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The theory and data of environmental science suggest that growth in rates of population, consumption and environmental degradation, as a result of the activities of industrialized societies, has created an ecological crisis to which modern societies must adapt. However, adaptation is problematic. Max Weber studied adaptive social change during the industrial revolution. The evolution of this new way of life was initially problematic because individuals who established industrialism were socialized under feudalism. In this dissertation, I consider The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Ca...

As distributed applications become more sophisticated, their implementation becomes more and more difficult. It is therefore important to study how to facilitate the implementation of efficient distributed applications. This thesis reviews the different classes of distributed languages and presents a new approach to develop efficient distributed programs using the Ada language. This approach is compared in detail with existing distributed programming languages, existing approaches to distributed Ada programs, and the Distributed Annex of the new revision of Ada language.

This study is focused on the effects of photoinduced intramolecular charge transfer (CT) in three differently twisted donor-acceptor (D-A) biphenyls. Taking into account a further pair of differently twisted D-A biaryls new universal insights into the photoinduced electronic and conformation dynamics of D-A biaryls are obtained. Furthermore, possible applications in fields of solar energy conversion and fluorescence sensing of microenvironments are demonstrated. Experimental means of stationary and time-resolved (ps to s) luminescence, transient absorption (sub-ps), polarization spectroscopy,...

Soil degradation has made erosion control and water harvesting an important measure in most of sub-Sahelian Western Africa. The construction of stone lines, dikes and dams has been proven a sustainable measure which is widely accepted by the rural population of northern Burkina Faso. The objective of a field study which was conducted in Bam Province from 1992 to 1994 was to investigate economic profitability of erosion control measures under farmers' conditions on household level and for different household sub-groups. Main aspects concerned yield changes in small farmers' staple food gr...

Society's evolving perception of the role of and value of higher education relates to education's role in employment. Employment is the most cited reason for school completion. The creation of peer tutoring programs was to improve the academic performance of underprepared students. This study evaluated tutors registered in the Tutorial Training Course T-15 at Chabot College, Hayward, California. The Tutor Evaluation and Self-Assessment Tool (TESAT) was utilized to measure the tutors' performance. Thirty tutors performed the pre- and post-assessments. The instructor also evaluated the tuto...

Cranial and postcranial research on East and Southeast Asians has shown population variability between and within these two regions. Moreover, as populations vary by sex, sex differences vary by population. The purpose of this study is to provide the first descriptive and comparative analysis of two recently curated samples of complete, documented, contemporary skeletons from Thailand (N=104) and Hong Kong (N=94) that have not been previously studied. Sex differences reveal Hong Kong males and females as larger but less dimorphic than Thais. Stepwise discriminant function analysis of the...

Foreign direct investment (FDI) is pivotal to the UK economy, with the UK being both the second largest investor abroad and the second largest host to foreign companies. Although since the Second World War FDI has been dominated by the USA, the more recent rise of Japan as both an international force in global markets and as an investor, has seen increasing amounts of Japanese FDI being directed towards the UK. Further, the perceived innovativeness of Japanese work organisation is held by many to have an even greater qualitative impact than the quantitative significance of Japanese FDI wou...

In this work we explore the relation between some local Dirichlet spaces and some operator ranges. As an application we give numerical bounds for an equivalence of norms on a particular subspace of the Hardy space. Based on these results we introduce an operator on H^2 which we study in some detail. We also introduce a Hilbert space of analytic functions on the unit disc, prove the polynomials are dense in it, and give a characterization of its elements. On these spaces we study the action of composition operators induced by holomorphic self maps of the disc. We give characterizations o...

Combinatorial Games are a generalization of real numbers. Each game has a recursively defined complexity (birthday). In this paper we establish some game bounds. We find some limit cases for how big and how small a game can be, based on its complexity. For each finite birthday, N, we find the smallest positive number and the greatest game born by day N, as well as the smallest and the largest positive infinitesimals. As for each particular birthday we provide the extreme values for those types of games, these results extend those in [1, page 214]. The main references in the theory of combinat...

William James and John Dewey insisted that pragmatic philosophy finds meaning in its struggle to deal with emergent social problems. Ironically, few have attempted to use pragmatism to articulate methods for ameliorating social difficulties. This dissertation attempts to do just that by putting James' and Dewey's philosophy to work on the moral and scientific problems associated with genetic engineering and the Human Genome Project. The intention is to demonstrate the usefulness of a pragmatic approach to applied ethics and philosophy of biology. The work of proponents and critics of genet...