In this thesis, a review of Kenneth Burke's use of the term attitude in his published works as well as in some unpublished notes, drafts and letters, is performed. Three periods of different usage are found. Early works feature a pervasive attitude with elements of both body and mind. This attitude is then subsumed into the pentad and the physiological connection is diminished, but attitude is given an important function as a connective between action and motion. The later Burke reinstates attitude as central to his theory of symbolic action, reconnects it to the physiological and includes it in the Pentad with parsimony-inducing effect. The attitude is then found to aid rhetorical analysis and show promise in being able to help analyse expressions not wholly in the realm of the conscious, be they in the form of a Bourdieu social practice or barely conscious rhetorical markers in conversation.

This work presents a new hybrid symbolic-numeric method for fast and accurate evaluation of multiple integrals, effective both in high dimensions and with high accuracy. In two dimensions, the thesis presents an adaptive two-phase algorithm for double integration of continuous functions over general regions using Frederick W. Chapman's recently developed Geddes series expansions to approximate the integrand. These results are extended to higher dimensions using a novel Deconstruction/Approximation/Reconstruction Technique (DART), which facilitates the dimensional reduction of families of integrands with special structure over hyperrectangular regions. The thesis describes a Maple implementation of these new methods and presents empirical results and conclusions from extensive testing. Various alternatives for implementation are discussed, and the new methods are compared with existing numerical and symbolic methods for multiple integration. The thesis concludes that for some frequently encountered families of integrands, DART breaks the curse of dimensionality that afflicts numerical integration.

This thesis presents a method for computing symbolic solutions of a certain class of improper integrals related to convolutions of Mellin transforms. Important integrals that fall into this category are integral transforms such as the Fourier, Laplace, and Hankel transforms. The method originated in a presentation by Salvy, However, many of the details of the method were absent. We present the method of Salvy in full which computes a linear homogeneous differentail equation which is satisfied by the integral in question. A theory of contour integrals is introduced that is related to the contour definition of Meijer G functions. This theory is used to prove the correctness of the method of Salvy and also gives a way to compute regions of validity for the solutions computed. We then extend the method to compute symbolic solutions of the integral along with where the solutions are valid.

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In the Chinese village Wukan, violence between the authorities and protesters took place when farmers resisted land transaction 2011. Wukan is one out of about ten thousand local protests annually in China, but unique in the modern Chinese history since it resulted in suspension of land transaction and the leaders of the protest where elected into the village committee, in an election which is considered by external observers as the most democratic in China. The aim of this paper is to understand destructive and constructive processes emerging out of interaction between protesters and the authorities. The focus is on how the actors (the authorities vs. protesting farmers) interpret their opportunities to: a) understand the intention of the other, b) be understood by the other, and c) influence the action of the other, in the different phases of the conflict. The conclusion is that when actors respond to disagreement with discursive closure, the destructivity increases, and vice versa.

This work presents a new hybrid symbolic-numeric method for fast and accurate evaluation of multiple integrals, effective both in high dimensions and with high accuracy. In two dimensions, the thesis presents an adaptive two-phase algorithm for double integration of continuous functions over general regions using Frederick W. Chapman's recently developed Geddes series expansions to approximate the integrand. These results are extended to higher dimensions using a novel Deconstruction/Approximation/Reconstruction Technique (DART), which facilitates the dimensional reduction of families of integrands with special structure over hyperrectangular regions. The thesis describes a Maple implementation of these new methods and presents empirical results and conclusions from extensive testing. Various alternatives for implementation are discussed, and the new methods are compared with existing numerical and symbolic methods for multiple integration. The thesis concludes that for some frequently encountered families of integrands, DART breaks the curse of dimensionality that afflicts numerical integration.

This thesis presents a method for computing symbolic solutions of a certain class of improper integrals related to convolutions of Mellin transforms. Important integrals that fall into this category are integral transforms such as the Fourier, Laplace, and Hankel transforms. The method originated in a presentation by Salvy, However, many of the details of the method were absent. We present the method of Salvy in full which computes a linear homogeneous differentail equation which is satisfied by the integral in question. A theory of contour integrals is introduced that is related to the contour definition of Meijer G functions. This theory is used to prove the correctness of the method of Salvy and also gives a way to compute regions of validity for the solutions computed. We then extend the method to compute symbolic solutions of the integral along with where the solutions are valid.

This thesis presents a new algorithm for computing the Hermite form of a polynomial matrix. Given a nonsingular n by n matrix A filled with degree d polynomials with coefficients from a field, the algorithm computes the Hermite form of A in expected number of field operations similar to that of matrix multiplication. The algorithm is randomized of the Las Vegas type.

Organizational adoption of information technology is an important decision for modern enterprises. Proper use of technology can increase benefits and competitive advantage. Inappropriate use could cause failure. Most previous literature focuses on treating technology adoption as a rational decision based on the functional needs of an organization. In many cases, however, technology adoption is not due to functional needs but environmental or peer pressure (called symbolic or ceremonial adoption). Different motivations for adoption may lead to different outcome. In addition, there is no generally accepted organizational adoption model that can include all key factors into consideration. Therefore, this study tries to understand what factors will affect an organization¡¦s adoption of a new information technology or use an information technology and whether different purposes (intangible value vs. tangible value) will affect the adoption or usage of information technology in organizations. The framework of this study was extended from the Fit-Viability Model to include the internal organizational factors and external environmental factors. We conducted a survey study and use PLS to analyze the collected data. The results show that the extended FV model can interpret organizational IT adoption and IT usage. The purpose of adoption did have effect on the intention to adopt information technology. In the symbolic adoption situation, TEF and viability had significant impacts on organizational intention to adopt; and in the functional adoption situation, TTF and viability had significant impacts on organizational intention to adopt. Different purposes of adoption have less significant effect on the actual use and performance of information system. TTF and actual use had significant impacts on organizational performance, and viability also had significant impacts on actual use of information technology in both situations. In other words, organizations can also benefit from IT adoption even if the original motivation was symbolic.

The development of software today, the company has their own test system usually. Because there has a few bugs in the every software. And it will make the damage of company¡¦s property or security of information. We can find the bugs in the software by the test systems. But the few bugs will appear repeatedly even if you have been fixed it. In this time, it will be effective if we use the automatic test systems. They can solve the waste of time and cost. Appearance of the automatic test system has been solved the defect of the test method in the past. In this paper will mention two kind of automatic test systems, one of them is concolic testing, and another is random testing. In the 2009, there had the few of evidence to discuss that the concolic testing was more effective than the random testing, but there wasn¡¦t have the enough demonstration. So I hope to prove that the effectiveness comparison between concolic and random testing by this paper.