Library: Best sellers

This study will attempt to answer the question of how can the rise in social violence since the 1980s be explained in the oil-rich nation of Venezuela? The once relatively peaceful nation of Venezuela has seen a dramatic rise in social violence over the last three decades that has placed her amongst some of the world's most dangerous countries. A review of the relevant literature will reveal that the study of a social phenomenon such as violence, in a nation such as Venezuela, is a complicated task because there are a number of different, but in many cases interlinked, variables that contribut...

A significant volume of literature has been developed that seeks to provide an explanation for the growth of FDI and its impact on less developed countries. The literature is characterized by diversity and controversy. Based on it, a range of reasons for encouraging investment have been proposed including its favorable effects on employment levels, the balance of payments and balance of trade of the host country and also the potential for acquisition of technology and skills (Cave: 1982 and Dunning: 1993). Equally, the potentially negative effects of growing levels of foreign investment on dom...

Trends and perspectives in dynamic environments point towards a need for optimal operating levels in reconfigurable manufacturing activities. Central to the goal of meeting this need is the issue of appropriate techniques for manufacturing process planning optimization in reconfigurable manufacturing, i.e. (i) what decision making models and (ii) what computational techniques, provide an optimal manufacturing process planning solution in a multidimensional decision variables space? Conventional optimization techniques are not robust, hence; they are not suitable for handling multidimensional s...

The modern FPGAs enable system designers to develop high-performance computing (HPC) applications with a large amount of parallelism. Real-time image processing is such a requirement that demands much more processing power than a conventional processor can deliver. In this research, we implemented software and hardware based architectures on FPGA to achieve real-time image processing. Furthermore, we benchmark and compare our implemented architectures with existing architectures. The operational structures of those systems consist of on-chip processors or custom vision coprocessors implemented...

As the sun set on the 20th century, a new age dawned in Japan. This new era, symbolized by the postmodern city of Tokyo, has ushered in not only technological innovation and economic prowess, but changing attitudes and values among Japanese young people. This transformation is not an uncommon or even new phenomenon, but simply the result of modern life. And one of the symptoms of modernity is the prevalence of an “ethics of materialism,” the ever-increasing concern for the acquisition of wealth and commodity goods, sometimes at the expense of the concern for human life itself. Walter Benja...

This thesis analyses how and why culture and geography influence the allocation and licensing of the radio frequency (RF) spectrum in different nations. Based on a broad comparative study of 235 countries, an inter-disciplinary approach is used to explore regulatory frameworks and attitudes toward risk. In addition, detailed case studies of the UK, France, the US and Ecuador provide deeper insights into the main contrasting regulatory styles. Three alternative sociological theories are used to analyse and explain the results for both the in-depth and broad brush studies. The Cultural Theory...

This work focuses on contemporary Zimbabwean Stone Sculpture - widely known until the early 1990s as "Shona Sculpture" - from the perspective of a critical anthropological analysis of cultural identity and representation. The analysis frames the inception of this art movement within the colonial socio-historical circumstances of its genesis, where discourse about the producers of this art form ("Shona discourse") was created. Drawing from the social context of inequality and racial (spatial) segregation, and from the concepts of the "primitive" in art and anthropology, the author aims to show ...

This study examines the socioeconomic and environmental implications of the new camu camu industry in Peru. Camu camu (Myrciaria dubia) is a small tree native to wetlands of the Amazon basin. It is especially abundant in Peruvian Amazonia. The high vitamin-C content of the fruit has generated interest in exporting camu camu products from Amazonia to more-developed countries. The government of Peru has been actively promoting this new extractive industry, as well as the planting of camu camu in rural areas. Non-governmental development organizations and private industry are now actively involve...

The delayed development of the Islamic world, in defiance of the formulaic approaches long favored by economists, suggests that the traditional Sharia and Islamic values and principles are at least partially responsible for the region’s persistent backwardness. By analyzing the impact of the legal regime of the Sharia on Saudi Arabia during the Arab Oil Bust of the 1980s, this thesis concludes that Islamic social values and the Sharia’s de facto role as an uncodified pre-emptive Arab common law implemented with high regard to precedent by ulama with extraordinary power of judicial review ha...

In the field of antitrust, the freedoms to contract and compete can and do contradict. Profit-maximizing companies desire perfectly competitive input markets to minimize their costs, but want monopolistic markets for their outputs to maximize their profits. Consequently, they have strong incentives to undermine competition in their output markets. In a world without antitrust laws, many companies would thus eliminate competition by using their freedom to contract, either by entering into legally enforceable agreements which fix prices or divide up markets, or by merging and acquiring rivals to...