Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 154-162).

This essay examines commitment and abandonment structured as two binary opposites informing For Whom the Bell Tolls. The intention behind this structuring is to highlight Hemingway’s message of the novel, set forth by the epigraph by Donne; everyone is part of mankind and every death diminishes everyone equally. The consistent structuring of characters can be seen by the fact that everyone who is committed, loyal and honest is punished while the reverse is true for people who abandon, desert and betray. The one exception to this is Pilar who, because of the role as a liberated woman given to her by Hemingway, is not included in this general categorization.

The goal of the research is to devise an equitable road pricing system which would leave the majority of routes free of tolls, so that low income people would suffer no cash loss although they would probably suffer loss of time. The aims of the dissertation are twofold. The first is to provide a numerical analysis of how urban commuters with differing abilities to pay would respond to additional road user charges. The welfare implications of such differential responses are examined and their policy implications analysed. The second aim is to develop a practical framework to model congestion pricing policies in the context of heterogeneous users. To achieve these aims, the following objectives have been set: (a) Using a simple network with two parallel competing routes, determine both welfare maximising and revenue maximising tolls under the constraint that only one route can be priced. In this setting, determine the allocation of traffic between the alternative routes, the efficiency gain, the revenue, the changes in travel cost and the distributional effects. (b) Establish a realistic model of an actual urban area to examine the impacts of selectively tolling congestible routes. As in the simple network case, assess the effects of toll policy on traffic distribution, network efficiency, revenues, and the welfare of the individual consumer and society. (c) Evaluate whether the non-identical treatment of users will enhance the acceptability of congestion pricing as a transport policy. Results from the simulations indicate that non-identical treatment of drivers? responses to toll charges provides better understanding of the differential impacts of various pricing policies. Allowing for heterogeneity in time valuation provides a better assessment of the efficiency of pricing policies and of the welfare impacts of toll charges, as it is able to capture their differential effects. More importantly, it shows that low-income commuters may not be significantly worse off with pricing especially when there is a free alternative route. This research demonstrates the need to adopt appropriate analytical techniques and assumptions when modelling the traffic equilibrium in a network with tolls. These include relaxing the homogeneity assumption, examining sensitivity to supply function parameter values and to the effect of vehicle operating cost, and using a route rather than link based measure of consumer surplus

abstract: Priced Managed Lanes (MLs) have been increasingly advocated as one of the effective ways to mitigating congestion in recent years. This study explores a new and innovative pricing strategy for MLs called Travel Time Refund (TTR). The proposed TTR provides an additional option to paying drivers that insures their travel time by issuing a refund to the toll cost if they do not reach their destination within specified travel times due to accidents or other unforeseen circumstances. Perceived benefits of TTR include raised public acceptance towards priced MLs, utilization increase of HOV/HOT lanes, overall congestion mitigation, and additional funding for relevant transportation agencies. To gauge travelers’ interests of TTR and to analyse its possible impacts, a stated preference (SP) survey was performed. An exploratory and statistical analysis of the survey responses revealed negative interest towards HOT and TTR option in accordance with common wisdom and previous studies. However, it is found that travelers are less negative about TTR than HOT alone; supporting the idea, that TTR could make HOT facilities more appealing. The impact of travel time reliability and latent variables representing psychological constructs on travelers’ choices in response to this new pricing strategy was also analysed. The results indicate that along with travel time and reliability, the decision maker’s attitudes and the level of comprehension of the concept of HOT and TTR play a significant role in their choice making. While the refund option may be theoretically and analytically feasible, the practical implementation issues cannot be ignored. This study also provides a discussion of the potential implementation considerations that include information provision to connected and non-connected vehicles, distinction between toll-only and refund customers, measurement of actual travel time, refund calculation and processing and safety and human factors issues. As the market availability of Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) is prognosticated by 2020, the potential impact of such technologies on effective demand management, especially on MLs is worth investigating. Simulation analysis was performed to evaluate the system performance of a hypothetical road network at varying market penetration of CAVs. The results indicate that Connected Vehicles (CVs) could potentially encourage and enhance the use of MLs. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering 2018

Developments in cutting tools, coolants, drives, controls, tool changers, pallet changers and the philosophy of machine tool design have made ground breaking changes in machine tools and machining processes. Modern Machining Centres have been developed to perform several operations on several faces of a workpiece in a single setup. On the other hand industry requires high value added components, which have many quality critical features to be manufactured in an outsourcing environment as opposed to the traditional in-house manufacture. The success of this manufacture critically depends on matching the advanced features of the machine tools to the complexity of the component. This project has developed a methodology to represent the features of a machine tool in the form of an alphanumeric string and the features of the component in another string. The strings are then matched to choose the most suitable and economical Machine Tool for the component’s manufacture. Literature identified that block structure is the way to answer the question ‘how to systematically describe the layout of such a machining centre’. Incomplete attempts to describe a block structure as alphanumeric strings were also presented in the literature. Survey on sales literature from several machine tool suppliers was investigated to systematically identify the features need by the user for the choice of a machine tool. Combining these, a new alphanumeric string was developed to represent machine tools. Using these strings as one of the ‘key’s for sorting a database of machine tools was developed. A supporting database of machine tools was also developed. Survey on machining on the other hand identified, that machining features can be used as a basis for planning the machining of a component. It analysed various features and feature sets proposed and provided and their recognition in CAD models. Though a vast number of features were described only two sets were complete sets. The project was started with one of them, (the other was carrying too many unwanted details for the task of this project) machining features supported by ‘Expert Machinist’ software. But when it became unavailable a ‘Feature set’ along those lines were defined and used in the generation of an alphanumeric string to represent the work. Comparing the two strings led the choice of suitable machines from the database. The methodology is implemented as a bolt on software incorporated within Pro/Engineer software where one can model any given component using cut features (mimicking machining operation) and produce a list of machine tools having features for the machining of that component. This will enable outsourcing companies to identify those Precision Engineers who have the machine tools with the matching apabilities. Supporting software and databases were developed using Access Database, Visual Basic and C with Pro/TOOLKIT functions. The resulting software suite was tested on several case studies and found to be effective.

This thesis deals with international road transport of passengers. It deals with legislation that is associated with this activity and the conditions that are imposed on international road transport operators. In the practical part deals with issues that are current in the field and tries to give instructions to their solution, or eliminate their negative impacts. It focuses primarily on the issue of safety, environmental and economic issues.

We examine the working mechanisms and efficiencies of zoning (regulation of floor area ratios and land-use types) and fiscal instruments (tolls, property taxes, and income transfer), and extend the instrument choice theory to include the congestion of road and nonroad infrastructure. We show that in the spatial model with heterogeneous households the standard first-best instruments do not work because they trigger distortion of spatial allocations. In addition, because of the household heterogeneity and real estate market distortions, zoning could be less efficient than, as efficient as, or more efficient than pricing instruments. However, when the zoning enacted deviates from the optimum, zoning not only becomes inferior to congestion charges but is also likely to reduce welfare. In addition, we provide a global platform that extends the instrument choice theory of pollution control to include various types of externalities and a wide range of discrete policy deviations for any reasons beyond cost–benefit uncertainties.

Since Presocratic Greece, suicide in the West has been “known” and controlled, both politically and discursively. Groups as diverse as theologians and literary critics have propagated many different views of self-killing, but, determining its cause and moralizing about it, they have commonly exerted interpretive power over suicide, making it nameable, explicable, and predominantly reprehensible. The four modernist authors that I consider in this dissertation -- Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner -- break completely with the tradition of knowing suicide by insisting on its inscrutability, refusing to judge it, and ultimately rendering it “almost unnamable,” identifiable but indefinable. In For Whom the Bell Tolls, Victory, Mrs. Dalloway, and The Sound and the Fury, respectively, these authors portray illustrative, but by no means definitive, modernist self-killings; they construct a distinctive representational space around suicide, one free of causal, moral, theoretical or thematic meaning and, I argue, imbued with the power to disrupt interpretation. “‘Almost Unnamable’: Suicide in the Modernist Novel” examines the power of self-killing’s representational space in early twentieth-century fiction, arguing for its importance not only to the history of suicide in the West but also to the portrayal of death in the twentieth-century novel. / text

Le contexte de cette recherche s’inscrit dans le cadre d’un contrat Cifre, passé entre un laboratoire (le GLYSI, devenu MODYS), une entreprise (petite PME de 70 salariés, proposant des solutions téléphoniques aux très petites entreprises) et l’ANRT. Une telle coopération présentait plusieurs avantages, tant pour la recherche sociologique que pour la PME. La recherche a ainsi pu obtenir de travailler sur un segment d’entreprise encore peu étudié, c'est-à-dire les TPE de 0 à 9 salariés, tant du point de vue de l’organisation que de la communication et de pratiquer une sociologie appliquée par le concours d’une immersion totale dans l’entreprise. La PME, quant à elle, attendait de comprendre les attentes futures de sa clientèle finale grâce à une méthodologie qualitative dont la spécificité est d’apporter des éclairages différents et complémentaire à ceux du pôle marketing et d’apporter des réponses aux problèmes de communication internes et aux cloisonnements géographiques.La recherche menée dans le domaine de la sociologie des organisations stricto sensu porte essentiellement sur la question du lien qu’entretiennent entre elles la communication et l’organisation d’entreprise et pose l’hypothèse que ce sont les prises de décisions qui relient ces deux éléments. Les résultats de l’analyse mettent également en exergue l’importance relative des NTIC dans le fonctionnement des TPE. Quant à la recherche menée pour le compte de l’entreprise, elle est rapidement confrontée à un contexte de marché particulier. Le marché des télécommunications traverse une période tourmentée puisque France Télécom en perd le monopôle. Ce faisant, le groupe France Télécom modifie ses appels d’offres, ce qui, à terme, va entrainer la fermeture de la PME. / The contexte of this research takes place within the framework of a contract Cifre.This contract was signed between a laboratory (the GLYSI, become MODYS), a company (small and medium-sized entreprise (SME) of 70 employees proposing phone solutions in very small entreprises) and the ANRT. Such a cooperation presented several advantages, both for the sociological research and for the SME.The research was so able to obtain to work on a segment of company still little studied, the very smalls companies from 0 to 9 employees, both from the point of view of the organization and of the communication, and to practise a sociology applied thanks to a total dumping in the SME, as for it, waited to understand the future waits of it final clientele thanks to a qualitative methodology and to bring answers to the internal communications problems and to the geographical subdivisions. The research concerns essentially the question of the link that maintain between them the communication and the organization of company and put the hypothesis that it is the decision-making which connect these two elements. The results of the analysis also highlight the relative importance of the new tools of information and communication in the functioning of the very small entreprises. As for the research led for the company, it is quickly confronted with a context of particular market. The market of telecommunications crosses a restless period, because France Télécom loses the monopole. In so doing, the group FT modifies its calls for tender what, later, is going to entrainer the closure of the SME.

We examine the working mechanisms and efficiencies of zoning (regulation of floor area ratios and land-use types) and fiscal instruments (tolls, property taxes, and income transfer), and extend the instrument choice theory to include the congestion of road and nonroad infrastructure. We show that in the spatial model with heterogeneous households the standard first-best instruments do not work because they trigger distortion of spatial allocations. In addition, because of the household heterogeneity and real estate market distortions, zoning could be less efficient than, as efficient as, or more efficient than pricing instruments. However, when the zoning enacted deviates from the optimum, zoning not only becomes inferior to congestion charges but is also likely to reduce welfare. In addition, we provide a global platform that extends the instrument choice theory of pollution control to include various types of externalities and a wide range of discrete policy deviations for any reasons beyond cost–benefit uncertainties.