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The environmental performance of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) was chosen to be the topic of study for this thesis. While this policy-relevant research area has gained increased coverage in the literature over the last decade, it has still proved difficult to generate empirical data and information of sufficient quality and quantity. A major aspect of environmental performance involves the management of waste, and waste minimisation was of particular interest to this programme of research. Another area of special interest for this thesis was the extent to which voluntary policy tools (voluntary initiatives, or VIs) could be utilised at the local level to engage with SMEs on the issue of improved environmental performance. The early desk study research revealed the major barriers preventing more environmental action by SMEs to date. The barriers included low-priority attachment to environmental issues, a lack of time/manpower and limited understanding. It also revealed that while VIs have proved successful at the 'macro' level there is little evidence or experience to draw on for their design or implementation at the local scale. The programme of empirical research Involved an original analysis of a recent nation-wide survey into the environmental attitudes of UK manufacturing businesses; the completion of an environmental attitudes survey with approximately 60 SMEs situated in East Anglia; observation of a waste-oriented local authority environment project Involving small businesses and a similar project with a rural village community in Suffolk, and finally the establishment of two voluntary waste minimisation initiatives on Industrial estates in Norfolk and Suffolk. The national survey analysis identified smaller sites as consistently less proactive in most areas of environmental thinking and action. This finding was not strongly confirmed by the survey of East Anglian SMEs which showed that a small business does not have to be a member of an environmental group/initiative to have already adopted certain sound environmental practices, even if primarily these measures were geared towards cost savings/efficiency gains. The industrial estates projects have proved to be particularly useful, demonstrating the potential benefits of this type of voluntary action which capitalises on the close geographical proximity of a number of SMEs sharing common problems. The benefits included a reduction of waste generation, the development of more environmentally responsive business cultures and improved relations with the local authority. The village community project that brought together all elements of the local society from the businesses to the school, in a rural setting, seems to be a sensible way to focus minds on the reduction of waste and consequent benefits.

Dans cette thèse nous étudions les algèbres des polynômes qui sont bornés sur un ensemble semi-algébrique non borné. Tout d'abord nous abordons le problème consistant à déterminer si un polynôme est borné sur un ensemble. Nous résolvons ce problème pour les polynômes à deux variables définis sur des ensembles semi-algébriques quelconques. Dans la section suivante nous donnons une méthode pour déterminer des générateurs de l'algèbre des polynômes bornés et ce pour une large classe de semi-algébriques du plan réel. Dans la section 3 nous établissons une relation entre les valeurs de bifurcation du complexifié d'un polynôme $f$ à deux variables et la stabilité de la famille d'algèbres des polynômes bornés sur les ensembles ${fle c}$. Dans la section 4 nous décrivons la structure de l'algèbre des polynômes bornés sur un certain type de sous-ensembles de $mathbb{R}^n$ avec $n$ arbitraire, que nous appelons tentacules pondérées. Nous donnons aussi une preuve géométrique du fait que l'algèbre d'un sous-ensemble non borné d'un ensemble algébrique propre n'est pas de type fini. Dans la section suivante nous établissons une correspondance entre les cônes convexes et les algèbres des ensembles obtenus par des inégalités sur des monômes appropriés. Enfin, nous démontrons une version du Positivstellensatz de Schmudgen pour les polynômes bornés sur un ensemble non compact. / The main topic of the thesis is a study of algebras of polynomials which are bounded on a given unbounded semialgebraic set. First we tackle the problem of deciding the boundedness of a polynomial on a set. We achieve it for polynomials in two variables for any semialgebraic set. We give also a method of finding generators of the algebra of bounded polynomials for a large class of semialgebraic subsets of the real plane. In Section 3 we have established a relation between bifurcation values of a complexification of polynomial $f$ in two variables and the family of algebras of bounded polynomials on the sets ${fle c}$. In section 4 we describe the algebras of bounded polynomials for subsets of $mathbb{R}^n$, where $n$ is arbitrary, which we call weighted tentacles. We also provide a geometric proof of the fact that for a unbounded subset of a proper algebraic set its algebra cannot be finitely generated. In the next section we establish a correspondence between convex cones and algebras of bounded polynomials on the sets described by monomial inequalities. At the end of this thesis we prove a version of Schmudgen's Positivstellensatz for bounded polynomials.

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Environmental sustainability, strict Municipal bylaws, ever-increasing waste disposal / Thesis (M.Sc.) - University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2009.

Student Number : 0003555T - MSc (Eng) dissertation - School of Electrical and Information Engineering - Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment / Successful radiotherapy treatments with high-energy proton beams require the accurate positioning of patients. This paper investigates computational methods for achieving accurate treatment setups in proton therapy based on the geometrical differences between a double exposed portal radiograph (PR) and a reference image obtained from the treatment planning process. The first step in these methods involves aligning the boundary of the radiation field in the PR with a reference boundary defined by the treatment plan. We propose using the generalised Hough transform (GHT), followed by an optimisation routine to align the field boundaries. It is found that this method worked successfully on ten tested examples, and aligns up to 82% of reference boundary points onto the field boundary. The next step requires quantising the patients anatomical shifts relative to the field boundary. Using simulated images, a number of intensity-based similarity measures and optimisation routines are tested on a 3D/2D registration. It is found that the simulated annealing algorithm minimising the correlation coefficient provided the most accurate solution in the least number of function evaluations.

This thesis is based on an Australian Research Council funded research grant. Fifty-one qualitative interviews were conducted with human service workers to gain an understanding of their interpretations of their clients’ ‘drug problems’ and of their own role, the service system and wider policies. Although harm minimisation has been Australia’s official drug policy since 1985, little is known about how harm minimisation is ‘enacted’ in the helping culture. To date human service workers have not been recognised in their constitutive role in harm minimisation discourse. Whilst a significant part of drug policy interventions are delivered via human services, the helping subject has not come under scrutiny. The drug using subject remains ill-conceived as a result of neglecting its partnering others or indeed its overlapping with other subject positions. Moving beyond recognising workers only in terms of staff opinions and attitudes, a relational and multi-level approach is adopted to introduce more complexity into the debate. After a brief historic discussion of the creation of the ‘human service worker’ and the ‘drug user’ (as client) and methodological considerations about discourse analysis, the thesis proceeds with the introduction of a conceptual framework consisting of four levels: the individual, relational, institutional and cultural political economic level. These levels are used to examine the existing literature on ‘drug problem factories’ and for the analysis of the data. By focusing on these levels the critical analysis of the interview material shows that ‘harm’ and ‘minimising’ are themselves contested categories and that different harms and different harm producing and minimising practices can be identified some of which have come into discourse, others are excluded or entirely absent. The human service workers struggle to make sense of their own role and to define how drug users are being ‘helped’ and could or should be helped. Their understanding of harm minimisation discourse aligns with, supports and/or resists other discourses such as (neo)liberalism, neoconservatism, prohibition and economic rationalism. The workers are portrayed as having substituted increasing complexity for initial simplicity in the course of working with ‘drug users’. In summary, this thesis offers a poststructuralist analysis of how harm minimisation is constituted, negotiated and undermined from the perspective of human service workers and shows how the service systems’ helping cultures enrol human service workers in harm producing and harm minimising practices. Harm minimisation consists of discursive and non-discursive elements and is a product of deliberate social forces as well as messy contingencies and unintended consequences.

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