A formal technique for the logical design of organisational information systems.

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Crime and the economy of makeshifts: Kent and Oxfordshire 1830-1885

This thesis examines the link between legislative reforms, crime and the makeshift strategies that the poor used to support their households in the Medway basin and rural districts in north Oxfordshire between 1830 and 1885. In short, this thesis considers whether the poor relied on different criminal strategies to maintain their makeshift households in both rural and urban environments. To this end, it examines how the labouring population in the two regions coped with a raft of legislative reforms and the sort of socio-economic changes that occurred over the longer term. This thesis also demonstrates how the technique of Record Linkage can help eliminate some of the problems that arise when data-sets are incomplete or when source documents are missing. To fulfill these objectives, this thesis is divided into eight chapters. The first of these outlines the research questions and definitions that are used throughout this survey. Chapter two engages with the current historiography that relates to the study of crime and poverty in Kent and Oxfordshire in the nineteenth century. It establishes how this thesis improves our understanding of the way that legislative reforms and socio-economic change helped to shape the criminal strategies that the labouring poor utilised in the two regions, between 1830 and 1885. Chapter three identifies the socio-economic emergence of the Medway basin as an industrial centre and explains why similar changes did not occur in Oxfordshire. The chapters which follow detail how population growth and industrial development affected labour markets and the distribution of welfare in the two regions. In doing so. they establish whether the poor in the two regions were reliant on the proceeds of crime to support their makeshift households. or whether they simply exploited weaknesses in the administration of local government institutions. so that they might improve the state of their household economies. When considered together, this thesis establishes that crime was one of the components that the labouring poor in Kent and Oxfordshire used to support their makeshift economies, when legislative reforms and socio-economic change threatened to undermine the solvency of their households

Making a black Beverly Hills : The struggle for housing equality in modern Los Angeles

This dissertation explores the black struggle for housing equality through mid-twentieth century Los Angeles, California. Alongside the rise of Los Angeles as a major metropolitan center, residential discrimination became embedded in the fabric of the city and African Americans found themselves forced to live on the increasingly run down Eastside. In response, a number of middle- and upper-class blacks led a campaign against housing discrimination by migrating to the Westside. While they were accused of abandoning low-income blacks and adopting white norms, affluent blacks defied racial restrictive covenants, endured white intimidation, and pursued lawsuits in an effort to live in some of the city\u27s desirable neighborhoods and attain full access to the city. Claiming their right to better housing and services, improving their financial status, and becoming regularly consuming Americans served as political statements for African Americans in a city that forbade people of color from fully enjoying those opportunities. Affluent blacks challenged the divisions that segregated the urban, racially diverse Eastside from the suburban, mostly white Westside. As they migrated westward, they invalidated housing discrimination and opened up more neighborhoods to people of color. While most whites ultimately responded to black in-migration by moving away, affluent blacks forged alliances across racial lines to keep their communities both integrated and prosperous. After moving to historic West Adams Heights and winning the legal battle against restrictive covenants, affluent blacks migrated further westward into the highly-regarded Crenshaw district. In an effort to thwart real estate blockbusting and maintain racial integration, affluent blacks established interracial neighborhood associations, worked with public schools, and organized community outreach programs. Despite white fears of neighborhood deterioration, as more blacks settled in the Crenshaw district and adjacent Ladera Heights, property values soared. Successful black doctors, attorneys, and entertainers heightened the reputation of the area. But the efforts toward integration proved no match to white resistance. By the 1980s, the Crenshaw district and Ladera Heights comprised of a majority black population and earned the ambiguous nickname the black Beverly Hills, a title that celebrated black achievement, yet kept affluent blacks in the shadow of mostly white Beverly Hills

Prediction Markets for Corporate Governance

Building on the success of prediction markets at forecasting political elections and other matters of public interest, firms have made increasing use of prediction markets to help make business decisions. This Article explores the implications of prediction markets for corporate governance. Prediction markets can increase the flow of information, encourage truth telling by internal and external firm monitors, and create incentives for agents to act in the interest of their principals. The markets can thus serve as potentially efficient alternatives to other approaches to providing information, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act’s internal controls provisions. Prediction markets can also produce an avenue for insiders to profit on and thus reveal inside information while maintaining a level playing field in the market for a firm’s securities. This creates a harmless way around existing insider trading laws, undercutting the argument for the repeal of these laws. In addition, prediction markets can reduce agency costs by providing direct assessments of corporate policies, thus serving as an alternative or complement to shareholder voting as a means of disciplining corporate boards and managers. Prediction markets may thus be particularly useful for issues where agency costs are greatest, such as executive compensation. Deployment of these markets, whether voluntarily or perhaps someday as a result of legal mandates, could improve alignment between shareholders and managers on these issues better than other proposed reforms. These markets might also displace the business judgment rule because they can furnish contemporaneous and relatively objective benchmarks for courts to evaluate business decisions

Computational fluid dynamics simulation of fluidized bed polymerization reactors

In this research, a CFD algorithm for simulation of fluidized bed polymerization reactors is described. In order to properly model the evolution of a polydisperse solid phase, population balance equation (PBE) must be solved along with other transport equations. A novel approach---DQMOM is applied to polydisperse fluidized bed to simulate particle aggregation and breakage in the reactors. Two different aggregation and breakage kernels are tested and the performance of the DQMOM approximation with different numbers of nodes are compared. Results show that the approach is very effective in modeling solid segregation and elutriation and in tracking the evolution of the PSD, even though it requires only a small number of scalars. After successfully developed DQMOM-multi-fluid CFD model, the multi-fluid model is validated with available experiments and discrete particle simulation (DPS). The results show good agreements with experiment data for binary system and DPS reults, and the simulations can describe segregation and mixing behavior in the fluidized bed;After the model development and validation, 2D and 3D simulations are conducted for a pilot-scale polymerization fluidized bed at operating conditions. Significant differences are observed between 2D and 3D simulations. The results shows that, for an industrial-scale fluidized bed, only 3D simulations are able to match the statics (bed height and pressure drop) and the dynamics (pressure power spectra) properties of the bed. The residence time for a polyethylene pilot reactor is on the order of hours, and the time scale for the fluid dynamics in the bed is on the seconds. It is impossible to run a three-dimensional simulation for hours using current CFD codes. Due to the time scale problem, a chemical reaction engineering model based on the age of particles is combined with multi-fluid model to initialize the fluidized bed to a steady state. Direct quadrature method of moments (DQMOM) is used to simulate the particle size distribution in the bed. The hot spots in the fluidized bed are also investigated using CFD simulations

Metaleaming: PGCE students learning about learning

As students, trainee teachers are required to reflect upon and take ownership of their own learning, but because of their future position as teachers, they also have to understand the learning of others. Trainee teachers have many ideas about teaching, but unless they have previous experience in the field, it is likely that their main understanding of what constitutes teaching and learning will be from their experiences of themselves as students. Many trainee teachers follow an uninterrupted route from school to university and then straight onto a PGCE course and will throughout their time in education have been experiencing teaching only from one direction 一 that of a student. During this time, many will develop ideas about what teachers actually do, but since a lot of what teachers do is preparation outside of the classroom, can students really get a balanced idea of the working life of a teacher? Trainee teachers, and indeed all postgraduate students need to reflect on their own learning in order to maximise their ability to assimilate and understand new information. This is the idea behind the concept of metalearning. Metalearning is a comparatively new phrase and as such, its meaning is still evolving. Originally defined by John Biggs (1985) as a process of being aware, and taking control, of one's own learning, it has subsequently been revisited and redefined. Some authors equate the concept with a practical form of metacognition, others with ideas involving reflective practice whilst others consider the phrase to mean "learning about learning" (Jackson, 2004). In the text which follows, the word is taken to mean "learning about learning" which could, in many cases be shown to subsume both the metacognitive and reflective theories. In any case, it is a very apt description of the principal role of trainee teachers. This longitudinal study tracks a group of trainee teachers following a PGCE course in order to observe their development and understanding of learning, both their own and that of their pupils and also to gain some insights into the experience of being a PGCE student in the 21 St Century