Thesis (doctoral)--University of Lapland, 2003. / Extra t.p. with thesis statement inserted. Includes bibliographical references (p. 328-344).

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 1985. / Photocopy from typescript.

Anaerobic digestion is a biochemical process in which organic carbon is biodegraded in an oxygen free environment through a microbial consortium. Engineered biological systems used for resource recovery often utilize anaerobic digestion to treat anthropogenic organic wastes by reclaiming the carbon as energy (methane gas) and a soil amendment (biosolids). Small-scale, or household, semi-continuous anaerobic digesters have been used in developed and developing countries for many decades to produce biogas from human and livestock waste, which is used for heating, lighting, and cooking. This application has been shown to improve the quality of life of the user. Although there is great potential for small-scale semi-continuous anaerobic digestion to provide much needed resource recovery functions and quality of life improvements in future development, the manner in which these systems are operated could lead to unintended consequences on human health because human waste often contains resistant pathogens. This paradigm is best demonstrated by soil-transmitted helminths that are known to be highly resilient in mesophilic anaerobic digestion environments and endemic to many developing countries. The idea that soil-transmitted helminths survive mesophilic anaerobic digestion is exacerbated when the biosolids from the digesters are land applied as a soil-amendment because this process fits perfectly into the lifecycle of soil-transmitted helminths that need soil environments to develop into infective larva. This research was divided into three sections to investigate the fate of human pathogens during semi-continuous anaerobic digestion and investigate techniques to enhance their removal. The sections were: 1) an examination into the fate (embryonation, development, inactivation, destruction) of Ascaris suum ova during mesophilic semi-continuous anaerobic digestion, with an emphasis on increased inactivation, 2) an investigation into the performance (volatile solids (VS) removal, E. coli and Salmonella destruction, methane production) of semi-continuous mesophilic anaerobic digesters and the effect of variations to solids retention time (SRT) and feeding frequency, and 3) development and application of mathematical models for pathogen inactivation kinetics and typical semi-continuous reactor residence time distributions to predict the removal efficiency of Ascaris suum ova during semi-continuous anaerobic digestion under different operating conditions. Results of these studies showed that during semi-continuous mesophilic anaerobic digestion variations in feeding frequency did not impact the fate of Ascaris suum ova or Salmonella; however it was observed that better removal of E. coli and higher methane production was achieved at the longer feeding interval (weekly). Additional results indicated that embryonated ova were destroyed faster than unembryonated ova under the experimental conditions, which suggests a potential mechanism to enhance removal of this common pathogen. Since an increased feeding interval proved to be beneficial for digester performance our findings suggest that wastes containing Ascaris suum ova could be stored in an aerated environment, for a period of time that does not negatively impact resource recovery, to lengthen the time between feedings and promote ova embryonation and ensuing destruction during digestion. Modeling results indicate that under mesophilic conditions (35oC) the ova of Ascaris suum could survive for 22 days and will not be completely removed from the effluent under typical feeding frequencies and average SRT were examined. Therefore, the use of anaerobic digestion as a resource recovery technology where soil-transmitted helminths proliferate should be applied with extra operational safeguards or be included as one step of several in a small-scale treatment train.

This study sought to understand using qualitative methods why and how the Government of Singapore came to set-up organized research units (ORU) in her two autonomous universities - the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Nanyang Technological University (NTU). That is, are ORUs the chief means in transforming NUS and NTU into top WCUs? The underpinnings of the institutional theory in the globalized context, the theory of academic capitalism, and guidance by frameworks on educational policy transfer, as well as the glonacal heuristics, together with document and discourse analysis of published documents, aided in the design of this study.This study finds that key state and institutional actors in Singapore decided to emulate the key features of U.S.-originated organized research units to make R&D and innovation-led economic growth the vehicle of sustaining this global city-state's global competitiveness in the knowledge-economy and to better elevate the status of both NUS and NTU as world-class. Because global rankings have branding implications, catch-up nations and institutions should make serious attempts to balance the ranking-enhancement effort with their local, national, and regional science-research needs given the constraints of available capital and resources.

This thesis examines the transfer pricing issue within the perspective of setting up a cost contribution arrangement for the international management of intangible property. / To this end, the first part presents the general rules governing the transfer pricing area in Australia, Canada, France, and the United States. The provisions of these countries will serve as a guiding line of this study. The first part presents, as well, the OECD Transfer Pricing Principles. / The second part examines the structural alternatives of the CCA tax vehicle. / The third part addresses the CCA concept itself. / The fourth part deals with the operational functioning of a CCA. The new challenges and the multiple issues raised by this new tax structure are addressed as well as the tax planning perspectives opening up through transfer pricing. / Finally, the fifth part questions the new dynamics of the conflicts between tax administrations generated by the CCA vehicle.

This study examines the relationship between an inventor’s motives and creativity, invention commercialization, and collaboration pattern. Special emphasis is placed on the educational background of inventors when examining the effect of inventor motive on invention commercialization. The data are based in a unique survey of patent inventors in the United States, and archival data. The GT/RIETI 2007 Inventor Survey includes information on commercialization for patented inventions and measures of inventor motives. Archival data based on Lai et al. (2011) was the basis for the collection of creativity measures based on U.S. patent technology subclasses. The results indicate that inventors’ motives differentiate the outcome of innovative activities. We found a firm motive has a positive effect on creating new combinations, commercialization of patents, and collaboration with coworkers. The results also suggest that the recognition motive negatively affects the creation of new combinations, and that there is no effect on the commercialization of the patent. As for collaboration pattern, the results show that individual differences in motives are associated with different patterns in collaboration. For example, task-oriented inventors are less likely to collaborate with others outside of the firm entity, whereas inventors with recognition motives are more likely to have a larger collaborative network with other professionals in the same field. This paper suggests that policy-makers should consider individual heterogeneity in innovative performance, knowledge creation, and patterns of collaboration. Based on the findings, future research and policy implications are discussed.

Dominant narratives of the green revolution focus on the top-down dissemination of technology produced by global scientific networks into developing regions or nations, but comparatively little scholarship has been produced regarding the forms of local knowledge which were transferred during the same process. This thesis will examine several important sites of interaction between formal scientific networks and indigenous knowledge with a focus on moments of historical transition in methodology. A main contention of this thesis is that this dissemination was not just a top-down flow of Western technology into Indian villages, but was rather a dialectical process by which class interest and reductionist science moulded the interaction between disparate knowledge systems. The focus will be an exposition of changes in research methodologies pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation’s Indian Agriculture Program, the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, and the founder of an indigenous knowledge database NGO, Anil Gupta.

This paper investigates the growth factors of EU regions in the 1990s. We test the hypothesis that regional growth is determined by endogenous growth factors, trade and technological catching-up in a growth accounting framework. Our estimations suggest that growth of EU regions is positively related to the accumulation of physical and human capital. Innovation activity as well as international technology transfer are important for growth. The latter is facilitated if a region is well endowed with human capital. Further, we observe that technological catching-up is promoted by intensive foreign trade, a result which underlines the importance of trade openness for EU regions. (authors' abstract) / Series: EI Working Papers / Europainstitut

Dominant narratives of the green revolution focus on the top-down dissemination of technology produced by global scientific networks into developing regions or nations, but comparatively little scholarship has been produced regarding the forms of local knowledge which were transferred during the same process. This thesis will examine several important sites of interaction between formal scientific networks and indigenous knowledge with a focus on moments of historical transition in methodology. A main contention of this thesis is that this dissemination was not just a top-down flow of Western technology into Indian villages, but was rather a dialectical process by which class interest and reductionist science moulded the interaction between disparate knowledge systems. The focus will be an exposition of changes in research methodologies pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation’s Indian Agriculture Program, the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, and the founder of an indigenous knowledge database NGO, Anil Gupta.

This thesis presents a commercial outcome prediction system (CPS) capable of predicting the likely future monetary return that would be generated by an invention. The CPS is designed to be used by university technology transfer offices for invention assessment purposes, and is based on the data from their historical invention cases. It is aimed at improving technology transfer offices' invention assessment performance. Using qualitative critical factors suggested by literature. a prototype CPS based on decision tree induction was developed. The prediction performance achieved by the prototype CPS was unreliable. Three surveys with various technology transfer offices were then performed, and the findings were incorporated into a final version of the CPS, which was based on neural networks. Subject to information obtained in the surveys, a number of potentially predictive attributes were proposed to form part of the predictor variables for the CPS. The CPS starts with a number of data reduction operations (based on principal component analysis and decision tree techniques), which identify the critical predictor variables. The CPS then uses five neural-network training algorithms to generate candidate classifiers, upon which the final classification is based. The prediction results achieved by the CPS were good and reliable. Additionally, the data reduction operations successfully captured the most discriminative invention attributes. The research demonstrated the potential or using the CPS for invention assessment. However, it requires sufficient historical data from the technology transfer office using it to provide accurate assessments.