Small businesses encounter problems unique to their size, limited resources and infrastructure while academic literature is limited on their challenges of globalization and partnership issues. They are often owned by equal partners, creating additional complications. Finding a suitable international strategy for growth and diversification as well as understanding practical business solutions for global operations are key variables to guide the decision process. A literature review and analysis of the international experiences of a small Canadian company were conducted to identify risks and resources for global market strategies. This investigation revealed that small companies should capitalize on network and alliance opportunities to gain access to international markets, and consider exporting to test market environments. Good leadership will provide a successful international strategy that fits the small business operations and the company's strategy, while leveraging their core capabilities and competitive advantage into a global niche strategy. --P. ii.
Technology advancements have helped biologists gather massive amount of biological data including genomic sequences of various species today. Sequence alignment techniques play a central role in investigating the adaptive significance of organism traits and revealing evolutionary relations among organisms by comparing these biological data. This thesis presents an algorithm to perform pairwise local sequence alignment. Recent pairwise local sequence alignment algorithms are either slow and sensitive or fast and less sensitive. Our algorithm is faster and at the same time sensitive. The algorithm employs suffix tree data structure to accurately identify long common subsequences in the two given sequences quickly. Regions of high similarity are again identified between segments of long subsequences already found. Several measures are taken into consideration to design the algorithm, such that the output is biologically meaningful. Data sets are carefully chosen and the output is compared with a well known algorithm, BLASTZ. Experiments conducted demonstrate that our algorithm performs better than BLASTZ in computation time, while either preserving or exceeding the accuracy of alignments at times.
The continuous developments in the field of mobile computing have made it possible to use mobile devices for healthcare applications. These devices can be used by healthcare providers to collect and share patients' medical data. However, with increasing adoption of mobile devices that carry confidential data, organizations need to secure the data from unauthorized users and mobile device theft. When unencrypted data is transmitted from one device to another it faces various security threats from malicious code, unsecure networks, unauthorized access, and data theft. The objective of this research is to develop a secure data sharing solution customized for healthcare environments, which would allow authorized users to securely access and share patients' data over mobile devices. We identify the vulnerable locations in mobile communication network that can possibly be exploited by unauthorized users or malicious code to access the confidential data, and develop an efficient security protocol that provides end to end data protection without compromising device's performance. To demonstrate the feasibility of our proposed data sharing architecture, a prototype customized for Point-of-Care-Testing (POCT) scenarios was built in collaboration with Northern Health, Prince George. Simulations were performed to analyze and validate our solution against the pre-defined requirement criteria. --P. ii.
The Canadian healthcare is facing a lot of challenges, due to a growing and aging population, an increasing burden of chronic diseases, and a rapidly increasing cost of healthcare. To address these challenges, healthcare organizations are coming up with new approaches for providing healthcare services. Capitalizing on its strong primary health care services, Northern Health is promoting integrated care through the Primary Care Home initiative. To support such an initiative, and improve health care services efficiency, an Information Technology (IT) infrastructure that support healthcare providers' collaboration needs to be put in place. This project provides a framework and recommendations for an IT infrastructure to support Northern Health's integrated care strategy. --P. iii.
Transaction processing in a distributed real time database system (DRTDBS) is coordinated by a concurrency control protocol (CCP). The performance of a CCP is affected by the load condition of a transaction processing system. For example, the performance of the Adaptive Speculative Locking (ASL) protocol degrades in high load conditions of the system. Priority protocols help a CCP by prioritizing transactions. The performance of the priority protocols is also affected by system load conditions, but they can be optimized by dynamically switching between priority protocols at run time when the system load changes. The objective of this research is to develop a protocol, Adaptive Priority Assignment protocol (APAP), which changes the priority protocol at run time to improve the performance of a CCP in a DRTDBS. APAP is implemented in a DRTDBS, where ASL is used as the underlying CCP to validate APAP. The performance of APAP was tested under varying system load conditions with various combinations of the database system parameters. Under the scenarios tested, APAP performed better than other priority protocols and demonstrated that dynamic selection of priority protocols during run time is an effective way to improve the performance of a CCP in a DRTDBS. --Leaf ii.
Social Networking Sites (SNSs) have become of fundamental importance in shaping the dynamics of the way people communicate. A primary objective of social media practitioners is to formulate strategies that can lead to higher number of adoption rates among users. The aim of this research is to study adoption of SNSs and to shed light on the factors that influence user preferences. To that end, first, by borrowing theories from business ecosystem, platform business, the technology acceptance model (TAM), and hedonic and utilitarian benefits an initial set of potential measures is reached. Next, the measures are used to create a quantitative survey which is completed by a sample of 100 university students. An exploratory factor analysis performed on the collected data yields four dimensions: 1) platform, measured by control over privacy and ease of use 2) user benefits 3) network, measured by number of friends and members and 4) contributor benefits. Consequently, the results of a conjoint analysis based on uncovered components highlight the considerable importance of control over privacy and ease of use from a user perspective. Moreover, findings show that for users, an optimal SNS where other users share mostly entertaining content, contributors share mostly useful content, applications are mostly fun, control over privacy of posts exists, a good number of friends are registered and accessible, and is easy to use. Results also show that content shared by external contributors is almost as important as content shared by users in shaping preferences. These findings are expected to be of value to both scholars and social media and communications practitioners. --Leaf ii.
With globalization, multinational networked organizations' need for exchange of information has led to the emergence of applications that are heavily dependent on globally distributed and constantly changing data. Such applications include, stock trading, Computer Aided Design and Manufacturing (CAD/CAM), online reservation systems, telecommunication systems, e-commerce systems and real time navigation systems. These applications introduce the need for distributed real time database systems (DRTDBS) which must access/manipulate data spread over a network in addition to meeting the real time constraints and maintaining database consistency. In order to improve performance within DRTDBS, attention needs to be given to concurrency control mechanism and transaction's time constraints. A number of protocols have been suggested in recent years to address these issues. One of the proposed protocols, Speculative Locking (SL), has especially demonstrated the capability of improving performance within Distributed Database System by allowing parallelism between conflicting transactions without violating serializability. This research extends SL by giving it the capability of taking a transaction's priority into consideration when scheduling transactions. In addition, a nested transaction model is used to access the data that is distributed across the network. We propose two new Priority-based Speculative Locking protocols: (1) Preemptive Speculative Locking (PSL) and (2) Priority inheritance Speculative Locking (PiSL). PSL extends SL by allowing any incoming higher priority transaction to preempt and abort any lower priority transaction in case of lock conflict thus giving the higher priority transaction a chance to meet the deadline. PiSL, on the other hand, attempts to prevent any wasted work by avoiding preemption by a higher priority transaction. Instead, the lower priority transaction inherits the priority of the blocked transaction. This gives both transactions an opportunity to meet their deadline whenever possible.
