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This thesis analyses the origins and the implications of the services sector's development, including a case study on Switzerland. In the first part, we study the definitions and classifications of service activities, as well as the post- and neo-industrial theses on the origins of the strong expansion of services in developed countries over the last decades. The second part analyses the implications for economic growth, employment and productivity growth of the services sector's development. Starting from a discussion of Baumol's unbalanced growth model, we discuss the variety of productivity...

Combinatorial Games are a generalization of real numbers. Each game has a recursively defined complexity (birthday). In this paper we establish some game bounds. We find some limit cases for how big and how small a game can be, based on its complexity. For each finite birthday, N, we find the smallest positive number and the greatest game born by day N, as well as the smallest and the largest positive infinitesimals. As for each particular birthday we provide the extreme values for those types of games, these results extend those in [1, page 214]. The main references in the theory of combinat...

A synopsis of eminent computer chess programs reveal that they are designed around a 'brute force' approach. An argument is made that by continuing the 'brute force' search approach, computer chess development is moving away from human evaluation methods. Research is done into studies of evaluation methods, and a discovery is made that humans use a form of intuition, called their 'sense of beauty', to choose the best chess move. A paper by Margulies is cited which formulates principles of beauty which apply to chess. Three versions of a chess program are developed, using no heuristics, standar...

This dissertation is an interpretive case study that examines alcohol use by a specific subculture of undergraduates, a college fraternity. Based on nearly three years of investigation using interviews, observation, and document analysis, this study takes a detailed look at the organization's indoctrination process and the ways that their practices are explained by its most astute observers, specifically high-status insiders. Various elements of the author's biography are integrated into the text and used to enhance understanding of the phenomenon under investigation. The multiple purposes of ...

Foreign direct investment (FDI) is pivotal to the UK economy, with the UK being both the second largest investor abroad and the second largest host to foreign companies. Although since the Second World War FDI has been dominated by the USA, the more recent rise of Japan as both an international force in global markets and as an investor, has seen increasing amounts of Japanese FDI being directed towards the UK. Further, the perceived innovativeness of Japanese work organisation is held by many to have an even greater qualitative impact than the quantitative significance of Japanese FDI wou...

Other investigators have surmised that different types of relationships use diverse maintenance strategies in order to keep the relationship in existence. This study examines relational maintenance strategies that people use specifically in the relationship known as friendship. Five adult friendship couples were interviewed for maintenance strategies they use to sustain their friendship. The discussions were recorded and transcribed. The Constant Comparison method was used to compare and contrast the data in order to discover strategies unique to friendships. Results revealed seven strategi...

In this work we explore the relation between some local Dirichlet spaces and some operator ranges. As an application we give numerical bounds for an equivalence of norms on a particular subspace of the Hardy space. Based on these results we introduce an operator on H^2 which we study in some detail. We also introduce a Hilbert space of analytic functions on the unit disc, prove the polynomials are dense in it, and give a characterization of its elements. On these spaces we study the action of composition operators induced by holomorphic self maps of the disc. We give characterizations o...

United States Air Force Officers are not often given the choice of career fields when they enter active duty. This may have some impact on performance on an academic measure in the assigned field. In addition to choice, levels of two causality orientations were assessed using Deci and Ryan's 1985 General Causality Orientation Scale, 12-Vignette version. Causality orientations are posited to exist in varying degrees in every individual and, for the purposes of this study, are tested to determine their association with academic achievement in a situation of limited choice. The overall aim of thi...

The aim of this study was to establish what is known about the treatment of schizoid personality disorder using psychodynamic psychotherapies, by conducting a systematic review of the literature. The limitations of this approach are set out, followed by an account of the development of the use of the term in descriptive psychiatry and the psychodynamic literature. The inclusion criteria used were studies in English and of adults, that had a methodology, had confirmed a diagnosis of schizoid personality disorder in the subject during the study, that used any type of psychodynamic approach, and ...

A great deal of literature confirms the fact that small family-owned businesses rarely extend beyond the founder of the business. This study explored and identified factors that helped to create a successful family business transition for two African American family-owned businesses in the San Antonio area. One family experienced working through a well thought-out succession plan that successfully passed the mantel from one generation to the next, while the other family experienced going through an unexpected, unplanned business succession that was also successful. Understanding the factors th...