Albania was noteworthy, not just for the isolationist policy of its government, or its domestic rigid policies applied to Europe's poorest country, but because of its high life expectancy at birth. At the end of the eighties, life expectancy at birth passed the boundary of seventy, although the country's GDP per capita was $2500 in 1990, the lowest in Europe (Madison 1995).This puzzled scholars, who either doubted the success of Albania, or because of the lack of firm information, speculated with different explanations (Watson, 1995). This research was initiated by this controversy in trying to first, estimate the scale of Albania's success in improving life expectancy and document the mortality transition in Albania during the period 1950-1990. It also looks at the social, economic and political factors behind the success of improving life expectancy at birth from 51 to 71 years in a relatively short period of 40 years. The research attempts to explain why the Albanian pattern of mortality, with very high infant and child mortality and very low adult mortality, is so different from that of other East European countries, which had the same social and economic backgrounds. The analysis concludes that the life style factors are the most likely factors in explaining the controversial mortality pattern of Albania. The research uses a new set of complete data, obtained from formerly-closed Albanian State Archives, which were made available only after 1994. It is the first time that the cause specific data are used to analyse the mortality transition in Albania. The research starts with a description of country's cultural and historical background. It continues with the political, social and economic transition during the communist rule 1945-1990, which are of particular importance in understanding the demographic regime in general, and the mortality transition in particular (Caldwell, 1986). The research continues with a detailed analysis of the availability and quality of mortality data. The analysis of mortality trends and patterns during this period confirms the success of Albania in achieving high life expectancy at birth by the end of eighties. It also shows that this was achieved by very low adult mortality, and relatively high infant and child mortality. The later analysis shows that this finding is related to the cause specific pattern of mortality, as well as regional differences within the country. The research ends with an international comparison of mortality trends and patterns in Albania, in the context of whether the Albanian success was part of the experience of countries that had "a good health at low cost" (Caldwell, 1986), or if the Albanian way is another route to low mortality.

Lemieux recently proposed a new approach that studies randomized quasi-Monte Carlothrough dependency concepts. By analyzing the dependency structure of a rank-1 lattice,Lemieux proposed a copula-based criterion with which we can find a ???good generator??? for the lattice. One drawback of the criterion is that it assumes that a given function can be well approximated by a bilinear function. It is not clear if this assumption holds in general. In this thesis, we assess the validity and robustness of the copula-based criterion. We dothis by working with bilinear functions, some practical problems such as Asian option pricing, and perfectly non-bilinear functions. We use the quasi-regression technique to study how bilinear a given function is. Beside assessing the validity of the bilinear assumption, we proposed the bilinear regression based criterion which combines the quasi-regression and the copula-based criterion. We extensively test the two criteria by comparing them to other well known criteria, such as the spectral test through numerical experiments. We find that the copula criterion can reduce the error size by a factor of 2 when the functionis bilinear. We also find that the copula-based criterion shows competitive results evenwhen a given function does not satisfy the bilinear assumption. We also see that our newly introduced BR criterion is competitive compared to well-known criteria.

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.

No description available.

No description available.

Defining sustainable development as non-declining utility, the relationship between sustainable development and optimal growth is examined critically in Part 1. The operation of the Hartwick rule for an exhaustible resource is explored under different values of the elasticity of substitution between capital and resources. The Hartwick rule is then extended to the case of fossil fuels, where carbon dioxide emissions arise as an externality. Optimal growth paths with exhaustible resources are shown to be non-sustainable for positive pure rates of time preference or if produced capital depreciates. For linked environment-economy models where pollution stocks dissipate, the optimal steady state is characterized and feasibility conditions for the steady state derived. When resources are renewable and production leads to emissions that damage the resource, the restrictions on the feasible resource stock size in the steady state are determined. Part 2 considers the problem of measuring sustainable development, deriving 'green NNP' as a transformation of the Hamiltonian function for an optimal control problem. Two problems in accounting for exhaustible resources are developed: resource discoveries and heterogeneous resource deposits. The key issue of the treatment of pollution and pollution abatement in green national accounts is explored through a series of six models: flow pollutants, stock pollutants, impairment of pollution dissipation, fossil fuels and carbon dioxide, living resources and acid rain, and household defensive expenditures. The models of flow accounts are extended to green wealth accounting, where it is shown that stocks of pollution can be treated as liabilities in the national balance sheet. Empirical measures of sustainable development are presented in Part 3, with a discussion of the policy implications of green national accounting. Estimates of the value of pollution and 'genuine' savings rates are presented for the UK and selected European countries. The genuine savings analysis is extended to resource depletion and carbon emission damages for over 50 developing countries, revealing significant dissaving in Subsaharan Africa.

泰勒法則 (Taylor rule) 認為央行關心的主要是產出成長與物價的穩定，利用利率工具促使產出成長與物價回到長期穩定水準。此法則由於操作簡單，容易為大眾了解，因此不但有助於人民對央行政策的監督，增加央行的責任感，也為民間提供一個預測未來經濟的工具，降低金融波動。雖然台灣每年仍會公佈貨幣數量 M2 的目標區，似採以盯住貨幣數量為主的貨幣政策，但近年來由於金融創新與自由化，貨幣替代品日增，貨幣的定義也日漸模糊，貨幣和產出及物價目標的相關性降低，我們因此有興趣檢測台灣央行的利率操作是否遵循泰勒法則。由於台灣是個小型開放體系，匯率對經濟狀況有很大的影響力，本文將匯率的變動引入泰勒法則， 和原本的產出成長和物價一同作為央行所關心的政策目標。匯率固有其重要性，但相較於產出成長和物價，對景氣的影響是間接的，所以本文認，央行對匯率的關心主要在其變動方向，而非變動幅度。在這種想法下，匯率在泰勒法則中將只是一個顯示其升降的指標變數。 本文在動態計量模型的設定上，考慮到內生變數間的同期因果關係，以及它們當中存在二元變數，故採用 Duker (2005) 裡所擬議的 Qual VAR (qualitative variable) 模型，使用 Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) 進行估計。對於估計結果的分析，則大致如同標準的VAR模型， 除了比較模型估計的顯著性與係數大小外，主要是要進行衝擊反應 (impulse-response) 分析，檢驗在各個政策目標的隨機衝擊下，對央行所操控的利率會有什麼樣的影響。

From the advent of association rule mining, it has become one of the most researched areas of data exploration schemes. In recent years, implementing association rule mining methods in extracting rules from a continuous flow of voluminous data, known as Data Stream has generated immense interest due to its emerging applications such as network-traffic analysis, sensor-network data analysis. For such typical kinds of application domains, the facility to process such enormous amount of stream data in a single pass is critical.

From the advent of association rule mining, it has become one of the most researched areas of data exploration schemes. In recent years, implementing association rule mining methods in extracting rules from a continuous flow of voluminous data, known as Data Stream has generated immense interest due to its emerging applications such as network-traffic analysis, sensor-network data analysis. For such typical kinds of application domains, the facility to process such enormous amount of stream data in a single pass is critical.

Thesis (LL. M.)--Judge Advocate General's School, U.S. Army, 1966. / "4th April, 1966." Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaf 38). Also issued in microfiche.