In this study, I aimed to examine the impact of different levels of education on real GDP (and real GDP per workforce) in Turkey, and hence the relationship between different levels of education and the standard of living is estimated by panel data techniques. The panel data set in the study is constructed by pooling 67 provinces of Turkey over the period of 1975-2000. Furthermore, in the empirical work, two models are employed: the model introduced by Knowles (1997) and the augmented Solow model with different levels of education. The panel data estimation of the Knowles&rsquo / s model implies that the secondary level of schooling has the greatest contribution to real GDP, while the augmented Solow model implies that the higher level of schooling has the largest impact on real GDP per workforce.

This dissertation attempts to investigate the relationship between certain narrative strategies and meaning(s), and presents a narratological analysis of Golding&rsquo / s three novels. It primarily refers to the terminology offered by Genette and Rimmon-Kenan and, considering the mode of narration (voice) and the mode of focalization (mood), it tries to unearth narrative elements in narrative fiction. This dissertation argues that the implied author employs narrative agents and strategies of perspectivisation in order to affect, manipulate, determine or change the meaning(s), and that storytelling authority can be violated or balanced by monitority of perceiving. In The Inheritors, the implied author plays with shifting perspective to portray the other from within / in Pincher Martin, s/he explores temporality and timelessness to reveal post-mortem individual consciousness / unconsciousness, and in Free Fall, s/he produces a first-person retrospective narration where the protagonist deals with the act of story-telling and attempts to reconstruct his identity through manipulating subnarratives and perspectives.

<p>Background: Companies today are under increasing pressure from their stakeholders to become more and more transparent regarding the way they deal with the impact on the environment and the communities where they operate in. This type of information is mainly provided by means of sustainability reports. Several guidelines have been developed to aid report makers on the way. Currently however these sustainability reports still differ widely in the quantity of information provided which makes them difficult to compare and it is therefore important to understand the factors that can influence the amount of information being published.</p><p>Purpose: The purpose of this study is to identify the factors having an impact on the amount of sustainability information published by Swedish companies using the guidelines developed by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI).</p><p>Method: Telephone interviews were conducted with eleven of the twenty-three Swedish companies listed in the GRI register in order to get their point of view regarding these factors.</p><p>Results: The study identified that the willingness to communicate with more than one stakeholder group is the most important factor that can influence the amount of information disclosed in sustainability reports. The authors also argue that a proactive attitude towards identifying legitimation strategies instead of an adaptive approach can also influence the degree of disclosure. Finally, a positive attitude towards the GRI guidelines may also contribute to producing a more detailed report.</p>

<p>Diagnostic systems become more and more an important within the field of vehicle systems. This is much because new rules and regulation forcing the manufacturer of heavy duty trucks to survey the emission process in its engines during the whole lifetime of the truck. To do this a diagnostic system has to be implemented which always survey the process and check that the thresholds of the emissions set by the government not are exceeded. There is also a demand that this system should be reliable, i.e. not producing false alarms or missed detection. One way of producing such a system is to use model based diagnosis system where thresholds has to be set deciding if the system is corrupt or not. There is a lot of difficulties involved in this. Firstly, there is no way of knowing if the signals logged are corrupt or not. This is because faults in these signals should be detected. Secondly, because of strict demand of reliability the thresholds has to be set where there is very low probability of finding values while driving. In this thesis a methodology is proposed for setting thresholds in a diagnosis system in an experimental test engine at Scania. Measurement data has been logged over 20 hours of effective driving by two individuals of the same engine. It is shown that the result is improved significantly by using this method and the threshold can be set so smaller faults in the system reliably can be detected.</p>

Title from PDF of title page. / Document formatted into pages; contains 92 pages. / Thesis (M.S.I.E.)--University of South Florida, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references. / Text (Electronic thesis) in PDF format. / ABSTRACT: In this research a heuristic algorithm is developed for searching and identifying preferred actions as applied to the bus route design problem. The search routine evaluates each subsequent segment added to the route in the context of the value of that segment and also the value of future decisions and opportunities for subsequent segments. The total overall maximum accessibility of the system is calculated using a minimum path network between each node pair and adding the accessibility of all route segments. This is equivalent to assuming that there was a direct shortest path route between every two destinations in the network. The quality of the designed network is obtained by comparing the share of the total benefits obtained from the heuristic with the share of the costs incurred with respect to a minimum path network. Several test cases and network scenarios are studied to evaluate the analytical tool developed. / ABSTRACT: In addition, different performance measures are used to identify the connecting routes that increase the accessibility of the system. / System requirements: World Wide Web browser and PDF reader. / Mode of access: World Wide Web.

The prevalence of insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) in obese children and adolescents is growing at an alarming rate, especially in ethnic minorities. It is not clear whether young people of different ethnic backgrounds vary in their metabolic response to excessive adiposity. Differences in lipid partitioning in the abdominal fat compartments have been observed among different ethnic groups. The aim of this study was to evaluate whether there are ethnic differences in intramyocellular lipid (IMCL) levels that are related to differences in insulin sensitivity. Eighty-two obese children and adolescents underwent 1) 1H nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy to non-invasively quantify IMCL levels in their soleus muscle, 2) an oral glucose tolerance test and (in a subset of subjects) a euglycemic-hyperinsulinemic clamp to assess insulin sensitivity, 3) a dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DEXA) scan to measure total percent body fat, and 4) magnetic resonance imaging to measure abdominal fat distribution. IMCL levels in Hispanic children and adolescents (1.50 ± 0.64%) were significantly greater than in their Caucasian (1.19 ± 0.40%) and African-American (1.09 ± 0.49%) peers. Visceral fat was significantly lower in African Americans (42.7 ± 18.8cm2) and were similar in Caucasians (70.9 ± 27.5cm2) and Hispanics (77.3 ± 41.9cm2). The three groups were not different with respect to insulin sensitivity. For the entire cohort, IMCL levels were inversely related to insulin sensitivity. There was a significant correlation between visceral fat and insulin resistance in Hispanics and Caucasians but not in African Americans. In conclusion, these data suggest that there are significant ethnic differences in lipid partitioning in both the muscle and abdominal compartment. These findings may explain ethnic differences in insulin sensitivity and further the understanding of the pathogenesis of insulin resistance and T2DM.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 208-215).

The purpose of this study was to investigate the potential use of Second Life (Linden Labs, 2004) and Skype (Skype Limited, 2009) as simulated virtual professional development tools for pre-service teachers seeking endorsement in teaching English as a Second Official Language (ESOL. Second Life is an avatar-based Internet program that allows end-users to interact, using audio and chat features, with a digital representation of themselves (an avatar). Skype is an Internet-based video conferencing program that allows users to see each other by way of a webcam. Of particular interest to this study was how a group of 12 pre-service teacher education students internalized professional knowledge and if that knowledge was actually transferred into active teaching practice and professional identity development. To investigate this knowledge transfer, an exploratory case study (Yin, 2008) was conducted framed around the theories of sociocultural constructivism (Kanuka & Anderson, 1999; Vygotsky, 1978) and critical pedagogy (Freire, 1990). The components of one module from the ESOL II course that addressed hegemonic curriculum and teaching practices were recreated in Second Life and Skype or analysis. Using within-case analysis (Miles & Huberman, 1994), vignettes (Ely, Vinz, Downing, & Anzul, 1997; Spalding & Phillips, 2007), and tallied collaborative utterances (Erben 2001), developmental progressions among the pre-service teachers were examined from the beginning to the end of the module and were evaluated for their relevance to knowledge transfer and self-regulation. The interactions were also examined for instances of amplifications and reductions of pedagogic practices (Erben 1999) through collaborative dialogue (Bakhtin, 2006; Erben, 2001; Wertsch, 1991). The findings of this study suggested the positive potential of using Second Life and Skype to enable self-regulation and pedagogic transformations to occur among the participants with appropriate considerations acknowledged for the teaching audience, developmental goals, and venue of instruction.

Weather conditions have certain impacts on roadway traffic operations, especially traffic safety. Bridges differ from most surface streets and highways in terms of their physical properties and operational characteristics. This research assess the driving risk under different weather conditions through focus group firstly, then it develops a multi-ordered discrete choice model that is used to analyze and evaluate driving risks under both single and dual weather conditions. The data is derived from an extensive questionnaire survey in Shanghai. And the questionnaire includes those factors related to roadway, drivers, vehicles, and traffic that may have significant impacts on traffic safety under severe weather conditions. Considering the actual situation these variables except driver's gender are selected as independent variables of risk evaluation. As a result, different risk levels and corresponding probability are calculated, which are very important to optimize emergency resource allocation and make reasonable emergency measures. Moreover, in order to reduce severe bridge-related crashes, the research develops an ordered probit model to analyze those factors contributing to bridge-related crash severity and to predict probabilities of different severity levels under rainy conditions.

In this thesis we study the effect of electron-electron interactions on Chiral two-dimensional electron gas (C2DEGs). C2DEGs are a very good description of the low-energy electronic properties of single layer and multilayer graphene systems. The low-energy properties of single layer and multilayer graphene are described by Chiral Hamiltoninans whose band eigenstates have definite chirality. In this thesis we focus on the effect of electron-electron interactions on two of these systems: monolayer and bilayer graphene. In the first half of this thesis we use the massless Dirac Fermion model and random-phase-approximation to study the effect of interactions in graphene sheets. The interplay of graphene's single particle chiral eigenstates along with electron-electron interactions lead to a peculiar supression of spin susceptibility and compressibility, and also to an unusual velocity renormalization. We also report on a theoretical study of the influence of electron-electron interactions on ARPES spectra in graphene. We find that level repulsion between quasiparticle and plasmaron resonances gives rise to a gap-like feature near the Dirac point. In the second half we anticipate interaction driven integer quantum Hall effects in bilayer graphene because of the near-degeneracy of the eight Landau levels which appear near the neutral system Fermi level. We predict that an intra-Landau-level cyclotron resonance signal will appear at some odd-integer filling factors, accompanied by collective modes which are nearly gapless and have approximate q[superscrit 3/2] dispersion. We speculate on the possibility of unusual localization physics associated with these modes. / text