Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 121-129).

Thesis (Honors)--University of South Florida, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 39-42).

Abstract The research question we wish to investigate is the degree to which different countries with differing levels of NSI strength and weakness cope in mitigating some of the adverse impacts of the recession. In general during the recession confidence declines or what Keynes calls the „animal spirit‟. Creative destruction is heightened as firms destroyed need to find other ways of recreating their economic activities. Exports and imports change. Investment from abroad declines and consumers afraid of the recession save or even hoard. Such a state is likely to impact those who are absorbing FDI and exporting to the heartland of the current recession which is the US market. China and India both export mainly hardware and software related goods and services respectively to this market where reduction in demand has resulted in company closures and unemployment. Even free trade has been challenged with protectionist and nationalist rhetoric on the rise during this recession. Given a recession that has affected the entire world economy and its constituent parts, both the way the recession impacts on different national economies and the ability of national economies to mitigate the recession are likely to be different. This paper concentrates on the latter not on the former per se. We examine what mitigating capability different national innovation systems have in relation to dealing with and responding to the current world financial and economic crises. The hypothesis we would like to test with descriptive comparative data is how far the relative strength or weakness of the NSI is capable of mitigating the adverse impact of the recession. We assume that that the nature and degree of impact of the recession across countries are likely to be different. In this paper we would like to take only the NSI factor in trying to account how such differences due to the individual characteristics of NSIs across different countries mitigate recessionary impact on given economies. For this, we propose to examine selected sectors from selected emerging economies such as China, India, Brazil and South Africa (BRICS excluding Russia) to estimate mitigating capabilities of different NSIs.

The demand for solar radiation forecasting has become a significant feature in the design of photovoltaic (PV) systems. Currently, the artificial neural network (ANN) is the most popular model that is used to estimate solar radiation. However, a new approach, called the extreme learning machine (ELM) algorithm, has been introduced by Huang et al. In this research, ELM and a multilayer feed-forward network with back propagation were used to predict daily global solar radiation. Metrological parameters such as air temperature, humidity and date code have been used as inputs for the ANN and ELM models. The accuracy and performance of these techniques were evaluated by comparing their outputs. ELM is faster than ANN, and results in a high generalization capability. / It is a comperison between ANN and ELM

The immensity of the social and (natural) environmental impacts that technologies have in today’s global context challenges the existing engineering education curricula. Observational research inspired the notion that the current engineering curricula is inadequately preparing engineers for their increasingly international roles. Observa- tional research was conducted in Morocco, Indonesia and Sri Lanka which highlighted the potential impact of engineering in addressing issues of marginalization. Perspectives from engineering industry and academia were also studied. This re- search confirmed that the future landscape of engineering will require engineering education to focus more significantly on non-technical skills and on providing inte- grated and interdisciplinary programs with an international focus. These studies also indicated that there is a need for engineers to both consider the circumstances of low-income communities and to reexamine the philosophies and pedagogy of current engineering programs. The perspectives of students was researched through forums and an engineering course. Five separate forums in April and May, 2006 were presented to engineering students at Queen’s University discuss and debate the idea of curricular reform. A module and pro ject that was based on a more holistic and socially conscious approach to engineering was incorporated into a first year engineering course at Queen’s Uni- versity called APSC 190: Professional Engineering Skills. Both the forum and course used observational research methods and questionnaires to determine that Queen’s students were very interested a program with greater focus on social and environmen- tal issues in a global context. Humanitarian Engineering is a proposed program for Queen’s University’s Faculty of Applied Science. This program intends to address the evolving expectations of engineering education in order to respond to the demands of industry, academia, students and society. Humanitarian Engineering is proposed to be a Master’s program and a four-year undergraduate option that is taken collaboratively with the existing engineering disciplines, e.g. Civil, Mechanical, Chemical, etc. It will be built on the philosophies of humility, appreciation and cooperation and will best suit the needs of society if taught through the methodologies of participatory action research (PAR) and biomimicry. / Thesis (Master, Civil Engineering) -- Queen's University, 2008-04-28 14:55:36.248 / Dr. Kevin Hall

Thomas Pogge has famously argued that the present arrangement of international institutions that allows for human rights violations to occur on an ongoing basis is unjust, and further, that powerful states that create and maintain these institutions are responsible for the resulting human rights violations. By setting the rules of economic and political interaction in the global forum, the world’s rich and powerful stack the deck against the global poor, making sustainable development difficult and making extreme poverty, malnutrition, and premature death common outcomes. Pogge concludes that this implication of responsibility creates a moral requirement for powerful nations to take immediate steps to reform the global institutional order in such a way as to minimize the number of foreseeable human rights violations that occur within it. I believe that Pogge is only partly correct in his analysis. In this paper, I argue that the global institutional order, which is comprised of a complex web of global and regional organizations with both political and economic aims, is not unjust as Pogge suggests. However, even if the maintenance of these institutions does not constitute an injustice, I believe that there remains an important sense in which powerful states that support the present arrangement of international institutions are responsible for ongoing subsistence rights violations. Establishing this responsibility means that states that continue to support present institutions are then also morally responsible for ensuring these human rights violations are remedied as a matter of justice. In his 2007 book National Responsibility and Global Justice, David Miller provides the sort of account of responsibility that I believe is lacking in Pogge’s work. Differentiating between moral responsibility, outcome responsibility, and causal responsibility, Miller shows that what we mean when we determine a party is “responsible” for a particular outcome can depend on several factors, viz., the foreseeability and the justification for harm. I argue that the sorts of remedies that are required in cases of moral responsibility, outcome responsibility, and causal responsibility turn out to be quite different from one another. / Thesis (Master, Philosophy) -- Queen's University, 2008-09-24 23:40:45.915

Strong gravitational lensing produces multiple distorted images of a background source when it is closely aligned with a mass distribution along the line of sight. The lensed images provide constraints on the parameters of a model of the lens, and the images themselves can be inverted providing a model of the source. Both of these aspects of lensing are extremely valuable, as lensing depends on the total matter distribution, both luminous and dark. Furthermore, lensed sources are commonly located at cosmological distances and are magnified by the lensing effect. This provides a chance to image sources that would be unobservable when viewed with conventional optics. The semilinear method expresses the source modeling step as a least-squares problem for a given set of lens model parameters. The blurring effect due to the point spread function of the instrument used to observe the lensed images is also taken into account. In general, regularization is needed to solve the source deconvolution problem. We use Krylov subspace methods to solve for the pixelated sources. These optimization techniques, such as the Conjugate Gradient method, provide natural regularizing effects from simple truncated iteration. Using these routines, we are able to avoid the explicit construction of the lens and blurring matrices and solve the least squares source optimization problem iteratively. We explore several regularization parameter selection methods commonly used in standard image deconvolution problems, which lead to previously derived expressions for the number of source degrees of freedom. The parameters that describe the lens density distribution are found by global optimization methods including genetic algorithms and particle swarm optimizers. In general, global optimizers are useful in non-linear optimization problems such as lens modeling due to their parameter space mapping capabilities. However, these optimization methods require many function evaluations and iterative approaches to the least squares problem are beneficial due to the speed advantage that they offer. We apply our modeling techniques to a subset of gravitational lens systems from the Sloan Lens ACS (SLACS) survey, and are able to reliably recover the parameters of the lens mass distribution with both analytical and regularized pixelated sources.

This thesis examines how, in the global context of the 1990s, economic planning for an economically disadvantaged peripheral region within a small open national economy has become an exercise in the maxim 'Think Globally and Act Locally". It examines the content, context and process of economic policy making in Atlantic Canada in the 1990s. It critically analyzes the dissonance between generic visions of a competitive Atlantic Canada and the particular regional realities that must be taken into consideration if the plans are to be successful. The thesis also suggests a normative course of action in policy planning and implementation that can reduce this dissonance. The thesis is organized around four fundamental questions: 1) How is a competitive economy created in the global context of the 1990s and what roles should the state and the market assume. 2) What prescriptions for competitiveness are being presented in Atlantic Canadian economic policy documents. 3) What impediments and advantages does the Atlantic Canadian political-economy present to the realisation of this vision of a competitive economy. and 4) How can the economic policy planning and implementation processes be improved in order to better the chances of success for these kinds of policies. The critical analysis of the literature addresses the first three questions by surveying the areas of industrial policy, management theory, and Atlantic Canadian economic history and economic development planning. The fourth question is addressed through an empirical case study evaluation of Nova Scotia Voluntary Planning, a non-government sector organization composed of industry and labour leaders, and of its economic strategy document entitled "Creating Our Own Future". Theoretical and methodological guidelines for the evaluation models were drawn from the literature on policy research, cooperative inquiry, critical planning and critical evaluation theory, the role of mediating structures in public policy delivery and planning as social learning.

Strong gravitational lensing produces multiple distorted images of a background source when it is closely aligned with a mass distribution along the line of sight. The lensed images provide constraints on the parameters of a model of the lens, and the images themselves can be inverted providing a model of the source. Both of these aspects of lensing are extremely valuable, as lensing depends on the total matter distribution, both luminous and dark. Furthermore, lensed sources are commonly located at cosmological distances and are magnified by the lensing effect. This provides a chance to image sources that would be unobservable when viewed with conventional optics. The semilinear method expresses the source modeling step as a least-squares problem for a given set of lens model parameters. The blurring effect due to the point spread function of the instrument used to observe the lensed images is also taken into account. In general, regularization is needed to solve the source deconvolution problem. We use Krylov subspace methods to solve for the pixelated sources. These optimization techniques, such as the Conjugate Gradient method, provide natural regularizing effects from simple truncated iteration. Using these routines, we are able to avoid the explicit construction of the lens and blurring matrices and solve the least squares source optimization problem iteratively. We explore several regularization parameter selection methods commonly used in standard image deconvolution problems, which lead to previously derived expressions for the number of source degrees of freedom. The parameters that describe the lens density distribution are found by global optimization methods including genetic algorithms and particle swarm optimizers. In general, global optimizers are useful in non-linear optimization problems such as lens modeling due to their parameter space mapping capabilities. However, these optimization methods require many function evaluations and iterative approaches to the least squares problem are beneficial due to the speed advantage that they offer. We apply our modeling techniques to a subset of gravitational lens systems from the Sloan Lens ACS (SLACS) survey, and are able to reliably recover the parameters of the lens mass distribution with both analytical and regularized pixelated sources.

Samtidigt som fattigdomen runt om i världen stadigt minskar så växer sig remitteringsflödena allt större. I denna uppsats undersöks om remitteringar kan anses vara en bidragande faktor till detta. För att kunna undersöka vår frågeställning har vi genomfört en regressionsanalys på ett dataset vi sammanställt bestående av olika mått på fattigdom och andra variabler som rimligen kan antas ha en effekt på fattigdom från 83 utvecklingsländer. Resultaten från vår studie tyder på att viss diskrepans råder inom forskningsområdet då vi inte har lyckats finna något statistiskt signifikant samband mellan remitteringar och minskad fattigdom. Det är tvärtemot vad tidigare forskning har kommit fram till. Vi vill dock understryka att det finns behov av mer omfattande studier av än större dataset för att minimera risken för bias i resultaten. / While poverty around the globe is decreasing steadily, the flow of remittances grows continuously. The outline for this paper is to examine whether or not there is a statistically significant relationship between poverty and remittances. To be able to examine our research question we have conducted a regression analysis on a new set of data which we have compiled. The data consists of two different measures of poverty and other variables which reasonably may have an effect on poverty, from 83 developing countries. The result from our study indicates a discrepancy in this field of research since we were not able to find any statistically significant relationship between poverty and remittances, which is contrary to what prior research has concluded. We want to emphasize, however, that more extensive research is required on yet bigger sets of data to minimize the risk of bias in the results.