Viena iš labiausiai išplitusių žiniatinklio paslaugų technologijų – SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) servisai, yra pakankamai sudėtingi ir neefektyvūs. Vis dažniau naudojamos įvairios šių servisų alternatyvos. Viena tokių alternatyvų yra REST (Representational state transfer) architektūros principų taikymas žiniatinklio paslaugų kūrimui. Šio tipo paslaugas yra paprasta realizuoti ir jos yra efektyvesnės nei SOAP variantas. Be to, jų kūrimo metodas remiasi gerai žinomomis ir senai žiniatinklyje nusistovėjusiomis koncepcijomis. Šiame magistriniame darbe atliktas REST architektūros principų tyrimas ir taikymas, darbo metu sukurtos, daugiavartotojiškos pozicionavimo sistemos kontekste. Aprašytos šios sistemos teikiamos galimybės, struktūra ir įgyvendinimo ypatumai. Tai pat, pateikti šios sistemos kontekste atlikto SOAP ir REST servisų efektyvumo eksperimento rezultatai. / One of the most known web service technologies today – SOAP Web services, is fairly complicated and inefficient. Other SOAP Web service alternatives become more and more popular. One of these alternatives is REST style architecture application in web service implementations. This type of web services is much simpler and efficient than SOAP Web services. Furthermore, it is based on well-established web concepts. This work describes analysis and implementation of REST style architecture in created multi-user position tracking system. Document provides detailed description of implemented position tracking system possibilities, structure and implementation peculiarity. Finally, experimental proof is given about SOAP and REST service implementations efficiency in this system.

Use of wireless network information for indoor positioning has been an area of interest since wireless networks became very popular. On the other hand, the market started to grow in variety and production volumes leading to a variety of devices with many different hardware and software combinations. In the field of indoor positioning, most of the existing technologies are dependent on additional hardware and/or infrastructure, which increases the cost and requirements for both users and providers. This thesis investigates possible methods of coupling indoor geo-fencing with access control including authentication, identification, and registration in a system. Moreover, various techniques are studied in order to improve the robustness and security of such a system. The focus of these studies is to improve the proposed system in such a way that gives it the ability to operate properly in noisy, heterogeneous, and less controlled environments where the presence of attackers is highly probable. To achieve this, a classification based geo-fencing approach using Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) has been employed so that accurate geo-fencing is coupled with secure communication and computing. Experimental results show that considerable positioning accuracy has been achieved while providing high security measures for communication and transactions. Favouring diversity and generic design, the proposed implementation does not mandate users to undergo any system software modification or adding new hardware components.

No abstract available. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2010.

This research has been conducted in an attempt to aid the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, in being more market oriented in a market that, until recently, saw little need to market its institutions in the past. Traditionally tertiary educational institutions have relied on their reputation to attract students. Fortunately tertiary institutions have recognised the need for marketing and positioning themselves in the market. Scholars highlighted what they considered to be the most important attributes when choosing a tertiary institution. Using this information, marketers at the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg (UNP), can tailor its marketing strategies around these attributes and the scholars that view them as important. The top 5 attributes that the scholars indicated were the most important are as follows: 1. Highly Qualified Lecturers 2. Academic Standards 3. International Recognition 4. Reputation 5. Affordable Fees The scholar's perceptions of institutions based on the most important attributes showed that the University of Cape Town (UCT) is perceived as being the top university - the market leader and can therefore be considered as the benchmark. UNP has been perceived as "average", between institutions such as UCT, Rhodes, Stellenbosch and Wits on one side and Damelin, Varsity College, University of South Africa (UNISA) on the other side. Generally the scholars perceived UNP in a positive light. The University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg is perceived positively with regards to up-to-date facilities (in terms of the laboratory, computers and the library), as well as a good social life, multi-racial mix, sports facilities, approachability of lecturers, security upgrades, and that it is an excellent academic institution. These represent the strengths of the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg and must be stressed and communicated to potential customers as well as present students who will in turn act as marketers themselves when with friends. The negative perceptions towards the UNP were related to: • Safety on campus at night, • The idea that the social life at UNP is what university is all about, • The lack of personal attention, and • Students being treated as nothing more than a student number to staff. These negative and poor perceptions must be dealt with through effective communication that will highlight the strengths of the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg. The result of the findings relating to the University's position in the market (based on the important attributes) is reflected in the positioning maps. From these maps it can be seen that the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg does not occupy a distinct position in the market. The mere fact that UNP was rated as average on the most important attributes reflects the poor positioning in the minds of the customers. It is a distinctive nature of positioning that must be sought after. As a result of the poor position the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg holds in the minds of the customer, steps to successful positioning were revisited and recommendations were made to the University. In communicating the position of UNP it must be remembered that the marketing mix needs to be aligned with the intended position of the business. The University's use of the lP's, a vital component of the positioning strategy, was evaluated and recommendations made to the University. / Thesis (M.Comm. ; School of Business) - University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2003.

When accidents occur, citizens often are the real first responders. This has been acknowledged and studied from an international perspective, particularly in relation to large crises and disasters, but remains relatively unstudied from a Swedish perspective. This thesis takes its point of departure from people who have been emergency callers or witnesses to traffic accidents, studying their actions and interactions at the scene of an accident in terms of boundaries, positioning and emergence. The aim of this thesis is to study how people’s actions in a specific situation are affected by their interactions with both real and imagined others and how their actions are affected by the spatial context. The thesis consists of four individual studies that relate differently to the main aim of the thesis. The first study focuses on first responders’ options to act in a place that simultaneously is the workplace of emergency personnel: the incident site. This study shows how first responders’ options to act are governed in large part by their interaction with emergency personnel and their boundary practices at the incident site. In this study, we apply theories of boundary practices from Nippert-Eng and the concept of boundary work from Gieryn to explain how emergency personnel control their place of work through boundary practices and through that process control those first responders who are present at the site. In other words, people’s actions at the incident site are affected by both the social and the spatial context. The second study focuses on a limited selection of first responders: those who have placed emergency calls. Through interviews with callers and transcriptions of their emergency calls, this study explores how the callers frame their decision to stop and place the call through different presentations of self. These presentations are constructed through moral positioning, in which the callers position themselves and their actions in relation to both real and imagined others. Thus, the callers also construct normative accounts of what is considered a “preferable” and “non-preferable” way to act at the scene of an accident. The third study takes its point of departure from theories and previous research on emergence because they have been used by disaster sociologists to explain how citizens are the real first responders to crises and disasters. Through the concepts of emergent behavior and emergent norms, papers in this research field have argued that people in these situations act according to “new and not-yet-institutionalized behavior guidelines”. In this study, I argue that emergence, in other words, citizens as the real first responders, is also present in everyday emergencies. Through the narratives of citizen first responders, I explore how they frame their actions through different normative narratives. These normative narratives are not necessarily emergent, however. Rather, the interviewees use past experience and presentations of self to justify their actions at the scene of an accident. The fourth study is an ethnographic reflection of the researcher’s place-bounded identity in a field study that revolves around several different places. Rather than focusing on a story of first responders, this study focuses on the researcher’s, i.e., my own, story from the scene of an accident, the fire truck and the fire station. What I have been able to study through these different studies are stories of actions rather than “actual” actions or behaviors. In these stories, it becomes clear that first responders relate to both a social and spatial context as they provide accounts of their actions at the scene of an accident. They relate to a social context because they frame their actions through their interactions with different actors and position themselves in relation to those actors—and in relation to a spatial context. That is, they perform their actions in a place that is someone else’s place of work, with jurisdictional claims of both legitimacy and control. In summary, this thesis contributes a deeper knowledge of how citizen first responders interpret, understand and tell the story of their actions at the scene of an accident. The contribution considers the fact that citizen first responders are something of a “blind spot”, not only in the field of emergency research but also for emergency personnel who do not always acknowledge the experience of first responders at the scene of accidents.

No description available.

This is an ethnographic study from within mathematics teacher education in Sweden. A methodological insider approach enabled to view teacher education from the students’ perspectives, by focusing how discursive power-relations affected what becoming mathematics teachers brought forward as concerning during two years of education. I took a socio-political theoretical perspective and understood discourse, power and positioning as dynamically interrelated concepts, which allowed the analysis to foreground several aspects simultaneously and to illustrate elusive phenomena as they occurred and disappeared. The results show that the mathematics education and mathematics discourses are open and multifaceted and reveal empowered positionings, whereas the language/culture and institutional discourses both are narrower and more constraining. These constraints, in turn, affect students’ possibilities to enact empowered positionings within the more open discourses. The core of education, that is mathematics and mathematics education, may therefore be obscured by discourses of “truths”. The study shows a need for further research on how to strengthen students’ possibilities to influence their education, and to ask questions like why education is organised this way, and who benefits from that.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the brand management of a motor manufacturing company. The study set out to establish what the most important elements are that contribute towards a successful brand and to identify a potential model that can be used to measure the brand elements that are evident in the Toyota brand. By using this model, the Toyota brand was evaluated, bringing to the fore the key success factors that have made Toyota the number one motor manufacturing brand in South Africa. The qualitative research was conducted to evaluate Toyota's understanding of its brand and then questioning the usage of the brand through an individual interview with the custodian of the Toyota Brand in South Africa. The results of this qualitative research were used to identify the key values that the manufacturer sees as brand-building elements and to then evaluate how they are using these values to build and enhance the brand. These core brand values were then evaluated in the quantitative research that followed. The quantitative research was conducted through questionnaires where the retail network (General Managers, Sales Managers in the Toyota retail network) evaluated Toyota SA's implementation of its brand's core values through the dealer network. The sample size consisted of twenty nine (N=29) randomly selected Unitrans Toyota dealers in the country. An extension of the study compared these key success factors with the values that are delivered through the retail network to the customers. The brand expectations that the customer has in mind to the realisation of the brand promise at retail level were compared. This study gives insight into the workings of the Toyota brand and tests the communication of the brand blueprint through to the retail network. This study allows Toyota to review the way they communicates their brand to the direct customer, the retail network. The study also found that Toyota should use the opportunity to communicate the brand name to its direct customers, namely the retailers, and that, if needed, Toyota should revise the communication strategy. Other recommendations are that both Toyota and its retailers should take note of the fast-changing business environment, acknowledge the importance of managing the length of the product line, and that Toyota should embrace the retailers as partners rather than mere franchisees. The retail network, in turn, can get a better understanding of the role it has to play to ensure the sustainability of the Toyota brand. The study also allows the retail network to realize the importance of customer service in the whole Toyota brand set-up. / Thesis (M.B.A.)--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2010.

Improved actuator point-to-point positioning performance, as measured by settling time, has been demonstrated in the context of manufacturing automation applications such as circuit board assembly and other product-transfer operations. The control objective is to move a single mass in a single axis from a starting position to a target position following the fastest possible motion trajectory while meeting final-position accuracy requirements. The actuator's achievable force that is available for acceleration is the fundamental variable that determines optimal settling time. The actuator technology employed is the linear variable reluctance motor. Mathematical motor models and simulation programs have been developed to perform several tasks necessary for demonstrating improved actuator performance: (i) optimal commutation under force ripple constraints has been computed to determine ripple-specified force limits and to provide excitation waveforms necessary for force production, (ii) motion profiles for several positioning task scenarios have been generated based on computed ripple-specified force limits, (iii) state space integral position control simulations have been performed to evaluate the degree of success of the proposed relaxation of force ripple constraints in improving settling time and (iv) the computed settling times for positioning tasks have been examined in relation to the copper losses associated with them in order to assess the trade-off. It has been shown that higher force capability is achieved when force-ripple constraints, which have been customarily emphasized in positioning applications, are relaxed. The higher capability is exploited by adopting faster motion trajectories, which are then imposed under feedback control to achieve faster settling time. Improved force capability with relaxed ripple constraints is demonstrated by generating average force versus speed capability curves under ripple constraints ranging from minimal ripple to unconstrained ripple. Improved positioning performance, with relaxed ripple constraints and without violating the final-position accuracy specification, is demonstrated by computing and comparing settling time for multiple positioning tasks with trajectories based on both extremes of force capability, lowest (no-ripple) and highest (unconstrained-ripple) force limits. The results have been demonstrated for two LVR motor configurations: one motor configuration represents typical (switched) linear and rotary variable reluctance motors while the other exhibits features of both switched and synchronous varieties of variable reluctance motors.

The development of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is enabled by the recent advances in wireless communication and sensing technologies. WSN have a wide range of scientific and commercial applications. In many applications the sensed data is useless if the location of the event is not associated with the data. Thus localization plays a substantial role in WSNs. Increased dependence on devices and sensed data presses for more efficient and accurate localization schemes. In many Internet of Things (IoT) deployments the area covered is large making it impossible to localize all devices and Sensor Networks (SNs) using single-hop localization techniques. A solution to this problem is to use a multi-hop localization technique to estimate devices' positions. In small areas SNs require at least three anchor nodes within their transmission range to estimate their location. Despite numerous existing localization techniques, the fundamental behavior of multi-hop localization is, as yet, not fully examined. Thus, we study the main characteristics of multi-hop localization and propose new solutions to enhance the performance of multi-hop localization techniques. We examine the assumptions in existing simulation models to build a more realistic simulation model, while studying and investigating the behavior of multi-hop localization techniques in large scale deployments before the actual deployment. We find that the introduced error follows the Gaussian distribution, but the estimated distance follows the Rayleigh distribution. We use the new simulation model to characterize the effect of hops on localization in both dense and sparse multi-hop deployments. We show that, contrary to common beliefs, in sparse deployments it is better to use long hops, while in dense deployments it is better to use short hops. Using short hops in dense deployments generates a large amount of traffic. Thus we propose a new solution which decreases and manages the overhead generated during the localization process. The proposed solution decreased the number of messages exchanged by almost 70% for DV-Distance and 55% for DV-Hop. Finally, we utilize mobile anchors instead of fixed anchors and propose a solution for the collinearity problem associated with the mobile anchor and use Kalman Filter (KF) to enhance the overall localization accuracy. Through simulation studies, we show that the scheme using a Kalman Filter decreases the estimation errors than using single direction by 31% and better than using weighted averages by 16% . As well, our new scheme overcomes the collinearity problem that appears from using mobile anchor nodes. / Thesis (Ph.D, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2014-04-30 01:53:55.817