The topic of this thesis is on political instability and revolutionary war in the countries that were involved with the Arab Spring. As created by James. C Davies (1962), the J-curve hypothesis serves as the foundational theoretical framework, where revolutions are ignited after prolonged improvements in political and economic living conditions which become interrupted by a sharp reversal. Panel data with variables that measure quantitative factors are analysed by using ordinary least squares (OLS) regression and logistic regression, to statistically test which factors have created political instability and ignited revolutionary war in the Arab Spring. The results of the statistical analysis indicate that political factors, rather than economic factors, such as political terror against the population and government corruption are the most relevant in explaining political instability and revolutionary war in the Arab Spring and the developments that followed.

A devotion to an open and progressive interpretation of human rights and the law secured Judge Ronald N. Davies’ legacy as an unintended, yet influential activist for advancing civil rights and of the twentieth century. His views helped change the definition and meaning of judicial activism in the modern vernacular and transform it into a new notion of judicial progressivism. A biography of Davies crystallizes the meaning of the racial and civil relations across an evolving American landscape. A study of his life alters the way in which scholars and the public perceive and understand the role of the Northern Plain in shaping lasting changes in America’s progressive movements through an interdisciplinary approach of history and law. When Davies of Fargo, North Dakota, rose to the bench of the United States District Court, he ceased any formal political party affiliation and became a Constitutionalist. With an egalitarian approach to the law, he oversaw numerous court proceedings and handed down rulings with measured consideration for any case that appeared on his docket. As his federal appointment came to include cases involving the desegregation of public schools, civil lawsuits against large-scale corporations, and the Alcatraz Indian Occupation, Davies’ sphere of influence exceeded regional and Civil Rights Era boundaries and characterized him as national figure in new facets of legal precedent. His rulings challenged traditional ethics as dictated by society’s majority-consent in the law and cast him as a seminal figure that embodied the meaning and influence of the northern plains within the law and advancing civil rights and social justice in the United States. His efforts to uphold a more inclusive and equal legal standard set into motion renewed consideration of the ways in which an individual’s actions within a broader institution can stimulate a modern national consensus despite entrenched historical precedent. Therefore, Davies’ life and career reflect a historical sensibility of the role, application, and influence of law-based code of ethics. His decisions, though not intended as overt civil activism, instilled lasting social, cultural, and political change in twentieth-century civil rights.

In this thesis, cluster analysis was applied to data comprising of customer spending habits at a retail chain in order to perform customer segmentation. The method used was a two-step cluster procedure in which the first step consisted of feature engineering, a square root transformation of the data in order to handle big spenders in the data set and finally principal component analysis in order to reduce the dimensionality of the data set. This was done to reduce the effects of high dimensionality. The second step consisted of applying clustering algorithms to the transformed data. The methods used were K-means clustering, Gaussian mixture models in the MCLUST family, t-distributed mixture models in the tEIGEN family and non-negative matrix factorization (NMF). For the NMF clustering a slightly different data pre-processing step was taken, specifically no PCA was performed. Clustering partitions were compared on the basis of the Silhouette index, Davies-Bouldin index and subject matter knowledge, which revealed that K-means clustering with K = 3 produces the most reasonable clusters. This algorithm was able to separate the customer into different segments depending on how many purchases they made overall and in these clusters some minor differences in spending habits are also evident. In other words there is some support for the claim that the customer segments have some variation in their spending habits. / I denna uppsats har klusteranalys tillämpats på data bestående av kunders konsumtionsvanor hos en detaljhandelskedja för att utföra kundsegmentering. Metoden som använts bestod av en två-stegs klusterprocedur där det första steget bestod av att skapa variabler, tillämpa en kvadratrotstransformation av datan för att hantera kunder som spenderar långt mer än genomsnittet och slutligen principalkomponentanalys för att reducera datans dimension. Detta gjordes för att mildra effekterna av att använda en högdimensionell datamängd. Det andra steget bestod av att tillämpa klusteralgoritmer på den transformerade datan. Metoderna som användes var K-means klustring, gaussiska blandningsmodeller i MCLUST-familjen, t-fördelade blandningsmodeller från tEIGEN-familjen och icke-negativ matrisfaktorisering (NMF). För klustring med NMF användes förbehandling av datan, mer specifikt genomfördes ingen PCA. Klusterpartitioner jämfördes baserat på silhuettvärden, Davies-Bouldin-indexet och ämneskunskap, som avslöjade att K-means klustring med K=3 producerar de rimligaste resultaten. Denna algoritm lyckades separera kunderna i olika segment beroende på hur många köp de gjort överlag och i dessa segment finns vissa skillnader i konsumtionsvanor. Med andra ord finns visst stöd för påståendet att kundsegmenten har en del variation i sina konsumtionsvanor.

We are living in the information age and this has had an effect on both science and theology. Our understanding of the fundamental role of information has increased significantly. One can even say that information has become an overarching metaphor in the world of science. This dissertation gives an overview of the impact of the information-based scientific world-view on the dialogue between science and theology. The study investigates the metaphorical use of information concepts to secure a better understanding of God's action in the world and the role that information plays in the processes of life. The focus is on the role of biological information, and its relation to divine action is investigated. The scientific importance of information and the possible impact of information concepts on the science and theology dialogue of the future are discussed. / Systematic Theology & Theological Ethics / M. Th.(Systematic Theology)

No description available.

Dans cette thèse nous reprenons, puis développons, le modèle de Davies-Fulling<br />qui présente de nombreuses analogies avec la radiation engendrée par un Trou Noir. <br />Ce modèle consiste en l'étude de la radiation émise par un miroir <br />se déplaçant dans l'espace-temps de Minkowski. <br />Lorsque la trajectoire est non-inertielle, le miroir engendre un flux d'énergie<br />dont les propriétés sont des fonctionnelles de la trajectoire.<br /><br />Dans le but de retrouver les problèmes présents dans l'étude de la radiation de Hawking, <br />nous nous sommes intéressés principalement au cas des miroirs<br />uniformément accélérés, qui possédent un horizon causal.<br />Afin de résoudre ces problèmes présents dans le cadre du modèle de Davies-Fulling,<br />nous avons introduit un nouveau modèle, qui dérive cette fois d'une action.<br />Un choix précis et motivé du Lagrangien permet d'y parvenir.<br />De plus, grâce à deux méthodes complémentaires, nous avons explicité <br />les corrélations quantiques présentes dans le flux émis.

The first decade of this century marked a moment of hypervisibility for lesbians and bisexual women on British television. During this time, however, lesbian hypervisibility was coded repeatedly as hyperfemininity. When the BBC and ITV adapted Sarah Waters’s novels for television, how, I ask, did the screen versions balance the demands of pop visual culture with the novels’ complex, unconventional – and in some cases subversive – representations of lesbianism? I pursue this question with an interdisciplinary methodology drawn from queer and feminist theories, cultural and media studies, and film adaptation theory. Chapter Two looks back to Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (BBC 1990). I examine this text – the first BBC television serial to feature a lesbian protagonist – to establish a vocabulary for discussing the page-to-screen adaptation of queer identities throughout this dissertation. Chapter Three investigates Waters’s first novel Tipping the Velvet (1998) and its complex intertextual relationship with Andrew Davies’s serialized version (BBC 2002). I also examine responses to the serial in the British press, tracing the ways in which dominant cultural forces seek to domesticate non-normative instances of gender and sexuality. Chapter Four examines Waters’s novel Fingersmith (2002) in relation to Peter Ransley’s adaptation (BBC 2005) to situate adaptations of Waters’s retro-Victorian texts amid the genre of television and film adaptations of Jane Austen novels. I argue that Ransley’s serial interrogates the notion of Austen as a “conservative icon” (Cartmell 24) and queers the Austen adaptation genre itself. To conclude this study I address Davies’s television film (ITV 2008) of Waters’s second novel Affinity (1999). In this chapter I examine how the adaptation depicts the disruptive lesbian at the centre of the text. I argue in particular that by casting an actress who does not conform to dominant televisual norms of femininity, the adaptation is able to create a powerful audiovisual transgendered moment which adds to the novel’s destabilization of Victorian hierarchies of gender and class. This chapter considers, finally, how Tipping the Velvet, Fingersmith and Affinity have contributed to lesbian visibility on British television. / Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2009-05-27 11:26:42.504

The starting point of my dissertation is the question: What would be needed of a device to culturally reconfigure the way that we see? The question has been addressed through a theoretical examination of spatial theories in modern times and a creative exploration of new spatialities in new media technologies, both visual and aural. Central to my thesis are three claims: 1. the paradigmatic mathematical theory of single-point perspective is fundamental to the imagining and construction of space in modern times; 2. perspective is a seductive space because its virtualisations seem more authentic than phenomenological experience; 3. the structure of perspective space prefigures the computer screen, hence any attempt to reconfigure the spatial imaginary through the devices of new media technologies must first confront the historical ubiquity of perspective. The specific focus of my written research is a comparative study of Filippo Brunelleschi's perspective device and the virtual reality work of Char Davies. This comparative study focuses on the ingredients of both devices as well as the similarities between the environments in which they were demonstrated. Brunelleschi's Peephole device, according to his biographer Manetti, first demonstrated perspective theory in the early fifteenth century. Brunelleschi's device, with its three main components, the mirror, the burnished silver and the painted panel, are examined in regards to the environment it was demonstrated in. The dissertation explores these elements as the essential conceptual ingredients for the reconfiguration of space in modern times. Aspects of Brunelleschi's device are also examined creatively in my practical work. Today emergent technologies are being used to explore the potential of a new spatial world order. However, these new technologies are generally based on an Old World order perspective. Even the cubist reconfiguration of space did not change, in any fundamental way, the dominant perspectival model of perception because it did not have the same ideological and psychological power as perspective, which seduced the viewer into believing that the gap (or loss) between the technology and reality had been compensated. Arguably, the same claims can be made for virtual reality devices. Hence, important to the dissertation is a comparative study of Brunelleschi's perspective device and the virtual reality work of Char Davies. The creative work investigates the effects and work of perspectival spatiality by examining (through digital video, photographically and sonically) residual spaces in the environment. To me these residual spaces provide potential resistances to the perspectival space from which they evolved, and thus show new ways of exploring the virtual reality of cyberspace that, while acknowledging the pervasive presence of perspective systems, also deconstruct or even map new post-perspective spatialities.

Thesis (M.B.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 60-64).

From Introductory note: The Complete Poems of W.H. Davies (London: Jonathan Cape, 1963; rev. 1968) has been used throughout this study. Accordingly, unless otherwise stated, all citations of poem numbers and pagination refer to this text. Critical literature on the work of W.H. Davies is restricted in quantity and limited in scope. There are few comprehensive assessments of Davies as poet, autobiographer, novelist, or raconteur. Apart from such sources as Richard J. Stonesifer's full-length critical biography (1963), Lawrence Hockey's biographical monograph (1971), and Thomas Moult's anecdotal and historical appreciation (1934), critical material must be drawn from contemporary reviews, isolated articles in magazines such as The Catholic World and Fortnightly Review, and specific chapters in surveys of the poetry of the early twentieth century, although Davies is frequently alluded to passim in literary histories which deal with this period. Many of these studies favour biographical exposition and evaluation rather than descriptive analysis and discursive interpretation. A detailed chronology of Davies's works is included in Stonesifer's discussion. This thesis is not attempting to trace a line of development for two reasons. First, the Complete Poems gives no indication of date of composition or publication of particular poems, and the present writer has access only to the dates of publication of individual volumes as external evidence of a chronology, internal evidence being confined to such infrequent references as "the birds of steel" in Poem no. 236, p. 260. Secondly, the lyrics themselves do not, on the whole, evince much stylistic and thematic development, and the concern of this study is with recurrent themes and techniques dispersed throughout the oeuvre.