Schools have always played an important role in modern society. They are a reflection of local values and changing educational and societal trends. The 21st century brings with it a multitude of challenges as we design schools and communities that embrace and engage learners in an era of global communication and unfettered knowledge exchange. This project explores the concept of a school-centred neighbourhood in response to these changes. Through a case study review of Grande Prairie’s Community Knowledge Campus, the study looks at the social influences of a multi-use school facility through the use of indicators of social capital, lifelong learning and learning-based community development. Interviews with school and municipal planners as well as facility users are used to explore the intended purpose of the development and to measure the effectiveness of this concept. The study concludes that multi-use school facilities have a measurable impact on the promotion of these social elements and thus contribute to the creation of a school-centred neighbourhood. Six recommendations are presented at the end of this study for use by school and municipal planners. These include: i) central locations and community linkages, ii) efficiencies and flexibility through multi-use school facilities, iii) the promotion of joint-use agreements, iv) coordinated school board capital planning and municipal land use planning, v) establishing a common planning language between schools and municipalities and vi) community planning and neighbourhood design through CKCs.

LingoBee is a mobile application, which was designed as a tool for language learning. This application assists learners by providing them a community for language learning. This mobile app is running on Android operation system, and using Web 2.0 technology.There are pre-existing social network applications that is used for language learning such as Livemocha. But LingoBee focuses not only on social network sites but also creating communities for language learning.In this thesis I will analyze LingoBee user data collection, in order to evaluate this application. This evaluation is based on two aspects. First, LingoBee can provide an environment for learners to develop their learning process. Second, LingoBee gives the language learning communities the necessary environment to improve. There are too many articles exists on these topics but none of them have consider these to aspects together.

This thesis presents and discusses the development, design and testing of a lightweight current pulse source prototype used for condition assessment of line connectors. The thesis is a continuation of a student project conducted in the fall semester of 2014 with the title "Condition Assessment of Line Connectors by Current Pulse Measurements - Effect of Reduced Pulse Rise Time And Connection Cable Cross Section". The student project looked into how weight and size could be removed from the present pulse source design, both by a reduced capacitor bank and by reduced connection cable cross section. The results from this project lead to the development of the lightweight pulse source prototype.The design and development is divided into three sections. Initially, the overall idea and generalization of the design is presented and discussed. Secondly, based on this conceptualization the design is broken down to each major component. These components were the battery, thyristor, capacitor bank, microcontroller, DC-DC Converter, and user interface. Their function and design criteria are presented and discussed in the thesis. The thesis also presents the circuit schematics of all the components designed specially for the prototype. Finally, the design is summarized and its weight and size compared to the present pulse source design. The measurements show that new pulse source prototype weights 7.6 kg compared to the 35 kg of the old design and is 47 dm^3 smaller. Note that the weight is measured without the connection cords and measurement equipment. enlargethispage{baselineskip}One of the major differences beside the size and weight is that the present pulse source uses a hardware based sequence control, while the prototype utilizes a microcontroller. This allows a much more flexible system since the behavior of the sequence control can be altered by rewriting the script. The microcontroller and script are presented in detail in the thesis and in the appendix.To verify the design, and to look into how the prototype operates during actual condition assessment measurements, a total of thirteen connectors were assessed. Three of these had an already known condition, while for the rest no prior condition assessment existed. The three connectors with a known state showed that it was possible to reproduce the results from the prior measurements using the pulse source prototype. The ten final connectors were meant to increase the number of measurements to see how the prototype handled during actual assessment tests. These measurements show that the prototype only needed a few alterations to it design to operate satisfactory. These alterations are presented and discussed in the thesis, while the condition assessment of all the connectors is presented in the appendix.In addition to the condition assessment measurements there were also conducted two separate experiments to define the battery capacity and setpoint accuracy of the prototype. The battery capacity test revealed that the battery capacity of the prototype is sufficiently large to supply the unit with power during continuous operation for at least four hours and ten minutes, and deliver 500 consecutive shots. The setpoint accuracy test indicated that the prototype's control sequence was able to reproduce the same current amplitude for the same setpoint with a deviation of only 26.4 A.All the tests performed on the prototype show that it works and operates as intended. Tests have shown that the prototype is able to produce and reproduce current pulses accurately up to and above 6000 A, and that the microcontroller based sequence control functions as intended.

Permanent Magnet (PM) machines can have difficulties dealing with unstable loads, which in worst case can make the machine to step-out of synchronous speed. This problem can be avoided by equipping the rotor with damper windings. During load variation the damper winding will induce a torque to dampen the impact of the load variation. To investigate the effects from using damper windings a numerical model of a PM machine was developed and studied in this thesis. The model is intended to operate with regards to load torque and the stator field. The stator configuration which was used in this thesis is very complex, which resulted in a lot of trial and error. Due to the complexity of the stator meant it had to be applied with a current density, which means that the voltage over the phases was not taken into account during the simulations. This simplification appears to have created an unnatural damping factor in the simulations.Simulations show that a high-conductive damper winding performs faster during load variations then a low conductive damper winding. The reason for this is that a low resistance will induce a high torque at low slip. The size of the windings also affects the performance but these are small and difficult to notice. Simulations show that the size of the damper winding should be between 5-10% of the size of the stator winding.

The conventional electrical system in place today sees our electrical devices powered by AC mains. But as renewable technologies such as solar photovoltaic and wind power become more prevalent at a household level, DC micro-grids could be a cheaper and more efficient alternative. New lighting devices (LED) can reduce the electricity consumption substantially. Two alternatives are envisioned in this paper: A stand-alone alternative in which there is no grid connection, that would require local storage (battery), and a grid-connection alternative. After reviewing and investigating relevant literature for this topic and writing theoretical part of thesis there were the fallowing tasks. One typical four member family household was described and hourly load curves for one year period, with typical summer and winter days, were made for this case. Next task that was completed was generating yearly energy production from solar panels, which the observed household contains, in INSEL software. With having those previously mentioned data, combined with necessary information about prices of all necessary components and prices from Croatian power system, it was possible to make feasibility and cost analysis where the two previously mentioned alternatives were investigated. With changing some parameters in that economical analysis several scenarios were observed. At the end conclusions were made about which one of those two options is more profitable and under what conditions. Also, suggestions were made for further work on this topic. This assignment is realized as a part of the collaborative project “Sustainable Energy and Environment in Western Balkans” that aims to develop and establish five new internationally recognized MSc study programs for the field of “Sustainable Energy and Environment”, one at each of the five collaborating universities in three different WB countries. The project is funded through the Norwegian Programme in Higher Education, Research and Development in the Western Balkans, Programme 3: Energy Sector (HERD Energy) for the period 2011-2014.

Schools have always played an important role in modern society. They are a reflection of local values and changing educational and societal trends. The 21st century brings with it a multitude of challenges as we design schools and communities that embrace and engage learners in an era of global communication and unfettered knowledge exchange. This project explores the concept of a school-centred neighbourhood in response to these changes. Through a case study review of Grande Prairie’s Community Knowledge Campus, the study looks at the social influences of a multi-use school facility through the use of indicators of social capital, lifelong learning and learning-based community development. Interviews with school and municipal planners as well as facility users are used to explore the intended purpose of the development and to measure the effectiveness of this concept. The study concludes that multi-use school facilities have a measurable impact on the promotion of these social elements and thus contribute to the creation of a school-centred neighbourhood. Six recommendations are presented at the end of this study for use by school and municipal planners. These include: i) central locations and community linkages, ii) efficiencies and flexibility through multi-use school facilities, iii) the promotion of joint-use agreements, iv) coordinated school board capital planning and municipal land use planning, v) establishing a common planning language between schools and municipalities and vi) community planning and neighbourhood design through CKCs.

In this thesis, we focus on integration issue of manufacturing and sales functions from the perspective of aggregate production planning. The manufacturing function and sales function are performed by separate affiliated companies of the same business group, which operate as an integrated supplier-buyer system. In particular, this study provides theoretical and practical insight into the use of forecast volatility measure to better match supply with demand so as to reduce the costs of inventory and stock-outs in the manufacturer-buyer relationship under described master production-scheduling environment. Nature of forecast modifications provided by the buyer lays the foundation for the study. We modify the existing aggregate production planning model to accommodate a measure of historical forecast evolution. The overall objective of the thesis is to provide management with aforecast evolution-modeling framework to examine performance characteristics of the manufacturer-buyer interaction.

Stochastic models of biochemical reaction networks are used for understanding the properties of molecular regulatory circuits in living cells. The state of the cell is defined by the number of copies of each molecular species in the model. The chemical master equation (CME) governs the time evolution of the the probability density function of the often high-dimensional state space. The CME is approximated by a partial differential equation (PDE), the Fokker-Planck equation and solved numerically. Direct solution of the CME rapidly becomes computationally expensive for increasingly complex biological models, since the state space grows exponentially with the number of dimensions. Adaptive numerical methods can be applied in time and space in the PDE framework, and error estimates of the approximate solutions are derived. A method for splitting the CME operator in order to apply the PDE approximation in a subspace of the state space is also developed. The performance is compared to the most widely spread alternative computational method.

Following attendance at a conference of the United States based Executive MBA Council in the year 2000, it was apparent that an increasing number of providers of Master of Business Administration (MBA) programs were including an international study tour component in their programs. / To place this in perspective, in 1994 there were 132 member institutions of the Executive MBA Council. The majority of member institutions were based in the United States. An international study tour component was involved in 73 of the programs with 16 of these optional. In 2001 there were 155 member institutions with an increased number of members from Europe and Asia-Pacific. They provided 194 programs of which 152 included an international study tour with only 10 optional. / In order to address this phenomenon of increasing exposure to global activities through an international study tour, the main purpose of what an MBA is to achieve was investigated. To gain insight into this post-graduate educational program, its genesis and evolution was researched from the literature and a comtemporary ideal type model of an MBA program was generated. / Thesis (DBA(DoctorateofBusinessAdministration))--University of South Australia, 2006.

Thesis (MEd (Human Resource Studies))--University of South Australia,1997