OOPS stands for Opensource Opencourseware Prototype System, a project sponsored by Fantasy Foundation. Aiming to benefit Chinese readers, this project recruit volunteer translators all over the world through internet to translate Opencourseware materials from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) into Chinese. This research was a qualitative case study conducted between 2004/2 ~ 2007/1. Multiple data sources were surveyed, including OOPS¡¦ online discussion forum, and archival information from OOPS website. Online archival data ranged from media reports, activity reports, e-newsletters, volunteer reports, survey summaries, and sub-group websites. Interviews with group leaders were also conducted. Evidence collected through these means were used to describe how OOPS employed the Internet to coordinate translation efforts and promote Opencourseware. In addition, this research applied Science of Complexity to explain the self organizing phenomenon within the network arisen from its participants. This research looked further into how Science of Complexity can clarify the organic process of a self organizing network going from simple to complex. This research found 1) the degree of openness in a collaborative knowledge network influenced its degree of self organization; 2) volunteer¡¦s willingness to participate was related to environment¡¦s fitness; 3) critical mass, diversity, variety, interaction and feedback promoted evolution; 4) a collaborative knowledge network¡¦s key to an organic expansion depended on participants¡¦ outgrowth and self organization; and 5) effective facilitation at the edge of chaos would foster new organization growth.

Nowadays, volatile and complex environment has forced most organizations to operate in team-based ways to increase their flexibility and adaptability. For teams to adapt, local innovation and change, that is, self-organization, is the most critical process. However, the self-organizing process is poorly understood both in academic and practice. To deep our understanding of self-organizing teams, this research attempts to explore the self-organizing mechanism in group cognitive system perspective. One System Dynamics model is built to represent important self-organization processes. And the classical self-organizing theory-Dissipative Structure Theory is applied to guide important simulations to acquire knowledge of dynamic interactions among those processes. Several positive loops are found to be quite essential in structuring and de-structuring team¡¦s operation structure. With the knowledge of evolutionary feedback acquired, impact of critical environmental factors, such as knowledge redundancy, communication quality, and open interactions, are further investigated and experimented.

Product life cycle (PLC) may be used as a managerial tool. Marketing strategies must change as the product goes through its life cycle. If managers understand the cycle concept, they are in a better position to forecast the future sales activities and plan marketing strategies. However, people often make the wrong PLC because of the difficulty of data access and lacking decision-making information. Therefore, this thesis applies customer behavior model to analyze the relationship between the frequency and the duration time from the product discussion, and it calculates the PLC pattern to explore the product¡¦s current position in customers¡¦ mind. Finally, the PLC curve will be constructed by using the information that we got from previous analysis. Moreover, we also employ data mining and information retrieval technique to diagnose the variance of discussion frequency and the content of discussion article to extract the distinctive event that influenced PLC curve. The main contributions of this thesis are described as the following sentence:

<p>This thesis aims to evaluate four artificial neural network architectures, each of which implements the sensory-motor mapping in an embodied, situated, and autonomous agent set up to reach a goal area in one out of six systematically varied T-maze environments. In order to reach the goal the agent has to turn either to the left or to the right in each junction in the environment, depending on the placement of previously encountered light sources. The evaluation is broken down into (i) measuring the reliability of the agents' capacity to repeatedly reach the goal area, (ii) analyzing how the agents work, and (iii) comparing the results to related work on the problem.</p><p>Each T-maze constitutes an instance of a broad class of problems known as delayed response tasks, which are characterized by a significant (and typically varying) delay between a stimulus and the corresponding appropriate response. This thesis expands this notion to include, besides simple tasks, repeated and multiple delayed response tasks. In repeated tasks, the agent faces several stimulus-delay-response sequences after each other. In multiple tasks, the agent faces several stimuli before the delay and the corresponding appropriate responses. Even if simple at an abstract level, these tasks raise some of the fundamental issues within cognitive science and artificial intelligence such as whether or not an internal objective world model is necessary and/or suitable to achieve the appropriate behavior. For such reasons, these problems also constitute an interesting base for evaluating alternative ideas within these fields.</p><p>The work leads to several interesting insights. Firstly, purely reactive controllers (as represented by a feed-forward network) may be sufficient, in interaction with the environment, to solve both simple and repeated delayed response tasks. Secondly, an extended sequential cascaded network that selectively replaces its own sensory-motor mapping achieves significantly better performance than the other networks. This indicates that selective replacement of the sensory-motor mapping may be more powerful than both modulation (as represented by a simple recurrent network) and replacement in each step (as represented by a standard sequential cascaded network). Thirdly, this thesis demonstrates that even reactive controllers may contribute to behavior, which, from an observer's point of view, may seem to require an internal rational capacity, i.e. the ability to represent and explore alternatives internally.</p>

Cilien und eukariotische Flagellen sind lange, dünne Fortsaetze von Zellen. Sie enthalten eine Struktur namens Axonem. Die wesentlichen Komponenten des Axonems sind die Filamente und Motorproteine namens Mikrotubuli und Dynein. Die Motoren forcieren die Filamente, sich in oszillierender Weise gegeneinander zu verschieben, was zu einem Schlagmuster entlang des Axonemes fuehrt. Wie diese Motoren koordiniert werden und wie dieses Phaenomen quantitativ beschrieben werden kann, ist nicht verstanden. Wir studierten die Wellenformen an Spermienschwaenzen, welche ein solches Axonem enthalten, unter verschiedenen Bedingungen mit einer Hochgeschwindigkeitskamera. Wir entwickelten eine automatisierte Bildanalyse-Software, die es erlaubt, lange Zeitreihen solcher Wellenformen von Filmen zu extrahieren. In einer anschließenden Fourieranalyse erzielten wir eine gemittelte Wellenform mit erhoehter Präzision. Ein Vergleich von unseren Daten mit den Vorhersagen einer Theorie (Camalet, Julicher et al. 1999) führte zu einer Diskrepanz. Entsprechend schlugen wir eine Erweiterung der Theorie vor, indem wir annahmen, daß an der Basis des Axonems ein viskos-elastisches Element existiert. Dies führte zu einer zufrieden stellenden Übereinstimmung zwischen Theorie und Experiment. Abschließend diskutieren wir offene Fragen und zukünftige Experimente. Als ein Nebenprodukt entdeckten wir ein neues Phaenomen, bei welchem Spermien Anordnungen von dynamischen Strudeln (Vortices) bilden. Wir beschrieben dieses Phaenomen im Detail und führten einen neuen Ordnungsparameter ein, mit dem die Ordnung zwischen vielen Objekten quantifiziert werden kann. Mittels dieses Ordnungsparameters konnten wir zeigen, daß dieses Muster sich erst ab einer kritischen Dichte herausbildet. Wir schlugen ein Model vor, um den Ursprung des Musters zu erklären. Die Simulation des Models zeigte volle Uebereinstimmung mit den wesentlichen Eigenschaften dieses Musters. Weiterhin schaetzten wir die typische Wechselwirkungskraft zwischen aktiven Axonemen mit 0.1 pN ab. Abschließend ziehen wir Schlußfolgerungen über die kollektive Wirkung von Axonemen im Allgemeinen mit Hinblick auf Spermienkooperation und metachronale Cilienwellen. - Die Druckexemplare enthalten jeweils eine CD-ROM als Anlagenteil: QuickTimeMovies (ca. 65 MB) Nutzung: PLAY32 - Übersicht über Inhalte siehe Dissertation S. 108 - 109 / Cilia and eukaryotic flagella are long, thin extensions of cells that contain a structure known as axoneme. The key components of the axoneme are microtubule filaments and the motor proteins dynein. These dynein motors force the microtubules to slide in an oscillatory fashion leading to a wave pattern along the axoneme. How these motors are coordinated and how this phenomenon can be described quantitatively is not understood. I therefore studied the waveforms of sperm tails that contain such an axoneme. I observed these waveforms under different conditions with a high-speed camera and developed an automated image analysis tool allowing the extraction of long time series of this waveform. In a subsequent Fourier analysis I increased the precision by obtaining an averaged waveform. I then compared the data to the predictions of a theoretical framework (Camalet, Julicher et al. 1999) and found that they do not agree. I suggested extending this theoretical framework by considering a visco-elastic element at the base of the axoneme, which leads to a satisfactory agreement. This project leaves open questions hence further work is discussed. As a side finding, I discovered a new phenomenon on how spermatozoa form dynamic vortex arrays. I described this pattern in detail and introduced a novel order parameter to quantify the order among many particles. I showed that the array only forms above a critical sperm density. I suggested a model to explain the origin of the pattern and showed by simulation that the model can account for the main features of the pattern. Finally I estimated the typical interaction force between beating axonemes to be 0.1 pN and drew conclusions about their collective action in general that might be relevant for sperm cooperation or metachronal waves of cilia.

Trotz genauer Produktionsplanung und -steuerung mit modernen Algorithmen beobachtet man in Fabriksystemen immer wieder plötzliche und unvorhergesehene Zusammenbrüche der Materialströme. Erstaunlicherweise scheinen diese Kapazitätseinbrüche nur wenig durch die aktuelle Pufferauslastung beeinflusst zu sein. Um die entsprechenden Effekte zu unterbinden, wird in diesem Aufsatz eine neuartige Strategie zur Selbstorganisation individueller Güter in Transportund Puffersystemen vorgestellt. Durch ein kooperatives („soziales“) Verhalten dieser Güter lassen sich deren gegenseitige Behinderungen reduzieren, was zu einer deutlichen Harmonisierung des Materialflusses in der innerbetrieblichen Logistik führt. Das vorgeschlagene Konzept wird an einer beispielhaften Fabrik illustriert. Im Rahmen eines erfolgreichen Modellprojekts wird seine praktische Umsetzung derzeit bei einem englischen Verpackungshersteller erprobt. / Despite careful production planning and control using modern algorithms, one can repeatedly observe sudden and unpredicted breakdowns of the material flows in factory systems. Surprisingly, these capacity dips are only marginally affected by the current buffer storage level. To enable prevention of these effects, this paper describes a new strategy for the self-organisation of individual goods in material handling systems. Where the behaviour of the individual goods is cooperative (“social”), their mutual hindrances can be reduced, which in turn leads to a noticeable smoothing of the intra-plant material flows. The suggested concept will be illustrated with a factory example. Its practical applicability is currently being tested within the scope of a successful pilot project with a packaging manufacturer.

This diploma thesis presents experimental evidence of a theoretical concept which predicts the self-organization of delta-layers of silicon nanoclusters in the buried oxide of a MOS-like structure. This approach of "bottom-up" structuring might be of eminent importance in view of future semiconductor memory devices. Unconventionally, a 15nm thin SiO2 layer, which is enclosed by a 50nm poly-Si capping layer and the Si substrate, is irradiated with Si+ ions. Ion impact drives the system to a state far from thermodynamic equilibrium, i.e. the local composition of the target is modified to a degree unattainable in common processes. A region of SiOx (x<2) - where x is a function of depth - is formed which is not stable. During annealing, the system relaxes towards equilibrium, i.e. phase separation (via spinodal decomposition and nucleation) sets in. Within a certain time window of annealing, the structure of the system matches with a structure similar to the multidot non-volatile memory device, the principal character of which is a 2D layer of Si nanoclusters of ~3nm in diameter which is embedded in a 3D SiO2 matrix at a distance of ~3nm from the Si substrate. The physical mechanisms of ion mixing of the two Si-SiOx interfaces and subsequent phase separation, which result in the desired sample structure, are elucidated from the viewpoint of computer simulation. In addition, experimental evidence is presented based on various methods, including TEM, RBS, and SIMS. Of particular importance is a novel method of Si nanocluster decoration which applies Ge as contrast enhancing element in TEM studies of tiny Si nanoclusters.

This dissertation has aimed to fabricate polypeptide based biomaterial and characterize physical properties. Electrospinning is used as a tool for the sample fabrication. Project focused on determining the feasibility of electrospinning of certain synthetic polypeptides and certain elastin-like peptides from aqueous feedstocks and to characterize physical properties of polymer aqueous solution, cast film and spun fibers and fiber mats. The research involves peptide design, polymer electrospinning, fibers crosslinking, determining the extent of crosslinking, fibers protease degradation study, fibers stability and self-organization analysis, structure and composition determination by various spectroscopy and microscopy techniques and characterization of mechanical properties of individual suspended fibers. Fiber mats of a synthetic cationic polypeptide poly(L-ornithine) (PLO) and an anionic co-polypeptide of L-glutamic acid and L-tyrosine (PLEY) of defined composition have been produced by electrospinning. Fibers were obtained from polymer aqueous solution at concentrations of 20-45% (w/v) in PLO and at concentrations of 20-60% (w/v) in PLEY. Applied voltage and spinneret-collector distance were also found to influence polymer spinnability and fibers morphology. Oriented fibers were obtained by parallel electrodes geometry. Fiber diameter and morphology was analyzed by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM). PLO fibers exposed on glutaraldehyde (GTA) vapor rendered fiber mats water-insoluble. A common chemical reagent, carbodiimide was used to crosslink PLEY fibers. Fiber solubility in aqueous solution varied as a function of crosslinking time and crosslinker concentration. Crosslink density has been quantified by a visible-wavelength dye-based method. Degradation of crosslinked fibers by different proteases has been demonstrated. Investigation of crosslinked PLEY fibers has provided insight into the mechanisms of stability at different pH values. Variations in fiber morphology, elemental composition and stability have been studied by microscopy and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX), following the treatment of samples at different pH values in the 2-12 range. Fiber stability has been interpreted with reference to the pH dependence of the UV absorbance and fluorescence of PLEY chains in solution. The data show that fiber stability is crucially dependent on the extent of side chain ionization, even after crosslinking. Self-organization kinetics of electrospun PLO and PLEY fibers during solvent annealing has been studied. After being crosslinked in situ, fibers were annealed in water at 22 °C. Analysis by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) has revealed that annealing involved fiber restructuring with an overall time constant of 29 min for PLO and 63 min for PLEY, and that changes in the distribution of polymer conformations occurred during the first 13 min of annealing. There was a substantial decrease in the amount of Na+ bound to PLEY fibers during annealing. Kinetic modeling has indicated that two parallel pathways better account for the annealing trajectory than a single pathway with multiple transition states. Bacteria have been engineered to make novel 250-mer elastin-like polypeptides (ELPs). Each was predicted to have an absolute net charge of less than 0.05 electron charges per amino acid residue in aqueous solution at neutral pH. Polymer structure in solution has been assessed by Circular dichroism spectroscopy (CD) and dynamic light scattering (DLS). Suitability for materials manufacture has been tested by electrospinning. Here, we have also tested the hypothesis that blending polypeptides of radically different amino acid composition will enable the realization of novel and potentially advantageous material properties. Aqueous polymer feedstock solutions consisted of pure ELP or ELP blended with a synthetic polypeptide, PLEY, which is highly ionized at neutral pH and spinnable. Morphology analysis of blended fibers by SEM has revealed the formation of a surprising variety of structures that are not seen in fibers of ELP or PLEY alone, for example, hollow beads. Analysis of blended fibers by fluorescence microscopy showed that there was little or no phase separation, despite the large difference in electrical properties between ELP and the synthetic polymers. Structure and composition of PLO, PLEY, ELPs and blends and electrospun fibers made of these polymers have been determined and compared. CD and FTIR have been utilized to obtain structural information on these polymers in aqueous solution, cast films and fibers. Fiber composition has been analyzed by EDX. Protein adsorption has been analyzed by quantitative fluorescence microscopy. The polymers adopted random coil-like conformations in aqueous feedstocks at neutral pH and in dehydrated cast films and fibers on glass, and the fibers comprised numerous counterions, according to spectral analysis. Adsorption of model proteins and serum proteins onto hydrated and crosslinked fibers depended on the electrical charge of the proteins and the fibers. The surface charge density of the fibers will be comparable to, but less than, the charge density on the outer leaflet of the plasma membrane of usual eukaryotic cells. Mechanical properties of a series of as-spun and crosslinked PLO and PLEY nanofibers with various diameters have been analyzed by using the pure bending mode and AFM technique. Aligned nanofibers were deposited on top of a microsized groove etched on a glass substrate. AFM tip was used as a probe, which could apply a measurable deflection and force onto the suspended nanofiber at a force calibration mode, so that the Young's modulus of a single nanofiber can be calculated based on the basic beam bending theories. The Young's moduli of the studied peptide nanofibers increased significantly with decreased fiber diameters. This study has also demonstrated that crosslinked electrospun PLO and PLEY fibers have a higher Young's modulus compared with their as-spun counterparts. Taken together, the results will advance the rational design of polypeptides for peptide-based materials, especially materials prepared by electrospinning. It is believed that this research will increase basic knowledge of polymer electrospinning and advance the development of electrospun materials, especially in medicine and biotechnology. The study has yielded two advances on previous work in the area: avoidance of an animal source of peptides and avoidance of inorganic solvent. The present results thus advance the growing field of peptide-based materials. Non-woven electrospun fiber mats made of polypeptides are increasingly considered attractive for basic research and technology development in biotechnology, medicine and other areas.

Complexity theory investigates complex systems and how parts of a system give rise to collective behaviours. My thesis focuses upon the nature of the complex systems emerging within the classrooms of three award-winning high school physics teachers in Ontario. Using vignettes for each teacher and their classroom system, I have highlighted themes related to the emergence of collective behaviours. My interpretations found the first classroom collective agreeing to work towards academic excellence with the intention of achieving success in university. The second classroom collective was invested in relationship-building and used the resulting emphasis on teamwork and group-oriented learning to further physics understanding. The final classroom system was in the process of learning to grapple with discovering physics through following and contending with the results of their instincts. From a complex systems perspective, differences amongst teachers and students and different sets of interactions result in unique systems. Therefore, a single prescription for the emergence of certain collective behaviours is unlikely. The journal/commentary format traces my changing understandings of complexity thinking in education and how those understandings made an impact on the way I approached and reflected upon the observations of the study. As such, the thesis also documents shifts in perspectives highlighting the tensions felt between reductionist and complexivist thinking. Ultimately, complexity thinking illuminated how important it was to consider the teacher as part of the system instead of separated from it. Further issues relating to complex emergence and physics education that lead to greater pedagogical awareness are discussed. / Thesis (Master, Education) -- Queen's University, 2007-07-18 13:48:42.481

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