investment evaluation of solar electric power station, two main parts, first focus on evaluation before positive decision about making investment, second part reflects the present situation, use economic criterion: net present value, internal rate of return, pay-off period and additional indices

Esta dissertação objetiva descrever diacronicamente o gerúndio, desde o latim até o português arcaico, a fim de apontar como e quando suas funções foram ampliadas à custa do particípio presente. Para levar a pesquisa a cabo, recorreu-se a dois difundidos métodos da Linguística Diacrônica: o método de análise documental indutiva e o método histórico-comparativo. O primeiro consiste em analisar traços e fenômenos linguísticos diretamente nos textos antigos para, ao cabo, sistematizar e interpretar os dados analisados. O segundo, mais teórico e mais abstrato, consiste em reconstruir traços de uma língua ancestral por meio da comparação indutiva de traços das línguas descendentes. Esta pesquisa consta de cinco corpora três de textos latinos e dois de textos portugueses medievais , nos quais se analisam não só o gerúndio, como também o particípio presente. Os corpora são estes: 1) Antología del Latín Vulgar, de Díaz e Díaz (1962); 2) Glosas Emilianenses, Glosas Silenses e documentos privados ibéricos, coligidos em Pidal (1950); 3) Os documentos do Tombo de Toxos Outos, de Pérez Rodríguez (2004); 4) 150 cantigas portuguesas de escárnio e maldizer; 5) Um Flos Sanctorum Trecentista, de Machado Filho (2009). Para a aplicação do método histórico-comparativo, recorre-se ao português e às outras quatro línguas neolatinas majoritárias: francês, italiano, castelhano e romeno. Os resultados mostram que a disputa entre o gerúndio e o particípio presente já ocorria desde os primeiros momentos da literatura latina, até que, por volta do século II d.C., antes de a relativa unidade do latim se romper, o gerúndio o sobrepujasse no latim popular. / This dissertation aims to describe diacronically the gerund, from Latin to Old Portuguese, in order to point out how and when its functions were enlarged at the expense of the present participle. In order to conduct this research, two diffused methods of Diachronic Linguistics were used: the method of inductive documental analysis and the historical-comparative method. The first consists in analyzing linguistic features and phenomena directly in the old texts in order to systematize and interpret the analyzed data. The second, more theoretical and more abstract, consists in reconstructing features of an ancestral language by the inductive comparison of features of the descendant languages. This research consists of five corpora three of Latin texts and two of Portuguese medieval texts , in which the gerund, as well as the present participle, are analyzed. The corpora are these: 1) Antología del Latín Vulgar, by Díaz y Díaz (1962); 2) Glosas Emilianenses, Glosas Silenses and private Iberian documents, collected in Pidal (1950); 3) Os documentos do Tombo de Toxos Outos, of Pérez Rodríguez (2004); 4) 150 Portuguese derision and cursing poems; 5) Um Flos Sanctorum Trecentista, by Machado Filho (2009). For the application of the historical-comparative method, the Portuguese and the other four Neo-Latin languages are used: French, Italian, Castilian and Romanian. The results show that the dispute between the gerund and the present participle had already taken place from the earliest moments of Latin literature, until, by the second century AD, before the relative unity of Latin broke, the gerund had surpassed it in popular Latin.

The ongoing change towards completely renewable power production in Sweden entails new challenges in maintaining a stable power system and puts greater demands on the frequency control. Hydropower caters for all frequency control in the Swedish grid today. However, the new challenges make it necessary to explore other technologies that potentially could provide frequency control. The aim of this master thesis is thus to map different technologies that potentially could deliver the reserves FCR and aFRR, with the main focus of investigating the economic potential of these technologies and their competitiveness during different seasons. The technologies investigated were lithium-ion batteries, flywheels, demand response and wind power plants. Different applications for these technologies were also investigated. The different investment alternatives were evaluated by calculating the net present value and the net present value ratio. The results show that the economic potential is greatest in cases where existing infrastructure could be used. Investments in stand-alone energy storage systems are not profitable today but might be so in the future as the prices continue to decrease. The results also show that many of the technologies and applications are competitive alternatives to hydropower during different seasons, which shows that there is potential in participating in the balancing markets with these technologies. However, it seems relevant to investigate further if, and if so how, the regulations on endurance can be adapted to actual conditions to further opening up the markets to more actors while maintaining a stable power system.

A thesis submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. / This thesis is an analysis of narratives of private game farming in Groot Marico. Through this case study, it argues that the material and symbolic processes of game farming and hunting depict a ‘colonial present’ in their constitution. Part of that ‘colonial present’ stems from ‘white privilege’, a legacy of South African history. A major part comes from the gate-keeping function of in-group beneficiaries represented by associations and networks. Race, class, language and capital are used to maintain the status quo. The situation has been aided by a state whose neo liberal policies support commercialisation more than social justice redress. The thesis traces the historical antecedents and the contemporary socio-economic and political factors that have led to white farmers’ conversion into game farming from domestic livestock production. Continuities of practices, from farm ownership to hunting have been processes that maintain the status quo. Yet white farmers have argued that these continuities are ‘tradition’, whether in hunting or game farming, while being silent on the lack of transformation of the industry. Despite the visibility of a few high-profile black personalities, the industry remains overwhelmingly white. I argue that the game farming community has created a ‘structure’ to which high-profile black figures can belong, not only as examples of transformation but primarily to protect vested interests by their token inclusion. Economic and political status has been the criteria upon which the few black figures have been ‘allowed’ into the group. In spite of the racial demographics, game farming is not homogenous as the Groot Marico case studies reveal. There are cleavages around the position of game farmers within the hierarchy of game farming, and these are informed by class. Trophy-hunters, meat producers, and small, marginal farmers all occupy different spheres within the game farming sector. The trophy hunter and game breeder are at the top of the hierarchy as opposed to the small one man game farmer surviving at the margins. The meat producer deals with the economics of supplying a niche market at a different level from the trophy game farmer and the small one man game farmer. Yet these three are bound together in an increasingly besieged farming community where land reform is a constant reminder of what can be lost. Other bonds of solidarity derive from a shared discourse of conservation that ties it to the maxim ‘if it pays it stays’. This economic tenet, describes the game farming community’s approach to wildlife conservation.

This thesis analyzes the long run relationship between stock markets and macroeconomic variables, such as the real industrial production index, consumer price index, money supply, and long-term government bonds. By the use of recent developments in cointegration methodologies a larger set of countries is analyzed due to mitigation of the issue where variables are integrated of different orders. Based on a present value model, this thesis applies an ARDL model and conducts the bounds testing procedure for analysis of cointegrating relationships among the variables. Complemented by the popular Johansen cointegration methodology, it is found that the variables are cointegrated for all of the twelve countries. Hence, the present value model provides a theoretical explanation of the long run connection between stock markets and macroeconomic variables. Finally, the long run relationship is estimated using both FMOLS and DOLS. Results show that real economic activity, proxied by the real industrial production index, enters a positive relationship with the stock market indices, and so does money supply. In contrast, the consumer price index and long-term government bonds enter a negative relationship with the stock market indices. Hence, this thesis adds to the literature by applying new methodologies to the topic, through which a larger set of countries can be analyzed, and by further analyzing the long run relationship between stock markets and real economic activity.

Nesta tese observa-se o papel que a semântica e a pragmática desempenham, na gramática inicial (early grammar) da interlíngua de falantes de português, na compreensão de textos em inglês e em espanhol nos quais se relatam eventos passados e se empregam as oposições Present Perfect x Past Simple e Pretérito Perfecto x Pretérito Indefinido. Assumimos (MICHAELLIS, 1998) que um dos valores mais fortes das formas compostas dessas duas línguas é o resultativo e que como o português, na maioria das vezes, expressa o resultado de outros modos, o aprendiz vê naquelas apenas uma maneira de expressar ações passadas. Em função disso, ao analisar a estrutura da língua estrangeira, acaba atribuindo aos tempos compostos de ambas os valores aspectuais das perífrases [TER+Particípio] e [ESTAR+Gerúndio] do português, que em muitos casos não coincide com os valores das formas perifrásticas das línguas que estão aprendendo. Enquanto as perífrases da língua estrangeira têm o aspecto perfectivo resultativo, as do português têm valor imperfectivo continuativo. Tal fato, que afeta a compreensão do texto, não é percebido pelos aprendizes. Estes analisam primeiramente a sintaxe da língua-alvo (top-down procedure, Liceras, 2003a) uma vez que não têm acesso aos traços que desencadeiam a fixação de parâmetros para a realização do bottom-up. O padrão de atribuição dos valores das perífrases da L1 para a L2 aparece nas interlínguas do espanhol e do inglês, apontando para um mesmo processo, independente de a língua-alvo ser mais ou menos próxima do português. Testes com análise de variância comprovam que se trata de um mesmo processo para as duas línguas, que começa a partir da reestruturação da L1, sugerindo que a aquisição dessa é regida pelos princípios da GU, mas que a marcação de parâmetros não acontecerá como na L1, mas se dará via reestruturação de porções da L1. Os valores semânticos utilizados na interlíngua, nesse estágio, também são os da L1, o que aponta que, assim como acontece com a fonologia, a criança nasce com sensibilidade para acessar qualquer valor semântico, mas existe um período crítico que faz com que a aquisição da L2 ocorra por reestruturação não apenas sintática mas também semântica dos valores da L1. A pragmática, por sua vez, será acessada, após a semântica, como uma sintonia fina do sentido / In this thesis, the roles of Semantics and Pragmatics in text comprehension tasks have been investigated in Portuguese speakers interlanguage early grammar. The texts in both English and Spanish had past events told employing Present Perfect x Past Simple and Pretérito Perfecto x Pretérito Indefinido pairings. We have adopted (Michaellis, 1998) that the English periphrasis has as its most salient meaning the resultative reading and have applied it to the Spanish periphrasis as well. Portuguese, on the other hand, expresses resultative meaning in different ways most of the times leading students to see in the Present Perfect and Pretérito Perfecto structures the past event meaning alone. Consequently, when analyzing the foreign language structures, learners end up assigning them the aspectual values which belong to the Portuguese [TER+Participle] and [ESTAR+Gerund] periphrases, despite their not sharing the same aspectual values most of the time, because the English and Spanish forms express the perfective and resultative aspect, while the Portuguese periphrasis indicates the imperfective and durative aspect. This mismatch affects text comprehension, but is not perceived by the students. Learners first analyze the target language structure (topdown procedure, Liceras, 2003a), once they cannot have access to the features which trigger the parameter setting, precluding a bottom-up procedure. The same pattern of value assignment from the L1 periphrasis to both L2 is noticeable in both English and Spanish interlanguages. Analysis of Variance tests have proven that both interlanguages undergo the same process, which starts from L1 reestructuring. This fact suggests that adult L2 learner will make use of UG principles, but will not set parameters the way children do, L2 will grow by reestructuring portions of L1. The semantic values applied in both English and Spanish interlanguages at this stage, are L1?s as well, allowing a comparison to the phonology acquisition. Children are born sensitive to any semantic value, but due to a critical period for semantics, adult L2 learners will acquire L2 semantic values by reestructing not only the syntax of L1 but also its semantic values. Learners will have access to pragmatics, after semantics, as a fine-tuned meaning

Esta tese objetiva analisar a obra do intelectual judeu-alemão Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966) produzida até o ano de 1933. Especialmente em sua atividade como publicista, Kracauer desenvolveu procedimentos de observação social que tinham como objetivo a análise de fenômenos de superfície, expressos por objetos relativamente marginais, pontuais e de extração cotidiana (por exemplo, o best-seller, a dança, o cinema, a moda etc.). Kracauer acompanhou elementos da vida social alemã durante a República de Weimar sob uma perspectiva epistemológica peculiar, que visava entender o conteúdo múltiplo de uma época a partir da interpretação minuciosa de suas manifestações mais ínfimas. Acompanho a trajetória de seu pensamento e procuro oferecer um modo de ler seus textos sobre as mais variadas e inusitadas temáticas. Nessa leitura, emergem as perspectivas de que esses trabalhos oferecem, por um lado, um diagnóstico de época; por outro, viabilizam uma forma específica de análise social, pautada na observação de fenômenos relativamente marginais. Durante o processo de interpretação dos ensaios kracauerianos, procuro expor o diálogo que ele manteve com o pensamento social contemporâneo e a constelação teórica que possibilitou tal junção entre sociologia e superfícies para o oferecimento de uma crítica do presente; além disso, aponto para o teor iluminista da sua reflexão, em contraposição a movimentos nostálgicos e regressivos que marcaram o período / The aim of this thesis is to analyze the works of the Jewish-German intellectual Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966) in the period up to 1933. Especially during his career as a publicist, Kracauer developed methods for social observation in order to analyze surface phenomena, represented by relatively marginal, particular and everyday life objects (the best seller, dance, movies and fashion, for example). During the Weimar Republic, Kracauer monitored elements of German social life, making use of a singular epistemological perspective that sought to understand the multiple contents of an epoch through the in-depth interpretation of its minutest manifestations. I set out to track the development of his thought and present a reading of his texts centering on varied and unusual themes. Such a reading offers two perspectives: a diagnosis of the times (Zeitdiagnose) on the one hand, and a specific form of social analysis based on relatively marginal phenomena on the other. During the process of interpreting Kracauers essays, I present his dialogue with social thought from the time as well as the theoretical constellation that allowed for such a connection between sociology and surface phenomena in creating a critique of the present. Additionally, I highlight the enlightened content of his reflections, in opposition to the nostalgic and regressive movements that marked the period

This thesis makes a contribution to that part of the economics literature that explores how behavioural economics can inform environmental economics. Theoretically, the thesis develops the concept of environmental morale. Empirically, the study investigates the role of environmental morale on individuals’ behaviour within two different contexts: recycling participation and intertemporal choices over different goods (i.e., money, environment, and health) and outcomes (i.e., gains and losses). Major objectives of this analysis are: to shed light on how environmental morale interplays with individuals’ behaviour under different recycling policy schemes, and to examine whether temporal discounting is domain specific and depends on environmental morale heterogeneity. Original survey investigations are employed to analyse these issues. Results highlight the relevance of environmental morale both in motivating individuals’ contribution to recycling and intertemporal choices towards environmental outcomes. Regarding the interaction between environmental morale, recycling participation and government interventions, results from this analysis suggest that a facilitating nudge policy seems to be relatively more powerful in increasing individuals’ contribution and motivation towards recycling. Considering intertemporal choices, a paradox of hyperopia seems to be located in data provided in this analysis. Some of the original contributions of the thesis are, first the broader reconceptualization of the definition of environmental morale and its operationalization in analyses of questionnaire preferences. Secondly, in line with other areas of research (i.e., tax compliance literature); this study pursues an investigation of individual and cultural differences with respect to recycling policies, an area which has been neglected in the environmental economics literature. In this regard, the analysis considers a comparison between psychology and economics students in Italy and the UK. Thirdly, conditioning discounting on environmental morale offers a unique opportunity to analyse how ethical considerations influence the way individuals form expectations on (near and far distant) future environmental outcomes.

"The process of securing data has always been a challenge since it is related to the safety of people and society. Nowadays, there are many cryptographic algorithms developed to solve security problems. However, some applications have constraints which make it difficult to achieve high levels of security. Light weight cryptography aims to address this issue while trying to maintain low costs. Side-channel attacks have changed the way of cryptography significantly. In this kind of attacks, the attacker has physical access to the crypto-system and can extract the sensitive data by monitoring and measuring the side-channels such as power consumption, electromagnetic emanation, timing information, sound, etc. These attacks are based on the relationship between side-channels and secret data. Therefore, there need to be countermeasures to eliminate or reduce side channel leaks or to break the relationship between side-channels and secret data to protect the crypto systems against side-channel attacks. In this work, we explore the practicality of Threshold Implementation (TI) with only two shares for a smaller design that needs less randomness but is still leakage resistant. We demonstrate the first two-share Threshold Implementations of light-weight block cipher Present. Based on implementation results, two-share TI has a lower area overhead and better throughput when compared with a first-order resistant three-share scheme. Leakage analysis of the developed implementations reveals that two-share TI can retain perfect first-order resistance. However, the analysis also exposes a strong second-order leakage. "

This thesis consists of a poetry manuscript and a critical component that considers the poetics and history that inform the writing of that manuscript. Critical Component: Charting the Sea in Caribbean Poetry This thesis focuses on the influence of the sea in constructing identity in the writing of Kamau Brathwaite, Derek Walcott, and Dionne Brand. It is particularly interested in examining how these poets trace identity primarily in The Arrivants, Omeros, and No Language is Neutral through their various employments of the sea and liquidity in those works. I then read selections from two of my poetic forbearers from the British Virgin Islands - Alphaeus Norman and Verna Penn Moll - in order to examine the construction of the sea in their poetry against the canonised work of Brathwaite, Walcott, and Brand. I argue through close contextual readings of the selected works that through engagement of various approaches each poet arrives at a portrait of Caribbean identity that is constructed integrally through the fluid, mutable natures of the sea. The five poets are scrutinised in four chapters, in relation to their personal philosophies regarding national or regional identity through essay writings and interviews but more prominently in close readings of their poetry and in particular their representations of the sea. I begin by arguing that in Brathwaite's The Arrivants (1980), the importance of the sea in the various formations of West Indian identity is represented through the exercising of his tidalectic process in his reconstructions of the archetypes of Legba and Ananse, and his ritualising of cricket and calypso. In Walcott's Omeros (1990), the sea is presented as the embodiment of history itself through which all of Saint Lucia's contemporary inhabitants must access their ancestral memories. Walcott utilises the Atlantic as a creolising force in his reimagining of the Homeric archetypes of Philoctetes, Achilles, Hector, and Helen. Brand however, departs from this metaphorical interpretation of the sea and turns inward, redefining the boundaries of land, sea, and sexual desire in Trinidad through a remapping of that island that is focused on the ocean, waterways, and the bodies of women. Lastly, British Virgin Islander poets Alphaeus Osario Norman and Verna Penn Moll embrace different mythic versions of the sea. Norman's work creates a distinct sailor aesthetic that resonates with classic European naval and militaristic poetry as a way to invoke a national pride, while Penn Moll focuses on performances of cultural and communal waterside rituals to frame narratives of local history and village culture. Ultimately, I argue that the sea is presented variously as a portal through which history and tribal memory can be accessed, and as a supernaturally transformative force for the poet. Creative Component: Make Us All Islands Make Us All Islands is a poetry manuscript based in the British Virgin Islands that explores historical and personal relationships with the sea. The first section revolves around the various arrivals of liberated Africans rescued from slave ships wrecked or captured by the British Navy in the early 1800s. The liberated Africans were not enslaved, but rather forced into indentureship before ultimately being segregated from society and then disappearing from history. The second section is built around the departure of a generation of Tortolan men to work in the sugar plantations of the Dominican Republic at the turn of the following century, alongside other Anglophone Afro-Caribbean migrants. A large portion of these poems are built around accounts of the greatest boating disaster in the islands' history, the loss of a schooner christened Fancy Me which wrecked in a hurricane in 1926 off the coast of the Dominican island Saona. The final movement personalises this exercise and focuses on the poet's interactions with the sea and memory.