Based on the domestic model of law, many assume that the global rule of law requires a world government with a central law-making body, a hierarchical court system, and a supranational system of coercive enforcement. Since there are important problems with the practicality and desirability of a world government, I defend a decentralized conception of the global rule of law without a world government. I begin by examining Immanuel Kant’s theory since he argued that a supreme sovereign is required for a lawful condition within states while recognizing certain limitations with applying this idea to the international level. I argue that Kant proposed a voluntary league of states without coercive public law in part because a supreme coercive authority at the global level would conflict with the sovereignty of nation-states and undermine the civil condition within states. In Chapter Two, I argue that theories of dispersed or shared sovereignty can resolve this problem. However, since there are further problems with even a federal world government, I consider whether the rule of law can be developed without a world government. I argue that the most important feature for the global rule of law is the impartial determination, interpretation and application of international law by various authoritative adjudicative and administrative institutions. There are two important challenges to my view. First, many argue that international law is not really “law” unless it is effectively enforced through a central system of sanctions; without this, it can at most create moral obligations but not true legal obligations. To the extent that such arguments assume a coercion-based conception of law, my response draws on H.L.A. Hart’s rejection of the command theory of law. The second challenge concerns democratic legitimacy. I argue that global administrative law can partly address concerns with legitimacy by using rule of law principles to limit the arbitrary exercise of power by transnational institutions and increase their accountability.

This study examines injury in competitive bodychecking and non-body checking youth ice hockey in male and female leagues in Ontario and Quebec. This study consisted of three parts: (1) quantifying the amount of injuries; (2) document situational factors in which hockey injuries occur; (3) observe play and interview parents to understand deeper subjective feelings towards injury and bodychecking. The research utilized a mixed method approach consisting of game observation, postgame injury assessments and semi-structured interviewing with parents. For this thesis, 56 games total were attended and only parents from the bodychecking team were interviewed. All games were video recorded through a dual camera video system. Game footage was then analyzed frame by frame to pinpoint injury locations, points of impact and situational factors surrounding the injury. Field-notes and interviews with parents allowed for a comprehensive look into the feelings and emotions surrounding injury and bodychecking. Results from the research revealed; 1) a disproportionately higher rate of injury in bodychecking hockey comparared to non-bodychecking male and female hockey; 2) an overwhelming percentage of injuries were the result of player and board contact; 3) majority of injuries occurred on legal play; and 4) parents support the concept of delaying bodychecking till later ages.

Wireless sensor network(WSN) is made up of a large number which are deployed in the environment to collect observations. Each sensor node preprocesses and extracts information from the raw observations. Each sensor node also has the ability to communicate with other sensor nodes or a fusion center via wireless channels. Many aspects of WSNs have been investigated recently, such as efficient routing protocols, distributed data compression and transmission, and collaborative signal processing. We investigate the information processing task at the fusion center. Radio transmission is one of the major power consumer, and the required transmission power not linear in distance between the transmitter and the receiver. Hence in this thesis, we consider a decision made at local sensor may need to go through multi- hop for minimal energy consumption. Sensor and relay employed decode and forward protocol. We investigate how to transmission reliability and how to combine the reliability and we proposed a fusion rule when observations are encoded by Turbo code.

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With load growth of distribution systems, it becomes very complicated for dispatchers to obtain restoration plan for unfaulted but out-of-service areas. In this thesis, a rule-based expert system with a colored Petri net (CPN) inference model is developed. The CPN models of distribution components such as four-way line switches are proposed to derive the proper switching operation plan for service restoration by applying reasoning in the CPN. After main transformer contingency has been identified and isolated, it is highly possible that the out of service customers can not be restored completely because of the shortage of capacity reserve. The feeders which serve more key customers with higher service priority will have better chance to be selected for restoration. With the system reconfiguration to cover the load change of service zones over a longer period, during the process of switching operation, the maximum load demand of out-of-service area over the restoration time is considered in the CPN. To prevent the over-unbalance tripping of distribution feeders during switching operation process, the maximum tolerable current unbalance between any two phases is also considered in the CPN model. To assure the restoration plan complying with the operation regulation, heuristic rules based on the standard operation procedures of Taipower distribution system are included in the best first search of the CPN. A Taipower distribution system with 67 feeders is selected for computer simulation in this thesis to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology. It is found that the service restoration of distribution systems can be obtained very efficiently by applying the proposed CPN model.

In this study, we implement an emotional text-to-speech system for the limited domain of on-line play-by-play baseball game summary. TheChinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL) is our target domain. Our goal is that the output synthesized speech is fluent with appropriate emotion. The system first parses the input text and keeps the on-court informations, e.g., the number of runners and which base is occupied, the number of outs, the score of each team, the batter's performance in game. And the system adds additional sentences in the input text. Then, the system outputs neutral synthesized speech from the text with additional sentences inserted, and subsequently converts it to emotional speech. Our approach to speech conversion is to simulate a baseball braodcaster. Specifically, our system learns and uses the prosody from a broadcaster. To learn the prosody, we record two baseball games and analyze the prosodic features of emotional utterances. These observations are used to generate some prosodic rules of emotional conversion. The subjective evaluation is used to study the preference of the subjects about the additional sentences insertion and the emotion conversion in the system.

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