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Due to the influence of the construction industry on the country’s economy, resolution of disputes is very important. The Arbitration Act 1996 was passed to remedy the complaints that had made arbitration unpopular. Comments from academics and practitioners indicated that construction arbitration remained unpopular and procedural innovation anticipated had not materialised. This study considers arbitration in the construction industry in England and Wales and evaluates its use and role since the passing of the Arbitration Act 1996. It also explores the potential use of arbitration against the use of litigation, statutory adjudication, mediation and expert determination having regard to variables of size of claim and dispute. A pragmatic theoretical perspective was followed, using a survey strategy. Initially a quantitative methodology was used, with structured questionnaires sent to users of arbitration, their legal advisers and construction arbitrators. To provide extension and clarification of matters revealed from questionnaires, interviews were conducted with construction arbitrators and construction lawyers, thereby incorporating a qualitative methodology. The study shows a significant decline in the use of construction arbitration, but comparing the two periods investigated, there was less of a decline for the more recent period, compared to the earlier period. As a dispute resolution method, arbitration was considered neutral, being neither poor, nor excellent. Arbitration’s standing, overall, is poor; however, for claims between £1 million and £10 million it is similar to the other methods referred to above. Positive influences towards choosing arbitration are that arbitration is private, providing fairness, allowing control of the process with an award that is final. Negative influences are that arbitration is costly, complex with procedures styled on litigation, subject to delays and confidence issues with arbitrators’ decisions. Cost and duration of arbitration remain the most problematic features, however the investigation suggests that users and particularly their lawyer advisers are reluctant to implement cost saving procedures.

In recent years, microlenses (ML), which are micro-scale spheres, have been used to overcome physical diffraction limit of optical microscopy (~200 nm). Although the use of such ML has provided highly resolved images of objects beyond the Abbe optical diffraction limit, the process needs to be refined before it can be applied widespread in materials, biological and clinical research. In this research work, we have implemented experiments on super-resolution imaging utilizing MLs of different refractive indices (n) and diameters to provide the scientific and engineering communities with practical guidelines for obtaining high resolution images with ease. With the support from experimental imaging data as well as FDTD simulations, we have shown that optimal super-resolution imaging with microspheres was accomplished under specific parameter range. We have identified ML with n=1.51 as a preferable choice over those MLs with n=1.4, 1.93, and 2.2, because of high reliability and high magnification for ML with n=1.51. With n=1.51 in mind, we have identified a diameter range from 15 μm to 50 μm provides high resolution and magnification for practical purposes. We show that other ML diameters provided high resolution as well; we believe that ML diameters between 15 μm and 50 μm are practically preferred. We were able to achieve <150 nm resolution and further refinement of this tool can potentially yield higher quality imaging results. Ideally, MLs will eventually be directly incorporated as a modular device in an optical microscope providing the researchers an effective, noninvasive, and economical alternative to complex super resolution microscopy techniques. To improve scanning efficiency, we also proposed microtubule (MT) based imaging. With the demonstration of theoretical optics, we conclude, at present time, that there are some practical concerns for MT-based imaging technique that may limit its application as super-resolution imaging technique. For example, MT-based imaging appears to possess a lower contrast than ML-based technique. Thus, although the concept of MT-based imaging is theoretically possible, we think that more work is needed to utilization of this tool for practical applications.

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This research examines environmental dispute resolution as applied to Superfund site cleanup and how the use of collaborative dispute resolution approaches, in particular Alternative Dispute Resolution and Community Involvement, are related to a community's socioeconomic and demographic profile. It examines the sociodemographic characteristics of residents living in census tracts containing Superfund sites in relation to the type of dispute resolution technique used. I hypothesize that collaborative dispute resolution techniques, as opposed to traditional settlement and/or litigation, are less likely to occur in Superfund communities with high poverty levels and high minority populations than in those with low poverty levels and low minority populations. Although minority and lower class communities are less likely to be placed on the National Priorities List (NPL), are slower to be cleaned up once on the NPL, and experience lower quality cleanups (O'Neil 2005; Sigman 2001; Omohundro 2004), the findings of this research indicate that the dispute resolution processes studied here do not contribute to such environmental clean up injustices. Minority status and poverty levels do not impact the likelihood that collaborative dispute resolution will be used in settling Superfund disputes. This analysis does show a significant correlation between education and the use of collaborative dispute resolution. Superfund communities in which residents have low educational attainment are less likely to use collaborative dispute resolution. Low educational levels may be the paramount disadvantage to overcome in the use and successful implementation of collaborative dispute resolution.

Most generic systems and hardware for non-governmental users lack capability to process images in high resolution coming from aerial crafts such as satellites, drones, airplanes and helicopters. These images are being displayed in poor quality due to the software running on low budgets, which restricts the high resolution they need. In this project I researched ways to obtain super high resolution images from aerial crafts for low cost and compared which method works best in producing the clearest and fastest images. I connected with the Loyola Marymount University Marketing team to collaborate with their photographers in producing the best quality aerial coverage images for the campus and city of Los Angeles.

As everyone knows, cancer is one of the greatest health enemies of mankind and became a major public health problem all over the world. Moreover, lung cancer is the most common global cancer leading to more than 1.3 million estimated deaths annually worldwide. Breast cancer is the most common cancer and the 2nd leading cause of death from in women in the US, Canada, and China. Therefore an instrument for the early diagnosis and monitoring of cancers in areas such as lung and breast is immensely important and necessary. The cadmium zinc telluride (CZT) semiconductor is a kind of novel radiation detector that can provide detailed information about spatial position. Also, the energy resulting from interactions between the radiation and the CZT material can also be assessed giving this type of detector added value in disease evaluation. A great deal of work on CZT detectors has been done for breast CT scanning. Furthermore, the CZT detector is also a potential solution for problems in lung cancer CT evaluation where the lack of energy information and high radiation exposure are less than ideal. Since sub-millimetre spatial resolution is required for post-contrast thoracic CT assessment, and $100~\mu m$ or better is critical for breast CT, the investigation of spatial resolution for CZT detectors is essential. In this thesis, the interactions within CZT detectors were analyzed. The influence of different configurations, including adjustment of anode size, gap size, detector thickness and bias voltage, were discussed. Next the methods to evaluate two kinds of signals (collected and transit signals), are provided in Chapter~2. In Chapter~3, an intensity difference method and an intensity ratio method for estimating the sub-pitch spatial resolution were described in detail. Finally, a detector spatial resolution between $10~\mu m$ and $20~\mu m$ was achieved using the collecting signal intensities ratio method and a $4~mm$ thick CZT detector with gap size of $g=50~\mu m$ and bias voltage of $V=300V$. Future work should focus on the contributions from characteristic X-rays emitted from cadmium and tellurium atoms. Also, the work presented was only on pixelated arrays and further assessment of cross-strip electrode detectors could also be of benefit. Lastly based on simulations done in this thesis all photons were assumed to strike the cathode at 90 degrees. Future work should also include non-orthogonal directions for photons. / Thesis / Master of Applied Science (MASc)

All far-field optical imaging is limited by diffraction from optical elements, a phenomenon called Rayleigh's curse. It has been shown that through the use of the spatial mode demultiplexing technique (SPADE), an arbitrarily small separation between two point sources can be resolved, given a sufficiently large total number of photons N. This quantum metrology approach to super-resolution has since then been demonstrated and generalized to more complex situations. We propose a variant of SPADE, that we call biphoton SPADE, applied to imaging systems with spatially entangled photon pairs generated through spontaneous parametric downconversion. Our method can achieve a higher precision than SPADE, given any non-zero level of entanglement. We furthermore demonstrate our technique in a coincidence imaging setup and show super-resolution while only projecting on a select few of the total optimal modes in the 2D joint basis. Since the method uses quantum light and provides even further sensitivity to SPADE, it can potentially be used in the future for various light-sensitive imaging applications and in combination with neural networks. In nature, one often finds structures that have only been replicated by humans through years of precise, state-of-the-art engineering. Polymer spherulites, naturally occurring birefringent crystals that grow around defects in a radial pattern, are an example of this. We show through the example of ascorbic acid, commonly referred to as Vitamin C, that spherulites are capable of creating beams with orbital angular momentum (OAM) through a process called spin-to-orbit coupling. This action of the ascorbic acid crystals is analogous to the one of spatially structured waveplates called q-plates, which are built to have an azimuthally dependant optic axis. This opens the door for potentially cheaper fabrication of q-plates, and possibilities of tuning the growth of the molecules for arbitrary wavefront shaping with natural crystals. Finally, because of the wide range of crystals in the spherulite class, further investigation into different spherulites could shed light on the relationship between crystal symmetry and structure, and the shaping of light.

The main contribution of this thesis is a new method of image compression based on a recently developed adaptive transform called Mixtures of Principal Components (MPC). Our multi-resolution extension of MPC-called Multi-Resolution Mixtures of Principal Components (MR-MPC) compresses and decompresses images in stages. The first stage processes the original images at very low resolution and is followed by stages that process the encoding errors of the previous stages at incrementally higher resolutions. To evaluate our multi-resolution extension of MPC we compared it with MPC and with the excellent performing wavelet based scheme called SPIHT. Fifty chest radiographs were compressed and compared to originals in two ways. First, Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) and five distortion factors from a perceptual distortion measure called PQS were used to demonstrate that our multi-resolution extension of MPC can achieve rate distortion performance that is 220% to 720% better than MPC and much closer to that of SPIHT. And second, in a study involving 724 radiologists' evaluations of compressed chest radiographs, we found that the impact of MR-MPC and SPIHT at 25:1, 50:1, 75:1 on subjective image quality scores was less than the difference of opinion between four radiologists. / Thesis / Master of Science (MS)

No / One of the features of the post-Cold War era has been a remarkable growth in academic and policy attention devoted to the role played by economic actors and economic agendas in the inception and perpetuation of civil conflicts as well as in shaping the prospects for postconflict peacebuilding. This has incorporated a large and diverse range of themes ranging from the trading of specific conflict goods, the conflict dynamics resulting from the interaction of greed, feasibility, and grievance factors at the local level, the broader economic and governance challenges arising from what has been labelled the ‘resource curse’, and the even broader challenges produced by the interaction of local, regional, and global economic structures.