Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

There is a large body of research that indicates that international equity markets co-move over time. This co-movement manifests in various instruments, ranging from equities and bonds to soft commodities. However, this co-movement is more prevalent over crisis periods and can be seen in returns and volatility transmission effects. The recent financial crisis demonstrated that no local market is immune to transmission effects from international markets. South African financial market participants, such as investors and policymakers, have a vested interest in understanding how the equity market in particular and the economy in general react to international financial crises. This study aims to contribute an improved understanding of how the South African equity market interacts with international equity markets, by identifying the degree of price and volatility transmission before, during, and after an international financial crisis. This was done by investigating the possibility of changes in price and volatility transmissions from the Asian financial crisis (1997–1998), the dotcom bubble (2000–2001) and the more recent subprime financial crisis (2007–2009). An Exponential Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (E-GARCH) model was employed within the framework of an Aggregate Shock model. The results indicate that during the international financial crises studied, the JSE All Share Index was directly affected through contagion effects inherent in the returns of the originating crisis country. Volatility transmissions during international financial crises came directly from the originating crisis country. Finally, the FTSE 100 Index was the main exporter of price and volatility transmission to the JSE All Share Index. / Thesis (M.Com. (Risk management))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2012

The use of Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles (UCAV) or drones have in recent yearsbecome the modus operandi of US counterterrorism strategy to eliminate sought out terrorists.Since the initiation of systematic drone strikes in Pakistan 2004, their use has increased andalso expanded into other countries. In 2012 Yemen experienced equal levels of strikes asPakistan. Thirteen years have passed since the “war on terror” began and although Osama binLaden has been killed, al-Qaeda still prevails and might be expanding. This study examines apossible spread of al-Qaeda from Pakistan to Yemen, since the initiation of drone strikes, byprocess tracing. Building on the literature of al-Qaeda, counterterrorism and UCAV, the aimhas been to analyze drone strikes affect on terrorism by tracing al-Qaeda’s development.Findings suggest there are indications of a spread from al-Qaeda in Pakistan to Yemen,although further research is required to confirm uncertainties in the material.

The use of Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles (UCAV) or drones have in recent years become the modus operandi of US counterterrorism strategy to eliminate sought out terrorists.Since the initiation of systematic drone strikes in Pakistan 2004, their use has increased andalso expanded into other countries. In 2012 Yemen experienced equal levels of strikes asPakistan. Thirteen years have passed since the “war on terror” began and although Osama bin Laden has been killed, al-Qaeda still prevails and might be expanding. This study examines apossible spread of al-Qaeda from Pakistan to Yemen, since the initiation of drone strikes, byprocess tracing. Building on the literature of al-Qaeda, counterterrorism and UCAV, the aimhas been to analyze drone strikes affect on terrorism by tracing al-Qaeda’s development.Findings suggest there are indications of a spread from al-Qaeda in Pakistan to Yemen,although further research is required to confirm uncertainties in the material.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 68-81). Also available in electronic version. Access restricted to campus users.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of South Carolina, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 150-153).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2005. / Title from first page of PDF file. Document formatted into pages; contains xiii, 126 p.; also includes graphics. Includes bibliographical references (p. 119-126). Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center

The Book of Leviticus has been described as the ‘first hygiene text’ based upon the observation that Leviticus contains a great deal of matter relating to two conditions. The first is צרעת translated in the Septuagint as λέπρα and confused in English translations with modern leprosy. The second, זוב was misused as a generic term for a whole spectrum of genital discharges. Apart from these, Leviticus contains nothing of a ‘medical’ nature. The question arises, as to whether these terms implied any sort of medical context or whether their only significance was as markers of ritual impurity to the priesthood. In Chapter 1 this question is developed and an hypothesis arrived at. A hermeneutic and methodology for the study are introduced and discussed. Chapter 2 is a review of the state of developing ‘medical practice’ in the Ancient Near East. Chapter 3 is concerned with the ideology of the levitical priesthood and their worldview in particular in respect of the establishment and operation of practice of ritual. Chapter 4 treats on the Levitical notion of impurity considered from both taxonomical and sociological standpoints and these approaches are discussed in the context of the present study. Chapters 5 and 6 each contain a detailed ‘medical exegesis’ of chapters 13 and 15 of Leviticus dealing with צרעת and .זוב Chapter 7 contains a similar treatment of the biblical notion of blemish and addresses the question of whether this was a mark of impurity like צרעת and .זוב In Chapter 8 embodies idea of contagion in the context of the ‘hygienic’ theme in Leviticus and the priests’ concern with what might imperil sacred objects. Chapter 9 employs context logometrical analysis in a detailed study of the word צרעת and whether there was, in Ancient Israel, any relationship, adverse or synergic between the activities of the priests in preserving purity, and early healthcare practice. Chapter 10 is a discussion of how צרעת has been seen from a theological perspective. While the exact nature of צרעת remains unknown, its biblical context — levitical and non levitical — is considered in relation to modern theories of the relationship of the impurity laws, sin and the wholeness↔ healthcare dynamic. Chapter 11 is a presentation of the conclusions that may be drawn from this study in respect of the wholeness↔ holiness paradigm posited in the hypothesis. It is concluded that there is no clear evidence to suggest that the priesthood saw צרעת and זוב in any terms commensurate with modern pathology and clinical medicine. Consequently it would be wrong to suppose, as many authors have, that in the levitical context, countermeasures to these conditions, though diagnostic, were hygienic in the modern, medical, — they were not, nor were they ever envisaged to be. That some of these measures subsequently found a significant place in preventive medicine appears to have been both fortuitous and fortunate.

abstract: Internet sites that support user-generated content, so-called Web 2.0, have become part of the fabric of everyday life in technologically advanced nations. Users collectively spend billions of hours consuming and creating content on social networking sites, weblogs (blogs), and various other types of sites in the United States and around the world. Given the fundamentally emotional nature of humans and the amount of emotional content that appears in Web 2.0 content, it is important to understand how such websites can affect the emotions of users. This work attempts to determine whether emotion spreads through an online social network (OSN). To this end, a method is devised that employs a model based on a general threshold diffusion model as a classifier to predict the propagation of emotion between users and their friends in an OSN by way of mood-labeled blog entries. The model generalizes existing information diffusion models in that the state machine representation of a node is generalized from being binary to having n-states in order to support n class labels necessary to model emotional contagion. In the absence of ground truth, the prediction accuracy of the model is benchmarked with a baseline method that predicts the majority label of a user's emotion label distribution. The model significantly outperforms the baseline method in terms of prediction accuracy. The experimental results make a strong case for the existence of emotional contagion in OSNs in spite of possible alternative arguments such confounding influence and homophily, since these alternatives are likely to have negligible effect in a large dataset or simply do not apply to the domain of human emotions. A hybrid manual/automated method to map mood-labeled blog entries to a set of emotion labels is also presented, which enables the application of the model to a large set (approximately 900K) of blog entries from LiveJournal. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.S. Computer Science 2011

In this thesis, we analyse financial contagion between Southern European (Greek, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish) and Central Eastern European (Czech, Polish and Hungarian) stock markets respectively sovereign bond markets in the period from January 2001 to June 2016. A quantile regression framework is applied to analyse contagion based on measuring of occurrences and degrees of co-exceedances. We use conditional variance (volatility) of analysed markets to find direction of the contagion. Our results show that during the analysed period contagion between stock markets exists. Contagion between stock markets is stronger during the financial and sovereign debt crisis. Direction of contagion is from Southern European to Central Eastern European Countries. We do not find evidence of contagion between Sothern European and Central Eastern European sovereign bond markets. Our results show "flight to quality", but not "flight from quality".