No description available.

No description available.

Mangroves, the woody plants, mainly grow in tropical or subtropical intertidal estuaries. In order to adapt to the environment of intertidal estuaries, mangroves develop the special characteristics of ¡§aerial roots¡¨, ¡§prop roots¡¨, ¡§viviparous seeds¡¨, and simpler plant groups. In Taiwan, mangroves mostly grow in the west coast, from Danshui to Pingdong. Mangrove forests, which have long be called as ¡§sea forest¡¨, are the unique ecological landscapes. This study aims to investigate the main mangrove forests areas in the Tainan City and Tainan County and their cultivating situations. The investigation areas include the mouths of the main rivers, coastal areas, salt fields, fishponds, and coastal marshes. The dominant components of Taiwan¡¦s mangroves are Avicennia marina¡]Forsk.¡^Vierh¡]Vierbenaceae¡^, Kandelia obovata Sheue,Liu¡®Yong¡ARhizophora stylosa Griff¡]Rhizophoraceae¡^and Lumnitzera racemosa Willd¡]Combretaceae¡^. Besides, there are 90 associated plants of the mangroves, which belong to 30 families and 76 genera. After investigating, it reveals that Avicennia marina is the more superior specie; Lumnitzera racemosa and Rhizophora stylosa mostly exist in Tainan City, while their cultivating groups can only be found in Shuangchun District in Tainan County; Kandelia obovata is mainly found in Tainan County, and scattered in Sihcao and the bank of Yanshuei stream in Tainan City. Protected areas have been set up in Beimen and Cigu of Tainan County and Sihcao of Tainan City. Man-made conservation areas include Shuangchun in Tainan County and An-ping harbor area in Tainan City. The mangrove plants existing in the areas mentioned above grow well. Moreover, people in Tainan City also plant many mangroves privately. Because of diking fishponds and quickly developing cities in past few years, many mangroves have disappeared. The previous investigations about the mangroves in Southern Taiwan were focused more on Kaohsiung area than in Tainan City and County. For this reason, hopefully the results of this study can make the information of the mangrove forests in the west coast of Taiwan more complete. Three suggestions about the conservation and cultivation of mangroves are listed as follows: (a) keeping the watercourses smooth, (b) deliberately evaluating the cultivation areas, and (c) increasing the habitats in the tidal zones.

Thesis (M.S.)--Northern Michigan University, 2009. / Bibliography: leaf 79.

Thesis (M.A.) - Simon Fraser University, 2006. / Theses (Faculty of Education) / Simon Fraser University. Also issued in digital format and available on the World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Central Florida, 2008. / Adviser: Karla Saari Kitalong. Includes bibliographical references (p. 200-204).

Thesis (Ph.D)--Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2010. / Committee Chair: Garrow, Laurie; Committee Co-Chair: Castillo, Marco; Committee Co-Chair: Goldsman, David; Committee Member: Griffin, Paul; Committee Member: White, Chelsea (Chip). Part of the SMARTech Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Collection.

The DARPA Urban Challenge in 2007 showed that fully autonomous vehicles, driven by computers without human intervention on public roads, are technologically feasible with current intelligent vehicle technology [6]. Some researchers predict that within 5-20 years there will be autonomous vehicles for sale on the automobile market. Therefore, the time is right to rethink our current transportation infrastructure, which is primarily designed for human drivers, not autonomous vehicles. The Autonomous Intersection Management (AIM) project at UT Austin aims to propose a large-scale, real-time framework to be a substitute for current traffic light and stop signs. Automobiles in modern urban settings spend a lot of time idling at intersections. In 2007, US drivers wasted 4.16 billion hours of their time and 2.81 billion gallons of gas in congestion, costing a total of 87.2 billion dollars nationwide [18]. A big portion of this waste takes place at intersections. The AIM project is able to utilize the capacity of intersections to minimize time waste and fuel consumption. The fundamental idea of Autonomous Intersection management (AIM) [13] is a reservation system in which cells in space-time will be reserved by the au- tonomous vehicles based on their trajectories. An intersection manager takes care of the reservation as well as communication with the vehicles. This mechanism tries to maximize the usage of the intersection area. It ensures a collision free intersection as well. The main question of this project is what intersection control mechanism is appropriate for reducing an autonomous vehicle's waiting time and improving the throughput of the intersection. Previous work proposed the first-come-first-served (FCFS) policy in which the reservation requests are served as soon as they are received. The results of simulation show that FCFS outperforms the current traffic systems, traffic light and stop sign, by orders of magnitude. We, however, observe that FCFS performs suboptimal in certain traffic patterns that are pretty common in urban settings. In this project, first we study the limitations of FCFS, then develop a more efficient policy to alleviate these limitations. The idea that we examined is a systematic policy of granting reservations that have the objective of minimizing the cost of delaying vehicles. In an attempt to build the system in reality, we used miniature robots called Eco-be. Due to their cost and size, Eco-bes are good candidates for testing a multi-agent system with a large number of agents. In spite of the fact that the physical challenges of Eco-bes do not perfectly match those of full size autonomous vehicles, they are still useful for demonstration and education purposes as well as for the study of collisions for which experiments with full size vehicles are costly and dangerous. / text

The ticket distribution industry is changing rapidly. The traditional travel distribution chain comprised airlines, travel agents, and computer reservation systems (CRSs). With the current migration of travel distribution to the Internet, the way in which these actors interact has been radically altered. / After deregulation, the airlines' dependence on travel agents and CRSs led to high commission and booking fees respectively. The Internet now offers airlines a means to directly distribute their product to the travelling public with minimal expense. The airlines are eagerly shifting as many of their distribution activities as possible to different forms of web-based distribution, hoping to bypass both travel agents and CRSs. This has allowed them to reduce the commission fees they pay to travel agents. Travel agents too are going online, competing vigorously with the airlines. The combined effect of these (r)evolutions has put the airlines firmly in charge of their own distribution system. / Any such a fundamental change in a sector of industry is bound to raise anticompetitive concerns, especially for those who stand to lose the most. These concerns are at the centre of this thesis. After their examination and evaluation, I conclude that anticompetitive concerns do indeed exist and that the regulatory or antitrust authorities have the unenviable task of preserving competition, not competitors, in a new and rapidly evolving market.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington. / Bibliography: l. [452]-472.