Master of Science / Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering / Todd Easton / Graph theory is a widely researched topic. A graph contains a set of nodes and a set of edges. The nodes often represent resources such as machines, employees, or plant locations. Each edge represents the relationship between a pair of nodes such as time, distance, or cost. Integer programs are frequently used to solve graphical problems. Unfortunately, IPs are NP-hard unless P = NP, which implies that it requires exponential effort to solve them. Much research has been focused on reducing the amount of time required to solve IPs through the use of valid inequalities or cutting planes. The theoretically strongest cutting planes are facet defining cutting planes. This research focuses on the node packing problem or independent set problem, which is a combinatorial optimization problem. The node packing problem involves coloring the maximum number of nodes such that no two nodes are adjacent. Node packings have been applied to airline traffic and radio frequencies. This thesis introduces a new class of graphical structures called suns. Suns produce previously undiscovered valid inequalities for the node packing polyhedron. Conditions are provided for when these valid inequalities are proven to be facet defining. Sun valid inequalities have the potential to more quickly solve node packing problems and could even be extended to general integer programs through conflict graphs.

Thin-film solar cells on glass substrates are likely to have a bright future due to the potentially low costs and the short energy payback times. Polycrystalline silicon (poly-Si, grain size &gt 1 pm) has the advantage of being non-toxic, abundant, and long-term stable. Glass as a substrate, however, limits the processing temperatures to ~600??C for longer process steps. Films with large grain size can be achieved by solid phase crystallisation (SPC), and especially by solid phase epitaxy (SPE) on seed layers, using amorphous silicon deposited at low temperatures as a precursor film. With SPC and SPE, the amorphous silicon film is typically crystallised at ~600??C over hours. During this anneal at atmospheric pressure -depending on the properties of the amorphous silicon film- ambient gas can percolate the film and can negatively affect the crystallisation. In this work, a high-vacuum anneal chamber was designed and built to allow the in-situ crystallisation of amorphous silicon films deposited on glass in a PECVD cluster tool. An important aspect of the design was the comfortable and safe operation of the vacuum anneal chamber to enable unattended operation. This was realised by means of a state-of-the-art, programmable temperature controller and a control circuit design that incorporates various safety interlocks. The chamber interior was optimised such that a temperature uniformity of 2-3K across the sample area was achieved. The chamber was calibrated and tested, and SPC and SPE samples were successfully crystallised. In initial SPC crystallisation experiments with solar cell structures, after post-deposition treatments, a 1 -sun open-circuit voltage of 465 mV was obtained, similar to furnace-annealed samples. In initial experiments with SPE solar cell structures, difficulties regarding the characterisation of the unmetallised solar cells with the quasi-steady-state open-circuit voltage method (QSSVOC) were encountered after post-deposition hydrogen treatment. A possible explanation for these difficulties is the contact formation with the metal probes. Furthermore, limiting factors of the QSSVOC method for the characterisation of unmetallised cells with high contact resistance values were investigated and, additionally, the accuracyof the QSSVOC setup was improved in the low light intensity range.

Thin-film solar cells on glass substrates are likely to have a bright future due to the potentially low costs and the short energy payback times. Polycrystalline silicon (poly-Si, grain size &gt 1 pm) has the advantage of being non-toxic, abundant, and long-term stable. Glass as a substrate, however, limits the processing temperatures to ~600??C for longer process steps. Films with large grain size can be achieved by solid phase crystallisation (SPC), and especially by solid phase epitaxy (SPE) on seed layers, using amorphous silicon deposited at low temperatures as a precursor film. With SPC and SPE, the amorphous silicon film is typically crystallised at ~600??C over hours. During this anneal at atmospheric pressure -depending on the properties of the amorphous silicon film- ambient gas can percolate the film and can negatively affect the crystallisation. In this work, a high-vacuum anneal chamber was designed and built to allow the in-situ crystallisation of amorphous silicon films deposited on glass in a PECVD cluster tool. An important aspect of the design was the comfortable and safe operation of the vacuum anneal chamber to enable unattended operation. This was realised by means of a state-of-the-art, programmable temperature controller and a control circuit design that incorporates various safety interlocks. The chamber interior was optimised such that a temperature uniformity of 2-3K across the sample area was achieved. The chamber was calibrated and tested, and SPC and SPE samples were successfully crystallised. In initial SPC crystallisation experiments with solar cell structures, after post-deposition treatments, a 1 -sun open-circuit voltage of 465 mV was obtained, similar to furnace-annealed samples. In initial experiments with SPE solar cell structures, difficulties regarding the characterisation of the unmetallised solar cells with the quasi-steady-state open-circuit voltage method (QSSVOC) were encountered after post-deposition hydrogen treatment. A possible explanation for these difficulties is the contact formation with the metal probes. Furthermore, limiting factors of the QSSVOC method for the characterisation of unmetallised cells with high contact resistance values were investigated and, additionally, the accuracyof the QSSVOC setup was improved in the low light intensity range.

Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns portrays the harrowing narrative of two women living in oppressive circumstances enforced to them by society and by their husband. In their suffering, the two manage to find strength in each other. Hosseini depicts a complex society in which many factors contribute to the suffering the main characters experience, many of which could be described as New Orientalist. This thesis will analyse the way education is portrayed in the novel and how Hosseini offers us a nuanced presentation that counters the New Orientalist themes present in the novel. We will start by analysing the main characters’ personal attitudes towards education and the parental influences in their lives. Then we will continue to analyse the way society is portrayed to affect potential educational options through other characters. Last, we will focus on the political climate in the novel, in particularly the Soviet Union and the Taliban, and how they affected the development of the educational system present in A Thousand Splendid Suns.

In September 2015, Argentinean artist Adrían Villar Rojas opened the exhibition Two suns at the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York. Featuring in the exhibition was a clay statue which resembled Michelangelo’s David albeit lying down and with some slight modifications to its pose and facial features for example. This paper aims to explore the possible link between the clay statue featured in Two suns and the David in relation to the term simulacra through a poststructuralist reading of Plato, Gilles Deleuze and Jean Baudrillard. By deconstructing the work of art and the theoretical material together both the effects and inner workings of the simulacra in Two suns as well as the constant changing meaning of symbols become mapped out.

The African novel The Suns of Independence, written by Ivorian author Ahmadou Kourouma, is considered one of the first to study the disillusionment of the postcolonial era after the independencies in Africa. The novel is celebrated for its narrative style, inspired by the Malinke culture and language, and characterised by its oral tradition and the interaction between the narrator and his audience. Using the concepts of Gérard Genette (1983), this study analyses the following narrative instances in the novel: The narrator addressing the narratee, proverbs, comparisons and riddles, the narrator addressing a character, the procedure of question-answer, and the dream, and discusses for each of the narrative instances the relationship of the narrator towards the story, the perspective, the narrative level, and the function of the narrator. The findings show that the alternation of narrative instances gives access to more functions of the narrator. The narrative instances in which the narrator addresses the narratee or the character and the procedure of question-response create an illusion of a dialogue between narrator and narratee, thus enhances the communicative function, whereas proverbs, comparisons, and riddles, apart from connecting with the narratee, also play an important role in order to explain and evaluate developments, characters and environments. Other narrative instances, such as the dream, play an important role for the narrative function.

This thesis is concerned with transnational literature and writers of the Middle Eastern and South Asian diasporas. It argues that the diasporic position of the authors enables their roles as comprador subjects. The thesis maintains that the figure of the comprador is always acted upon by its ontological predisposition, so that diasporic positionality often involves a single subject which straddles and speaks from two or more different subject positions. Comprador authors can be said to be co-opted by Western metropolitan publishing companies who stand to benefit by marketing the apparent marginality of the homelands about which these authors write. The thesis therefore proceeds from the notion that such a diasporic position is the paradoxical condition of the transnational subject or writer. I submit that there is, to some degree, a questionable element in the common political and cultural suggestions that emerge upon closer evaluation of diasporic literature. Indeed, a charge of complicity has been levelled against authors who write, apparently, to service two distinct entities – the wish to speak on behalf of a minority collective, as well as the imperial ‘centre’ which is the intended interlocutor of the comprador author. However, it is this difference, the implied otherness or marginality of the outsider within, which I argue is sometimes used by diasporic writers as a way of articulating with ‘authenticity’ the cultures and politics of their erstwhile localities. This thesis is concerned, therefore, with the representation of ‘the East’ in four novels by diasporic, specifically comprador writers, namely Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns. I suggest that the ‘third-world’ and transnational literature can also be a selling point for the transnational subject, whose representations may at times pander to preconceived ideas about ‘the Orient’ and its people. As an illustration of this double-bind, I offer a close reading of all the novels to suggest that on the one hand, the comprador author writes within the paradigm of the ‘writing back’ movement, as a counter-discourse to the Orientalist representations of the homeland. However, the corollary is that such an attempt to ‘write back’, in a sense, re-inscribes the very discourse it wishes to subvert, especially because the literature is aimed at a ‘Western’ audience. Moreover, the template of the comprador could be used to explain how a transnational post-9/11 text from an Afghan-American, for instance, may be put to the service of the imperial machine, and read, therefore, as a supporting document to the U.S. policy on Afghanistan.