varbetydligt mindre än det största. Även efter felsökning verkar acceleratorngenerera tal med något större fel än andra implementationer avCORDIC. Precisionen anses dock vara tillräcklig för avsedda applikationer.</p>

Dans cette thèse, nous donnons des approximations discrètes de quantités lisses associées à certaines courbes planes ou à certaines surfaces de l'espace euclidien de dimension 3. Dans le cas des courbes, le défaut angulaire en un point P de la courbe est une bonne approximation de la courbure de la courbe en ce point. Nous donnons une majoration de l'erreur commise en fonction du jet d'ordre 1 de la courbure, de la géométrie de la courbe et du maximum de la distance entre P et un point variable de la courbe. Dans le cas des surfaces, nous donnons une majoration entre la courbure discrète en un point P d'une surface lisse S et un polynôme homogène en les courbures principales de S en P. Notre majorant dépend du jet d'ordre 1 des courbures de S en P, de l'épaisseur, du nombre de points du maillage et surtout de sa taille. Enfin, nous construisons une classe particulière de maillages qui permet d'avoir des résultats de convergence ponctuels lorsque la taille des maillages tend vers 0.

Tez (Doktora) - Süleyman Demirel Üniversitesi, Fen Bilimleri Enstitüsü, Matematik Anabilim Dalı, 2008. / Kaynakça var.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Phonetic convergence (PC) is speech specific accommodation characterized by an increase in similarity in a dyad’s speech patterns due to an interaction. Previous research has demonstrated that PC occurs in dyads during various interactive tasks (e.g. map completion and picture matching) and in cross-linguistic conditions (e.g. dyads who speak the same or different native language) (Pardo, 2006; Kim et al., 2011). Studies suggest that speakers who are closer in linguistic distance (i.e. share the same native language) are more likely to converge than speakers who are far apart (i.e. speak different native languages) (Kim et al, 2011). However, Interdialectal conditions where speakers use different national dialects of the same language have been studied to a far lesser extent (Babel, 2010). Similarly, studies have examined both segmental and suprasegmental features that are susceptible to PC but rhythm has not been studied extensively (Krivokapic, 2013; Rao et al., 2011). Though initial studies postulated that PC is the result of either automatic or social processes, more current research suggests that a combination of both kinds of processes may be better able to account for PC (Goldinger, 1997; Shepard et al., 2001; Babel, 2009a). The current dissertation uses novel measures such as Interlocutor Similarity and EMS + centroid to implicate global properties of vowels and rhythm respectively as acoustic correlates of PC. Moreover, it finds that speakers showed both convergence and divergence in vowels and rhythm as moderated by their language background. Close interactions between native speakers of American English (AE) resulted in convergence whereas interdialectal interactions (between AE and Indian English speakers) and mixed language interactions (between native and non-native speakers of AE who are native speakers of SP) resulted in both convergence and divergence. The results from this study may shed light on how speakers attenuate the highly variable nature of speech by adapting speech patterns to aid intelligibility and information sharing (Shepard et al., 2001) and that this attenuation is moderated by social demands such as identity and cultural distinctiveness. / text