An Exploratory Study of Entrepreneurship in Taiwan’s Small & Medium Enterprises – Case Studies of Six Manufacturing Companies

Entrepreneurship with organization setting has been conceptualized in a variety of ways. Studies in this area remain broad and appear relatively fragmented. From previous literature reviews, we found that little attention has been paid toward the entrepreneurial management model with the starting-up phases of Small & Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Taiwan. In view of this, the purpose of this study is to fill this gap in the literature by proposing a research framework that integrates both entrepreneurship literature and Small & Medium Enterprises (SMEs) literature. To address this problem, a new research method based on integrating cases study and in-depth interviews methods are also proposed. According to the results, the individual factor was the central part among the four contributing factors (reproduction, imitation, valorization, and venture). With respect to the six dimensions of entrepreneurship (strategic orientation, commitment to opportunity, commitment to resources, control over resources, management frame, and compensation philosophy), the enterprises interviewed in this research all set forth their perspectives. As for the four kinds of entrepreneurial status, there were four entrepreneurial imitation companies and two entrepreneurial venture companies in this research. To conclude, several propositions were proposed, and the results released that the individual factor was the crucial part among the four contributing factors. Research also examined the main dimensions of entrepreneurship for analyzing the theoretical basis

The Organizational Innovativeness Inventory for information and electronic enterprises: Development and Validation

The primary purpose of this study is to develop Taiwan localization and suitable inventory for the measuring organizational innovation in information and electronic enterprises. In review of relevant literatures, and with reference to opinions from scholars and practical experience from enterprises, the framework of the inventory would be initially established. Concerning the inventory reliability, Cronbach's coefficient, item-total correlation and test-retest reliability coefficient have been employed to test the extent of internal consistency and the stability of the inventory. In the construction of validity, Linear Structural Relation was adopted to carry out confirmatory factor analysis. The suitability and fitness of the seven dimensions and 58 questions have been thus verified. As a result, this inventory with adequate validity and reliability can serve as effective instrument for the measurement of organizational innovation in domestic information and electronic enterprises. The developed questionnaire of this study is a method to quantify the organizational innovation. These instrument targets two areas OI and TI evaluation model–to assess inattentiveness in an organization

H. 264 Error Resilience Coding Based on Multihypothesis Motion Compensated Prediction

[[abstract]]In this paper, we propose efficient schemes for enhancing the error robustness of multi-hypothesis motion-compensate predictive (MHMCP) coder without sacrificing the coding efficiency significantly. The proposed schemes utilize the concept of reference picture interleaving and data partitioning to make the MHMCP-coded video more resilient to channel errors, especially for burst channel error. Besides, we also propose a scheme of integrating adaptive intra-refresh into the proposed MHMCP coder to further improve the error recovery speed. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed methods can effectively and quickly mitigate the error propagation and the penalty on coding efficiency for clean channels due to the inserted error resilience features is rather minor[[fileno]]2030144030009[[department]]電機工程學

Fast Mode Decision Algorithms for Adaptive GOP Structure in the Scalable Extension of H.264/AVC

[[abstract]]We propose a fast mode decision algorithm to reduce the computational complexity of adaptive GOP structure (AGS) in the scalable extension of H.264/AVC. AGS can improve the coding efficiency of the scalable extension of H.264. It, however, needs to perform motion-compensated temporal filtering (MCTF) of all possible GOP sizes, leading to much higher computation than the fixed GOP structure. In our proposed algorithm, after performing the MCTF with the maximum GOP size, we utilize two features to decide whether to perform the remaining MCTFs of sub-GOPs and mode selection. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can significantly reduce unnecessary MCTF computation for AGS, while maintaining good coding efficiency.[[fileno]]2030144030011[[department]]電機工程學

Kinematic Analysis of a Novel Vibratory Bowl Feeder

This study aims to propose a kinematic analysis approach for a novel vibratory bowl feeder, and verify its feasibility by kinematic simulation. First, the novel design is presented, and its advantages compared with conventional feeders are described. Moreover, the equations for kinematic analysis are derived. Finally, the solid model for the proposed design is established, and then kinematic simulation is performed by ADAMS software. The simulation results indicate that the proposed design can effectively advances the part with high efficiency

Computation-aware intra-mode decision for H.264 coding and transcoding

[[abstract]]been equipped with modern video codecs. Video communications, especially for encoding H.264 format bit-stream, however, are usually very power-consuming, leading to rather limited communication period for mobile devices powered by batteries. Computation-aware video coding can effectively extend the battery life. In this paper, we propose a computation-aware intra mode decision for H.264 coding and transcoding applications. The proposed algorithm optimizes the visual quality by adaptively adjusting the number of prediction modes in mode decision under a given computation constraint. We introduce a new concept of computation buffer and formulate the computation control of mode decision as a rate-distortion optimization problem of computation buffer control. Experimental results show that our proposed algorithm can effectively control the computational complexity while maintaining good RD-performance and satisfying the given computation constraint.[[fileno]]2030144030046[[department]]電機工程學

Production of biodiesel from chicken wastes by various alcohol-catalyst combinations

An environmentally friendly biorefinery process for producing biodiesel from chicken wastes was performed for this study. Low acid value (0.13±0.01 mg KOH/g) chicken oil was obtained by preparing chicken wastes with moderate heating and filtration processes that minimized damage to the lipids and thus facilitated subsequent reactions. Methanol-lipids in a molar ratio of 6:1 and a methanol-ethanol-lipids mixture in a molar ratio of 3:3:1 were both reacted with 1% KOH catalyst for transesterfication. Furthermore, ethanol-lipids in a molar ration of 6:1 were analogously transesterified with 1% sodium ethoxide. The amounts of biodiesel were 771.54 mg/mL±15.28, 722.98 mg/mL±37.38, and 714.86 mg/ mL±29.99 from methanol, eth-anol, and a mixture of methanol/ethanol (3:3), respectively, after transesterification. The total amount of ethyl ester was comparable with the total amount of methyl ester. In addition, ethanol is a renewable resource and a biorefinery concept can be contributed for biodiesel production. Further-more, transesterification of chicken oil with a mixture of methanol/ethanol (3:3) only needed a relatively short reaction time of an hour. Densities, viscosities, sulphur contents, acid values, and flash points of all esters were within the specifications of CNS 15072 and EN 14214. The transesterification system for chicken oil in ethanol and mixed methanol/ethanol (3:3) demonstrated in this study is a potential candidate for biodiesel production

BANet: Blur-aware Attention Networks for Dynamic Scene Deblurring

Image motion blur usually results from moving objects or camera shakes. Such blur is generally directional and non-uniform. Previous research efforts attempt to solve non-uniform blur by using self-recurrent multi-scale or multi-patch architectures accompanying with self-attention. However, using self-recurrent frameworks typically leads to a longer inference time, while inter-pixel or inter-channel self-attention may cause excessive memory usage. This paper proposes blur-aware attention networks (BANet) that accomplish accurate and efficient deblurring via a single forward pass. Our BANet utilizes region-based self-attention with multi-kernel strip pooling to disentangle blur patterns of different degrees and with cascaded parallel dilated convolution to aggregate multi-scale content features. Extensive experimental results on the GoPro and HIDE benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed BANet performs favorably against the state-of-the-art in blurred image restoration and can provide deblurred results in real-time

An Extended Analytic Solution of Combined Refraction and Diffraction of Long Waves Propagating over Circular Island

An analytic solution of long waves scattering by a cylindrical island mounted on a permeable circular shoal was obtained by solving the linear long wave equation (LWE). The solution is in terms of the Bessel function expressed by complex variables. The present solution is suitable for arbitrary bottom configurations described by a power function with two independent parameters. For the case of the paraboloidal shoal, there exists a singular point (α=2) which can be removed using Frobenius series, where α is a real constant. The present solution is reduced to Yu and Zhang’s (2003) solution for impermeable circular shoal. The numerical results show some special features of the combined effect of wave refraction and diffraction caused by a porous circular island. The effect of key parameters of the island dimension, the shoal slope, and permeability on wave scattering was discussed based on the analytic solution