This exploratory study examined outcomes of single telephone counselling calls, with a self-selected sample of 38 clients from a family counselling agency. The sample was interviewed by telephone at two days and six weeks after the call to assess crisis counselling outcomes in affect, identification of the problem and action taken, and client equilibrium. Repeated measures of the 'perceptual concordance' of counsellor and client were taken over a period of six weeks, assessing levels of concordance between client and counsellor about perceptions of counselling, and client equilibrium. The sufficiency of a single counselling session was also assessed. 'Perceptual concordance' was suggested by reduced client stress, high levels of agreement between client and counsellor in the identification of the problem and agreed action, and satisfaction with the counselling. Positive indicators of restored client equilibrium included a maintenance of lower stress levels, changes in behaviour, improvement in perceptions of the seriousness of the problem, satisfaction with life and with the counselling. Further research of equilibrium as a concept, and an indicator of crisis resolution is warranted. The sufficiency of a single session of counselling was supported by 56% of clients. The variety of services used by clients as an outcome of the counselling suggests that it could be beneficial for telephone counselling agencies to offer a follow-up call. Verifying the agreed action and assessing equilibrium could be useful indicators of effective telephone counselling.

Presently, the more or less global political consensus is that the primary task of government is to perpetually maximise a quantity called 'economic growth'. Given the decline of 'socialist' models of industrialisation, the economic consensus is that economic growth is best achieved through the deregulation of markets, industry and trade, as free markets are self-regulating institutions that automatically and efficiently optimise growth through their tendency to reach 'equilibrium.' Another word for this consensus might be 'neoliberalism'. This cosy situation, however, is increasingly under challenge from the recent transformation of global warming from a deniable proposition to a clear and present danger. As ecologists and earth scientists have long argued, global warming (an unforeseen side effect of what was called the 'energy crisis' in the 1970s) is just one of many aspects of a generalised global ecological crisis. The biosphere, environmentalists tell us, is radically 'out of balance'. Given this impasse, it appears that the science of social systems (economics) and the science of living systems (ecology) are incommensurable. This incommensurability is the starting point of the thesis, which seeks to provide a genealogy of the concepts of equilibrium and growth as they appear in the claims of both disciplines to represent 'hard' science. Drawing from debates in the philosophy of science, studies in the history of ideas, the anthropology of technology, and political economy, the thesis charts the mutual exchange of metaphors and analogies between the natural and the social sciences, and traces a surprisingly parallel trajectory in the separate histories of economics and ecology. Beginning with early historicist and organicist conceptual frameworks, both sciences embraced 'mechanism' in their bid to attain the mantle of Science. For both sciences, the attainment of this status was associated with the incorporation of the language of energetics and an insistent identification of 'equilibrium' with the central scientific object of inquiry, 'the market' and 'the ecosystem' respectively. What is ironic in these claims is that the acceptance of the machine metaphor effecti vely screened out the study of actual machinery from the pure states of nature called 'the market' or 'the economy.' This history is taken up to the climactic moment of the early 1970s, when, it is argued, the ontological foundations of ecology and economics collided. This is the moment from which the political discourses of neoliberal globalisation and global environmental crisis both date, and since then we see the rise of hybrid discourses that attempt to address and overcome the deep contradictions of disciplinary specialisation. The thesis concludes with a brief discussion of the implications of this conceptual legacy, and in analysing the interactions of the 'new ecology' and the 'new economy', offers suggestions as to why what appeared in 1971 as a fundamental and obvious contradiction between 'growth' and 'equilibrium', no longer attracts debate.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

In this paper we characterize the "price of anarchy", i.e., the inefficiency between user and system optimal solutions, when costs are non-separable, asymmetric and nonlinear, generalizing earlier work that has addressed "price of anarchy" under separable costs. The generalization models traffice equilibria, competitive multi-period pricing and competitive supply chains. The bounds established in the paper are tight and explicitly account for the degeee of asymmetry and nonlinearity of the cost function. We introduce and alternate proof method for providing bounds that uses ideas from semidenfinite optimization. Finally, in the context of nulti-period pricing our analysis establishes that user and system optimal soulutions coincide.

Increasingly used in online auctions, buyout prices allow bidders to instantly purchase the item listed. We distinguish two types: a temporary buyout option disappears if a bid above the reserve price is made; a permanent one remains throughout the auction or until it is exercised. In a model featuring time-sensitive bidders with uniform valuations and Poisson arrivals but endogenous bidding times, we focus on finding temporary and permanent buyout prices maximizing the seller's discounted revenue, and examine the relative benefit of using each type of option in various environments. We characterize equilibrium bidder strategies in both cases and then solve the problem of maximizing seller's utility by simulation. Our numerical experiments suggest that buyout options may significantly increase a seller’s revenue. Additionally, while a temporary buyout option promotes early bidding, a permanent option gives an incentive to the bidders to bid late, thus leading to concentrated bids near the end of the auction. / Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA)

Thesis (M.Sc.)--Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 371-385).

Thesis (M. Sc.)(Metallurgical Engineering)--University of Pretoria, 2003. / Summaries in Afrikaans and English. Includes bibliographical references. Available on the Internet via the World Wide Web.

This thesis highlights the role of phase interfaces on phasetransformations in metallic materials. The deviation from localequilibrium at the moving phase interface has been analysed interms of solute drag theory and finite interface mobility. Inparticular the planar growth of proeutectoid ferrite fromaustenite in steel has been studied. The deviation from localequilibrium is caused by dissipation of Gibbs energy bydiffusion inside the phase interface and interface friction. Inthe analysis the interface is divided into three zones and thethermodynamic and kinetic properties are assumed to varycontinuously across the interface. A new model suitable formulticomponent alloys is developed. The model reduces to thefamiliar solute drag model by Cahn under simplifyingconditions. It was demonstrated how the interface model couldbe combined with a method for calculating the volume diffusionin both the growing and parent phases. With this combination ofprocedures the changes in local conditions at the interface, asthe growth rate changes due to long-range diffusion, could bedemonstrated for the case of continuous cooling in an Fe-Nialloy. The critical limit for massive transformation in the Fe-Niand Fe-C systems was calculated and found to lie well below theT0 line for both systems. The calculated limit for Fe-Ni wascompared with a recent experimental study and reasonableagreement was found. For the Fe-C system the limit calculatedwith the present model was compared with a phase-field model.The two approaches showed qualitatively the same behaviour andthe quantitative difference was due to different assumptions onhow properties vary across the interface. Finally, an attempt to simulate the partitionless growth offerrite in austenite in the Fe-Ni-C system was performed. Inthe applied model the dissipation of Gibbs energy inside theinterface and in the nickel spike ahead of the migratinginterface were accounted for. The long-range diffusion ofcarbon in austenite was treated with an approximate analyticalgrowth equation. A continuous change from paraequilibriumconditions and quasi-paraconditions could be shown in anisothermal section of the Fe-Ni-C phase diagram. Partitionlessgrowth starts in a parabolic fashion but slows down. For alloysoutside the limit for quasiparaconditions partitionless growthis predicted to stop abruptly while for alloys inside thatlimit growth approaches a second parabolic growth law. However,the latter case should not be expected in practise because ofimpingement effects.

The non-ideal aqueous electrolyte simulator (NAELS) is composed of three major parts: a Newton-Raphson non-linear optimization program written by Weare, et al (1987); an activity coefficient subroutine for non-ideal electrolyte systems based on Pitzer's model; and an extensive, user expandable database. It is robust, stable, and requires neither thermodynamic data nor initial guesses as input. NAELS provides very good estimates of equilibrium speciation and solubility in concentrated electrolyte systems. NAELS was assembled as a technical utility package for use on IBM-compatable microcomputers. / Graduation date: 1992