"What Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is going to do is start to weaken the foundation of the way we've done things for 100 years...Congress already should be discussing the next telecom bill," said Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Michael Powell in February 2004, before the...

During the last decades, distributed energy (DE) resources received considerable attention and support because of the confluence of technology development - particularly gas turbines - and deregulation - which would allow access to the distribution systems. DE was seen as addressing numerous...

Entrepreneurship stimulates economic growth, creates jobs, and provides opportunities for independence and self-realization. Over the last 10 years, policy makers around the globe have been actively pursuing the elusive goal of an entrepreneurial economy. Often building on existing Small and...

During the late 1980s, globalization of the world's economies and technological development created the conditions for the expansion of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in telecommunications. This tendency has been further boosted by different economic reforms that countries have implemented,...

The economic cost of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emission is an important policy consideration. As public awareness of climate change consequences increase, there is increased political support for greenhouse gas emission controls. However, there are disagreements over the intensity of...

This thesis proposes a practical approach to defining flexible design and development strategies for maximizing the expected value of engineering systems. Specifically, the approach deals with the fact that it is generally computationally impractical to explore all the possible ways a system...

This thesis discusses ensemble forecasting, a promising new weather forecasting technique, from various viewpoints relating not only to its meteorological aspects but also to its user and policy aspects. Ensemble forecasting was developed to overcome the limitations of conventional deterministic...

This thesis assesses fare payment technologies for Transport for London in 2015. Based on a survey of technical literature, feasible payments technologies in 2015 include current smartcard technology, contactless bankcards and near-field communication (NFC) mobile phones. Five fare payment...

Globalization is changing the way in which the world is organized. The world trade regime is increasingly the dominant mode of organizing international relations. Within this context of globalization and liberalization of trade, empirical examples of a race to the bottom co-exist with examples...

Online service providers (OSPs) such as Google, Yahoo!, and Amazon provide customized features that do not behave as conventional experience goods. Absent familiar metaphors, unraveling the full. scope and implications of attendant privacy hazards requires technical knowledge, creating...