The modern world is facing a revolutionary development in the clinical medicine and biomedical sciences. Due to the different life supporting systems, it is easily possible to keep patients with severe diseases alive. With organ transplantation a lot of people, who would otherwise die can live long and happy lives. In vitro fertilization allows a woman to bear the child that is not genetically related to her. Due to the possibility of contraception, safe abortions and prenatal diagnosis, women and couples can make preferable choices concerning their future child. Such medical developments and improvements have a great impact on our life, and provoke a lot of ethical questions and moral dilemmas. The aim of this thesis is to answer the question whether prenatal diagnosis can be justified as it mainly leads to the selective abortion, whether and when the fetus counts as a person and whether the prospective parents can perform selective abortion on the basis of fetal disability; and to discuss ethical problems that are experienced by the doctor, who brings the news into the family and what is his/her role in the decision-making process.

Human vision is remarkable. By limiting the main concentration of high-acuity photoreceptors to the eye's central fovea region, we efficiently view the world by redirecting the fovea between points of interest using eye movements called <em>saccades</em>. <br /><br /> Part I describes a saccadic vision system prototype design. The dual-resolution saccadic camera detects objects of interest in a scene by processing low-resolution image information; it then revisits salient regions in high-resolution. The end product is a dual-resolution image in which background information is displayed in low-resolution, and salient areas are captured in high-acuity. This lends to a resource-efficient active vision system. <br /><br />Part II describes CMOS image sensor designs for active vision. Specifically, this discussion focuses on methods to determine regions of interest and achieve high dynamic range on the sensor.

An ad hoc network is a collection of mobile wireless devices that cooperate with each other to route packets amongst themselves. The main difficulty in designing routing algorithms for such a network is the large number of topology changes that the network undergoes due to device movement. Selective flooding is a routing technique that is more resilient to topology changes than traditional algorithms but is more bandwidth efficient than pure flooding. An on-demand selective flooding algorithm has been designed and tested on the ns-2 simulator. In scenarios involving a large number of topology changes, selective flooding outperforms other ad hoc network routing techniques. Unfortunately, selective flooding is much more bandwidth hungry and is unable to scale to handle reasonable traffic loads. Interestingly, the analysis of selective flooding reveals major problems with traditional ad hoc networking techniques. Many current algorithms demonstrate shortcomings when dealing with bursty traffic, and current wireless hardware cannot handle ad hoc networking traffic in an efficient manner. These issues need to be addressed before ad hoc networking technology can become feasible for widespread use.

This thesis concerns selective attention in the context of the Stroop task (identify the colour) and Reverse Stroop task (identify the word). When a person is asked to select and identify one dimension of a bidimensional stimulus (e. g. , the word RED printed in green) the typical finding is that the word influences colour identification (i. e. , the Stroop effect) but the colour does not influence word identification (i. e. , no Reverse Stroop effect). A major account of performance in these tasks posits that one dimension interferes with the other only when a translation occurs (e. g. , Roelofs, <i>Psychological Review, 2003</i>; Sugg & McDonald, <i>Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, 1994</i>; Virzi & Egeth, <i>Memory & Cognition, 1985</i>). This translation assumption is implicit in virtually all work in the field. The first part of this thesis completely undermines the translation assumption. In a series of four experiments (two unique paradigms), I demonstrate that interference from the colour in a Reverse Stroop task occurs in the absence of a translation. The second part of this thesis contains two additional experiments designed to discriminate between translation effects and response conflict effects. The results of these experiments confirm that a translation was not required because no stimulus conflict effect, the most likely locus of a translation effect, was observed. However, response conflict effects were observed. The third part of this thesis implements a computational model based on the principle that the strength of association (Cohen, Dunbar, & McClelland, <i>Psychological Review, 1990</i>) between a specific stimulus and its response (Logan, </i>Psychological Review, 1988</i>) is important in determining the influence of the irrelevant dimension. This model has no translation mechanism. A final experiment was conducted to test this model; the model accounted for over 98% of the variance in RTs and 92% of the variance in interference and facilitation scores in both the Stroop and Reverse Stroop tasks independent of whether a translation was required.

The potential application of a hydrogel-based strong anion-exchange (Q) membrane to purify plasmid DNAs was evaluated. The maximum binding capacity of plasmid DNA was estimated to be 12.4 mg/ml of membrane volume with a plasmid DNA recovery of ~ 90%, which is superior to other commercially available anion-exchange resins and membranes. The membrane was able to retain its structural integrity and performance after multiple cycles of usage (> 30 cycles). The inherent properties of plasmid DNA, membrane adsorbent, and the ionic environment on membrane performance were identified as the factors affecting membrane performance and their effects were systematically investigated. Plasmid DNAs with smaller tertiary structure have shorter dynamic radius and/or lowersurface charge densities, which tended to have a better adsorption and recovery than those with larger tertiary structure. Environmental Scanning Electron Microscopy (ESEM) revealed that the hydrogel structure is more porous on one side of membrane than the other, and higher plasmid DNA adsorption and recovery capacities were observed if the more porous side of the membrane was installed upward of flow in the chromatographic unit. ESEM also revealed improved pore distribution and increased membrane porosity if membrane was pre-equilibrated in the buffer solution for 16 hours. The development of better flow through channel in the hydrogel membrane upon extensive soaking further improved plasmid DNA adsorption and recovery capacities. The ionic environment affects the tertiary size of plasmid DNA; and the optimal operating pH of membrane chromatography was different for the plasmid DNAs investigated in this study. The relative contribution of these factors to improve membrane chromatography of plasmid DNAs was analyzed using statistical modeling. It was found that the adsorption of plasmid DNA was mainly affected by the available adsorptive area associated with membrane porosity, whereas the recovery of plasmid DNAs was mainly affected by the environmental pH. A novel, RNase-free, and potentially scalable bioprocess was synthesized using the hydrogel membrane as the technology platform for the manufacturing of pharmaceutical-grade plasmid DNA. High bioprocess recovery and product quality were primarily associated with the optimal integration of impurity removal by calcium chloride precipitation and anion-exchange membrane chromatography and the implementation of isopropanol precipitation as a coupling step between the two impurity-removing steps. Complete removal of total cellular RNA impurity was demonstrated without the use of animal-derived RNase. High-molecular-weight (HMW) RNA and genomic DNA (gDNA) were removed by selective precipitation using calcium chloride at an optimal concentration. Complete removal of the remaining low-molecular-weight (LMW) RNA was achieved by membrane chromatography using the high-capacity and high-productive hydrogel membrane. The simultaneous achievement of desalting, concentrating and buffer exchange by the coupling step of isopropanol precipitation and the high efficiency and resolution of DNA-RNA separation by anion-exchange membrane chromatography significantly reduced the operating complexity of the overall bioprocess, increased the overall recovery of plasmid DNA, and enhanced product quality by removing trace amounts of impurities of major concern for biomedical applications, such as gDNA, proteins, and endotoxin.

Decrements in selective attention are a commonly experienced phenomenon that has practical implications for many industries. Two causes of such deficits are mental fatigue and alcohol intoxication, which impair selective attention by decreasing the efficiency of inhibitory processes. The present research examined the effects of these two factors on the selective attention subtest of the Useful Field of View test in both a baseline and an experimental session. Participants in the mental fatigue condition (n = 14) were tested while performing a divided attention task for two hours to induce mental fatigue. Those in the alcohol condition (n = 10) were tested while achieving a peak blood alcohol content of 0.05%. No differences between the two groups were observed, nor was a significant decline in selective attention observed as a result of either manipulation. The results indicate three possible explanations for this lack of a difference including a floor effect on the selective attention task, a pop-out effect in switching from the divided to the selective attention task, and an increase in attentional effort regulation due to the contrast in difficulty of the divided and selective attention tasks.

Recently, the transmission of vector quantization (VQ) over a code-division multiple access (CDMA) channel has received a considerable attention in research community. The complexity of the optimal decoding for VQ in CDMA communications is prohibitive for implementation, especially for systems with a medium or large number of users. A suboptimal approach to VQ decoding over a CDMA channel, disturbed by additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), was recently developed. Such a suboptimal decoder is built from a soft-output multiuser detector (MUD), a soft bit estimator and the optimal soft VQ decoders of individual users. <p>Due to its lower complexity and good performance, such a decoding scheme is an attractive alternative to the complicated optimal decoder. It is necessary to extend this decoding scheme for a frequency-selective Rayleigh fading CDMA channel, a channel model typically seen in mobile wireless communications. This is precisely the objective of this thesis. <p>Furthermore, the suboptimal decoders are obtained not only for binary phase shift keying (BPSK), but also for M-ary pulse amplitude modulation (M-PAM). This extension offers a flexible trade-off between spectrum efficiency and performance of the systems. In addition, two algorithms based on distance measure and reliability processing are introduced as other alternatives to the suboptimal decoder. <p>Simulation results indicate that the suboptimal decoders studied in this thesis also performs very well over a frequency-selective Rayleigh fading CDMA channel.

Human blood reflects the health of internal organs and tissues, the constituent can be affected on account of abnormal health status. Moreover, the ion concentration of chloride and ammonium in human blood relates to the functionality of our kidney and liver, which is one of the most important health indicators. For real-time monitoring and detecting applications, this study uses micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) surface micromachining process technology to develop an extended-gate field-effect transistors (EGFET), and by combining two different ion-selective membranes (ISM), a disposable silicon-based chloride and ammonium micro ion sensor was fabricated. The main process steps include four photolithography process and two thin film deposition. In order to probe into the influences on modulating three designing parameters: (i) channel width to length ratio; (ii) channel shape; (iii) mixing ratio of the sensing film additives, the size of the sensing area is fixed to 1¡Ñ1 mm2 while the device is fixed to 6 mm3. In this thesis, the optimization of the development chloride and ammonium micro ion sensors, according to the measuring results from the commercial semiconductor analyzer (Agilent B1500A), when measuring range of 10-1~10-5 mol/L, the sensitivity and linearity for the chlorine ion sensor is 47.5 mV/pCl and 99.13%, as for the ammonium ion sensor are 41.2 mV/pNH4 and 99.28%, the interfering ion selectivity coefficients (log KCl,OH, log KNH ,Na) are -4.71 and 0.53 respectively.

The research has investigated the traditional bakery¡¦s marketing strategy. In recent years, traditional bakery store has impacted by the introduce of western diet culture and people being used to having western bakery food. Using the case of Wu Chi Bakery, as a well-known bakery store in local, it has faced the difficulty. The framework of the research is according to the developing procedure of marketing strategy. To understand the marketing environment of the bakery industry and the marketing strategy of the Wu Chi Bakery. The conclusions as below: 1. Product strategy: Characteristics of the product is the most important factor when consumer have to decide whether to purchase. 2. Promotion strategy: Service and introduction is the most efficiency way to promote the product. 3. Channel strategy: Using selective distribution strategy to expand channels. 4. Price strategy: To unify the price, using single-price strategy ,except for bulk purchase. According to the conclusions, suggestions are as below: 1. Taking advantage of being specialty. 2. Enlarging channels. 3. Varying the product line. 4. Combined with related industries.

In this thesis, the problem of data transmission in amplify-and-forward (AF) co- operative system which implemented joint channel estimation and data detection at the destination (receiver) is considered. The nonlinear block code is designed to as- sist the above methodology. The design criterion takes into account the uncertainty of channel parameters at the receiver based on joint channel estimation and data detection algorithm and the simulations will prove that it can achieve full diversity that is offered by multiple relay and frequency-selective fading channel. Using an approximation of the union boun on the error probability as the design criterion, such that it can be simulated as a function for simulated annealing algorithm. The designed codewords are applied to the AF cooperative system. In order to assess the performance of joint estimation and detection fashion, the numerical simulations will be carried out the word error rate (WER) performances illustrate that improve- ment over differnt benchmark schemes can be obtained.