In recent years, many strides have been achieved in the area of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), which is leading to constant innovations in the types of applications that WSNs can support. Much advancement has also been achieved in the area of smart homes, enabling its occupants to manually and easily control their utility expenses. In this thesis, both areas of research will be colluded for a simple, yet critical application: efficient and economical comfort control in smart residential spaces. The goal is to design a central, modular energy consumption control system for residential spaces, which manages energy consumption in all aspects of a typical residence. This thesis is concerned with two facets of energy consumption in residences. The first facet is concerned with controlling when the heating, ventilating, and air conditioning unit (HVAC) operates for each room separately. This is in contrast to a typical HVAC system where comfort is provided across the floor as a whole. The second facet is concerned with controlling the lighting in each room so as to not exceed a certain input value. The communication network that supports the realization of these coveted goals is based on Zigbee interconnected sensor nodes which pour data unto a smart thermostat which does all the required calculations and activates the modules required for comfort control and energy management, if needed. A Java-based discrete event simulator is then written up to simulate a floor of a typical Canadian single-family dwelling. The simulation assumes error-less communication and proceeds to record certain room variables and the ongoing cost of operation periodically. These results from the simulator are compared to the results of the well known simulator, created by DesignBuilder, which describes typical home conditions. The conclusion from this analysis is that the Comfort Control and Energy Management Algorithms (CEMA) are feasible, and that their implementation incurs significant monetary savings.

Because of the global economic depression and competitive stress from international industries, Kaohsiung also faces its difficulty for further development and construction. Due to the 911 terrorist attack event in the U.S., the total number of those who travel to Taiwan from January to June of year 2002 decreased 7.3% compared to the same period of year 2001, a sharp decline. In October year 2002, an explosion event happened in Bali in Indonesia, and furthermore, in April year 2003, another disaster, the dreadful SARS disease raged through Taiwan. These could make tourists worry about safety while traveling, making the dull tourism business an even worse situation. In order to carry out decisions made by Council for Economic Planning and Development, starting form January 1st, year 2002, the Executive Yuan opened the gate of visiting Taiwan for people from Mainland China under particular conditions. However, with concerns of safety of the whole island, we still hold serious control of opening our gate for tourism, so the tourism business still cannot make a hit as originally expected. Actually it is a very important step to open the tourism market for people from Mainland China to visit Taiwan, to make the relationship of cross strait normalize. With WTO principles do cross strait share equal rights to open the tourism market to each other. Our government has been seriously considering the issue of Three-Links in recent years but has made only little progress. The present study collected and investigated newspaper articles and editorials related to this issue in Taiwan of year 2002. The findings point out that the two political parties in Taiwan differed a lot in political stands. This may influence the economy in Taiwan. Though Three-Links is not a cure-all, it could definitely benefit the economic development in Taiwan. Moreover, according to interviews with some experts in this field and an analysis of questionnaires, it is easy to tell Three-Links is a future trend. Three-Links can benefit industries in Taiwan to make business contacts with industries in Mainland China, even to broaden the business scope to the whole world. The main spirit of tourism business is ¡§human¡¨. Mainland Chinese who regularly travel abroad and who are willing to visit Taiwan reached up to the number of 1.2 million. Kaohsiung is an international harbor and further a must pass port for Mainland Chinese. This should be an important chance and moment to develop and push Kaohsiung to become the entrance of tourism business in southern Taiwan. Nominal Group Technique (NGT) is one of the Interactive Management (IM) methods. This method can efficiently deal with complicated problems or controversial issues discussed in a group or a society. By questionnaire analysis and the NGT method did I complete this study and achieve the following goals: 1. Cooperative efficient participation 2. Clarify and define issues 3. Form common consensus and conclusion 4. Interactive learning rebuild cognition as a group We vote for the top 10 strategies to urge development of Kaohsiung. We consider that ¡§Make Kaohsiung the entrance of tourism business and deepen the mechanism of culture and biology in southern Taiwan.¡¨ and ¡§Release limitations for Mainland Chinese¡¦s¡¦ visiting Taiwan, make Kaohsiung international airport the first.¡¨ two worth studying future topics and very likely make benefits for the future development of Kaohsiung.

Theory and research suggests a link between self-esteem and cardiac vagal tone (parasympathetic nervous system influence on the heart). A literature review suggests that vagal tone protects the body against physiological threat responding (e.g., sympathetic responding) and that vagal tone is highest when we feel secure. Terror management theory posits that humans, who live in a largely symbolic world, derive feelings of security and protection from threat by way of acquiring and maintaining self-esteem. Thus we hypothesized that if vagal tone provides physiological security, and we derive a sense of security through symbolic means by way of self-esteem, then high or increased self-esteem should lead to high or increased vagal tone. To test this hypothesis we conducted two studies in which we manipulated self-esteem by giving participants positive or negative feedback. We predicted that positive feedback would lead to higher vagal tone than negative feedback. Consistent with these predictions, in both studies we found indications that positive feedback increased vagal tone relative to negative feedback. In Study 2, to more fully test our theoretical perspective we induced threat by leading participants to believe they would receive electric shocks. We predicted that both self-esteem and vagal tone would buffer against sympathetic threat responding. Consistent with our model we found that the positive feedback eliminated the sympathetic response to threat of shock that was elicited in the negative feedback condition. Also consistent with our model, higher vagal tone predicted lower sympathetic responding to threat of shock. We discuss future directions for this research and implications for physical health.

Cheap electronic storage and Internet bandwidth has increased the amount of online data. Large quantities of metadata are created to manage this wealth of information. Methods to organize and structure metadata has led to the development of ontologies - data that is organized to describe the relation between elements. The creation of large ontologies has brought forth the need for ontology management strategies. Ontology alignment and merging techniques are standard operations for ontology management. Accurate ontology alignment methods are typically semi-automatic, meaning they require periodic user input. This becomes infeasible on large ontologies and the accuracy and efficiency drops significantly when these algorithms are forced to align without human interaction. Bioinformatics, for example, has seen the influx of large ontologies, such as signal pathway sets with thousands of elements or protein-protein interaction (PPI) databases with hundreds of thousands of elements. This drives the need for a reliable method of large-scale ontology alignment. Many bioinformatics ontologies contain references to domain ontologies - manually curated ontologies describing additional, general information about the terms in the ontologies. For example, more than 2/3 of proteins in PPI data sets contain at least one annotation to the domain ontology the Gene Ontology. We use the domain ontology references as features to compute similarity between elements. However, there are few efficient ways to compute similarity from structured features. We present a novel, automatic method for aligning ontologies based on such domain ontology features. Specifically, we use simulated annealing to reduce the complexity of the domain ontologys structure by finding approximate relevant clusters of elements. An intermediate step performs hierarchical clustering based on the similarity between elements of the ontology. Then the mapping between clusters across aligning ontologies is built. The final step builds an alignment between matched clusters. To evaluate our methods, we perform an alignment between Human (Homo Sapiens) and Yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) signal pathways provided by the Reactome database. The results were compared against reliable homology studies of proteins. The final mapping produces alignments that are significantly more accurate than the traditional ontology alignment methods, without any human involvement.

In recent years, many strides have been achieved in the area of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), which is leading to constant innovations in the types of applications that WSNs can support. Much advancement has also been achieved in the area of smart homes, enabling its occupants to manually and easily control their utility expenses. In this thesis, both areas of research will be colluded for a simple, yet critical application: efficient and economical comfort control in smart residential spaces. The goal is to design a central, modular energy consumption control system for residential spaces, which manages energy consumption in all aspects of a typical residence. This thesis is concerned with two facets of energy consumption in residences. The first facet is concerned with controlling when the heating, ventilating, and air conditioning unit (HVAC) operates for each room separately. This is in contrast to a typical HVAC system where comfort is provided across the floor as a whole. The second facet is concerned with controlling the lighting in each room so as to not exceed a certain input value. The communication network that supports the realization of these coveted goals is based on Zigbee interconnected sensor nodes which pour data unto a smart thermostat which does all the required calculations and activates the modules required for comfort control and energy management, if needed. A Java-based discrete event simulator is then written up to simulate a floor of a typical Canadian single-family dwelling. The simulation assumes error-less communication and proceeds to record certain room variables and the ongoing cost of operation periodically. These results from the simulator are compared to the results of the well known simulator, created by DesignBuilder, which describes typical home conditions. The conclusion from this analysis is that the Comfort Control and Energy Management Algorithms (CEMA) are feasible, and that their implementation incurs significant monetary savings.

Då samordnad individuell plan infördes i lagstiftningen 1 januari 2010 var syftet att personer med behov av insatser från fler organisationer än en skulle erbjudas en samordnad individuell plan för att tydliggöra de olika organisationernas ansvar, och förbättra för den enskilde klienten. Syftet med vår studie var att undersöka hur samordnad individuell plan förändrat samverkan mellan kommun och landsting när det handlar om personer med dubbeldiagnos. Studien har bedrivits kvalitativt med en deduktiv strategi, där fyra yrkesverksamma inom en och samma stad har intervjuats. De teorier som användes var case managment samt systemteori. Våra slutsatser är att tillvägagångssättet bör förändras för att undvika extra arbete, det behövs ytterligare riktlinjer för hur samverkan skall bedrivas innan ett gott resultat av lagändringen kan ses, båda organisationerna lägger stor vikt vid klientens behov, klienten blir mer delaktig när SIP används samt att organisationerna behöver mer kunskap om varandras arbetsområden.

A more rapid and widespread use and implementation of technology in construction often fails since its benefits and limitations remain somewhat unclear. Project control is one of the most variable and time consuming task of construction project managers and superintendents, and yet continues to be mostly a manual task. Controlling tasks such as tracking and updating project schedules can be assisted through remotely operating technology such as hi-resolution cameras that can provide construction management and other users with imaging feeds of job site activities. Although construction cameras have been around for many years the costs, benefits, and barriers of their use have not been investigated nor quantified in detail. Subsequently, definitions and understanding vary widely, making it difficult for decision makers at the organizational level to decide on the investment in camera technology. This thesis reviews the status of hi-resolution cameras and their present use in construction. Results of a multi-phased survey to industry professionals were collected in order to identify benefits and barriers and develop a cost-benefit model that can be used for implementation technology in construction.

Cheap electronic storage and Internet bandwidth has increased the amount of online data. Large quantities of metadata are created to manage this wealth of information. Methods to organize and structure metadata has led to the development of ontologies - data that is organized to describe the relation between elements. The creation of large ontologies has brought forth the need for ontology management strategies. Ontology alignment and merging techniques are standard operations for ontology management. Accurate ontology alignment methods are typically semi-automatic, meaning they require periodic user input. This becomes infeasible on large ontologies and the accuracy and efficiency drops significantly when these algorithms are forced to align without human interaction. Bioinformatics, for example, has seen the influx of large ontologies, such as signal pathway sets with thousands of elements or protein-protein interaction (PPI) databases with hundreds of thousands of elements. This drives the need for a reliable method of large-scale ontology alignment. Many bioinformatics ontologies contain references to domain ontologies - manually curated ontologies describing additional, general information about the terms in the ontologies. For example, more than 2/3 of proteins in PPI data sets contain at least one annotation to the domain ontology the Gene Ontology. We use the domain ontology references as features to compute similarity between elements. However, there are few efficient ways to compute similarity from structured features. We present a novel, automatic method for aligning ontologies based on such domain ontology features. Specifically, we use simulated annealing to reduce the complexity of the domain ontologys structure by finding approximate relevant clusters of elements. An intermediate step performs hierarchical clustering based on the similarity between elements of the ontology. Then the mapping between clusters across aligning ontologies is built. The final step builds an alignment between matched clusters. To evaluate our methods, we perform an alignment between Human (Homo Sapiens) and Yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) signal pathways provided by the Reactome database. The results were compared against reliable homology studies of proteins. The final mapping produces alignments that are significantly more accurate than the traditional ontology alignment methods, without any human involvement.

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Submitted by Duarte Zeny (zenydu@gmail.com) on 2013-01-16T15:10:56Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Disserta_final_Lucidalva Ribeiro G. Pinheiro.pdf: 775397 bytes, checksum: 5210f5bc39ee2a164a556284801b5fd3 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2013-01-16T15:10:56Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Disserta_final_Lucidalva Ribeiro G. Pinheiro.pdf: 775397 bytes, checksum: 5210f5bc39ee2a164a556284801b5fd3 (MD5) / Objetivo geral buscar, investigar como é realizado o desenvolvimento dos projetos de informatização de unidades informacional e o gerenciamento da comunicação entre profissionais de Ciência da Informação (bibliotecários e arquivistas) e profissionais de Tecnologia da Informação (analistas de sistemas, programadores, entre outros profissionais). Os objetivos específicos tiveram como foco a utilização de possíveis soluções para minimizar ou eliminar as dificuldades de comunicação relatadas. Entre as possíveis soluções buscou-se verificar a existência de algum projeto para a informatização das unidades de informação; verificar se os profissionais que compunham a amostra da pesquisa conheciam ou utilizavam a metodologia do PMI (Project Management Institute). O método utilizado foi a pesquisa de campo. A amostra da pesquisa foi composta por 22 bibliotecários de realidades distintas (que deveriam colocar empresa pública e privada, no estado da Bahia) e para a coleta dos dados optou-se pela aplicação de questionário. Foi constatado que 33% dos entrevistados não elaboraram projeto para informatização de unidades de informação e 82% não conheciam e não aplicavam a metodologia PMI no desenvolvimento de atividades relacionadas à informatização. Na pesquisa foi constatado que, em relação ao problema de comunicação entre profissionais de CI e TI, 50% das respostas afirmam a existência de problemas ou ruídos na comunicação, informação que valida a premissa inicial. / Salvador