Self-Negation as understood in this research project is the tendency for the African Caribbean people to belittle their African heritage and valorise their European one while being a product of both. This has led to deeply considered critical responses from Caribbean historians, literary and cultural icons, and revolutionary figures. However, this has not been adequately addressed within Caribbean theological reflection, particularly in the way that Self-Negation manifests in the relationship between the Church and African Caribbean indigenous cultural productions. Located in the field of Caribbean Theology, this research project explores and describes the complex relationship between the Church and Junkanoo in contemporary Bahamian society for the purpose of suggesting praxes for addressing Self-Negation. It employs an interdisciplinary Practical, Contextual approach to Theology using ethnographic methods such as interviews and observations to access and reflect on the inner experiences of Bahamians as they integrate or separate the two in every day life. The following conclusions are made as a result of the findings: firstly, the Junkanoo/Church relationship is complex and self-negating; it is marked by dichotomy, ambivalence, and dissonance in identity. Secondly, both the Church and Junkanoo contribute to Self-Negation, but can, and do, also contribute to Overcoming, the opposite process. While the former is perpetuated by a hermeneutic of dichotomy, which continually sees Church and Junkanoo as incompatible, the latter is perpetuated by a hermeneutic of embrace, which sees them as already integrated, mutually critical and creative spaces in which African Bahamian religiocultural identity is affirmed. Thirdly, theologically reflecting on the problematic concept of sin at the heart of the Junkanoo/Church relationship, namely the conflation of African religious and cultural heritage with sinfulness, the research argues for a hermeneutic of embrace to undergird integrative practices between Junkanoo and the Church.

黃文傑. / "2002年8月" / 論文 (哲學碩士)--香港中文大學, 2002. / 參考文獻 (leaves 81-88) / 附中英文提要. / "2002 nian 8 yue" / Huang Wenjie. / Lun wen (zhe xue shuo shi)--Xianggang Zhong wen da xue, 2002. / Can kao wen xian (leaves 81-88) / Fu Zhong Ying wen ti yao. / Chapter 第一章 --- 緒論 --- p.1 / Chapter 第一節 --- 《爾雅》的編者和成書年代 --- p.1 / Chapter 第二節 --- 《爾雅》的性質 --- p.6 / Chapter 第三節 --- 《爾雅注疏》 --- p.11 / Chapter 第四節 --- 本文硏究的目的和方法 --- p.17 / Chapter 第二章 --- 《爾雅注疏》所見的古籍徵引 --- p.20 / Chapter 第一節 --- 《爾雅注疏》的古籍徵引 --- p.20 / Chapter 第二節 --- 《爾雅注疏》的引《詩》硏究 --- p.28 / Chapter 第三章 --- 《爾雅注疏》的引《詩》與《毛傳》釋《詩》 --- p.36 / Chapter 第一節 --- 漢初《詩》傳 --- p.36 / Chapter 第二節 --- 《爾雅》與《毛傳》釋《詩》的異同比較 --- p.41 / Chapter 第四章 --- 《爾雅注疏》引《詩》與齊、魯、韓三家《詩》的關係 --- p.65 / Chapter 第一節 --- 《爾雅》與《魯詩》 --- p.67 / Chapter 第二節 --- 《爾雅》與《齊詩》及《韓詩》 --- p.72 / Chapter 第五章 --- 總結 --- p.78 / 參考書目 --- p.81 / 附錄凡例 --- p.89 / 附錄一：《爾雅注疏》引《詩》資料表 --- p.90 / 附錄二 ：《爾雅注疏》引《詩》與《毛傳》釋（詩》對照表 --- p.216

Jack Hilibrand. / "September 7, 1956." "This report is based on a thesis that was submitted to the Department of Electrical Engineering, August 1956, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology." / Bibliography: p. 50-51. / Army Signal Corps Contract DA36-039-sc-64637 Dept. of the Army Task 3-99-06-108 Project 3-99-00-100

Steganographie ist die Kunst der vertraulichen Kommunikation. Anders als in der Kryptographie, wo der Austausch vertraulicher Daten für Dritte offensichtlich ist, werden die vertraulichen Daten in einem steganographischen System in andere, unauffällige Coverdaten (z.B. Bilder) eingebettet und so an den Empfänger übertragen. Ziel eines steganographischen Algorithmus ist es, die Coverdaten nur geringfügig zu ändern, um deren statistische Merkmale zu erhalten, und möglichst in unauffälligen Teilen des Covers einzubetten. Um dieses Ziel zu erreichen, werden verschiedene Ansätze der so genannten minimum-embedding-impact Steganographie basierend auf Syndromkodierung vorgestellt. Es wird dabei zwischen Ansätzen basierend auf stochastischen und auf deterministischen Matrizen unterschieden. Anschließend werden die Algorithmen bewertet, um Vorteile der Anwendung von Syndromkodierung herauszustellen.

Mobile telecommunications industry has experienced high growth rates for the recent 30 years. Accordingly, forecasting the future of mobile telecommunications services is important not only for mobile operators but also for all stakeholders in this industry ranging from handset manufacturers to vendors. In this thesis, the diffusion of mobile telecommunications services in 20 countries from different regions around the world is examined for the period of 1981 to 2010 with special emphasis on Turkey, in order to address the uncertainty in optimal model selection. The Gompertz, logistic and Bass models are fitted to the observed data of mobile phone penetration by means of nonlinear least squares. The fitness accuracies of the models are evaluated based on root mean square error (RMSE). Empirical results show that S-shaped growth models are capable of explaining the diffusion of mobile telecommunications services. The findings also suggest that there is no superior model in defining the diffusion process and the most suitable model is country dependent. Finally, we observe that the diffusion in late entrant countries appears to be faster than pioneer countries and peak demands in mobile telephones occur during the period of 1999 to 2006, which suggests a remarkable multinational learning effect and significance of the transition into digital technology.

Reinsurance is one of the most important tools to be used by insurance companies, for managing risks. This is an effective way / however, there are situations where reinsurance is insufficient, such as the occurrence of a natural hazard. When a natural hazard occurs, many insured experience loss at the same time, which drains the reinsurance market capacity. If future market capacity could be forecasted, then it would be easier for companies to decide when to include cat bonds or any other additional securities in their portfolio. In order to establish a model for market capacity, its relationship with other market parameters and the association among parameters are examined. In this study, these relationships are analyzed and used to establish an algorithm for predicting the next years reinsurance capacity. Moreover, last 10-year data for market capacity is used to establish and AR(1) model, in order to create a comparison with the algorithm. A case study of cat bonds is done, which uses the pricing load calculation of the Lane model and aims to ease the decision-making process by comparing the loads of cat bond and reinsurance pricing.

In this thesis we obtain several interesting algebraic properties of the operations used in the block cipher IDEA which are important for cryptographic analyzes. We view each of these operations as a function from $mathbb Z_{2}^n times mathbb Z_{2}^n to mathbb Z_{2}^n$. By fixing one of variables $v(z)=mathbf Z$ in $mathbb Z_{2}^n times mathbb Z_{2}^n$, we define functions $mathbf {f}_z$ and $mathbf {g}_z$ from $mathbb Z_{2}^n$ to $mathbb Z_{2}^n$ for the addition $BIGboxplus$ and the multiplication $BIGodot$ operations, respectively. We first show that the nonlinearity of $mathbf {g}_z$ remains the same under some transformations of $z$. We give an upper bound for the nonlinearity of $mathbf {g}_{2^k}$, where $2leq k &lt / n-1$. We list all linear relations which make the nonlinearity of $mathbf {f}_z$ and $mathbf {g}_z$ zero and furthermore, we present all linear relations for $mathbf {g}_z$ having a high probability. We use these linear relations to derive many more linear relations for 1-round IDEA. We also devise also a new algorithm to find a set of new linear relations for 1-round IDEA based on known linear relations. Moreover, we extend the largest known linear class of weak keys with cardinality $2^{23}$ to two classes with cardinality $2^{24}$ and $2^{27}$. Finally, we obtain several interesting properties of the set $ { ({mathbf X},{mathbf X} BIGoplus {mathbf A}) in mathbb Z_2^n times mathbb Z_2^n ,|, (mathbf {X}BJoin {mathbf Z})BIGoplus( ({mathbf X} BIGoplus {mathbf A} ) BJoin mathbf {Z} ) = {mathbf B} }$ for varying ${mathbf A}, {mathbf B}$ and ${mathbf Z}$ in $mathbb Z_2^n$, where $BJoin in { BIGodot,BIGboxplus }$. By using some of these properties, we present impossible differentials for 1-round IDEA and Pseudo-Hadamard Transform.

Efficient management of blood throughout the countries is of great economic importance, in addition to its major impact on the success of medical operations. This study is concerned with the analysis of policies for managing a unique blood supply chain network, which is defined in the new Blood and Blood Products Law of the Republic of Turkey. The main objective of the study is to obtain a better understanding of the system, and to find improved policies to be able to manage it efficiently. A discrete event simulation model is developed to analyze the blood supply chain of a pilot region in Turkey. Effects of different management policies on the supply chain performance are analyzed. Important improvements are achieved in terms of the selected performance measures such as outdate, mismatch and shortage rates of the region. Our proposed model can be used by both national health authorities and the Turkish Red Crescent Society as a decision support tool to analyze other regions and to examine alternative policies.

In this thesis, we address the route selection problem for Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAV) under multiple objectives. We consider a general case for this problem where the UAV has to visit several targets and return to the base. For this case, there are multiple combinatorial problems to be considered. First, the paths to be followed between any pairs of targets should be determined. This part can be considered as a multi-objective shortest path problem. Additionally, we need to determine the order of the targets to be visited. This in turn, is a multi-objective traveling salesperson problem. The overall problem is a combination of these two combinatorial problems. The route selection for UAVs has been studied by several researchers, mainly in the military context. They considered a linear combination of the two objectives / minimizing distance traveled and minimizing radar detection threat / and proposed heuristics for the minimization of the composite single objective problem. We treat these two objectives separately. We develop an evolutionary algorithm to determine the efficient tours. We also consider an exact interactive approach to identify the best paths and tours of a decision maker. We tested the two solution approaches on both small-sized and large-sized problem instances.

There is a growing interest in electronic auctions in the literature. Many researchers work on the single attribute version of the problem. Multi-attribute version of the problem is more realistic. However, this brings a substantial difficulty in solving the problem. In order to overcome the computational difficulties, we develop an Evolutionary Algorithm (EA) for the case of multi-attribute multi-item reverse auctions. We generate the whole Pareto front using the EA. We also develop heuristic procedures to find several good initial solutions and insert those in the initial population of the EA. We test the EA on a number of randomly generated problems and compare the results with the true Pareto optimal front obtained by solving a series of integer programs. We also develop an exact interactive approach that provides aid both to the buyer and the sellers for a multi-attribute single item multi round reverse auction. The buyer decides on the provisional winner at each round. Then the approach provides support in terms of all attributes to each seller to be competitive in the next round of the auction.