International environmental governance : a case for increased regulation in the carbon markets

Includes bibliographical references.International consensus exists in that any route towards re-writing past wrongs in environmental governance must include a mechanism for internalizing the social costs of emissions by the major polluters - mainly energy intensive industries and utilities companies, providing heightened financial motivation to adopt cleaner modes of production. It is widely agreed upon that to do so value must be attached to emissions reductions, and with the Kyoto Protocol one such mechanism has been established. At the forefront of Kyoto is an economic quantity instrument known in the carbon markets as 'cap and trade'. The central question[s] in this research paper [are:] Are carbon trading and emissions offsetting feasible in the context of international environmental governance? What are the obstacles posed by the carbon cap and trade system in a free-market

Compact Optical Frequency Standards for Future Applications Beyond the Laboratory

Atomic clocks provide one of the fundamental building blocks upon which modern telecommunications systems are constructed. Since the invention of the frequency comb in the early 2000s, laboratory frequency standards have quickly outpaced their compact counterparts. Compact clocks, however, have continued to leverage microwave transitions not yet exploring the advantages of an optical atomic clock. With the recent development of robust frequency combs compact optical clocks can now be realized. In this dissertation two atomic species are investigated for a compact atomic frequency standards. Both of these clocks are in different development stages but offer unique advantages. The optical rubidium atomic frequency standard relies on a two-photon transition in rubidium. This dissertation details the design necessary to achieve best clock stabilities to date leveraging this two-photon transition. Calculations and measurements of required environmental instabilities to reach stabilities of $1\times 10^{-15}$ at one day are included. The hardest environmental parameters to suppress are the self collisional shift and the ac-Stark shift. A new approach to reduce ac-Stark shift is discussed as well as a robust thermal design which achieved necessary temperature stabilities. Calcium provides a much narrower transition then the two-photon rubidium for which to build a clock. A calcium vapor cell could revolutionize experimentation with this species. This dissertation describes a first ever closed calcium vapor cell. I also describe a method for continuous operation of this vapor cell without replenishing calcium or cleaning the optical windows. The optical rubidium atomic frequency standard has shown fractional frequency instabilities of $4\times 10^{-13}/\sqrt{\tau(s)}$ for $\tau$ from 1 to 10,000 seconds, with potential to achieve instabilities of less then $1\times 10^{-13}$ at one second and less then $4\times 10^{-15}$ at one day. The calcium clock is still in vapor cell development stages, showing some promise for future fully realized calcium clock based on vapor cell technologies

Redefining the War on Terror

This thesis aims at achieving working definitions of terrorism and violence and to review the actions and political and legal considerations that the United States has made with the intention of arguing that there are few, if any, features that legitimize the conflict as a just war under philosophical and ethical considerations of the term, and is instead a series of deliberate acts of state terrorism and human rights abuses. Then lastly to apply post-colonial theory to the history and development of militarized action by the natives occupying the Middle East region. In short, concentration is on the broader circumstance of the War on Terror

Similarity and explanation for dynamic telecommunication engineer support.

Understanding similarity between different examples is a crucial aspect of Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) systems, but learning representations optimised for similarity comparisons can be difficult. CBR systems typically rely on separate algorithms to learn representations for cases and to compare those representations, as symbolised by the vocabulary and similarity knowledge containers respectively. Deep Metric Learners (DMLs) are a branch of deep learning architectures which learn a representation optimised for similarity comparison by leveraging direct case comparisons during training. In this thesis we explore the symbiotic relationship between these two fields of research. Firstly we examine what can be learned from traditional CBR research to improve the training of DMLs through training strategies. We then examine how DMLs can fill the traditionally separate roles of the vocabulary and similarity knowledge containers. We perform this exploration on the real-world problem of experience transfer between experts and non-experts on service provisioning for telecommunication organisations. This problem is also revealing about the requirements for practical applications to be explainable to their intended user group. With that in mind, we conclude this thesis with work towards the development of an explanation framework designed to explain the recommendations of similarity-based classifiers. We support this practical contribution with an exploration of similarity knowledge to support autonomous measurement of explanation quality

Anti-Judaic Religious Polemic and Apocalyptic Thought in the \u3cem\u3eDisputation of Majorca\u3c/em\u3e and its Later Manuscript Tradition

In this study, I first examine the Disputation of Majorca (1286) and analyze how its Christian disputant, Inghetto Contardo, blended apocalyptic thought and anti-Judaic discourse. Although other studies, most notably Ora Limor’s critical edition, have touched upon the nature of Inghetto’s arguments, none have discussed his clear implementation of intertwined anti-Judaic religious polemic and apocalyptic thought in a satisfactory manner. I place Inghetto in an apocalyptic milieu of the later thirteenth century that especially emphasizes the imminence of the Last Days. In effect, Inghetto’s employment of St. Jerome’s Daniel exegesis is perfectly suited to 1286, when Jews are most likely to believe a Christian telling them that Daniel prophesies on Christ’s Second Coming in 1290. The latter half of my thesis continues to emphasize the close ties between religious polemic and apocalyptic thought that are present in the Disputation. Here, I argue that Heinrich of Oberburg, the scribe of Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana MS Lat. 4074, a fifteenth-century manuscript including the Disputation, copied this codex specifically for a religious audience interested in the twelfth-century abbot Joachim of Fiore’s viri spirituales, a mix of canons, friars, and Jews who would receive heavenly rewards in return for the reforms they would carry out during the End Times. BAV MS Lat. 4074 contains a previously unstudied excerpt from Joachim’s Liber de concordia that describes hermeneutical connections between the Old and New Testaments and collectively intensifies the Daniel prophecies already present in the Disputation. Moreover, I continually argue that Heinrich envisioned his audience employing anti-Judaic polemic in the midst of all their apocalyptic expectation, with the understanding that engaging in disputation was part of the viri spirituales’ role and would help them earn God’s promised rewards

Racial and Cultural Awareness in White Fraternity Men: Contributors to Misunderstanding

When thinking about fraternity life on a national level, many stereotypes come into play. Many cases of alcohol abuse, hazing, and sexual assault have been well documented amongst fraternities and college students in general. There have also been a number of incidents where fraternities have events that were culturally insensitive or outright racist. However, there is not a solid understanding of where their cultural awareness, or lack thereof, may come from and how it can lead to misunderstandings. This article will examine this trait further, particularly in white fraternity men, and develops a framework through which student affairs practitioners can challenge and educate members of the Greek community

Identification of altered Ras signaling and intermediate filament hyperphosphorylation in giant axonal neuropathy

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)Giant axonal neuropathy (GAN) is a rare genetic disease that causes progressive damage to the nervous system. Neurons in GAN patients develop an abnormal organization of cytoskeletal proteins called intermediate filaments (IFs), which normally provide strength and support for the overall cell structure. The irregular IF structure in GAN patient neurons leads to a progressive loss of motor skills in children and subsequent death in adolescence. GAN is caused by reduced levels of the gigaxonin (Giga) protein. Giga functions to control the degradation of other cellular proteins, and the loss of Giga in GAN cells results in significantly elevated levels of the galectin-1 (Gal-1) protein. Gal-1 stabilizes the active form of the Ras signaling protein, which functions as a molecular switch to regulate the phosphorylation and subsequent organization of IFs. The connection between these pathways led us to propose that Giga regulates IF phosphorylation and structure by modulating Ras signaling through the degradation of Gal-1. Using GAN patient cells, we demonstrated that restoring Giga reduced Gal-1 protein levels, decreased IF phosphorylation, and reestablished normal IF organization. Similar effects of reduced IF phosphorylation and improved IF structure were also obtained in GAN cells by directly decreasing the protein levels of either Gal-1, or downstream Ras signaling proteins. Taken together, these results demonstrate that the loss of Giga induces Gal-1 mediated activation of Ras signaling, thereby leading to the increased IF phosphorylation and abnormal IF structure observed in GAN cells. Identification of aberrant Ras signaling is significant because it is the first to specify a mechanism by which the loss of Giga leads to the development of GAN and provides targets for novel drug therapies for the treatment of this currently immedicable genetic disease