"Creative labor in radio" : the creativity of radio show host in Hong Kong

published_or_final_versionMedia, Culture and Creative CitiesMasterMaster of Social Sciences in Media, Culture and Creative Citie

Environmental Systems Analysis - Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong

Undergraduate course in environmental systems analysis offered at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong in Fall 2015

THE EFFECT OF TRADABLE DISCHARGE PERMIT (TDP) PROGRAMS ON THE RELIABILITY OF WATER QUALITY IN RIVERS

Tradable Discharge Permit (TDP) programs have shown, both in practice and in theory, to have tremendous potential as cost-effective methods of pollution control. Nevertheless, there are still many uncertainties regarding TDP programs that if not adequately addressed, might impair their success. Concerns range from issues of market failure that prevents optimal trading, to political agendas that differ from a typical TDP program in their priorities, to modeling difficulties that might cause erroneous predictions of cost savings and environmental performance. The hopelessness of trying to overcome these concerns all at once is recognized. And therefore, apart from a brief discussion where the more common of these uncertainties are identified and discussed, attention is focused only on the uncertainty associated with environmental modeling, specifically that associated with the stochastic aquatic environment. Numerous studies have been carried out to predict the potential impacts of TDP programs, whether positive or negative, on the environment they are intended to protect. These studies have been invaluable in laying essential groundwork for the further understanding and actual implementation of such programs. However, many of these studies assumed deterministic environmental models when in reality nothing is ever constant. The environment is an open system vulnerable to, amongst many other agents, weather variations and changes in microbial behavior. It is therefore, this study's goal to attempt to advance a step forward by re-assessing those same questions asked many times before, but this time without disregarding the stochastic nature of the environment. The Willamette and Athabasca Rivers in Oregon, USA and Alberta, Canada, respectively are used as example case studies. These systems are simulated to predict how they might respond if discharge permit trading were implemented. The Mean-Value First-Order Second-Moment (MFOSM) method is used to evaluate the reliability of each system's dissolved oxygen (DO) concentration meeting set standards, as a function of its BOD wasteload distribution and environmental randomness. The results show that trading does indeed influence environment quality. For the Willamette River, trading improves the water quality reliability. For the Athabasca River, trading makes the reliability worse. However, these effects are quite minimal in that, for any target reliability to be achieved that is reasonable, trading is found not to change the reliability significantly in comparison to that attained under a policy of no trading

Improving Simulations of Aqueous Systems through Experimental Bias

In order to enhance the ab initio molecular dynamics treatment of aqueous systems, the Boltzmann inversion directed simulation method was developed that derives a corrective bias to the system pairwise potential using experimental data. The bias acts as an empirical correction that enables routine-level simulation of density functional theory water to achieve comparable liquid structure to experiment at ambient temperature without significantly increasing computational cost

Power Flow Solution for Radial Distribution Networks

Power flow analysis on distribution systems is not having enough attention as compared to transmission systems. Generally, distribution networks are radial and the resistance to reactance ratio, R/X is high. By making use of the special structure of radial network, a simple method is first developed to obtain the connection matrix and hence the nodes beyond any specified branch, which is the branch-node matrix by using the special structure of radial distribution network. The necessary formulas are derived to calculate the receiving-end voltage in terms of the sending-end voltage and the receiving-end line flows. At each and every of the iterations, receiving-end voltages are updated by computing the line losses. The main aim of this project is to attain a simple power flow method which is suitable for solving radial distribution networks and develop the necessary MATLAB programme. The specially designed MATLAB programme to solve radial distribution networks was successfully developed and tested on several standard radial distribution networks. Meanwhile, Newton-Raphson power flow method is developed to test the radial networks for strengthening the validity of the results obtained. Besides, comparisons are made between both Newton-Raphson power flow method and proposed approach. The proposed approach for radial distribution network can be implemented on any practical data

Metamodelling for auxetic materials

The use of Finite Element (FE) based homogenisation has improved the study of composite material properties. A homogenisation is a method of averaging a heterogeneous domain by using a replacement unit cell according to the proportions of constituents in the domain. However, the homogenisation method involves enormous computational effort when implemented in engineering design problems, such as optimisation of a sandwich panel. The large number of computations involved can rule out many approaches due to the expense of carrying out many runs. One way of circumnavigating this problem is to replace the true system by an approximate surrogate model, which is fast-running compared to the original. In traditional approaches using response surfaces, a simple least-squares multinomial model is often adopted. In this thesis, a Genetic Programming model was developed to extend the class of possible models by carrying out a general symbolic regression. The approach is demonstrated on both univariate and multivariate problems with both computational and experimental data. Its performances were compared with Neural Networks - Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLP) and polynomials. The material system studied here was the auxetic materials. The auxetic behaviour means that the structure exhibits a negative Poisson's ratio during extension. A novel auxetic structure, chiral honeycomb, is introduced in this work, with its experiments, analytical and simulations. The implementations of the auxetic material surrogate models were demonstrated using optimisation problems. One of the optimisation problems was the shape optimisation of the auxetic sandwich using Differential Evolution. The shape optimisation gives the optimal geometry of honeycomb based on the desired mechanical properties specified by the user. The thesis has shown a good performance of numerical homogenisation technique and the robustness of the GP models. A detailed study of the chiral honeycomb has also given insight to the potential application of the auxetic materials

Power Flow Solution for Radial Distribution Networks

Power flow analysis on distribution systems is not having enough attention as compared to transmission systems. Generally, distribution networks are radial and the resistance to reactance ratio, R/X is high. By making use of the special structure of radial network, a simple method is first developed to obtain the connection matrix and hence the nodes beyond any specified branch, which is the branch-node matrix by using the special structure of radial distribution network. The necessary formulas are derived to calculate the receiving-end voltage in terms of the sending-end voltage and the receiving-end line flows. At each and every of the iterations, receiving-end voltages are updated by computing the line losses. The main aim of this project is to attain a simple power flow method which is suitable for solving radial distribution networks and develop the necessary MATLAB programme. The specially designed MATLAB programme to solve radial distribution networks was successfully developed and tested on several standard radial distribution networks. Meanwhile, Newton-Raphson power flow method is developed to test the radial networks for strengthening the validity of the results obtained. Besides, comparisons are made between both Newton-Raphson power flow method and proposed approach. The proposed approach for radial distribution network can be implemented on any practical data

Historicizing hybridity and globalization : The South Seas Society in Singapore, 1940 - 2000

Master'sMASTER OF ART

SHARP-1 REPRESSES MYOGENIC DIFFERENTIATION THROUGH RECRUITMENT OF METHYLTRANSFERASE G9A

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH