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This thesis explores a thought of a new form of accounting and designs a practical accounting model 'Accounting for Thrift' with traditional Chinese cultural thinking for a harmonious society. It introduces and discusses the development of traditional Chinese cultural thinking in the context of a brief history of China. The writer argues that the spirit of traditional Chinese cultural thinking is oneness between heaven and man, and there are three layers of meanings of heaven: Dao, Moral Virtue and the Natural World and they are in order. The moral corruption has been throughout the history of China due to leaving Dao since Confucius's time, and the moral corruption makes people unable to see the interconnection of everything; consequently, people lose the harmonious relationship with nature and between ourselves in this natural world. The up-to-date research data collected regarding the general environmental situation in China uses Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and it shows the immorality of the whole society due to the economy-focused thinking; therefore, a practical accounting model with spiritual and organic values is designed based on Dao for helping recover the morality of the whole society and then restoring the harmony between human beings and nature and between ourselves; i.e. primal episteme in which intrinsic sustainability can be achieved in all aspects.

The complex relationship between array gain patterns and microphone distributions limits the application of traditional optimization algorithms on irregular arrays, which show enhanced beamforming performance for human speech capture in immersive environments. This work analyzes the relationship between irregular microphone geometries and spatial filtering performance with statistical methods. Novel geometry descriptors are developed to capture the properties of irregular microphone distributions showing their impact on array performance. General guidelines and optimization methods for regular and irregular array design are proposed in immersive (near-field) environments to obtain superior beamforming ability for speech applications. Optimization times are greatly reduced through the objective function rules using performance-based geometric descriptions of microphone distributions that circumvent direct array gain computations over the space of interest. In addition, probabilistic descriptions of acoustic scenes are introduced to incorporate various levels of prior knowledge for the source distribution. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed optimization methods, simulated gain patterns and real SNR results of the optimized arrays are compared to corresponding traditional regular arrays and arrays obtained from direct exhaustive searching methods. Results show large SNR enhancements for the optimized arrays over arbitrary randomly generated arrays and regular arrays, especially at low microphone densities. The rapid convergence and acceptable processing times observed during the experiments establish the feasibility of proposed optimization methods for array geometry design in immersive environments where rapid deployment is required with limited knowledge of the acoustic scene, such as in mobile platforms and audio surveillance applications.