Although relativistic physics tend to omit nondynamical "absolute objects" such as a flat metric tensor or a preferred time foliation, there exist interesting questions related to such entities, such as worries about the "flow" of time in special relativity, and the apparent disappearance of time altogether in canonical general relativity. This latter problem is related to the lack of a fixed causal structure with repect to which one might posit "equal-time" commutation relations, for example. In view of these issues, we consider whether including a flat background metric, and perhaps a preferred foliation, is physically worthwhile. We show how a derivation of Einstein's equations from flat spacetime can be generalized to include a preferred foliation, the possible significance of which we discuss, though ultimately we suggest why such a foliation might be present in metaphysics and yet absent from physics. We also derive a new "slightly bimetric" class of theories using the flat spacetime approach. However, such derivations are only formally special relativistic, because they give no heed to the flat metric's causal structure, which the curved effective metric might well violate. After reviewing the history of this problem, we introduce new variables to give a kinematic description of the relation between the two null cones. Then we propose a method to enforce special relativistic causality by using the guage freedom to restrict the configuration space suitably. Consequences for exact solutions, such as the Schwarzschild solution and its 'singularity,' are discussed. Advantages and difficulties regarding adding a mass term to the theory are discussed briefly. / text

We study isometric maps between Teichmüller spaces and bounded symmetric domains in their Kobayashi metric. We prove that every totally geodesic isometry from a disk to Teichmüller space is either holomorphic or anti-holomorphic; in particular, it is a Teichmüller disk. However, we prove that in dimensions two or more there are no holomorphic isometric immersions between Teichmüller spaces and bounded symmetric domains and also prove a similar result for isometric submersions. / Mathematics

This paper explores how corporations can choose technical standards used throughout its organization. A methodology for choosing the standard is introduced. It is based on the methods that professional standards organizations use to create new standards for industries. The steps to choose an external standard as well as create new internal standards are consensus, development, approvals, and maintenance. Questions about standards from Applied Materials are answered: what technical standard should be used for engineering drawings, should the company use metric units, what tolerance scheme should be used, and how are standards chosen when a merger or acquisition is performed? Applied Materials should use the ASME Y14.5M-1994 standard. The move to metric should be done if the customers request it. Simple parts and complex assemblies should not be toleranced the same way. When mergers and acquisitions are done, the consensus, development, approval, and maintenance method should be used to choose which standards should be used. / text

We study the ∂-Neumann operator and the Kobayashi metric. We observe that under certain conditions, a higher-dimensional domain fibered over Ω can inherit noncompactness of the d-bar-Neumann operator from the base domain Ω. Thus we have a domain which has noncompact d-bar-Neumann operator but does not necessarily have the standard conditions which usually are satisfied with noncompact d-bar-Neumann operator. We define the property K which is related to the Kobayashi metric and gives information about holomorphic structure of fat subdomains. We find an equivalence between compactness of the d-bar-Neumann operator and the property K in any convex domain. We also find a local property of the Kobayashi metric [Theorem IV.1], in which the domain is not necessary pseudoconvex. We find a more general condition than finite type for the local regularity of the d-bar-Neumann operator with the vector-field method. By this generalization, it is possible for an analytic disk to be on the part of boundary where we have local regularity of the d-bar-Neumann operator. By Theorem V.2, we show that an isolated infinite-type point in the boundary of the domain is not an obstruction for the local regularity of the d-bar-Neumann operator.

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The English used in Malaysia is one of the varieties of New Englishes and this variety has emerged due to the spread of English around the world (Platt, et al., 1983; Pillai, 2006). In the case of Malaysia, Malay is the national language and standard English exists to be the language of an elite (Bao, 2006), also as a language of interaction. Over years of playing its various roles as a language of interaction, there has emerged a variety of English that is distinctively Malaysian (Asmah, 1992). Baskaran (2002) points out that English is now adopted and adapted in the linguistic ecology of Malaysia, and all Malaysians should be proud of it with all its local ‘nuances and innuendos’. Malaysian English today is ‘a rich tapestry of a typical transplanted variety of English’. Malaysian English (ME) is one of the new varieties of English, with some distinct features include the localized vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar as well as pragmatic features (Pillai, 2006; Pillai and Fauziah, 2006, p.39). The present study has embarked on a specialised study of vocabulary. In particular, it examined the English collocations produced by non-native speaker English users in Malaysia. The study provided insight into the nature of the internal norms of English used in Malaysia to see how these English restricted collocations being used by this group of learners. The investigation focused on the learners’ productive knowledge of Verb-Noun collocations of their written English with the impact of exposure and frequency. Nesselhauf (2003) has the opinion that verb-noun combinations are the most frequently mistaken so they should perceive particular attention of learners. Investigating collocation in English language learning is paramount as such study may inform us on the use of restricted collocations in English language teaching and learning in Malaysian context. The findings in Chapter 4 and 5 suggest that the frequency of the cloze verb does have an effect as predicted by Kuiper, Columbus and Schmitt (2009). This is so because frequency is a measure of likely exposure. The more frequent an item is in corpora, the more likely a learner is to be exposed to it. What is needed is a much more nuanced notion of exposure. The findings in Chapter 6 proves that the malformed collocations make sense could be a way of making the World English perspective relevant after all. A new testing approach is proposed; semantic plausibility metric, which is used as a tool for this study, can be useful used as a measure of vocabulary acquisition as well as looking at learners’ test taking strategies. The findings of the present research on Malaysian English collocations contribute new knowledge to the existing understanding and literature on the acquisition of collocations.

This study explored the publication pattern of Canadian computer scientists and compared the impact of conference papers and journal articles published by these researchers. It was found that conference proceedings are the preferred venue for scholarly communication, but the impact of conference papers is not comparable to that of journal articles. The potential reasons for the lower impact of conference papers are discussed, and possible approaches to improve the current scholarly communication system in computer science are proposed.

A central theme in phylogenetics is the reconstruction and analysis of evolutionary trees from a given set of data. To determine the optimal search methods for the reconstruction of trees, it is crucial to understand the size and structure of neighbourhoods of trees under tree rearrangement operations. The diameter and size of the immediate neighbourhood of a tree has been well-studied, however little is known about the number of trees at distance two, three or (more generally) k from a given tree. In this thesis we explore previous results on the size of these neighbourhoods under common tree rearrangement operations (NNI, SPR and TBR). We obtain new results concerning the number of trees at distance k from a given tree under the Robinson-Foulds (RF) metric and the Nearest Neighbour Interchange (NNI) operation, and the number of trees at distance two from a given tree under the Subtree Prune and Regraft (SPR) operation. We also obtain an exact count for the number of pairs of binary phylogenetic trees that share a first RF or NNI neighbour.

In this thesis, we will present examples of Voronoi diagrams that are not tessellations. Moreover, we will find sufficient conditions on subspaces of E2, S2 and the Poincaré disk and the sets of sites that guarantee that the Voronoi diagrams are pre-triangulations. We will also study g-spaces, which are metric spaces with ‘extendable’ geodesics joining any 2 points and give properties for a set of sites in a g-space that again guarantees that the Voronoi diagram is a pre-triangulation.