The idea of common morality is not a new idea. Philosophers have been engaged with it from the very early days. Many modern philosophers intend to perceive it when they compare or contrast it with the implications of ethical theories for genuine understanding of moral facts. They believe that without having any reference to what common people think, believe and practice, it is preposterous to construct a complete set of abstract norms and postulate them as relevant to practical life. In this work, proceeding with a motive of understanding the characteristic strength of common morality and to see how meaningfully we can designate the relevance of common moral beliefs in our applied ethical discussion, I am basically exploring two different accounts common morality view. The first one is the universalistic account which emerges from the works or Bernard Gert and Tom Beauchamp (including their colleagues), and the other one, I believe, sets its journey from the wombs of the critics of the first one. In this work, in order to properly designate the relevance of common morality, I am intending to develop the second account.

This thesis investigates in what way trade flows in Europe have been altered and differ for countries belonging to a preferential trade agreement as well as a common currency area. More specifically, how exports among the European countries are affected by memberships with the European Union and the EMU. A total of 72 countries have been chosen which represents the main trading partners between the EU and the rest of the world. Out of these 72 countries, 25 represent EU members which include 12 EMU member countries. The econometric analysis employ a gravity model with 18 variables in order to determine their impact on trade flows. This is done through a regression with a log-log equation where the dependent variable is export. The other variables included are chosen to explain export flows among the EU members as well as their trade with EMU countries and the rest of the world. Furthermore, variables representing trade affinities are included to determine whether or not they have a significant effect on trade. The regression is divided into four time periods in order to more easily determine how the trade pattern in Europe have altered from the establishment of the EU and the EMU. The first time period represent an early state of EU membership, the second a mature state of EU membership, the third when EU was reformed and the fourth an early state of EMU membership. The regression results illustrate that the majority of the selected variables are significant but most importantly that the trade affinity variables are proven to have an impact on trade flows. The results also show that trade has increased and that in the case of EU membership it is more profitable to join than to remain outside. Moreover, the result show in par-ticular that countries that belong to the EMU have a stronger orientation of their exports to the rest of the world then other EU countries. For the latter, the European market is of prime importance.

Since the Euro has founded in 1999, the Asian Currency has become an important issue. The most important prerequisite for adopting common currency for the countries in the area is the synchronization of business cycle. This paper analyses the degree and responses of business cycles for Asian countries when they face to the common shocks. The empirical findings from this paper can be summarized as follows. First, the shocks of Japanese economy are more important to Asian countries than the shocks from the United States, except for Thailand and Indonesia. Second, Malaysia and the Philippine are substantially influenced by the Thailand. Therefore, the Asian economy is evidently forming its regional (or bloc) economy continually. The findings from this paper are in the same line with the result from Hazel (2001), who concludes the business cycles of Japan and Korea are commoved. The degree of synchronization of business cycles for Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippine are quite high as well.

I den här uppsatsen beskrivs kommunikationen stödd av ett talbaserat kommunikationshjälpmedel mellan två personer utan funktionshinder. Beskrivningen görs utifrån ett teoretiskt perspektiv som tar hänsyn till att kommunikation är en interaktiv social process och fokus ligger på processen i vilken man skapar samförståelse. En kvalitativ metod användes där observationer samlades in genom videoinspelningar av personer involverade i en måltid. Materialet analyserades genom en kommunikationsanalys i vilken fokus låg på hur samförståelse uppnåddes. Hastighetsbegränsning och symbolurvalet visade sig vara egenskaper hos kommunikationshjälpmedlet som påverkade kommunikationen på så sätt att deltagarna på grund av dessa fick reparera eller avbryta den aktuella konversationen. För att kompensera för hastighetsbegränsningen och symbolurvalet använde sig deltagarna framförallt av två olika strategier, den ena innebar att man genom samkonstruktion skapade yttranden och den andra innebar att man använde sig av den ackumulerade samförståelsen för att på ett så ekonomiskt sätt skapa yttranden. Sammantaget visade sig kommunikationen med hjälp av ett hjälpmedel vara en process i vilken alla deltagare var involverade och påverkades av situationen.

This dissertation focuses on the spatial aspects of oil and natural gas production to investigate the extent and effects of inefficient and unnecessary spatial competition. Because oil and natural gas are migratory, operators can cause hydrocarbon resources to flow from a neighboring property onto his or her own through rapid extraction. This problem is compounded when productive leases are comparatively small, as is the case in Texas. Following an introduction and literature review, the third chapter takes advantage of a natural experiment to demonstrate how spillovers in production limit total cumulative recovery, and how the assignment of secure property rights can enhance economic outcomes. The chapter examines production from wells in Oklahoma and Texas near the panhandle border. While wells on either side of this line have similar geologies and so should be similarly productive they are exposed to different treatments: Oklahoma has a much higher rate of unitization (a contractual scheme where competing owners hire a common operator and share profits), whereas the unitization rate in Texas is lower. Using regression discontinuity design, I find that Oklahoma wells are produced more slowly early on, and that this results in greater cumulative recovery over the course of a well’s life (150% more relative to Texas). These results are robust after controlling for reservoir specific effects, and across parametric, semi-parametric and nonparametric specifications. xiiThe fourth chapter quantifies the degree to which competing owners interfere with each other’s production through spatial spillovers. I use a spatial econometric model that controls for spatial autocorrelation and spatial dependence and can therefore identify the spillovers in production. Additionally, by comparing leases owned by competing producers to leases owned by a common producer, I show empirically how securing property rights through common ownership can alleviate the externality in production. A priori, one would expect that when a common producer owns adjacent leases, the producer has the incentive to fully account for how spillovers in production affect neighboring wells. Conversely, when adjacent landowners are in competition to extract the resource, they will not account for the damage rapid production causes at neighboring wells. After controlling for secondary injection I find that this is indeed the case for Slaughter field of West Texas. The fifth chapter investigates the statistical properties of oil and natural gas production. I find striking evidence that both oil and natural gas production are power-law distributed with the exponent approximately equal to one. This distribution might arise from disequilibrium in production and exploration. Highlighting this distribution is important because it has potential consequences for the political economy of regulation as well as for resource management. For example, because the most productive wells lie in the far-right tail of the distribution, regulation geared to prevent a Deepwater Horizon scale spill need fall on a vanishingly small percent of wells. The distribution also has consequences for management because a company profitability depends disproportionately on how it manages its most productive wells. The sixth chapter provides a short conclusion.

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Online communities thrive on their members participation and contributions. Continuous encouragement of participation of these members is vital for an online community. Social visualizations are one of the methods to make members explicitly aware of their connections and relationships. There are numerous ways to visually represent information, current-status, power, and acceptance of members in an online community. In this thesis I present a design of a visualization representing the evolving reciprocity of relationships among users based on the comments they give to each others posts. The purpose of the visualization is to emphasize and hopefully trigger a common bond in the community and thereby increase their participation. We developed and deployed the visualization in an online community called WISETales where women in science and engineering share personal stories. We also deployed modified and improved versions of the visualization in two other communities, I-Help class discussion forums and the Vegatopia discussion forum for vegetarians. In this thesis we present the results of the evaluation in these three communities. The results unfortunately, were negative. Even though separate explanations for the lack of motivational effect can be found in each of the experiments, it seems that the chosen motivational approach was too gentle to encourage participation. It seems for reciprocation to take place, the users need to be committed to the community and already have some other underlying motivation to participate actively. The visualization also should provide some new information that they werent aware of previously. This was not the case with the users in the three chosen communities. WISETales was too new and can barely be called a community. I-Help was not a community, but a place for student to post questions for the teacher to answer. Vegatopia, in contrast, is well established, active community, where people know each other, and engage in conversations with each other. The visualization did not provide any new information for them that they didnt know and only served as a brief attraction for a day (novelty effect). We are still optimistic, however, that the visualization may be useful for active and too dynamic communities where people are unaware of their social relationships because they are too many, for example, social network sites like Twitter.

This dissertation justifies the contention that culture contributes to the theological task in an ancillary way to Scripture. Chapter 1 introduces the primary issues. Chapter two interacts with two existing models of theology and culture, which respectively suggest that the theological task transcends and embraces culture. Chapter 2 also introduces a third way, that the theological task should employ culture. Chapter 3 justifies this thesis by demonstrating that culture is inherently a theologically meaningful text for three reasons: (1) God purposed for culture to be an expression of the imago Dei that stages truth in cultural form; (2) Post-Fall culture-producing image-bearers are enriched with truth content via general revelation; and (3) God graciously restrains post- Fall culture-producing image-bearers from being as sinful as they could be and God graciously enables humanity to retain positive epistemological value. Chapter 4 clarifies the worldview orientation antithesis that limits culture's value; though the antithesis limits culture's value in the theological task it does not eliminate it. Chapter 5 summarizes the conclusions set forth in this dissertation and briefly recounts several examples of individuals who model these conclusions rightly and wrongly.

This dissertation focuses on the spatial aspects of oil and natural gas production to investigate the extent and effects of inefficient and unnecessary spatial competition. Because oil and natural gas are migratory, operators can cause hydrocarbon resources to flow from a neighboring property onto his or her own through rapid extraction. This problem is compounded when productive leases are comparatively small, as is the case in Texas. Following an introduction and literature review, the third chapter takes advantage of a natural experiment to demonstrate how spillovers in production limit total cumulative recovery, and how the assignment of secure property rights can enhance economic outcomes. The chapter examines production from wells in Oklahoma and Texas near the panhandle border. While wells on either side of this line have similar geologies and so should be similarly productive they are exposed to different treatments: Oklahoma has a much higher rate of unitization (a contractual scheme where competing owners hire a common operator and share profits), whereas the unitization rate in Texas is lower. Using regression discontinuity design, I find that Oklahoma wells are produced more slowly early on, and that this results in greater cumulative recovery over the course of a well’s life (150% more relative to Texas). These results are robust after controlling for reservoir specific effects, and across parametric, semi-parametric and nonparametric specifications. xiiThe fourth chapter quantifies the degree to which competing owners interfere with each other’s production through spatial spillovers. I use a spatial econometric model that controls for spatial autocorrelation and spatial dependence and can therefore identify the spillovers in production. Additionally, by comparing leases owned by competing producers to leases owned by a common producer, I show empirically how securing property rights through common ownership can alleviate the externality in production. A priori, one would expect that when a common producer owns adjacent leases, the producer has the incentive to fully account for how spillovers in production affect neighboring wells. Conversely, when adjacent landowners are in competition to extract the resource, they will not account for the damage rapid production causes at neighboring wells. After controlling for secondary injection I find that this is indeed the case for Slaughter field of West Texas. The fifth chapter investigates the statistical properties of oil and natural gas production. I find striking evidence that both oil and natural gas production are power-law distributed with the exponent approximately equal to one. This distribution might arise from disequilibrium in production and exploration. Highlighting this distribution is important because it has potential consequences for the political economy of regulation as well as for resource management. For example, because the most productive wells lie in the far-right tail of the distribution, regulation geared to prevent a Deepwater Horizon scale spill need fall on a vanishingly small percent of wells. The distribution also has consequences for management because a company profitability depends disproportionately on how it manages its most productive wells. The sixth chapter provides a short conclusion.