Thesis (M.A. (Human Resource Management))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2007.

The objective of this paper is to discuss the financial status of Kaohsiung city after the impact of the Governing Allocation of Revenues and Expenditures Act and the merge of Kaohsiung city and county. After Kaohsiung city-county consolidation to elevate status on December 25, 2010, the new government, by the law, needs to accept the obligations and responsibilities of Kaohsiung County in addition to the original outstanding debts of two governments. It is therefore interesting to ask if the restructuring of administrative regions policy leads to the budget deficit of the new government too large. To this end, we test whether the Kaohsiung fiscal deficits are too large to be sustaintable over the period 1987-2010. Our empirical results have shown that, at the present system of laws, the fiscal deficits of the Kaohsiung city-county consolidation are satisfied since they are stationary.

The management of Human Resources is concerning on the issue of employee retention following a merge and acquisition. This study focused on the effects of employee retention and how the Human Resources Department adjusts their salary following a merge and acquisition. Individual case study is used as the methodology of this study and the research subject is Winteck Corporation, which merges and acquires with HannStar LTD. (Yang-Mei 1st and 2nd Factory). Subsequently, the study will use both organizations¡¦ staff financial data such as their annual income, salary structure and benefits, enterprise system, and the corporate culture to do the analysis and comparison. In addition, the discussions had been made about how the salary system adjustment of Winteck Corporation affected the employee retention and the methods found are as following, using the team performance as the standard assessment for the adjustment of original factory employees¡¦ salary, and authorized supervisors to adjust the salary according to employees¡¦ performance. Overall, there is a standard method for the company to select, train and utilize the talented employees as well as to retain employees after a merge and acquisition. Select the employees based on their capability; train the employees after a merge and acquisition as well as clam down their unstable emotion; utilize their professional skills and experiences into the new organization after a merge and acquisition; retaining the employees by paying the original salary while their job structure, position, benefits, and so on are based on the Winteck Corporation. The advantages following a merge and acquisition: 2. upgrade the quality of employees; 3. higher rate for employee retention; 1. increase the production of new products.Discussions: 1. how to develop a standard structure of the salary system following a merge and acquisition; 2. the proposal of salary system for employee retention in the original factory following a merge and acquisition.

Increasing demand on freeway facilities is a major challenge facing urban areas in the United States and throughout the world. Active Traffic Management (ATM) strategies can be used to increase the performance of these facilities through improved operations without the significant expenditure associated with adding capacity. One ATM strategy that has been widely deployed in the current state of practice is ramp metering, which controls the traffic demand placed on a freeway. Merge control strategies are less prevalent and largely undeveloped. This study examines the recurrently congested northbound section of Interstate Highway 35 that approaches downtown Austin, Texas. Using the VISSIM microsimulation platform, a model of this segment was developed and calibrated to reflect current peak-hour congestion. Within this model, ramp metering and merge control technologies were implemented. The impacts on traffic throughput, speed and travel time for each of these proposed systems are evaluated. / text

Recent developments in linguistic theory carried out within the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995; Adger 2003;) provide a functional and concrete framework for an analysis of noun phrases in the Indonesian language, a Western-Malayo Polynesian sub-branch of the Austronesian language family. An analysis of Indonesian noun phrase structure within this framework demonstrates that the head noun occurs in a base-generated position, at the bottom of a DP, while pre- and post-nominal modifiers are contained within a number of additional projections that merge above the head noun. In this thesis, the proposal is made for a relatively unrestricted adjunction analysis, whereby head adjunction via Merge allows for the direct expansion of the head N at various levels of the Indonesian DP. Evidence is presented to show that the adjoined status of attributive nouns and adjectives, a plural feature [PL], and the feature [DEF] generates a complex hierarchical structure in which there is no predefined order between a specifier or complement and the head noun. In addition, it is argued that bare nouns are neutral with respect to number and, given that number-marking, possession and (in)definiteness are optional, all projections that merge above the head N are optional and context is needed to accurately interpret an Indonesian bare noun.

Much change has resulted from pressures at a global level, which now impact on South Africa as a member of the international community. Some changes were dramatic and, to a limited extent, resulted in revolutionary transformation. Various problems were experienced in the higher education sector in general. Merging of some higher education institutions in South Africa as part of transformation seemed to be an obvious solution. This was welcomed by some, yet resisted by others. Various forces started to evolve in the merging process. Owing to one of the most important characteristics of a force, namely its directedness, it can only be perceived (visibly) in its psychological context. The first objective of this study was to conceptualise some psychological forces within the context of a merging higher education institution. The second objective was to determine the perceptions and attitudes of academic school directors, deans and vice-rectors towards the thematically identified psychological forces in a quantitative manner. The last objective was to make recommendations on how the psychological conceptualisation of forces could be utilised in the future development of the merged university in this study. A qualitative exploratory and descriptive design was used to identify items that could be used in a quantitative survey. The quantitative data collected were used to assess interrelations among constructs. Constructs consisted of items related to the force as well as the psychological domain. Cronbach alpha coefficients and factor analysis of items linked to each construct were performed to confirm uni-dimensionality. Practically significant differences between certain constructs were reported by using Cohen's d-value. A measure of sampling adequacy (MSA) was also conducted as developed by Kaiser. Variances were explained and communalities were also indicated. Regarding the first objective, it was determined that the government, council, management, students and alumni, culture, strategy, peers and resources were identified in the three psychological domains. Regarding the second objective, the results indicated the highest affectivity towards management and the lowest towards council; the highest cognition for management and the least for council; and a positive conation towards management and a less positive conation towards council. However, communalities lower than 50% were reported on the construct "conative towards council". It could therefore be concluded that, based on the identified forces and their respective links with the psychological domains, evidence exists of negative affectivity towards and limited understanding of council. The contrary, however, applies in the case of management, which attracted much affectivity, cognition and conation in respect of the merger. Recommendations are made for the organisation and for future research. / Thesis (M.A. (Human Resource Management))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2007.

Recent developments in linguistic theory carried out within the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995; Adger 2003;) provide a functional and concrete framework for an analysis of noun phrases in the Indonesian language, a Western-Malayo Polynesian sub-branch of the Austronesian language family. An analysis of Indonesian noun phrase structure within this framework demonstrates that the head noun occurs in a base-generated position, at the bottom of a DP, while pre- and post-nominal modifiers are contained within a number of additional projections that merge above the head noun. In this thesis, the proposal is made for a relatively unrestricted adjunction analysis, whereby head adjunction via Merge allows for the direct expansion of the head N at various levels of the Indonesian DP. Evidence is presented to show that the adjoined status of attributive nouns and adjectives, a plural feature [PL], and the feature [DEF] generates a complex hierarchical structure in which there is no predefined order between a specifier or complement and the head noun. In addition, it is argued that bare nouns are neutral with respect to number and, given that number-marking, possession and (in)definiteness are optional, all projections that merge above the head N are optional and context is needed to accurately interpret an Indonesian bare noun.

Much change has resulted from pressures at a global level, which now impact on South Africa as a member of the international community. Some changes were dramatic and, to a limited extent, resulted in revolutionary transformation. Various problems were experienced in the higher education sector in general. Merging of some higher education institutions in South Africa as part of transformation seemed to be an obvious solution. This was welcomed by some, yet resisted by others. Various forces started to evolve in the merging process. Owing to one of the most important characteristics of a force, namely its directedness, it can only be perceived (visibly) in its psychological context. The first objective of this study was to conceptualise some psychological forces within the context of a merging higher education institution. The second objective was to determine the perceptions and attitudes of academic school directors, deans and vice-rectors towards the thematically identified psychological forces in a quantitative manner. The last objective was to make recommendations on how the psychological conceptualisation of forces could be utilised in the future development of the merged university in this study. A qualitative exploratory and descriptive design was used to identify items that could be used in a quantitative survey. The quantitative data collected were used to assess interrelations among constructs. Constructs consisted of items related to the force as well as the psychological domain. Cronbach alpha coefficients and factor analysis of items linked to each construct were performed to confirm uni-dimensionality. Practically significant differences between certain constructs were reported by using Cohen's d-value. A measure of sampling adequacy (MSA) was also conducted as developed by Kaiser. Variances were explained and communalities were also indicated. Regarding the first objective, it was determined that the government, council, management, students and alumni, culture, strategy, peers and resources were identified in the three psychological domains. Regarding the second objective, the results indicated the highest affectivity towards management and the lowest towards council; the highest cognition for management and the least for council; and a positive conation towards management and a less positive conation towards council. However, communalities lower than 50% were reported on the construct "conative towards council". It could therefore be concluded that, based on the identified forces and their respective links with the psychological domains, evidence exists of negative affectivity towards and limited understanding of council. The contrary, however, applies in the case of management, which attracted much affectivity, cognition and conation in respect of the merger. Recommendations are made for the organisation and for future research. / Thesis (M.A. (Human Resource Management))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2007.

The special architecture of the Cell BE processor has made scientists revisit the problem of sorting. This paper implements and tests a variant of merge sort where a number of 2-to-1 mergers are connected in a pipelined tree. For large trees there are many more such mergers than processors which means they must be mapped to the processors in some way. Optimized mappings are tested and results show that changing the model used when optimizing might be beneficiary. It is also shown that the small size of the local storages on the co-processors is not limiting the performance.

In the rapidly evolving software industry, bots have become integral to automating tasks and enhancing developer productivity and are revolutionizing the way security patches are implemented in software projects. Our study investigates the impact of DEPENDABOT on the speed and efficacy of security patching in GitHub Open Source Software projects, by studying merge times and factors that contribute to DEPENDABOT’s resolution of security issues in JavaScript projects. We use a dataset containing DEPENDABOT Security Pull Requests. Our study validates previous findings by collecting data from the GitHub API and publishing a dataset collected between 2021 and 2024. We face challenges with collecting features impacting merge times, but overcome them by prioritizing the top 3 features and 2 additional ones. We also investigate the factors behind not merging Pull Requests to identify the obstacles in adopting DEPENDABOT’s recommendations, by analysing Pull Request comments. We start performing sentiment analysis and topic modeling but switch to GitHub Copilot instead and continue investigating presence of factors impacting rapid merge times. Our results present a lower adoption rate of DEPENDABOT Security Pull Requests in JavaScript Open Source Software projects, specifically 13%, compared to those of the original study. 76% of Pull Requests are merged within 4 days, with a median decision time of 0,3 days. The main reason for not merging a DEPENDABOT Security Pull Requests is that another DEPENDABOT Security Pull Request supersedes it. Factors associated with faster merge are related to smaller changes and, controversially, disabling auto merge.