Thesis (M. Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 67-72). Also available in print.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Florida State University, 2005. / Advisor: Keith Ihlanfeldt, Florida State University, College of Social Sciences, Dept. of Economics. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Jan. 24, 2006). Document formatted into pages; contains x, 158 pages. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 2004. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1982. / Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 284-288).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2007.

Bone fractures, mostly of the lower leg and foot, due to impact with hockey pucks are becoming a common injury in ice hockey. These injuries can take up to more than two months to heal and return to play. In the professional levels of play, these injuries cost the team in more than one way. Firstly, a member of the team cannot play for some time and secondly the team may continue to pay the player their salary even though they are injured and not providing their full services to the team. These injuries do not appear to be researched at this time and the current equipment options do not appear to provide adequate protection to prevent injury. This work attempts to develop a testing setup, which is composed to several components, to investigate the minimum requirements that lead to these injuries. A puck-shooting machine was used to impact composite tibias and the velocity at which they fractured was recorded. Other components were designed, built, and selected to comprise the testing setup. The results obtained with the testing setup presented in this work provided valuable insight on these injuries. The composite tibias fractured at impact velocities ranging from 28.83 – 31.25 m/s. Puck orientation at impact was captured with high-speed video. Slight improvements in the testing setup and methodology could provide even more valuable information that could lead to improvements in protective devices designed to prevent these injuries. / February 2016

The severity of injury associated with sport concussions that present with a loss of consciousness or impact seizures is ambiguous. A disconnect between the clinical and biomechanical aspect can be observed throughout the literature pertaining to loss of consciousness and impact seizures. Clinicians have dismissed a loss of consciousness or the presence of impact seizures as an indicator of severity. However, early biomechanical research suggests that loss of consciousness is caused by greater magnitudes of impacts and damage to more vulnerable brain regions. However, this research was conducted on animal and cadaver models and may not adequately represent sport-related concussions. Recent methodologies such as laboratory reconstructions of head impacts and finite element modeling can provide new information on the severity of impact associated with these signs of concussions. Study One compared the magnitudes of head dynamic response and brain tissue deformation between impact representations of punches that lead or do not lead to LOC in boxing. The main findings of this study revealed knockout punches were the result of by unprotected hooks to the mandibular angle resulting in greater brain tissue trauma. Study Two compared cases of concussions with and without LOC in American football. Head dynamic response and brain tissue deformation was also greater in the LOC group in this sport, consistent with boxing impacts. The main predictor of LOC was found to be impact velocity which has implications in terms of prevention. Study Three compared the magnitudes of head dynamic response and brain tissue deformation between cases of concussions with a loss of consciousness and cases of concussion with impact seizures in American football. The two types of clinical presentations had similar severities of brain tissue deformation with the exception of strain rate in the white matter being smaller in cases of impact seizures. The findings of this thesis support the notion that concussions with loss of consciousness or impact seizure represent a more severe injury than concussions without these signs. It may be appropriate to address these signs of injury differently in return to sport protocols to reflect their severity. The findings also suggests that prevention of loss of consciousness should be sport specific. Hooks to the side of the jaw were the primary cause in boxing, whereas LOC could be caused by different event types in American football. However, in both sports, impact velocity and impact location played an important role in the risk for loss of consciousness.

One of the major tools for assisting in the implementation of sustainable development is environmental assessment (EA). This thesis has sought to develop a model and associated techniques required to provide an effective and efficient EA of projects in the water environment. The challenge has been to integrate a number of disparate elements into a cohesive model that provides workable procedures and outputs. The conceptual elements of the EA process have included the needs of environmental ethics and values; the political decision-making processes; current legislation and policy; the communication of infonnation for a range internal and external stakeholders and decisionmakers; the links with technical and economic issues; and The Environmental Agency's project management systems.

In predicting environmental hazards or estimating the impact of human activities on the marine ecosystem, scientists have multiplied the need for sample analysis. The classical microscopic approach is time consuming and wastes the talent and intellectual abilities of trained specialists. Therefore, scientists developed an automated optical tool, called a Flow Cytometer (FC), to analyse samples quickly and in large quantities. The flow cytometer has successfully been applied to real phytoplankton studies. However, analysis of the data extracted from samples is still required. Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) are one of the tools applied to FC data analysis. Despite several successful applications, ANNs have not been widely adopted by the marine biologist community, as they can not possible to change the number of species in the classification problem without retraining of the full system from scratch. Training is time consuming and requires expertise in ANNs. Moreover, most ANN paradigms cannot cope effectively with unknown data, such as data coming from new phytoplankton species or from species outside the scope of the studies. This project developed a new ANN technique based on a modular architecture that removes the need for retraining and allows unknowns to be detected and rejected. Furthermore, the Support Vector Machine architecture is applied in this domain for the first time and compared against another ANN paradigm called Radial Basis Function Networks. The results show that the modular architecture is able to effectively deal with new data which can be incorporated into the ANN architecture without fully retraining the system.