Due to the great increase in motor vehicle traffic, the provision of highways, roads, streets and bridges has become a most important function of government at the present time. Complications arise because the vehicles using the public roads are privately owned and operated. [...]

Advertising is an institution of economic, cultural and spatial regulation. This thesis examines the role of the advertising industry in mediating the geographies of markets and identities. In the same way that Stuart Ewen (1976) links the structure of the advertising industry in the 1920s to its role in the consolidation of national markets, mass consumption patterns and consumer identities congruent with Fordism, I tie the restructuring of the industry in the current period to the new regime of flexible accumulation. There is an increased need for information about consumers and a heightened design-intensity in flexible production. Institutions of power/knowledge such as advertising play an important role in linking production and consumption and in establishing a “just-in-time” consumption. In addition, through the process of “branding”, advertising agencies attach images to goods. Branding involves matching consumer identities with the “identities” of products. An important component of this process encompasses the formation of “brandscapes”, places where the product is sold and consumed. Advertising both responds to the location of consumers and situates consumers in space. At the same time that advertising has grown in importance, I find that the advertising industry is experiencing a crisis in the 1980s and 1990s. This crisis reflects a weakening of the industry’s ability to regulate the formation of markets and identities. The increasingly discontinuous and fluid spatial and temporal nature of consumer identities, combined with “reflexive modernization”, have made it increasingly difficult for advertisers to locate consumers in terms of both identity and space. In response to this crisis and under new conditions of flexible accumulation, U.S. agencies have reoriented both their organizational structure and their methods of operating. In terms of the reorganization of agencies themselves, I focus on two divergent tendencies in the 1980s and 1990s: the concentration! transnationalization of agencies on one hand, and the increased polarization/flexibility of agencies on the other. I draw upon trade journal literature and 55 interviews with employees. With respect to changing methods, I examine the role of agencies in processes of globalization, market segmentation and shifting gender identities. Increasingly sophisticated methods of monitoring consumers’ use of commodities, forms of resistance and places of consumption point to an escalation of surveillance in the current period. My thesis presents a contribution to debates over both flexibility and identity. I argue that the distinction between producer and consumer has become increasingly blurred, and that the two have come closer together at the site of advertising.

Strong seasonality is observed in the volatile hourly Alberta temperature and its low- and high-order statistical moments. We propose a time series model consisting of a linear combination of an annual sinusoidal model, a diurnal sinusoidal model and a fractional residual model, to study the characteristics of these spatial and time-dependent Alberta temperatures. Wavelet multi-resolution analysis is used to measure Hurst exponents of the temperature series. Our empirical results show that these Hurst exponents vary over various time scales, indicating the existence of multi-fractality in the temperatures. Such temperature models are of importance for the pricing and insurance of agricultural crops, of tourist resorts and of all forms of energy extraction and generation of importance to the resource-based economy of Alberta. Of particular interests are the observed extreme volatilities in the winters, caused by the unpredictable Chinook winds, which may be an important reason to introduce a Chinook insurance option. / 64 leaves : map ; 29 cm

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The analysis of cost and profit efficiencies of a sample of 588 Quebec dairy farms shows significant potential to reduce costs and increase profits. In general, the small farms were more cost efficient while large farms were more profit efficient. Increased use of farm grown feed was associated with higher efficiency while increased use of concentrates was associated with lower efficiency. / The productivity of individual dairy farms were estimated using data envelopment analysis. The average annual growth rate of productivity was 0.70% with a standard deviation of 2.44% for the 1987--93 period. The Spearman's rank correlation coefficient did not show any significant relationship between farm size and growth rate. / The Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) approach, used for the first time to estimate technical efficiency, performed equally as good as the regression models in modeling the technology especially at the higher levels of output. The efficiency values estimated using ANN were higher than that estimated by ordinary least squares method. The results indicate the existence of significant potential for improving the efficiency of resources on Quebec dairy farms.

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