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When looking at societies that are in transition from violence to peace, one of the major issues that is present is the need to reconcile with past adversaries. Political philosophy points to the need for the creation of a social contract that all groups can reach through reasonable agreements. This represents a political reconciliation between groups. This thesis classifies this idea as the need for cognitive reconciliation. The field of Social Psychology points to how negative emotions, or affect, can inhibit the use of reason. The field of Conflict Resolution asserts that there must also be a reconciliation on an emotional level as well. This thesis classifies this as the need for affective reconciliation. This project looks at a way to integrate the cognitive and affective forms of reconciliation into a single model.

This study investigates methods for the synthesis and resolution of chiral resorcinarenes.The first direct synthesis of C4 dissymmetric resorcinarenes by the Lewis acid catalysed condensation of 3-alkoxyphenols and alkyl aldehydes was developed. The chirality of these novel resorcinarenes was demonstrated by nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (n.m.r.) and enantioselective HPLC. The structure and physical properties of the new materials were characterised by several methods including X-ray crystallography.Resolution of the chiral resorcinarenes was achieved on a multi-gram scale by either formation of their diastereomeric camphorsulfonate esters or diastereomeric "amide" derivatives followed by flash chromatographic separation. The absolute configuration of one resorcinarene camphorsulfonate diastereomer was determined by X-ray crystallography and the stereochemistry of the related diastereomers assigned based on spectroscopic and chromatographic properties. Hydrolysis of the resolved resorcinarene camphorsulfonate diastereomers afforded the C4 symmetric resorcinarenes of known absolute stereochemistry. The absolute configuration of one resorcinarene "amide" diastereomer was also determined by X-ray crystallography.Functionalisation of the resorcinarene racemates with 2- and 3-picolyl ethers afforded a number of resorcinarene based pyridine ligands. The complexation behaviour of the ligands was examined and X-ray crystallographic data obtained for complexes with silver(I) and copper(II) salts.A significant proportion of the work described in this thesis has been published in four separate peer reviewed papers which have been attached as appendices 12-15.

This thesis will explain what an appropriate process for dispute resolution in a retirement village should look like. It will also evaluate how close to that ideal the model contained in the Retirement Villages Act 2003 (RVA) is. It will conclude that the Act model fails because at both steps in its dispute resolution process, it places one of the parties, the operator, in the position of selecting, ensuring independence and paying for a mediator and a disputes panel. This thesis also finds the lack of legal status for residents' committees deprives residents of a source of support and representation. The linchpin role in the Act, the statutory supervisor, also has a disputes resolution function. This thesis finds the role of statutory supervisor also lacks independence because the selection and payment for the role is placed with the operator. Evidence suggests a large share of the market is 'captured' by one Trustee Company that does not maintain independence from operators and may not communicate with residents at a level appropriate to the age of the resident population; the average age of retirement village residents in New Zealand is 83 years. The thesis also finds that mediation is not a suitable process for people in their later years, especially older women when the contested matters surround contractual rights and include on-going fees. The key finding in the thesis is that the Act is not fair or independent for residents.

This dissertation investigates the utility of the web for anaphora resolution. Aside from offering a highly accurate, web-based method for pleonastic it detection, which eliminates up to 4% of errors in pronominal anaphora resolution, it also introduces a web-assisted model for definite description anaphoricity determination and a prototype system of anaphora resolution that uses the web for virtually all subtasks. The thesis starts with a thorough analysis of the relationship between anaphora and definiteness, a study that bridges the gap between previously reported empirical studies of definite description anaphora and the linguistic theories developed around the concept of definiteness. Various naturally-occurring definite descriptions found in the WSJ corpus are analyzed from both perspectives of familiarity and uniqueness, and a new classification scheme for definite descriptions is developed. With the fundamental issues solved, the rest of the thesis focuses on the various ways the web can be exploited for the purpose of anaphora resolution. This thesis presents methods of high-precision, high-recall anaphoricity determination for both pronouns and definite descriptions. Evaluation results suggest that the performance of the pleonastic it identification module is on par with casually-trained human annotators. When used together with a pronominal anaphora resolution system, the module offers a statistically significant performance gain of 4%. The performance of the anaphoricity determination module for definite descriptions, which benefits from both the insight gained from the study on anaphora and definiteness and the significantly expanded coverage offered by the web, is also one of the highest among existing studies. The thesis also introduces a web-centric anaphora resolution system. Aside from serving as the information source for implementing selectional restrictions and discovering hyponym/synonym relationships, the web is additionally used for gender/number determination and many other auxiliary tasks, such as determining the semantic subjects of as-prepositions, identifying antecedents for certain empty categories, and assigning appropriate labels for proper names using information available from the text itself. With a design that specifically leaves room for the application of verb-argument and genitive co-occurrence statistics, the web-based features provide statistically significant gains to the system's performance. / Software Engineering and Intelligent Systems

Abstract On September 24, 1999, the first high-resolution commercial nature resource satellite, IKONOS-2, had been successfully launched. This started a new era to the applications of remote sensing. The best resolution of the IKONOS imageries is 0.82m. This imagery provides more detail spatial information than previous satellites. Many high spatial resolution satellites with hyper-spectral imageries will be launched successively by the year of 2002. When the time comes, the application of remotely sensed images in the area of land and sea will certainly be more widespread. Those imageries will be the fundamental data source for digital earth. The main purpose of this paper is to apply the IKONOS multi-spectral satellite imageries to derive the shallow water depth. Two key studies will be included as follows. The first is to discuss the high-resolution characteristics of IKONOS images and its precise geometrically correction. The other is applying the multi-spectral images to calculate water depth by regression with few field-measured bathymetry. It is anticipated that the high-resolution remote sensing technology will be an alternative tool to the shallow water bathymetric surveying. The rugged terrain imageries of CARTERRA Geo level in Taipei County were selected and the bundle adjustment was used for precise images geometrically correction. The positioning accuracy is approximate 1.83m for east-west direction, 1.35m for north-south direction, and 1.6m for elevation. If the orthophoto is been rectified by using bundle adjustment method, the horizontal position accuracy of the check points is about 2.04m. In accordance with these results, using bundle adjustment in the CARTERRA Geo level imagery rectification has proved feasible. In the study of using muti-spectral images to derive the shallow water depth, both simulated data, IKONOS and SPOT satellite images of South Bay in KenTing are used to verify the influence of wave effect in the satellite imageries. By means of the concept of multi-resolution analysis in wavelet theory, the Daubechies D4 coefficients is tried to filter out the wave effect. Significant improvement on the shallow water depth calculation after filtering wave effect is shown in the result. The accuracy of water depth derivation using high resolution is about 30cm for the water depth shallower than 10m. This research proves that derivation of shallow water depth by using high-resolution satellite imagery is feasibility.