本文係以Sutherland (1995)的模型為基礎，放寬資本完全移動的特殊假定，引進總合供給面的隨機性干擾，據以探討名目工資僵固、實質工資僵固及充分就業三種情況下，當經濟體系遭逢來自於貨幣需求面、商品需求面乃至於總合供給面外生隨機性干擾的衝擊之際，以本國物價水準穩定為政策目標的央行，於採行物價目標區政策後，對各總體變數的穩定效果為何。 由本文的討論中，我們可以獲得以下幾點結論： 1、於名目工資僵固的情況下，當經濟體系所面臨的隨機性干擾來自於貨幣需求面或商品需求面，則產出與物價二者間呈現完全正相關；當經濟體系所面臨的隨機性干擾來自於總合供給面，則產出與物價呈現負相關。 2、就Keynes學派的說法，若名目工資不再具有僵固性，而可隨著物價自由調整(即實質工資僵固)，則總合供給曲線會呈一垂直線，產出固定在一水準下。此時產出雖未達充分就業下的產出水準，但其所分析出的結果卻會與充分就業下所分析出的結果相一致。 3、在實質工資僵固或是經濟體系已達充分就業的情況下，產出僅為外生隨機干擾項的線性函數。因而，央行在採行物價目標區後，並不需要以產出的減少作為代價，亦即物價與產出間不再具有抵換關係。 4、當經濟體系面臨來自貨幣需求面的隨機性干擾時，在名目工資僵固的情況下，物價、產出及匯率皆具有蜜月效果，而利率不具有蜜月效果；在實質工資僵固及充分就業的情況下，物價及匯率具有蜜月效果，而利率亦不具有蜜月效果。 5、當經濟體系面臨來自商品需求面的隨機性干擾時，在名目工資僵固的情況下，物價、產出及利率皆具有蜜月效果，而匯率不具有蜜月效果；在實質工資僵固的情況下，物價具有蜜月效果，而物價所減少的變異，則由匯率或利率所吸收(意指若匯率有蜜月效果，則利率即不具有蜜月效果；或反之)；在充分就業的情況下，物價及利率具有蜜月效果，而匯率不具有蜜月效果。 6、當經濟體系面臨來自總合供給面的隨機性干擾時，在名目工資僵固的情況下，僅物價具有蜜月效果，產出不具有蜜月效果，而匯率及利率是否具有蜜月效果則視資本移動程度大小而定，當資本移動程度愈大時，匯率及利率愈不易具有蜜月效果；在實質工資僵固及充分就業的情況下，所得到的結論與名目工資僵固的情況下相一致，只是減少了對產出水準的探討。

目前全球正興起另一波企業購併的風潮，其中更以大企業為主軸，使得大企業愈來愈走向大型化的趨勢。而當企業購併時，不僅需睜大眼睛慎選購併對象，更需進一步做好於購併後關於被購併公司策略調整之工作，以免造成時間與資金的浪費，因此本研究即在探討企業在購併後該如何選擇策略調整的方向，及有哪些因素會影響組策略調整的改變幅度與調整時間。 因此，本研究首先針對過去文獻與過去實際進行跨國購併的案例中，購併公司的實際作法提出一關於購併後人事調整、組織文化調整、行銷策略調整與研究發展策略的調整等工作之策略調整方向選擇參考架構，藉以提供一般企業在面臨國際購併時的參考，同時亦作為本研究關於探討影響改變幅度與調整時間因素的基礎架構。 本研究根據過去實際跨國購併案例中，購併公司對於策略調整之改變幅度與調整時間所考慮的因素，同時對五家個案公司分別驗證該影響因素是否適用，及究竟有哪些因素對於購併公司而言，在選擇改變幅度與調整時間的策略上較具影響力。 最後根據上述驗證結果，提出幾項有關影響改變幅度與調整時間因素的命題。命題包括：購併公司對於被購併公司之未來定位與被購併公司原來定位之差異程度及被購併公司的原有經營體質等兩因素會影響購併公司對被購併公司的改變幅度。至於影響調整時間的因素，包括：市場競爭激烈程度、被購併公司原有的經營體質、購併公司本身的目標、購併公司對於被購併公司之未來定位被購併公司原有定位之差異程度，其中後兩項因素對於調整時間影響較大。 根據本研究所提出之策略調整參考架構，對於即將進行購併之企業或對於已經在從事購併的企業而言，可以提供該企業對於進行策略調整一個值得參考的架構；同時企業在作策略調整的工作時，對於改變幅度與調整時間的決定上，可以考慮本研究所提出的八項命題，藉以使其節省在作決策上的所需思考的範圍與時間，使其增加購併成功的機會。 / Recently, the cases of M&A are rapidly growing. M&A makes them grow strongly and globally. When the mother company merges or acquires the target company, she should notice not only the selection of the target company, but also the integration between the mother company and target company. The importance of the post-merged integration is evident, according to the paper and thesis discussion. Therefore, this research will focus on discussing the main factors of influenced post-----merged strategy changes. The research will acquire the conclusions by examining five experienced Taiwan enterprises. According to this research, we find the factors of influenced scale of changes are as follows: 1. The foreseen position of the target company should achieve. 2. Both the advantages and the disadvantages of the target company. According to this research, we find the factors of influenced integrated time are as follows: 1. The foreseen position of the target company should achieve. 2. Both the advantages and the disadvantages of the target company. 3. The motivation of the mother company. 4. The degree of market competition. Eventually, this research advise the enterprise who are planing to merge or acquire another enterprise should consider of. Also, this research summarize a reference structure of post-merged strategy changes.

Electronically displayed images are becoming increasingly important as an interface between man and information systems. Lengthy periods of intense observation are no longer unusual. There is a growing awareness that specific demands should be made on displayed images in order to achieve an optimum match with the perceptual properties of the human visual system. These demands may vary greatly, depending on the task for which the displayed image is to be used and the ambient conditions. Optimal image specifications are clearly not the same for a home TV, a radar signal monitor or an infrared targeting image display. There is, therefore, a growing need for means of objective measurement of image quality, where "image quality" is used in a very broad sense and is defined in the thesis, but includes any impact of image properties on human performance in relation to specified visual tasks. The aim of this thesis is to consolidate and comment on the image measure literatures, and to find through experiment the salient properties of electronically displayed real world complex imagery that impacts on human performance. These experiments were carried out for well specified visual tasks (of real relevance), and the appropriate application of image measures to this imagery, to predict human performance, was considered. An introduction to certain aspects of image quality measures is given, and clutter metrics are integrated into this concept. A very brief and basic introduction to the human visual system (HVS) is given, with some basic models. The literature on image measures is analysed, with a resulting classification of image measures, according to which features they were attempting to quantify. A series of experiments were performed to evaluate the effects of image properties on human performance, using appropriate measures of performance. The concept of image similarity was explored, by objectively measuring the subjective perception of imagery of the same scene, as obtained through different sensors, and which underwent different luminance transformations. Controlled degradations were introduced, by using image compression. Both still and video compression were used to investigate both spatial and temporal aspects of HVS processing. The effects of various compression schemes on human target acquisition performance were quantified. A study was carried out to determine the "local" extent, to which the clutter around a target, affects its detectability. It was found in this case, that the excepted wisdom, of setting the local domain (support of the metric) to twice the expected target size, was incorrect. The local extent of clutter was found to be much greater, with this having implications for the application of clutter metrics. An image quality metric called the gradient energy measure (GEM), for quantifying the affect of filtering on Nuclear Medicine derived images, was developed and evaluated. This proved to be a reliable measure of image smoothing and noise level, which in preliminary studies agreed with human perception. The final study discussed in this thesis determined the performance of human image analysts, in terms of their receiver-operating characteristic, when using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) derived images in the surveillance context. In particular, the effects of target contrast and background clutter on human analyst target detection performance were quantified. In the final chapter, suggestions to extend the work of this thesis are made, and in this context a system to predict human visual performance, based on input imagery, is proposed. This system intelligently uses image metrics based on the particular visual task and human expectations and human visual system performance parameters. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Medical School; School of Computer Science, 1999.

<p>This thesis considers the problem of tracking multiple static or moving targets with one single pan/tilt-camera with a limited field of view. The objective is to minimize both the time needed to pan and tilt the camera's view between the targets and the total position uncertainty of all targets. To solve this problem, several planning methods have been developed and evaluated by Monte Carlo simulations and real world experiments. If the targets are moving and their true positions are unknown, both their current and future positions need to be estimated in order to calculate the best sensor trajectory. When dealing with static and known targets the problem is reduced to a deterministic optimization problem.</p><p>The planners have been tested through experiments using a real camera mounted above a car track using toy cars as targets. An algorithm has been developed to detect the cars and associate the detections with the correct target.</p><p>The Monte Carlo simulations show that, in the case of static targets, there is a huge advantage to arrange the targets into groups to be able to view more than one target at the time. In the case of moving targets with estimated positions it can be concluded that if the objective is to minimize the error in the position estimation the best planning choice is to always move to the target with the highest position uncertainty.</p>

<p>In angle-only target tracking the aim is to estimate the state of a target with use of measurement of elevation and azimuth. The state consists of relative position and velocity between the target and the platform. The platform is an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and the tracking system is meant to be a part of the platform’s anti-collision system. In the case where both the target and the platform travel with constant velocity the angle measurements do not provide any information of the range between the target and the platform. The platform has to maneuver to be able to estimate the range to the target.</p><p>Two filters are implemented and tested on simulated data. The first filter is based on a Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) and is designed for tracking nonmaneuvering targets. Different platform maneuvers are studied and the influence of initial errors and the geometry of the simulation scenario is investigated. The filter is able to estimate the position of the target if the platform maneuvers and the target travels with constant velocity. Maneuvering targets on the other hand can not be tracked by the filter.</p><p>The second filter is an interacting multiple model (IMM) filter, designed for tracking maneuvering targets. The filter performance is highly dependent of the geometry of the scenario. The filter has been tuned for a scenario where the target approaches the platform from the front. In this scenario the filter is able to track both maneuvering and non-maneuvering targets. If the target approaches the platform from the side on the other hand, the filter has problems with distinguish target maneuvers from measurement noise.</p>

A magnetic target drug delivery system consisting of biodegradable polymeric microspheres (poly D, L-lactic acid) loaded with magnetite nanoparticles (10-100 nm) and anticancer drug (paclitaxel) was studied. The magnetite nanoparticles were synthesized by chemical precipitation. The as-synthesized magnetite nanoparticles were subsequently introduced into a mixture of polymer magnetic polymeric composite particles were investigated and further correlated with the reaction parameters. It was found that the size and characteristics of the polymeric composite particles depended on the viscosity of the polymer solution. Preliminary drug release experiments showed that the loaded drug was released with the degradation of the polymer. The release rates could be enhanced by an oscillating external magnetic field. / Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA)

The Weapon Target Assignment (WTA) problem is a fundamental problem arising in defense-related applications of operations research. This problem consists of optimally assigning n weapons to m targets so that the total expected survival value of the targets after all the engagements is minimum. The WTA problem can be formulated as a nonlinear integer programming problem and is known to be NP-complete. There do not exist any exact methods for the WTA problem which can solve even small size problems (for example, with 20 weapons and 20 targets). Though several heuristic methods have been proposed to solve the WTA problem, due to the absence of exact methods, no estimates are available on the quality of solutions produced by such heuristics. In this paper, we suggest linear programming, integer programming, and network flow based lower bounding methods using which we obtain several branch and bound algorithms for the WTA problem. We also propose a network flow based construction heuristic and a very large-scale neighborhood (VLSN) search algorithm. We present computational results of our algorithms which indicate that we can solve moderately large size instances (up to 80 weapons and 80 targets) of the WTA problem optimally and obtain almost optimal solutions of fairly large instances (up to 200 weapons and 200 targets) within a few seconds

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1984. / Vita. Bibliography: leaves [335]-348.

Vision and infrared sensors are very common in surveillance and security applications, and there are numerous examples where a critical infrastructure, e.g. a harbor, an airport, or a military camp, is monitored by video surveillance systems. There is a need for automatic processing of sensor data and intelligent control of the sensor in order to obtain efficient and high performance solutions that can support a human operator. This thesis considers two subparts of the complex sensor fusion system; namely target tracking and sensor control.The multiple target tracking problem using particle filtering is studied. In particular, applications where road constrained targets are tracked with an airborne video or infrared camera are considered. By utilizing the information about the road network map it is possible to enhance the target tracking and prediction performance. A dynamic model suitable for on-road target tracking with a camera is proposed and the computational load of the particle filter is treated by a Rao-Blackwellized particle filter. Moreover, a pedestrian tracking framework is developed and evaluated in a real world experiment. The exploitation of contextual information, such as road network information, is highly desirable not only to enhance the tracking performance, but also for track analysis, anomaly detection and efficient sensor management. Planning for surveillance and reconnaissance is a broad field with numerous problem definitions and applications. Two types of surveillance and reconnaissance problems are considered in this thesis. The first problem is a multi-target search and tracking problem. Here, the task is to control the trajectory of an aerial sensor platform and the pointing direction of its camera to be able to keep track of discovered targets and at the same time search for new ones. The key to successful planning is a measure that makes it possible to compare different tracking and searching tasks in a unified framework and this thesis suggests one such measure. An algorithm based on this measure is developed and simulation results of a multi-target search and tracking scenario in an urban area are given. The second problem is aerial information exploration for single target estimation and area surveillance. In the single target case the problem is to control the trajectory of a sensor platform with a vision or infrared camera such that the estimation performance of the target is maximized. The problem is treated both from an information filtering and from a particle filtering point of view. In area exploration the task is to gather useful image data of the area of interest by controlling the trajectory of the sensor platform and the pointing direction of the camera. Good exploration of a point of interest is characterized by several images from different viewpoints. A method based on multiple information filters is developed and simulation results from area and road exploration scenarios are presented.

Acquisitions are considered to be the ultimate form of corporate growth in today’s increasingly complex and global business economy. There is a significant lack of research done in understanding the growth of I.T. SMEs by means of acquisitions. All previous research concerning acquisitions has focused mostly on large sized organizations, involved in cross national operations. SMEs do not compete in an international arena like multinational corporations, who have already inherited a culture of accommodating acquired firms and achieving synergy. Therefore the question here arises as to how SMEs pursue growth via acquisitions despite having limited resources and capabilities.   Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to study acquisition growth strategy of two I.T. firms (SYSteam AB and Sigma AB) which have grown from SMEs to large firms by means of acquisitions.   Method: In order to fulfill the purpose of this study the authors conducted a qualitative case study of two I.T. firms. The authors used interview as the data collection method.   Results/conclusions: There are many different factors which lead a firm to pursue acquisitions. Increased market share, proximity to key customers and entrepreneurial nature of the founders were the main ones. Acquisition brings about numerous synergies and integration is a key to capitalizing upon these synergies. Acquisition induces entrepreneurial orientation and facilitates the emergence of acquisition capabilities within the acquiring firm.