This study aimed to investigate the factors that affect e-commerce adoption in small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in the developing country context of Botswana. The research was undertaken using an interpretive paradigm with multiple case studies in nine SMEs that were codenamed C1Alpha, C5Home, C6Lodge C2Beta, C3Gamma, C4Teq, C7Panda, C8Estate, and C9Autoco. Data collection tools and techniques involved face-to-face semi-structured and unstructured interviews, telephone interviews, website content analysis, document analysis of SME reports and observations. A conceptual framework was developed to capture elements from extant e-commerce adoption literature that are defined in the research question. Data collected from each of the SMEs was analysed to present the findings based on the elements described above. These elements include the following: 1) the nature and characteristic of the business environment, 2) use of ICT and Web Applications; 3) managerial characteristics and perception of e-commerce; 4) factors that affect e-commerce adoption or the lack of it; 5) the interaction of the factors and how they determine the level of e-commerce adoption, and 6) the role of the local business environment. The main findings of this study are the factors for e-commerce adoption for each of the SMEs. The study emerges with factors of e-commerce adoption that have been derived from various patterns of e-commerce adoption as represented in the nature and characteristics of the SMEs. This study makes a theoretical contribution by proposing a conceptual framework for investigating factors affecting e-commerce adoption in SMEs. Methodologically, the study adds a different blend to the research approach by undertaking in-depth studies on selected SMEs in Botswana, and provides an interpretive assessment of e-commerce adoption research in a developing country context of Botswana. Strategies for improving e-commerce development in the selected SMEs are presented, as well as implications of the research findings. This study provides insights into understanding SME e-commerce adoption factors in other contexts with similar characteristics.

This thesis investigates how developments in audio for digital television can be utilised to improve the experience of hearing impaired people when watching television. The work has had significant impact on international digital TV broadcast standards; it led to the formation of the UK Clean Audio Forum whose recommendations based on the research have been included in ETSI international standards for digital television, adopted into ITU standards for IPTV and also into EBU and NorDig digital television receiver specifications. In this thesis listening tests are implemented to assess the impact of various processes with a phantom centre channel and with a centre loudspeaker. The impact of non-speech channel attenuation and dynamic range control on speech clarity, sound quality and enjoyment of audio-visual media are investigated for both hearing impaired and non-hearing impaired people. For the first time the impact of acoustical crosstalk in two channel stereo reproduction on intelligibility of speech is quantified using both subjective intelligibility assessments and acoustic measurement techniques with intelligibility benefits of 5.9% found by utilising a centre loudspeaker instead of a phantom centre. A novel implementation of principal component analysis as a pre- broadcast production tool for labelling AV media compatible with a clean audio mix is identified, and two research implementations of accessible audio are documented including an object based implementation of clean audio for live broadcast that has been developed and publicly demonstrated.

Toward A Hybrid Music Theatre explores the coming convergence between the English-language musical theatre and contemporary opera. The research focuses specifically on the implementation of avant-garde compositional techniques within a commercial music theatre form. Areas of application include practices in narrative structure, multiplicity of character portrayal, instrumental and vocal characterizations, vocal writing, and soundscape narrative. Works by Italian and American twentieth-century composers have been examined for the use of such techniques including Luigi Dallapiccola, Luigi Nono, Bruno Maderna, Luciano Berio, Leonard Bernstein, and Stephen Sondheim. Works such as Berio’s "Outis" and Sondheim’s "Merrily We Roll Along" have influenced the thinking on narrative structure, while Dallapiccola’s "Volo di notte," Maderna’s "Don Perlimplin," and Sondheim’s "Into The Woods" have contributed to the discussion of instrumental and vocal characterizations. Choral techniques such as those found in the works of György Kurtág and Krzysztof Penderecki influenced the quasi-soundscape effects. Three full works accompany the portfolio, "The Proposal," "The Passion of John" and "The Rose Prologues." The work embodied in these projects represent a significant development to the journey moving toward hybridity. The narrative structure of "The Proposal" addresses two sides of a musical story told simultaneously. The two primary characters are portrayed by seven singers and various instruments. "The Passion of John" explores timbre, time and space as a means of musical storytelling while "The Rose Prologues" explores a single image from multiple perspectives in short-form opera. The direction taken with these works lays out a path for future composers to explore.

With a dramatic economic growth rate of 10% per year, China, as one of the Big Emerging Markets, has drawn increasing attention from both academia and industry. Its market potential and growth rate is believed to be the top attraction for global investment. In many sectors, the increasing number of options available to consumers has led to the emergence of a consumer society in China and has further fed the development of variance in consumer behaviour. This has imposed imperatives of consumer research in China, especially market segmentation research, on both foreign multinational companies and indigenous 5 manufacturers, in order i) to identify the unique needs of consumers, to provide more desirable product/service packages, and iii) to communicate brand value via more appropriate messages to targeted consumers.

The recent improvements and developments on Intelligent Agents (IA), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and 3D visualisation, coupled with an increasing desire to integrate interactivity within virtual spaces bring concerns in regard to the articulation of narratives in such environments.

The amount of textual information available electronically has made it difficult for many users to find and access the right information within acceptable time. Research communities in the natural language processing (NLP) field are developing tools and techniques to alleviate these problems and help users in exploiting these vast resources. These techniques include Information Retrieval (IR) and Information Extraction (IE). The work described in this thesis concerns IE and more specifically, named entity extraction in Arabic. The Arabic language is of significant interest to the NLP community mainly due to its political and economic significance, but also due to its interesting characteristics. Text usually contains all kinds of names such as person names, company names, city and country names, sports teams, chemicals and lots of other names from specific domains. These names are called Named Entities (NE) and Named Entity Recognition (NER), one of the main tasks of IE systems, seeks to locate and classify automatically these names into predefined categories. NER systems are developed for different applications and can be beneficial to other information management technologies as it can be built over an IR system or can be used as the base module of a Data Mining application. In this thesis we propose an efficient and effective framework for extracting Arabic NEs from text using a rule based approach. Our approach makes use of Arabic contextual and morphological information to extract named entities. The context is represented by means of words that are used as clues for each named entity type. Morphological information is used to detect the part of speech of each word given to the morphological analyzer. Subsequently we developed and implemented our rules in order to recognise each position of the named entity. Finally, our system implementation, evaluation metrics and experimental results are presented.

This thesis is an exploratory study on how people of African descent in the UK use blogs as social, cultural and counterhegemonic practice and is positioned within the theoretical frameworks of alternative media and critical race theory (CRT). The research questions at the centre of this study are what motivates African Caribbean people in the UK to become bloggers; what gratification they experience through authoring blogs; how they use blogs to address issues of representation in the mainstream media and their perceptions of the social impact of their activities as bloggers. The findings reveal that motivation for blogging is linked to voice, visibility and empowerment and gratification is linked to voice, knowledge sharing, knowledge acquisition and social interaction. While voice, as a motivational factor and gratification for some participants is linked to interests in creative writing and journalism, for many others motivation and gratification are driven by a complex set of factors linked to issues of race and representation. These stem from feelings of being voiceless, invisible and marginalised as African Caribbean people in British society and blogs function as an assertive strategy and medium for self-representation. The constructed narratives of the bloggers who participated in this study reveal their experience of subtle forms of prejudice and discrimination perpetuated through dominant discourses in the mainstream media and marginalisation in the wider society. The findings demonstrate that race and ethnicity are inextricably linked to motivation and gratification and influence blogging practice and content production. This thesis expands on current literature by documenting how African Caribbean people have appropriated blogs to harness social and cultural capital, to mediate against racism and marginalisation within British society and to empower themselves and their communities.

Capturing, recreating and representing a high fidelity virtual representation of the dynamic human form has long been a target for a diverse range of applications including tele-presence, games, film and TV special effects. The complexity of the challenge, to achieve a lifelike, faithful and believable representation, is such that a wide range of techniques and approaches have been developed. These are both due to research lead curiosity and requirements to address specific objective for particular problems. This work starts from a novel standpoint: that the processes of surfacing, tessellation and texturing, commonly used in 3D reconstruction, are computationally expensive and un-necessary. This work argues that by integrating the reconstruction and rendering processes into a single process that is aligned with the architecture of modern graphics hardware, a lightweight component solution can be achieved that is suitable for application on the end user systems within the many application domains. In order to achieve this aim the research undertaken seeks to both define an appropriate technique and develop detailed understanding of the reconstruction process pipeline and impacting factors. This is achieved through a complementary investigation of the tools and frameworks that are necessary to support iterative development of the approach with reliable, repeatable objective assessment. This reasons that by understanding the nature of the capture, reconstruction and presentation pipeline and by objective evaluation of the emerging reconstruction techniques this research will define an approach for 3D video based reconstruction that effectively utilises the processing potential of a single system to deliver acceptable levels of performance (speed) and fidelity (visual quality) for a componentised, multi-purpose 3D reconstruction and rendering solution. This thesis describes the research that has driven the evolution of technique and documents the iterations made. It presents a novel framework for experimentation and evaluation of the techniques and demonstrates how the use of these tools has enabled both rapid prototyping of approach and objective evaluation of improvement. The work concludes with a review of the approach taken and identifies approaches for evaluation of performance (speed) and fidelity (visual quality) that enable both repeatable experimentation within the research pipeline and reliable comparison of the end-to-end process against other techniques.

End-User privacy concerns surrounding use of Social Networks present new and complex problems for research. Specifically, a phenomenon known as “the Privacy Paradox” has been observed where end-users stated concerns, attitudes and intended behaviour are not consistent with the actual behaviour within the network. Numerous causes have been proposed as potentially being the root of the problem of this paradoxical phenomenon including a lack of user awareness of privacy issues, a low level skill in using technology or a lack of privacy salience within the social network itself. However, the role of the User Interface (UI) in contributing to, and potentially providing a solution to, poor privacy behaviour is under-explored. A potentially fruitful avenue of enquiry given that behaviour is considered to be a reaction to environmental stimulus and the UI provides the environment within which the user is interacting. This thesis implements a two phase approach to furthering understanding of privacy behaviour in social networks. First, a survey is implemented exploring the relationship of concepts within the privacy paradox identifying that users stated needs are not being met by their observable behaviour. Secondly, two experiments are implemented in order to explore this behaviour as an interaction with the network; these questions are answered to build a social network profile and can be grouped according to their potential sensitivity. A model of social psychology, the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB), is used to develop such experiments in order to examine the cognition behind these interactions. Each of the salient influencers defined by the TPB is used to inform a series of UI treatments and form the basis for experiment groups. An initial experiment explores the method and is used to inform the design of the second, which also introduces a factorial design to explore the relationships between treatments. These experiments show that participants within the treatment groups disclose less information than the control, with statistical significance. Within the first experiment this non-disclosure took place across all questions sensitivities, possibly due to limitations in the experimental method. However, participants in experiment two appear far more selective in their disclosure, choosing not to answer more sensitive questions suggesting that they thought of their privacy while interacting with the system. Findings within this thesis suggest that the UI plays an important role in influencing end-user behaviour as it can inform the context of the interaction as it happens.

One of the challenging issues in Next Generation Wireless Systems (NGWS) is seamless Vertical Handover (VHO) during the mobility between different types of technologies (3GPP and non-3GPP) such as Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM), Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi), Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX), Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) and Long Term Evolution (LTE). Therefore, the telecommunication operators are required to develop an interoperability strategy for these different types of existing networks to get the best connection anywhere, anytime without interruption of the ongoing sessions. In order to identify this problem accurately, the research study presented in this thesis provides four surveys about VHO approaches found in the literature. In these surveys, we classify the existing VHO approaches into categories based on the available VHO techniques for which we present their objectives and performances issues. After that, we propose an optimised VHO approach based on the VHO approaches that have been studied in the literature and take into consideration the research problems and conclusions which are arisen in our surveys. The proposed approach demonstrates better performance (packet loss, latency and signaling cost), less VHO connection failure (probability of minimising VHO reject sessions), less complexity and an enhanced VHO compared with that found in the literature. It consists of a procedure which is implemented by an algorithm. The proposed procedure of loose coupling and Mobile Internet Protocol version 4 (MIPv4) provides early buffering for new data packets to minimise VHO packet loss and latency. Analysis and simulation of the proposed procedure show that the VHO packet loss and latency are significantly reduced compared with previous MIPv6 procedures found in the literature. The proposed algorithm is composed of two main parts: Handover Initiation and Optimum Radio Access Technologies (RATs) list of priority. The first part includes two main types of VHO and gives priority to imperative sessions over alternative sessions. III This part is also responsible for deciding when and where to perform the handover by choosing the best RATs from the multiple ones available. Then, it passes them to the decision phase. This results in reducing the signaling cost and the inevitable degradation in Quality of Service (QoS) as a result of avoiding unnecessary handover processes. The second part defines RATs list of priority to minimise VHO connection failure. Analysis and simulation based performance evaluations then demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the traditional algorithms in terms of: (a) the probability of VHO connection failure as a result of using the optimum RATs list of priority and (b) the signaling cost and the inevitable degradation in QoS as a result of avoiding unnecessary handover processes.