The regimes of today that regulate and protect Intellectual Property Rights are based on Western cultural and philosophical values. This realization leads to the supposition that culture may influence the notion of patents. This raised the question of whether patent valuation would underlie a cultural bias. If patents are important in international business it is evident that a cultural impact on patent valuation would have significant implications and necessitate dedicated investigation. A literature review confirmed a knowledge gap in this area. This work, therefore, aims to investigate cultural impact on patent valuation. A distinction is made between a valuation from an ethical point of view and an economic valuation. Following a mixed methods approach, this research applies semi-structured interviews to create survey items for a questionnaire that then provides data that can be analyzed statistically and qualitatively. For quality assurance, a pre-questionnaire is used as an intermediate step. The results of the quantitative and qualitative analyses are subject to a between-method triangulation, which is interpreted in the following discussion in the light of relevant theory. The findings of this investigation confirm that there is indeed a cultural impact on the notion of patents. Two cultural dimensions, “Uncertainty Avoidance” and “Institutional Collectivism” correlate significantly with ethical patent valuation. Furthermore, it is not the complete cultural dimension, “Future Orientation”, but a specific aspect of it that correlates with economic patent valuation. A relationship between standpoints towards the ethical valuation of patents and economic patent valuation could not be proven. The research questions of what cultural dimensions have an impact on patent valuation and how and why they impact are answered. In addition, this work provides a model that represents cultural impact on patent valuation.

FundaÃÃo Cearense de Apoio ao Desenvolvimento Cientifico e TecnolÃgico / Este trabalho discute a problemÃtica socioambiental desencadeada pela atividade imobiliÃria e o conseqÃente crescimento urbano na Ãrea de entorno da planÃcie flÃvio-marinha do rio Pacoti o qual ocorre por meio da implantaÃÃo de condomÃnios, rede hoteleira e loteamentos. As omunidades que constituem o objeto de estudo desta pesquisa - AbreulÃndia, Mangabeira e Porto das Dunas - pertencem aos municÃpios de Fortaleza, EusÃbio e Aquiraz respectivamente. O objetivo central desta pesquisa à analisar os impactos socioambientais originados das relaÃÃes que os agentes imobiliÃrios, o Estado e as comunidades locais estabelecem entre si e com o meio ambiente, dando Ãnfase Ãs estratÃgias de resistÃncia, constituÃdas e vivenciadas especialmente pelas comunidades tradicionais que habitam essa Ãrea. Para compreender a dinÃmica cotidiana das comunidades em anÃlise, foi necessÃria a efetiva participaÃÃo da pesquisadora no dia-a-dia dessas comunidades, o que possibilitou o entendimento das atitudes, interesses, conflitos e a luta de classes que estabelecida entre os moradores dessas localidades. No trabalho foram utilizados depoimentos, fotografias, documentos oficiais e uma vasta literatura. A recuperaÃÃo dos aspectos histÃricos foi fundamental para se compreender a maneira como ocorreu a ocupaÃÃo desses espaÃos e permitiu apreender as mudanÃas de funÃÃo desses lugares ao longo do tempo. Entende-se que os moradores originais estÃo vivendo em situaÃÃo difÃcil, pois os recursos naturais que utilizam para sobrevivÃncia estÃo se tornando cada vez mais escassos, conseqÃÃncia das constantes agressÃes que o meio ambiente sofre. O mercado imobiliÃrio atuante nesses lugares faz com que o preÃo da terra se valorize, dificultando o acesso à moradia dos que pertencem a classes sociais menos favorecidas, o que origina o fenÃmeno da segregaÃÃo socioespacial. à fundamental explicar tais processos, pois se faz necessÃrio combinar o crescimento socioeconÃmico com a conservaÃÃo dos recursos naturais e o direito de todos interagirem com a natureza na perspectiva do desenvolvimento sustentÃvel.

ABSTRACT Postponement strategies offer opportunities for firms to achieve effective supply chain management. Postponement strategies could be classified into manufacturing postponement which delays the product differentiation and logistics postponement which delays the distributing process to the confirmed customer orders. In practice, the way to implement manufacturing postponement is more complicated than logistics postponement¡¦s. By employing the logistics postponement strategy, all the firms have to consider is the distribution of finalized products from a centralized inventory to final retailers. Comparing with integrating all the manufacturing activities, logistics postponement strategy could be an effective one for firms to handle the demand uncertainty over the regional markets. By employing the logistics postponement strategy, firms could decrease the cost of inventory and backorder through delaying products distribution to the confirmed customer orders. The connection between real options and postponement is also showed on this point. By employing the real options, decisions could be made when the firms wait and get more information about the market. The value the firms wait to get is also the benefits that logistics postponement strategy could reach by logistics postponement. Thus, the flexibility to decrease the inventory and backorder cost is considered as the management flexibility that real options could evaluate. On the other way, it¡¦s not always free for firms to get such a flexible management ability. The capital that firms have to invest for any change of the supply chain becoming the flexible one could be equal to buying the exercise right in real options. We therefore could construct a model to evaluate the value of logistics postponement strategy via real options and help the firms to judge what would be the proper occasions for logistics postponement to be implemented.

With the advent of Chip Multi Processors (CMPs), improving performance relies on the programmers/compilers to expose thread level parallelism to the underlying hardware. Unfortunately, this is a difficult and error-prone process for the programmers, while state of the art compiler techniques are unable to provide significant benefits for many classes of applications. An interesting alternative is offered by systems that support Thread Level Speculation (TLS), which relieve the programmer and compiler from checking for thread dependencies and instead use the hardware to enforce them. Unfortunately, data misspeculation results in a high cost since all the intermediate results have to be discarded and threads have to roll back to the beginning of the speculative task. For this reason intermediate checkpointing of the state of the TLS threads has been proposed. When the violation does occur, we now have to roll back to a checkpoint before the violating instruction and not to the start of the task. However, previous work omits study of the microarchitectural details and implementation issues that are essential for effective checkpointing. Further, checkpoints have only been proposed and evaluated for a narrow class of benchmarks. This thesis studies checkpoints on a state of the art TLS system running a variety of benchmarks. The mechanisms required for checkpointing and the costs associated are described. Hardware modifications required for making checkpointed execution efficient in time and power are proposed and evaluated. Further, the need for accurately identifying suitable points for placing checkpoints is established. Various techniques for identifying these points are analysed in terms of both effectiveness and viability. This includes an extensive evaluation of data dependence prediction techniques. The results show that checkpointing thread level speculative execution results in consistent power savings, and for many benchmarks leads to speedups as well.

This thesis presents an in depth study of the expansion of settlement in Christchurch between 1850-62, the pre-Municipal Council years. It is confined spatially to the 'central city' area within the four Avenues. Four research problems are studied: (1) The laying out of Christchurch by the New Zealand Company surveyors for the Canterbury Association, in particular, the reasons for the use of a grid street pattern. It was found that many factors were involved in its use. These included the personal preferences of the surveyors and the Association committee members, the topographic nature of the site chosen and contemporary planning convention. (2) The initial selection of town sections by the colonists and the reasons behind their choices. The 'orders of choice' of the sections have been tabulated and mapped to show section preference and how the settlers perceived the economic value of particular areas of the town grid for their commercial prospects. Town section auctions, leases, sales and subdivisions as well as church land are investigated. (3) The sale of the Town Reserves surrounding the town section area is also studied; the reason for their early sale, the nature and characteristics of the sales including prices and purchasers and their occupations. It was found that the prices paid were significantly related to the spatial positions of the lots within the Reserve blocks and to the time of their sale, in response to contemporary land values. There was no significant relationship between prices and the occupations of the buyers. (4) Public works undertaken by the Association and the Provincial Government are studied and their relationship with immigration and population figures. The scale of public works carried out at particular times was found to relate both to available finance and to immigration, the source of labour. Various aspects of public works, for example, street and footpath formation and bridging and drainage work were found to be indicative of differential growth between periods of depression and prosperity.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 1996. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 112-119). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 1996. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 112-119). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Graduate School of Business. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (D.P.A.)--University of Georgia, 1989. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 253-271).

Thesis (M.S.)--Duquesne University, 2006. / Title from document title page. Abstract included in electronic submission form. Includes bibliographical references (p.28-29) and index.