When a major disruption occurs, an organization’s performance is usually negatively affected. The great recession of 2008 – 2009 was such a disruption which had global implications that had not been seen since the great depression that started in the 1930s. This thesis is intended to contribute to the understanding of how leanness and slack resources affect firm performance in the presence of disruptions that test supply chain resilience, or the ability to restore the firm’s performance to its original condition after encountering stress or a large disturbance. These disruptions may not only affect the firm’s financial performance during the disruption but also well after the disruption has occurred. Two industries with differing supply chains, food and beverage, and electronics and computer, were investigated. The study is based on archival data (N=10,020 and 668 firms) with observations from just before and just after the great recession, a disruption that affected the entire global economy. Our results suggest (1) the effect of inventory leanness and slack resources on firm performance is industry specific; and (2) variation in firm performance is less in the post-disruptive period than in the pre-disrupted period. Overall, our findings call for a contingency perspective to specify the level of inventory leanness and slack resources when determining their impact on firm performance to support supply chain resilience.

Most land use plans and policies, including those concerning growth management, are created in urban hubs (Afshar, 1994; Summer, 2005). My interest in this thesis started by asking the question: What are the criteria that ensure that land use plans and related policies serve rural livelihoods and stewardship under the lens of sustainability and resilience? Being a citizen residing in Niagara Region, I was inspired to find out the criteria to judge plans and policies in rural Niagara as a case study. This thesis uncovers the categories of consideration for rural areas close to urban centres in developed countries, and the context-specific criteria pertaining to rural Niagara. The eight context-specific categories, merged with sustainability and resilience imperatives, are presented as evaluation criteria in a brief form as follows: 1. Plans and policies should provide for building communities’ capacity in participative and collaborative governance including overlap in governance; 2. provide means for reconciling different interests in a way that celebrates diversity and ensures sufficiency and opportunity for all towards intragenerational equity while supporting community solidarity to acknowledge slow variables and feedback signals; 3. provide for the support of viable farming by fostering livelihood sufficiency and preserving resources for future generations within a regional character; 4. provide for strengthening the socio-economic base integrity in ways that also maintain/ rehabilitate the socio-ecological base by reducing threats to its long-term integrity while encouraging diversity and innovation. 5. Plans and policies are to be used as tools to reduce intragenerational and intergenerational inequities in livelihood sufficiency and opportunity through collective responsibility, and innovative solutions to the local poverty problems. 6. Plans and policies should allot specific clauses to alleviate land stressors through institutionalized adoption of the precautionary principle, socio-ecological system integrity and the application of all sustainability imperatives while rewarding voluntary stewardship. 7. Plans and policies should acknowledge and foster multi-functionality in agriculture as one of the means to foster livelihoods, socio-ecological system integrity, and sustainable use of resources through the integration of all sustainability imperatives. Multi-functionality entails fostering diversification, the building of a regional modular character while acknowledging slow variables and system feedbacks through innovative local solutions 8. Plans and policies should cater for Preparedness for the Future by institutionalizing the adoption of precaution and adaptation as one of the means to prepare for uncertainty and applying all sustainability imperatives to seek mutually supportive benefits while nurturing a resilient Niagara character through all resilience imperatives The above eight categories relate to all the sustainability imperatives (listed in appendix C) and all the resilience imperatives (listed in appendix D) in various ways. The research used the technique of triangulation for corroborating evidence. By reviewing a purposeful sample of Niagara government and non-government documents, the presence of the eight categories was confirmed. A sample of articles in a local paper also confirmed the presence of the categories. By counting the number of mentions for each category, the priority order was inferred. In the case of Niagara the top priority is given to “Viable Farming” as concerns grow over the mounting challenges faced by family farms. “Stewardship” is the second priority to enable the rural and farming communities to play the role of land stewards.

The study of resilient children has overturned many deficit focused models about the ontogenesis of children raised in adversity. Resilience research has flourished over the last three decades, and emphasis on the development of resilience skills are increasingly being incorporated into prevention programs. This study explores whether youth identified as resilient are as likely as those identified as vulnerable to engage in excessive gambling behaviour, and to examine the impact of several risk and protective factors on gambling severity among adolescents. The sample consisted of 1,273 students aged 12-19. The results suggest that vulnerable youth, low in resilience, are more likely to meet diagnostic criteria for problem gambling. There were no significant differences between resilient and low risk-exposure groups suggesting that the individual protective factors examined in this study may prevent maladaptive outcomes. These findings were interpreted with respect to their implications for resilience and prevention research.

The demand for applications like transmission and sharing of video is ever-increasing. Although network resources (bandwidth in particular) and coverage, networking technologies, compression ratio of state-of-the-art video coders have improved, unreliability of the transmission medium prevents us from gaining the most benefit from these applications. This thesis introduces a video coder that is resilient to network failures for transmission applications by using the framework of multiple description coding (MDC). Unlike traditional video coding which compresses the video into single bitstream, in MDC the video is compressed into more than one bitstream which can be independently decoded. It not only averages out the effect of network errors over the bitstreams but it also makes it possible to utilize the multipath nature of most network topologies. An end-to-end rate-distortion optimization is proposed for the codec to make sure that the codec exhibits improved compression performance and that the descriptions are equally efficient to improve the final video quality. An optimized strategy for packetizing the compressed bitstreams of the descriptions is also proposed which guarantees that each packet is self-contained and efficient. The evaluation of the developed MD codec over simulated unreliable packet networks shows that it is possible to achieve improved resilience with the proposed strategies and the end video quality is significantly improved as a result. This is further verified with subjective evaluation over a range of different types of video test sequences.

Thesis (MEd)--University of Stellenbosch, 2007. / Bibliography. Also available via the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Texas, Aug., 2007. / Title from title page display. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (MEdPsych)--University of Stellenbosch, 2006. / Bibliography. Also available via the Internet.

Thesis (Ph.D.) - James Cook University, 2006. / Typescript (photocopy) Bibliography: leaves 172-207.

Thesis (Ed. Spec.)--University of Wisconsin--Stout, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Education, March 1999. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.