No description available.

This dissertation is a pooled time series, cross-sectional, quantitative study of the impact of international financial transfer on the level of democracy. The study covers 174 developed and developing countries from 1976 through 1994. Through evaluating the democracy and democratization literature and other studies, the dissertation develops a theory and testable hypotheses about the impact of the international variables foreign aid and foreign direct investment on levels of democracy. This study sought to determine whether these two financial variables promote or nurture democracy and if so, how? A pooled time-series cross-sectional model is developed employing these two variables along with other relevant control variables. Control variables included the presence of the Cold War and existence of formal alliance with the United States, which account for the strategic dimension that might affect the financial transfer - level of democracy linkage. The model also includes an economic development variable (per capita Gross National Product) to account for the powerful impact for economic development on the level of democracy, as well as a control for each country's population size. By addressing and the inclusion of financial, economic, strategic, and population size effects, I consider whether change in these variables affect the level of democracy and in which direction. The dissertation tests this model by employing several techniques. The variables are subjected to bivariate and multivariate analysis including bivariate correlations, analysis of variance, and ordinary least square (OLS) multivariate regression with robust matrix and a lagged dependent variable. Panel corrected standard error (PCSE) was also employed to empirically test the pooled timeseries cross-sectional multivariate model. The dissertation analytical section concludes with path analysis testing which showed the impact of each of the independent variables on the dependent variable. The findings indicate less impact of international financial variables upon the level of democracy than hypothesized. Foreign assistance correlates negatively with economic development levels and has no effect on democracy levels. In contrast, foreign direct investment associates positively to economic development levels and, through increased economic development, contributes to democracy.

In this thesis, we established a cellular CDMA reverse channel model, which incorporates a time-invariant discrete multipath Nakagami-fading channel in a multiple-cell system. The effects of intra and inter-cell interference, perfect power control, lognormal shadowing and RAKE receiver with varying number of taps are investigated. For performance improvement forward error correction and smart antenna techniques are incorporated into the model. Expressions for probability of bit error are developed under a range of operating conditions and the model is tested using Monte Carlo Simulation. / Turkish Army author

No description available.

Digitized by Kansas State University Libraries

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Science, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of requirements for the degree of Master of Science. Johannesburg, 2015. / This dissertation is based on three di erent combinatorial papers: 1. The rst paper is by Silvia Heubach and Tou k Mansour: Enumeration of 3-Letter Patterns in Compositions. Combinatorial Number Theory in Celebration of the 70-th Birthday of Ronald Graham. In: De Gruyter Proceedings in Mathematics. 243-264, (2007). 2. The second paper is by Daniel J. Velleman and Gregory S. Warrington: What to expect in a game of memory. American Mathematical Monthly, 120:787-805 (2013). 3. The third paper is by Mireille Bousquet-M elou and Richard Brak: Exactly Solved Models of Polyominoes and Polygons. Polygons, Polyominoes and Polycubes. In: Lecture Notes in Physics, 775:43-78, (2009). / GR 2016

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. February 23, 2016 / This work investigates the effectiveness of using clustering methods in solving various capacitated location-routing problems (CLRP) for medium- and large-scale datasets, with up to 20 000 datapoints. Different clustering methods as well as hybrid clustering methods are tested and compared. A new problem called the planar CLRP (plCLRP) is introduced. Based on the results from the clustering methods, cluster-based approaches are suggested to solve variants of the CLRP. These include the Hamiltonian p–median problem (HpMP), the planar CLRP (plCLRP), the concentrator discrete CLRP (cdCLRP) and the standard discrete CLRP (sdCLRP). A new method called the two-phased proportional regret ordering based unconstrained to constrained (PROBUC) method is also proposed to create capacitated clusters. The focus falls on finding effective non-exponential time algorithms that can be used to solve large-scale problems with good results. A full set of results for each problem are presented and comparisons are made with known results from the literature where possible. The PLRP (periodic location-routing problem) introduced by Prodhon and Prins (2008), is also investigated. A change in the current problem formulation, as provided by Prodhon (2011), is proposed to enforce single-source constraints across time horizon and limit the maximum number of vehicles. An approach to solve the PLRP, based on the cluster-based approaches to solve the discrete CLRPs, is suggested. The results of the cluster-based approach are compared to best-known solutions for existing PLRP instances given by Prodhon (2009a). A set of large scale PLRP instances are introduced, based on instances generated by Harks et al. (2013) for the sdCLRP.

No description available.

This thesis presents and evaluates a generic algorithm for incrementally computing the dominant singular subspaces of a matrix. The relationship between the generality of the results and the necessary computation is explored, and it is shown that more efficient computation can be obtained by relaxing the algebraic constraints on the factoriation. The performance of this method, both numerical and computational, is discussed in terms of the algorithmic parameters, such as block size and acceptance threshhold. Bounds on the error are presented along with a posteriori approximations of these bounds. Finally, a group of methods are proposed which iteratively improve the accuracy of computed results and the quality of the bounds. / A Dissertation submitted to the School of Computational Science in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2008. / Date of Defense: May 22, 2008. / Riemannian Manifolds, Iterative Methods, Convergence Theory, Numerical Optimization, Eigenvalue Problems, Trust-Region Methods, Riemannian Optimization, Optimization on Manifolds / Includes bibliographical references. / Kyle Gallivan, Professor Co-Directing Dissertation; Pierre-Antoine Absil, Professor Co-Directing Dissertation; Anjaneyulu Krothapalli, Outside Committee Member; Gordon Erlebacher, Committee Member; Anuj Srivastava, Committee Member; Yousuff Hussaini, Committee Member.

This thesis presents and investigates ideas for improvement of the creation of quality centroidal voronoi tessellations on the sphere (SCVT). First, we discuss the theory of CVTs in general, and specifically on the sphere. Subsequently we consider the iterative processes, such as Lloyd's algorithm, which are used to construct them. Following this, we examine and introduce different schemes for creating their input values, known as generators, and compare the effects of these different initial points with respect to their ability to converge and the amount of work required to meet a given tolerance goal. In addition, we describe a method for density functions via images so that we can shape generator density in an intuitive manner and then implement this method with examples to demonstrate it's efficacy. / A Thesis submitted to the School of Computational Science in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science. / Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2008. / Date of Defense: June 18, 2008. / Cvt Scvt Centroidal Voronoi Tessellations Sphere D / Includes bibliographical references. / Max Gunzburger, Professor Co-Directing Thesis; Janet Peterson, Professor Co-Directing Thesis; Gordon Erlebacher, Committee Member.