Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University. Page 54 misnumbered. Pagination error page 98 / The amount of solar radiant energy received at the outer limits of the earth's atmosphere is nearly a constant, but the amount reaching the earth's surface varies considerably due to astronomical, meteorological, physiographic and cultural factors. The purpose of this study was to describe the temporal and areal distribution of these variations within the Intermontane Basin and Plateau Region of the western United States. This was done in three steps. On the basis of 11 years of daily and monthly data from 10 stations, regression and correlation analysis were used to examine the relation of insolation to environmental elements that appeared to influence its distribution in the region. Secondly, regression analysis was investigated for possible use in computing insolation values missing from the records of the 10 stations and for extension of the station network to non-insolation stations. Finally, maps and diagrams were prepared from actual and computed data and used to describe the areal and temporal distribution of insolation in the region [TRUNCATED]

222 pages / The novels of Don Berry rank among the best to emerge from the Northwest and can be considered as serious entries in a growing group of New Western novels. While the term "New Western" is widely used, definitions of its meaning are diverse and at times conflicting. This study delves into the diversity and presents a definition of the New Western novel as a historical tool. The New Western is seen as a probe into the themes and traditions of the western experience, and. as such it can be used in the study of history. The use of fiction in the study of history presents several problems, however, because a novelist goes beyond the usual constraints of a factual record. How the novelist uses, or in some cases abuses, the historical record is important to the historian. This study examines Don Berry's Trask as an example of a New Western novel to determine the manner in which the historical records and traditions of the Northwest have been adapted to use in fiction.

Thesis (MTech (Quality))--Cape Peninsula University of Technology, 2010. / The proposed research will consist of an investigation into the prevalence of construction waste in construction companies in the Western Cape. Construction waste has been proved to have a negative effect on the economic strength of construction companies and on the environment. Currently, the South African construction industry is faced with low productivity compared to the manufacturing industry, which poses a serious challenge to the construction industry in its effort to deliver quality projects. Poor work quality and low productivity are the common problems of the industry. Storage, handling and flaws in management systems were also identified as major causes of construction waste. The construction industry has a critical role to play in ensuring economic growth and development in the formal and informal sectors of the South African economy. However, the industry faces some serious challenges in its endeavour to deliver infrastructure projects effectively. Contractors face many problems when undertaking construction projects owing to poor performance and their work is characterised by poor quality. In construction, higher productivity means seeing the final result sooner, which in turn creates customer satisfaction and ensures sustainability.

Dissertation (M Techy( Information Technology))--Cape Peninsula University of Technology, 2011 / The importance of e-commerce for SMEs has been well established. However, it remains an area of strategic concern amongst organisations across all industries. Furthermore, there is distinct lack of strategic planning in the majority of SMEs. Performance measurement has been identified as an important mechanism for making strategic decisions and it has been suggested that organisations align their strategic planning with their performance measurement systems. However, a large percentage of SMEs have no formal performance measurement systems in place. This has therefore been identified as a potential growth area for SMEs on which the success of the informal sectors depends.Despite the importance of SMEs throughout all economies, to-date limited research has been conducted on SMEs and e-commerce performance measurement. The aim of the present study was to investigate the manner in which the lack of e-commerce performance measurement is influencing the effective management of SMEs in the Western Cape province of South Africa. To achieve this aim, an electronic survey, investigating various aspects of e-commerce performance measurement, was compiled and sent via electronic mail to SMEs of various industries in the Western Cape. A total of 31 SMEs responded. Results indicated that the majority (67.7%) of SMEs in the Western Cape were not currently measuring their e-commerce performance. It was, however, considered highly important to a large percentage of the respondents and 65% of the respondents indicated that they do plan to measure e-commerce performance in the future; however, they need to overcome a number of obstacles to do so. These obstacles were identified and a list of e-commerce performance measurement critical success factors was compiled to guide SMEs in future strategic planning.The present research has proved that SMEs in the Western Cape Province of South Africa are no different from the rest of the world in that they are lagging behind their larger counterparts in terms of e-commerce performance measurement and therefore are lagging behind in terms of strategic concern and the ultimate growth of the organisation is therefore at risk. E-commerce performance measurement is thus an important area that SMEs need to align with their organisations‟ strategy.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD (Biodiversity and Conservation Biology) / This work centered on the tadpoles in a temporaray pond in the middle of Kenilworth racecourse, Cape Town, South Africa. Trapping was carried out over two wet seasons and five species were found. The racecourse was selected to investigate the tadpole community occupying temporary winter pools. The main focus of this study was the community of tadpoles that occur in the ephemeral ponds in the centre of Kenilworth Racecourse. This study was a very broad insight into tadpole ecology in the Western Cape. / South Africa

Great western development is a regional and preferential reform which began in the mid-1990s, and which intends to promote China's western economy. In this study, I statistically measure the effects of agricultural input growth, technological improvements and most importantly the improvement in institutional efficiency, which is attributed to great western development. This measurement is pursued by first discussing general aspects of Chinese agriculture, including a brief history of China's agricultural economy and politics as well as agricultural policy changes after the reforms. In order to estimate the effects of great western development on the Chinese agricultural production, I use the stochastic frontier production function. This approach is used widely in the field of economics in areas of measuring technical efficiency and policy effects in an industry with random shocks. I accompany this approach with several economic theories such as maximum likelihood estimation (MLE), measurement of technical inefficiency and estimation of technical change in the production function. An important contribution of this thesis is empirical estimation of stochastic frontier production function for great western development and a hypothesis test using the Monte-Carlo method. By maximum likelihood estimation with respect to the stochastic frontier production function, the measurement of the efficiency improvement is produced for the west and the east of China before and after great western development, respectively. A conclusion, made after the empirical analysis, is that great western development has positive effects on agricultural production and productivity in the western China. / Land and Food Systems, Faculty of / Graduate

The phenolic extractives from western hemlock wood (Tsuga heterophylla (Raf.) Sar.) have been examined. The total extractive content of the wood amounted to 1.5% of the dry weight. A leucoanthocyanidin and two lignans, conidendrin and hydroxymatairesinol, were isolated from the phenolic fraction by precipitation of a methanol solution into peroxide-free ether followed by separation on silicic acid-calcium sulphate chromatobars. The pigment produced by acid treatment of the isolated leucoanthocyanidin was shown by spectral studies and alkaline degradation to be a mixture of cyanidin and an unidentified anthocyanidin. The two anthocyanidins had identical Rf values in different solvents and similar ultra-violet spectra in ethanol-hydrochloric acid solution but the shift of the absorption maxima caused by addition of aluminium chloride was negligible in the case of the unknown compound and amounted to 30 mµ for cyanidin. Similar separations of the absorption maxima after complexing with aluminium ion were observed with the 3-methyl and 3-isopropyl ethers of the two anthocyanidins. The alkaline degradation products from the leucoanthocyanidin contained protocatechuic acid but no phloroglucinol. Degradation products of phloroglucinol, however, were present in the reaction mixture. These results suggested that the leucoanthocyanidin occurred in the wood in dimeric form and that alkaline degradation of this structure produced a symmetrical hexahydroxyhenzophenone derivative which split up directly into fragments identical to those obtained from phloroglucinol under the same conditions. New information on the structure of hydroxymatairesinol was obtained by comparison of the infrared spectra of the fully acetylated hydroxymatairesinol with that of the reduced compound and by neutral potassium permanganate oxidation of trimethylhydroxymatairesinol. The results obtained were in good agreement with only one of the two structures previously proposed for hydroxymatairesinol by other workers. The NMR spectra of hydroxymatairesinol and structurally related compounds were compared, but the interpretation of the spectrum of hydroxymatairesinol proved to be difficult because broad, incompletely resolved lines were obtained due to the complexity and asymmetry of the molecule. / Science, Faculty of / Chemistry, Department of / Graduate

A canker on the main stem of oppressed western hemlock (Tsuga hetero hylla (Rafn.) Sarg.), 1 to 3 inches in diameter at breast height, was found at Powell River and Tumour Island, British Columbia. The canker is irregularly elliptical, with a conspicuous resin exudation in the early stages. The canker appears to be annual. A species of Cephalosporium (Fungi Imperfecti, Moniliales) was consistently isolated from cankers collected at Powell River. The pathogenicity of the organism has not been proven to date. The growth and hyphal characters of the organism, and the temperature-growth relations of the organism in culture are described. The conidial apparatus of the organism was investigated. Attempts to produce the perfect stage in culture were unsuccessful. / Science, Faculty of / Botany, Department of / Zoology, Department of / Graduate

Both historically and geographically Western Australia has been separated from the rest of the Australian continent. Sixteen hundred miles of desert intervene between the settled south western tip of the continent and the main concentration of Australian population in the southeast. Partly owing to this geographic isolation, the Swan River colony (founded in 1829) passed the first sixty years of its existence with very little intercourse with the more flourishing eastern Australian colonies. It was not until the goldrush of the 1890’s that the eastern Australians began to display an interest in the far west. The presence of large numbers of these "T'othersiders" in the Western Australian goldfields played an important part in securing the colony's entrance into the new Australian Commonwealth which came into existence on January 1, 1901, The old settlers and the leaders of the colony's responsible government were none too eager to accept the terms of federation, maintaining that, under the proposed constitution, the new states would not have sufficient sources of revenue to meet their obligations, but their objections were over-ruled by the unanimous pro-federation sentiment of the diggers. From the first Western Australia's peculiar position — a state with a small population and a large, undeveloped area ... resulted in special financial concessions being granted to her. Such concessions mitigated, but did not completely obliterate, the separatist tendencies of the western state. In 1906 a motion was introduced into the state parliament favouring secession from the federal union but nothing came of it. The War-induced encroachment of the federal government on taxation fields which had formerly been state preserves intensified the irritation felt by state leaders toward the ever-increasing powers of the Commonwealth government. Such sentiments were mirrored in newspaper articles expounding the theory that the federal bond was preventing Western Australia from realizing her full potentialities. The reports of a number of federally-appointed boards in the 1920's indicate that, even during these prosperous years, secessionist sentiments were held by a sizeable portion of the state's inhabitants. Nevertheless, it was not until the depression fell, with a particularly severe impact on primary-producing Western Australia, that secessionism became the dominant factor in the state's politics. The cause of secession was adopted by the state administration, partly from a desire to use it as a means of exacting a more generous financial arrangement from the Commonwealth government. A referendum on the question of secession was held concurrently with the state elections in April, 1933.Although the state's electorate repudiated the parties sponsoring secession they recorded a two-to-one majority in favour of the state seceding from the Australian Commonwealth and becoming a self-governing Dominion. The newly elected Labour government redeemed their election pledge to attempt to give effect to the people's mandate, as expressed in the referendum results, by sending petitions to the British parliament requesting the passage of legislation which would release the state from the Australian Commonwealth. A joint committee of both houses, appointed to investigate the constitutional propriety of receiving the state's petition, reported that such a request could be entertained only if it came from the federal parliament. Following this rebuff from the British parliament the secessionist movement withered and died, leaving behind a better system of deciding on state grants in Australia, and a noteworthy decision defining the relationship of the state and federal governments with the British parliament in the ever evolving British Commonwealth. / Arts, Faculty of / History, Department of / Graduate

Three dilignol rhamnosides were isolated in 0.15 to 0.40% yield from the ethyl acetate solubles of a methyl alcohol extract of western red cedar (Thuja plicata Donn) leaves using silicic acid and Sephadex LH-20 pressure column chromatography. One of the three dilignol rhamnosides was characterized as l-(3'-methoxy-4'-hydroxyphenyl)-2-0-l"-[2"-hydroxy-4"-(propane-3"'-α-L-rhamnoside)phenyl]-propane-l,3 diol, using NMR and chemical degradation in conjunction with mass spectral techniques on the compound and its derivatives. The other dilignol rhamnosides were not completely characterized, but were shown to be chemically related to the dilignol identified. Based upon NMR, chemical and mass spectral data, the uncharacterized dilignol rhamnosides are speculated to contain phenylcoumaran and guaiacyl benzdioxane structures. The characterized dilignol rhamnoside represents the first reported occurrence of a free dilignol glycoside in plant tissues. The unusual α-L-rhamnose moiety of the dilignol occurs in a previously unreported linkage to the n-propyl hydroxyl group uncommon in lignin. The rhamnoside also displays the previously unreported guaiacylglycerol-catechol-β-aryl ether structure rather than the commonly observed guaiacylglycerol-guaiacyl-β-aryl ether structure. A new combustion-absorption technique was developed and validated which allows high efficiency evaluation of low activity radioactive products separated on thin layer cellulose chromatography plates. The technique was applied to an analysis of the anabolic products of an infusion feeding of U- (14)C--L-phenylalanine to western red cedar leaves. Facile imbibition of U-(14) C-L-phenylalanine occurs within ten hours. Maximum incorporation of 0.30%. and 0.40% of the available radioactivity occurs in the characterized dilignol rhamnoside, and its suspected phenylcoumaran homolog respectively, at the three to five hour period of the infusion feeding. The incorporation results indicate the participation of the dilignol rhamnosides in aromatic metabolism in the leaves of western red cedar. This feeding experiment is preliminary to future detailed biosynthetic studies in the leaf tissue. The combustion-absorption technique is limited to combustible sample weights of 7 mg. / Forestry, Faculty of / Graduate