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Digital information communication technologies (DICTs) play an ever-more prominent role in politics, from the technologically sophisticated presidential campaign of Barack Obama to the Twitter-inspired Occupy Wall Street movement. However, not all political groups embrace technology to the same degree. Little scholarly attention has been paid to understanding why some groups adopt DICTs and use them to achieve political goals, while others do not. This dissertation attempts to remedy this by examining what drives DICT adoption among 48 organizations involved in advocacy activities in support of and in opposition to gay rights and marriage equality. It further contributes to the literature on DICTs and politics by considering the role of national context in DICT adoption, selecting organizations based in the United States, Ireland, and the United Kingdom, and comparing patterns of DICT adoption cross-nationally. Several important findings emerge from this research. First, there is significant variation in the extent to which the 48 organizations under study adopted DICTs. There appears to be no relationship between organizational ideology and an organization's tendency to adopt DICTs, nor do the characteristics of the organizations' staff or target publics appear to influence their adoption of DICTs, although this does seem to affect the extent to which they deploy offline tools. The paper finds that first-mover advantage plays a key role in DICT adoption, with laggards finding it hard to build online momentum. Further, the amount of resources an organization is able to deploy strongly affects their ability to adopt DICTs. A number of national factors also appear to play a role in DICT adoption, particularly the competitiveness of the issue that organizations are engaged with, and the political traditions of the nation in which organizations are domiciled. Overall, this paper finds that the adoption of DICTs is a complex process, born of an interaction between an org

Coccolithophores play a key role in the ocean carbon cycle, regulating the uptake and release of CO2. Satellite observations over the past few decades show ocean change in a warming world is accompanied by changes in the latitudinal distribution of coccolithophore blooms. Despite their importance in the carbon cycle, knowledge of the causes of coccolithophore blooms, and how they may respond to future climate change is limited. In this study evidence from marine sedimentary cores is used to derive longer, more complete records of past coccolithophore productivity, and the factors that potentially caused enhanced coccolithophore productivity in previous interglacials. Carbonate-rich marine cores; subtropical P71 from north of New Zealand (33°51.3‟S, 174°41.6‟E) and subantarctic Ocean Drilling Project (ODP) 1120 from the Campbell Plateau (50°3.803‟S, 173°22.300‟E) show abrupt changes between foraminiferal-rich sediments during glacials to coccolith-rich sediments during interglacials. Both cores encompass the last two complete interglacial cycles, Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 5 (71-130ka) and MIS 7 (191- 243ka). While MIS 5 has been well-studied in the Southwest Pacific Ocean, research on MIS 7 is limited. From the literature, and data from this study, new insights are presented into the climatic and oceanographic conditions during MIS 7. Sea surface temperatures in the subtropical Tasman Inflow were comparable to present during MIS 7a (191-222ka), but were cooler in MIS 7c (235-243ka), implying a change in flow regime potentially related to the dynamics of the South Pacific Gyre. During MIS 7a and 7c the temperature gradient across the Subtropical Front (STF), which separates subtropical and subantarctic waters, was greater than present on the Chatham Rise, at >2°C per 1° latitude. In the Tasman Sea, the STF moved northwards by ~2° latitude. This thesis employs grain size data and scanning electron microscope images to show that significant coccolithophore blooms occur

The cost of living is a subject of peculiar and vital interest to every individual and every group in society today. The struggle for life is becoming keener and the individual is finding stronger competition in the race for life than ever before. people are continually developing new wants, and providing these are wholesome wants, it is a sign of progress. What were luxuries for the last generation are considered necessities for this. Then again, less and less people are directly producing the bulk of their living on the land and more and more are paying for every item of their living in dollars and cents. ... This thesis is a small attempt to gather together the experience of a limited number of people residing in the city of Winnipeg who are interested in the subject itself, and are possessed of sufficient public spirit to contribute something from their experience. The families contributing range in income, it is judged, from $1800 to $3500, with one exception which is somewhat lower... Family expenditures are usually classified as follows: Food, Shelter, Operating Expenses, Clothing, Higher life or advancements, Savings. It is the purpose of this thesis to deal with the first four classes of the group, namely food, shelter, operating expenses and clothing, not with the idea that they make complete lifing, but that they comprise the necessaries of life and the last two occupy more or less the region of choice...