Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Laws'

The thesis deals with problems of conflict of laws and its latest developments, especially in Europe, in relation to international air transport. (1) The contractual situations connected with air transport are analysed in light of the applicable international air law conventions and of a comparative survey of the conflict of laws rules of some states and international conventions on conflict of laws concerning contracts. Where the international air law conventions do not supply the solution or where they are not applicable resort has to be made to the conflict of laws. (2) Conflict of laws also arises in the legal interaction (contracts, sale of goods, transfer of ownership--res in transitu, torts, marriages, wills, etc.) between persons onboard an aircraft in flight. (3) The aircraft as an expensive and highly mobile chattel poses problems from the rights in rem point of view in the conflict of laws. (4) Aircraft accidents and the tortious liability of persons and entities involved as well as obligations arising from assistance and rescue operations pose conflict of laws problems.

This thesis evaluates the arguments for replacing antidumping laws with competition laws or, alternatively, for recasting antidumping laws in the pattern of competition laws.
The work discusses the objectives and criteria used in antidumping and antitrust cases. It highlights the harmful and chilling effects of antidumping sanctions. It is a study of whether antidumping laws should be replaced by either supra national (Competition laws) or harmonised domestic antitrust regimes, which penalise international predatory pricing without at the same time penalising non-predatory international price discrimination.
It is suggested that progressive reforms of antidumping rules should become an agenda item of all future WTO Rounds and should focus on reconciling antidumping rules with antitrust treatment of predatory pricing practices.
The progressive inclusion of antitrust criteria into WTO antidumping laws should be made a condition for progress in future WTO negotiations.

Thesis advisor: Robert C. Bartlett
Thesis advisor: Nasser Behnegar
This dissertation presents the different accounts of the origin of law in Plato’s Laws and I seek to show how the question of the law’s origin relates to Plato’s political philosophy as a whole. For the early modern political philosophers, the concept of a pre-political “state of nature” plays a central role in their attempt to describe the sources and limits of legitimate political authority. The question of the origin and development of the city is given much less emphasis by the ancient philosophers and it is not clear how their opinions about this question relate to their understanding of politics. In Plato’s Laws, however, the question of whether law has a divine, natural, or conventional origin is at the center of the Athenian Stranger’s inquiry. I begin by arguing that the conventionalist view of law, religion, and morality as it is presented in Book X depends on a materialist natural science that the Athenian knows to be deficient. At the same time, the Athenian also knows that he does not possess demonstrative knowledge of the existence of providential gods. Because of his knowledge of his ignorance about these matters, he is compelled to consider the claim that certain laws have a divine origin. In order to evaluate these claims he turns the conversation toward the question of the purpose of law and shows that a divine law must be understood to perfect human beings by making them virtuous. I argue that the core of the Athenian’s confrontation with the claim that law has a divine origin is a dialectical inquiry into virtue and happiness. Although the Athenian does not carry out this inquiry in the conversation in the Laws itself, I argue that the results of such an inquiry are shown by his new beginning in Book III, which begins with the question of the origin of the regime. In Book III he breaks with the traditional claims about law’s divine origin and he offers his own account of the human origin of the city and its laws. Although the Athenian’s account is in some respects similar to that of the conventionalists, I argue that he departs from them in important respects due to his deeper understanding of the roots of our ignorance about the human good
Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2016
Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Discipline: Political Science

Many living biological tissues are known to grow in response to their mechanical environment, such as changes in the surrounding pressure. This growth response can be seen, for instance, in the adaptation of heart chamber size and arterial wall thickness to changes in blood pressure. Moreover, many living elastic tissues actively maintain a preferred level of mechanical internal (residual) stress, called the mechanical homeostasis. The tissue-level feedback mechanism by which changes of the local mechanical stresses affect growth is called a growth law within the theory of morphoelasticity, a theory for understanding the coupling between mechanics and geometry in growing and evolving biological material. The goal of this thesis is to develop mathematical techniques to analyse growth laws that are biologically plausible, and to explore issues of heterogeneity and growth stability. Firstly, we review attempts based on the Second Law of Thermodynamics (Coleman-Noll procedure) concluding that they cannot universally restrict the mathematical form of growth laws. In light of these results we focus on the phenomenological concept of homeostasis. We hypothesize that growth laws are functions of homeostatic stress (homeostasis-driven growth). Secondly, we demonstrate that for a static residually stressed network made of elastic bars connected in series and parallel, the network response has the same functional form as the response of individual bars (similarly to electrical circuits). For a dynamically evolving network, on the other hand, the macroscopic network response is a nonlinear function of microscopic homeostasis-driven growth laws with no electrical counterpart. We characterise the macroscopic growth dynamics as non-monotonic and non-oscillatory. Thirdly, we discuss the growth dynamics of tubular structures, which are very common in biology (e.g. arteries, plant stems, airways). We model the homeostasis-driven growth dynamics of tubes which produces spatially inhomogeneous residual stress. We show that the stability of the homeostatic state nontrivially depends on the anisotropy of the growth response. The key role of anisotropy may provide a foundation for experimental testing of homeostasis-driven growth laws. Fourthly, we apply our theoretical framework to the growth of Ammonites' seashells. We demonstrate how homeostasis-driven growth produces seashell morphology that is consistent with observation and that cannot readily be captured with previous models.

This thesis is concerned with providing a philosophically motivated theory of the semantics of generics, by relating work in linguistics to work in philosophy and drawing out the philosophical issues involved. The results should be of interest to both disciplines. In chapter one, I survey the literature on genericity and give a characterisation of generic sentences and their central properties. This is needed, since the many and varied analyses of their semantics create some confusion over what actually counts as a generic sentence. I defend a philosophically robust characterisation of generic sentences, a characterisation that I go on to employ in the rest of thesis. The nomic regularities expressed by generics have been most closely studied in the literature on laws of nature, Special Science laws, and ceteris paribus laws. I examine this literature in chapter two, and then, in my third chapter, relate this to the nomic features of generics. This leads me to make an important distinction between an exception and a counterexample to a generic, which I develop into an analysis of the semantics of generics in chapter four. In the process, I argue for a radical shift in thinking about laws of nature, and defend my claim that it is the nomic regularities expressed by generics, rather than traditional laws of nature, which play the most basic role in understanding the nature of regularities. Finally, in chapter five I apply my account to restricted laws and generalisations by considering the extent to which traditional accounts of the effects of context on quantification apply to generics. I demonstrate that some new features of the bare plural claimed to exist in recent work in linguistics can be subsumed rather more simply under my account and also show that the semantics of the familiar English universal quantifiers are rather more complicated than philosophers often think.

Thesis (M.S.) -- University of Maryland, College Park, 2007.
Thesis research directed by: Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Title from t.p. of PDF. Includes bibliographical references. Published by UMI Dissertation Services, Ann Arbor, Mich. Also available in paper.

History
Ph.D.
Whaling in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was a global industry. Ships from many nations with crews from ports all over the world hunted in waters from the Arctic Ocean to the Tasman Sea. Whale oil illuminated the cities and greased the machines of the Industrial Revolution. Far from formal legal institutions, the international cast of whalemen created their own rules and methods for resolving disputes at sea over the possession of a valuable natural resource. These unwritten customs were remarkably effective in preventing violence between crews of competing ships. Whaling was intensely competitive, yet the dangers of hunting in often treacherous conditions fostered a close knit community that was able to fashion resolutions to disagreements that also maximized their catch. Legal scholars have cited whaling customs as evidence that property law is often created by participants and not imposed by legislatures and courts. Whaling law was, in fact, a creation of both whalemen and lawyers. At sea, whalemen often improvised and compromised in ways that had more to do with personal and communal ethics than with well understood customs. Lawyers and judges, looking for certainty and consistency, imagined whaling customs to be much more established and universally observed than was ever the case. The same loose whaling customs that prevented violence and litigation failed, however, to check practices that severely depleted the available supply of bowhead and sperm whales. As a close knit community capable of governing themselves, American whalemen should have been able to find a way out of the "tragedy of the commons" which predicts that commonly owned and competitively exploited resources are - without an external or group imposed system of restraint - fated for destruction. Prior to about 1850, whalemen, generally believing that whales as a species were impervious to extinction, saw no need to limit their catch. By the time whalemen recognized that whales stocks were seriously depleted other sources of energy - coal oil and petroleum - had swept the market. There was, at this point, no reason to preserve the prey of a soon to be obsolete endeavor.
Temple University--Theses

This thesis critically examines the origins and development of international criminal lave to identify the defining features of this emerging legal tradition. It critically evaluates the experimental approach taken in Article 21 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which attempts to codify an untested normative super-structure to guide this legal tradition.
International criminal law is a hybrid tradition which seeks legitimacy and answers to difficult questions by drawing on other established legal traditions. Its development at the confluence of public international law, international humanitarian law, international human rights law and national criminal laws has resulted in gaps in difficult cases with no clear answers. These lacunae have been filled by recourse to judicial discretion, exercised consistent with Patrick Glenn's theory of transnational common laws, and by privileging one of the competing aims of international criminal law: enhancing humanitarian protection versus maximizing fairness to the accused.

Distributive laws in Computer Science are rules governing the transformation of one programming structure into another. In programming, they are programs satisfying certain formal conditions. Their importance has been to date documented in several isolated cases by diverse formal approaches. These applications have always meant leaps in understanding the nature of the subject. However, distributive laws have not yet been given the attention they deserve. One of the reasons for this omission is certainly the lack of a formal notion of distributive laws in their full generality. This hinders the discovery and formal description of occurrences of distributive laws, which is the precursor of any formal manipulation. In this thesis, an approach to formalisation of distributive laws is presented based on the functorial approach to formal Category Theory pioneered by Lawvere and others, notably Gray. The proposed formalism discloses a rather simple nature of distributive laws of the kind found in programming structures based on lax 2-naturality and Gray's tensor product of 2-categories. It generalises the existing more specific notions of distributive laws. General notions of products, coproducts and composition of distributive laws are studied and conditions for their construction given. Finally, the proposed formalism is put to work in establishing a semantical equivalence between a large class of functional and object-based programs.

The minimum wage is a tool of public policy which despite being in favor of politics tends to be in displeasure of economists. Recent consensus study shows (Alston, 1992; Fuller, 2003) that consensus on minimum wage among economists has a tendency for weakening. The goal of my thesis was to map the consensus of economists on minimum wage in the course of the 20th century and to help to answer the question how the view of economists has changed on this topic and which events were of greatest influence. As a way of measuring the consensus I chose the studying of academic articles because it is the direct output of academic community. My study shows that from the 1930s we can see a constant strengthening of ideas that a minimum wage has a negative effect on economy.

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Leis de programação são importantes tanto para definir a semântica axiomática de linguagens de programação quanto para auxiliar o processo de desenvolvimento de software. De fato, estas leis podem ser utilizadas como base para práticas informais de desenvolvimento como refactoring, que vem sendo popularizada por metodologias modernas, em especial por Extreme Programming. Embora não tenham sido suficientemente exploradas ainda, as leis de modelagem provavelmente podem trazer benefícios similares, mas com um impacto positivo maior em confiabilidade e produtividade, devido ao melhor suporte antecipado no processo de desenvolvimento de software. Em geral, transformação de modelos que preservam semântica são propostas de maneira ad hoc tendo em vista que são difíceis de serem provadas que são consistentes com respeito a semântica formal. Como consequência, pequenos equívocos podem levar a transformações que deixem o modelo inconsistente. Por estes motivos, este trabalho propõe um conjunto de leis de modelagem (que podem ser vistas como transformações de modelos bidirecionais que preservam semântica) que podem ser utilizas com segurança para se derivar leis mais complexas. Estas leis descrevem transformações de modelos em Alloy, uma linguagem formal para modelagem orientada a objetos. Além disso, será mostrada como estas leis podem ser utilizadas para refatorar especificações em Alloy. Com o intuito de se verificar a consistência das leis, foi proposta uma semântica denotacional para Alloy, utilizando a própria linguagem e uma noção de equivalência indicando quando dois modelos em Alloy possuem a mesma semântica. Por fim, o Alloy Analyzer, ferramenta utilizada para fazer análises em modelos em Alloy, foi estendida com algumas das leis básicas propostas. Como resultado, algumas diretrizes para a implementação de sistemas de transformação foram propostas

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Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico
Uma abordagem formal e crucial na especificação e desenvolvimento de sistemas complexos. Inspirado pela engenharia, o desenvolvimento de software deve preterir a abordagem empirica e seguir uma abordagem estruturada, formal, passível de repetição e prova face ao advento de sistemas mais complexos, paralelos e concorrentes. Este trabalho apresenta uma extensão conservativa de OhCircus, uma linguagem de especificação oncorrente, que integra CSP, Z, orientação a objetos e um calculo de re- finamento. Esta extensão suporta a definição de heranca de processo, onde uxo de controle, operações e componentes de estado em um superprocesso, podem ser reusados por seus subprocessos. Neste trabalho nos apresentamos a gramatica estendida de OhCir- cus, acompanhada por um conjunto de regras de tipos que lidam com as novas construções da linguagem. Nos apresentamos, em termos da Unifying Theories of Programming definida por Hoare e He, a semântica formal de heranca de processo e suas construções de suporte. A principal contribuição deste trabalho e um conjunto, formalmente provado, de leis algebricas que lidam com herança de processo. Nós também explanamos informalmente como essas leis podem contribuir para uma teoria de completude para OhCircus. Finalmente nossas leis são exercitadas atraves de um estudo de caso

The social sciences are often thought to be inferior to the natural sciences because they do not have laws. Bohman writes that “the social sciences have never achieved much in the way of predictive general laws—the hallmark of naturalistic knowledge—and so have often been denied the honorific status of ‘sciences’” (1994, pg. vii). Philosophers have suggested a number of reasons for the dearth of laws in the social sciences, including the frequent use of ceteris paribus conditions in the social sciences, reflexivity, and the use of ‘odd’ concepts. This thesis argues that the scarcity of laws in the social sciences is primarily due to the concepts that social scientists often work with. These concepts are described as Nomadic and are characterised by disagreement about what can reasonably be included within the scope of a concept. The second half of the thesis explores the implications of this analysis. It argues firstly, that counterfactual analysis is problematic when using Nomadic concepts. Secondly, it argues that taking an intentional perspective on behaviour often involves the use of Nomadic concepts so, if social scientists do hope to formulate laws, then they are more likely to succeed if they focus on behaviour that is not intentional.

This study examined the relationship between married individuals, their mothers-in-laws, fathers-in-law and marital adjustment. Participants were 33 male and 123 female married college students (mean age of 30) who responded to a questionaire assessing perceived in-law social support, perceived dissimilarity in family values with in-laws, triangulation with in-laws, and marital adjustment.

The main topic of my PhD has been the study of power laws in software systems within the perspective of describing software quality. My PhD research contributes to a recent stream of studies in software engineering, where the investigation of power laws in software systems has become widely popular in recent years, since they appear on an incredible variety of different software quantities and properties, like, for example, software metrics, software faults, refactoring, Java byte-code, module dependencies, software fractal dimension, lines of code, software packages and so on. The common presence of power laws suggests that software systems belong to the much larger category of complex systems, where typically self organization, fractality and emerging phenomena occur. Often my work involved the determination of a complex graph associated to the software system, defining the so called “complex software network”. For such complex software networks I analyzed different network metrics and I studied their relationships with software quality. In this PhD I took advantage of the theory of complex systems in order to study, to explain and sometimes to forecast properties and behavior of software systems. Thus my work involved the empirical study of many different statistical properties of software, in particular metrics, faults and refactorings, the construction and the application of statistical models for explaining such statistical properties, the implementation and the optimization of algorithms able to model their behavior, the introduction of metrics borrowed from Social Network Analysis (SNA) for describing relationships and dependencies among software modules. More specifically, my research activity regarded the followings topics: Bugs, power laws and software quality In [1] [7] [16] [20] [21] [22] module faultness and its implications on software quality are investigated. I studied data mining from CVS repositories of two large OO projects, Eclipse and Netbeans, focusing on “fixing- issue” commits, and compared static traditional approaches, like Knowledge Engineering, to dynamic approaches based on Machine Learning techniques. The work compares for the first time performances of Machine Learning (ML) techniques to automatic classify “fixing-issues” among message commits. Our study calculates precision and recall of different Machine Learning Classifiers for the correct classification of issue- reporting commits. The results show that some ML classifiers can correctly classify up to 99.9% of such commits. In [22] Java software systems are treated as complex graphs, where nodes represent a Java file - called compilation unit (CU) - and an edges represent a relations between them. The distribution of the number of bugs per CU, exhibits a power-law behavior in the tail, as well as the number of CUs influenced by a specific bug. The exam of the evolution of software metrics across different releases allows to understand how relationships among CUs metrics and CUs faultness change with time. In [1] module faultness is further discussed from a statistical perspective, using as case studies five versions of Eclipse, to show how log-normal, Double Pareto and Yule-Simon statistical distributions may fit the empirical bug distribution at least as well as the Weibull distribution proposed by Zhang. In particular, I discuss how some of these alternative distributions provide both a superior fit to empirical data and a theoretical motivation to be used for modeling the bug generation process. Further studies reported in [3] present a model based on the Yule process, able to explain the evolution of some properties of large object- oriented software systems. Four system properties related to code production of four large object-oriented software systems – Eclipse, Netbeans, JDK and Ant are analyzed. The properties analyzed, namely the naming of variables and methods, the call to methods and the inheritance hierarchies, show a power-law distribution. A software simulation allows to verify the goodness of the model, finding a very good correspondence between empirical data of subsequent software versions, and the prediction of the model presented. In [18], [19] and [23] three algorithms for an efficient implementation of the preferential attachment mechanism lying at the core of the Yule process are developed, and their efficiency in generating power- law distribution for different properties of Object Oriented (OO) software systems is discussed. Software metrics and SNA metrics In [2] [8] [13] [17] software metrics related to quality are analyzed and some metrics borrowed from the Social Network Analysis are applied to OO software graphs. In OO systems the modules are the classes, interconnected with each other by relationships like inheritance and dependency. It is possible to represent OO systems as software networks, where the classes are the network nodes and the relationships among classes are the network edges. Social Networks metrics, as for instance, the EGO metrics, allow to identify the role of each single node in the information flow through the network, being related to software modules and their dependencies. In [2] these metrics are compared with other traditional software metrics, like the Chidamber-Kemerer suite, and software graph metrics. The exam of the empirical distributions of all the metrics across the software modules of several releases of two large Java systems systematically shows fat-tails for all the metrics. Moreover, the various metric distributions look very similar and consistent across all system releases and are also very similar in both systems. Analytical distribution functions suitable for describing and studying the observed distributions are also provided. The work in [17] presents an extensive analysis of software metrics for 111 object-oriented systems written in Java. For each system, we considered 18 traditional metrics such as LOC and Chidamber and Kemerer metrics, as well as metrics derived from complex network theory and social network analysis, computed at class level. Most metrics follow a leptokurtotic distribution. Only a couple of metrics have patent normal behavior while some others are very irregular, and even bimodal. The statistics gathered allow to study and discuss the variability of metrics along different systems. In [8] a preliminary and exploratory analysis of the Eclipse subprojects is presented, using a joint application of SNA and traditional software metrics. The entire set of metrics has been summarized performing a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and obtaining a very reduced number of independent principal components, which allow to represent the classes into a space where they show typical patterns. The preliminary results show how the joint application of traditional and network software metrics may be used to identify subprojects developed with similar functionalities and scopes. In [13] the software graphs of 96 systems of the Java Qualitas Corpus are anlyzed, parsing the source code and identifying the dependencies among classes. Twelve software metrics were analyzed, nine borrowed from Social Net- work Analysis (SNA), and three more traditional software metrics, such as Loc, Fan-in and Fan-out. The results show how the metrics can be partitioned in groups for almost the whole Java Qualitas Corpus, and that such grouping can provide insights on the topology of software networks. For two systems, Eclipse and Netbeans, we computed also the number of bugs, identifying the bugs affecting each class, and finding that some SNA metrics are highly correlated with bugs, while others are strongly anti-correlated. Software fractal dimension In [6] [12] [14] [15] the self similar structure of software networks is used to introduce the fractal dimension as a global software metric associated to software quality, at the system level and at the subproject level. In [6] the source code of various releases of two large OO Open Source (OS) Java software systems, Eclipse and Netbeans is analyzed, investigating the complexity of the whole release and of its subprojects. In all examined cases there exists a scaling region where it is possible to compute a self-similar coefficient, the fractal dimension, using “the box counting method”. Results show that this measure looks fairly related to software quality, acting as a global quality software metric. In particular, we computed the defects of each software system and we found a clear correlation among the number of defects in the system, or in a subproject, and its fractal dimension. This correlation exists across all the subprojects and also along the time evolution of the software systems, as new releases are delivered. In [14] software systems are considered as complex networks which have a self- similar structure under a length-scale transformation. On such complex software networks a self-similar coefficient is computed, also known as fractal dimension, using "the box counting method”. Several releases of the publically available Eclipse software system were analyzed, calculating the fractal dimension for twenty sub-projects, randomly chosen, for every release, as well as for each release as a whole. Our results display an overall consistency among the sub- projects and among all the analyzed releases. The study founds a very good correlation between the fractal dimension and the number of bugs for Eclipse and for twenty sub-projects. This result suggests that the fractal dimension could be considered as a global quality metric for large software systems. Works [12] and [15] propose an algorithm for computing the fractal dimension of a software network, and compare its performances with two other algorithms. Object of study are various large, object-oriented software systems. We built the associated graph for each system, also known as software network, analyzing the binary relationships (dependencies), among classes. We found that the structure of such software networks is self-similar under a length-scale transformation. The fractal dimension of these networks is computed using a Merge algorithm, first devised by the authors, a Greedy Coloring algorithm, based on the equivalence with the graph coloring problem, and a Simulated Annealing algorithm, largely used for efficiently determining minima in multi-dimensional problems. Our study examines both efficiency and accuracy, showing that the Merge algorithm is the most efficient, while the Simulated Annealing is the most accurate. The Greeding Coloring algorithm lays in between the two, having speed very close to the Merge algorithm, and accuracy comparable to the Simulated Annealing algorithm. 1.b Further research activity In [4] [9] [10] [11] the problem of software refactoring is analyzed. The study reported in [4] analyzes the effect of particular refactorings on class coupling for different releases of four Object Oriented (OO) Open Source (OS) Java software systems: Azureus, Jtopen, Jedit and Tomcat, as representative of general Java OS systems. Specifically, the “add parameter” to a method and “remove parameter” from a method refactorings, as defined according to Fowler’s dictionary, may influence class coupling changing fan-in and fan-out of classes they are applied to. The work investigates, both qualitatively and quantitatively, what is the global effect of the application of such refactorings, providing best fitting statistical distributions able to describe the changes in fan-in and fan-out couplings. A detailed analysis of the best fitting parameters and of their changes when refactoring occurs, has been performed, estimating the effect of refactoring on coupling before it is applied. Such estimates may help in determining refactoring costs and benefits . In [9] a study of the effect of fan-in and fan-out metrics is performed from the perspective of two refactorings, “add parameter to” and “remove parameter from” a method, collecting these two refactorings from multiple releases of the Tomcat open source system. Results show significant differences in the profiles of statistical distributions of fan-in and fan-out between refactored and not refactored classes. A strong over-arching theme emerged: developers seemed to focus on the refactoring of classes with relatively high fan-in and fan-out values rather than classes with high values in any one. In [10] is considered for the first time how a single refactoring modified these metric values, what happened when refactorings had been applied to a single class in unison and finally, what influence a set of refactorings had on the shape of FanIn and FanOut distributions. Results indicated that, on average, refactored classes tended to have larger FanIn and FanOut values when compared with non-refactored classes. Where evidence of multiple (different) refactorings applied to the same class was found, the net effect (in terms of FanIn and FanOut coupling values) was negligible. In [11] is shown how highly-coupled classes were more prone to refactoring, particularly through a set of ‘core’ refactorings. However, wide variations were found across systems for our chosen measures of coupling namely, fan-in and fan-out. Specific individual refactorings were also explored to gain an understanding of why these differences may have occurred. An exploration of open questions through the extraction of fifty-two of Fowler’s catalog of refactorings drawn from versions of four open-source systems is accomplished, comparing the coupling characteristics of each set of refactored classes with the corresponding set of non-refactored classes. In [7] I presented some preliminary studies also on the relationships about Micro- patterns, more specifically anti-patterns, and software quality, while in [5] and [21] I analyzed the role of Agile methodologies in software production and the relationships with software quality and the presence of bugs.

I looked at mass shootings that have happened in the United States in the past decade and was inspired to do research and discover what was behind these tragedies. In my Honors Thesis paper, I dug up important historical background and context that has given rise to the creation of the 2nd Amendment. I took a stab at assessing the significance and profound impact that the original constitutional framework wages on 21st century America. From there, I discussed the implications of Supreme Court precedent in individual gun rights cases that have interpreted 2nd Amendment doctrine. Next, I created a comprehensive assessment of gun laws broken down by state. I also provided a brief summary of Congress's Bill No Break session that attempted to curb national gun violence in the aftermath of Sandy Hook. At the end, I shed light on a couple of countries; Australia and Japan, who have scaled back access to guns and initiated educational gun safety programs that promote national gun policy reform. I used these two standard-bearers as a collective model for the U.S. to try to emulate in terms of enhancing awareness and understanding about the real danger that guns pose to society.

This study reads five contemporary novels by Irish writers to examine the reciprocal influences of law and Irish fiction in their work. The selected workds by Colm T ib n, Edna O’Brien, John Banville, Kevin Barry and Mike McCormack span a relatively short period of time (1989 to 2013) but take a long view of the fraught relationship between the Irish people and institutions of legal, political and social power, from the enactment of the 1937 Constitution, Bunreacht na h ireann to the apparent breakdown in the legitimacy of the state following the Celtic Tiger crash of 2008. Each chapter is devoted to a particular novel, tracing different thematic and formal appropriations of law or law-like systems across a broad developmental arc, from the critical realism of Colm T ib n through to the historiographic metafiction of Kevin Barry and the domestic science fiction of Mike McCormack.

This thesis presents a comparative analysis of Aboriginal customary law and Canadian law in relation to the management and conservation of natural resources on crown lands. By reference to field research carried out with respect to a specific context of Aboriginal resource management, the thesis highlights the sophistication and distinctiveness of the customary Aboriginal regulation of community-based common property resource harvesting and management in both subsistence and commercial use contexts. This perspective reveals the conflictual tendencies between Aboriginal and State systems of the regulation of resource management where the former has been largely unrecognized by the latter. An analysis of the relevant jurisprudence highlights the ethocentric bias mitigating against the recognition and acceptance of Aboriginal resource management that has continued right up to the present time.

In this thesis an experimental method to calculate cohesive characteristics for an adhesive layer in a End Notched Flexure (ENF) specimen is presented and evaluated. The method is based on the path independent J-integral where the energy release rate (ERR) for the adhesive is derived as a function of the applied forces and the rotational displacements at the loading point and at the supports of the specimen. The major advantage with the method in comparison with existing theory known by the job initiator is that it is still applicable with ENF specimens that are subjected to yielding of the adherends.

The structure of this thesis is disposed so that the theory behind the J-integral method is shortly described and then an evaluation of the method is performed by aid of finite element simulations using beam and cohesive elements. The finite element simulations indicates that the ERR can be determined with good accuracy for an ENF specimen where a small scale yielding of the adherends has occurred. However when a fully cross sectional yielding of the adherends is reached the ERR starts diverging from the exact value and generates a too high ERR according to input data in the simulations, i.e. the exact values. The importance in length of the adhesive process zone is also shown to be irrelevant to the ERR measured according to the J-integral method.

Simulation performed with continuum elements indicates that a more reality based FE- simulation implies a higher value of the applied load in order to create crack propagation. This is an effect of that the specimen is allowed to roll on the supports which makes the effective length between the supports shorter than the initial value when the specimen is deformed. This results in a stiffer specimen and thus a higher applied force is needed to create crack propagation in the adhesive layer.

An experimental set up of an ENF specimen is created and the sample data from the experiments are evaluated with the J-integral method. For measuring the rotational displacements of the specimen which are needed for the J-integral equation an image system is developed by the author and validated by use of linear elastic beam theory. The system calculates the three rotational displacements of the specimen by aid of images taken by a high resolution SLR camera and the system for measuring the rotations may also be used in other applications than for a specific ENF geometry. The validation of the image system shows that the rotations calculated by the image system diverge from beam theory with less than 2.2 % which is a quite good accuracy in comparison with the accuracies for the rest of the used surveying equipment.

The results from the experiment indicates that the used, about 0.36 mm thick SikaPower 498, adhesive has an maximum shear strength of 37.3 MPa and a critical shear deformation of 482 µm. The fracture energy is for this thickness of the adhesive is determined as 12.9 kJ/m².

This report ends with a conclusion- and a suggested future work- chapter.

Classical kinetic theory of gases is based on the Boltzmann equation (BE) which describes the evolution of a system of particles undergoing collisions preserving mass, momentum and energy. Discretization methods have been developed on the idea of replacing the original BE by a finite set of nonlinear hyperbolic PDEs corresponding to the densities linked to a suitable finite set of velocities. One open problem related to the discrete BE is the construction of normal (fulfilling only physical conservation laws) discrete velocity models (DVMs). In many papers on DVMs, authors postulate from the beginning that a finite velocity space with such "good" properties is given, and after this step, they study the discrete BE. Our aim is not to study the equations for DVMs, but to discuss all possible choices of finite phase spaces (sets) satisfying this type of "good" restrictions. We start by introducing the most general class of discrete kinetic models (DKMs) and then, develop a general method for the construction and classification of normal DKMs. We apply this method in the particular cases of DVMs of the inelastic BE (where we show that all normal models can be explicitly described) and elastic BE (where we give a complete classification of normal models up to 9 velocities). Using our general approach to DKMs and our results on normal DVMs for a single gas, we develop a method for the construction of the most natural (from physical point of view) subclass of normal DVMs for binary gas mixtures. We call such models supernormal models (SNMs). We apply this method and obtain SNMs with up to 20 velocities and their spectrum of mass ratio. Finally, we develop a new method that can lead, by symmetric transformations, from a given normal DVM to extended normal DVMs. Many new normal models can be constructed in this way, and we give some examples to illustrate this.

The hydrodynamic equations of change for a reacting gas mixture of monomers and dimers are studied. The gas is considered to be dilute and described by the kinetic theory of Lowry and Snider (J. Chem. Phys. 61, 2320 (1974)). From the kinetic equations for the density operators representing the monomer and dimer, the equations of change for one-molecule observables are obtained. Since the energy operator involves the intermolecular potential energy, it is necessary to derive the energy balance equation from the von Neumann equation, since this includes molecule-molecule correlations. As well, the kinetic theory formulated by Lowry and Snider is rewritten so that rearrangement collisions are emphasized. A collisional sum rule is derived involving the commutation properties of channel projectors and their respective potentials. A known property of the optical theorem is that it identifies the reactive loss terms as part of the non-reactive transition superoperators. The sum rule is applied to rewrite the non-reactive transition superoperators so as to display the reactive loss terms. This aids in establishing conservation laws for the physical observables of mass, linear momentum, angular momentum and energy. A form of the optical theorem in which kinetic energy off-diagonality is allowed for is also derived. Both the optical theorem and the sum rule are based on the strong orthogonality hypothesis, which plays a fundamental role in the Lowry-Snider theory. On localising the physical attributes at the centres of mass of the molecules, the contributions to the equations of change from collisional transfer (due to the forces and torques between the collision partners) and from the transfer of the physical attributes from the reactants to the products are identified. The transformation of dimer internal degrees of freedom into monomer translational degrees of freedom or vice versa when a dimer Is dissociated or formed is found to contribute to the equations of change by virtue of the differing locality of the collision partners. The decomposition of the kinetic energy operator into its components for radial and rotational motions allows the kinetic energy flux contributions associated with the pressure tensor and the molecular angular momentum flux to be identified.
Science, Faculty of
Chemistry, Department of
Graduate

The manuscript presents my research on hyperbolic Partial Differential Equations (PDE), especially on conservation laws. My works began with this thought in my mind: ''Existence and uniqueness of solutions is not the end but merely the beginning of a theory of differential equations. The really interesting questions concern the behavior of solutions.'' (P.D. Lax, The formation and decay of shock waves 1974). To study or highlight some behaviors, I started by working on geometric optics expansions (WKB) for hyperbolic PDEs. For conservation laws, existence of solutions is still a problem (for large data, $L^\infty$ data), so I early learned method of characteristics, Riemann problem, $BV$ spaces, Glimm and Godunov schemes, \ldots In this report I emphasize my last works since 2006 when I became assistant professor. I use geometric optics method to investigate a conjecture of Lions-Perthame-Tadmor on the maximal smoothing effect for scalar multidimensional conservation laws. With Christian Bourdarias and Marguerite Gisclon from the LAMA (Laboratoire de \\ Mathématiques de l'Université de Savoie), we have obtained the first mathematical results on a $2\times2$ system of conservation laws arising in gas chromatography. Of course, I tried to put high oscillations in this system. We have obtained a propagation result exhibiting a stratified structure of the velocity, and we have shown that a blow up occurs when there are too high oscillations on the hyperbolic boundary. I finish this subject with some works on kinetic équations. In particular, a kinetic formulation of the gas chromatography system, some averaging lemmas for Vlasov equation, and a recent model of a continuous rating system with large interactions are discussed. Bernard Rousselet (Laboratoire JAD Université de Nice Sophia-Antipolis) introduced me to some periodic solutions related to crak problems and the so called nonlinear normal modes (NNM). Then I became a member of the European GDR: ''Wave Propagation in Complex Media for Quantitative and non Destructive Evaluation.'' In 2008, I started a collaboration with Bruno Lombard, LMA (Laboratoire de Mécanique et d'Acoustique, Marseille). We details mathematical results and challenges we have identified for a linear elasticity model with nonlinear interfaces. It leads to consider original neutral delay differential systems.

This thesis investigates the conceptual relationship between laws of nature and free will. In order to clarify the discussion, I begin by distinguishing several questions with respect to the nature of a law: i) do the laws of nature cover everything that happens? ii) are they deterministic? iii) can there be exceptions to universal and deterministic laws? iv) do the laws of nature govern everything in the world? In order to answer these questions I look at three widely endorsed accounts of laws: "Humean" regularity accounts, laws as relations among universals, and the dispositional essentialist account. I argue that there is nothing in the very nature of a law - in any of the accounts surveyed - that implies a positive answer to questions (i) and (ii). I show that this has important consequences for the free will problem. I then turn to the compatibility of free will and determinism. I focus on the Humean view and the dispositional essentialist account of laws. And the bulk of this discussion concerns the consequence argument, especially the question of whether the laws of nature are "up to us". I show that, on the dispositional conception of laws, there is no sense in which the laws of nature are up to us, contrary to the Humean view. However, this does not mean that there is no room for free will on the dispositional account. I argue that free will requires the laws of nature to be limited in scope, rather than being indeterministic. I conclude by showing that this allows one to resist the claim that indeterminism rules out free will.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2009.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 211-215).
This thesis studies the problem of determining achievable rates in heterogeneous wireless networks. We analyze the impact of location, traffic, and service heterogeneity. Consider a wireless network with n nodes located in a square area of size n communicating with each other over Gaussian fading channels. Location heterogeneity is modeled by allowing the nodes in the wireless network to be deployed in an arbitrary manner on the square area instead of the usual random uniform node placement. For traffic heterogeneity, we analyze the n x n dimensional unicast capacity region. For service heterogeneity, we consider the impact of multicasting and caching. This gives rise to the n x 2n dimensional multicast capacity region and the 2" x n dimensional caching capacity region. In each of these cases, we obtain an explicit information-theoretic characterization of the scaling of achievable rates by providing a converse and a matching (in the scaling sense) communication architecture.
by Urs Niesen.
Ph.D.

Truthlikeness is a property of a theory or a proposition that represents its closeness, similarity or likeness to the truth. The notion allows to defend a middle position between infallibilism and scepticism, providing an optimistic understanding of a set of ideas regarding science that may seem to imply, prima facie, an instrumentalist or pessimistic view of scientific theories. In this sense, perhaps all scientific theories are strictly speaking false, but some may be closer to the truth than others; scientific progress is possible because of an increase in truthlikeness; truth might be said to be the aim of science in the sense of pursuing a better approximation to it; our best developed theories (including the unobservable parts) work because they are close to the truth; and finally, one may embrace fallibilism and still be able to estimate that some theories are closer to the truth than others. Since Popper’s failure to provide a satisfactory definition of truthlikeness, the notion has become a topic of intense discussion by philosophers of science and logicians. This gave rise to two main perspectives, the content-consequence and the similarity approach. This dissertation proposes a framework to define truthlikeness for deterministic and probabilistic laws within Niiniluoto’s version of the similarity approach. According to Niiniluoto, truthlikeness for quantitative deterministic laws can be defined by the Minkowski metric. We present some counter-examples to the definition and argue that it fails because it considers truthlikeness for quantitative deterministic laws to be just a function of “accuracy”, but an accurate law can be wrong about the actual “structure” or “behaviour” of the system it intends to describe. We develop a modification of Niiniluoto’s proposal that defines truthlikeness for quantitative deterministic laws as a function of two factors: accuracy and nomicity. The latter represents the qualitative behaviours implied by a law that are not captured by value comparison and can be measured by shape similarity, appealing to the Euclidean distance between the corresponding derivative functions. The final proposal solves the presented counter-examples and defines a new way of understanding scientific progress. The framework is expanded to cover probabilistic laws, which represent a relevant subset of actual scientific laws. When this research was developed, there were almost no proposals in the literature of truthlikeness to deal with probabilistic laws or probabilistic truths in general. In this way, we followed Niiniluoto’s suggestion to use the Kullback–Leibler divergence to define the distance between a probability law X and the true probability law T and we argue that the Kullback–Leibler divergence seems to be the best of the available probability distances to measure accuracy between probabilistic laws. However, as in the case of deterministic laws, we argue that accuracy represents a necessary but not sufficient condition, as two probabilistic laws may be equally accurate and still one may imply more true or truthlike probabilistic consequences, behaviours or facts about the system than the other. The final proposal defines truthlikeness for probabilistic laws again as a function of accuracy and nomicity, in intimate connexion with the proposal developed for deterministic laws.

In the present work we concern ourselves with the question of the existence of other anomalous diffusion laws generated by CTRWs. Based on our recent results on the asymptotic behavior of CTRWs with superheavytailed waiting time and asymmetric heavy-tailed jump length distributions (whose first and/or second moments are infinite), we find the conditions of superslow diffusion and establish corresponding laws by analytical methods and provide a verification using numerical simulation.