To clarify the spatiotemporal distribution of the winter and spring larval fish assemblage in the coastal waters off Kaohsiung and Pingtung, Taiwan, larval fishes were collected during four research cruises by conducting 35 tows of the larval net in coastal waters off Zuoying, Linyuan, Linban and Fangliao in January and March 2009 and in coastal waters off Linyuan adjacent to the Kaoping River estuary in January and March 2010. Water temperature, salinity and dissolved oxygen were measured during the sampling of the fish larvae. Seawater samples were also collected for analyzing concentrations of nutrient salts. In 2009, a total of 2,023 fish larvae, representing 38 families and 74 species, were collected. The fish larvae assemblage exhibited seasonal variation in both abundance and species composition. The abundance (460 ind./1000m3) and the number of species (34 families and 66 species) of the fish larvae collected in March were higher than those (28 ind./1000m3, 14 families and 27 species) collected in January. Fish larvae also exhibited spatial variation in species composition. In January, the most dominant families of fish larvae were: Myctophidae off Linyuan, Sparidae off Linban and Nomeidae off Fangliao. In March, in the northward coastal waters off Linyuan Scombridae was the most dominant family, and in the southward coastal waters off Linyuan, Clupeidae and Sillaginidae were the dominant families. No significant differences existed in the abundance of fish larvae among the sampling areas, but the abundance of fish larvae in the sampling sites off Linyuan and Linban tended to be strongly influenced by tide. In 2010, a total of 1,959 fish larvae, representing 39 families and 59 species, were collected. These fish larvae showed diurnal and seasonal variations in abundance and in species composition. The abundance (767 ind./1000m3) and the number of species (39 families and 55 species) of the fish larvae in March were higher compared with those (26 ind./1000m3, 16 families and 25 species) in January. Moreover, the abundance of fish larvae in the nighttime was higher than that in the daytime. In March, the most dominant family in the daytime was Serranidae, whereas the most dominant family in the nighttime was Myctophidae, indicating the diurnal migration of Myctophidae these larvae. Cluster analysis indicated that the abundance and species composition of the fish larvae differed between January and March in 2009. The difference in species composition among the four sampling areas was only found significant for the fish larvae collected in the coastal waters off Fangliao in winter, and the most influenced families were Nomeidae and Myctophidae. In 2010, seasonal variations were found in the abundance and species composition of the fish larvae, and the abundance of the fish larvae showed the difference between nearshore and inshore sampling sites in the nighttime in winter. In spring, the fish larvae were all inshore fishes, but the species composition had annual variation. The temperature and salinity data obtained in the sampling sites conformed to the surface seawater of South China Sea, indicating that the occurrence of the dominant family Scombridae may be related to the seawater of South China Sea.

The scaling of VLSI technology has spurred a rapid growth in the semiconductor industry. With the CMOS device dimension scaling to and beyond 90nm technology, it is possible to achieve higher performance and to pack more complex functionalities on a single chip. However, the scaling trend has introduced drastic variation of process and design parameters, leading to severe variability of chip performance in nanometer regime. Also, the manufacturing community projects CMOS will scale for three to four more generations. Since the uncertainties due to variations are expected to increase in each generation, it will significantly impact the performance of design and consequently the yield. Another challenging issue in the nanometer IC design is the high power consumption due to the greater packing density, higher frequency of operation and excessive leakage power. Moreover, the circuits are usually over-designed to compensate for uncertainties due to variations. The over-designed circuits not only make timing closure difficult but also cause excessive power consumption. For portable electronics, excessive power consumption may reduce battery life; for non-portable systems it may impose great difficulties in cooling and packaging. The objective of my research has been to develop design methodologies to address variations and power dissipation for reliable circuit operation. The proposed work has been divided into three parts: the first part addresses the issues related with power/ground noise induced by clock distribution network and proposes techniques to reduce power/ground noise considering the effects of process variations. The second part proposes an elastic pipeline scheme for random circuits with feedback loops. The proposed scheme provides a low-power solution that has the same variation tolerance as the conventional approaches. The third section deals with discrete buffer and wire sizing for link-based non-tree clock network, which is an energy efficient structure for skew tolerance to variations. For the power/ground noise problem, our approach could reduce the peak current and the delay variations by 50% and 51% respectively. Compared to conventional approach, the elastic timing scheme reduces power dissipation by 20% − 27%. The sizing method achieves clock skew reduction of 45% with a small increase in power dissipation.

In nanometer technologies, process variation control and low power have emerged as the first order design goal after high performance. Process variations cause high variability in performance and power consumption of an IC, which affects the overall yield. Short channel effects (SCEs) deteriorate the MOSFET performance and lead to higher leakage power. Double gate devices suppress SCEs and are potential candidates for replacing Bulk technology in nanometer nodes. Threshold voltage control in planar asymmetric double gate transistor (IGFET) using a fourth terminal provides an effective means of combating process variations and low power design. In this thesis, using various case studies, we analyzed the suitability of IGFET for variation control and low power design. We also performed an extensive comparison between IGFET and Bulk for reducing variability, improving yield and leakage power reduction using power gating. We also proposed a new circuit topology for IGFET, which on average shows 33.8 percent lower leakage and 34.9 percent lower area at the cost of 2.8 percent increase in total active mode power, for basic logic gates. Finally, we showed a technique for reducing leakage of minimum sized devices designed using new circuit topology for IGFET.

In this paper, we will explore architecture variations of ARM7 microprocessors. The ARM7TDMI is a 32-bit microprocessor developed by ARM Ltd. It used in embedded application such as mobile phones, pager and PDAs. However, as portable products grow in complexity more processing power is required. This paper focuses on the implementation of the architecture variations of ARM7 microprocessors. The evolutions from our RTL design to architecture variations are described and the trade offs between high performance and low gate count discussed.

Parvoviruses cause dreadful enteritis in waterfowls and lead to tremendous financial losses. This study aims at developing effective way to prevent waterfowl parvoviral infection. Duck parvoviruses (DPVs) and goose parvoviruses (GPVs) were isolated from organs of infected waterfowls. The presence of virus in the specimens was identified using polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and subsequent restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) analysis. To reveal the genetic variation of viral capsid proteins (VPs), full length VPs gene were amplified and sequenced. The sequence data indicated the sequences diverge 4.1 to 4.4% among viral strains isolated during 1990 to 1999. The variant amino acids cluster in the common regions of VP3 at residues 203-266 and 482-534, which overlaps with the regions proposed to expose on the outer surfaces of parvoviral particles. These data implying that selective pressure from host immune system might play a part. The nucleotide sequences of VPs also reveal that DPV and GPV share 77 % similarity at the DNA, and 84.6% at the protein level. The most variable regions reside in the N-terminal of VP2 before the initiation codon of VP3 with 35% (19/54) amino acids divergence. This study also reveals the presence of conserved strain-specific residues in VPs and these residues seldom vary among different isolates of the same virus, suggesting that they might be important in maintaining viral structure or host specificity which worth further investigation. To investigate the antigenicity of VPs, the GPV genomic DNA encoding common region of VPs was fused in frame with glutathione S-transferase (GST) gene for the expression of GST-GPV (248-516) fusion protein in bacterial cells. Purified fusion protein was used as immunogen for the generation of rabbit anti-GPV (248-516) antiserum. The potential diagnostic usage was confirmed by the fact that this antiserum was able to differentiate between viral infected and uninfected primary embryonic fibroblast cells by immunocytochemical analysis. In addition, VPs in purified DPV and GPV virions were analyzed by Western blotting. This antiserum detected two prominent proteins bands with the molecule weight of 80 and 70 kilodaltons, which correspond to the sizes of VP1 and VP2 reported in the literature. The fact that VP1 of DPV reacts weakly with this antiserum suggests the existence of antigenic discrepancy between DPV and GPV. For the purpose of developing subunit vaccine for the control of Derzy's disease, recombinant full length VPs were expressed using both prokaryotic, GST and histidine-tagged fusion proteins, and eukaryotic, baculovirus and mammalian vero cell, expression systems. After large- scale production and purification, same amount of 4 recombinant VPs were individually used to immunize 1-week-old geese. The antibodies induced after immunization were then evaluated by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). All four recombinant proteins stimulate approximately 7 to 8 folds increases of ELISA antibodies titers, and together with preliminary data of safety tests suggest a potential usage as subunit vaccine for the control of parvoviral infection.

Among most of the LEED registered and LEED certified health-care facilities, there is a credit variation between the LEED pilot checklist and the final checklist. The credit variation between the LEED pilot and final checklists implies failure in achieving the pre-defined green objectives. Most of the credits were given up due to financial reasons. Although most of the credits in the LEED credit list emerge as design issues, accomplishing a LEED rating is primarily the owner??s responsibility. In order to minimize the variation between the LEED pilot checklist and LEED approved checklist, the owner needs to conduct significant project planning. The owner should integrate the LEED objectives early in the project and should include the cost of the LEED process in the capital budget. Since there are limited LEED certified health-care projects, adoption of the systems approach for planning and developing a green health-care facility using the IDEF0 method is recommended. The IDEF0 method can produce an outcome array which represents the matrix of all possible circumstances. This will give the owner and the project team the ability to better forecast cost and schedule decisions, even when there is a lack of historical data relating to green health-care projects. The approach will be beneficial in analyzing the various outcomes, cost, and feasibility of projects in terms of integrating LEED objectives early on. This could minimize the credit variation, as well as cost and schedule overruns during the project execution stage. Adequately defining the full development process upfront is vital to the overall success of any project, especially for green buildings, since they are a developing trend in the construction industry.

Harold Lasswell (1936) defined politics as the exploration of "who gets what, when, and how." As such, one of the central concerns of democratic governance is the role that affected interests play not only in politics, but in the implementation of adopted policies as well. In this dissertation, I use both comparative method case studies, as well as pooled-time series statistical techniques, to examine the effects of political, economic and market forces, and competition between the affected interests on implementation of the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977. The findings of this, as well as previous, research shows that state-level implementing agencies have some discretion in enforcement activities; however, closer examination shows that this discretion is rarely used. This lack of use of regulatory discretion by the state-level implementing agencies suggests that in most states, there is either sufficient competition between the affected interests to neutralize the excessive use of discretion in enforcement activity, or that there is insufficient pressure placed on the implementing agencies by the affected interests to warrant the use of discretion.

The bottom sediments near the coast of Taiwan Strait are mainly terrestrial origins. The sediment transport processes are controlled by the meteorology hydrology factors, including winds, waves, flows and sea level variations. This study is aimed to investigate the influence of wave-current interaction to the sediment dynamics in the vicinity Shuitou Harbor of Chinmen. Emphasize is placed on analysis of observed meteorology and hydrology data and the bottom topography. The data used in this study are from the field observations during the development of Shuitou Harbor. The hourly data include winds, currents, waves and tides. Additional bottom topography surveys were carried out twice per year, one in April and the other in October. The period of time series data is between October, 2001 and April, 2006. The results of the analyses showed that (1) During the period of northeast monsoon, deposit dominated in the northern part of the study area (Shuitou Harbor vicinity), while erosion dominated in the southern part. The deposition and erosion phenomena reversed during the period of southwest monsoon. (2) The bottom topography variations had higher correlation with the large waves and flows in the winter northeast monsoon season. (3) Winds correlate well with the large waves and flows in the winter, while the correlation is weak in the summer. (4) Resuspension of bottom sediments seems play a major role in the sediment transport, especially in the winter large wave condition. During persistent northeast monsoon, wave height increased significantly that bottom sediments were eroded and transported by the southward mean flow, erosion occurred (in the southern part of the study area). (5) There are two likely sources of sediment. The major source of sediment is from the north, brought by the southward China coastal current in winter. The second source of sediment is from the south, Jiulong River, which occurred mostly in the summer. (6) The long term analysis of topography variations in the vicinity of Shuitou Harbor showed that there is a balance of deposition and erosion. The depositions in the northern part of the study area during the northeast monsoon were eroded and moved north during the period of southwest monsoon. On the other hand, in the southern area, the erosions during the winter were supplied by northward sediment movement in summer. In the long term, the seabed terrain of Shuitou Harbor has no significant change.

<p>Syftet med examensarbetet var att undersöka vilka strategier barn använde sig av när de räknade samt om variation av antal, föremål och gruppering påverkade deras val av strategier. Undersökningen gjordes genom strukturerade observationer då femton barn, födda 2002, på tre olika förskolor räknade föremål där antal, gruppering och material varierades. I vårt teoriavsnitt bearbetades Gelman och Gallistels fem räkneprinciper och Martons variationsteori. Resultatet visade att barn använde sig av samtliga fem räkneprinciper på olika sätt och i olika ordning när de räknade samt att både antal, material och gruppering hade betydelse för barns val av strategier vid antalsbestämning. Barnen hade lättare att räkna legobitar än kulor och behärskade de olika principerna bättre då antalet var färre eller materialet grupperat i rader.</p>

Zugl.: Leipzig, Univ., Diss., 2009