Groundwater is a major source of water in the western US. However, there are limited recharge estimates in this region due to the complexity of recharge processes and the challenge of direct observations. Land surface Models (LSMs) could be a valuable tool for estimating current recharge and projecting changes due to future climate change. In this study, simulations of three LSMs (Noah, Mosaic and VIC) obtained from the North American Land Data Assimilation System (NLDAS-2) are used to estimate potential recharge in the western US. Modeled recharge was compared with published recharge estimates for several aquifers in the region. Annual recharge to precipitation ratios across the study basins varied from 0.01% to 15% for Mosaic, 3.2% to 42% for Noah, and 6.7% to 31.8% for VIC simulations. Mosaic consistently underestimates recharge across all basins. Noah captures recharge reasonably well in wetter basins, but overestimates it in drier basins. VIC slightly overestimates recharge in drier basins and slightly underestimates it for wetter basins. While the average annual recharge values vary among the models, the models were consistent in identifying high and low recharge areas in the region. Models agree in seasonality of recharge occurring dominantly during the spring across the region. Overall, our results highlight that LSMs have the potential to capture the spatial and temporal patterns as well as seasonality of recharge at large scales. Therefore, LSMs (specifically VIC and Noah) can be used as a tool for estimating future recharge in data limited regions.

Widespread droughts can have a significant impact on western United States streamflow, but the causes of these events are not fully understood. This dissertation examines streamflow from multiple western US basins and establishes the robust, leading modes of variability in interannual streamflow throughout the past century. I show that approximately 50% of this variability is associated with spatially widespread streamflow anomalies that are statistically independent from streamflow's response to the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). The ENSO-teleconnection accounts for approximately 25% of the interannual variability in streamflow, across this network. These atmospheric circulation anomalies associated with the most spatially widespread variability are associated with the Aleutian low and the persistent coastal atmospheric ridge in the Pacific Northwest. I use a watershed segmentation algorithm to explicitly track the position and intensity of these features and compare their variability to the multi-basin streamflow variability. Results show that latitudinal shifts in the coastal atmospheric ridge are more strongly associated with streamflow's north-south dipole response to ENSO variability while more spatially widespread anomalies in streamflow most strongly relate to seasonal changes in the coastal ridge intensity. This likely reflects persistent coastal ridge blocking of cool-season precipitation into western US river basins. I utilize the 35 model runs of the Community Earth System Model Large Ensemble (CESMLE) to determine whether the model ensemble simulates the anomalously strong coastal ridges and extreme widespread wintertime precipitation anomalies found in the observation record. Though there is considerable bias in the CESMLE, the CESMLE runs simulate extremely widespread dry precipitation anomalies with a frequency of approximately one extreme event per century during the historical simulations (1920 - 2005). These extremely widespread dry events correspond significantly with anomalously intense coastal atmospheric ridges. The results from these three papers connect widespread interannual streamflow anomalies in the western US - and especially extremely widespread streamflow droughts - with semi-permanent atmospheric ridge anomalies near the coastal Pacific Northwest. This is important to western US water managers because these widespread events appear to have been a robust feature of the past century. The semi-permanent atmospheric features associated with these widespread dry streamflow anomalies are projected to change position significantly in the next century as a response to global climate change. This may change widespread streamflow anomaly characteristic in the western US, though my results do not show evidence of these changes within the instrument record of last century.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, the deaths of migrants have become a regular occurrence in southern Arizona where an average of 170 bodies are recovered from the desert each year. This dissertation examines the causes and effects of death and disappearance along the U.S.-Mexico border, seeking to address the contradiction present in the fact that thousands of people have died or disappeared in one of the world’s most heavily surveilled landscapes. It interrogates the ways in which the dead, the missing, and their families are simultaneously erased and exposed in a biopolitical process that has powerful implications beyond the space of the borderlands. The observations for this dissertation are drawn from nearly a decade of both ethnographic research and applied humanitarian assistance in the field of forensic human identification, primarily at the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner, in Tucson, Arizona. Although the majority of migrant fatalities have been determined by the medical examiner to be accidental, resulting from exposure to the elements or unknown causes, a historical analysis reveals the violent nature of these deaths and disappearances, which are a structured result of U.S. border and immigration policies. From their homes to their destinations, migrants in the Americas face a particular kind of structural violence and social invisibility that is revealed when they disappear at the border. This disappearance is then made more thorough by the structured lack of access for families of the missing to services to assist them in their search. Practices of care, whether occurring within families of the missing and dead, during the desert crossing itself, or in the forensic work to identify the dead, powerfully contest the invisibility and erasure experienced by migrants in the Americas today.

With a deep conviction that this study will be useful to those who would better understand contemporary foreign policy, "The Legislative Origins of the Marshall Plan" is written with the following purposes: (1) to discover the origin and motives of the Marshall plan, (2) to discover the effect of the world-wide tours made by Congressmen in 1947 upon the legislative processes in the Marshall plan, (3) to compare and evaluate the respective contributions of the two houses of Congress to the Marshall plan, (4) to ascertain whether the Marshall plan is an economic, political, or humanitarian instrument, and (5) to evaluate the domestic effects, both governmental and economic, and to project them into the future.

Final thesis "Issue of inventories in a company with business activities" contains in a summary bookkeeping of inventories and other problems connected with inventories - evaluation of inventories in various parts of business cycle, problems with stocktaking, ordering of inventories. Ivnentories and their evaluation is defined under both czech law and international standards. In the last part there is an example of concrete czech company which is a member of international corporation.

Faculty of Humanities School of Social Sciences 0413346n Wanguimaina@hotmail.com / This research report is a study of US foreign policy towards Kenya. The context of the study is informed by the role that the US played in Kenya’s democratisation process in the post-Cold War era, the 1998 US embassy attacks in Kenya, and US policy following the events of 11 September 2001. The study sets out to examine how these events subsequently affected the domestic policies of Kenya. It identifies the continuities and new avenues of the bilateral relations between Kenya and the US. Democracy, terrorism and US foreign policy are the underlying factors of the study.

The need for regulation of the credit rating agencies (CRAs) arose due to their role in the subprime mortgage crisis. The CRAs awarded risky securities '3-A' investment grade status and then failed to downgrade them quickly enough when circumstances changed which led to investors suffering substantial losses. The causes identified by the regulators for the gatekeeper failure were conflicts of interest (as the issuers of these securities pay for the ratings); lack of competition (as the Big Three CRAs have dominated the market share); and lack of CRA regulation. The regulators, both in the US and EU, have tried to address these problems by introducing soft law self-regulation in accordance with the International Organisation of Securities Commissions Code and hard law statutory regulation such as that found in the "Reform Act" and "Dodd-Frank Act" in the US and similar provisions in the EU. This thesis examines these provisions in detail by using a doctrinal black-letter law method to assess the success of the regulators in redressing the problems identified. It also examines the US case law regulation relating to the legal liability of CRAs. The findings are that the US First Amendment protection, exclusion clauses and case law, all lack a deterrent effect on the actions of CRAs. As CRAs have escaped substantial damages, investors are left uncompensated for their losses. The thesis concludes that the issues of conflicts of interest and an anti-competitive environment persist. This thesis recommends the introduction of liability for the CRAs based on the Australian Bathurst case and which should be put in a statutory footing, including the requirements that are needed for making exclusion clauses effective. Rotation of CRAs for every three years would minimise the conflicts of interest. Regulators should require CRAs to purchase professional indemnity insurance, if available, to compensate investors.

This is a thesis about English and American imaginative identification with Italy in the period 1848–1865, facilitated by and expressed through periodicals and newspapers. At the centre of the thesis sits New England magazine The Atlantic Monthly, which during the Civil War emerged as a vehicle for abolitionist literature, but which also published extensively on Italy. The Risorgimento, the movement that sought Italian unification, triumphed in 1861—the same year that the battle of Fort Sumter signalled the start of the American Civil War that would last until 1865. This thesis investigates the transatlantic relationship between the Risorgimento and the Civil War as it emerged in The Atlantic Monthly, The Springfield Daily Republican and other nineteenth–century publications, and it does so through contextualised readings of Arthur Hugh Clough, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Emily Dickinson. These three seemingly very disparate authors are connected by The Atlantic Monthly: Clough’s epistolary poem on the fall of the 1849 Roman Republic, Amours de Voyage, was first published there in 1858; Harriet Beecher Stowe serialised her historical Italian romance Agnes of Sorrento in The Atlantic Monthly between 1861 and 1862; and Dickinson was inspired to write a series of poems on Italy and volcanoes after reading both The Atlantic Monthly and local morning newspaper The Springfield Daily Republican. They are also connected by their fascination with Italy. This thesis argues that nineteenth–century periodicals need to be studied in a transatlantic context: they cannot be read, in the traditional style of Benedict Anderson, as simple affirmations of nationalism and national culture. Another way of putting it is to say that this thesis is about a series of exchanges of influence and thought that get attached to national projects but are in themselves international.

Diplomová práce ?Zásoby v obchodní společnosti? se zaměřuje na popis problematiky zásob v obchodní společnosti. Cílem práce je zanalyzovat současnou právní úpravu v oblasti účetnictví zásob v České republice, identifikovat potenciální problémy, obtíže či nesrovnalosti a zároveň tuto oblast porovnat s IFRS a US GAAP. Cílem práce není vyčerpávajícím způsobem popsat veškeré problémy, které se zásobami v obchodní společnosti přicházejí v úvahu. Zejména daňové aspekty jsou vysvětleny jen v základní rovině. Praktická část práce osvětluje problematiku účtování zásob na konkrétní obchodní společnosti, která je součástí mezinárodní korporace. V praktické části je také srovnáno účetnictví zásob podle českých účetních předpisů s účetnictvím podle US GAAP a navrženo řešení zjištěných nedostatků.

Práce se zabývá vymezením zásob, metodami evidence zásob a oceňováním zásob podle platné právní legislativy ČR, podle IFRS/IAS a US GAAP. V práci jsou teoretické poznatky srovnány s praxí vedenou u výrobní společnosti a formulovány doporučení k nápravě nepřesných postupů.