The main intention of this thesis is the analysis of the factors that influence the precious metals market according to the selected methodology. The secondary intention is the consideration of the posibility to include the commodities traded on the precious metals market in the portfolio of investments. The introductory chapter deals with the listing of the commodities, the most important commodity exchanges and derivatives. The second chapter individually describes the precious metals. The first subsection of the second chapter analyzes the supply and demand for the individual metals. The following subsections focus on the factors that influence the price of the precious metals in history and in present time. The analytical part, which concludes this chapter includes the calculations of correlation coefficients, average growth coefficient and standard deviation of the factors that influence the precious metals. The last chapter of this thesis is dedicated to diamonds and is divided to two major subsections. The first subsection describes the history of the most significant diamonds, the characteristics of diamonds, the types of the deposits and the major producers of diamonds. The second subsection analyzes the prices of natural and synthetic diamonds and the development of profit of the selected company in terms of time. The last chapter deals with investments in diamonds.

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Thesis (M.Phil.)--City University of Hong Kong, 2006. / "Submitted to Department of Physics and Materials Science in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy" Includes bibliographical references.

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Despite the repeated collapse of mining towns and sites in the Great Slave Lake region, most residents embrace new resource projects as possibilities for creating viable futures. Situated at the intersection of socio-cultural and linguistic anthropology, this ethnographic investigation of the Canadian diamond boom of the 2000s illustrates how imagining stable livelihoods despite a record of impermanence and crises depends on integrating and reframing past failures with present aspirations for “the good life”. At the height of the diamond boom in 2007, future imaginaries were largely associated with high wage job creation in the rapidly expanding industrial sector. Based on 18 months of fieldwork among those said to benefit most from new industrial development: the Aboriginal under/unemployed, this dissertation’s ethnographic attention is on job training programs and employment interventions that promised local residents new futures. The fieldwork coincided with the global financial crisis and almost none of the 90 students followed through the research secured work in the industry at the conclusion of their training. Nevertheless, people continue to maintain faith in a future linked to resource development. Capturing people’s everyday re-makings of tomorrow in uncertain times, this dissertation reveals that while employment in global extractive industries is unable to provide economic security to those who seek it, its promises are productive for four reasons. First, they (re)define the natural world as ‘opportunities for work’. Second, the specific techniques of industry and statecraft that surround mining (impact and benefit agreements, and socio-economic monitoring) transform everyday events of difference and inequality into catastrophes which render industrial development sensible even urgent. Third, they orient public sentiment towards a “future anterior,” a form of temporal longing that I argue impedes a deep reading of the historical present and participates in a politics of deferral. Fourth, they rely on and reproduce a chronotopically constrained public debate on natural resource development.

Despite the repeated collapse of mining towns and sites in the Great Slave Lake region, most residents embrace new resource projects as possibilities for creating viable futures. Situated at the intersection of socio-cultural and linguistic anthropology, this ethnographic investigation of the Canadian diamond boom of the 2000s illustrates how imagining stable livelihoods despite a record of impermanence and crises depends on integrating and reframing past failures with present aspirations for “the good life”. At the height of the diamond boom in 2007, future imaginaries were largely associated with high wage job creation in the rapidly expanding industrial sector. Based on 18 months of fieldwork among those said to benefit most from new industrial development: the Aboriginal under/unemployed, this dissertation’s ethnographic attention is on job training programs and employment interventions that promised local residents new futures. The fieldwork coincided with the global financial crisis and almost none of the 90 students followed through the research secured work in the industry at the conclusion of their training. Nevertheless, people continue to maintain faith in a future linked to resource development. Capturing people’s everyday re-makings of tomorrow in uncertain times, this dissertation reveals that while employment in global extractive industries is unable to provide economic security to those who seek it, its promises are productive for four reasons. First, they (re)define the natural world as ‘opportunities for work’. Second, the specific techniques of industry and statecraft that surround mining (impact and benefit agreements, and socio-economic monitoring) transform everyday events of difference and inequality into catastrophes which render industrial development sensible even urgent. Third, they orient public sentiment towards a “future anterior,” a form of temporal longing that I argue impedes a deep reading of the historical present and participates in a politics of deferral. Fourth, they rely on and reproduce a chronotopically constrained public debate on natural resource development.

Paramagnetic defects in free standing polycrystalline diamond films made by chemical vapour deposition (CVD) have been studied using electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR), electron-nuclear double resonance (ENDOR) and infrared absorption. EPR experiments at a range of frequencies (1-35 GHz) confirm the ¹H hyperfine parameters for the recently identified H1 defect (Zhou et al., Phys. Rev. B, 54:7881 (1996)). In the samples studied here, H1 is always accompanied by another defect at g=2.0028(1). Saturation recovery measurements are consistent with two defects centred on g=2.0028. The spin-lattice relaxation rate of H1 is a factor of 10-100 times more rapid than the single substitutional nitrogen centre (N⁰_S), which is known to be incorporated into the bulk diamond. ¹H matrix ENDOR measurements indicate that the H1 centre is in an environment with hydrogen atoms 2-10 A distant from the centre. The near neighbour hydrogen identified by the EPR was not detected in the ENDOR experiments. The concentration of H1 correlates with the total integrated C-H stretch absorption in the samples studied here. All the evidence is consistent with H1 being located at hydrogen decorated grain boundaries (or in intergranular material) rather than in the bulk diamond. The affect of annealing the films in vacuo up to 1900 K has been studied. On annealing at 1700 K it was found that some of the hydrogen on internal grain boundaries became mobile but was not lost from the sample, and the intensity of the EPR absorption at g=2.0028 decreased. Annealing at 1900 K severely degraded the optical properties of the samples, and a new defect with g=2.0035(2) was created. Infrared measurements show that hydrogen is lost from most CVD diamond samples when annealed to 1900 K for four hours. An EPR imaging (EPRI) probe was designed and built. This comprised a 3-loop, 2-gap loop-gap resonator and a pair of anti-Helmholtz coils providing a magnetic field gradient ∂B_z/∂z. Using this probe the distribution of N⁰_S was measured in the growth direction of four CVD diamonds to a resolution of 20 μm. The distribution of N⁰_S is shown to be different to the distribution of defects with g=2.0028. Two-dimensional images of the spin density of N⁰_S in single crystal type Ib diamonds made by the high temperature and pressure (HTP) method have been generated, demonstrating a resolution of 100 μm. A two-dimensional image of the spin density of g=2.0028 defects in a CVD sample is compared to a photograph of the same sample, showing the correlation between the distribution of the defects with the distribution of non-diamond material in the sample. The distribution of the [N-N]⁺ defect in a natural diamond has been examined using ∂B_z/∂B_ϰ field gradient coils.

Thesis (MEng(MiningEngineering))--University of South Australia, 2001.