Shipping industry belongs to an international business. It plays an extremely important role in the economic and trade development of a country, so it can be regarded as a symbol of extension of the national strength of a country. Besides, it earns a lot of foreign capital for the country, but never creates any negative effects to the society domestically, such as environmental protection, noise, congestion, and so on. This is something that other manufacturing industries are incomparable with. Especially that Taiwan is an island, Taiwan should be engaged in the studies of shipping business through the rich marine resources. Then, unlimited business opportunities and vitality must be brought to Taiwan, achieving the aspiration of and confidence in standing in Taiwan but looking far to the world. International marine transportation business can be divided into irregular bulk shipping and regular container shipping. Between them, irregular bulk shipping is mostly the loading of the bulk cargoes by one or two consignors in one whole vessel. It is almost a completely competitive market. In order to obtain the greatest profit through the unlimited shipping lines and cargo loading, the best business operation ways and the best vessel allocation should be selected. For regular container shipping, services are provided to a great number of consignors with fixed shipping lines, fixed anchoring harbors and fixed rate. The cost of refueling of shipping industry occupies an extremely high proportion of the variable cost of marine transportation. When the price of the international fuel rises continuously, the cost of fuel increases accordingly. Taking the international vessel-use fuel MF-180 for example, the market quotation of oil in Taiwan on Jan. 6, 1999 was US$74/MT. After that, the price rose continuously. Down to Oct. 2007, there appeared the market quotation of oil at above US$500/MT. According to the ¡§Medium Term Oil Market Report of International Energy Agency (IEA)¡¨ announced on Jul. 9, 2007, the whole world would face the shortage of oil supply in five years, and the oil price was estimated to be rising continuously. Bulk marine transportation is irregular shipping without the fixing of any regular shipping lines and cargo loading. If refueling is to be made to vessels, there should be more efficient estimation and decision on the refueling harbor, refueling volume and refueling cost so as to achieve the minimum variable cost and acquire the greatest profit. Through review of the literature about the refueling of voyages as well as the interviews with experts, the paper investigates the literature of the decision support system, and uses the prototype development method to complete the model construction and the analytical design of system, practically establish a prototype of refuel decision support system for bulk shipping, and provide the solutions of average sailing speed of voyages, refueling volume and refueling harbor. After the results are compared with those of the actual cases, the paper evaluates the effects of the decision support system. Through the users¡¦ feedback, the prototype is revised to increase the completeness of the system, which provides a reference for the bulk shipping proprietors in constructing a refueling decision support system in future.

As refresher courses are getting popular in Taiwan, it is good news for those who want to continue their studies at the same time of working. However, an individual social role will be getting more complicated during this situation of inter-role conflicts. While a full-time worker also needs to act as a student after work, will he encounter the inter-role conflicts of learning and working? This study aims on students who are taking refresher courses at public or private two-year junior college, two-year college, and university in Kaohsiung. We try to discuss the relationship between inter-role conflicts, social support and learning burnout of students who are taking refresher courses. We indicate the relationship between inter-role conflicts, social support and learning burnout due to different background characteristics of respondents. The study result is supported by empirical data and provides some suggestions for those who want to take refresher courses and further researchers. We send out 800 questionnaires and get 602 returned ones. The final valid questionnaires are 589 and the return rate is 76.62%. The result is indicated as below: 1. Most of respondents in this study are female, single, and study in national two-year junior college right now. Their tenure in current company is 1-5 years. Most of them have strong motivation of self actualization even they all play different social roles now. The age of most respondents is between 31-40 and most of them work in manufacturing industries and would prefer to study at school in short distance. 2. The result indicates the inter-role conflicts that learning interferes working or learning and working interfere each other have strong impact on learning attitude. Besides, the inter-role conflicts that learning interferes working or learning and working interfere each other have strong impact on interpersonal relationship alienation. The three kinds of inter-role conflicts all have strong impact on low learning emotion. Furthermore, the inter-role conflicts which learning and working interfere each other have strong impact on emotion burnout. 3. The moderation effects of families¡¦ support, managers¡¦ support, colleagues¡¦ support and classmates¡¦ support are partially supported in this study.

This thesis proposes an approach to segmenting and identifying mixed-language speech. Automatic LID can be divided into four steps, feature extraction, segmentation, segment clustering, and re-labeling. In feature extraction, we compare the group delay feature (GDF) with MFCC feature. Unlike the traditional feature from Fourier trans-form magnitude, GDF uses the phase spectrum. In segmentation, we compare delta Bayesian information criterion (delta-BIC) with support vector machines (SVMs). A delta-BIC is applied to segment the input speech utterance into a sequence of lan-guage-dependent segments using acoustic features. The segments are clustered using the K-means algorithm. Finally, re-labeling is used to determine the language of the clusters. SVMs proceed to segment and identify automatically after model training. Considering the effect of the accent issue, we use the corpus English Across Taiwan (EAT) to perform our system. The experimental results show that the system can reach 78.13% in the frame hit rate under the baseline 57.77%.

Using ultrasonic guided waves improve a problem of time-consuming and laborious with conventional ultrasonic method involving point¡Vby-point inspection. In order to measure of hundreds meters of pipeline in oil and chemical industries, guided waves inspection technique is used and developed widely. For fast and long range inspection, a pulse-echo system is used to excite Lamb waves propagating along the pipe. The collection and analysis of the returning echoes indicate the present of corrosion. But if the pipe features, like bends or supports, are corrosive, the signal of corrosions is often covered with echoes of pipe features. Then it causes the inspection more difficult. In this study, the pipe feature which discussed is the welded support. The focus of the advanced analysis, Discrete Wavelet Transform, of the echoes reflected from the welded support on a 3 inch pipe by experimental and finite element method, so as to improve the ability of corrosion inspection on pipe features. To study the feasibility of the improvement in the effect of coherent noise for guided wave inspection by Wavelet analysis. Results show that original signals can not be differentiated by comparing with signals of normal support, general corrosive support, and support with notch. But after processing these three signals by Wavelet analysis, the situation of the 3 type supports from the signals can be differentiated. The simulated results of two different models and five exciting frequencies show the similar trend to the experimental results after Wavelet transform processing. It is success on separating the signals of normal support and corrosive support with Wavelet Analysis, and this method of this study is useful to improve the effect of coherency noise for guided wave inspection.

Thesis Erasmus University Rotterdam. / ook verschenen in gedrukte versie. With bibliogr., with a summary in Dutch.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 163-177).

Thesis (M.S.)--Florida State University, 2004. / Advisor: Dr. Lisa K. Spainhour, Florida State University, College of Engineering, Dept. of Civil Engineering. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed 6/16/04). Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 105-124).

Thesis--School of Advanced Airpower Studies, Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala., 1996-97. / Title from title screen (viewed Nov. 7, 2003). "May 1998." Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.S. in Operations Research)--Naval Postgraduate School, December 2003. / Thesis advisor(s): Moshe Kress, Robert Dell. Includes bibliographical references (p. 45-47). Also available online.