Analyses of the nature and structure of scientific theories have predominantly focused on formalisation. The Received View of scientific theories considers theories as axiomatised sets of sentences. In Hilbert-style formalisation theories are considered formal axiomatic calculi to which interpretation is supplied by a set of correspondence rules. The Received View has long been abandoned. The Semantic View of scientific theories also considers theories as formal systems. In the Semantic conception, a theory is identified with the class of intended models of the formal language, if the theory were to be given such linguistic form. The proponents of the Semantic View, however, hold that this class of models can be directly defined without recourse to a formal language. Just like its predecessor, the Semantic View is also not free of untenable implications. The uniting feature of the arguments m this work is the topic of theoretical representation of phenomena. The Semantic View implies that theoretical representation conies about by the use of some model, which belongs to the class that constitutes the theory. However, this is not what we see when we scrutinise the features of actual representation models in physics. In this work particular emphasis is given to how representation models are constructed in Classical Mechanics and Nuclear Physics and what conceptual resources are used in their construction. The characteristics that these models demonstrate instruct us that to regard them as families of theoretical models, as the Semantic View purports, is to obscure how they are constructed, what is used for their construction, how they function and how they relate to the theory. For instance, representation models are devices that frequently postulate physical mechanisms for which the theory does not provide explanations. Thus it seems more appropriate to claim that these representation devices mediate between theory and experiment, and at the same time possess a partial independence from theory. Furthermore, when we focus our attention to the ways by which representation models are constructed we discern that they are the result of the processes of abstraction and concretisation. These processes are operative in theoretical representation and they demand our attention if we are to explicate how theories represent phenomena in their domains.

As the Internet market has become mature over the years the population of the internet users grows rapidly, which makes a significant change to people¡¦s life style in many ways, such as communication, shopping, entertainment, finance trading, information transmission. Undoubtedly, the popularity of the Internet in daily life leads to the fact that more and more people get used to listening to the radio on the internet. The paper explores the viewpoints of the audience to understand the audience webcasting comportment in depth and to probe into the webcasting situations. Hopefully, this research will provide webcasting service providers a complete scheme which can impel and activate the webcasting market in Taiwan. The studying variables of the research are based on Belk¡¦s five compositions (1975): physical surroundings, social surroundings, time perspective, task definition and antecedent state. Therefore, the report will interpret the connection between audience¡¦s receive behavior and webcasting situations. This research adopts an open network questionnaire investigation. The questionnaires were collected from 364 effective copies of 404 research objects with webcasting experience. Based on the collected data, the conclusions are as following: 1. For audiences, webcasting is the main amusement after work. 2. The majority audiences link to the webcasting right after the morning work. It indicates that listener have higher listening liberty from the webcasting than the traditional broadcasting. 3. The audiences who like to enjoy the webcasting under a leisurely, relaxed, happy atmosphere have the steady webcasting habit. Besides, those who enjoy the webcasting under the calm, happy atmosphere are random audiences. 4. Webcasting can be listener¡¦s activity before bed and it can be considered the family amusement as well. In addition, it can be shared with colleagues at work. 5. Audio on demand will be more suitable for a program that is with a theme and content that audiences can share with others. 6. The shorter the interval of the audiences listening, the more regular the audiences have listening habits. 7. The webcasting is an easy amusement for audiences, and as well as a pleasant company, which makes the audiences stay with webcasting as longer as they can.

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no / A comparison is presented between two indoor localization algorithms using received signal strength, namely the vector algorithm and the Comparative Received Signal Strength (CRSS) algorithm. Signal values were obtained using ray tracing software and processed with MATLAB to ascertain the effects on localization accuracy of radio map resolution, number of access points and operating frequency. The vector algorithm outperforms the CRSS algorithm, which suffers from ambiguity, although that can be reduced by using more access points and a higher operating frequency. Ambiguity is worsened by the addition of more reference points. The vector algorithm performance is enhanced by adding more access points and reference points while it degrades with increasing frequency provided that the statistical mean of error increased to about 60 cm for most studied cases. / Unable to contact publisher. Contact webform only works for members - no email addresses. Raed said he would try and get contact details - email 14th March 2016 / The full text is unavailable. The publisher is unable to be contacted.

RSS-based localization is a promising solution for estimating the position of a non-collaborative emitter using a network of collaborative sensors. This paper examines RSS-based localization and differential RSS (DRSS) localization in the presence of correlated shadowing with no knowledge of the emitter's reference power.  A new non-linear least squares (NLS) DRSS location estimator that uses correlated shadowing information to improve performance is introduced. The existing maximum likelihood (ML) estimator and Cram\' er Rao lower bound (CRLB) for RSS-based localization given do not account for correlated shadowing. This paper presents a new ML estimator and CRLB for RSS-based localization that account for spatially correlated shadowing and imperfect knowledge of the emitter's reference power. The performance of the ML estimator is compared to the CRLB under different simulation conditions. The ML estimator is shown to be biased when the number of sensors is small or the shadowing variance is large. The effects of correlated shadowing on an RSS-based location estimator are thoroughly examined. It is proven that an increase in correlated shadowing will improve the accuracy of an RSS-based location estimator. It is also demonstrated that the ideal sensor geometry which minimizes the average error becomes more compact as correlation is increased. A geometric dilution of precision (GDOP) formulation is derived that provides a metric for the effect of the position of the sensors and emitter on the location estimator performance. A measurement campaign is conducted that characterizes the path loss at 3.4 GHz. The measurements are compared to the log-distance model. The errors between the model and the measurements, which should theoretically be Gaussian, have a Kurtosis value of 1.31. The errors were determined to be spatially correlated with an average correlation coefficient of 0.5 at a distance of 160 meters. The performance of the location estimators in simulation is compared to the performance using measurements from the measurement campaign. The performance is very similar, with the largest difference between the simulated and actual results in the ML estimator. In both cases, the new NLS DRSS estimator outperformed the other estimators and achieved the CRLB. / Master of Science

No / A comparison is presented between two indoor localization algorithms using received signal strength, namely the vector algorithm and the Comparative Received Signal Strength (CRSS) algorithm. Signal values were obtained using ray tracing software and processed with MATLAB to ascertain the effects on localization accuracy of radio map resolution, number of access points and operating frequency. The vector algorithm outperforms the CRSS algorithm, which suffers from ambiguity, although that can be reduced by using more access points and a higher operating frequency. Ambiguity is worsened by the addition of more reference points. The vector algorithm performance is enhanced by adding more access points and reference points while it degrades with increasing frequency provided that the statistical mean of error increased to about 60 cm for most studied cases. / No full text available. Unable to contact the publisher.

Inter-Cell Interference (ICI) will be one of main problems for degrading the performance of future wireless networks at cell edge. This adverse situation will become worst in the presence of dense deployment of micro and macro cells. In this context, the Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) technique was introduced to mitigate ICI in Next Generation Wireless Networks (NGWN) and increase their network performance at cell edge. Even though the CoMP technique provides satisfactory solutions of various problems at cell edge, nevertheless existing CoMP handover schemes do not prevent unnecessary handover initialisation decisions and never discuss the drawbacks of CoMP handover technique such as excessive feedback and resource sharing among UEs. In this research, new CoMP-based handover schemes are proposed in order to minimise unnecessary handover decisions at cell edge and determine solution of drawbacks of CoMP technique in conjunction with signal measurements such as Reference Signal Received Power (RSRP) and Received Signal Received Quality (RSRQ). A combination of calculations of RSRP and RSRQ facilitate a credible decision making process of CoMP mode and handover mode at cell edge. Typical numerical experiments indicate that by triggering the CoMP mode along with solutions of drawbacks, the overall network performance is constantly increase as the number of unnecessary handovers is progressively reduced.

L'objectif de ce travail doctoral est de tester et d'expliquer l'influence des bénéfices que les membres perçoivent dans les communautés virtuelles de support initiées par les entreprises sur leurs intentions comportementales à l'égard de ses produits. Une étude ethnographique a d'abord été menée et a complété les enseignements tirés de la revue de littérature. Ensuite, une collecte de données quantitative a été menée sur des communautés virtuelles des éditeurs des logiciels. A l'issue des résultats de la recherche, nous avons principalement démontré que les bénéfices perçus par les membres favorisent leurs intentions de réachat et de recommandation des produits de l'entreprise sous conditions que cette dernière participe activement dans les activités de sa communauté. Par ailleurs, cette influence positive s'opère aussi à travers le sentiment communautaire du membre. / The objective of this doctoral work is to test and to explain the influence of the benefits that are paid to members in virtual communities of support initiated by companies on their behavioral intentions with respect to its products. An ethnographic study was first conducted and completed the lessons learned from the literature review. Then, quantitative data collection was conducted on virtual communities of software publishers. At the end of the search results, we mainly demonstrated that the benefits received by members promote their intentions of reachat and recommendation of the products of the company under conditions that the latter actively participates in the activities of its community. Moreover, this positive influence also operates through the community feeling of the Member.

Localization accuracy based on RSS (Received Signal Strength) is notoriously inaccurate in the application of wireless sensor networks. RSS is subject to shadowing effects, which is signal attenuation caused by stationary objects in the radio propagation. RSS are actually the result of decay over distances, and random attenuation over different directions. RSS measurement is also affected by antenna orientation. Starting from extracting the statistical orders in the function relationship between RSS and distance, this thesis first shows how non-metric MDS (Multi-Dimensional Scaling) is the suitable method for cooperative localization. Then, several issues are presented and discussed in the application of non-metric MDS, including determining full connections to avoid flip ambiguities, leveraging the proper initial estimation to avert from local minimum solutions, and imposing structural information to bend the localization result to a priori knowledge. To evaluate the solution, data were acquired from different scenarios including accurate radio propagation model, indoor empirical test, and outside empirical test. Experiment results shows that non-metric MDS can only combat the small scale randomness in the shadowing effects. To combat the large scale ones, macro-diversity approaches are further presented including rotating the receiver’s antenna or collecting RSS from more than one mote in the same position. By averaging the measurements from these diversified receivers, simulation results and empirical tests show that shadowing effects can be greatly reduced. Also included in this thesis is how effective packet structures should be designed in the mote programming based on TinyOS to collect different sequences of RSS measurements and fuse them together. / UOIT

The South African Income Tax Act (58 of 1962) does not specifically deal with the tax treatment of receipts resulting from illegal activities. Expenditure resulting from illegal activities is also only partly dealt with in terms of Section 23(o) of the Income Tax Act. This has resulted in uncertainty pertaining to the normal income tax treatment of illegal activities within a South African context. In response to this, the South African Revenue Service has issued a draft interpretation note dealing with the tax consequences of embezzlement and theft of money for both the victim as well as the offender during 2013. This draft interpretation note also deals with the normal tax consequences of illegal receipt in the hands of the thief. In an attempt to evaluate this draft interpretation note to clarify the tax consequences of illegal activities in South Africa, the meaning of illegal receipts is firstly determined. Subsequently the concept of „illegal receipts‟ is measured against the definition of „gross income‟ contained in Section 1 of the Income Tax Act. Expenditure relating to illegal activities is also analysed and measured against the general deduction formula contained in Section 11(a) of the Income Tax Act. Relevant principles established from general case law applicable to the definition of gross income as well as the general deduction formula is analysed to determine its applicability within the context of illegal receipts and expenditure. Also, principles established through case law, both nationally and internationally, specifically applicable to the taxation of illegal activities were analysed to establish guidelines that could be applied to clarify the taxability of illegal activities within a South African context. / MCom (South African and International Tax), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015