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This research examines the changing nature of the Asian online gaming industry and the position of Taiwan in the regional market. The evidence used was gathered through fieldwork conducted in Taiwan, Beijing and Shanghai from January to October in 2007. Firstly, it explores the situation from the perspective of political economy in order to understand the process of commodification, including production, marketing and distribution. The research establishes that the game industry operates within a highly competitive market requiring substantial investments. Since game production requires complex technological skills, there is a high capital cost, and the process is very time consuming. Today's online gaining business has segmented into different sectors with varying roles, i.e. developer, publisher, distributor and operator, controlled by different players in the business. The research shows that Asian game firms seek vertical synergies by expanding complex collaborative networks of production, marketing and operation in order to minimize costs and maximize profits. This implies that an international value chain has been established within the regional economy due to that the capacity of modern East Asian cities to accelerate the integration of the online gaming industry into regional economic activity. Secondly, online gaming overall is a popular form of interactive entertainment in the intra-Asian market. The key theories used to understand digital games are debated between narratology and ludology. However, neither is capable of providing an explanation for the Asian gaming culture. On further examination, certain types of game genres, 'wuxia' and 'cute' games, are found to have a particular appeal for Asian users. The wuxia genre is exclusively circulated in the greater Chinese cultural arena. The 'cute' game originates from the protagonists and themes of Japanese video games. This genre is well accepted by Asian users living in urban environments, and has become a force to unite city gainers in different Asian countries. Lastly, the thesis explores the unique position of Taiwan's game industry, which has been transformed from a test-bed for games aimed at the Chinese market into an intermediary between China and the rest of the world. Before 2002, Taiwan was regarded as a springboard for foreign firms wishing to enter the big Chinese market. Now, China's game industry has emerged and Chinese games have been exported to other Asian countries. Currently Taiwan is the biggest export market. The sophisticated features of the Taiwanese market mean that it can act as a stepping stone for Chinese game firms wishing to expand into wider regional and global markets.

The perfective marker V-"le" is claimed to be one of the most problematic items in the acquisition of L2 Chinese, perhaps because no unified and comprehensive treatment of it exists in the literature. Although much has been written on this topic, the semantic and pragmatic functions of V-"le" have remained elusive. While linguists and grammarians all agree that V-"le" performs multiple functions, there has been no consensus on its meaning and usage. Adding to this complex situation is that V-"le" is not always syntactically obligatory in Mandarin Chinese. Even though scholars are well aware of the phenomenon of "optionality" with Chinese aspect markers, disagreement and ambiguity prevail. Smith (1997) claims that V-le, like other aspect markers in Chinese, is always syntactically optional. Li and Thompson (1981) claim that the use of V-"le" depends largely on the speaker's viewpoint as to whether an event is "bounded" or not. Both seem to suggest global optionality. In contrast, textbooks written for Chinese L2 learners discuss V-"le" as obligatory in various different contexts. Having found no established and unified treatment of V-"le" that reflects native speaker's knowledge regarding its obligatory and optional use, we conducted a larger survey of 482 native speakers, 316 adolescents and 166 adults, in an attempt to capture some generalizations on the obligatory and optional use of -"le" in various contexts. Our results show a range of frequencies, from very high (98% to 100%) in the context of accomplishment predicates and activity predicates as the first event in a sequence; to high (67% to 84%) in the context of achievement predicates; to variable (31% to 64%) in the context of resultative verb complements. We argue that this pattern of V-"le" suppliance can be derived by positing a hierarchy of boundedness in the predicate and that it follows a redundancy principle in discourse. The results from learners' data suggest that they acquired the knowledge of the perfective marking in the obligatory context after 300-400 hours of classroom instruction. They consistently used -"le" with accomplishment verbs and activity verbs as the first event in a sequence. They also consistently omitted -"le" with resultative verb complements, a hint of their implicit understanding of the semantic cues given by the predicates. In sum, the learners had a good understanding of the semantic properties of the verb class and had acquired a good, but not yet native-like, knowledge about the interaction between the perfective marker V-"le" and the lexical and semantic properties of different verb type categories. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

This thesis illustrates the domino reaction of burning matches caused by heat transfer, which was inspired by the domino effects happening in everyday life. This thesis incorporates both aesthetical and technical skills to model a Computer Graphic (CG) match, design match textures, adjust materials colors and control burning effects. The purpose of this thesis is to simulate the visual effects of a collection of matches burning sequentially. It provides a methodology to design and model the match texture, set up the heat values to move along the match geometry, simulate the flames which change according to the heat values at different match points, and construct the texture changes and bending geometry of match after burning. The proposed procedure in this thesis provides a way to create a collection of matches with any desired number and let them burn sequentially.

All microwave and millimeter-wave systems are made of monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMICs) which are placed together using bond wires and discrete transmission line components (such as filters and couplers) to form microwave integrated circuits and subsystems. Most of the problems encountered in microwave circuits, being at the MMIC level or at the hybrid circuit implementation level, are due to the presence of the underlying dielectric substrate. In this thesis, we propose the use of micromachining techniques to eliminate the dielectric substrate and to create a localized low-loss and low-$\rm\epsilon\sb{r}$ environment. The idea attacks the most basic point: How to build microwave planar circuits on very low dielectric constant substrates to eliminate dispersion and dielectric loss and to result in a TEM-wave, while still being compatible with standard silicon and GaAs processing techniques. The low-$\rm\epsilon\sb{r}$ environment is accomplished by depositing a 1-2$\mu$m-thick dielectric membrane layer on top of the dielectric substrate, then using micromachining techniques to locally remove the supporting silicon or GaAs substrate. By using this technology, a membrane suspended 1-2 nH inductor has shown a resonant frequency of 60 GHz which is around three times higher than the same inductor built on a silicon substrate. This technology is also applied to the design of interdigitated resonators and filters which achieved conductor-loss limited performance at 15-40 GHz. A 20.3 GHz 16% bandwidth filter is presented and results in a measured port-to-port conductor-loss limited insertion loss of 1.7 dB. A Lange-coupler employing the membrane technology is also built and a $3.6\pm0.8$ dB port-to-port coupling bandwidth from 6.5 to 20 GHz is achieved while preserving a phase balance of $90\pm3$ degree. The micromachined interdigitated filter and Lange-coupler are used in a Ku-band single-sideband mixer. This SSB mixer achieves a 9.5 dB port-to-port conversion loss at 17 GHz with an image rejection of 30 dB for an IF of 1 GHz and above, requires no DC bias and 1-2 mW of LO power. This technology is fully compatible with the via-hole process in Silicon, SiGe, GaAs and InP MMICs, and can result in high performance millimeter-wave ICs suitable for high volume productions.