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No description available.

Product liability, which is generally understood as referring to the civil liability of a manufacturer or distributor for damage caused by a defect in the product, has undergone rapid changes and become increasingly important in the contemporary legal, social and economic development of many countries in different parts of the world. The concept of strict product liability is now an accepted part of the legal regime for consumer protection in most industrialised countries such as the USA, the EC, Australia and Japan. On the other hand, a developing country such as Malaysia is still in the process of enacting a proper law in this respect. The question thus arises as to whether the same principle of strict liability can be adopted in Malaysia. Focusing on the development of product liability law in the UK as a basis for the general understanding of the subject, this study attempts to answer this question as well as to find a solution to the product liability phenomenon in Malaysia. On that premise the specific objectives of the study are: (1) To identify the nature and magnitude of the problems of defective products in the UK by analysing different bases of liability which offer different protections to the injured party. (2) To provide a clear understanding of the concept of strict product liability which has been designed in the European context and implemented in the UK through Part 1 of the Consumer Protection Act 1987, which currently becomes the central tenet of the product liability debate. (3) To examine the existing law on product liability in Malaysia which can be found under the law of contract and the common law of negligence. (4) To examine the suitability of adopting a strict liability rule in Malaysia in preference to the present rule under the common law in the light of the real needs of the country. (5) To suggest an alternative to the present law which is more suitable in the economic and social context of Malaysia as a developing country.

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An Enzyme-Linked Immunosorbent Assay (ELISA) was developed which detected slug antigens in postmortem gut analysis of carabid beetles. The ELISA was used to identify beetles which fed on slugs in three fields of oilseed rape and winter wheat in the Tyne valley, Northumberland. Generalist species such as Harpalus rufipes, Pterostichus melanarius, Pterostichus nladidus, Anlara silnilata and Nebria brevicollis fed on slugs in the field. Molluscan specialists such as Carabus violaceus and Cychrus caraboides also fed on slugs in the field. Laboratory studies indicated that many large and medium sized carabids were able to predate small slugs. Some beetle species did not eat slugs but exposure to the beetles increased slug mortality. Therefore, postmortem investigations may underestimate the impact that carabids exert on slugs as they do not measure the number of slugs killed. Slug mucus affected the locomotory activity of generalist and specialist beetle species. Beetles foraged longer, covered greater distances, made more turns, walked slower and spent more time stationary on soil covered in slug mucus compared to control areas. Abax parallelepipedus, P.melanarius, Pterostichus niger and H.rufipes all reduced slug damage to a chinese cabbage crop in a miniplot experiment compared with unprotected plots. However, these differences were not significant. A.parallelepipedus was most effective at reducing slug damage to the chinese cabbage but was rare in arable land. H.rufipes was least effective at reducing slug damage but was abundant in arable land in both years of the study. A high proportion of H.rufipes beetles fed on slugs in the field. None of these four species occurred at densities in the field which reduced slug damage in the miniplot experiment.

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Standard overcurrent protection schemes for passive radial systems assume single direction current flow. The addition of distributed generation (DG) presents issues for the protection scheme, as current can flow from multiple directions. This thesis investigates the impact of DGs on overcurrent protection designed for a radial system, and proposes solutions to address the issues. A realistic feeder system and its protection scheme are developed in PSCAD/EMTDC. A point-of-common-coupling (PCC) is identified, indicating the portion of feeder that can potentially operate as an island. One DG, with output adjusted to maintain a specified power flow at the PCC, is added to the feeder system. The performance of the overcurrent protection in the presence of line, ground, and three-phase faults is analyzed. A second machine, outputting full capacity at unity power factor, is added to the feeder system. The strategies used to develop the single-DG modified protection scheme are applied to the two-DG system. The functionality of the modified protection scheme is verified.

Standard overcurrent protection schemes for passive radial systems assume single direction current flow. The addition of distributed generation (DG) presents issues for the protection scheme, as current can flow from multiple directions. This thesis investigates the impact of DGs on overcurrent protection designed for a radial system, and proposes solutions to address the issues. A realistic feeder system and its protection scheme are developed in PSCAD/EMTDC. A point-of-common-coupling (PCC) is identified, indicating the portion of feeder that can potentially operate as an island. One DG, with output adjusted to maintain a specified power flow at the PCC, is added to the feeder system. The performance of the overcurrent protection in the presence of line, ground, and three-phase faults is analyzed. A second machine, outputting full capacity at unity power factor, is added to the feeder system. The strategies used to develop the single-DG modified protection scheme are applied to the two-DG system. The functionality of the modified protection scheme is verified.

Service-oriented architectures (SOA), and in particular Web services, have quickly become a popular paradigm to develop distributed applications. Nowadays, more and more organizations shift their core business to the Web services platform within which various interactions between the autonomous services occur. One of the widely accepted standards in the Web services platform is Business Process Execution Lan- guage for Web Services (BPEL4WS, or BPEL for short). BPEL defines a language to integrate Web services by creating composite Web services in the form of business processes following the service orchestration paradigm, and it enables organizations to focus on core competence and mission-critical operations while outsource every- thing else to reduce costs and time to market. However BPEL is deficient in privacy issues. The facts are: (1) service requestors?? personal information is fundamental to enable business processes (e.g., the mortgage approval business process); (2) privacy concerns have become one of the most important issues in Information Technology and has received increasing at- tention from organizations, consumers and legislators; (3) most organizations have recognized that dealing correctly and honestly with customers?? privacy concerns can have beneficial returns for their businesses, not only in terms of being compliant with laws and regulations but also in terms of reputation and potential business op- portunities. If not addressed properly, privacy concerns may become an impediment to the widespread adoption of BPEL. Privacy issues have many aspects, the privacy concerns of potential service re- questor (i.e., client) and the privacy concerns of service provider (i.e., organization) are two of them. Service requestor specifies his/her privacy concerns as privacy preference, while service provider defines and publishes its privacy policy to specify its privacy promises. Before requestor accesses certain service, he/she likes to know whether the service provider will respect his/her privacy preference. Otherwise, the requestor may seek the desired service from somewhere else. On the other hand,even though most organizations publish their privacy promises, it will be more convincing if customers are assured that such privacy promises are actually kept within the organizations. In this thesis, we propose a privacy enforcement framework for business processes. In particular, we focus on those that are automated using BPEL. The framework consists of two parts. One focuses on the service requestors?? perspective of privacy, the other concentrates on the privacy concerns of the business process owner (i.e., the service provider). More specifically, the first part of the framework is based on description logic, and allows to represent privacy concepts and perform some rea- soning about these concepts. The reasoning engine will check requestor??s privacy preference against the service provider??s published privacy promises before the re- questor accesses the desired service. The second part of the framework facilitates the service provider to enforce its privacy policy within all its business processes throughout the life cycle of personal data. The privacy enforcement can be achieved step by step: privacy inspection, privacy verification and privacy obligation man- agement. The first step, privacy inspection, aims to identify which activity needs the involvement of what personal data. The second step, privacy verification, is to verify the correctness of designed BPEL business processes in terms of privacy. The third step is to enforce the privacy by managing the fulfillment of the obligation during the execution of business process. The privacy enforcement framework presented in the thesis has been implemented. The first part of the framework is implemented in the Privacy Match Engine prototype. For the second part of the framework, as different parts of the privacy policy need to be enforced at different stages of the life cycle of business processes, the implementation consists of a privacy verification tool and a privacy obligation management system.

Bibliography: leaves 318-346. / v, 346 leaves ; 30 cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / This thesis explores the subject of how effective a national government environment protection institution can be in making industry sustainable. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of Politics, 1999