Doctor of Philosophy / Aim and significance: The aim of this research was to investigate how evidence-based practice (EBP) in nursing homes is understood in the context of Taiwan, a non-Western country. There is a growing movement towards using research evidence to inform practice in the nursing profession with variable success. To date, factors that promote or inhibit implementation of EBP in health care have been investigated through research conducted in hospital settings in Western countries. Remarkably little is known about nurses’ experience and perceptions of EBP in residential aged care facilities (RACFs), especially in non-Western countries. Method: The study adopted a mixed method approach. Subjects were recruited from six nursing homes in the Hsinchu district of Taiwan. In Stage 1, 89 registered nurses completed a comprehensive questionnaire specifically developed for this project. It was designed to elicit information about (1) their experience of and attitudes towards research and EBP; (2) the barriers they perceive to its implementation; and (3) what strategies they believe would enhance its implementation in the nursing home setting. In Stage 2, six nursing managers participated in semi-structured in-depth interviews that explored the same topic areas as those in the questionnaire but used an open-ended format which allowed for new themes to emerge. Findings: The majority of nurses and nursing managers expressed positive attitudes towards research and EBP but reported relatively little experience in its implementation. Nurses relied most heavily on knowledge derived from past experience and on interactions with nursing colleagues, medical staff and patients to inform their clinical practice. They identified the main barriers to EBP as: insufficient authority to change practice, their own lack of research knowledge and insufficient time to implement new ideas in the workplace. They believed EBP would be facilitated by: improved access to computers and internet facilities in the workplace; more effective research training; collaboration with academics; and dedicated time to search for and read research articles. As anticipated, nurses viewed the issues from a practical stance in relation to their own time, resources and lack of authority to effect change. Nursing managers expressed similar views to the nurses in relation to attitudes towards EBP implementation. However, they identified barriers which related to aspects of the organizational framework. In particular, they expressed concerns about issues such as budgetary constraints, staff quality (notably the reliance on minimally trained assistants in nursing (AINs) for direct resident care), as well as factors that reflected the wider political and economic context of health care in Taiwan. Conclusion: The findings of this study have implications for research, policy and practice in both Western and non-Western countries. Further research on EBP would be beneficial if conducted in settings other than hospitals, such as RACFs. There remains also the need to examine the potential for EBP in different social-cultural contexts, such as those in non-Western countries. Nursing managers have generally been excluded in previous research but, because of their particular role, there is a need to examine their perspectives of EBP and then compare these with those of the nurses. In Taiwan specifically, policy change is needed at both government and institutional levels to encourage and support the development of protocols and procedures for the implementation of EBP. If EBP was a government requirement for accreditation and a standard for protocols in hospitals and RACFs, it would lead to improved standards of care and cost effectiveness. This study supports the findings of a number of investigations conducted in Western countries which indicate that further education and training in research for nurses may lead to higher standards of patient care, greater job satisfaction and higher staff retention rates.

Thesis (M.S.)--Oregon State University, 2007. / Printout. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 39-44). Also available on the World Wide Web.

The OSIRIS instrument on board the Odin satellite uses limb viewing techniques to measure scattered sunlight and so determine the vertically resolved concentrations of atmospheric constituents including ozone. Initially, a proof of concept instrument was built and tested. This instrument, the Developmental Model, is now housed at the third floor clean room of the Physics Building on the University of Saskatchewan campus. <p> The Developmental Model was incorporated into a system designed to monitor scattered sunlight above Saskatoon. The system was set up to transmit skylight to the Developmental Model using a fiber optic cable and to perform all measurements automatically and with minimal user interaction. The system was calibrated to determine the pixel to wavelength response. Characterizations of the point spread function and relative intensity response of the detector were also made. A shutter system was designed and constructed to measure the detector dark current. An enclosure was built on the top of the Physics Building to provide a weather proof environment and so allow data collection throughout the year. Zenith sky measurements were taken during twilight hours to provide information on the depth of absorption in the Chappuis band, an indicator of the total ozone column. The absorption depth was converted to a Dobson Unit measurement for the ozone column. <p> Analysis of collected data provides two conclusions. The first is that a measurement set in the presence of clouds shows different signatures than a clear measurement set. The second conclusion is the detection of a diurnal trend in the total ozone column with greater amounts measured in the morning. The OSIRIS USASK Observatory is now operational and collecting data for future analysis of scattered sunlight measurements above Saskatoon.

The theme of this thesis is to analyse the performance of a conventional mesh topology in a multipath fading environment and compare it with a newly proposed multiple cell based mesh topology. The communication performance in general is measured by the overall through-put, packets delivery reliability, average message delivery delay and power-consumption. In this thesis, for simplicity of the calculation the network performance is indirectly measured in-terms of the number of additional routes originally required to connect an isolated or disconnected device, percentage of the devices which have reliable and unreliable route from or to the back bone routers, number of hops from back-bone routers to the nodes and redundant routes which includes the routes inside the particular cell or outside to the other cell. In this simulation 240 nodes has been used within the area of 120 x 60 m2 which is just in accordance with an average size of industry. Network simulation is broken down into five different scenarios with respect to different number of field devices or nodes and back bone routers along with the presence of obstacles in the area and then analysed respectively. Entire simulation and analytical work have been done on MATLAB. Major applications of multiple cell based mesh topology can be used within industrial process automation, such as pulp and paper, steel, oil and gas, etc.

The OSIRIS instrument on board the Odin satellite uses limb viewing techniques to measure scattered sunlight and so determine the vertically resolved concentrations of atmospheric constituents including ozone. Initially, a proof of concept instrument was built and tested. This instrument, the Developmental Model, is now housed at the third floor clean room of the Physics Building on the University of Saskatchewan campus. <p> The Developmental Model was incorporated into a system designed to monitor scattered sunlight above Saskatoon. The system was set up to transmit skylight to the Developmental Model using a fiber optic cable and to perform all measurements automatically and with minimal user interaction. The system was calibrated to determine the pixel to wavelength response. Characterizations of the point spread function and relative intensity response of the detector were also made. A shutter system was designed and constructed to measure the detector dark current. An enclosure was built on the top of the Physics Building to provide a weather proof environment and so allow data collection throughout the year. Zenith sky measurements were taken during twilight hours to provide information on the depth of absorption in the Chappuis band, an indicator of the total ozone column. The absorption depth was converted to a Dobson Unit measurement for the ozone column. <p> Analysis of collected data provides two conclusions. The first is that a measurement set in the presence of clouds shows different signatures than a clear measurement set. The second conclusion is the detection of a diurnal trend in the total ozone column with greater amounts measured in the morning. The OSIRIS USASK Observatory is now operational and collecting data for future analysis of scattered sunlight measurements above Saskatoon.

Three studies were conducted to investigate the use of molecular techniques to identify Salmonella serotypes in poultry. In the first experiment, two polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-based techniques: denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (DGGE) and polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (PAGE) were used to analyze Salmonella serotype isolates from two turkey processing plants (A and B). Genotypic patterns of each isolate were compared with those of known serotypes identified by traditional antibody precipitation methods. In Plant A, four different Salmonella serotypes were identified: Derby, Hadar, Montevideo, and Senftenberg. In plant B, ten serotypes were identified: Agona, Anatum, Brandenburg, Derby, Hadar, Meleagridis, Montevideo, Reading, Senftenberg, and Typhimurium. S. Derby was predominant in Plant A (83%) while S. Typhimurium was the most common serotype recovered in Plant B (39%). Overall, DGGE was more sensitive than PAGE. Isolates of the same serotypes were all grouped together by DGGE, while PAGE failed to group all like serotypes. Next, DGGE and REP-PCR were used as genotyping tools for identifying Salmonella. Fifty-four Salmonella isolates from two turkey processing plants (A and B) were evaluated. The isolates were comprised of the following serotypes: Brandenburg, Derby, Hadar, and Typhimurium (n = 6, 21, 12, and 15, respectively). Both methods were very sensitive and detected diverse fingerprint profiles among the isolates. The data suggested that REP-PCR and DGGE are useful tools for identifying Salmonella serotypes in research trials of this type. The final trial was carried out to track Salmonella serotypes throughout an integrated poultry operation using DGGE. Four flocks were sampled from grow-out through processing. The data showed that there was correlation between Salmonella serotypes found on processed carcasses and during grow-out. In addition, the isolates were compared against 15 known serotypes in our data base and only S. Hadar from the data base matched the unknown Salmonella isolates. Overall, these studies demonstrate that PCR-based methods could be considered as an alternative to conventional methods of antibody-based serotyping. Molecular methods were found to be reliable, sensitive, inexpensive, reproducible, and less labor intensive than conventional methods.

The economy development of Taiwan was facing the bottleneck in the1990s. The government set forth knowledge-based economy which involves high-tech industrial programs in order to break through the bottleneck. Computer networks were used to encourage economy, to accelerate production efficiency, and to enhance Taiwan¡¦s international competitiveness. The ratio of R&D expenses and GDP was 2.06% in the year of 2000, was 2.54% in 2004, and went higher and higher every year. Though the goal of 3.0% R&D expenses and GDP rate in the year of 2010 was still pursuing, the investment expenses in R&D produced great innovation effect index. And the exceptional achievement was within 10th place in the world. The results of this study indicate that if the ratio of R&D expenses and GDP. could be increased to above 3.5%, the technical innovation ability will be accelerated and elevated by the knowledge diffusion effect. Therefore, Taiwan¡¦s international competitiveness could be raised up to within 5th place in the world. A sound and integral constitutional government system creates political and economical stability. And this kind of stability is essential to economic prosperity. Economic growth depends upon the developing of knowledge-based economy. Thus, the non-economic turmoil and anarchy which are likely to hinder the development of knowledge-based economy in nowadays Taiwan should be eliminated completely.

The shape construction of three-dimensional objects has numerous applications in area that include manufacturing, virtual simulation, science, medicine, and consumer marketing. In this thesis, we consider a automatic system which captures and triangulates views of a real world 3D objects and finally registers and integrates them. There are four steps in our system, image acquisition, image processing, model construction and stereoscopic display. First step, image acquisition, we take 2D image pairs (by CCD camera movement) from different angles of the model with one CCD camera. Second step, image processing. In order to derive depth form two images captured by the CCD camera, we find registration points between two images by using image segmentation, feature extraction, image registration. Third step, 3D model construction, we divide it into three parts. First part, we generate partial depth surface by Delaunay triangle splitting , and for a selected set of viewing directions. Second part of this step, different surfaces have to be mapped into a uniform coordinate system for the given 3D object. Integration of registered surfaces defines the third part of the model construction. This finally, can lead to the generation of a complete 3D model of the given scene or of the given object. After generating a complete 3D model, we create a stereoscopic view in last step. We put on the LC-Shutter-Glasses and look through the lenses at high-resolution full color display while the lenses "shutter" on and off alternatively. The monitor displays only the left view while the right lens of the glasses shutters, and display the right view while the left lens of the glasses shutters.

IP multicast is an efficient means of sending to a group. Our protocol is built on top of the existing static hosts IP unicast and multicast forwarding services to avoid triangle routing which always occurs in Mobile IP. Relying only on the existing multicast service model and reconstructing the delivery tree every time a multicast member and/or source move is not always a good solution. By applying the ideas of bi-directional tunneled multicast [3], our protocol attempts to hide host mobility from all other members of the group. Therefore, the multicast distribution tree will not be updated for the sake of member location change. Furthermore, our protocol has near shortest delivery paths like remote subscription protocol [3]. Our protocol can also adapt to the fluctuation of both host movement and the number of mobile members (i.e., having mobility and scalability properties). According to our protocol, the tunnel convergence problem resulting from bi-directional tunneling will be solved. By changing service range ``R', we can trade off the advantages and disadvantages of both bi-directional tunneling and remote subscription (they are the extremes of RBMoM). We measure the system performance and cost in different service range, topology size and mobile population density through simulation. According to the results of our simulation, we believe our protocol has much better performance without using the current Mobile IP multicast solutions.

Wireless Ad hoc Network is a self-organizing network. It consists of many mobile nodes and it is a dynamic topology network. It is an impermanent wireless network. It is not an infrastructure-based network, and can be deployed in a short time. Therefore, it can be highly used in some emergency situations, such as, in emergency rescue actions, in military ¡Ketc. As a result, multicast plays an important role here. But before putting it into applications, we have to consider some problems such as scalability, control overhead, data delivery ratio, and routing delay. Some approaches we have learned can¡¦t resolve these problems. So, here we propose a new multicast routing protocol. It¡¦s a kind of core-based multicast protocols. First, we divide whole network into several sub-networks called as cluster, and pick up a node as the cluster core node from each cluster, and this cluster core node will manage all member nodes in this area. All cluster core nodes will connect to each other. Source node in each cluster will send messages to the it¡¦s cluster core-node and then the cluster core node will forward this message to other cluster core-nodes. Finally, the messages will be sent to the destination, member nodes of a multicast session. In this multicast routing protocol, we reduce control packets by localization and lower control overhead. With localization, every nodes only have information from near-by nodes, and this reduce the delay time of routing effectively. More, localization does not increase too much nodes when a message travels from A to B and raise the data delivery ratio. And because of localization, whole network is scalability.