This dissertation describes the introduction and development of school journeys within the Swedish elementary schools during the period 1890 to 1940. The study focuses on how the jour­neys were perceived, organised and performed by elementary school teachers and their pupils. The development of school journeys is mainly due to two different organisations: The Elemen­tary School Teachers of Sweden (Sveriges allmänna folkskollärarförening, SAF) and the Swe­dish Tourist Association (Svenska Turistföreningen, STF). The latter started to support school journeys performed by elementary schools in 1898, by allowing teachers to apply for economic benefits. SAF, on the other hand, helped the development of journeys through the production of guidelines. They also appointed a special School Journey Committee 1899 that were to pro­mote school journeys, and they introduced special youth hostels for travelling school-classes in about 50 cities in Sweden during 1897-1930. School journeys were introduced in Sweden in 1894. The term was used to describe longer journeys taken by school children under the direction of teachers. Its intention was to give the pupil direct experience of the work that had been done in the classroom. The subjects that were dealt with in school, geography, history and nature studies, were thus objectified during the journey. Children were to see and experience such things that hitherto had been nothing but names. In this dissertation the different purposes of the journeys are discussed and it is argued that the journeys became a mean to translate into practise some of the progressive educational prin­ciples that Swedish progressive educators discussed at the end of the nineteenth century. These principles included that education should be based on direct observation, that it should pro­mote self-activity and that it should give the pupils a sense of the national community and shape their national identity. The study consists of three parts. The first part deals with the origin of school journeys and the educational principle of direct observation. The second part presents the ways the notion of school journeys were translated into practise. The third part discusses the image of Sweden that was presented to the children, through the journeys. / digitalisering@umu

Thesis (M.CM)--Hong Kong Baptist University, 2006. / Dissertation submitted to the School of Chinese Medicine. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 32-35).

Thesis--Cologne. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [xi]-xxxi).

Thesis--Uppsala. / Includes bibliographical references.

This diploma thesis deals with economic relations between the Czech Republic and the People's Republic of China. It is divided into theoretical and practical part. The theoretical part involves two chapters which deal with bilateral relations of both countries on general level. In the first chapter I compare the czech and chinese business environment and mutual economic cooperation using main economic indicators. This chapter is also dedicated to political relations and the problems which China is facing nowadays. The second chapter deals with current economic and export strategies of both countries and their penetration. The last part of this chapter is dedicated to czech institutions which support czech export. The third chapter is the practical part of this thesis in which I focused on putting knowledge of the theoretical part into practice using case study of czech company Škoda Praha, a.s.

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This report examines Porphyry’s De antro nympharum and its eclectic mixture of philosophy, allegory, and mysticism in the form of a Homeric commentary. The paper situates Porphyry’s commentary in the broader tradition of Homeric interpretation with special attention to Stoic exegesis and Platonic views on poetry and myth. It also contextualizes Porphyry’s philosophy in terms of the mystery cults, particularly Mithraism, that had grown very popular by Porphyry’s time. The paper argues that Porphyry devised a practice of reading intended to promote a level of philosophical contemplation beyond the level of rational discourse, in keeping with the Neoplatonic philosophy of his teacher, Plotinus, and that this practice is especially evident in the De antro nympharum. / text

Suppliers in competitive electricity markets regularly respond to prices that change hour by hour or even more frequently, but most consumers respond to price changes on a very different time scale, i. e. they observe and respond to changes in price as reflected on their monthly bills. This thesis examines mixed complementarity programming models of equilibrium that can bridge the speed of response gap between suppliers and consumers, yet adhere to the principle of marginal cost pricing of electricity. It develops a computable equilibrium model to estimate the time-of-use (TOU) prices that can be used in retail electricity markets. An optimization model for the supply side of the electricity market, combined with a price-responsive geometric distributed lagged demand function, computes the TOU prices that satisfy the equilibrium conditions. Monthly load duration curves are approximated and discretized in the context of the supplier's optimization model. The models are formulated and solved by the mixed complementarity problem approach. It is intended that the models will be useful (a) in the regular exercise of setting consumer prices (i. e. , TOU prices that reflect the marginal cost of electricity) by a regulatory body (e. g. , Ontario Energy Board) for jurisdictions (e. g. , Ontario) where consumers' prices are regulated, but suppliers offer into a competitive market, (b) for forecasting in markets without price regulation, but where consumers pay a weighted average of wholesale price, (c) in evaluation of the policies regarding time-of-use pricing compared to the single pricing, and (d) in assessment of the welfare changes due to the implementation of TOU prices.

Suppliers in competitive electricity markets regularly respond to prices that change hour by hour or even more frequently, but most consumers respond to price changes on a very different time scale, i. e. they observe and respond to changes in price as reflected on their monthly bills. This thesis examines mixed complementarity programming models of equilibrium that can bridge the speed of response gap between suppliers and consumers, yet adhere to the principle of marginal cost pricing of electricity. It develops a computable equilibrium model to estimate the time-of-use (TOU) prices that can be used in retail electricity markets. An optimization model for the supply side of the electricity market, combined with a price-responsive geometric distributed lagged demand function, computes the TOU prices that satisfy the equilibrium conditions. Monthly load duration curves are approximated and discretized in the context of the supplier's optimization model. The models are formulated and solved by the mixed complementarity problem approach. It is intended that the models will be useful (a) in the regular exercise of setting consumer prices (i. e. , TOU prices that reflect the marginal cost of electricity) by a regulatory body (e. g. , Ontario Energy Board) for jurisdictions (e. g. , Ontario) where consumers' prices are regulated, but suppliers offer into a competitive market, (b) for forecasting in markets without price regulation, but where consumers pay a weighted average of wholesale price, (c) in evaluation of the policies regarding time-of-use pricing compared to the single pricing, and (d) in assessment of the welfare changes due to the implementation of TOU prices.

This thesis proposes equilibrium models to link the wholesale and retail electricity markets which allow for reconciliation of the differing time scales of responses of producers (e.g., hourly) and consumers (e.g., monthly) to changing prices. Electricity market equilibrium models with time of use (TOU) pricing scheme are formulated as large-scale variational inequality (VI) problems, a unified and concise approach for modeling the equilibrium. The demand response is dynamic in these models through a dependence on the lagged demand. Different market structures are examined within this context. With an illustrative example, the welfare gains/losses are analyzed after an implementation of TOU pricing scheme over the single pricing scheme. An approximation of the welfare change for this analysis is also presented. Moreover, break-up of a large supplier into smaller parts is investigated. For the illustrative examples presented in the dissertation, overall welfare gains for consumers and lower prices closer to the levels of perfect competition can be realized when the retail pricing scheme is changed from single pricing to TOU pricing. These models can be useful policy tools for regulatory bodies i) to forecast future retail prices (TOU or single prices), ii) to examine the market power exerted by suppliers and iii) to measure welfare gains/losses with different retail pricing schemes (e.g., single versus TOU pricing). With the inclusion of linearized DC network constraints into these models, the problem size grows considerably. Dantzig-Wolfe (DW) decomposition algorithm for VI problems is used to alleviate the computational burden and it also facilitates model management and maintenance. Modification of the DW decomposition algorithm and approximation of the DW master problem significantly improve the computational effort required to find the equilibrium. These algorithms are applied to a two-region energy model for Canada and a realistic Ontario electricity test system. In addition to empirical analysis, theoretical results for the convergence properties of the master problem approximation are presented for DW decomposition of VI problems.