The following thesis is an examination of the establishment and initial development of a British airborne force. Beginning with an examination of airborne development outside the UK up to 1940, it traces the growing British use of air transport as a tool for imperial policing in the inter-war period, and examines why this did not lead to the logical step of creating a dedicated British airborne force. The impact of German airborne operations and the defeat at Dunkirk in 1940 on British attitudes is then analysed, followed by a detailed examination of the mechanics of the establishment of a British airborne force, ending with the British 1st Parachute Brigade attaining operational status in January 1942.

published_or_final_version / Computer Science and Information Systems / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

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Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / Electronic commerce (EC) and software agents are two of the hottest fields of research in information science. As the Internet is rapidly becomes a popular marketplace for consumers and sellers of goods and services, combining these two research areas offers lucrative opportunities both for businesses wishing to conduct transactions over the World Wide Web (WWW) and for developers of tools to facilitate this trend. The focus in this chapter will be on software agents specifically designed for electronic commerce activities. We will briefly describe the history of agent research in general, defining characteristics of agents, and will touch on the different types of agents. Following this introduction we will describe the learning and action mechanisms that make it possible for agents to perform tasks. Finally, we will describe the issues associated with the deployment of electronic commerce agents (ECAs).

This study investigates the Web presence and Web Impact Factor (WIF) for country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) of Middle-Eastern countries, and sub-level domains (SLDs) related to education and academic institutions in these countries. Counts of links to the web sites of Middle-Eastern countries were calculated from the output of Yahoo search engine. In this study, we compute the WIF at two levels: top-level domains, and sub-level domains. The results show that the Middle-Eastern countries, apart from Turkey, Israel and Iran, have a low web presence. On the other hand, their web sites have a low inlink WIF. Specific features of sites may affect a countryâ s Web Impact Factor. For linguistic reasons, Middle-Eastern web sites (Persian, Kurdish, Turkish, Arabic, and Hebrew languages) may not receive and attract the attention that they deserve from the World Wide Web community.

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