Over the last thirty years Cornwall has experienced a dramatic population expansion. Population growth has had effects in many areas, but particularly in housing. The increased demand for housing from those migrating into the area has inflated house prices, yet the Cornish economy is afflicted by low wage levels and high unemployment rates, creating a 'mortgage gap' for long term residents. This coupled with the decline in availability of both publicly and privately rented accommodation has resulted in what has been termed a housing 'crisis' (George 1987, Deacon et al. 1988, Lennon 1991, Williams 1993). It has been suggested that this 'crisis' has resulted in a 'two tier' housing system, recent inmigrants generally enjoying better housing chances than longer term residents of Cornwall (Williams, 1993). Furthermore, it has been suggested that much of Cornwall's housing problems remain 'hidden' having been absorbed into existing household structures. The research presented in this thesis aimed to assess the housing circumstances and chances of both recent in-migrant and long-term residents in order to discover if they do in fact differ. Whether or not housing need was being absorbed into existing household structures was also explored, as were the reasons why. It was found that the housing circumstances and chances of recent in-migrants are generally better than those of long-term residents and that this was as a result of the distinctly different economic characteristics of the groups. Housing need was also found to be to a large extent 'concealed'. This was mainly young adults who were unable to set up independent households as a result of a lack of affordable accommodation. The research suggests that families remain a source of support and assistance to their members in relation to housing, but that the type of support given varies according to occupational class and economic means which might serve to disadvantage long-term residents still further in the future.

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No description available.

Behavioral patterns prediction in the context of Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs)has been receiving increasing attention due to enabling on-demand, intelligent traffic analysis and response to real-time traffic issues. One of these patterns, sequential patterns, are a type of behavioral patterns that describe the occurence of events in a timely-ordered fashion. In the context of VANETs, these events are defined as an ordered list of road segments traversed by vehicles during their trips from a starting point to their final intended destination, forming a vehicular path. Due to their predictable nature, undertaken vehicular paths can be exploited to extract the paths that are considered frequent. From the extracted frequent paths through data mining, the probability that a vehicular path will take a certain direction is obtained. However, in order to achieve this, samples of vehicular paths need to be initially collected over periods of time in order to be data-mined accordingly. In this thesis, a new set of formal definitions depicting vehicular paths as sequential patterns is described. Also, five novel communication schemes have been designed and implemented under a simulated environment to collect vehicular paths; such schemes are classified under two categories: Road Side Unit-Triggered (RSU-Triggered) and Vehicle-Triggered. After collection, extracted frequent paths are obtained through data mining, and the probability of these frequent paths is measured. In order to evaluate the e ciency and e ectiveness of the proposed schemes, extensive experimental analysis has been realized. From the results, two of the Vehicle-Triggered schemes, VTB-FP and VTRD-FP, have improved the vehicular path collection operation in terms of communication cost and latency over others. In terms of reliability, the Vehicle-Triggered schemes achieved a higher success rate than the RSU-Triggered scheme. Finally, frequent vehicular movement patterns have been effectively extracted from the collected vehicular paths according to a user-de ned threshold and the confidence of generated movement rules have been measured. From the analysis, it was clear that the user-de ned threshold needs to be set accordingly in order to not discard important vehicular movement patterns.

Research to date discovered two gaps restricts the existing service innovation theories from full support for SMEs - who also require good service innovation theory to innovate and to survive in the fast-pacing market - which are: goods-thinking-based service innovation logic and incomprehensible service innovation theory for SMEs. In this research, we share and enhance the vision of system thinking researchers - interaction plays the very basis and important role in service value creating and delivering - as our theory foundation. Founding on this interaction-centric notion, we propose an easy-to-adapt service innovation methodology which suggests that SMEs could do service innovation by adjusting business interactions, and justify it with a comprehensive model evaluated by simulation techniques and a prototype supporting information system mechanism to provide support for SME users. Last but not the least, at the end of this research, we re-examine the system thinking framework with our discoveries, and signaled a possible adjusting direction of the framework for more value-oriented purposes. From the practical view, we identify a way to extend the current system thinking theory to a practical model for real world SME’s service innovation purposes. For the academic research, our interaction-centric service innovation methodology is believed to enhance the to-date system thinking theories. In addition, we also identify several future possibilities for academic researchers in this field to discover.

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Assessing the timing of seasonal movements by the prehistoric peoples of Otago has long been a problem in the archaeology of this region. The oxygen isotope ratio (18 o/16o) of mollusc shell carbonate is temperature dependent. By sampling successive increments of shell growth, palaeotemperature curves can be constructed to provide �season of death� estimates for individual shells. In this work carbonate samples from the blue mussel (Mytilus edulis) were used to estimate the seasonality of four prehistoric fishing sites. A total of 275 samples of shell material were analysed for carbon and oxygen isotope ratios at the Institute of Nuclear Sciences, Lower Hutt. Where fishing and shellfishing were important activities they were consistently associated with the winter season. A model of seasonal activity is presented for the Early part of the prehistoric period.

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No description available.

A genus-two Riemann surface admits a canonical decomposition into Dirichlet polygons determined by its six Weierstrass points. All possible associated graphs are determined explicitly from circle packing problems, solved by systems of linear inequalities whose solutions determine a finite 6-dimensional polyhedral complex in 12-dimensional space. The 6-dimensional Moduli Space of genus-two Riemann surfaces inherits a canonical explicit decomposition into Euclidean polyhedra, giving new natural coordinates for the Teichmuller Space of all possible constant curvature geometries on a marked genus-two surface.