Several mechanisms have been proposed to explain the process of vein pattern formation in plant tissues. The most widely accepted amongst biologists is the canalization hypothesis, derived from pea root and stem experiments. According to this hypothesis, a signal, thought to be the phytohormone auxin, is transported polarly from cell to cell from the shoot to the root and is canalized progressively into narrow channels of high auxin fluxes that later differentiate to become vascular tissue. In this project, we set out to test whether auxin canalization drives vein pattern formation, using Arabidopsis thaliana mutants with increased auxin transport (max4-1, max3-9, max2-1 and max1-1). We predicted that the mutants would have distinct vein patterns and especially different angles between the primary and secondary veins, compared to the wild type. First rosette leaves of 15 plants per genotype were harvested for analysis each day from 7 to 17 days after sowing, giving a total of eight hundred twenty-five leaf samples to analyze. Venation patterns were extracted and analyzed using custom-made software written with Matlab. Overall, compared with the wild type, mutants with the highest auxin transport (max4-1 and max3-9) had different vein patterns at early developmental stages, confirming a role for auxin transport in vein patterning. However, veins of mutants and wild type connected at similar angles, which is not consistent with the auxin canalization hypothesis, as originally formulated.

The purpose of our study is to see how the interaction between the social services and police work when a child under 15 years is suspected of crimes. What happens to the child from an agency perspective? How is the experience for the child and how do they get their voices heard? How is the professional perspective for a child when a child is suspected of a crime? What do the various authorities for short-term and long-term measures for the child? We have chosen to do a qualitative study using semi-structured interviews. The study includes six interviews with two police officers, three field secretaries and a social worker in two different municipalities. A medium sized municipality, and a larger community. The people we interviewed think differently about collaboration. The municipality have different workforms. In the smaller municipality works a social worker at the police station once or twice a week. While in the larger municipality the police and social worker work separately but together nonetheless. The result shows that they are not completely satisfied with the interaction that is today, but it takes a lot of time to build it up and it can always be better. Furthermore, the study shows that the lack of time and resource issues control much of social service work. For the analyzes we have used a theory of interaction. The result shows that the professionals are using the children’s perspective a lot when they are working with children who are suspected of crime.

Real time applications over IP network became widely used in different fields; social video conference, online educational lectures, industrial, military, and online robotic medical surgery. Online medical surgery over IP network has experienced rapid growth in the last few years primarily due to advances in technology (e.g., increased bandwidth; new cameras, monitors, and coder/decoders (CODECs)) and changes in the medical care environment (e.g., increased outpatient care, remote surgeries). The purpose of this study was to examine and analyze the impact of IP networks parameters; delay, jitter, throughput, and drop packet on the performance of real-time medical surgery videos sent across different IP networks; native IPv6, native IPv4, 6to4 and 6in4 tunneling transition mechanisms and compare the behavior of video packets over IP networks. The impact of each parameter over IP networks is examined by using different video codecs MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4. This study has been carried out with two main parts; theoretical and practical part, the theoretical part of this study focused on the calculations of various delays in IP networks such as transmission, processing, propagation, and queuing delays for video packet, while the practical part includes; examining of video codecs throughput over IP networks by using jperf tool and examining delay, jitter, and packet drops for different packet sizes by using IDT-G tool and how these parameters can affect quality of received video. The obtained theoretical and practical results were presented in different tables and plotted into different graphs to show the performance of real time video over IP networks. These results confirmed that video codecs MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4 were highly impacted by encapsulation and de-capsulation process except MPEG-4 codec, MPEG-4 was the least impacted by IPv4, IPv6, and IP transition mechanisms concerning throughput and wastage bandwidth. It also indicated that using IPv6-to-4 and IPv6-in-4 tunneling mechanisms caused more bandwidth wastage, high delay, jitter, and packet drop than IPv4 and IPv6.

Several mechanisms have been proposed to explain the process of vein pattern formation in plant tissues. The most widely accepted amongst biologists is the canalization hypothesis, derived from pea root and stem experiments. According to this hypothesis, a signal, thought to be the phytohormone auxin, is transported polarly from cell to cell from the shoot to the root and is canalized progressively into narrow channels of high auxin fluxes that later differentiate to become vascular tissue. In this project, we set out to test whether auxin canalization drives vein pattern formation, using Arabidopsis thaliana mutants with increased auxin transport (max4-1, max3-9, max2-1 and max1-1). We predicted that the mutants would have distinct vein patterns and especially different angles between the primary and secondary veins, compared to the wild type. First rosette leaves of 15 plants per genotype were harvested for analysis each day from 7 to 17 days after sowing, giving a total of eight hundred twenty-five leaf samples to analyze. Venation patterns were extracted and analyzed using custom-made software written with Matlab. Overall, compared with the wild type, mutants with the highest auxin transport (max4-1 and max3-9) had different vein patterns at early developmental stages, confirming a role for auxin transport in vein patterning. However, veins of mutants and wild type connected at similar angles, which is not consistent with the auxin canalization hypothesis, as originally formulated.

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Cultural heritage tourism is the fasted growing segment of the tourism industry, because there is a trend toward an increased specialization among tourists. This is evident in the rise in the volume of tourists who seek adventure, culture, history, archaeology and interaction with local people. Specially, tourists who come to visit Malacca State are interesting in cultural heritage sites have increased recently and are expected to continue. This study attempts to investigate the relationship between cultural heritage destination attributes and tourist satisfaction, and to identify the relationship between cultural heritage destination attributes and tourist satisfaction in terms of selected tourists¡¦ demographic characteristics and travel behavior characteristics. In this study, expectancy-disconfirmation theory was used to provide a conceptual framework. The theory holds that consumers first form expectations of products or service performance prior to purchasing or use. Subsequently, purchasing and use convey to the consumer beliefs about the actual or perceived performance of the product(s) or service(s). Then the consumer will compare the perceived performance to prior expectation. Consumer satisfaction is seen as the outcome of this comparison. The study area for this study was Malacca State, Malaysia. Malacca State is a historical city centre which has been listed as UNESCO World Heritage Site since 7 July 2008. Malacca has adopted as its slogan, ¡§Visiting Malacca Means Visiting Malaysia¡¨, because Malacca have developed over 500 years of trading and cultural exchanged between east and west in the straits of Malacca. Besides that, Malacca also demonstrates the early stages of history originating in the 15th century Malay Sultanate, Portuguese, and Dutch periods beginning in the represents the British era from the end of the 18th century. Furthermore, in year 2009, total of 8.9 million tourists has visited Malacca. It increased about 1.7 million tourists flowing in compared year 2008. The data of this study were collected from the on-site survey method. The sample population for this study was composed of tourists, who visited Malacca State in May, 2010. The survey was conducted at two sites in the cultural heritage sites of Malacca State. Out of 150 questionnaires, 115 were usable. Therefore, the data from 115 respondents were analyzed in this study. A few of appropriate statistical analyses such as frequencies, descriptive, factor analysis, linear regressions analysis, Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), and Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) were used according to respective objectives and descriptors. The factor analysis was conducted to create correlated variable composited from the original 23 attributes. Using factor analysis, 23 analysis attributes resulted to three dimensions: General Tour Attraction, Culture and Heritage Attraction, and Differentiate and Amenity Attraction. These three factors then were related with overall satisfaction. The linear regression analysis revealed that was relationship between cultural heritage destination attributes and tourists¡¦ overall satisfaction. ANOVA showed that there was significant difference between derived factor in relation to gender, age, education, country of origin, household income, past experience to cultural heritage sites, length of stay, and information selected, such as internet, newspaper, holiday exhibition, brochure or travel magazine or guidebook, and local or town trail among the demographic and behavior characteristics. The lastly, ANCOVA showed that origin of country, household income per year, and decision time of the control variables controlled the relationship between the overall satisfaction of tourists and derived factors. According to the results of this study, origin of country and household income controlled the relationship between the overall satisfaction of tourists and derived Factor 3 (Differentiate and Amenity Attraction) and time planning showed significant in relationship between the overall satisfaction of tourist of tourists and derived Factor 2 (Cultural and Heritage Attraction). Based on the results several recommendations can be made to improve and increase tourists¡¦ satisfaction of the cultural heritage tourism in Malacca State, such as comprehending what tourists seek at cultural heritage attractions will help tourism marketers better understand their customers. Through this study, planners or marketers can identify which attributes satisfy the tourist who visit cultural heritage destinations will help tourism planners develop appropriate strategies to attract their customers and serve them effectively. Besides that, it allow planners or marketers knowing who the satisfied tourists are may help reduce marketing costs and maintain cultural heritage destinations¡¦ sustainability.

According to human nature of having a taste for beauty, advertisers heavily rely on physical attractive male and female models as the product spokespersons to enhance consumers¡¦ liking of the ad, and this is so-called ¡§What-is-beautiful-is-good stereotype.¡¨ Previous research focuses on the impact of physical attractiveness of models on consumer perceptions and advertising persuasion. However, service is different from products due to the high intangibility and interaction with consumers. Therefore, this research takes one step forward to examine how a service provider¡¦s physical attractiveness influences advertising persuasion. The present study uses experimental design to investigate the advertising effects of service provider¡¦s physical attractiveness (high vs. moderate), gender congruence between service provider and customer (congruent gender vs. incongruent gender), and type of service (search service vs. experience service). Thus, 2x2x2 factorial design is conducted. The ad effects are measured by attitudes toward the ad and purchase intention toward the ad to observe the responses under eight different and fictitious scenarios. The results indicate that, a highly attractive service provider is not necessarily more effective than a moderately attractive one. When promoting a service with search attributes, either gender congruence between service provider and consumer or service provider¡¦s physical attractiveness matters in advertising persuasion. When promoting a service with experience attributes, a moderately attractive service provider is more effective than a highly attractive one in the condition of the same gender between provider and consumer. The findings suggest that companies and marketers should take account of not only the match-up of service attributes and physical attractiveness but also the target customer gender to enhance their advertising persuasion.

The contract is essential for the employment, the labor contracts standardize the right and duty for the employment, but the psychological contract is another type of contract. A psychological contract is an employee's belief about the mutual obligations, and it balances the relationship between the employee and his/her organization. In order to promote the corporation's competition, the corporation carries out the restructuring and downsizing strategies, but these strategies are contrary to the critical role that people play in successful organization. Under this condition, the employee's belief and loyalty become more important to maintain the balance of relationship between employee and his organization. When the psychological contract was violated, it may lead to reduce the employee's belief, loyalty, job satisfaction and performance, citizenship behavior, even the employees will turn- over. However, the react may be affected by the individual's discrepancy and external circumstances. The case study is based on the employees in Yueng Foong Yu Paper MFG. CO., LTD. so as to prove if the psychologial contract violation will reduce the employee's performance, and some factors deal with how to affect the violation of psychological contract and work performance. The result is shown as the following: 1. In different SEU(Strategic Entrepreneurial Units¡^, the performance of the employees in the general management office is better than the Fine Paper and Board SEU. 2. In the sexual difference, the task performance of the female employees is better than that of the male ones. 3. In the workage, the employees whose contextual performance are from 11 to 15 years are better than the ones whose workage are over 25 years. 4. The difference between psychological contract violation and work performance is insignificant. 5. When the employees whose orgnizational commitment is higher feel more satified with the organizational benefits, his/her task performance becomes worse. 6. The difference between employability, personal characteristics and work performance is significant. 7.The differecne between relationship of employers and employees and contextual performance is significant.

This thesis presents the design and fabrication of coplanar waveguide to microstrip transitions and planar spiral inductors, and the design of metal-insulator-metal capacitors, a planar band-pass, and a low-pass filter structures as an application for the inductors and capacitors using the RF MEMS technology. This thesis also includes a packaging method for RF MEMS devices with the use of benzocyclobutene as bonding material. The transition structures are formed by four different methods between coplanar waveguide end and microstrip end, and they are analyzed in 1-20 GHz. Very low loss transitions are obtained by maintaining constant characteristic impedance which is the same as the port impedance through the transition structures. The planar inductors are formed by square microstrip spirals on a glass substrate. Using the self-inductance propery of a conductive strip and the mutual inductance between two conductor strips in a proper arrangement, the inductance value of each structure is defined. Inductors from 0.7 nH up to 20 nH have been designed and fabricated. The metal-insulator-metal capacitors are formed by two coplanar waveguide structures. In the intersection, one end of a coplanar waveguide is placed on top of the end of the other coplanar waveguide with a dielectric layer in between. Using the theory of parallel plate capacitors, the capacitance of each structure is adjusted by the dimensions of the coplanar waveguides, which obviously adjust the area of intersection. Capacitors from 0.3 pF up to 9.8 pF have been designed. A low-pass filter and a band-pass filter are designed using the capacitors and inductors developed in this thesis. In addition to lumped elements, the interconnecting transmission lines, junctions and input-output lines are added to filter topologies. The RF MEMS packaging is realized on a coplanar waveguide structure which stands on a silicon wafer and encapsulated by a silicon wafer. The capping chip stands on the BCB outer ring which promotes adhesion and provides semi hermeticity. Keywords: Transition between transmission lines, planar spiral inductor, metal-insulator-metal capacitor, RF MEMS packaging, surface micromachining.

In quality control applications, Time-Between-Events (TBE) type observations may be monitored by using Exponentially Weighted Moving Average (EWMA) control charts. A widely accepted model for the TBE processes is the exponential distribution, and hence TBE EWMA charts are designed under this assumption. Nevertheless, practical applications do not always conform to the theory and it is common that the observations do not fit the exponential model. Therefore, control charts that are robust to departures from the assumed distribution are desirable in practice. In this thesis, robustness of the lower-sided TBE EWMA charts to the assumption of exponentially distributed observations has been investigated. Weibull and lognormal distributions are considered in order to represent the departures from the assumed exponential model and Markov Chain approach is utilized for evaluating the performance of the chart. By analyzing the performance results, design settings are suggested in order to achieve robust lower-sided TBE EWMA charts.