School quality and housing prices

Includes bibliographical references (p. 84-96).Thesis (B.Sc)--University of Hong Kong, 2010.published_or_final_versio

Impact of secondary education reform on tertiary students’ generic competencies: A case study of associate degree freshmen in Hong Kong

This paper examines the correlation between curriculum reforms and the development of generic competencies among Hong Kong tertiary students (or secondary leavers who were admitted to Associate Degree and Higher Diploma). A total number of 3626 freshmen completed a set of self-assessment questionnaires, which were used to analyse the correlation between five generic competencies, across three academic years from 2010 to 2012. Five of the generic competencies, which were highlighted in the proposed new three-year New Senior Secondary (NSS) academic structure, were measured and compared between students from different academic backgrounds. The finding of the study indicated significantly higher scores in generic competencies for the traditional Hong Kong Advanced Level Examination (HKALE) secondary school curriculum in 2012 compared to earlier cohorts, whilst in general no significant difference was found between students from the traditional curriculum and the new academic structure of the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education (HKDSE) in the mixed ‘double cohort’ year of 2012. The result points to the potential early impact of NSS on students’ generic skill development across both the old and new curriculum

董橋專欄文章的語言風格研究

董橋是當今著名的文字大家，也是香港重要的專欄作者。董橋於上世紀九十年代中旬始涉筆專欄寫作，至今仍筆耕不綴。他的專欄文章，風格獨特，在香港文學史以至當代中國文學史上地位特殊，具有研究的價值。 本論文以語言風格學為主要理論依據，並運用舉證、歸納、統計等方法， 考察董橋專欄文章的語言風格。論文主要分為四章：第一章為引論，概括交代研究的背景、對象、目的、範圍以及對語言風格理論作一簡述；第二章為風格的形成(上)「創作主體與交際語境」，從生活經歷、文化修養、思想性情、 創作觀以及專欄載體等主客觀因素，探討董橋語言風格的成因；第三章則為風 格的形成(下)「風格要素與風格手段」，涵蓋詞彙風格、句法風格和修辭風格的研討，重點考析董橋專欄文章語言風格賴以形成的語言要素及風格手段。 結構上則採「先總後分」的方法，先描述董橋的語言風格本色，然後再按個別欄目分析各自的語言風格特色。第四章為總結，重申董橋專欄文章風格的構成 原因，勾勒文章中反覆而持續出現的「語言風格」，並帶出董橋文章的「正典化」現象，收結全文

Developing electric bus driving cycles with significant road gradient changes::A case study in Hong Kong

Battery electric buses have been increasingly being deployed to replace traditional diesel buses in providing urban public transport services. Accounted for over 30% of daily passenger trips, the franchised bus system in Hong Kong only retained a few battery electric buses after its trial programme. Under the unique bus driving environment in Hong Kong, more evaluations are anticipated for further deployment of electric buses. Driving cycle is a widely adopted platform for the assessment of vehicle fuel economy, energy consumption, emissions and driving range. Therefore, it is necessary to have a purposely developed driving cycle for battery electric buses. A comprehensive review of bus driving cycles developed elsewhere shows that the impacts of road gradients are seldom considered. Therefore, in this study, the only remaining battery electric bus route with significant gradient changes was selected for speed data collection and synthesis for a set of driving cycles. Results shown that driving characteristics of this route were comparable to urban bus cycles developed in other cities, but were slightly different from bus cycles developed for other conditions. It was also observed that battery electric buses appeared to be less responsive to drivers’ acceleration activities than that of a supercapacitor bus

A bottom-up clustering approach to identify bus driving patterns and to develop bus driving cycles for Hong Kong

Bus transport has been an important mode taking up a significant share of urban travel demand and thus the corresponding impacts on the environment are of great concerns. Use of driving cycles to evaluate the environmental impacts of buses has attracted much attention in recent years worldwide. The franchised bus service is currently playing important roles in the public transport system in Hong Kong; however, there is no driving cycle developed specifically for them. A set of bus driving cycle was therefore developed using a bottom-up approach where driving data on the bus network with mixed characteristics were collected. Using the Ward’s method for clustering, the collected data were then categorized into three clusters representing distinct franchised bus route patterns in Hong Kong. Driving cycles were then developed for each route pattern including (i) congested urban routes with closely spaced bus stops and traffic junctions; (ii) inter-district routes containing a number of stop-and-go activities and a significant portion of smoother high speed driving; and (iii) early morning express routes and mid-night routes connecting remote residential areas and urban areas. These cycles highlighted the unique low-speed and aggressive driving characteristics of bus transport in Hong Kong with frequent stop-and-go activities. The findings from this study would definitely be helpful in assessing the exhaust emissions, fuel consumptions as well as energy consumptions of bus transport. The bottom-up clustering approach adopted in this study would also be useful in identifying specific driving patterns based on vehicle speed trip data with mixed driving characteristics. It is believed that this approach is especially suitable for assessing fixed route public transport modes with mixed driving characteristics

Increasing the civil service retirement age in Hong Kong : a study of policy processes and dynamics

published_or_final_versionPolitics and Public AdministrationMasterMaster of Public Administratio

Multiple Block-Size Search Algorithm for Fast Block Motion Estimation

Abstract-Although variable block-size motion estimation provides significant video quality and coding efficiency improvement, it requires much higher computational complexity compared with fixed block size motion estimation. The reason is that the current motion estimation algorithms are mainly designed for fixed block size. Current variable block-size motion estimation implementation simply applies these existing motion estimation algorithms independently for different block sizes to find the best block size and the corresponding motion vector. Substantial computation is wasted because distortion data reuse among motion searches of different block sizes is not considered. In this paper, a motion estimation algorithm intrinsically designed for variable block-size video coding is presented. The proposed multiple block-size search (MBSS) algorithm unifies the motion searches for different block sizes into a single searching process instead of independently performing the search for each block size. In this unified search, the suboptimal motion vectors for different block sizes are used to determine the next search steps. Its prediction quality is comparable with that obtained by performing motion search for different block sizes independently while the computational load is substantially reduced. Experimental results show that the prediction quality of MBSS is similar to full search. Block matching, motion estimation, video coding, search pattern, directional search