The ethics of economic sanctions is an issue that has been curiously neglected by philosophers and political theorists. Only a handful of philosophical journal articles and book chapters have ever been published on the subject; yet economic sanctions, as I will show, are significantly morally problematic and their use stands in need of moral justification. The aim of this thesis then is to consider how economic sanctions might be morally justified. Of the few writers who have considered this issue, the majority point to the analogies between economic sanctions and war and use the just war principles (just cause, proportionality etc.) as a framework within which to assess their moral permissibility. I argue that this is a mistake. The just war principles are derived from a set of complex and detailed arguments all planted firmly within the context of war. These arguments contain premises that, whilst they may hold true in the case of war, do not always hold true in the case of economic sanctions. Nevertheless, the rich just war tradition does offer a valuable starting point for theorising about economic sanctions and in the thesis I consider how the wider just war tradition might be brought to bear on the case of economic sanctions, beginning, not with the just war principles, but with the underlying arguments for those principles. In particular, I consider whether economic sanctions can be justified on the grounds that they are a form of self- or other-defence, that they are the ‘lesser evil’ and that they are a form of punishment. I argue that certain types of economic sanctions can be justified on the grounds that they are a form of self- or other- defence and that, in extreme circumstances, certain types of economic sanctions can be justified as the ‘lesser evil’. However, I argue that economic sanctions cannot be justified on the grounds of punishment. I also develop a ‘clean hands’ argument for economic sanctions that is unavailable to the just war theorist; I argue that where the goods and services to be supplied would contribute to human rights violations or other wrongful acts, there is a duty to impose economic sanctions to avoid complicity in this wrongdoing.

Abstract Management is a field that started getting attention in the beginning of the 20 th century by Frederick Taylor. His publication is called the Principles of Scientific Management and is based on the principles of using scientific methods to find the best way of conducting each operation within a production facility. Many of Taylor’s principles may appear obsolete today but the matter of an effective material flow is still highly current. Efficiency is the relationship between the input into an operation and its result. A substantial part of the material flow is storage and the costs tied to it. An area about the importance of eliminating storage is JIT or just in time. The main principle of JIT is that a product shouldn’t be produced until a customer expresses its demand for it. Inventory Management is an area within JIT and contains different principles regarding how to avoid storage. Production Management is another area with a set of principles on how to plan an efficient layout of the production. There are many benefits that can be achieved with an efficient production flow and also many disadvantages if the flow is inefficient. It is therefore important to identify the weak spots in the production line and improving them. Our research question: How can the principles of JIT within the areas Inventory Management and Production Management be used to make the material flow more efficient? By conducting a case study at a company in the plastic recycling business, we have come to a conclusion. They need to reduce the amount of material in the warehouse by either buying less material or by increasing the capacity of the cutting operation. The can also make the cutting operation automatic in order to decrease to amount of time that is required for the cutting. They can also eliminate the need for storing half complete material by purchasing a more efficient granulation machine. The last thing to improve is to move the warehouse for final storage closer to the loading area in order to decrease the amount of time needed for that particular operation.

Most modern applications deal with very large amounts of data. Having to deal with such huge amounts of data is in itself a challenge. This challenge is complicated even more by the fact that, in many cases, this data is constantly changing and evolving. For instance, relational databases that handle the data of day-to-day transactional applications often have tables with very high data change rates. It is not uncommon to even have temporary or volatile tables that get created from scratch and completely dropped over the course of one query workload. This dissertation focuses on optimizing structured queries over dynamic and constantly changing data sets. Our work address this issue, and some of the challenges related to it. We address the issue of database statistics becoming stale and inaccurate due to constantly changing data. We introduce ways to automatically analyze the existing statistics and recommend and collect the necessary statistics to optimize a single query or a query workload. We introduce a mechanism to automate the recommendation and collection of statistical views for a given query workload. We also compare two methods of using these statistical views in selectivity estimation. We evaluate our methods and techniques with experimental studies using prototypes that we built into commercial database systems.

Adaptive Just-in-Time compilers employ multiple techniques to concentrate compilation efforts in the most promising spots of the application, balancing tight compilation budgets with an appropriate level of code quality. Some compiler researchers propose that Just-in-Time compilers should benefit from method-specific compilation strategies. These strategies can be discovered through machine-learning techniques, where a compilation strategy is tailored to a method based on the method's characteristics. This thesis investigates the use of Support Vector Machines in Testarossa, a commercial Just-in-Time compiler employed in the IBM J9 Java Virtual Machine. This new infrastructure allows Testarossa to explore numerous compilation strategies, generating the data needed for training such models. The infrastructure also integrates Testarossa to learned models that predict which compilation strategy balances code quality and compilation effort, on a per-method basis. The thesis also presents the results of an extensive experimental evaluation of the infrastructure and compares these results with the performance of the original Testarossa.

Thesis (M.S.)--Ohio University, November, 2001. / Title from PDF t.p.

Thesis (Th. M.)--Dallas Theological Seminary, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves[53]-58).

Thesis (M.B.A.)--Carleton University, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 162-168). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Carleton University, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 68-75). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Thesis (Th. M.)--Dallas Theological Seminary, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves[53]-58).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 1998. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 198-208). Also available on the Internet.