There has been increased attention given in the tourism literature to experiential perspectives of tourism. This thesis addresses the lack of attention in previous experiential studies to the relationship between heritage buildings and tourism. Specifically, this thesis explores the influence of heritage buildings in shaping international tourists' experiences of a particular region of New Zealand: Hawke's Bay. This research sought insight into the specific attributes of heritage buildings that influenced the experiences of international tourists visiting the region, and examined the relative importance of heritage buildings for international tourism to Hawke's Bay, as perceived by international tourists visiting the region. In this way, results are assumed in the personal constructs of individual consumers (Beeho Prentice, 1997; Prentice, Witt Hamer, 1998; McIntosh Siggs, 2005). An increased understanding of the relationship between heritage buildings and tourism is essential in strengthening support for preservation, for product development and promotion. A mixed-methodology comprising of 50 semi-structured interviews, 66 photograph-supported interviews and 354 structured questionnaires was adopted. Hawke's Bay's heritage buildings were found to have an important influence on tourists' experiences of the region, visually and as part of the narratives of their reported experiences. Attributes of Hawke's Bay's heritage buildings that influenced tourists' experiences of the region included their architecture, exterior and interior design, colour, history and associated stories. Furthermore, the interviews elicited three key experiential themes that emerged from respondents' narratives of their experiences in Hawke's Bay. They are; 'visual appeal', 'personal reflections' and 'engaging experiences'. Specifically, it was found that a townscape is not a passive space. Heritage buildings render the townscape an experiential place filled with emotion, mindfulness, engagement, and imbued with personal meaning. Visitors in effect created their own experiences through their active interaction with the environment; rendering it relevant to a context they were personally interested in, or which held personal significance for them. Analysis of the questionnaires revealed that, as perceived by international tourists, heritage buildings are important to a region; a significant proportion of respondents indicated that they would theoretically be willing to pay some money to ensure the preservation of Hawke's Bay's heritage buildings. This thesis evidences the important relationship between heritage buildings and tourism, and future research is advocated to advance upon the conclusions made in this research.

This study aims to analyze how industrial design as a profession and discipline has been presented to the public in Turkey. The object of the study is constituted by the popular home style magazines which increased rapidly in number through the dynamics of the post-1980 period. These publications have been inspected in the scope of the research and their in constructing and shaping public awareness about design culture has been the focus of the study. The main theme of the thesis is focused on the analysis of Turkish social values which changed after the 1980s and on how the magazines handled the subject of design, and the qualities which they highlighted in the presentation of the products. In addition, the roles which were ascribed to design and to the designers in terms of the newly calibrated consumption values, have also been discussed. The socio-political and economic transformations of the post-1980 period constitute the contextual framework of the thesis.

This work undertakes the first comprehensive theoretical assessment of syndicated loans. It is shown that syndicated and bilateral (single lender) loans should be good substitutes in meeting a borrower's financing requirements, but that syndicated loans are more complex and impose additional risks to the parties in the way they are arranged. The existing explantions of loan syndication - that they are hybrids of private bank loans and public debt instruments, that syndication is a portfolio management tool, and that loans are syndicated where they are too large to be provided bilaterally - are unable to substantially explain both the nature of syndicated loans and practice in the loan markets. A rigorous new explanation is developed, which shows that syndication reduces the rate of lending costs, so that the return to the loan originator is greater, and the borrower's cost of financing is lower, where a loan is syndicated rather than provided bilaterally. This explanation is shown to hold in competitive loan markets and to be consistent with the observation that syndicated loans are generally larger than other loans. Incidental to this new explanation, new expressions of the return to a bank from providing a loan on a bilateral basis and from originating a syndicated loan are also developed. New algorithms are also developed for determining the distribution of the commitments from syndicate participants and thus the originator's final hold, the amount it must lend itself, where the loan is underwritten. This provides, for the first time, a rigorous basis for assessing the expected return, and the risk, for the originator of a given syndicated loan. Finally, empirical testing finds that a bank's observed lending history is significant to its decision to participate in a new syndicated loan but that predictions of participation, which are fundamental inputs into the final hold algorithms, based on this information have relatively little power. It follows that there is competitive advantage to loan originators that have access to other, private information on potential participants' lending intentions.

The technological advances in wireless networks, smart phones, social networks, embedded sensor technologies and the wide spread of mobile devices have exposed customers to number of services. With these advanced technological innovations, computing capability and connectivity, customers look forward to get useful services and information by means of their mobile devices anywhere and at anytime thereby saving time and money. The importance of mobile commerce is increasing every day, since the mobile devices are becoming central part of our lives. One of the challenge here is the ability to reinforce the application behavior by utilizing context information. The analysis and utilization of context information is necessary to build intelligent applications and thereby focusing on less user attention by understanding the current situation. The information about the current location of a mobile customer, the time of request, and personal characteristics like nature of work, profession and economic status are utilized by applications to provide accurate context-aware services. Many of context-aware applications focus mainly on user activity, preferences which are not sufficient to provide context-aware intelligent services. However, there are few works in developing an integrated model for analyzing the context information. Many authors describe the context representation using five elements like who, what, where, when and how to provide a user centric view without emphasizing on the feature of generality and structural representation of context parameters. Since context information takes multiple forms, it is essential and necessary to make broad classification which helps application designers and developers to deal with possible contexts and their impact on application behavior. In addition, the context classification enables to understand complex customer situations due to changing mobile environment. Therefore, it is required to design a model which analyzes the context information of customers in a dynamic environment and hence, provide real time accurate service. The design and development of context-aware mobile commerce services requires a general conceptual model which can handle any type of context information for different applications. Due to the dynamic nature of business environment and also the customer preferences keep emerging, there is a need to develop business model which adapts to changing environment. To understand the current situation of customers in such highly dynamic environments and to enable the business transactions quickly among parties involved, it is essential to construct and analyze an integrated view of information from distinct sources. The adaptation of the provided services based on customer needs depends when the relevant context information is self-described in the form of beliefs. The observations made on combination of context information are deduced into beliefs as a result the decision making time to provide service reduces considerably. The aim of the thesis, is to design and develop a context-aware system which has been applied for mobile commerce environment by considering the customer context information. To do this, we have designed two models: the Context-Information, Observation and Belief (C-IOB)model and the commercial business model. The main function of C-IOB model is to support the application to identify a suitable context-aware service and to execute business transaction for a customer by analyzing the context information in the form of beliefs. We classify the used Context Information(CI)into four types: physical, system, application and social environment. The business model discusses the formal description of participants who are involved in commercial business. The C-IOB model The Context Information, Observation and Belief model deduces beliefs on customer, by combination of available context information during transaction execution or service provision. The beliefs represent the various situations of customers based on specific nature of the applications. The beliefs developed about an entity(e.g. ,person, place, thing) are primitive in most theories of decision making so that applications can use these beliefs to identify and execute context-aware services. The C-IOB model reduces the solution search space, since the knowledge about an entity is organized using cognitive factors, which maps user context information into real world observations and beliefs, as a result the decision making time by the system reduces considerably. The five CI -constructs: who, what, where, when and how enable many types of context information acquisition in our work. The commercial business model A commercial business model mainly involves the formal description of business participants who are involved in commercial business transactions. To meet the growing needs and to fulfill high expectations of customers, it is very important that application designers have to address the issue of building viable business models for commercial environment. The business model describes how an enterprise or an organization captures and delivers economical value to customers. In particular, the customers play major role in transactions execution and hence understanding and identifying the needs of customer is an important issue in building the business model for commercial purpose. Mobile Commerce Environment Mobile commerce environment (MCE) is one of the specific forms of commercial business model. It deals with transactions like purchases with the objective of supplying commodities like goods and services to customers using mobile devices. A Mobile commerce environment is established by considering set of customers, vendors and bankers, who are involved in commercial business activities like buying of electronic goods and services. The environment is based on certain factors like the type of customers, the type of transactions and the type of electronic products involved in purchasing. M-commerce is one of the most effective and useful ways of conducting business as the customers are constantly using mobile devices and it significantly assists customers in making transactions anywhere, anytime and thereby improving the customer satisfaction. C-IOB model based mobile commerce environment Mobile commerce applications are required to be flexible, in providing services due to inherent anytime and anywhere paradigm. The traditional systems during commercial business transactions, take large time to search the right product, which leads to more utilization of device resources like memory and computational power. In addition, the users are striked with more information which is not significant. Therefore, there is a need to design applications, which identify the customer requirements by acquiring the context information from distinct sources and thereby providing timely and specific information or services to the customer. Hence, to adapt services based on various situations, it is required to develop a systematic approach for representation and utilization of context information modified to special characteristics of mobile commerce applications. The mobile commerce environment uses C-IOB model for analyzing the relevant context information of customers and the context based beliefs helps to identify a suitable service for an end customer, thereby reducing mobile transaction execution time and providing customer benefits. The simulation environment consists of 10,000 electronic products which are categorized based on technical and commercial features. The simulation is carried out with ten mobile commerce transactions, the database consists of information about500 customers and 100vendors who deal with electronic products selling and10bankersfor money transactions. The customer context information is acquired from physical, system, application and social environment. When customers ends are quest for a service, the current context information is acquired, a set of observations is formulated and belief is deduced. The customer is provided with relevant information or service based on deduced belief. The simulation exhaustively tests the working of the system for mobile commerce transactions under different context environments. Some of the case studies are designed by applying the C-IOB model which includes placing the purchase order for the product, money transfer and after sales service. In summary, we have developed a context-aware system by using C-IOB model and also the design of commercial business model. To evaluate the performance of the system, we have incorporated context-awareness aspect for 10 business transactions applied to mobile commerce. The proposed system using C-IOB model provides customer required services as accurately as possible. The system has the capability to adapt to real time situation of customer needs, thereby enhancing the customer satisfaction. The simulation results have shown that the time to execute mobile commerce transactions is less using context based beliefs compared to context unaware approach. The accuracy of the system with belief based approach is higher than without context information. The customer benefits in business transaction are also enhanced by our design approach.

The reasons why African women become engaged in sex work have received little attention in academic research. While it is largely acknowledged that there exists a connection between entering the sex trade and poverty, not all women who are poor enter sex work. Through the use of life histories with 21 women between the ages of 18 and 42, this thesis explores the combination of factors that lead women and girls to become commercial sex workers in Nairobi, Kenya. This method provides a detailed look at initiation into sex work as it occurs over the life course for women and girls in this context. Additionally, this thesis examines how structural violence impinges on their lives, thereby increasing vulnerability to engagement in sex work. Examining the larger socio-political and economic contexts illustrates how issues such as HIV/AIDS, migrant labour, changing gender roles, the erosion of existing familial structures and gender inequities structure risk for suffering for women. These issues result in many girls losing caregiver support by being orphaned, while additionally, women are burdened with providing total economic and social support for the family in a society that has gendered economic opportunities. Both girls and women are left with few options other than the sex trade to survive.

The reasons why African women become engaged in sex work have received little attention in academic research. While it is largely acknowledged that there exists a connection between entering the sex trade and poverty, not all women who are poor enter sex work. Through the use of life histories with 21 women between the ages of 18 and 42, this thesis explores the combination of factors that lead women and girls to become commercial sex workers in Nairobi, Kenya. This method provides a detailed look at initiation into sex work as it occurs over the life course for women and girls in this context. Additionally, this thesis examines how structural violence impinges on their lives, thereby increasing vulnerability to engagement in sex work. Examining the larger socio-political and economic contexts illustrates how issues such as HIV/AIDS, migrant labour, changing gender roles, the erosion of existing familial structures and gender inequities structure risk for suffering for women. These issues result in many girls losing caregiver support by being orphaned, while additionally, women are burdened with providing total economic and social support for the family in a society that has gendered economic opportunities. Both girls and women are left with few options other than the sex trade to survive.

<div>The evolution of existing building construction is envisioned as modular construction. Instead of on-site construction, buildings can be assembled on-site using prefabricated modular elements. These modular elements could integrate intelligent building technologies to enable autonomous, occupant responsive, scalable, cost-effective, and sustainable features. On-site assembly of modular construction elements would offer better quality control, decrease material waste and resources, with more predictable schedules. These building elements would allow more cost-effective integration of new intelligent sensors, adaptive interfaces, renewable energy and energy recovery technologies, comfort delivery, and resiliency technologies, making high-performance buildings more affordable. To explore and evaluate these modular and intelligent comfort delivery concepts and advanced approaches for interaction with occupants, a new Human-Building Interactions Laboratory (HBIL) has been designed and is under development. The facility has a modular construction layout with thermally active panels, and the interior surface temperature of each panel can be individually controlled using a hydronic system. Such configuration allows us to emulate different climate zones and building type conditions and perform studies such as the effect of different kinds of active building surfaces on thermal comfort, localized comfort delivery, and occupant comfort control. Moreover, each panel is reconfigurable to investigate different interior surface treatments for thermal, visual, and acoustic comfort conditions. <br></div><div>In this MS thesis work, the overall design approach of the facility is presented. Development, experimental investigation of thermal performance, and aligned design modifications of a prototype thermo-active wall panel are explained in detail. Detailed development of a 1-D transient numerical model for the prototype wall panel and its tuning and validation are also presented. Furthermore, the design and installation plan of the hydronic system for the HBIL facility are also presented with an initial commissioning plan.</div>

No Abstract / Thesis / Bachelor of Arts (BA)