Background Synergies or rather the absence of synergies has been blamed for many failures in regards to mergers and acquisitions. Still, there are companies using mergers and acquisitions as a natural part of their growth strategy, indicating that these organizations manage to handle synergies efficiently. Purpose The purpose of this study is to analyze synergies in regards to mergers and acquisitions in technical trading companies to learn about success factors. Method Because of synergies’ complexity this study has used a qualitative approach. The empirical findings have been compiled by semi-conducted interviews with company representatives from the organizations regarded in the study. Conclusion The conclusion points at several success factors in regards to synergies and mergers and acquisitions. However, the three most important were found to be; the entrepreneurship and human capital, the corporate head’s knowledge, the experience and selection capability and the inclusion of acquisitions (developed from the urge for growth) in their business models.

With the increased technological advances of thermal imagers, existing theoretical models are not capable of predicting the advantages of advanced thermal imagers. The advanced thermal imager contains a staring focal plane array, which may be sensitive to multiple spectra, and light enough to be mounted on a rifle. Research was conducted to address portions of these three areas. Psychophysical experiments were conducted to model the impact of insufficient sampling on human observer performance for the identification of military vehicles. An information comparison metric was proposed for the comparison of different spectral images. The impact of dead pixels and thermal imager noise on the comparison metric were measured. A human performance model was then developed to predict a humans ability to identify small handheld objects. The impacts of these models on current and future research were discussed.

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The aim of this study is to develop a seawater desalination system that uses sea-wave energy as the sole energy source for system operation. This system is composed of a sea-wave energy acquisition system, a reverse-osmosis device, and a proposed mechanism linking the system to function synchronously. The relationships between various system parameters and system characteristics are analyzed. The limitations and constraints of system operations are then suggested. For the purpose of comparison, another system, which indirectly drives the reverse-osmosis system through an additional stage of energy storage, is introduced. To analyze the system dynamic properties, the following steps are implemented. First, a mathematical model than can properly describe the system characteristics is derived. This model is found to be a nonlinear one, which increase the difficulties of system analysis enormously. However, it is also noted through a preliminary examination that the effect of system nonlinearity becomes insignificantly if the system parameters are properly adjusted. Under these parameters, the linearied model is analyzed. The effects of different system parameters on the amount of energy acquisition and desalinated water are investigated. The analysis indicates that the amount of energy acquisition or desalinated water is closely related to both the selected energy acquisition system and the desalination system. For a given energy acquisition system and sea wave condition, an improper system parameter selection of desalination system will either make the whole system operation inefficient or devastate the functioning of acquisition system. This suggests that certain parameters of the desalination system must be adjustable in a real operation. The study also shows that the linearied system can be approximated by a model with two degrees of freedom. This model may offer the convenience for the optimization of system parameters.

e-Learning has been developed for a decade in Taiwan, where rapidly kept pace with advanced countries. Many industries create e-Learning best practice and become benchmark in a leading way in Greater China. Taiwan government plays a critical role to support digital learning development through counseling, project import, quality certification system, technology transfer and R&D subsidies. In this study, the author who has been a technical worker in an e-Learning company for years observes its development and improvement to analysis the key points in each stage of development. Furthermore, the case study is about the integration of group enterprises and its strategy corresponds to each stage to research the future of digital learning industrial chain development. The e-Learning industry is both competitive and cooperative. Every company¡¦s products are competing, but they also need to integrate with each other before they can offer clients the solutions and right services. Therefore, the study focuses on whether the group enterprises take advantage of its industrial value chain integration to raise the position and compete with the other companies to make the maximum performance. There is also hoped that the results of the study will provide the reference of success possibility for digital learning or new industry.

After the 1990s, the activities of acquisition among firms have become an international trend. Associated with the situation of global economic slump, both the domestic and international enterprises are eager to establish more powerful and effective business groups, and strengthen their competitiveness in order to create firms with higher commercial value. The rapid acquisition by firms usually results in the situation of promptly laying off employees, decreasing employees¡¦ salary, etc, and therefore generates many risks to the entire groups. The employees of those enterprises being acquired feel unsafe about their future, so their working pressure keeps growing. Similarly, the employees of the firms that conduct acquisition also worry about their working rights being threatened by the increasing number of competitors brought by the organizational reformation. These negative impacts usually have several effects: e.g. reluctance of working, uncomfortable working atmosphere, loss of human resources, and decrease of firm¡¦s overall productivity. It is found that comparative less literature focuses on exploring the influences of acquisition, and investigate the correlation between its impact and the promise given by firms and employees¡¦ working effectiveness. This study distributed 120 questionnaires in total: 90 returned and 80 effective. First, the construct validity of factor analysis and evaluation and the reliability of Cronbach alpha value were used as the tool of analysis. Then Regression Analysis was also adopted and the conclusions listed below were made: A. After acquisition, the employees¡¦ (those of enterprises being acquired) expected distance has significant negative influence toward organizational promise. 1. After acquisition, the employees¡¦ expected distance has negative influence upon firm¡¦s emotional promise. 2. After acquisition, the employees¡¦ expected distance has negative influence upon firm¡¦s sustained promise. 3. After acquisition, the employees¡¦ expected distance has negative influence upon firm¡¦s moral promise. B. After acquisition, the influence of employees¡¦ (those of enterprises being acquired) expected distance toward their working effectiveness is uncertain. 1. Evaluation of working effectiveness from subjective perspectives: 1.1. After acquisition, the employees¡¦ expected distance has no significant influence upon missionary effectiveness. 1.2. After acquisition, the employees¡¦ expected distance has positive influence upon contextual effectiveness. 2. Evaluation of working effectiveness from both subjective and objective perspectives (only limited to those who have records of subjective working effectiveness): 2.1. After acquisition, the employees¡¦ expected distance has no significant influence upon objective working effectiveness. 2.2. After acquisition, the employees¡¦ expected distance has no significant influence upon subjective missionary effectiveness. 2.3. After acquisition, the employees¡¦ expected distance has no significant influence upon subjective contextual effectiveness.

Information Acquisition is the most essential and the most widely¡Vused function on the Internet. The Internet provides a platform on which News to be communicated to users faster and services to be delivered more efficiently. With the growth of users on the Internet, the online news database becomes a powerful tool of information acquisition under the integration of computers and communication technologies. Users can find useful information related to their work and daily life very easily. The purpose of this research is to investigate the information acquisition behavior affiliated with different uses of on-line news database. We use the Task-Technology Fit Model proposed by Goodhue and Thompson (1995) to investigate whether a better fit can result in a better decision satisfaction. An experiment was designed to study the user satisfaction under different settings of task characteristics and search tools. The results indicate that different search tools result in different satisfaction levels. More specifically, the keyword search has resulted a higher user satisfaction than the classified catalog search tool. Unfortunately, we do not find a better fit between task characteristics and the search tool can result in a higher user satisfaction. The findings can tell why Google, a pure keyword search engine, becomes dominating on the Internet search. It also provides implications for the design of search tools and the improvement on the functions of classified catalogs for developing on-line news Databases.

A merger of steel mills has arisen up in the global steel industry. What is the reason to activate those steel mills involved in such a kind of business action, even those steel mills are with a mass scale. According to the expert's prediction, only ten to twelve steel mills will be survived after ten or twenty years and each steel mill will with a capacity over fifty million tons. Actually, there is one steel mill reached this scale after merging with other mills. In chapter 1, to describe the background motivation, purpose and limitation related to the study. In chapter 2, the study of the related theory and information about the competitive strategy, merger and acquisition, diversification, core competence and strategic alliance. To understand the theory and can be used for the analysis in the next chapter. In chapter3, the introductions to the tendency of development for the global steel industry and the case of merger between the steel mill. To realize the reason, background, strategic thinking and expected benefit from it. Meanwhile, the introduction to the career of the development for the steel industry of the Japan, USA and Taiwan in the past and now. In chapter 4, the introduction to the China Steel Corporation and to understand what cause it to have the most competitive strength in the global steel industry. Also, two cases will be reported which concerned about the cost and experience brought to China Steel Corporation to realize how to learn from it next time for the merge and acquisition activity. In chapter 5, the conclusion has been made by the study. The diversification is the necessary step taken by the steel mills in order to grow up, but the key point is on the evaluation and estimation. The profitability and future expansion will be the top priority. Who can close to the end-user will be the winner for the competition. The major consideration to the merger and acquisition held by the steel mills lie on the complementary of the product, the market sharing and distribution and cost down. The Mainland China, due to its mass population will be a big consumer for the steel. So, China Steel should pay attention to evaluate and deep into the market of the South of the China where 500 million people will become a huge market in future. Is bigger the better? Somebody doubt it, the synergy and profit will be the focus on consideration to a merger activity.

We propose to design a DSP based image acquisition and pattern recognition system. This system which could mainly apply to do the vision guided automatic drill on the Flexible Printed Circuit Board (FPCB) includes three sub systems as ¡§Image acquisition system¡¨ , ¡§Pattern recognition system¡¨ and ¡§PCI communication system¡¨ . First , we obtain the FPCB image by the CCD camera , and do the pattern match for the drill goal on it . After computing , DSP transmits the goal coordinates to the computer user interface application . By the experiment result , we successfully make the whole system match the original purpose by using two image pre-process steps.

The rapid growth of World Wide Web has created a new platform for information exchange. Although WWW makes more data easily available, it has also created many problems such as information overload, disorientation, and reduced quality of data. In order to solve these problems, most current approaches primarily focused on information filtering and searching based on the technical perspective. Few researches have provided analytical results of the information acquisition behaviors over the Web. Based on the cognitive fit theory and task-technology fit (TTF) theory, this study proposes a comprehensive research model to describe the individual information acquisition strategies on the World Wide Web. To examine the research model, a laboratory experiment was performed on a group of 120 students. Sixteen task scenarios were designed and one prototype website was developed according to the specifications defined through the literature review and a pilot study. The research results show that both task structure and system characteristics have an impact upon individual information acquisition behaviors over the website. The experiment also confirms that subjects feel more satisfactions at adopting formal search and purposeful browsing strategies. The understanding effect of the research object is a function of scanning and purposeful browsing strategies. The interaction between task structure and system characteristics is also significant. These findings allow us to have a better understanding of information acquisitions behavior on the Web.