Abstract This thesis applies the method of finite-difference frequency -domain to solve the field when light propagating through the optical waveguide. Comparing with other method, method of finite-difference time-domain which required to be calculated with larger matrices and without any ideal approximate rapid solution, our method only needs to solve the joint equations. Method of finite-difference frequency -domain will be more efficient than method of finite- difference time-domain in optical waveguide simulation. However, all that we need to confer with are how to sample the effective indices for set grind points and the deal for the boundary conditions in partial differential equations, including electric wall, magnetic wall, absorption boundary and other boundary conditions, etc. Next, we confer with the difference deal between TE and TM waves respectively. Final, we confer with high-order finite-difference and the method for calculating extremely large area or extremely high precision in order to use the method of finite-difference frequency-domain to find the incident, reflective, and scattering fields by the fastest and the exactest procedures.

In spite of having a fixed standard of pronunciation, English is being used in various ways in parts of the world, particularly in its way of utterance. English vowel is playing one of the significant roles in making different varieties of English language. This essay tries to see into detail how some phonetic features (formant movement, frequency, pitch) of English vowels vary in relation to Bengali, Catalan, Italian, Spanish and Swedish speakers. It has been found that all these speakers vary a lot from each other in the utterance of English vowels.

This thesis examines the emergence of different business structure in Taiwan and South Korea. This thesis questions how, in very similar contexts, different economic institutions have evolved. In contrast to the political, market, and cultural perspectives dealing, the historical comparative institutional analysis adopted in this research suggests institutions alone could not explain the different business structure. In Korea and Taiwan, different business structure has emerged during the 1960s and 1970s, and this thesis considers three factors underlying their formations: political conditions, historical events, and industrial adjustments. The Chaebols in Korea, to a large extent are the result of a political alliance between the South Korean governments with the entrepreneurial elites to overcome their weak political support basis. Thus South Korea was, exposed largely to the leverages and influences of large business conglomerates which in turn benefited the growth of the Chaebols. In Taiwan, however, the business groups are the oucome of state policies in the economic realm. To avoid political challenges from centralized business groups, the KMT government in Taiwan distanced itself from the business sector and when necessary, exerted strong measures to restrict the business concentration. Thus, business structure in Taiwan are more diffused and balanced in its proportions. SMEs produces most of the export goods while the Large enterprises and State own enterprises produce the domestic consumer goods. This thesis pilots aspects of an alternative explanation, which aims to add additional explanation to the literature. Contrary to the prior conception of the institutional logic, the thesis concludes that growth of business structure in East Asia must incorporate attributes of historical and political conditions that support the entrepreneurial behavior, and the wider environment that serves to deter or reinforce risk-taking behavior.

The purpose of this study will be to ascertain the extent social acceptance, or social status of an individual in one population, measured sociometrically, tends to remain constant for that individual in another population.

The Same-Different task is an experimental paradigm in which a stimulus pair is presented in succession to a participant whose task is to determine if the stimuli are Same or Different. Typical results show that participants tend to be quicker to respond Same then they are to respond Different. Since the 1960s, many models were proposed to explain this effect, but none has yielded conclusive evidence. The objective of this thesis is to test these models with three experiments by focusing on three research questions: 1) what is the source of the effect, the participant or the stimuli?; 2) what is the organization of the cognitive mechanisms underlying the task?; and 3) what is the effect of the number of attributes on the processing capacity? Results show that the fast-same effect stems from the characteristics of the stimuli rather than an inherent preference for sameness. They also show that the cognitive architecture underlying the task is serial, but that it does not seem to explain solely the fast-same effect. Indeed, the fast-same effect seems to be rather caused by a more efficient processing of Same stimuli in the first 500 ms of the treatment compared to Different stimuli.

This research was conducted to study the effects of supplemental L-Methionine (L-Met) and DL-Methionine (DL-Met) on nutrient metabolism, muscle gene expression, and growth performance of pigs. Twenty crossbred young barrows (initial Body Weight (BW) 21.2 ± 2.7 kg) were randomly assigned to 2 treatments. Crystalline L-Met and DL- Met were supplemented to the diets in Treatment 1 and 2 (both at 0.13%, ased basis), respectively. After 4 weeks of an ad libitum feeding trial, BW and feed intake were measured to calculate Average Daily Gain, Average Daily Feed Intake, and Gain: Feed. The blood samples were collected from the jugular vein for analyses of plasma AA and metabolite concentrations. The longissimus dorsi muscle samples were collected for analysis of myogenesis gene expression. The findings from this study (from gene expression to animal growth performance) suggest that the bioefficacy of L-Met is the same as for DL-Met, indicating the highly efficient conversion of D-Met to L-Met in young growing barrows.

Background: Informed consent is the autonomy of the patient who involves decision-making after being informed of and understanding the physician. Objectives: This study sought to investigate and compare patients¡¦ and physicians¡¦ perceptions of informed consent and the factors that influence their viewpoints on informed consent. Methods: The subjects were citizens without medical background and physicians working in four hospitals. Self-structured questionnaire was used to gather information. The physicians were recruited from two medical centers, a regional hospital and a district hospital in Kaohsiung. The data is analyzed by SPSS 14.0 and used descriptive statistics, item analysis, factor analysis, chi-square test, Fisher's exact probability test, t-test, and ANOVA. Results: The response rates were 97% in citizens (n=891) and 79 % in physicians (n=158). As for the concept of informed consent, 55.7% citizens thought that doctor should respect the opinion from the patient and family during the informed consent process. Furthermore, 91.2% the citizens prefer to know the information about their health condition from the physicians rather than from family (8.8%). Regarding the sequence of informing the physical condition, 29.9% citizens also prefer directly from the physician. As for the decision-making process, 55% respondents thought that patient¡¦s own decision is the most important. 52.5% physicians thought that doctor should respect the opinion from both the patient and family and the bad news should be informed by physicians (88.0%) rather than by family. As for the sequence of knowing the bad news, 46.2% physicians preferred to inform family first and inform patient after discussing with family. In decision-making process, 48.7% physicians thought that physician¡¦s opinion was still more important than opinion of patients and family. Further analysis revealed that patients¡¦ gender and the level of family visited hospital have significant difference on the perception of informed consent (p=0.027; p=0.000); gender, age, educational background and living locations also have significant difference on ¡§who to deliver the bad news.¡¨ (p=0.006; p=0.004; p=0.035; p=0.012); Citizens¡¦ age, educational background and career have significant influence on their opinion of informed consent of recently visiting doctor (p=0.014; p=0.006; p=0.001). The variables in the physicians¡¦ background have no relation with the means of informing and decision-making. The gender and position of the physician have significant effect on the opinion of practice of informed consent (p=0.015 and p=0.001). Conclusions: We concluded that the perceptions of informed consent, there was no difference between physicians and citizens; however the citizen chose the patient first, and the physician chose the family first during the process of informed consent. Physicians have better perceptions of informed consent than the common citizens.

This study aims to investigate various and multiple viewpoints of scholars, textbook editors, elementary school teachers, and student parents on the connection issue between different editions of elementary school textbooks, so as to submit our conclusions and suggestions. The concrete purpose of this study is double: a) What are the multiple voices of the connection issue of different textbooks? b) How are these voices formed? In order to reach the above purpose, the research method is mainly qualitative method, complementing by quantitative method. The study subjects are three scholars, three editors of school textbooks, 18 elementary school teachers, and five student parents. We adopt interview method of qualitative research. According to the introductory interviews, the researchers compile preliminary questionnaire, which is distributed to 160 elementary school teachers in all the 16 counties and cities in the Taiwan area. The last open-end question allows the answerers to write down their opinions, which are then used as one part of data analysis of this study. Finally, we conduct our analysis and discussion by means of incessant comparative analysis and type analysis. Synthetically, we then produce the conclusions and suggestions of this study. The following are the conclusions we reached: 1. The connection between the formal outlines and the temporary ones of the nine-year-through consistent policy causes various connection problems of different editions years ago. Take math course for example. This course is being narrowed and regulated owing to the formal outlines' annual details, which, though brings out a converging agreement, still causes some connection problems, though fewer. Even though connection problems remain, teachers should manage to reduce the problems to the minimum when conducting their teachings, so as to make the teachings more favorably. 2. Because of poor understanding towards the present nine-year-through consistent policy curricula outlines, elementary school teachers can not explain the connection problems to the student parents clearly, which makes the latter take dubious stance towards this issue. The nature of elementary school curricula is of the class of starting point of Burner's spiral curriculum; furthermore, the teaching units are circular through the six years. Thus, the negligent and omitting elements can be redressed to some point. On the other hand, whether students' learning contents are negligent or not will be redressed by the "feedback loop" to rectify the teaching objects and complement the teaching materials. 3. Elementary school teachers with teaching experience less than five years are mostly inexperienced teachers who don't understand the curricula outlines. From our interviews we realize that all kinds of selection tests almost never touch issues concerning curricula outlines. Under this vein, the chance to understand the curricula outlines is relatively meager, which is a warning and chasm for elementary teaching staff cultivation curricula. 4. The connection problems of different elementary textbook editions have something to do with the natures of curricula or fields. Curricula of artistic ability have less connection, which might have something to do with having no tests. "Having tests" tops all the connection issues of different elementary school textbooks. 5. The connection issues of different elementary school textbooks manifest the loose joining of "theory and practice" of teaching, which is the chief cause of the long-term negligence of the outcry of elementary school teachers who really do the teachings. On the one hand, the low professional status and image of elementary school teachers partly contribute to the above phenomenon. On the other hand, many elementary school teachers hold the belief that politics is behind education. In the long run, they feel inactive to all the educational issues. 6. Transfer students have to face horizontal transfer of different editions of their textbooks. Various levels of transfer problems occur because of different transfer times during the semester. But connection problems are not unsolvable. The joint cooperation between elementary school teachers and the publishers of elementary school textbooks still can patch up the chasm of connection.

Violence in sport happening during sporting fight as well as out of play, is becoming a serious social problem, most often sporting activity is criticised exactly through the excessive manifestation of aggression. There are rather controversial attitudes of scientists towards manifestation of men and women aggression presented. That prompted to do a research analysing possibility of manifestation of aggression among different sex handball players of various performance (n=119) and have established interrelation of various forms of aggression. Having analysed manifestation of aggression in the aspect of sex, it was found that women are eager to express hostile aggression more than men. Summarising manifestation of aggression in the aspect of performance, the form of instrumental aggression is more expressed in high peak performance women handball players, and a feature of jealousy and tendency to hostile aggression is more peculiar to low peak performance women. Upon establishing coherence of various aggression forms among high peak performance handball players, it was founded that with increasing possibility of manifestation of instrumental aggression, a possibility of verbal aggression was also increasing. Instrumental aggression of low peak performance handball players – both men and women - is more related to defensive aggression.

Endorsement is a popular marketing communications tool that has been used by marketers for many years. However, traditional methods of marketing are now being surpassed as sophisticated consumers become more cynical and seek out unofficial, noncommercial information about brands. Due to the advent of technology, consumers are able to communicate independently via the internet in order to seek out, and provide, their own endorsements for products and brands. This study differentiates between different forms of dependent (paid-for) endorsements and independent (non-paid-for) endorsements; namely regular consumer endorsements, expert endorsements and association endorsements, and investigates their relative effects on brand trust. In addition, this study introduces a new form of endorsement, namely implied independent association endorsement, and tests its effect on brand trust. First, a conceptual framework of the structure of the relationship between endorsements and brand trust was compiled from relative endorsement literature. The study then investigated these relationships amongst South African nutritional supplement users who make use of the Internet to gather product information. The study made use of an Internetbased experimental research design. The study divided subjects into two experimental groups and one control group. The effect of each form of endorsement on brand trust was tested comparatively between the groups. The measurement instrument used to measure brand trust was an adapted version of the brand trust scale (BTS) designed by Delgado-Ballester (2004:573-592). Three one-way between-groups ANOVAs were conducted to compare the variability of brand trust scores between the different experimental groups. The covariate brand familiarity was included to account for previous experience with the brand used in the experiment. One-way between-groups ANCOVA’s were used to control the potential confounding that the covariate brand familiarity had on each dependent variable. The results indicate that neither dependent nor independent regular consumer endorsements have an affect on brand trust scores. However, whilst independent expert and independent association endorsements do significantly influence brand trust scores, dependent expert and dependent (implied independent) association endorsements do not. Finally, it was found that independent endorsements have a greater affect on brand trust scores than dependent (implied independent) endorsements in the association endorsement category. The first implication for managers is that different forms of endorsement influence brand trust differently, therefore, managers should be able to distinguish between different forms of endorsement available to them to use in their marketing communications mix. Secondly, managers should start investigating methods of monitoring or influencing independent expert and association endorsements to benefit from their positive influence on brand trust, which in turn has a positive affect on brand equity, consumer loyalty, brand extension acceptance and retailer re-purchases decisions. Copyright / Dissertation (MCom)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Marketing Management / MCom / Unrestricted