Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2005. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

A travers une étude interculturelle détaillée et comparée de la production théâtrale minoritaire canadienne et américaine, ma thèse cherche à mettre en lumière les les apports thématiques et esthétiques du théâtre multi-ethnicque nord-américain contemporain à la tradition anglo-américaine du 20ème siècle. Les communautés asiatiques, africaines et aborigènes sont retenues comme poste d'observation privilégié de l'expression esthétique de la condition multiculturelle postcoloniale dans le théâtre nord-américain de la période allant de 1972 à nos jours. Sur base d'un corpus de pièces de théâtre, ma recherche m'a permis de redéfinir les grandes articulations des notions d'hybridité, d'identité et de communauté/nation postcoloniale. Through a detailed cross-cultural approach of the English Canadian and American minority theatrical production, my thesis aims to identify the thematic and aesthetic contributions of multi-ethnic North American drama to the Anglo-American tradition of the 20th century. My study examines North American drama from the vantage points of African, Asian, and Native communities from 1972 until today. Relying on a number of case studies, my research opened up new avenues for rethinking the notions of hybridity and identity in relation to the postcolonial community/nation.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri--Columbia, 1999. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

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Key studies of apocalypse in previous years have consciously and unconsciously understood the genre in terms of its paradigmatic consistency across examples. This emphasis points out valuable similarities among a wide range of texts, but also diminishes the significance of a text’s locally and historically rooted ways of depicting experience. This study reflects an effort to rebalance the meaning of apocalypse by looking at a specific locale – the North American West Coast. I examine popular, critical, and literary representations of the West Coast to trace out the unique ways that they configure regional identities. Ultimately, I make the case for site-specific criticism, which values provisional, locally rooted terminologies and tropes for analyzing cultural problems. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2011-01-26 14:00:17.35

This dissertation discusses two independent topics. The first part of the dissertation relates three theories of international economics (comparative advantage, competitive advantage, and competitiveness), and formulates the thesis that incorporating them in the form of readily available individual competitiveness indicators in OR/MS models offers promise to enhance decision-support for the strategic planning of global supply chains in general, and for locating facilities in particular. The objectives of this research were to relate each of these theories and to describe their interrelationships; to describe measures provided by two well-known annual competitiveness reports; and to illustrate application of the theories as a means of supporting the thesis of the research, and justifying the research questions we pose for future research. While this research discusses topics relative to the broader background of global supply chain design, it illustrates applications associated with facility location, a component of the global supply chain design. In the last chapter of the first part of the dissertation, we provide a vision to foster future research that will enhance the profitability of international enterprises under NAFTA. The second part of the dissertation deals with the DSCR model with capacity expansion and contraction. The strategic dynamic supply chain reconfiguration (DSCR) problem is to prescribe the location and capacity of each facility, select links used for transportation, and plan material flows through the supply chain, including production, inventory, backorder, and outsourcing levels. The objective is to minimize total cost. The configuration must be dynamically redesigned over time to accommodate changing trends in demand and/or costs by opening facilities, expanding and/or contracting their capacities, and closing facilities. The problem involves a multi-period, multi-product, multi-echelon supply chain. Research objectives are alternative formulations of DSCR and tests that identify the computational characteristics of each model to determine if one offers superior solvability in comparison with the others. To achieve the first objective, we present an initial MIP model, a refined model that relates decision variables according to a convenient structure, and branch and price (B&P) schemes for the refined model. We found that the network-based formulation offered superior solvability compared to the traditional formulation.

Thesis (Ph.D.) in Psychology--University of Maine, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 136-169).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Bowling Green State University, 2006. / Document formatted into pages; contains x, 210 p. : ill. (some col.) Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M. Div.)--Emmanuel School of Religion, 2005. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 60-61).

abstract: Ponderosa pine forests are a dominant land cover type in semiarid montane areas. Water supplies in major rivers of the southwestern United States depend on ponderosa pine forests since these ecosystems: (1) receive a significant amount of rainfall and snowfall, (2) intercept precipitation and transpire water, and (3) indirectly influence runoff by impacting the infiltration rate. However, the hydrologic patterns in these ecosystems with strong seasonality are poorly understood. In this study, we used a distributed hydrologic model evaluated against field observations to improve our understandings on spatial controls of hydrologic patterns, appropriate model resolution to simulate ponderosa pine ecosystems and hydrologic responses in the context of contrasting winter to summer transitions. Our modeling effort is focused on the hydrologic responses during the North American Monsoon (NAM), winter and spring periods. In Chapter 2, we utilized a distributed model explore the spatial controls on simulated soil moisture and temporal evolution of these spatial controls as a function of seasonal wetness. Our findings indicate that vegetation and topographic curvature are spatial controls. Vegetation controlled patterns during dry summer period switch to fine-scale terrain curvature controlled patterns during persistently wet NAM period. Thus, a climatic threshold involving rainfall and weather conditions during the NAM is identified when high rainfall amount (such as 146 mm rain in August, 1997) activates lateral flux of soil moisture and frequent cloudy cover (such as 42% cloud cover during daytime of August, 1997) lowers evapotranspiration. In Chapter 3, we investigate the impacts of model coarsening on simulated soil moisture patterns during the NAM. Results indicate that model aggregation quickly eradicates curvature features and its spatial control on hydrologic patterns. A threshold resolution of ~10% of the original terrain is identified through analyses of homogeneity indices, correlation coefficients and spatial errors beyond which the fidelity of simulated soil moisture is no longer reliable. Based on spatial error analyses, we detected that the concave areas (~28% of hillslope) are very sensitive to model coarsening and root mean square error (RMSE) is higher than residual soil moisture content (~0.07 m3/m3 soil moisture) for concave areas. Thus, concave areas need to be sampled for capturing appropriate hillslope response for this hillslope. In Chapter 4, we investigate the impacts of contrasting winter to summer transitions on hillslope hydrologic responses. We use a distributed hydrologic model to generate a consistent set of high-resolution hydrologic estimates. Our model is evaluated against the snow depth, soil moisture and runoff observations over two water years yielding reliable spatial distributions during the winter to summer transitions. We find that a wet winter followed by a dry summer promotes evapotranspiration losses (spatial averaged ~193 mm spring ET and ~ 600 mm summer ET) that dry the soil and disconnect lateral fluxes in the forested hillslope, leading to soil moisture patterns resembling vegetation patches. Conversely, a dry winter prior to a wet summer results in soil moisture increases due to high rainfall and low ET during the spring (spatially averaged 78 mm ET and 232 mm rainfall) and summer period (spatially averaged 147 mm ET and 247 mm rainfall) which promote lateral connectivity and soil moisture patterns with the signature of terrain curvature. An opposing temporal switch between infiltration and saturation excess runoff is also identified. These contrasting responses indicate that the inverse relation has significant consequences on hillslope water availability and its spatial distribution with implications on other ecohydrological processes including vegetation phenology, groundwater recharge and geomorphic development. Results from this work have implications on the design of hillslope experiments, the resolution of hillslope scale models, and the prediction of hydrologic conditions in ponderosa pine ecosystems. In addition, our findings can be used to select future hillslope sites for detailed ecohydrological investigations. Further, the proposed methodology can be useful for predicting responses to climate and land cover changes that are anticipated for the southwestern United States. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Geological Sciences 2012