It is the aim of this study to examine what has been done in Cyprus in the field of education since 1974 when Cyprus faced the devastating consequences of the Turkish invasion which affected all aspects of life in Cyprus and consequently education. Special interest, however, is shown in the development of education prior to 1974 in order to show how decisively the political, social and economic factors influenced the present day education. The introductory chapter describes briefly the aims of this study, the strategy for research and the main sources consulted aiming at providing a compactly general picture of this study. Chapter 2 provides some information concerning the background and history of Cyprus and concentrates on the factors influencing the development of education in Cyprus to 1974. In Chapter 3 is presented a picture of the battle for control of education which was intensified after the 1974 coup launched by the Junta of Athens against President Makarios and the Turkish invasion which caused a crisis of national identity. The same chapter examines the system of educational administration which is highly centralized and a less rigidly centralized system is proposed. Pre-primary, Primary, Secondary and Higher Education is discussed in Chapters 4,5,6 and 7 respectively. Pre-primary education has made great strides and is considered to be necessary for the normal development of children. Its rapid development, however, was necessitated after the 1974 catastrophe when an increasing number of women joined the work force. In Primary education the curriculum which has been developed emphasizes the child's active participation in all aspects of life placing the child in the centre. The graduate entry into primary education creates better prospects for its further improvement. After the Turkish invasion the role of Technical Education became more important since the rebuilding of Cyprus economy was based, to a great extent, on this level of education. Despite the progress made in the field of Technical Education, the prejudice against it hinders its further expansion. The efforts invested in the task of developing Secondary Education after independence have produced results since there have been major innovations, the most important being the Lyceum of Optional Subjects introduced in 1980, which served Cyprus for 15 years and is expected to be replaced by the new proposed system of the integrated Lyceum. The third-level institutions, both in public and private sectors, achieve high standards. However, the educational development in Cyprus reached its apogee with the establishment of the University of Cyprus. Teachers in Cyprus constitute the cornerstone of the educational system; therefore, Chapter 8 is devoted to the teaching profession in Cyprus; the current situation is explained, some problem areas are highlighted and possible solutions are suggested. Finally, the introduction of a Pastoral care system and a Bilingual Education project in schools in Cyprus is examined in the last two chapters.

The maritime industry is an economic activity that enables global trade and travel. However, the transportation network is threatened by security risks that seek to exploit vulnerabilities and cause damage to ships, interrupt the global supply chain network, and endanger the lives of crewmembers and passengers. While policies exist to aid in the prevention of attacks, these policies, alone, are insufficient to sustain global maritime domain security and awareness. Policies must be effectively enforced and complemented with highly trained crewmembers who have the knowledge and skills to efficiently prevent, detect, and respond to threats. This study analyzed maritime security policies and model courses to benchmark training requirements and create a topic development matrix for a centralized training academy for maritime security personnel. A course overview, syllabus, and learning objectives were created to reflect required and recommended security training components, with a focus on the cruise industry. This study concluded that a centralized training academy has significant benefits not only directly to the company where it is applied, but also to the maritime industry as a whole. Additional research would conduct evaluations of the academy and customize this curriculum for other companies engaged in ocean trade to enhance global maritime security and awareness.

The purpose of this study was to record and interpret the methods and procedures employed in the operation of the centralized system of the athletic program in the white senior high schools of Dallas, Texas, for the years 1931 through 1940.

The investigator made a study of the history, philosophy, method, and operation of centralized purchasing as it now exists for the state-supported institutions in the State of Texas and other selected states (New Hampshire, Montana, Michigan, Nebraska, and Minnesota).

The key update cost is an important parameter of the performance evaluation of the secure group communications in the wireless networks. It is a very public issue to reduce the key update cost. In the tree-based multicast key management scheme, a user is randomly assigned to one of the all leaf nodes. In this thesis, we divide the users into two groups which are new call users and handoff call users. Then, we propose that new call users are assigned to some of the special leaf nodes in the key tree and the handoff call users are assigned to others. This scheme is called class-based multicast key management scheme. We analyze this two multicast key management schemes for secure group communications. This thesis shows that class-based scheme could reduce the key update cost in some special case.

The concept of Cognitive radio enables the unlicensed users to share the spectrum with licensed users, on the condition that the licensed users have preemptive priority. The use of the channel by unlicensed users should not result in more than acceptable interference level to the licensed users, if interference occurs. The sense and react strategy by unlicensed users sometimes does not lead to acceptable level of interference while maintaining an acceptable data transfer rate for the unlicensed users. Proactive channel access has been proposed for the purpose of reducing the interference to primary users and to reduce the idle channel search delay for the secondary users. There are many methods used in the literature to model the channel state fluctuations. Based on these models the future channel states are predicted. In this thesis we introduce a predictive channel usage scheme which is capable of reducing the interference caused by the unlicensed users. Furthermore our scheme is capable of increasing the data rates the unlicensed users experience through the reduction of the idle channel identification delay. In our scheme no assumptions are made about the distribution of licensed user channel usage. We learn the traffic characteristics of the channels using a learning scheme called Probabilistic Suffix Tree algorithm.

The concept of Cognitive radio enables the unlicensed users to share the spectrum with licensed users, on the condition that the licensed users have preemptive priority. The use of the channel by unlicensed users should not result in more than acceptable interference level to the licensed users, if interference occurs. The sense and react strategy by unlicensed users sometimes does not lead to acceptable level of interference while maintaining an acceptable data transfer rate for the unlicensed users. Proactive channel access has been proposed for the purpose of reducing the interference to primary users and to reduce the idle channel search delay for the secondary users. There are many methods used in the literature to model the channel state fluctuations. Based on these models the future channel states are predicted. In this thesis we introduce a predictive channel usage scheme which is capable of reducing the interference caused by the unlicensed users. Furthermore our scheme is capable of increasing the data rates the unlicensed users experience through the reduction of the idle channel identification delay. In our scheme no assumptions are made about the distribution of licensed user channel usage. We learn the traffic characteristics of the channels using a learning scheme called Probabilistic Suffix Tree algorithm.

In this thesis, three key issues that restrict networks from scaling up so as to be able to cope with the rapid increase in traffic are investigated and series of approaches are proposed and tested for overcoming them. Firstly, scalability limitations owing to the use of a broadcast mechanism in one collision domain are discussed. To address this matter, servers under software-defined network architectures for eliminating discovery messages (SSED) are designed in this thesis and a backbone of floodless packets in an SDN LAN network is introduced. SSED has an innovative mechanism for defining the relationship between the servers and SDN architecture. Experimental results, after constructing and applying an authentic testbed, verify that SSED has the ability to improve upon the scalability of the traditional mechanism in terms of the number of switches and hosts. This is achieved by removing broadcast packets from the data and control planes as well as offering a better response time. Secondly, the scalability restrictions from using routers and the default gateway mechanism are explained. In this thesis, multiple distributed subnets using SDN architecture and servers to eliminate router devices and the default gateway mechanism (MSSERD) are introduced, designed and implemented as the general backbone for scalable multiple LAN-based networks. MSSERD's proposed components handle address resolution protocol (ARP) discovery packets and general IP packets across different subnets. Moreover, a general view of the network is provided through a multi-subnets discovery protocol (MDP). A 23 computers testbed is built and the results verify that MSSERD scales up the number of subnets more than traditional approaches, enhances the efficiency significantly, especially with high load, improves performance 2.3 times over legacy mechanisms and substantially reduces complexity. Finally, most of the available distributed-based architectures for different domains are reviewed and the aggregation discovery mechanism analysed to establish their impact on network scalability. Subsequently, a general distributed-centralised architecture with open-level control plane (OLC) architecture and a dynamic discovery hierarchical protocol (DHP) is introduced to provide better scalability in an SDN network. OLC can scale up the network with high performance even during high traffic.

In this thesis, we investigate partner selection schemes in multiuser cooperative networks. In networks, cooperative partners adopt coded cooperation to forward signals. Among the literature, two classes of two namely, centralized partner selections and distributed partner selections, have been proposed to select appropriate relays. Centralized partner selection is able to achieve the global optimization than distributed partner selection. However, centralized partner selections require high complexity, and global channel state information, which demands large amount of overhead and waste radio resources. Especially when the size of network increases, the cost to search appropriate relay for each user dramatically increases. Hence, we consider distributed partner selection scheme in the thesis. Among the existing work, fixed priority selection algorithm is a distributed partner selection algorithm strategy; where partner assignment is based on node indices do not include any channel information. To enhance performance, we exploit the geographical information of all users. Different from other distributed partner selection schemes, we adopt the method of Carrier Sense Multiple Access to exchange local information. We proposed coverage search algorithm, nearest source search algorithm and nearest middle-point search algorithm, the serve as the criteria of partner selection. The contributions of this thesis are to raise SNR, increase the probability that the achievable rate is great than the data rate in the distributed partner selection scheme, and enhance system performance.

This research uses the optimal control theory to construct two kinds of dynamic economic systems, which are an economic system without externalities and with externalities. Within each economic system both the centralized economy model and the decentralized economy model are included. The centralized economy (a social planner) model representes a kind of ideal economy, and the goal what the social planner pursues is that the resource allocation of the society satisfies the Pareto Efficiency criteria. On the other hand, the decentralized economy model (consists of a representative producer and a representative consumer) demonstrates the real economy, where economic agents persue their own best interests. While constructing the models, goods market equilibrium, labors market equilibrium, the dynamic accumulation process of capital, and the dynamic accumulation course of pollution are under consideration. Then, I apply optimal control method to get the first order conditions, and compare these f.o.c¡¦.s to verify whether they are unanimous. This paper proves that when externalities of pollution does not exist in the dynamic economic system, the decentralized economy model can achieve the Pareto Efficiency. On the contrary, when externalities of pollution emerges in the dynamic economic system, the decentralized economy model cannot reach Pareto Efficiency. If the externalities of pollution is internalized by the dynamic decentralized economic system economy, it will coincide with Pareto Efficiency. Besides, Pigouvian tax is still an effective policy instrument. Finally, I discuss all dynamic models in this paper to find out whether there exists a long-term and stable steady state. I find stable steady state, saddle-point equilibria, do exist under certain restrictions.