As a result of widespread and effective usage of internet, firms tend to collaborate to reduce their operating costs. This thesis analyzes collaboration opportunities for a group of small shippers. A transportation intermediary determining the optimal actions for arriving shippers and a mechanism allocating savings to the shippers is proposed in the thesis. The performance of the intermediary is assessed by using computational analyses. An experimental set is formed that is by changing the parameters that are expected to significantly affect the optimal policy structure and the surplus budget (or deficit) changes. It is seen that increasing variable costs like cross-assignment cost and waiting cost leads to the increase in comparative performance of the optimal policy compared to the na&iuml / ve policy, which is defined according to a simple rule, although increasing dispatching cost, which can be considered as a fixed cost, leads to an opposite result. The performance of the optimal policy is also assessed by using a myopic policy, in which shippers are trying to maximize their own benefit without considering the overall benefit of the grand coalition.

This thesis focuses on the underground transportation forms that began to emerge in city centers in the second half of the 20th century. Besides providing an illustration and evaluation of the selected case projects, the notions of speed and time are opened for discussion as significant concepts that interact to affect the physical formations both of cities and transport policies. The developments in urban transport technologies after the 1960s are also examined as leading factors in the development of today&rsquo / s multimodal and multilayered urban transportation hubs.

A corporation which is aiming to create a world class brand should evaluate its existing product portfolio as a first step to configure its future products better. Therefore, this study is performed with the collaboration of Temsa Global Company, who desires to create a global brand in the commercial vehicle area: Temsa. The aim of the study is to find out the relationship between the brand specific design characteristics and visual product design features with a semantic approach, through a case study on a local commercial vehicle manufacturer: Temsa Global Company.

Search engines are essential components of the World Wide Web; both commercially and in terms of everyday usage, their importance is hard to overstate. This thesis examines the question of why there is bias in search engine results – bias that invites users to click on links to large websites, commercial websites, websites based in certain countries, and websites written in certain languages. In this thesis, the historical development of the search engine industry is traced. Search engines first emerged as prototypical technological startups emanating from Silicon Valley, followed by the acquisition of search engine companies by major US media corporations and their development into portals. The subsequent development of pay-per-click advertising is central to the current industry structure, an oligarchy of virtually integrated companies managing networks of syndicated advertising and traffic distribution. The study also shows a global landscape in which search production is concentrated in and caters for large global advertising markets, leaving the rest of the world with patchy and uneven search results coverage. The analysis of interviews with senior search engine engineers indicates that issues of quality are addressed in terms of customer service and relevance in their discourse, while the analysis of documents, interviews with search marketers, and participant observation within a search engine marketing firm showed that producers and marketers had complex relationships that combine aspects of collaboration, competition, and indifference. The results of the study offer a basis for the synthesis of insights of the political economy of media and communication and the social studies of technology tradition, emphasising the importance of culture in constructing and maintaining both local structures and wider systems. In the case of search engines, the evidence indicates that the culture of the technological entrepreneur is very effective in creating a new megabusiness, but less successful in encouraging a debate on issues of the public good or public responsibility as they relate to the search engine industry.

The perceived socio-economic significance of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has dramatically expanded the domains in which this cluster of technologies is being discussed and acted upon. Action to promote the 'information society' has made its way into governmental policy. National technology policy and action cannot however be adequately understood solely as the calculation of needs according to the development aspirations of the country concerned. Instead it needs to be placed in the intersection of simultaneous efforts by national and international organisations to shape technological developments. This research examines the nature of efforts made to promote ICT innovation through national policies and programmes in the midst of international and regional influences. The thesis involves the historical analysis of the policies for ICT diffusion in Greece within the context of the European efforts to promote the information society. It examines how the Greek state undertook to implement a large-scale ICT programme, in the backdrop of hesitant attempts at modernisation and technological innovation. The research traces the emergence of the ICT programme and the European visions which framed it, and explores the discourses and practices through which it came to materialise. The research is theoretically infomred by Foucault's ideas on governmentality, focusing on the government and self-government of conduct. The study explores the discourses sustained through the European and Greek policies on the information society. Practices of funding, monitoring and reporting are also scrutinised to understand the forms of discipline and contestation they gave rise to. Through this theoretical analysis, the research engages in a context-sensitive examination of the taken-for-granted relationship between policies and their implementation. The main contribution of the thesis lies in illuminating the often neglected role of international and regional organisations in shaping technological agendas, and the material practices which allow them to operate effectively across distances.

The thesis sets forth a model relating political contention to technological development. The selective realisation of a technical potentiality is shown to have been determined by conflict and negotiation among shifting alliances of state and private-industrial entities, each attempting to impose its requirements upon an emergent technology and thereby to dictate the precise form and pace of technical development. The 'course of communications satellite development is examined during the technology's formative period from 1961 to 1975--as the product of struggles over technological control. Negotiation centered upon control, and contending modes of technical development were promoted and opposed on the basis of their perceived consequences upon the distribution of effective control over the technology. The initial mode of satellite development lasted from 1961 to 1971 and is characterised as pre-emptive underdevelopment; urgency and haste were combined with tight constraints on the qualitative breadth allowed to technological articulation. Pre-emptive underdevelopment derived from an uneasy political accommodation struck among constituencies dominant during this phases the U.S. government, American communications carrier industry and a Western European intergovernmental bloc. The reigning compromise was directed toward expediting satellite development sufficiently to forestall rival deployments without endangering existing and anticipated interests in both satellite and competitive technologies. Technical development beneath a minimum level risked undermining the regime of control by leaving open the possibility of rival satellite systems; but development beyond a maximum level would have harmed the outstanding industrial and political interests in whose defence control was sought, while subverting the control regime by widening the legitimate scope for multinational participation in authority over the technology. Pre-emptive underdevelopment, it is argued, was succeeded largely by the products of its own success in meeting the policy requirements of initially dominant entities and in thus reducing the continued importance of satellite technology as a political arena and instrumentality. Restraints upon development could therefore, in the post-1971 period, be relaxed, while the growing demand for a wider array of satellite services encouraged emergence of a more intensive mode of technological development under the auspices of a de-cartelised, quasi-federal and multinational political regime.

Zircon (U-Th)/He (zircon He) dating has become a widely used thermochronologic method in the geosciences. Practitioners have traditionally interpreted (U-Th)/He dates from zircons across a broad spectrum of chemical compositions with a single set of ⁴He diffusion kinetics derived from only a handful of crystals (Reiners et al., 2004). However, it has become increasingly clear that a "one-size-fits-all" approach to these kinetics is inadequate, leading to erroneous conclusions and incongruent data. This dissertation develops a more grain-specific approach by showing the fundamental role that intracrystalline radiation damage plays in determining the He diffusivity in a given zircon. I present three appendices that seek to quantify the radiation damage effect on He diffusion in zircon, explain how this effect manifests in zircon He dates, and show how to exploit such manifestations to better constrain sample thermal histories. Of particular importance, this dissertation represents the first comprehensive study to concentrate on the entire damage spectrum found in natural zircon and also the first to show that two different mechanisms affect He diffusion in zircon in different ways across this spectrum. In the first appendix, I and my fellow co-authors describe results from a series of step-heating experiments that show how the alpha dose of a given zircon, which we interpret to be correlated with accumulated radiation damage, influences its He diffusivity. From 1.2 × 10¹⁶ α/g to 1.4 × 10¹⁸ α/g, He diffusivity at a given temperature decreases by three orders of magnitude, but as alpha dose increases from ~2 × 10¹⁸ α/g to 8.2 × 10¹⁸ α/g, He diffusivity then increases by about nine orders of magnitude. We parameterize both the initial decrease and eventual increase in diffusivity with alpha dose with a function that describes these changes in terms of increasing abundance and size of intracrystalline radiation damage zones and resulting effects on the tortuosity of He migration pathways and dual-domain behavior. This is combined with another equation that describes damage annealing in zircon. The end result is a new model that constrains the coevolution of damage, He diffusivity, and He date in zircon as a function of its actinide content and thermal history. The second and third appendices use this new model to decipher zircon He datasets comprising many single grain dates that are correlated with effective uranium (eU, a proxy for the relative degree of radiation damage among grains from the same sample). The model is critical for proper interpretation of results from igneous settings that show date-eU correlations and were once considered spurious (appendix B). When applied to partially reset sedimentary rocks, other sources of date variability, such as damage and He inheritance, have to be considered as well (appendix C).

Following Roberts (1990) and Dent (1990). this study investigates the importance of complexifying the relationship between strategy and accounting. The genealogical approach of Hoskin et al (1997) provides inspiration as to the ways in which strategic discourse (itself promoted as a subject of study by Knights and Morgan (1990,1991,1995)) is historically contingent upon practices of accounting. I take up this task of inaugurating the study of accounting practice and strategy discourse, from strategy to accounting, to develop a new perspective of how their interaction takes place. This gives birth to a re-reading of the strategy (and accounting) literatures, from the direction of a constitutive notion of accounting practices. In particular, the processual and critical schools of strategy are found to promote conventional notions of accounting as mirror, as secondary and passive practice, which circulate beneath the usual level of visibility. Building on this emergent approach, a post- Foucauldian theory of practices is outlined from a methodological viewpoint. This approach does not begin from such general categories as 'the individual', 'the social' or 'the economic', and thereby does not follow conventional understandings of 'doing ethnography'. The inquiry is empirically situated within the context of a longitudinal investigation (1997-2000) into the U. K. based part of a global telecommunications company, Teleco. I discover complex interactions between accounting practices and the workings of strategy, both as presence and absence. There is a partial presence of strategy even within the most 'strategic' parts of Teleco, in conjunction with a growing absence within those parts most distant from 'the strategy'. Despite this, or perhaps because of this, the spread of accounting and accounting based-practices rolls on, albeit in a non-uniform way. This brings forth the possibility of a strategic accounting, one whose practices are perhaps most visibly internalised and effected on my very self, thus adding weight to the rejection within this thesis of the metaphysical categories of either 'strategy' or 'accounting.

An industrial traffic management and control system based on Automated Guided Vehicles faces several combined problems. Decisions must be made concerning which vehicles will respond, or are allocated to each of the transport orders. Once a vehicle is allocated a transport order, a route has to be selected that allows it to reach its target location. In order for the vehicle to move efficiently along the selected route it must be provided with the means to recognise and adapt to the changing characteristics of the path it must follow. When several vehicles are involved these decisions are interrelated and must take into account the coordination of the movements of the vehicles in order to avoid collisions and maximise the performance of the transport system. This research concentrates on the problem of routing the vehicles that have already been assigned destinations associated with transport orders. In nearly all existing AGV systems this problem is simplified by considering there to be a fixed route between source and destination workstations. However if the system is to be used more efficiently, and particularly if it must support the requirements of modern manufacturing strategies, such as Justin- Time and Flexible Manufacturing Systems, of moving very small batches more frequently, then there is a need for a system capable of dealing with the increased complexity of the routing problem. The consideration of alternative paths between any two workstations together with the possibility of other vehicles blocking routes while waiting at a particular location, increases enormously the number of alternatives that must be considered in order to identify the routes for each vehicle leading to an optimum solution. Current methods used to solve this type of problem do not provide satisfactory solutions for all cases, which leaves scope for improvement. The approach proposed in this work takes advantage of the use of Backpropagation Artificial Neural Networks to develop a solution for the routing problem. A novel aspect of the approach implemented is the use of a solution derived for routing a single vehicle in a physical layout when some pieces of track are set as unavailable, as the basis for the solution when several vehicles are involved. Another original aspect is the method developed to deal with the problem of selecting a route between two locations based on an analysis of the conditions of the traffic system, when each movement decision has to be made. This lead to the implementation of a step-by-step search of the available routes for each vehicle. Two distinct phases can be identified in the approach proposed. First the design of a solution based on an ANN to solve the single vehicle case, and subsequently the development and testing of a solution for a multi-vehicle case. To test and implement these phases a specific layout was selected, and an algorithm was implemented to generate the data required for the design of the ANN solution. During the development of alternative solutions it was found that the addition of simple rules provided a useful means to overcome some of the limitations of the ANN solution, and a "hybrid" solution was originated. Numerous computer simulations were performed to test the solutions developed against alternatives based on the best published heuristic rules. The results showed that while it was not possible to generate a globally optimal solution, near optimal solutions could be obtained and the best hybrid solution was marginally better than the best of the currently available heuristic rules.

This thesis explores the experience of breast cancer patients' online participation in relation to their illness. The research focuses on the work of narrating as the key process in patients' online communication. Empirically, it stems from the noticeable recent proliferation of breast cancer forums, particularly in online spaces. I argue that the production of a story and its telling online enables the patient to cope with a radically new situation in her life. The claim for the significance of breast cancer patients' online communication, particularly narrating, is located within the historical and cultural context of the illness. In examining the process of narrating and storytelling, I draw on sociological and psychoanalytical theories of narrative and storytelling, and sociological debates on issues of health and illness, everyday life and the nature of agency, social exchange, and the tension between the public and the private. The study is based on a phenomenological study that included twenty nine online (e-mail) and twelve face-toface interviews with breast cancer patients, and a textual analysis of related websites. It shows how the work of narrating is facilitated through the online space, highlighting it as a process that has significant consequences for their ability to cope with their illness. The thesis concludes with a self-reflexive account of the employment of narrating as a conceptual, analytical and methodological tool for the study of breast cancer patients' processes of online communication. It argues for the need to acknowledge the constraints that shape the online space, calling into doubt its supposed openness, borderlessness, fluidity and lack of structure. In particular, the discussion highlights the persistence of the cultural dimension of the online communication, questioning the extent to which the nature of online communication is global, as is often argued. The concluding chapter uses the empirical case to engage with the broader concern with the relationship between media, communication and agency. Key words: narrative; narrating; storytelling; Internet; online; offline; breast cancer; agency; interviews.