The objective of this thesis is to analyze the bilateral relations between Lebanon and Syria between the years 1989-2005. In the defined time period, the Lebanese-Syrian relations were characterized by the establishment and fall of the Syrian domination over Lebanon. This study focuses on this transformation in their relations and mainly questions how the Lebanese-Syrian relations were transformed, how it affected and in turn were affected by the broader regional setting. Accordingly, the thesis is consistent of four main parts. In each historically divided time period, the major determinants of the direction of their relations and the changes and continuities in regard to these determinants are investigated. In the first part, the study focuses on the historical evolution of their relations with due attention to the dispatchment of Lebanon from Greater Syria and post-independence period. In the second part, their relations are analyzed in the era of Lebanese civil war which also signifies the beginning of active and effective Syrian involvement in Lebanese affairs. The third part encompasses the period of unquestioned Syrian domination over Lebanon in the post-civil war period up until the year 2000. In the fourth part, the changes in the direction of their relations studied in relate to the role of changing international and regional environment in affecting their relations.

<p>The Syrian de facto occupation of Lebanon since 1976 is usually interpreted as the expression of the Syrian regime's adherence to traditional power considerations, rather than to the ideology of the ruling Ba'th party. In particular since Syria originally intervened on the side of the pro-status quo Lebanese Christians, and helped them defeat the anti-status quo Lebanese Muslims and Palestinians. In other words, they intervened against its traditional allies. The central question posed in this study is: Why is Lebanon so important to Syria that it is willing to make large human and material sacrifices in order to retain its grip on this small strip of territory? The traditional answers to this question are not satisfactory; the need for an alternative approach is apparent. While not refuting the description of Syrian policies as being based on pragmatic considerations, this analysis attempts to show that Syrian policies toward Lebanon in fact originate in the fundamental values promoted by Ba'th ideology. By employing a cognitive theoretical approach, the perceptions held by the Syrian leadership at the time of Syrian intervention are taken into account. This approach allows a number of key images to emerge, notably the image of an external plot against the Arab nation; one of the cornerstones of Ba'th ideology. When studying the modern day relationship between Syria and Lebanon, the same focus on Arab unity and the historical brotherly ties between the two countries can be identified. Hafez al-Asad's death and the rise to power of his son, Bashar al-Asad, has not lead to a radical change in Syrian policy, rather it is apparent that the same considerations and the same underlying images still guide the Syrian decision-makers. The result is that although pragmatism guides Syrian policies, the ideology of the Ba'th party sets the frames for this pragmatism and that a traditional two-state model cannot be applied on the relationship between Syria and Lebanon. The central finding in this study is that the Syrian leadership will go to great lengths to ensure Lebanon stays Arab and preserve the last remains of Arab unity in the face of the Zionist enemy. In the struggle against Israel, Syria and Lebanon are to remain Brothers in Arms.</p>

Dans cette thèse, nous étudions deux problèmes de théorie des graphes largement étudiés ces trois dernières décennies: les codes correcteurs d'erreur et la domination.<br />Nous étudions d'abord deux généralisations des codes correcteurs d'erreurs : les codes parfaits sur des alphabets mixtes et les codes pondérés de rayon un. Ces problèmes ont beaucoup été étudiés sur la métrique de Hamming.<br />Nous les étudions dans la métrique de Lee, et nous montrons des résultats aussi bien d'existence que d'inexistence.<br />Nous montrons aussi que le rapport de dualité entre la domination et les codes est fort pour la grille carrée lorsque l'on considère des boules sans le centre.<br />Puis, nous étudions la domination dans les produits de graphes. Depuis que Vizing a conjecturé en 1968 que la domination est surmultiplicative pour le produit cartésien de graphes, les relations entre des variantes du nombre de domination d'un produit de graphes et ses facteurs ont attiré beaucoup d'attention. Après avoir donné quelques bornes sur le nombre de domination totale du produit direct de graphes, nous déterminons le nombre de domination de puissance des produits de chemins.<br />Puis, nous montrons une conjecture ``à la Vizing'' pour le nombre de domination totale supérieure du produit cartésien.<br />Ensuite, nous étudions la domination avec une approche structurelle. En continuation de l'étude de Favaron et Henning, nous fournissons plusieurs bornes supérieures sur le nombre de paire-domination des graphes sans étoiles, pour chaque nombre de branches, et des graphes sans P_5. Nous proposons aussi des familles infinies de graphes pour lesquels ces bornes sont atteintes.<br />Enfin, nous comparons la domination totale supérieure et la paire-domination supérieure, deux variantes de la domination qui ont attiré l'attention récemment, et nous donnons des bornes précises pour les arbres.

As an important part of our lives, stories help us to form both our personal identities and the identities of the social groups that make up our society. They facilitate us to be in contact with our beliefs, our feelings, our knowledge, our perception, and what is significant to us. Similarly, we understand those very things from the stories of others. These stories are obtained through different ways: family, friends, literature, poetry, religion, teachers, movies, art, and so on. Through these, our culture is born and sustained. There is no doubt that architecture is an important defining element of our culture. For that reason, we must decisively evaluate its essential role in the communication of these stories. Being more than just the planning, design and construction of a building, the architecture design process involves the manipulation of mass, space, volume, texture, light, shadow, materials, program, and other elements in order to achieve an end which is aesthetic as well as functional, and if taken further architecture can be experienced through the senses. When thinking about what architecture involves, I have to ask myself a question, can architecture take a more dynamic role in the transmission of our culture; generally, symbolically, and more particularly, by encouraging and reinforcing the dissemination of stories? In our modern-day western built-environment, museums have taken a most active role programmatically in the transmission of our culture and stories. My thesis will focus on this building type. During the last 30 years, museums have experienced a change from presenting real things to the creation of experiences. In essence, exhibitions have transitioned from object-oriented to story-centered. How can architecture better provide this recently modified museum experience? Furthermore, what can architecture do to push this focus even further so that people are better able to absorb these stories and experiences? Before attempting to answer these questions however, I must explain how my thesis question will be explored in actual terms. Consequently, I will investigate how the architecture of a museum can further activate, reinforce, and promote a set of stories important to our culture and country as a whole. My thesis project will be a museum that portrays the sequence of events and cultural history of Puerto Rico. With this in mind, I would like to explore an effective method to convey and inform people about who we are and where we come from. All the elements that had contributed to its creation give this culture the distinctive attributes to set it as the perfect model to use architecture as the tool that will disseminate our cultural history. Given the fact that it is very compelling for people to learn through visualization, the creation of a museum that reflects the Puerto Rican culture would be an outstanding tool to educate people. However, instead of designing a museum that merely houses artifacts, I want to create a museum that tells a story about about Puerto Rico's past and present.

Ce travail de thèse vise à comprendre les dynamiques sociales qui viennent influencer le processus d'appropriation d'une technologie SNA au sein d'une organisation. Pour ce faire, nous avons mené une étude inter-cas menée au sein de deux collectivités territoriales françaises et une étude intra-cas chez BOUYGUES CONSTRUCTION en nous appuyant sur un cadre théorique mobilisant la théorie de l'acteur stratégique de Crozier et Friedberg et la théorie de la pratique de Bourdieu. Un des principaux résultats de cette thèse est que l'appropriation d'une technologie SNA passe principalement par une appropriation socio-politique en deux phases : une phase d'appropriation de la nouvelle dimension donnée au capital social et une phase d'appropriation de la technologie pour servir les intérêts des acteurs concernant le développement du capital social. Nous avons également identifié que l'introduction d'un outil SNA est assignée à différentes notions symboliques (symbole de la légitimité du contrôle et de la supervision, symbole du soutien du top-management des pratiques de travail transversales, le symbole de la rigidité des structures organisationnelles, le symbole de la gestion des ressources informelles comme une ressource spécifique, le symbole de l'exclusion...) qui viennent légitimer et asseoir les différentes stratégies des groupes d'acteurs. Enfin, nous avons constaté que certains symboles liés à l'introduction du SNA sont étroitement liés à la culture de l'organisation. Ces principaux résultats ont pu être confortés par l'étude intra-cas menée chez BOUYGUES CONSTRUCTION, présentée comme une étude d'un cas particulier pouvant complémenter l'investigation menée au sein des deux collectivités territoriales.

This thesis develops an account of non-domination as a principle of legitimacy that ought to govern both inter-group and intra-group relations in multicultural states. It applies this principle to the question of how political institutions should respond to claims for the accommodation of controversial minority practices, using the example of the polygamous community in Bountiful, British Columbia. In developing this account, the thesis engages with three bodies of theoretical literature – of multiculturalism, of political legitimacy, and of autonomy. In the dominant normative theories of multiculturalism, answers are centered on what the limits of toleration are, what it means to recognize a collective identity, or what group rights can be claimed and how group rights are balanced with individual rights. While not rejecting the importance of these issues in a pluralistic state, my approach de-centers them by subsuming them under the broader problem of what makes a political authority morally legitimate vis-à-vis particular collective - as well as abstract individual - subjects. I argue that the most promising response to this problem lies with the concept of non-domination, conceived as a foundational principle of political legitimacy for multicultural states. This principle both demands and checks a democratic method for determining specific forms of accommodation. In some cases the advancement of non-domination between groups conflicts with the advancement of non-domination within groups. In political theory this question is often taken up by feminist scholars concerned with the ‘paradox of multicultural vulnerability’ and, more generally, with the dilemma of how to identify and critique internalized oppression while promoting full respect for individual moral agency. Borrowing from these debates, I outline a conception of the relational moral autonomy of the person and argue that it forms a necessary component of a non-domination- based analysis. The conclusion of the thesis with respect to minority social practices is that specific claims should be determined on the basis of a democratic process aimed at uncovering whether and when, all things considered, the accommodation of that particular practice is consistent with non-domination both between and within groups. / Thesis (Ph.D, Political Studies) -- Queen's University, 2011-09-29 11:13:58.516

This thesis examines the impact of outdoor advertising on public space, by situating outdoor advertising within arguments about global corporate domination. I argue that the implosion of commercial messages into ever-increasing amounts of public space has repercussions for our ability to relate to each other as anything other than commercial beings. Outdoor advertising necessitates the use of stereotypes to communicate with its audience. The regulatory mechanisms for advertising sanction this use of stereotypes, which puts commercial needs and rights to free speech before the public's right to distance itself from commercial messages and values. The discourses of advertising and its progenitors reinforce hegemonic conceptions of gender, class and ethnicity thereby imbuing space with values which do not encourage diversity but promote narrow and limiting options for the self. By carefully examining the 'entrepreneurial adexec' and 'public interest' discourses that surround outdoor advertising, I argue that its global privatising power has been able to continue without challenge, as potential criticisms are silenced before they are even articulated. It will be shown how the various regulatory mechanisms operating under discourses of 'public accountability' actually serve commercial interests rather than public interests by supporting private-public partnerships and focussing narrowly on the implicit meaning in ads. Particularly problematic representations of gender, class and ethnicity in outdoor ads will be analysed to discern the various ways these impose certain values on public spaces in Christchurch through the process of commercialisation. Finally, graffiti and billboard liberation as forms of cultural resistance to this commercialisation will be examined.

A broadcast is a function $f:V \rightarrow { 0,...,diam(G)}$ that assigns an integer value to each vertex such that, for each $v\in V$, $f(v)\leq e(v)$, the eccentricity of $v$. The broadcast number of a graph is the minimum value of $\sum_{v\in V}f(v)$ among all broadcasts $f$ for which each vertex of the graph is within distance $f(v)$ from some vertex $v$ having $f(v)\geq1$. This number is bounded above by the radius of the graph, as well as by its domination number. Graphs for which the broadcast number is equal to the radius are called radial. We prove a new upper bound on the broadcast number of a graph and motivate the study of radial trees by proving a relationship between the broadcast number of a graph and those of its spanning subtrees. We describe some classes of radial trees and then provide a characterization of radial trees, as well as a geometric interpretation of our characterization.

Let $G\ensuremath{\mathbin{\raisebox{0.3mm}{$\scriptstyle\square$}}} H$ denote the Cartesian product of the graphs $G$ and $H$. Domination of the Cartesian product of two graphs has received much attention, with a main objective to confirm the truth of Vizing's well-known conjecture. The conjecture states that the domination number of the Cartesian product of two graphs is at least as large as the product of the respective domination numbers. The potential truth of Vizing's conjecture gives rise to investigating the domination of graph products that generalizes the Cartesian product. The generalized prism $\pi G$ of $G$ is the graph consisting of two copies of $G$, with edges between the copies determined by a permutation $\pi$ acting on the vertices of $G$. A generalized Cartesian product $G\ensuremath{\mathbin{\raisebox{0.3mm}{${\scriptstyle \square}$}\hspace{-1.99mm}\raisebox{0.65mm}{${\scriptstyle \pi}$}}} H$ is defined here, incorporating structural properties of both the Cartesian product of two graphs as well as the generalized prism of a graph. Conditions on the isomorphism of two generalized Cartesian products are explored first, establishing a characterization in the case of natural isomorphisms. A comparison of the diameter of the generalized Cartesian product and the corresponding Cartesian product graph is used to illustrate the structural differences between these graph products. This comparison is continued through a study of the validity of an inequality similar to Vizing's conjecture for Cartesian products. Graphs that attain equality in the general bounds for the domination number of the Cartesian product and generalized Cartesian product are investigated in more detail. For any graph $G$ and $n\geq 2$, $\min\{|V(G)|,\gamma(G)+n-2\}\leq\gamma(G\ensuremath{\mathbin{\raisebox{0.3mm}{$\scriptstyle\square$}}} K_{n})\leq n\gamma(G)$. A graph $G$ is called a consistent Cartesian fixer if $\gamma(G\ensuremath{\mathbin{\raisebox{0.3mm}{$\scriptstyle\square$}}} K_{n})=\gamma(G)+n-2$ for each $n$ such that $2\leq n<|V(G)|-\gamma(G)+2$. A graph attaining equality in the stated upper bound on $\gamma(G\ensuremath{\mathbin{\raisebox{0.3mm}{$\scriptstyle\square$}}} K_{n})$ is called a Cartesian $n$-multiplier. Both of these classes are characterized. Concerning the generalized Cartesian product, $\gamma(G\ensuremath{\mathbin{\raisebox{0.3mm}{${\scriptstyle \square}$}\hspace{-1.99mm}\raisebox{0.65mm}{${\scriptstyle \pi}$}}} K_{n})\leq n\gamma(G)$ for any graph $G$, permutation $\pi$ and $n\geq 2$. A graph attaining equality in the upper bound for all $\pi$ is called a universal multiplier. Such graphs are characterized similar to a known result for generalized prisms. A similar problem for the product $G\ensuremath{\mathbin{\raisebox{0.3mm}{${\scriptstyle \square}$}\hspace{-1.99mm}\raisebox{0.65mm}{${\scriptstyle \pi}$}}} C_{n}$ is considered, with conditions on a graph being a so-called cycle multiplier provided. A graph attaining equality in the lower bound $\gamma(G\ensuremath{\mathbin{\raisebox{0.3mm}{${\scriptstyle \square}$}\hspace{-1.99mm}\raisebox{0.65mm}{${\scriptstyle \pi}$}}} H)\geq\gamma(G)$ for some permutation $\pi$ is called a $\pi$-$H$-fixer. A brief investigation is conducted into the existence of universal $H$-fixers, i.e.~graphs that are $\pi$-$H$-fixers for some $H$ and all permuations $\pi$ of $V(G)$, and it is shown that no such graphs exist when $n\geq 3$. A known efficient algorithm for determining $\gamma(G\ensuremath{\mathbin{\raisebox{0.3mm}{$\scriptstyle\square$}}} P_{n})$ is surveyed, and modified to accommodate any Cartesian product $G\ensuremath{\mathbin{\raisebox{0.3mm}{$\scriptstyle\square$}}} H$, thereby establishing a general framework for evaluating the domination number of $G\ensuremath{\mathbin{\raisebox{0.3mm}{$\scriptstyle\square$}}} H$ for a fixed graph $G$ and any $H$. An algorithm to determine $\gamma(G\ensuremath{\mathbin{\raisebox{0.3mm}{$\scriptstyle\square$}}} T)$ for any tree $T$ is provided, and it is observed to be polynomial for trees of bounded maximum degree. The general framework for $G\ensuremath{\mathbin{\raisebox{0.3mm}{$\scriptstyle\square$}}} H$ is also modified to accommodate the generalized Cartesian product $G\ensuremath{\mathbin{\raisebox{0.3mm}{${\scriptstyle \square}$}\hspace{-1.99mm}\raisebox{0.65mm}{${\scriptstyle \pi}$}}} H$. The study diverts from the main topic of domination to investigate the planarity of the generalized Cartesian product graph. If both $G$ and $H$ are 2-connected graphs, then $G\ensuremath{\mathbin{\raisebox{0.3mm}{${\scriptstyle \square}$}\hspace{-1.99mm}\raisebox{0.65mm}{${\scriptstyle \pi}$}}} H$ is nonplanar. A known simple polynomial-time planarity testing algorithm is surveyed, and used to establish conditions on the planarity of $P_{m}\ensuremath{\mathbin{\raisebox{0.3mm}{${\scriptstyle \square}$}\hspace{-1.99mm}\raisebox{0.65mm}{${\scriptstyle \pi}$}}} P_{n}$, the generalized Cartesian product of two paths. This research aims to lay the foundation on which further properties of the generalized Cartesian product and further generalizations may be studied, as well as to provide various open problems to spark interest in the research area.

This thesis examines a wide collection of frequency assignment problems. One of the largest topics in this thesis is that of L(2,1)-labellings of outerplanar graphs. The main result in this topic is the fact that there exists a polynomial time algorithm to determine the minimum L(2,1)-span for an outerplanar graph. This result generalises the analogous result for trees, solves a stated open problem and complements the fact that the problem is NP-complete for planar graphs. We furthermore give best possible bounds on the minimum L(2,1)-span and the cyclic-L(2,1)-span in outerplanar graphs, when the maximum degree is at least eight. We also give polynomial time algorithms for solving the standard constraint matrix problem for several classes of graphs, such as chains of triangles, the wheel and a larger class of graphs containing the wheel. We furthermore introduce the concept of one-close-neighbour problems, which have some practical applications. We prove optimal results for bipartite graphs, odd cycles and complete multipartite graphs. Finally we evaluate different algorithms for the frequency assignment problem, using domination analysis. We compute bounds for the domination number of some heuristics for both the fixed spectrum version of the frequency assignment problem and the minimum span frequency assignment problem. Our results show that the standard greedy algorithm does not perform well, compared to some slightly more advanced algorithms, which is what we would expect. In this thesis we furthermore give some background and motivation for the topics being investigated, as well as mentioning several open problems.