<p>Date June 04, 2008</p><p>Level Master Thesis EFO705, 10 points (15 credits)</p><p>Authors Pornratchanee Sethakaset Tanawan Santimataneedol</p><p>Bangkok, Thailand Bangkok Thailand</p><p>Date of Birth: 28 October 1982 Date of Birth: 5 March 1984</p><p>Title The Application of Human Resource Management in Thai SMEs –</p><p>A Case Study of Albatross Company Limited</p><p>Supervisor Mona Andersson</p><p>Problems : How can the entrepreneur of SMEs manage their human resources?</p><p>Can previous research and studies about HRM in SMEs be applied in the Thai entrepreneurial SME?</p><p>Does the HRM in the company change and transform over time?</p><p>Purposes : The purposes of this study are to review the relevant studies and research about HRM in SMEs in order to investigate how human resources are managed in SMEs and to determine if the previous studies are applicable to Thai entrepreneurial SMEs.</p><p>Methodology : This master’s thesis is based on a qualitative approach in order to investigate HRM in SMEs and easier to understand the behavior in a certain case. The main secondary data is also collected from website which is the utilizing material for this thesis.</p><p>Conclusion : In this study, it was concluded that this Thai SME manages its human resource in a mixture between informal and formal way. HRM is used and practiced more as the company grows which the entrepreneur plays a central role in the Human Resource Management in SMEs.</p>

<p>Wireless sensor networks offer easy implementation, flexibility and mobility of hand held </p><p>devices. Sensors consist of an internal power source, which is the great limitation for </p><p>the life time and the usage of sensor networks. To increase the life time, sensors should </p><p>stay in energy saving sleep mode as long as possible, because in sleep mode the radio is </p><p>either shut down or working with less energy. Better energy handling is implemented in </p><p>different power saving mechanism of common Medium Access Control protocols, which are </p><p>evaluated and analyzed and further extensions and ideas to improve the energy efficiency </p><p>are presented. Slotted PSM is simulated with the NS2 and compared to the WLAN 802.11 </p><p>PSM technology and the results show that energy efficiency and power consumption are </p><p>much better implemented and life time increases with the use of Slotted PSM.</p>

<p>Small and medium-sized enterprises play much more important roles in both domestic and international markets nowadays. The issue that factors influence their export performance (mainly the export sales and profits) also becomes much more attractive these years. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the factors which influence the SMEs’ export performance and how each factor influences the SMEs’ export performance. This study is built on a modified model of the factors influencing the SMEs’ export performance. The authors use case study to conduct this research, and one company’s (Company B’s) data is collected through the semi-structured interview. Some findings are obtained: the important factors which influence Company B’s export performance contain the trade shows, the expenses on getting the authentication, capital sources, export rebate, firm network, firm previous experience, firm competencies, personal network, international orientation and personal previous experience. In addition, the authors also find the effect of firm size is indirect. However, customs duty, transportation, as well as building up the brand do not play important impacts on export performance. Take the trade shows as an example, personal cards and product samples are sent to the customers, then the customers who are interested in the products will contact Company B. In this way, the customers are accumulated and the export sales increase. Thus, the export performance is enhanced.</p>

<p>Cake filtration is a unit operation to separate solids from fluids in industrial processes. The build up of a filter cake is usually accompanied with a decrease in overall permeability over the filter leading to an increased pressure drop over the filter. For an incompressible filter cake that builds up on a homogeneous filter cloth, a linear pressure drop profile over time is expected for a constant fluid volume flow. However, experiments show curved pressure drop profiles, which are also attributed to inhomogeneities of the filter (filter medium and/or residual filter cake).</p><p>In this work, a mathematical filter model is developed to describe the relationship between time and overall permeability. The model considers a filter with an inhomogeneous permeability and accounts for fluid mechanics by a one-dimensional formulation of Darcy's law and for the cake build up by solid continuity. The model can be solved analytically in the time domain. The analytic solution allows for the unambiguous inversion of the model to determine the inhomogeneous permeability from the time resolved overall permeability, e.g. pressure drop measurements. An error estimation of the method is provided by rewriting the model as convolution transformation.</p><p>This method is applied to simulated and experimental pressure drop data of gas filters with textile filter cloths and various situations with non-uniform flow situations in practical problems are explored. A routine is developed to generate characteristic filter cycles from semi-continuous filter plant operation. The model is modified to investigate the impact of non-uniform dust concentrations.</p>

In this thesis, we focus on topics relevant to developing and deploying large-scale wireless sensor network (WSN) applications within real dynamic urban environments. Given few reported experiences in the literature, we designed our own such network to provide a foundation for our research. The Smart Condo, a well-defined project with the goal of helping people age in place, provided the setting for our WSN that would non-intrusively monitor an occupant and environment. Although we carefully designed, developed, and deployed the network, all of our planning did not prepare us for a key challenge of that environment: significant radio-frequency interference. Most researchers tend to ignore the existence of interference along with its potentially serious implications: beyond impacting network performance, it can lead researchers to misleading or unrealistic conclusions. Interference is a particularly difficult problem to study because it varies in time, space, and intensity. Other researchers have typically approached the problem by investigating only known interferers. Instead, we approach the problem more generally and consider interference of unknown origins. We envision nodes periodically observing their environment, recognizing patterns in those observations, and responding appropriately, so we use only standard WSN nodes for our data collection. Unfortunately, collecting high-resolution data is difficult using these simple devices, and to the best of our knowledge, other researchers have only used them to collect rather coarse data. Within the Smart Condo urban environment, we recorded a transceiver's received power level at 5000 Hz, a higher rate than we encountered elsewhere in the literature, using 16 synchronized nodes. We explored traces from 256 channels and observed a number of recurring patterns; we then investigated classifying traces automatically and obtained rather promising results. We focused on the two patterns most detrimental to packet reception rates and further investigated both sampling and classification techniques tailored to them. As part of our work, we extended our simulator, making it capable of generating impulsive interference, and developed a proof-of-concept pattern-aware medium access control (MAC) protocol. Through experiments using both the simulator and WSN devices, we evaluated the classifier and proof-of-concept MAC. Our results show that impressive gains in the packet reception rates are possible when nodes can recognize and appropriately react to interference. Using our techniques, nodes can communicate more efficiently by reducing the number of failed transmissions and consequently decreasing overall network congestion.

Many of the celestial bodies we know are found to be magnetized:the Earth, many of the planets so far discovered, the Sun and other stars,the interstellar space, the Milky Way and other galaxies.The reason for that is still to be fully understood, and this work is meant to be a step in that direction. The dynamics of the interstellar medium is dominated by events likesupernovae explosions that can be modelled as irrotational flows.The first part of this thesis is dedicated to the analysis of some characteristics of these flows, in particular how they influencethe typical turbulent magnetic diffusivity of a medium, and it is shownthat the diffusivity is generally enhanced, except for some specific casessuch as steady potential flows, where it can be lowered.Moreover, it is examined how such flows can develop vorticity when they occur in environments affected by rotation or shear,or that are not barotropic. Secondly, we examine helical flows, that are of basic importance for the phenomenon of the amplification of magnetic fields, namely the dynamo.Magnetic helicity can arise from the occurrence of an instability: here we focus on theinstability of purely toroidal magnetic fields, also known as Tayler instability.It is possible to give a topological interpretation of magnetic helicity.Using this point of view, and being aware that magnetic helicity is a conserved quantity in non-resistive flows,it is illustrated how helical systems preserve magnetic structureslonger than non-helical ones. The final part of the thesis deals directly with dynamos.It is shown how to evaluate dynamo transport coefficients with two of the most commonly used techniques, namely theimposed-field and the test-field methods.After that, it is analyzed how dynamos are affected by advectionof magnetic fields and material away from the domain in which theyoperate.It is demonstrated that the presence of an outflow, likestellar or galactic winds in real astrophysical cases,alleviates the so-calledcatastrophic quenching, that is the damping of a dynamoin highly conductive media, thus allowing the dynamo process to work better. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defence the following paper was unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper nr 5: Submitted</p>

<p><font face="Times New Roman"> <p align="left">This study explores the effect of English as medium of instruction in Geography teaching in Grade 11. It focuses on classroom interaction where both the teachers and learners have limited proficiency in the language of instruction. It reflects on the challenges experienced by Afrikaans speaking teachers in mediating Geography lessons to isiXhosa speaking learners in Grade 11 at one secondary school in the Western Cape.</p> </font></p>

Cake filtration is a unit operation to separate solids from fluids in industrial processes. The build up of a filter cake is usually accompanied with a decrease in overall permeability over the filter leading to an increased pressure drop over the filter. For an incompressible filter cake that builds up on a homogeneous filter cloth, a linear pressure drop profile over time is expected for a constant fluid volume flow. However, experiments show curved pressure drop profiles, which are also attributed to inhomogeneities of the filter (filter medium and/or residual filter cake). In this work, a mathematical filter model is developed to describe the relationship between time and overall permeability. The model considers a filter with an inhomogeneous permeability and accounts for fluid mechanics by a one-dimensional formulation of Darcy's law and for the cake build up by solid continuity. The model can be solved analytically in the time domain. The analytic solution allows for the unambiguous inversion of the model to determine the inhomogeneous permeability from the time resolved overall permeability, e.g. pressure drop measurements. An error estimation of the method is provided by rewriting the model as convolution transformation. This method is applied to simulated and experimental pressure drop data of gas filters with textile filter cloths and various situations with non-uniform flow situations in practical problems are explored. A routine is developed to generate characteristic filter cycles from semi-continuous filter plant operation. The model is modified to investigate the impact of non-uniform dust concentrations.

Small and medium-sized enterprises play much more important roles in both domestic and international markets nowadays. The issue that factors influence their export performance (mainly the export sales and profits) also becomes much more attractive these years. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the factors which influence the SMEs’ export performance and how each factor influences the SMEs’ export performance. This study is built on a modified model of the factors influencing the SMEs’ export performance. The authors use case study to conduct this research, and one company’s (Company B’s) data is collected through the semi-structured interview. Some findings are obtained: the important factors which influence Company B’s export performance contain the trade shows, the expenses on getting the authentication, capital sources, export rebate, firm network, firm previous experience, firm competencies, personal network, international orientation and personal previous experience. In addition, the authors also find the effect of firm size is indirect. However, customs duty, transportation, as well as building up the brand do not play important impacts on export performance. Take the trade shows as an example, personal cards and product samples are sent to the customers, then the customers who are interested in the products will contact Company B. In this way, the customers are accumulated and the export sales increase. Thus, the export performance is enhanced.

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