Acknowledgments

I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor, George Gerrity, and my co-supervisor, Lawrie Brown, for their criticisms, insights, thoughtful suggestions and continual prodding during the course of this study.

This thesis is dedicated to my fiancée Lynne Smith: without her support and encouragement, this work may not have been completed.

This thesis is set in Adobe Palatino, Computer Modern Typewriter and Computer Modern Math using L^ATEX2_e and dvips version 5.58. Figures were drawn with xfig version 3.1.3, and converted to PostScript. Graphs were created with Gnuplot version 3.5 and converted through xfig to PostScript.