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This dissertation analyses developments in the international regulation of foreign direct investment (FDI). The international legal framework of investment encompasses numerous binding or non-binding legal instruments, including customary international law, bilateral investment treaties, and international organizations’ decisions and resolutions. The rules established by the international legal framework become effective and significant when they are able to be adapted by appropriate and compatible domestic law frameworks. Through analyzing the Turkish foreign investment regulations and pol...

This dissertation introduces a new design for a computer-aided algorithmic music composition system. Rather than exploring specific algorithms, this study focuses on system and component design. The design introduced here is demonstrated through its implementation in athenaCL, a modular, polyphonic, poly-paradigm algorithmic music composition system in a cross-platform interactive command-line environment. The athenaCL system offers an open-source, object-oriented composition tool written in Python. The system can be scripted and embedded, and includes integrated instrument libraries, post-ton...

In 1904-1905 Max Weber published the sociological classic The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In this book Weber argues that religion, specifically “ascetic Protestantism” provided the essential social and cultural infrastructure that led to modern capitalism. Weber’s suggests that Protestantism has “an affinity for capitalism.” Indeed, something within Protestantism—by accident or design—creates the necessary preconditions that lead to the flowering of a just, free, and prosperous society. At the same time, Weber wonders if the economic backwardness of certain societies and...

Economic sanctions have been used as an instrument of American foreign policy ever since the Taft administration adopted the Dollar Diplomacy. This dissertation analyzes the trade Embargo the United States imposed upon Cuba after the Revolution from different perspectives: from the political, considering the main guidelines of American foreign policy toward Latin America, especially during the Cold War, and from the juridical, considering different perspectives of customary international law. Since the embargo was imposed only after American property had been expropriated with...

Groundwater represents an important supply source for municipal and irrigation uses in Far West Texas. The City of El Paso receives about 50 percent of its municipal water supply from surface water and 50 percent from local groundwater. Groundwater pumping in El Paso is from the Hueco Bolson and the Mesilla Bolson. Historic groundwater pumping in the Texas portion of the Mesilla Bolson has not resulted in significant changes in groundwater levels or groundwater quality in existing wells. Historic pumping in the Hueco Bolson has resulted in lowered groundwater levels and brackish groundwater ...

Traditional Islamic law has long been regarded as academic, local in nature, and relevant only as a measure of the inadequacy of women’s rights in the family law regimes of a few Islamic states. In opposition, the author argues that the Sharia is both a quasi-regional customary international law capable of competing with prevailing customary international law, and brings its own international agenda of “Islamic human rights” that compete with and seek to displace “Western human rights.” Rather than acknowledging the rights of Muslims qua Muslims internationally, aggressive proponents of an “Am...

The operational aspects of Lambda Calculus are studied as a fundamental basis for high-order functional computation. We consider systems having full reduction semantics, i.e., equivalence-preserving transformations of functions. The historic lineage from Eval-Apply to SECD to RTNF/RTLF culminates in the techniques of normal-order graph Head Order Reduction (HOR). By using a scalar mechanism to artificially bind relatively free variables, HOR makes it relatively effortless to reduce expressions beyond weak normal form and to allow expression-level results while exhibiting a well-behaved linear ...

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...

The carotid body initiates reflexes aimed principally at the homeostatic maintenance of blood gas tensions. This thesis tested the hypothesis that the carotid body is also a physiological glucosensor, with a role in mediating exercise hyperpnoea. In anaesthetised rats, insulin-induced hypoglycaemia (from ca. 6.5 to 2.8 mmol L-1) caused an ca. two-fold increase of oxygen consumption that was associated with a significant, carotid body-dependent increase in ventilation (from ca. 420 to 640 ml min-1 kg-1) without change in blood gas tensions. This hypoglycaemic hyperpnoea was associated with hypo...

This study examines the role of occupational status in the racialization of Indian physicians in Southern California. Since the liberalization of U.S. immigration policy in 1965, the number of first and second-generation Indian doctors in the U.S. has grown to nearly seven percent of the nation's physician workforce; however, Indians constitute less than one percent of the total U.S. population. Overrepresented in one of America's most prestigious professions, Indians are more visible in U.S. medicine than in the U.S. at large. Previous scholarship in immigration research, Asian American St...