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This dissertation investigates some literary configurations of Beijing through contemporary Chinese literature and films. These configurations are built upon three specific urban spaces (military compound, siheyuan and some modern constructions) by three significant literary groups. The literary groups discussed in this work are Dayuan wenhua quan (Compound Cultural Group), Dierdai jingweier zuojia (Second-generation Beijing Flavor Writers), and Beipiao diliudai dianyingren (Beijing Floater Sixth-generation Filmmakers).This study adopts a particular methodology. Inspired by Henri Levebvre, it establishes a framework which connecting urban spaces (representations of space), writers and literary productions (representational space). It examines what these urban spaces mean to Chinese writers and filmmakers and how these people thus adopt them to configure particular urban images of Beijing. It argues that these different configurations are actually the projections of those writers and filmmakers' own cultural imaginations, emotional catharsis, and manifest their own cultural positions. "Compound Cultural Group" interprets Beijing as "compound Beijing," which represents revolutionary culture in communist China. Their nostalgia toward the compound in the Cultural Revolution indicates the decline of the once ruling social group. As for "Second-generation Beijing Flavor Writers", Beijing is a traditional and a masculine city. In their novels, siheyuan is considered as the embodiment of Chinese tradition and Beijing girl is portrayed as masculine women. This imagination fulfills their own cultural appeal to reconstruct traditional values in the "Cultural Fever" in the 1980s. In the eyes of "Beijing Floater Sixth-generation filmmakers," Beijing is a cosmopolitan metropolis. In their films, this globalized modern city is an urban dream for migrants.

Electrostatic instabilities associated with a model applicable to the auroral acceleration region consisting of an ion beam, precipitating electrons and stationary background electrons are theoretically investigated. The kinetic dispersion relation is solved numerically without approximations. It is shown that two low-frequency plasma instabilities are present and these may generate the low-frequency electric field fluctuations (LEFs) that have been observed in the acceleration region. A parameter variation study is carried out in order to reveal the features of the instabilities. The model is adapted to suit two possible regions of study: (1) drifting cool ions and (2) drifting cool ions and counter-streaming hot electrons. The slow ion-acoustic instability which dominates at low ion beam drift velocities is studied by varying plasma parameters such as the propagation angle, ky/k, the wavenumber, k, the cold background electron density, nco, the hot electron temperature and the cool ion beam temperature. The second mode, the modified two-stream instability, which dominates at larger ion beam drift velocities and at oblique angles of propagation is investigated in a similar manner. To complete the study of these two instabilities, the effect of drifting hot electrons is examined briefly through a similar parameter variation study. / Thesis (M.Sc.)-University of Durban-Westville, 1999.

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The airplane has one great advantage over all other forms of transportation: only a short time is required to construct the facilities necessary for its operation over a wide range of the earth’s surface. China is a vast nation: the huge size of the country and the resulting distances combine with the total absence of modern transportation to create a particularly strong demand for air transport. This is an urgent need, especially since the country' s economy, industries and trade cannot develop without transportation.

To evaluate the relationship of the natural law of the Universe and apply it to a concept of man-made or man-defined law, one must consider to some extent the over-all picture of the Universe as we know and understand it today. Primarily our main concern is the small portion of the world in which we, as individuals, reside. Occasionally we broaden our concern to our state and nation, and possibly to our world. Until recently our interest has been with our law (as each individual or sovereign nation sees it), our control, our flight in space.

The successive wave of hijacking of airplanes at gunpoint in 1961 made the press declare that the newest form of transportation had been struck by "air-age piracy''. The hijacking of airplanes is not new, however. The earliest cases had political implications as they involved the seizure of Czechoslovakian airplanes by refugees from communist-controlled countries who compelled the pilots to fly to the American zone of West Germany. The series of seizures of Cuban airplanes by political refugees who flew them to the United States were of the same vein. So, allegedly, was the seizure of a DC-8 jetliner by a French Algerian who sought to draw attention to the Algerian problem.

The present law governing the liability of manufacturers to make reparation for harm caused by defects, attributable to negligence, in their products has been hammered out over a period of rather more than a century by the courts which, on both sides of the Atlantic, administer the principles of the Anglo-American system, and finds its origin in an English case, Winterbottom v. Wright (1). The sole parallel between this case and those immediately concerning the aircraft manufacturer is that both are derived from allegedly defective vehicles: for the rest, Winterbottom v. Wright did not involve a manufacturer, and was not tried on the issue of the tort of negligence. Its importance in the law of products liability, and the solution to the paradox, lie not in what was decided in the case but in the misinterpretation of the decision by later courts, and in their application of that misinterpretation to cases which were properly based on the tort of negligence.