It is generally assumed that increased map precision (ie map unit homogeneity) and map purity (map unit accuracy) should result from increasing the scale of mapping of the soil resource, since it should enable a more intricate breakdown of the landscape into landform facet based units. This study compared the predictive success of a 1:10K scale soil association map with the 1:25K and 1:lOOK scale soil landscape maps within the Birrigai area of the Paddy's river catchment, south west of Canberra, A.C.T. The 1:25K and the 1:lOOK scale soil landscape maps were also evaluated in a second larger evaluation area in the Paddy's river catchment which allowed more of the larger soil landscape map units to be evaluated. The 1:25K scale soil map was produced by another author for the A.C.T Government, and was surveyed at a substantially lower survey intensity than that for the 1:lOOK and 1:10K scale soil maps (ie only 0.05 observation sites / cm2 of published map). These maps were evaluated using a set of randomly located independent evaluation sites in each evaluation area, and from these calculating and comparing standard Marsman & de Gruijter(1986) measures of Map Purity. The strength of soil-landscape relationships within this catchment were determined from a Fixed One Way Analysis of Variance, and from more simplistic graphical comparisons of the means and standard deviations of the discrete soil data within these landform based map units. Soil-landscape relationships for the Nominal scale soil data (ie class type data) were evaluated by comparing the Marsman & de Gruijter(1986) Homogeneity index ratings among the soil map units. Intensive survey traverses were also carried out in selected soil landscapes to further evaluate the strength of soil landscapes present. The results revealed obvious improvements in map quality associated with increasing map scale from 1:100,000 to 1:10,000, and these included increases in the predictive success (Map Purity), reductions in the extent of map unit impurities, and planning advantages associated with having individual land facets delineated on the 1:10,000 scale map. The respectable purity ratings achieved by the 1:100,000 scale soil landscape map (ie average purity rating of 63%) was largely attributed to the flexibility of the "soil material" approach to soil landscape mapping. The relatively poor performance of the 1:25K consultancy soil landscape map demonstrated the fact that; any benefit gained from the improved intricacy in the representation of map unit delineation's with increased mapping scale, will be drastically reduced if it is not matched by an associated increase in the intensity of field investigations. Evaluations of the soil-landscape relationships found that the land facets of the Paddy's river catchment generally failed to delineate areas that were both uniform and unique in respect of their soil properties. Soil-landscape relationships were instead found to be quite complex, applying to only certain land facets, and in regards to only certain soil properties. Soil maps with units based on landsurface features were recommended on the basis of the importance of other landscape factors other than soils to land capability ratings, as well as on the useability of such maps. This study recommended the adoption of a" >2 detailed soil profile observations / land facet in each map unit" mapping standard to ensure a reasonable estimate of the variability and modal soil conditions present, as well as a reliable confirmation of the perceived soil-landscape relationships. The error usually associated with small scale mapping was effectively reduced by rapid ground truthing, involving driving along the major roads dissecting the map area and making brief observations of soil exposures on road batters, despite the bias of the road network making such mapping improvements uneven across the map. The major point to come from this study was the re-emphasising of the point that soil spatial variability has to be accepted as a "real landscape attribute" which needs to be accurately described and communicated to land users, and must not be considered as some sort of soil mapping failure. The fact that individual facets of the landscape rarely coincide with unique pockets of uniform and unique soils and soil properties must be considered simply an on the ground reality of nature, and not some mapping failure. It was thought that since other landscape factors (eg hillslope gradient) most often dominate the determination of land use suitability and capability, it is better to effectively describe the range and modal state of the soil conditions within such facets, then to attempt to extrapolate possible soil boundaries using geostatistical techniques which cut across such land facets, and mayor may not correlate with real groupings of soil properties, depending on the spatial resolution of the soil variability distribution in the landscape. Even so the results of this investigation do put the validity of the physiographic terrain class mapping model as a predictor of soil traits under question, at least for the more complex landscape settings.

[Abstract]: Mapping agencies, national and regional, are finding it increasingly difficult to maintain the currency of their suite of map related products and services. These products include topographic maps and the provision of up to date topographic data. The maintenance of this socially important spatial information is at issue through the duplication of effort that presently exists within government agencies at all levels. A dedicated data sharing and topographic maintenance program has the potential to solve all of these issues. The "NOW Map" gives the "map hungry" public the ability to obtain spatially located data and products in time frames and formats of their choosing. This system is capable of delivering consistent, dynamic and contemporary geospatial information. It will be flexible, in response to a modern ever-changing society, and capable of providing up to date topographic maps and data that not only meets current standards, but also continually exceeds them. After the development of initial procedures, a pilot study was conducted to expand and further refine data collection and analysis procedures. This was followed by a final data-gathering research phase. The research used relevant local, interstate and international examples in all areas of the study. The outcomes of the pilot study and analysis of the second research segment demonstrated that maps can be maintained more efficiently through the utilisation of accurate up to date information. These topographically significant updates can be provided incrementally by organisations that maintain data as part of their own core business.

Across boreal forests and resource rich areas, human-induced change is rapidly occurring at various spatial scales. In the past, satellite remote sensing has provided a cost effective, reliable method of monitoring these changes over time and over relatively small areas. Those instruments offering high spatial detail, such as Landsat Thematic Mapper or Enhanced Thematic Mapper (TM or ETM+), typically have small swath widths and long repeat times that result in compositing intervals that are too large to resolve accurate time scales for many of these changes. Obtaining multiple scenes and producing maps over very large, forested areas is further restricted by high processing costs and the small window of acquisition opportunity. Coarse spatial resolution instruments such as the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) or the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) typically have short revisit times (days rather than weeks), large swath widths (hundreds of kilometres), and in some cases, hyperspectral resolutions, making them prime candidates for multiple-scale change detection research initiatives. <p>In this thesis, the effectiveness of 250m spatial resolution MODIS data for the purpose of updating existing large-area, 30m spatial resolution Landsat TM land cover map product is tested. A land cover polygon layer was derived by segmentation of Landsat TM data using eCognition 4.0. This polygon layer was used to create a polygon-based MODIS NDVI time series consisting of imagery acquired in 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2005. These MODIS images were then differenced to produce six multiple-scale layers of change. Accuracy assessment, based on available GIS data in a subregion of the larger map area, showed an overall accuracy as high as 59% with the largest error associated with change omission (0.51). The Cramers V correlation coefficient (0.38) was calculated using the GIS data. This was compared to the results of an index-based Landsat change detection, Cramers V=0.67. This thesis research showed that areas greater than 15 hectares are adequately represented (approximately 75% accuracy) with the MODIS-based change detection technique. The resulting change information offers potential to identify areas that have been burned or extensively logged, and provides general information on those areas that have experienced greater change and are likely suitable for analysis with higher spatial resolution data.

Across boreal forests and resource rich areas, human-induced change is rapidly occurring at various spatial scales. In the past, satellite remote sensing has provided a cost effective, reliable method of monitoring these changes over time and over relatively small areas. Those instruments offering high spatial detail, such as Landsat Thematic Mapper or Enhanced Thematic Mapper (TM or ETM+), typically have small swath widths and long repeat times that result in compositing intervals that are too large to resolve accurate time scales for many of these changes. Obtaining multiple scenes and producing maps over very large, forested areas is further restricted by high processing costs and the small window of acquisition opportunity. Coarse spatial resolution instruments such as the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) or the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) typically have short revisit times (days rather than weeks), large swath widths (hundreds of kilometres), and in some cases, hyperspectral resolutions, making them prime candidates for multiple-scale change detection research initiatives. <p>In this thesis, the effectiveness of 250m spatial resolution MODIS data for the purpose of updating existing large-area, 30m spatial resolution Landsat TM land cover map product is tested. A land cover polygon layer was derived by segmentation of Landsat TM data using eCognition 4.0. This polygon layer was used to create a polygon-based MODIS NDVI time series consisting of imagery acquired in 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2005. These MODIS images were then differenced to produce six multiple-scale layers of change. Accuracy assessment, based on available GIS data in a subregion of the larger map area, showed an overall accuracy as high as 59% with the largest error associated with change omission (0.51). The Cramers V correlation coefficient (0.38) was calculated using the GIS data. This was compared to the results of an index-based Landsat change detection, Cramers V=0.67. This thesis research showed that areas greater than 15 hectares are adequately represented (approximately 75% accuracy) with the MODIS-based change detection technique. The resulting change information offers potential to identify areas that have been burned or extensively logged, and provides general information on those areas that have experienced greater change and are likely suitable for analysis with higher spatial resolution data.

Nowadays Optical fiber communication is one of the important way to convey information, and there is strong competition in optical long-haul transmission to achieve high channel bit rates and large transmission capacity. Therefore, it is important to study a technology to improve the performance of such system. As we have already known, the dispersion flattened fiber (DFF) and Return-to-zero differential phase shift keying (RZ-DPSK) modulation are attractive, because it can improve the transmission performance of the long-haul system, therefore, it is possible to improve the transmission performance by a combination of the RZ-DPSK and the DFF, and the performance improvement investigation is required, because it will contribute to improve the system design of the long-haul optical fiber communication systems in near future. In this master thesis, a theoretical study focused on the RZ-DPSK transmission system using DFF is conducted. One important technology of current long-haul optical fiber communication system is a dispersion map. In this master thesis, difference of the transmission performance is characterized with regard to number of dispersion blocks within the dispersion map, different repeater output power and different compensation scheme within dispersion map, etc., all of them calculated by a numerical simulator .The goal is to clarify the optimum dispersion map design of the long-haul DPSK based transmission and find the effective method to improve the transmission performance.

This thesis presents a 3D stereoscopic interactive fish tank system that combines the 3D stereoscopy and ¡§controller-free¡¨ components. Based on the characteristics of human vision, when seeing the objects, the left eye image and right eye image will be slightly different, one can use the intensity information and the epipolar geometry to proceed matching, and then to generate the 3D depth information. This system allows a user to use gesture to do interaction. It estimates 3D objects depth information, and uses eyes distance, distance between the user and the sensor, disparity map to calculate the virtual objects¡¦ three-dimensional coordinate, and then transforms hand and virtual objects¡¦ coordinate into the same coordinate to allow accurate interaction. The system allows users to experience the innovative multi-media interactive entertainment.

In this research, we integrate the voice commands technique into Google Map. It means that we can control part of the movements for Google Map search without using the mouse or keyboard but with voice. Our voice command system is built on the client side. The biggest different between our system and state-of-the-art real-time speech processing system is that all the computation about the speech process always work on the client side. For our corpus, we choose the Top100 scenic spots in Taiwan and some specific control commands as our training data. In the experiment of our research, we make use of the different ways to train the acoustic models and design dictionary and language models to estimate the efficiency on our system. Actual usage in the system, we can move the map center to the specific location sequentially by voice command operations for location, control and coordinate. we estimate the overall search process time on some specific locations by different users. It spends 20.8 seconds in average which spends most of time in recording stage.

MAP kinases and transcription factors homologous to Saccharomyces cerevisiae Fus3p/Kss1p and Ste12p have been identified in several plant pathogenic fungi and found to be required for pathogenicity and sexual reproduction. A gene encoding the homolog of Fus3p/Kss1p in Neurospora crassa was isolated previously and named mak- 2 (mitogen activated kinase -2). This dissertation describes the isolation of the Ste12p homolog, pp-1 (protoperithecia-1) and the comparison of the phenotypes of the mak-2 and pp-1 mutants. The similar phenotypes of the mak-2 and pp-1 null mutants suggest that these proteins are part of the same MAP kinase signaling cascade in N. crassa. In addition to reduced growth rate, the phenotypes of the mutants demonstrate that this pathway is required for female fertility, contributes to aerial hyphal development and repression of conidiophore development. The mak-2 MAP kinase pathway also regulates several genes putatively involved in secondary metabolism during the mating process. Among these is a gene cluster that is likely to be involved in the production of a polyketide secondary metabolite. An orthologous gene cluster was also identified in M. grisea, and the structural and functional homology of these two related gene clusters was characterized. Microarray analysis was used to extend the analysis of gene expression in mak-2 and pp-1 mutants, and a number of downstream target genes of the MAP kinase pathway were identified and called mak-2 kinase-regulated genes (mkr). A model of this MAP kinase pathway in N. crassa was developed. Since N. crassa is a saprophytic fungus but closely related to several plant pathogens, this research may provide an important perspective on the evolution of a major regulatory pathway governing fungal pathogenesis.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri--Columbia, 2001. / "December 2001." Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 181-193). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Pennsylvania, 1933. / "Reprint from the Journal of applied psychology, vol. XVII, no. 4." Bibliography: p. 405-406.