El canvi energètic succeït a mitjans del segle XX, en el procés de substitució dels dendrocombustibles pels combustibles fòssils, és un dels factors determinants en relació al fenomen de l'abandonament del sector primari, amb la consegüent desaparició de masos agrosilvoramaders o bé la seva reconversió cap al sector terciari. Al llarg de la segona meitat del segle XX, l'evolució dels sectors productius, marcada pel pas d'un sector primari històric a un procés de terciarització, ha desembocat en un canvi en el paisatge i les formes de vida mostrant repercussions en els sistemes ecològics i socioeconòmics. La crisi del sector primari es tradueix en un canvi socioecològic i en una transformació en la composició i estructura del paisatge, on s'observa una tendència a l'aforestació en detriment dels usos i les cobertes del sòl relacionades les activitats socioeconòmiques tradicionals. Aquest fenomen no és exclusiu del massís del Montseny, sinó que s'ha produït de manera generalitzada en l'àmbit de les muntanyes catalanes i de la Mediterrània. A través de la visió interdisciplinària de la socioecologia i en el context de l'anàlisi de les manifestacions del canvi global, aquesta recerca realitza una aproximació a la història ambiental de la vall de Santa Fe, un dels indrets més significatius del Montseny, per tal de comprendre i quantificar la transformació del paisatge al llarg d'un període recent de cinquanta anys, comprès entre 1956 i 2006. Més enllà, s'ha assajat en les implicacions funcionals del procés d'aforestació en l'escolament hídric superficial. En aquest context, els objectius de la tesi són, en primer lloc, descriure i analitzar els processos de canvi socioecològic produïts a la vall de Santa Fe a través de la història ambiental; quantificar, a través de l'anàlisi cartogràfica, el canvi d'usos i cobertes del sòl en el període 1956-2006 com una de les manifestacions del canvi global a l'àrea d'estudi; avaluar la transformació del paisatge a nivell de composició i configuració mitjançant el càlcul d'índexs paisatgístics; i, per últim, modelitzar els canvis hidrològics emprant el model de simulació de creixement forestal GOTILWA+. / Energetic change occurred in the middle of the XXth Century due to the replacement process of dendrofuels by fossil fuels is one of the main factors in relation with primary sector abandonment. As a consequence, masos (Catalan traditional farmhouses supported by agricultural, forestry and livestock activities) were abandoned or restructured into tertiary sector. Throughout the second half of the XXth Century, the evolution of the productive sectors has been characterized by a historic primary sector shift to tertiary sector, which has lead to a change in landscape as well as in life style, showing repercussions on ecological and socio-economic systems. Primary sector crisis has lead to a socio-ecological change and a transformation in landscape composition and structure, where a trend towards afforestation can be observed to the detriment of those land uses and land covers related with socioeconomic traditional activities. This process is not exclusive for Montseny massif but also has been observed generally in Catalan and Mediterranean mountain areas. Under interdisciplinary vision of socio-ecology and in the context of global change analysis, this research approaches to environmental history of the valley, one of the main representative places in the Montseny mountains, in order to understand, besides to quantify, the landscape transformation throughout a recent period of fifty years comprised between 1956 and 2006. Furthermore, functional implications of the afforestation process for water runoff have been tested. In this context, main goals of the research are, first of all, to describe and to analyze socio¬ecological change processes occurred in Santa Fe valley along environmental history; to quantify, through cartographic analysis, land use and land cover change in the period 1956-2006 as one of the main signs of global change at the study site; to evaluate landscape transformation at the level of composition and configuration by means of landscape metrics and indices assessment; and, finally, to model hydrological changes using the forest growth simulation model GOTILWA+.

Aquesta tesis analitza l'impacte ambiental i econòmic de tres cultius energètics (Brassica carinata, Brassica napus and Populus spp.) destinats a la producció d'energia tèrmica, elèctrica i per biodiesel.Durant la dècada dels noranta , la biomassa per a la producció d'energia va esdevenir como una font d'energia renovable amb un gran mercat amb molt de creixement a Europa.La biomassa, i en particular els cultius energètics (cultius cultivats per amb l'única finalitat d'obtenir energia com a producte final) rebien molta atenció com a promesa de font d'energia sostenible. Degut a aquestes expectatives i aquest creixent interès molts governs de la Unió Europea van reconèixer que un increment de l'ús dels cultius energètics hauria ser acompanyat d'anàlisis detallats, diferents estudies van ser realitzats focalitzant en l'impacte ambiental i energètic de la biomassa i els cultius energètics. Països del nord-oest i centre d'Europa van posar molt esforç en la recerca i recerca de cultius energètics destinats a produir energia (tèrmica i elèctrica) durant dècades. En canvi, la implementació d'aquests cultius al sur d'Europa ha estat més lenta. Per exemple, només a Espanya, està previst que l'any 2010 existeixin 1 milió d'hectàrees que produiran 1.09 Mtep amb cultius energètics, però la realitat es que l'energia produïda amb cultius energètics és pràcticament inexistent a l'actualitat. Actualment hi ha una necessitat d'anàlisis quantitatius de l'actuació ambiental, energètica i econòmica de la biomassa de cultiu energètic explotada en les condicions tècniques del sud d'Europa.Alguns dels resultats obtinguts demostren que la biomassa produïda a escala local té un potencial de reducció d'emissions de CO2 eq. Entre 33.1% a 88% depenent de la tipologia de biomassa quan es compara amb recursos no renovables com el gas natural or diesel. / This thesis analyse the environmental and economical performance of three energy crops (Brassica carinata, Brassica napus and Populus spp.) for energy production.During the nineties, biomass for energy conversion came to be seen as one of the sources of renewable energy with the largest potential for market growth in Europe.Biomass, and in particular energy crops (crop plants used to obtain energy) received attention as a promising, sustainable energy source. Due to the expectancy, this aroused and the fact that most of the EU governments recognized that an increase in the use of energetic crops should be accompanied by a detailed analysis, several studies were made that focused on the energy and environmental performance of biomass and energy crops. North-western and central European countries put the biggest effort into the research and use of energy crops for power and heat generation over recent decades, while in southern Europe the introduction of energy crops to agriculture is slower. For example, only in Spain, it is foreseen that by 2010 one million hectares will be destined for the production of 1.09 Mtep by energetic crops, but the fact is that the energy produced by energy crops is inexistent.Nowadays there is a need for a reliable quantitative assessment of the environmental, energetic and economic performance of biomass energetic crop production under the existing conditions in southern Europe.Some of the results obtained demonstrate that the energy production applying biomass produced at local scale can reduce CO2 eq. emissions from 33.1% to 88% depending on the biomass typology and compared to non-renewable resources as gas natural or diesel.

This thesis has been conducted within the framework of the doctoral programme in Prehistoric Archaeology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. The study focuses on the recent prehistory of the western Mediterranean region, specifically on the south-east of the Iberian Peninsula and the Balearic Islands. This is an area in which the Universitat Autònoma has a well-established research record. Various studies have highlighted the economical, political and social changes undergone by societies during the last millennia before the change of era. These changes include an increasing social distinction between communities and between individuals, the use of specific subsistence techniques and a proliferation of metalwork. They led both to the dismantling of previous economic systems and to the development of new production methods, which, in cases like that of the Argaric society, brought the introduction of political and economical control relationships and exploitation. The study of the economic dynamics of prehistoric societies can, and already has been, approached through the analysis of different archaeological material features. (Macro)lithic materiality provides a crucial source of information which has hardly been exploited by traditional archaeological studies, with the exception of the chipped stone industry (silex, quartzite, etc.). In fact, many macrolithic instruments (grindingstones, hammerstones, whetstones, etc.) were the means of production in crafts and/or everyday activities. The organisation of these activities and crafts was directly affected by the aforementioned social and economical changes. Consequently, Chapter 1 of this thesis deals with the importance of analysing macrolithic materiality from a prehistoric point of view and discusses what this analysis can reveal about the economic systems in use in the western Mediterranean from the 4th to the 1st millennia cal BC. Furthermore, this study defines the archaeological context through reference to various sites. In the Vera basin (Almer'a), the settlement of Gatas is particularly relevant. This is because it is a useful dating reference for the last three thousand years in the south¬east of the Peninsula, especially for the Argaric period. R. Risch's thesis of 1995 listed the macrolithic items found on earlier digs and this study adds more recent finds. This, therefore, completes the study of macrolithic sets of instruments used in the settlement during the periods corresponding to the Chalcolithic Age, the Argar culture, the Late Bronze Age and the Final Bronze Age. In addition to this region of Almer'a, we focus on a geographic area which, until now, had been excluded from the study of macrolithic instruments: the valley of the River Guadalent'n. There are some settlements here that were continuously occupied from the end of the Neolithic to the Late Bronze Age. Earlier studies have indicated how important the town of Lorca was in the Argaric period. For this reason, it is interesting to note the relationship between Lorca and other enclaves in the same area, such as Los Cipreses and El Barranco de la Viuda. During the Late Bronze Age, there was another settlement near Lorca, Murviedro, which has yielded a significant number of macrolithic items. These are also presented in this study. Finally, we have incorporated the lithic materials from the settlement of Son Fornés in Mallorca. This has allowed us to explore both a physical and a chronological context which is very different from that of the south-east of the Peninsula. As will be seen, what stands out in the comparison between two geographic and chronological areas is the non-linear nature of the historical development of past societies. The historical setting described above gives us a picture of complex, surplus societies within a framework of considerable social and economical change. Therefore, a paleo-economic examination of the organisation of the production process will necessarily require an evaluation of technical working conditions. Of particular interest, in this case, are those aspects relating to the efficiency of the tools employed. The functionality of these tools and their suitability to the tasks for which they were used are two aspects which are dealt with in the methodological discussion in Chapter 2. On one hand, we base the functional description of macrolithic inventories on the mechanical properties of the raw materials from which the instruments are made (Section 2.1). To do this, it was necessary to design a test programme, using industrial machinery on which to submit stones to a series of specific conditions of wear and tear. On the other hand, the fields of application of each of the lithologies, in their role as work instruments, were defined through the analysis of archaeological and experimental marks, together with archaeological-contextual information (Section 2.2). The results obtained using this methodological approach were integrated into the study of the selection and management of macrolithic resources (Chapter 3) to define the configuration of the raw-materials supply system. These results were also taken into account when presenting the macrolithic material from other technological perspectives, such as the manufacture, use and maintenance of work tools (Chapter 4). In this way, it is possible to obtain an approximate idea of the degree to which the economic system adapted to the optimisation of the instruments at each historical context. The spatial analysis of macrolithic materiality makes it possible to describe the productive activities performed and the composition of the technical equipment used in production units (Chapter 5). These aspects determined the productive capacity of each of the settlements and the position each one adopted in a particular economic system. Together with the contexts of production, the contexts of amortisation of macrolithic instruments obtained a certain importance during specific periods of prehistory. It is possible that materials amortised in building structures, domestic and funerary constructions, as well as those used in gravegoods, correspond to different technological patterns to those we see in operative instruments. Therefore, in Chapter 6 we contrast the criteria that rule in both types of production. Chapter 7 deals with the overall evaluation of the results obtained throughout the study of macrolithic inventories presented in this work. This chapter includes a paleo-economic interpretation of social contexts based on the economic aspects that we consider most relevant: production value, use value and production volume. These aspects help to define the level of specialisation of the work tools and of the working areas in each of the spatial-temporal contexts. They also help to determine the degree of access that the inhabitants had to the production and consumption of the products obtained from the various production areas. The objective is to identify the productivity conditions under which the production processes operated and the arguments which determined the different economic systems that were established in each period and place. Finally, in Chapter 9 we provide a synthesis of the main characteristics of the social dynamics of lithic resources and instruments in the western Mediterranean throughout recent prehistory.

In this paper, we test the hypothesis that the introduction of Taiwan Top 50 Tracker Fund (TTT) would impact the market liquidity of its underlying stocks. We address this issue by adopting several volume-based and price-based liquidity measures to present the multi-dimension of liquidity. Our empirical results show that after the introduction of TTT, the standardized trading volume decreases and the market becomes more volatile for the underlying stocks. Both the quoted spread and the effective spread widen in the post-introduction period. These findings suggest deterioration of market liquidity for the underlying stocks. We then further follow Lin et al. (1995) to decompose the effective spread to examine the changes in spread components. We find a significant increase in the adverse selection component in contrast to a slight decline in the order processing cost. Overall, we find evidence that the liquidity of the underlying stocks tends to deteriorate after the introduction of TTT primarily because there is an increase in the cost of informed trading. Our finding is consist with the prediction of Subrahmanyam (1991) where the migration of liquidity traders to the basket securities raises the portion of informed traders in the market of underlying stocks and tends to increase the adverse selection risk and reduce the market liquidity of the underlying stocks.

Zugl.: Stralsund, Fachhochsch., Diplomarbeit, 2001

Zugl.: Wildau, Techn. Fachhochsch., Diplomarbeit, 2007

Zugl.: Darmstadt, Hochsch., Diplomarbeit, 2007

Zugl.: Wildau, Techn. Fachhochsch., Diplomarbeit, 2007.

Zugl.: Edinburgh, University of Edinburgh, Diss., 2005 / Hergestellt on demand

The concept of age management as a management with regard to the age of employees is due to demographic changes increasingly important topic. Therefore it is necessary the organizations should take care about age management to get by competitive fight and to avoid loosing experienced, qualified and loyal employees. Age management is gaining prominence due to delay founding families, an aging population and the lack of labor force. The basic threatened groups of age management are mainly workers 50+, graduates and ultimately mothers with small children. All these groups of workers require attention and the management of each organization should take care about them. The aim of this work is to identify the pillars of the field of age management as part of human resources management in an organization, including evaluation of their objectives, strategies used within a given area. From a qualitative survey, namely structured interviews with human resources employees and after that with all managers can say that the organization is aware of the risks associated with the employment of graduates and workers 50+ and part of human resources management is to focus on risky groups of employees. The organization is aware of the qualities of its employees and is trying to use their retention of knowledge that human capital brings to achieve competitive advantage.