Anionic metal-oxalate complexes have been generated in the gas phase and an attempt at determining plausible structures were made. Two different experimental techniques were coupled to mass spectrometry: Infrared Multiphoton Dissociation (IRMPD) and ion mobility. Both techniques were compared to theoretical structures calculated using various levels of theory. With the use of IRMPD, frequencies were generated for each complex and compared to theoretical frequencies. Plausible structures for all complexes were found using the M-series of density functional levels of the theory when the 6-311+gd basis set was used and Bhandhlyp functional was appropriate for the lanl2dz basis set. Using ion mobility allowed for collision cross-sections to be calculated and compared to theoretical collision cross-sections of the various structures. Unfortunately no plausible structures were determined using this technique due to a lack of calibrants for the negative mode of ion mobility.

This thesis presents a detailed study of the composition dependence of the thermal and transient mobility of electrons in binary rare gas mixtures. The time independent electron real mobility in binary inert gas mixtures is calculated versus mole fraction for different electric field strengths. The deviations from the linear variation of the reciprocal of the mobility of the mixture with mole fraction, that is from Blanc's law, is determined and explained in detail. Very large deviations from the linear behavior were calculated for several binary mixtures at specific electric strengths, in particular for He-Xe mixtures. An interesting effect was observed whereby the electron mobility in He-Xe mixtures, for particular compositions and electron field strength could be greater than in pure He or less than in pure Xe. The time dependent electron real mobility and the corresponding relaxation time, in particular for He-Ar and He-Ne mixtures are reported for a wide range of concentrations, field strengths (d.c. electric field), and frequencies (microwave electric field). For a He-Ar mixture, the time dependent electron mobility is strongly influenced by the Ramsauer-Townsend minimum and leads to the occurrence of an overshoot and a negative mobility in the transient mobility. For He-Ne, a mixture without the Ramsauer-Townsend minimum, the transient mobility increases monotonically towards the thermal value. The energy thermal relaxation times 1/Pτ for He-Ne, and Ne-Xe mixtures are calculated so as to find out the validity of the linear relationship between the 1/Pτ of the mixture and mole fraction. A Quadrature Discretization Method of solution of the time dependent Boltzmann-Fokker-Planck equation for electrons in binary inert gas mixture is employed in the study of the time dependent electron real mobility. The solution of the Fokker-Planck equation is based on the expansion of the solution in the eigenfunctions of the Fokker-Planck operator. / Science, Faculty of / Chemistry, Department of / Graduate

Migration and mobility processes are thought to be important (yet complex) modulators of health related risk and vulnerability as experienced by people who use drugs. Few studies in Canada have examined this relationship, and there is no research available addressing this specific aspect of health and well-being in people who use drugs in Ottawa-Gatineau. While migration can be defined as a permanent (or near permanent) relocation process, mobility refers to a person's temporary or short-term movement between geographic locations (Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, 2001). Understanding how the reasons for mobility and migration, typically described as “push and pull” factors, and the processes itself impact on the local community is invaluable for informing intervention in terms of type, location and timing and identifying solutions to reduce the inequalities resulting in and from the migration process. This cross-sectional study aimed to assess the prevalence and geography of mobility and migration among study participants, characterize the circumstances surrounding the mobility and migration process, and explore their impact on health related outcomes, among people who use drugs in Ottawa-Gatineau, Canada. Understanding the prevalence, patterns and characteristics of mobility and migration events may offer greater insight into the associated health risks, which in turn will assist in the development of targeted health and social services for this group. We hypothesized that the act of moving itself, as well as type of mobility and migration (i.e. specific push and pull factors), may be associated with health risk behaviours and health outcomes. People 18 years or older currently living in Ottawa-Gatineau, and who used illicit drugs in the past six months were recruited using respondent-driven sampling. Geography of lifetime migration was mapped, and health related outcomes and access to social support services were evaluated against lifetime and recent migration and travel. Quantitative analysis of health and social support related outcomes was carried out by comparison of means and proportions between groups, and complemented by qualitative exploration of push and pull factors and effects of the last mobility and migration events. Our study identified a heterogeneous inner-city population of people who use drugs where widespread homelessness, incarceration, low income and a high degree of mobility and migration placed individuals at varying levels of health-related vulnerability. Participants moved to Ottawa-Gatineau from all over Canada and other countries, but most arrived from within Ontario. Multiple factors were involved in the decision to migrate and in choosing Ottawa-Gatineau in particular. Escaping a negative environment and seeking out family connections were the most commonly cited “push and pull” factors, respectively. Maintaining family connections was also identified as a major reason for mobility or lack thereof among travelers and non-travelers alike. There was evidence to suggest that the mobility and migration processes affected health, drug use and access to resources among some of the participants and for a wide variety of reasons. Comparing the two groups using t-test for means and Chi-square (or Fisher’s exact) test for proportions, we found crack cocaine and injection drug users who migrated recently to be poorly connected to harm reduction services and thus at particularly high risk for blood-borne infections and other drug-related harms. Similarly, participants using crack cocaine or injection drugs and who traveled were significantly less likely to access social support services. In this study we have shown that within a broad cohort of people who use drugs in Ottawa-Gatineau, subjects are a highly mobile group, and face a considerable number of environmental challenges that predispose individuals to increasing risk behaviour even when using drugs only occasionally. This vulnerability is greatest in the period following migration. While push and pull factors may vary by place, a common theme identified in this study is the perceived and actual positive influence of family. Further research employing a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods using a socioecological, intersectionality and lifecourse approach (Egan, et al., 2011) may provide added insights into the role of family in modulating vulnerability through social connectedness and support among drug users as they navigate the mobility and migration process.

Mobility support in education is one of key, longtime targets of the EU. Apart from significant financial resources that are put into this target through various EU programmes, mobility is also supported by other means. This master's thesis focuses on describing and analyzing mobility support in terciary education in the EU in view of the newest trends in this field -- the use of ICT. The aim is to introduce and critically evaluate the current problematics of academic mobility in the EU, describe the relation and importance of physical and virtual mobility and outline possible future developments. Furthermore, the paper attempts to justify this mobility support by putting academic mobility in the context of individual and economic competitiveness, and thus find out whether virtual mobility itself can be a catalyst for competitiveness.

The purpose of this investigation, conceived in its broadest sense, was to study the living arrangements of older persons over a specific period of time in an attempt to arrive at some generalizations about the nature and changes of these arrangements as they relate to certain sociological variables.

O atual modelo de planejamento dos transportes é constantemente confrontado com novos ideais associados à mobilidade sustentável. Assim, inúmeros pesquisadores debruçam-se em busca de indicadores e índices capazes de avaliar e monitorar o desempenho de políticas públicas relacionadas ao tema. Dessa forma foi desenvolvido o Índice de Mobilidade Urbana Sustentável (IMUS), uma ferramenta pautada nos preceitos da mobilidade sustentável com a proposta de tornar-se um apoio à gestão municipal. Por ser um método recente, sua aplicação ainda é limitada. Assim, o objetivo deste estudo concentra-se em realizar o cálculo do índice na cidade de Curitiba, muito conhecida por suas soluções urbanas que associam o planejamento dos transportes ao uso do solo. A aplicação do método na cidade fundamentou-se não apenas em obter o simples score relacionado ao desempenho das condições da mobilidade local, mas também possibilitaram avaliar o próprio método. O valor resultante alcançado foi correspondente a 0,747, confirmando Curitiba como uma cidade com características bastante positivas quanto às políticas urbanas voltadas à mobilidade. Por outro lado, foram identificadas algumas deficiências, especialmente quanto aos modos não motorizados de transporte. O cálculo do IMUS permitiu encontrar também indicadores que não foram capazes de identificar aspectos reconhecidamente favoráveis da cidade, demonstrando que possivelmente esses apresentem problemas de avaliação ou normalização de valores. A aplicação do método também se mostrou eficiente para promover uma avaliação intraurbana entre as diversas regiões da cidade. Nesse aspecto Curitiba demonstrou um saudável equilíbrio, sem apresentar grandes disparidades quanto suas políticas locais. Tal característica mostra-se bastante favorável para identificar Curitiba como um benchmarking da mobilidade sustentável. Finalmente o método foi testado como uma ferramenta de comparação entre cidades distintas, demonstrando também ser eficiente, desde que se mantenha uma estrutura de cálculo compatível entre as cidades que se deseja comparar. / The current transportation planning approach is constantly confronted with new values derived from the concept of sustainable mobility. As a consequence, several researchers have devoted time and effort in the search of indicators and indexes capable of evaluating and monitoring the performance of urban policies related to the theme. The Sustainable Urban Mobility Index (I_SUM) was one of them. It is a decision support tool developed to help municipal administrations in the planning and management of sustainable mobility. As it is a recent method, its application is still limited to just a few cases. The objective of this study is to conduct an application of the index in Curitiba, which is a well-known city due to the quality of its urban planning solutions that associate transport planning to land use. The application of the method in the city was motivated not only by the possibility of having a score showing the performance of the city regarding sustainable mobility, but also by the opportunity of evaluating the method itself. The overall resulting value was 0.747, what confirms that Curitiba has very positive characteristics and effective urban policies regarding sustainable mobility. Conversely, some deficiencies were identified, especially concerning non-motorized transport modes. The I_SUM calculation also allowed the identification of indicators that were not able to identify aspects that are good to the city. That may suggest problems in the assessment or normalization procedures of the index. The method application was also efficient for the evaluation of city subdivisions. Curitiba also performed well in that intra-urban evaluation, with a positive equilibrium of the values throughout the city. It may be an indication that the city policies are homogeneously applied in the entire urban area, what certainly contributes to characterize Curitiba as a benchmark of urban mobility. Finally, when used to compare distinct cities, the method was also efficient. In that case, the calculation was compatible with a structure adjusted to simultaneously represent the compared cities.

This dissertation describes practices among men who desired men from 1910 to 1945 that combined mobility, eroticized leisure practices, and non-urban spaces in cultivating nascent sexual subcultures. It contains four case studies that detail how vacillations between "productive" labor and recurrent "drifting" allowed men to simultaneously perform normative gender identities while conveying their sense of sexual difference with respect to white bourgeois manhood. Each case study explores institutional linkages between mobility and stigmatized male sexualities, and analyzes autobiographies, correspondence, visual culture, and fictional works in which men who desired other men imagined their ambivalent relationships to labor as a means of expressing their discomfort with the sexual and gender constraints of modern commercial centers. This study suggests that the eroticization of laboring male bodies and "natural" leisure spaces were vital in cultivating subcultures based on non-heterosexual desire. Moreover, while the historiography of male homosexuality prior to World War II has largely focused on urban experience, this discussion illuminates a decidedly anti-modern bristling against city life and commercialism that also motivated the movements of men who desired men in this period. The first two chapters trace the development of queer "tramp" identities. By the 1920s, socioeconomic changes and American folklore perpetuated tramp nostalgia in which writers portrayed wandering homeless men as romantic dreamers wary of marital confinement, rather than economically marginalized laborers. Analyses of sociological records involving working-class gay men in Chicago and the career of tennis champion Bill Tilden demonstrate that this tramp epistemology enabled white men to cultivate non-heterosexual identities through their desires for mobility and their challenges to prevailing distinctions between work and pleasure. The final two chapters describe the queer spatial and temporal potential of non-urban spaces (specifically waterways and beaches) among artists and working-class men. In fantasies contained in paintings and archived correspondence, sailors embodied mobility, erotic "masculine" physicality, and sentimentalized vulnerability. At the same time, artists and writers saw in their tourist practices the potential to attain queer intimacies. Their depictions of beach leisure allowed them to mobilize fantasies of same-sex relationalities that evaded both the capitalist privileging of "masculine" productivity and modern sexual categorizations.

The design and fabrication of a novel soft landing instrument Soft Landing Ion Mobility (SLIM) is described here. Topics covered include history of soft landing, gas phase mobility theory, the design and fabrication of SLIM, as well as applications pertaining to soft landing. Principle applications devised for this instrument involved the gas phase separation and selection of an ionized component from a multicomponent gas phase mixture as combing technique to optimize coatings, catalyst, and a variety of alternative application in the sciences.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / This thesis examines how “unhomeliness” in a Zimbabwean context enjoins mobility and the diasporic particularities that manifest as subjects move back and forth in a homemaking journey between the country-side and the urban, as well as mobility to foreign countries and back to the homeland. Particularities of inclusion and exclusion, (re)emplacement, (re)identity, assimilation, rejection and (un)belonging, all loom large as mobility, paradoxically, takes root and comes to shape experience in as significant a way as being in a homeland or hostland. This thesis is also about the ways in which the “diasporic” settler, in one of the novels which destabilises the familiar paradigms of diasporic literature, can exist and be dominant in the foreign but colonised spatial setting without needing to assimilate, and how this attempt to territorialise can traumatise those marginalised by the settler community. Since the end of the twentieth century, there has been a rise in the significance of space in humanities and literary studies. Theories about diaspora, identity and belonging have featured strongly in works of scholars of space and place such as Henri Lefebvre, Yi-Fu Tuan, Doreen Massey, Edward Soja, Tim Cresswell, Nigel Thrift, Robin Cohen, John Agnew, and Kelly Baker. Space is largely regarded as a dimension within which matter is located.

International student mobility is a growing expression of internationalisation. Research has shown that close to 3.7 million international students travelled across the borders of their own country to study in 2009, representing a 77% increase since 2000 (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD], 2011). Historically, the mobility was one-dimensional from South to North, but of late there is evidence of North-South and South–South mobility. Despite being viewed as victims of a brain drain, there is emerging evidence that there are some African countries that play increasingly vital roles in receiving the world’s top higher education students. It is within the context of this emerging evidence that this study examined the phenomenon of student mobility to Nigeria. This study addressed two main research questions, namely: Why do international students choose to leave their country of origin to study in Nigeria? How did international students in Nigeria choose the institution they are currently attending? This study adopted a qualitative approach using semi-structured interviews and document analysis. The highest ranked public university and the highest ranked private university in Nigeria, according to the Webometrics ranking of 2015, were purposively chosen as the sites for the research. A total of thirty-five international students were involved in face-to-face interviews at both universities. Institutional documents as well as national documents - mainly from the National Universities Commission (NUC) – were consulted in collecting data. This study used the push-and-pull theory of migration to fully understand the phenomenon being studied. The empirical findings reveal that international students are attracted to Nigeria and the two selected universities for reasons ranging from scholarship opportunities and quality of education offered by Nigerian institutions to parental influence in the choice of Nigeria and the institution at which they study. The study also gave an indication of the impact and influence of terrorism that could be seen as push factors in decisions to study in Nigeria. The study further highlighted the challenges students face both at national and institutional levels as well as making known the improvements that they would like to take place. It was also observed that regional hubs are an emerging trend of student mobility in Africa. It is believed that the recommendations made - if adopted - will go a long way towards enhancing internationalisation strategies for Nigeria and much more for the continent of Africa as a whole. The study makes a contribution to the body of knowledge regarding the phenomenon of academic student mobility. Keywords: Internationalisation; student mobility; Africa; Nigeria; push-and pull factors; regional hub; brain drain; international students; university and higher education. / Dissertation (MEd)--University of Pretoria, 2016. / NRF / Education Management and Policy Studies / MEd / Unrestricted