This article aims to study if merge event can make abnormal return by setting up a merge-arbitrage investment portfolio; and if this abnormal return to be affected by taking consideration of related costs. During the period of merge event, the results from both CAPM model and Fama-French model show that the abnormal return from the merge-arbitrage investment portfolio is quite significant if not considering the direct and indirect costs; but the return will become insignificant if considering all the costs. However, there is no co-relation between merge-arbitrage investment portfolio and stock market investment portfolio, no matter if we have taken the costs into consideration or not. The relationship between the two investments is in linear regression. Furthermore, although size and market-to-book ratio are positively and negatively, respectively, related to the portfolio return, these relationships are statistically insignificant.

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According to the information, the value of corporation acquired in global mergers amounted to US$4 trillion. Last year the biggest merger & acquisition was the AT&A bought the BellSouth Group in US for US$860 billion. After 1990, the corporate mergers & acquisitions become a main magic tool of a company to strengthen its market competition. Examples of same industry mergers were: Glaxo Wellcom PLC bought SmithKline Beecham PLC & Pfizer with Warner-Lambert in Pharmaceutical industry Daimler Benz bought Chrysler in vehicle industry Compaq with Digital in high technology industry Seibu Group with Itochu in Supermarket industry Bank of Tokyo with Mitsubishi Bank in banking industry Taiwan Mobile with Columbia in communication industry The diversification of M&A such as: Viacom with CBS Corporation The famous Canadian wine group ¡V Seagram acquired the well-known Asian company Polygram Musical Company at US$106 billion America Online with Time Warner. The above illustrated that the M&A in the diversification and related industry has become a trend and as vital element in the main tool to enhance market competition. In 2002, the figure showed the total global value in M&A was US$1.1 trillion. Regionally, the M&A trading in Europe, US and Japan (excluding other Asian countries) were US$1.5 trillion, US$1.44 trillion and US$3,815 billion respectively. However, research by the KPMG Consulting illustrated that 59% of M&A performances were not good as expected. Many cases and statistics revealed that about 30% - 50% of the completed M&A in US failed, whereas the success rate did not reach 50% in the M&A cases in Europe. The cases showed that the performance of M&A would need to go through a conformity process to become effective. In this study, the case used was two apparel firms of different products in Hong Kong (Horizontal Merger), which for the reasons other than the above, agreed to merger to become one of the biggest apparel corporation in Hong Kong. Nevertheless, during the process of combination, many problems had arisen, such as: 1. Corporate Culture 2. Core Value 3. Measurement of Performance 4. Market Positioning 5. Organization Structure 6. Sales Operation 7. Operation Mode of Production 8. R&D Because of the differences in conceptual recognition, and changes in internal and external circumstances, the right and wrong attempts, in the course of learning process, had made from profits to loss, from loss to profits again and achieved a mixed effect in the growth path and future expectation. In this regard the operation was not smooth after the merger. But after continual improvement and re-engineering, the new company has become to make profit in 2004.

In this thesis, various designs of VLSI sorter architectures are proposed. This thesis first presents a baseline serial sorter architecture built on a central memory module equipped with a single compare-and-swap (C&S) functional unit. A dedicated low-cost address generation circuit which controls the order of data accesses and C&S operation in order to support sorting of data sequences with any length is proposed. By exploring the bit-permutation technique to create the access orders suitable for different C&S steps, the address generator can be built by only two adders and three shifters plus some control circuits, and consumes only about 1K gates. Next, this thesis also proposes a two-bank memory architecture to reduce the required memory ports from four to two such that the sorter memory can be realized by on-chip SRAM blocks. Our experimental results show that the overall silicon cost can be reduced by more than 56% for the sorter circuit which can sort the data sequence of length up to 1024. In addition to the serial sorter architecture, this thesis further proposes three possible parallel sorter architectures including the pipeline sorter, cascade sorter, and block sorter. Among these three architectures, the pipeline sorter can deliver the best throughput although it can be used only for fixed-length data sequences. On the other hand, the block sorter is the most flexible design suitable for sequences with variable length. It is designed based on the block-level even-odd merge sort algorithm. It significantly outperforms the previous block sorter design by using more efficient algorithm, architectural pipelining, and better block C&S(BC&S) unit which can realize separate pre-sort and merge processes efficiently. Our implementation results show that by using the 0.18um technology, the core size of the proposed sorter with block-size of four is about 0.509mm2, and can sorting a 1024-point sequence within 32.84us.

<p>The special architecture of the Cell BE processor has made scientists revisit the problem of sorting. This paper implements and tests a variant of merge sort where a number of 2-to-1 mergers are connected in a pipelined tree. For large trees there are many more such mergers than processors which means they must be mapped to the processors in some way. Optimized mappings are tested and results show that changing the model used when optimizing might be beneficiary. It is also shown that the small size of the local storages on the co-processors is not limiting the performance.</p>

This thesis proposes a merging mechanism for multiple video surveillances in TCP networks. Merging video streams not only can benefit network administration but also reduce the waste of bandwidth. In this thesis, we design a Video-Merging Gateway (VMG) between cameras and control center to merge two video streams transmitted from cameras and received by control center. In the merging mechanism, we develop two modes: Interleave and Overlay. Interleave mode includes two operation types: Single Frame and Proportional. The former merges video streams by interleaving frames one by one from two cameras, and the latter merges video streams according to an FPS (frame per second) ratio between two cameras. Overlay mode vertically displays two video streams in separate frames on the web browser. We implement VMG on a Linux platform. In the interleave mode, we recalculate both the sequence number and the Ack number of a video packet, and create Ack packet for dropped frames while merging two TCP video streams. In the overlay mode, we modify the decoding messages in the frames and separate data between two video streams to avoid decoding errors. Finally, we analyze the complexity of merging algorithms. By carefully determining the timing for responding the created Ack based on Retransmission Time Out (RTO), packet retransmition can be avoided. In addition, we found out that the number of instructions to execute the algorithm is increased by multiple integers along with the picture sizes under interleave mode. As for overlay mode, the number of instructions is increased linearly along with the payload length and the total amount of data and Ack packets.

The goal of this dissertation is to argue on the basis of the minimalist framework that the topichood of sentence topics and contrastive focus result from derivational and structural differences in the left periphery and to provide acquisition data from child language to support this claim, showing data from Korean, a free word-order and pro-drop language in which topics and contrastive foci are realized morphologically. In Korean, topic phrases merge in the left periphery and contrastive focus phrases undergo scrambling, one of the shared properties of free word-order languages. It is consistent in fixed word-order languages such as Italian and Hungarian and a free word-order language like Korean that topics merge and contrastive foci move to the left. Topics precede contrastive foci: topics merge in TopP, a higher functional projection than FocP, to which focus phrases move. In the process of language acquisition, the derivational and structural differences between topic phrases and contrastive focus phrases may have influences on the developmental order of grammar acquisition. In acquisition data from two-year-old Korean children, topics emerge earlier than contrastive foci, indicating that topic and contrastive focus are also acquisitionally different. This study is the first attempt to examine the structural differences and the influence on language acquisition of morphologically derived topic phrases and contrastive focus phrases in acquisition data from a free word-order and pro-drop language. This study shows the structural consistency of topic and contrastive focus between a free word-order language and fixed word-order languages. The syntactic and acquisitional distinction of topic merge and contrastive focus movement is compatible with the semantic and pragmatic approaches to topic and focus. This study provides evidence of the syntactic differences between topic and contrastive focus without dependence on phonetic features; therefore, this study is a base for drawing a map of the left periphery of human languages. / text

Work zones are an essential part of roads maintenance. Despite all the efforts addressed to reduce work zone’s negative impacts on the road traffic performance and improve the road safety, there still exist work zone related congestions and traffic problems. This thesis aims to study and analyze highway reconstruction/maintenance activities, their impacts and existing ways of reducing these negative effects and investigating the role of Intelligent Transport Systems in improvement of the difficulties caused by work zones. The research of the factors influencing capacity resulted in three factors presented in each considered study. The factors are heavy vehicle percentage, weather conditions and police presence. An unusual approach presented by Weng &amp; Meng (2011) distinguishes among the examined analytical models. Their Decision-Tree model, based on training a large data set, showed significantly lower values of errors of prediction of level-of-service. Three different dynamic late merge systems (DLMS) have been simulated and analyzed using the AIMSUN micro-simulation software. The simulation outcome shows promising results favoring the use of DLMS. Among the simulated systems is extra focus put on the ALINEA algorithm that shows potential to improve traffic flow in work zones. Conducted sensitivity analysis shows different behaving of the ALINEA algorithm due to change of regulator parameter and critical occupancy. In order to investigate performance of the ALINEA algorithm, an extensive research has to be conducted. The research should include various work zone configurations as well as different values of heavy vehicle percentage and the parameters within the algorithms code should be subjects to optimization.