This essay tells about the meaning of eurhythmics for children’s development and why it is so difficult to draw attention to the value of eurhythmics compared to other activities in preschool. The essay builds upon a story that shows what consequences may follow when the meaning of the eurhythmics in the process of learning is not acknowledged. By looking at the relation between rhythm and human beings in a global perspective, I have examined the meaning of rhythm for the human well-being. The question I have researched is; why does eurhythmics appeal to almost every child in spite of being rejected by so many teachers? By researching the reasons behind these completely different points of views, I have tried to enhance the understanding for the different perspectives. I see a danger in the fact that the children lose a very important way to express themselves, as the eurhythmics in preschool and elementary school has to give way for other theoretical subjects. Despite the knowledge many of us possess regarding the development of children, we consent to the limitation of the different ways to express ourselves that we were born with. With my text, I want the reader to reflect over things that might otherwise have been unthought-of. The essay is a story that draws on my own experiences. I have during many years worked with eurhythmics groups in preschool and have been able to follow a positive development in the children whom have participated in my eurhythmics sessions. Yet, I have been experiencing a resistance from some pedagogues, which takes away the children’s opportunity to participate. Moreover, I have gained knowledge of the subject matter by having conversations with people who have long experience with working with children and eurhythmics/music. I have, during the process of writing, many of my thoughts confirmed; such as eurhythmics being one of the hundred languages Loris Malaguzzi talks about and how it is being jeopardized if not given attention and stimulation. By the help of literature, I have reflected over the subject and myself and my actions.

With advances in information technology, various cloud computing related research and development has become a hot trend. Except the vast amount of studies and reports appearing in local magazines and newspapers, government agencies have also set up corresponding R & D projects. However, most of these studies focus on the infrastructure or platform level of the cloud. For example, the projects for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) include the Cloud Computing Center for Mobile Application at Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), the Cloud Service and Technology Center at Information Industry Institute (III) and the already launched ¡§hiCloud¡¨ at Chunghwa Telecom Corporation. In the business side, there is TCloud Computing that does the development of both "Infrastructure" and "Platform as a Service" (PaaS). As to Software as a Service (SaaS) related research, III has gathered 10 domestic companies to participate the co-operation plans for education cloud, manufacture cloud, ¡K and practice cloud, a total of nine cloud services. However, they are all in the early stages without much success stories or usages. The study of this thesis is angled toward business needs, from the point of resource-based analysis to see how a firm will be affected if introduction of SaaS to business. In particular, we will study this subject from four dimensions, which are the competitiveness of enterprises, IT outsourcing strategy, cost structure analysis and data security technology, to identify the possible critical factors for the introduction for cloud computing services. As most people are perceived, cloud computing has a comparative advantage of cost saving over traditional approach.

Recently years, TFT-LCD industry has become the major development policy in Taiwan, and the scale of investment of the TFT-LCD¡¦s industry has become more and more in Taiwan, Japan and Korea. The Profit of the TFT-LCD monitor and television industry has been compressed very seriously to injure the chance and cost advantage of the second-string companies to run above business. Hence, this research is focused on a case of a TFT-LCD company termed ¡§A company¡¨ owns two old generation factories, and uses the strategy theories of scenario analysis, competition advantage, five forces analysis, resource-based view, value chain and so on and strategy tools of strategy map and balanced scorecard to analyze and find out the transformation strategy of the case of the ¡§A company¡¨ to build up the best competition advantage. To realize the competition status of outside and internal environment of TFT-LCD industry, and the resources base of the case of ¡§A company¡¨ in Taiwan, and the development situation using scenario analysis in order to define the direction of the operation strategy of the case of ¡§A company¡¨ that owns two third generation factories. The result is using strategy development tools of strategy map, balanced scorecard, key performance indicator management to develop the execution plan and performance measure indicators of the transformation strategy.

LCD panel industry is one of the most promising industries in the world. Taiwanese LCD panel makers have performed quite well in the past few years. On the controversy, the BLU has been viewed as a low entry barrier industry with many suppliers and its profit margin seems to have been squeezed due mainly to its position between big giant LCD panel makers and limited key materials suppliers. However, BLU is one of Taiwan's few competitive industries in the global market because of its high self-sufficient rate and leading technologies over their Korean and Japanese competitors. Sometimes, Taiwan¡¦s BLU industry is even performing better than other component industries within the LCD industry supply chain. It's worth examining the competitive advantages for Taiwan BLU industry by analyzing "Company R", one of the leaders in Taiwan BLU industry. We start our research by highlighting the key characteristics of the LCD industry and the dynamics of the BLU supply chain. After analyzing the marketing, technology, and management requirements for the BLU industry, we have concluded the key success factors of the BLU industry. Then with a brief introduction of ¡§Company R¡¨, we have identified the company's competitive advantages and potential long-term strategies by analyzing the company¡¦s unique positioning and resources, and comparing those with the above-mentioned key success factors of the BLU industry. According to our study, demand for BLU should continue to grow with increasing demand for LCD TVs, in longer term. The major issue for LCD panel industry will be "demand and supply" relationship, while for BLU industry is the "volume" and its "competitive advantages" for each company. The technology development for BLU will continue. BLU is not just a so-called ¡§assembling business¡¨, and its industry entry barrier is much higher than before. Besides, the cluster effect and vertical integration are inevitable for LCD panel makers. To be successful in BLU industry, a company not only needs to focus on these key success factors, but also needs to keep developing and improving its core competencies relative to its competitors.

The objective of this study is to investigate the determinants of the export behavior of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Turkey. In SMEs, key decision makers play important roles / therefore, studying the impact of managerial characteristics is of paramount importance for understanding the determinants of SME export behavior. Particularly, possible relations between CEO age, tenure, level of education, international experience and foreign language skills and the export performance of SMEs will be examined. While doing this, two distinct theories, namely, upper echelons perspective and resource-based view of the firm (RBV) will be integrated. Furthermore, the study will focus on the role of the human capital as a strategic resource that may enhance the SME export performance. The relations between international experience and foreign language skills of the human capital and SME export performance will be analyzed from upper echelons perspective and RBV point of view. Overall, this study attempts to illustrate that CEOs and human resources are valuable, rare, inimitable and non-substitutable resources for SMEs, and that studying their attributes in SME internationalization context is crucial to understanding the determinants of expert activities of SMEs. As a result, this study expects to reveal important implications for those who aim at increasing the export performance of SMEs. Practitioners may benefit from the findings by addressing which managerial and human capital characteristics influence SME export behavior and in which directions, so that they can better match the characteristics of CEOs and human capital with SMEs in order to attain higher export performance.

Novel methods of object recognition that form a bridge between today&rsquo / s local feature frameworks and previous decade&rsquo / s strong but deserted geometric invariance field are presented in this dissertation. The rationale behind this effort is to complement the lowered discriminative capacity of local features, by the invariant geometric descriptions. Similar to our predecessors, we first start with constrained cases and then extend the applicability of our methods to more general scenarios. Local features approach, on which our methods are established, is reviewed in three parts / namely, detectors, descriptors and the methods of object recognition that employ them. Next, a novel planar object recognition framework that lifts the requirement for exact appearance-based local feature matching is presented. This method enables matching of groups of features by utilizing both appearance information and group geometric descriptions. An under investigated area, scene logo recognition, is selected for real life application of this method. Finally, we present a novel method for three-dimensional (3D) object recognition, which utilizes well-known local features in a more efficient way without any reliance on partial or global planarity. Geometrically consistent local features, which form the crucial basis for object recognition, are identified using affine 3D geometric invariants. The utilization of 3D geometric invariants replaces the classical 2D affine transform estimation /verification step, and provides the ability to directly verify 3D geometric consistency. The accuracy and robustness of the proposed method in highly cluttered scenes with no prior segmentation or post 3D reconstruction requirements, are presented during the experiments.

Previous research from environmental psychology shows that human well-being suffers in windowless environments in many ways and a window view of nature is psychologically and physiologically beneficial to humans. Current window substitutes, still images and video, lack three dimensional properties necessary for a realistic viewing experience – primarily motion parallax. We present a new system using a head-coupled display and image-based rendering to simulate a photorealistic artificial window view of nature with motion parallax. Evaluation data obtained from human subjects suggest that the system prototype is a better window substitute than a static image and has significantly more positive effects on observers’ moods. The test subjects judged the system prototype as a good simulation of, and acceptable replacement for, a real window, and accorded it much higher ratings for realism and preference than a static image.

This thesis explores one possible method of preventing helicopter crashes caused by brownout using the noise generated by the helicopter rotor as an altimeter. The hypothesis under consideration is that the helicopter's height, velocity, and obstacle locations with respect to the helicopter, can be determined by comparing incident and reflected rotor noise signals, provided adequate bandwidth and signal to noise ratio. Heights can be determined by measuring the cepstrum of the reflected helicopter noise. The velocity can be determined by measuring small amounts of Doppler distortion using the Mellin-Scale Transform. Height and velocity detection algorithms are developed, optimized for this application, and tested using a microphone array. The algorithms and array are tested using a hemianechoic chamber and outside in Georgia Tech's Burger Bowl. Height and obstacle detection are determined to be feasible with the existing array. Velocity detection and surface mapping are not successfully accomplished.

This dissertation presents the development of a semi-supervised incremental learning framework with a multi-view perspective for image concept modeling. For reliable image concept characterization, having a large number of labeled images is crucial. However, the size of the training set is often limited due to the cost required for generating concept labels associated with objects in a large quantity of images. To address this issue, in this research, we propose to incrementally incorporate unlabeled samples into a learning process to enhance concept models originally learned with a small number of labeled samples. To tackle the sub-optimality problem of conventional techniques, the proposed incremental learning framework selects unlabeled samples based on an expected error reduction function that measures contributions of the unlabeled samples based on their ability to increase the modeling accuracy. To improve the convergence property of the proposed incremental learning framework, we further propose a multi-view learning approach that makes use of multiple features such as color, texture, etc., of images when including unlabeled samples. For robustness to mismatches between training and testing conditions, a discriminative learning algorithm, namely a kernelized maximal- figure-of-merit (kMFoM) learning approach is also developed. Combining individual techniques, we conduct a set of experiments on various image concept modeling problems, such as handwritten digit recognition, object recognition, and image spam detection to highlight the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

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