Thesis (M. Hous. M.)--University of Hong Kong, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.Hous.M.)--University of Hong Kong, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available in print.

Thesis (Ph . D.)--Andhra University, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.Soc.Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 1987. / Also available in print.

Thesis (M. Hous. M.)--University of Hong Kong, 2006.

Data centres lie at the heart of almost every service on the Internet. Data centres are used to provide search results, to power social media, to store and index email, to host “cloud” applications, for online retail and to provide a myriad of other web services. Consequently the more efficient they can be made the better for all of us. The power of modern data centres is in combining commodity off-the-shelf server hardware and network equipment to provide what Google’s Barrosso and Ho ̈lzle describe as “warehouse scale” computers. Data centres rely on TCP, a transport protocol that was originally designed for use in the Internet. Like other such protocols, TCP has been optimised to maximise throughput, usually by filling up queues at the bottleneck. However, for most applications within a data centre network latency is more critical than throughput. Consequently the choice of transport protocol becomes a bottleneck for performance. My thesis is that the solution to this is to move away from the use of one-size-fits-all transport protocols towards ones that have been designed to reduce latency across the data centre and which can dynamically respond to the needs of the applications. This dissertation focuses on optimising the transport layer in data centre networks. In particular I address the question of whether any single transport mechanism can be flexible enough to cater to the needs of all data centre traffic. I show that one leading protocol (DCTCP) has been heavily optimised for certain network conditions. I then explore approaches that seek to minimise latency for applications that care about it while still allowing throughput-intensive applications to receive a good level of service. My key contributions to this are Silo and Trevi. Trevi is a novel transport system for storage traffic that utilises fountain coding to max- imise throughput and minimise latency while being agnostic to drop, thus allowing storage traffic to be pushed out of the way when latency sensitive traffic is present in the network. Silo is an admission control system that is designed to give tenants of a multi-tenant data centre guaranteed low latency network performance. Both of these were developed in collaboration with others.

This dissertation investigates land and tenancy disputes in Gedeo, southern Ethiopia, between 1941 and 1974. Such disputes were a deeply entrenched feature of Ethiopian land tenure systems until the revolution, and despite its importance the subject has not received the attention it deserves. Based on local court archival documents and oral interviews, the dissertation seeks to understand how these conflicts shaped agrarian relationships in Gedeo during this crucial period. The study highlights how differential access to resources created disharmony within Gedeo. It not only contributed to the proliferation of disputes but also eroded community cohesion, one of the consequences of which was that when Ethiopia was invaded by Italy in 1935 it was too divided and weak to defend itself effectively from external aggression. The post-liberation period was a formative time in the history of Gedeo. During this time the gabbar system was gradually replaced by landlord-tenant relationships. There was significant economic development largely due to the increasing importance of the coffee trade, but also land and tenancy disputes became a dominant feature of this period. Although land disputes were common in many other parts of Ethiopia, tenancy disputes in the south are described in the existing literature as distinctive from those in northern Ethiopia. The existing works mainly discuss tenancy relationships in the south from an ethnic perspective. This factor might have exacerbated the rivalries; however, it was not the main factor. This dissertation argues that competition for available resources was at the heart of the problem. The increased polarisation of landlord-tenant conflict continued to damage agrarian relationships. The inability of the government to deal with the problem made the situation worse and as a result tenants were obliged to find alternative ways to express their grievances. In February 1960 when the Michele uprising erupted the government rushed to intervene with the heavy use of security forces. Nevertheless the tenancy problem did not show sign of improvement until it was resolved finally and fundamentally by revolutionary means in 1974.

No description available.

Concerning the role of urban village in the rental market, early renewal damages the immigration of the lower income groups, thus affect the supply of the primary labor force. Therefore, a right time of urban village renewal play an important role in labor flow which is a critical attribute to economy growth. Previous studies mostly focus on the urban planning and social problems in these areas. But this thesis will regard the urban villages as an indispensible part of the housing market especially in the transitional stage of Chinese economy which indicates a suitable renewal policy of urban village. In order to research on the role of the urban village, the sample analysis of urban village in Shenzhen is made. The thesis will evaluate the urban village’s role in different sectors, i.e. local government, house owner, tenant and the real estate developer, aiming to find a suitable justification to the urban village existence in current transitional society in China. The role of urban village is common problem in China and other emerging economies since the urban village is an inevitable phenomenon in the rapid urbanization. In the circumstance of low social welfare society, the urban village solves an exceptional part of housing problem.

John Bowlby’s work on attachment theory in the 1960s altered the cultural understanding of parent-child relationships. Bowlby argued that the ability for an individual to form attachments later in life, be that familial, romantic, or friendship is affected by whether or not that individual formed a strong attachment to a primary caregiver in early childhood. My thesis uses Bowlby’s theory as a critical lens to examine three novels by the Brontës: Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë. I use this theory in order to demonstrate that these novels are what I have termed proto-attachment narratives, which is to say narratives about attachment before formal attachment theory existed, and, further, that they work to bridge the gap between the contemporary nineteenth-century debate on child rearing and Bowlby’s theory. In addition, I discuss how each of these novels exemplifies, complicates, and expands upon Bowlby’s theory in its own way. Wuthering Heights demonstrates the cyclical nature of damaged attachments and works to find a way to break from that cycle. Jane Eyre gives a clear understanding of an individual’s lifelong struggle with failed attachments and the importance of a balanced power dynamic to forming healthy attachments, and, finally, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall examines how even properly formed, healthy parent-child attachments can lead to development problems, if the power granted to those parental attachment figure is not used responsibly. I further theorize that we can use these novels as a starting point to discuss how we might define attachment narratives as a genre, as they hold many similarities with more clearly defined modern attachment narratives.