My dissertation focuses on the effect of several variables on two key forms of political participation -- voting and candidacy. First, I examine how voter turnout is impacted by differences in the intensity of political beliefs across the electorate and the resulting impact on candidate issue choice. Next, I examine the role of term limits and political party recruitment policies in determining the quality of the political class. Finally, I examine the impact of term limits at the lower rungs of the political ladder on the quality of individuals seeking higher office. In Chapter 2, I present a modified version of Downs’ spatial model to analyze the effect on candidates’ policy choices when there is a positive relationship between political extremism and conviction. I assume that alienation and lack of conviction affect voter turnout negatively. I find that the positive relationship between political extremism and conviction leads candidates away from the center and describe the conditions under which segments of the electorate will abstain in equilibrium. Incorporating candidate asymmetry through differences in valence and campaign finances resulted in the strategy of the disadvantaged candidate being unrestricted. Meanwhile, the advantaged candidate can afford to be more centrist or extremist than his opponent in order to win the election. In Chapter 3, I present a multi-period model analyzing the impact of political party recruitment and retention policies and the implementation of term limits on the quality of individuals seeking a career in politics. Candidates differ in political skill and their political skill directly affects the provision of a public good. Term limits lead to a restructuring of the timing of rewards for political careers. I find that term limits increase the probability of entry of those of lesser quality. Under certain conditions, term limits reduce the expected ability of those entering the political arena, as those of higher ability are more adversely affected by the restructuring of rewards. In Chapter 4, I explore the extent to which term limits alter the average quality of office-seekers for higher-level political positions. In addition, I determine whether improvement in quality in upper level political positions comes at the expense of lower level positions. The results suggest that term limits on lower level elected offices reduce the expected political skill of officeholders at this level. Under limited circumstances, term limits will also reduce the expected political skill of those seeking upper level political positions. Under most conditions, term limitation at lower level offices lead to an improvement in the quality of elected officials in upper level offices. / text

published_or_final_version / Public Administration / Master / Master of Public Administration

Drawing on social movement literature, my thesis examines if news media, NGO, business and government engagement of the BP Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico is affected by issue or event complexity, visuality, or issue build-up. To engage this, data from English language newspaper articles in the US, Canada, and the UK, press releases by Greenpeace and Sierra Club, press releases by BP, ExxonMobil, and Shell as well as press releases by the White House are analyzed using both quantitative and qualitative methods. I find that as an issue or event’s casual narrative becomes less complicated and as it becomes easier to portray visually its engagement by social and political actors increases. I also find that issue engagement is influenced by whether or not social and political actors signal an issue or an event’s importance to others.

The main goal of this thesis is to present cosmological perturbation theory (based on the standard Friedmann cosmological model) in volume-preserving coordinates, which then provides a suitable basis for studies in cosmological averaging. We review perturbation theory to second order, allowing for averaging to second order in future research. To solve the averaging problem we need a method of covariantly and gauge invariantly averaging tensorial objects on a background manifold. This is a very difficult problem. However, the definition of an average takes on a particularly simple form when written in a system of volume-preserving coordinates. Therefore, we develop a three dimensional and a four dimensional volume-preserving coordinate gauge in this thesis that can be used for averaging in cosmological perturbation theory.

This thesis introduces performance and power optimization techniques for caches. Our optimization techniques target both conventional caches, which are implemented using six-transistor (6T) cells, and highly reliable caches implemented using eight-transistor (8T) cells. In 6T cell caches, we enhance leakage power dissipation by adapting a previous proposed technique, Drowsy Cache, according to the application behavior. We show that spatial locality in embedded applications is low and Drowsy Cache misses a significant leakage power saving opportunities. By taking a finer granularity approach, we achieve a significant leakage power reduction with minimal performance overhead. Although 6T cell caches are commonly used, we show that they are not proper choice for future designs due to poor stability. We investigate 8T cells as alternative reliable designs for implementing caches. However, Column Selection Issue limits efficiency of 8T cells during write operations. Previous solution, Read-Modify-Write (RMW), addressed column selection issue by requiring a read operation before each write operation, imposing significant overhead on performance, cache traffic, and power. We observe that a significant share of cache accesses in RMW is either redundant or unnecessary, consequently can be avoided without compromising program execution consistency. Based on our observations, we propose two techniques which exploit a buffering mechanism to detect and filter out unnecessary and redundant cache accesses. Our simulation results show that our techniques improve performance and cache traffic effectively in 8T cell caches. Furthermore, we propose a novel dual threshold 8T cell which reduces leakage power significantly with negligible impact on performance. Our proposed cell also improves stability and robustness to process variations compared to the conventional 8T cells. / Graduate / 0544 / farahani.mostafa@gmail.com

This thesis analyzes the impact of the European Union (EU) on the Turco-Hellenic conflict. The theoretical foundation of this thesis is the link between EU enlargement, policies of conditionality and the process of &lsquo / Europeanization&rsquo / . The thesis makes the point that, apart from visible capabilities such as Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), enlargement is a more significant channel through which the EU interacts with the conflicts in its periphery. With this in mind, the thesis makes a survey of EU involvement in the Turkish-Greek conflict starting from the 1960s, emergence of the Cyprus issue between Greece and Turkey and the changing nature of Turkey-Europe relations with Greece&rsquo / s membership in 1981.

Although skin disease and musculoskeletal disorders are believed to be common among nursing home workers, to date there have been no coordinated international studies of these occupational issues. Therefore, it was considered appropriate to conduct one of the first cross-cultural investigations of occupational dermatology and ergonomic complaints among nursing home workers in Australia, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan using a standardised methodology. This thesis documents a 4-year investigation of skin disease and musculoskeletal disorders conducted among 465 nursing home staff in Australia, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. Skin diseases were diagnosed by specialist physicians during medical examinations, while information on musculoskeletal disorders was collected by means of a self-reported questionnaire. There were major differences in both the location and type of skin disease between the 4 groups. Overall, the Australian group suffered a generally higher prevalence of skin disease than in the other three countries investigated, most likely due to their significantly higher rate of sun-induced skin damage. The high prevalence of cutaneous fungal disease seen within the Taiwanese subjects most probably arose from the comparatively higher temperature and relative humidity of Taiwan. Other potentially important skin disease risk factors included previous skin disease and a history of allergy, both of which are consistent with current knowledge. Although musculoskeletal disorders were found to be most prevalent among the Japanese nursing home staff at almost all body sites, the reasons for this are not clear. It may have related to a generally higher musculoskeletal rate, or a higher degree of self-reporting on their questionnaires. Individual MSD risk factors included moving patients, washing patients, working as an assistant nurse and daily alcohol consumption. Interestingly, MSD was found to be a co-factor for current skin disease. Overall, this study indicated that certain occupational health issues consistently affect nursing home staff in the 4 countries, but the prevalence and rank order varies from nation to nation. It was also shown that nursing home work incurs a reasonable degree of risk and that skin disease and musculoskeletal disorders are important occupational issues within these facilities.

Thesis (M.P.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 139-140).

Thesis (M.B.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 92-93).

Thesis (M. Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 87-90).