A Survey of the Order Contortae in Tennessee

(Statement of the Problem) The problem has been to check all available Tennessee material in order to determine the taxonomic limits and distribution of the taxa belonging to the order of Contortae (Gentianales of Bentham and Hooker and others) as represented in the flora of Tennessee. In addition, keys have been arranged for the identification of the families, genera, and species

Asiakasreunakytkennän testausalustan kehitys

Customer Edge Switching (CES) and Realm Gateway (RGW) are technologies designed to solve core challenges of the modern Internet. Challenges include the ever increasing amount of devices connected to the Internet and risks created by malicious parties. CES and RGW leverage existing technologies like Domain Name System (DNS). Software testing is critical for ensuring correctness of software. It aims to ensure that products and protocols operate correctly. Testing also aims to find any critical vulnerabilities in the products. Fuzz testing is a field of software testing allowing automatic iteration of unexpected inputs. In this thesis work we evaluate two CES versions in performance, in susceptibility of Denial of Service (DoS) and in weaknesses related to use of DNS. Performance is an important metric for switches. Denial of Service is a very common attack vector and use of DNS in new ways requires critical evaluation. The performance of the old version was sufficient. Some clear issues were found. The version was vulnerable against DoS. Oversights in DNS operation were found. The new version shows improvement over the old one. We also evaluated suitability of expanding Robot Framework for fuzz testing Customer Edge Traversal Protocol (CETP). We conclude that the use of the Framework was not the best approach. We also developed a new testing framework using Robot Framework for the new version of CES.Customer Edge Switching (CES) asiakasreunakytkentä ja Realm Gateway (RGW) alueen yhdyskäytävä tarjoavat ratkaisuja modernin Internetin ydinongelmiin. Ydinongelmiin kuuluvat kytkettyjen laitteiden määrän jatkuva kasvu ja pahantahtoisten tahojen luomat riskit. CES ja RGW hyödyntävät olemassa olevia tekniikoita kuten nimipalvelua (DNS). Ohjelmistojen oikeellisuuden varmistuksessa testaus on välttämätöntä. Sen tavoitteena on varmistaa tuotteiden ja protokollien oikea toiminnallisuus. Testaus myös yrittää löytää kriittiset haavoittuvuudet ohjelmistoissa. Sumea testaus on ohjelmistotestauksen alue, joka mahdollistaa odottamattomien syötteiden automaattisen läpikäynnin. Tässä työssä arvioimme kahden CES version suorituskykyä, palvelunestohyökkäyksien sietoa ja nimipalvelun käyttöön liittyviä heikkouksia. Suorituskyky on tärkeä mittari kytkimille. Palvelunesto on erittäin yleinen hyökkäystapa ja nimipalvelun uudenlainen käyttö vaatii kriittistä arviointia. Vanhan version suorituskyky oli riittävä. Joitain selviä ongelmia löydettiin. Versio oli haavoittuvainen palvelunestohyökkäyksille. Löysimme epätarkkuuksia nimipalveluiden toiminnassa. Uusi versio vaikuttaa paremmalta kuin vanha versio. Arvioimme työssä myös Robot Framework testausalustan laajentamisen soveltuvuutta Customer Edge Traversal Protocol (CETP) asiakasreunalävistysprotokollan sumeaan testaukseen. Toteamme, ettei alustan käyttö ollut paras lähestymistapa. Esitämme myös työmme Robot Framework alustaa hyödyntävän testausalustan kehityksessä nykyiselle CES versiolle. Kehitimme myös uuden testausalustan uudelle CES versiolle hyödyntäen Robot Frameworkia

Ontario\u27s mental health system: The experience of families and their perspective on reform

Over 100 family members were interviewed—individually and in focus groups—to gain a picture of their lived experience and their perspective on reform of Ontario\u27s mental health system. The thesis looks at needs of families in two ways. first, by examining the common themes of their experience with the mental health system and with supporting consumers in the community; and second, by asking families directly about their satisfaction with existing supports, and about needed additional supports. Focus group participants were asked to make suggestions about innovative models to meet unmet need, and about how families could participate more fully in the mental health system as a stakeholder . The results provided a picture of families‘ needs and strengths, on an individual and collective basis. Common themes which emerged pertained to a number of different aspects of family experience. First of all, the research documented the struggle to engage the mental health system, families found various barriers and facilitating factors in interpreting the presence of a mental health problem, looking for potential sources of help, and then actually accessing supports from the formal mental health care system. The thesis showed the sometimes dire consequences when help was not forthcoming, or was altogether inaccessible. Secondly, family experience with institutional care was documented, showing a wide divergence of perceptions of quality. Negative perceptions were associated with the intimidating hospital atmosphere, criticisms of the medical model, and instances of neglect and abuse. Positive (or ambivalent) perceptions were associated with family respite, stabilization and improvement of the consumer, and specific instances of humane or perceptive care giving. Also, several barriers to families’ goal of informed, active involvement with care were shown, along with successful strategies of becoming involved. Next, families described several themes pertaining to their relative\u27s transition to the community, and his or her connection with ongoing community resources Descriptions of the actual transition process revealed, again, lack of family involvement, instances of premature discharge (with questionable hospital motives), and lack of assistance with the transition to community life, including connection to ongoing resources. Families made specific comments about the existence and appropriateness of housing, vocational support, income maintenance, and social support. A common theme here was families‘ criticism that supports were designed in such a way to prevent integration in the different aspects of community life. Various struggles which family members faced on a day to day basis were documented, including disruption of daily work routines, of social and family life, of future hopes and plans, and of the mental health of other family members. The thesis also documented ways in which people had adapted to and changed their situation for the better. Personal resources, and assistance from family support groups were significant in this regard. Satisfaction ratings of existing supports revealed that families on the whole were somewhere between neutral and somewhat satisfied with formal resources They were somewhat satisfied with informal resources, such as the support of family and friends. Ratings of needed new resources, as inferred by frequency of listings, revealed that vocational assistance, information/referral, and housing were top priority for family members. Quantitative and qualitative material was then synthesized to give a broader context to family needs. The qualitative themes indicative of need (for example, lack of information about available resources) were matched with appropriate quantitative ratings, thus providing an indication of urgency of the need, then, key recommendations were included which were made by families as to how that need could or should be met. A final section provides a dynamic picture of needs by showing how each changes in the course of the families’ experience with different components of the mental health system, and how each changes as individual and collective family strengths manifest themselves

Between Scylla and Charybdis: women's labour migration and sex trafficking in the early Twentieth Century

This article explores the discursive and practical entanglements of women’s work and sex trafficking, in Britain and internationally, in the early twentieth century. It examines discussions about trafficking and women’s work during a period that was instrumental in codifying modern, international conceptions of ‘trafficking’ and argues that porous and faulty borders were drawn between sex work, women’s licit work, and their sexual exploitation and their exploitation as workers. These borders were at their thinnest in discussions about two very important sectors of female-dominated migrant labour: domestic and care work, and work in the entertainment industry. The anti-trafficking movement, the international labour movement, and the makers of national laws and policies, attempted to pick sexual labour apart from other forms of labour, and in doing so wilfully ignored or suppressed moments when they obviously intersected, and downplayed the role of other exploited and badly-paid licit work that sustained the global economy. But these attempts were rarely successful: despite the careful navigations of international and British officials, work kept finding its way back into discussions of sex trafficking, and sex trafficking remained entangled with the realities of women’s work

Traffickers and pimps in the era of white slavery

In the early twentieth century, the idea of pimping and trafficking was being codified in most Western countries, and was deployed to rearticulate prostitution as part of a criminally organized underworld that stood firmly apart from the normal world of work, migration, and licit relationships. Pimps and traffickers were caricatured, demonized, and racialized, and increasingly seen as the chief cause of prostitution, in contrast to older feminist critiques which articulated prostitution as part of a wider system of gender exploitation underpinned by the uncontrolled sexual appetites of all men. This article looks at two pimps and traffickers, Antonio Carvelli and Alexander Di Nicotera, who were arrested in London in 1910, as a way to challenge and complicate these understandings of pimps and traffickers in the era of ‘white slavery’. It deploys the techniques of microhistory and ‘intimate’ history to uncover these elusive historical actors and to place them in a wider global and personal context. Examining the lives, work, and movements of Carvelli and de Nicotera, and others like them, reveals men who were indeed part of a mobile, cosmopolitan world of commercial sex, but it also shows the ways in which this supposed ‘underworld’ was deeply entangled with the licit economies of global capitalism. It allows us to see how these intermediaries in the sex industry were themselves often exploited and marginalized, even if their response to these experiences was to exploit others. Finally, it reveals that these men were in complex interpersonal relationships with women who sold sex in these local and global markets. When viewed in this way, Carvelli and de Nicotera slip in and out of the categories we might assign to them, and offer new ways of thinking about third parties and about the globalizing commercial sex industry in this important period

Possible maps: Newfoundland, 1763-1829

Islands have a disproportionate role – as strategic locations, as imaginative or symbolic locales, as extractive zones and as ecological bellwethers – in oceanic imperial histories. They were and are places of ‘great practical use and metaphorical power’. And yet Newfoundland was seen (and continues to be seen) as marginal and peripheral, even if the biomass that was pulled out of its ocean fed – quite literally – a global network of exploitation. This article uses four overlapping maps to tell four overlapping stories: James Cook’s circumnavigation of the island in 1763–8; Lt David Buchan’s trek into the interior to contact the Beothuk in 1811 and 1820; William Eppes Cormack and Joseph Sylvester’s trek across the island in 1822; and finally, a series of story-maps created by Shanawdithit, who is apocryphally known as ‘the last of the Beothuk’. In doing so, it draws in Indigenous ‘storywork’ and cartographic histories and makes a case for storytelling as powerful methodology for examining overlooked colonial histories. These maps and stories highlight the complexity of encounter with a place rather than a coherence of colonial ideologies. Through the stories these maps help me tell, I hope to show how the peripheries of some people’s empires were the centres of other people’s worlds

Schooners and schoonermen, my grandfather and me

This article, part of History Workshop Journal's 'Historic Passions' series is an analysis of an unpublished manuscript that the author's grandfather wrote on the history of the Labrador Fishery in light of the author's own life in 1990s Newfoundland, during the early years of the cod moratorium

The Emmet's Inch: 'Small' history in a digital age

Digitization has usually been considered a facilitator of what has been called “big” history. While digital history projects increasingly make good and sensitive use of individual and granular records and use them to bring human complexity into a larger analysis, the digitization of published material and archives have mostly been discussed by historians in aggregate: they are valued chiefly for their ability to give us “big data” about phenomena in the past. Yet for those interested in questions and methodologies of microhistory, biographical history, history from below, and other kinds of what we might call ‘small” history, the digitization of archives and individual records is an equally transformative development. This article will examine the way that digitization has changed how historians discover, concatenate and communicate small stories in their narratives and arguments. I will consider the practice and the ethics of telling and digitizing individual histories and suggest some different ways of dealing with the new boundaries—and boundlessness—that the “mass digitized turn” throws up, particularly for historians working in the period after 1800. Finally, amidst an increased emphasis on digitization and big data in the field of history, I want to assert the continuing power of all kinds of small histories to explain the past and to connect it to our present, and ourselves

A Thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in the Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy

While existing studies have provided rich insights for understanding asset pricing factors or anomalies, this thesis refreshes the understanding of several major asset pricing phenomena from novel perspectives. Specifically, the refreshed understanding is achieved by conditioning on time-series or cross-sectional information. The first chapter resurrects the size effect, the first challenge to market efficiency under the CAPM. Motivated by the extensive evidence of information barriers facing small stocks and the consequential underreaction of small-stock prices to information shocks, I conjecture that a big-minus-small effect comparable in strength to the small-minus-big effect exists. Conditional on ex-ante signals capturing information shocks, I uncover the two faces of the size effect. The finding not only translates into a size investment strategy with a remarkable improvement in risk-return trade-off but also sheds new light on the long-standing argument about the size effect’s validity. The second chapter refreshes the understanding of the low-beta anomaly. While recent studies have resolved the previously known low-beta anomaly from different perspectives, this chapter discovers a new low-beta anomaly not explained by these studies. I show that, theoretically, the new and known low-beta anomalies differ in their underlying factors. The known low-beta anomaly is driven by factors directly correlated with the market risk, while the new low-beta anomaly is driven by factors only partially correlated with the market risk. Besides showing that the low-beta anomaly is still unexplained by existing studies, the significance of the new low-beta anomaly lies in that it identifies partial-correlated factors, which are unnoticeable but are important for driving asset returns. The last chapter extends the analysis of the low market-beta anomaly to all factors or anomalies. Unlike the negative market beta-alpha relationship, which directly violates equilibrium theories such as the Consumption-CAPM, the implication of a factor-beta anomaly is unclear. After all, there is no consensus on the origins of most factors or anomalies, making it more attractive to clarify this class of phenomena as a whole to pave the way for economic interpretations. I explicitly model the mechanism for a factor-beta anomaly to emerge under a factormodel framework, which rationalizes the pervasiveness of low factor-beta anomalies and provides a paradigm for inferring information from an observed factor-beta anomaly. Through the stochastic discount factor, asset pricing factors are at the core of the interaction between the financial market and the real economy. This thesis takes a crucial step toward understanding this interaction by enhancing the understanding of these asset pricing factors and anomalies.DissertationDoctor of Philosophy (PhD

Firm core business processes and the effect on performance

This study investigates firm’s core business processes’ effect on its performance. First, a conceptual model including the three core business processes, product development management, supply chain management and customer relationship management, and performance measures is constructed based on previous research and literature. The conceptual model consists of 16 research hypotheses. Second, empirical evidence is introduced to test the research hypotheses. Finally, the conceptual model is partly verified through the test of hypotheses. The data used in this study was collected through use of a web-based questionnaire targeted to the upper management in Finnish companies. The questionnaire was sent to 15 941 decision makers, of which 1 157 completed the survey. Three multivariate data analysis techniques were used to address the research questions in empirical part of the study. First, a measurement model was constructed through use of a confirmatory factor analysis to confirm the theoretically proposed factor constructs. Second, a structural equation model was built to test part of the hypotheses. Third, a mediational analysis was conducted to test rest of the research hypotheses. The findings of this study support the importance of core business process integration. It seems that one core business process directly driving the performance is the customer relationship management. However, both product development management and supply chain management are paramount for overall success of a firm. According to the results of this study the managers should attempt to integrate the firm’s core business processes, by implementing cross-functional integration, customer driven development, and demand supply integration. These actions and implementations should help a firm in the pursuit of financial performance. The study provides a generalized model that links core business processes and performance. A further study should be made to investigate underlying mechanisms how core business processes affect on performance