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Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited / Iran may have a nuclear weapon soon if Washington and Moscow do not unite to slow its efforts. The collapse of the Soviet Union created new complications in a long tradition of nonproliferation cooperation between the United States and Russia, and Iran is just one example. In the 1960s, faced with a common nuclear threat of China, Washington and Moscow united to negotiate the Limited Test Ban Treaty and Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to prevent China and other nuclear aspirants from proliferating nuclear weapons. They shepherded their allies to the nonproliferation table and made them sign the treaties. Their efforts retarded nuclear proliferation but failed to prevent China, India, and Pakistan, from gaining nuclear weapons. Following the Cold War their cooperative relationship changed as Washington began treating Moscow as an unequal partner and their nonproliferation efforts broke down into a cooperative and uncooperative mix. This mix has reduced the effectiveness of their efforts and may accelerate proliferation. The September 11th terrorist attacks put more attention on the nuclear proliferation threat to the international community. If this threat is to be minimized, Washington and Moscow need to work together, as they did against China, to prevent new nuclear powers from emerging. / Captain, United States Air Force

Keywords: emotion, gratitude, social dilemma, cooperation / The emergence of the positive psychology movement has inspired research on positive emotions over the years; yet, several constructs have received limited attention. One of such is gratitude. Research has demonstrated that gratitude leads to prosocial behaviors, such as the engagement in effortful assistance to others, or involving in gift-exchanges in dyadic relationships. However, few studies have directly examined the effects of gratitude on cooperation, particularly, in a social dilemma context. Therefore, the current research aims at investigating the impact of gratitude on cooperative behaviors in a public good game. Traditional methodology in emotion research induces emotions exogenously, i.e. with the use of recall procedures, imagination of scenarios or video clips. Here, a new methodology is introduced where the emotion of gratitude is induced endogenously, within a public good game. Using this new induction procedure, it was found that endogenous gratitude motivated cooperative behaviors. In addition, it was also of interest to investigate the potential influences of contextual factors on the gratitude-cooperation linkage. Studies were systematically conducted to examine three contextual variables, namely; human contact through handshaking, threat of exclusion, and perspective-taking through empathy induction. Results across the four studies suggest that the emotion of gratitude acts as a motivator for cooperative behaviors in the presence of an exclusion option and empathy induction. / Leung, Hildie. / Advisers: Winton Wing-tung Au; Darius Kwan-shing Chan. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 73-06, Section: B, page: . / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2011. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 72-85). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [201-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstract also in Chinese.

This research is about Brazil's international development cooperation in agriculture. I take two cooperation programmes carried out by the Brazilian government in Mozambique – ProSAVANA and More Food International (MFI) – to analyse the processes whereby cooperation policy is formed and transformed. I ask how Brazil's domestic politics interact with international affairs to shape agricultural cooperation with Mozambique. I consider the ‘priests, technicians and traders' of Brazilian cooperation, following a caricature used by one respondent to characterise disputes in ProSAVANA. This triadic portrayal captures the diversity of actors, interests and discourse of Brazilian cooperation. It is also analytically useful to investigate how actors relate to one another and how alliances, networks or coalitions, held together on the basis of convenience, shared beliefs or common narratives, emerge and evolve over time. My analytical approach places actors and interests in the context of institutional processes, but also against policy narratives that are the product of history, state-society interactions and class-based struggles in Brazil. The latter are, in turn, at the root of those institutional processes and actors' identities. Narratives may be used to pursue certain agendas but they also construct the agendas and the identity of the actors that articulate them. My research also emphasises the inter-spatial or travelling dimension of cooperation policy, with flows of influence occurring forwards and backwards. Brazilian actors, interests and discourse travel from Brazil to Mozambique, get interpreted and absorbed selectively and this has repercussions back to the point of origin. Finally, I argue that Brazil's development encounters in Mozambique proved harder to manage than suggested by the presumed affinities and claims about horizontal relations in Brazilian cooperation. The experiences of ProSAVANA and MFI illustrate the challenges facing the Brazilian cooperation narrative and its governing principles. I discuss implications for the Brazilian ‘model' and for the South-South paradigm.

The purpose of this study was to better understand the historical development of the British Columbia (B.C.) community college, university college, and institute system with the focus on the changing nature of voluntary inter-institutional collaboration in relation to provincial coordination. The study also examined the related themes of centralization and decentralization within B.C.'s system and the development of a provincial system of autonomous institutions. The methodology used was qualitative, and more specifically, interpretive in nature and based on the historical method and the underlying assumptions of hermeneutics. The researcher began by analyzing pertinent primary and secondary sources of literature in relation to the study's purpose. The findings from the literature analysis formed the basis for interview questions that were asked of 10 key informants to fill gaps in understanding and confirm findings. The study found that the B.C. system began as a decentralized group of autonomous, community-oriented institutions but became more centrally coordinated by government in the late 1970s and early 1980s, largely because of increased costs and a worsening economy. The 1990s witnessed a high level of centralized decision making with stakeholder involvement, which has been replaced by a move towards decentralization and greater institutional autonomy in the early 2000s based on the market ideology of the new government. Throughout the decades, the B.C. system has had a history of voluntary collaboration but that collaboration has been gradually blended over time with provincial coordination as government built a system of autonomous institutions. The main conclusions of the study are that an appropriate balance may be achievable between centralization and decentralization in order to maintain a coherent system of accountable, autonomous institutions but would need systematic efforts by government and institutions and a policy framework for system governance. Such a balance may be achieved by learning from the lessons of B.C.'s rich history and from the experiences of other jurisdictions. To achieve system goals, the Ministry and institutions could build on the history of voluntary collaborative efforts, which seem particularly important among educators at the program level. The Ministry might reward such collaboration and hold institutions accountable for it. / Graduation date: 2003

Multicast is a bandwidth efficient mechanism to provide wireless services for a group of nodes. Providing reliable wireless multicast is challenging due to channel fading. This thesis investigates cooperation among receiving nodes to enhance the reliability of wireless multicast. A time division based cooperative multicast strategy is proposed, and the optimal scheduling scheme is found to maximize the system throughput. It is shown that the optimal relay number is bounded by a threshold, and the optimal time allocation can be found using an efficient algorithm. Numerical results show that the proposed strategy can enhance network performance when the average channel condition between receiving nodes is better than that of the direct link. To provide incentive for cooperation, this thesis further studies the interactions among selfish nodes using game theoretic approaches. The cooperative multicast process is modeled as a repeated game and the desired cooperation state which satisfies the absolute fairness and the Pareto optimality criteria is found. A Worst Behavior Tit-for-Tat incentive strategy is designed to enforce cooperation and its effectiveness is studied under both the perfect and the imperfect monitoring scenarios. To address the issue of imperfect monitoring, an interval based estimation method is proposed. Simulation results show that the proposed strategy can enforce cooperation efficiently even the monitoring is imperfect. / Signal and Image Processing

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references.

Lag om exploateringssamverkan (ESL) trädde i kraft 1987 och syftet med lagen är bland annat att fastighetsägare i samråd med kommunen ska ha möjlighet att iordningsställa mark och anläggningar för exploatering vid lantmäteriförrättning (Boverket, 2009). Exploateringssamverkan är en användbar metod när behov finns av samverkan i områden med splittrad fastighetsindelning (Proposition 1985/86:2). Vid splittrad fastighetsindelning kan exploateringssamverkan göra det lättare för fastighetsägarna och kommunen att utforma och genomföra en detaljplan utan att vara bundna till fastighetsgränser. Lagstiftningen upplevs komplicerad vilket troligen är en anledning till att ESL endast har använts i fåtalet fall enligt Plan- och byggutredningen (SOU, 2005).    Syftet med arbetet har varit att undersöka processen med exploateringssamverkan och dess möjligheter och begränsningar. Tillämpningen av ESL inom förrättningsförfarandet och kommunikationen mellan de olika aktörerna i exploateringssamverkan har studerats. De metoder som har använts i arbetet är litteraturstudie, fallstudier och intervjuer.   De möjligheter som exploateringssamverkan ger enskilda fastighetsägare är att genomföra exploatering tillsammans med andra fastighetsägare och att exploateringssamverkan kan ske oberoende av fastighetsgränser. Det är nödvändigt att fastighetsägarna har goda kunskaper i planprocessen och är intresserade och driver exploateringen framåt. Begränsningarna är att tvångsinlösen kan ske trots att fastighetsägare inte deltar i exploateringssamverkan. Genomförandet upplevs invecklat och troligen känner fastighetsägarna inte till möjligheten med exploateringssamverkan.   I Sverige finns det stor tillgång av mark för bebyggelse som har låga markvärden men oavsett var det byggs kommer exploateringskostnaderna att vara höga. Den rättvisa fördelning av byggrätter i exploateringssamverkan som i sig är positiv räcker antagligen inte som motiv för delaktighet om det inte finns värdefull mark i området. Det är mer attraktivt med exploateringssamverkan i områden med höga markvärden där exploateringsbehovet och den potentiella vinsten är stora. / The Act on development cooperation (ESL) came into force in 1987 and the purpose of the Act is to provide a tool allowing property owners in consultation with the municipality to consolidate land parcels and provide infrastructure for development, as part of the cadastral survey process (Boverket, 2009). Development cooperation is a useful method when there is a need of collaboration in areas with fragmented real estate (Proposition 1985/86: 2). In areas of fragmented real estate development cooperation can make it easier for property owners and municipalities to design and implement a detailed plan without being tied to property boundaries. The perceived complexity of the legislation is probably one reason why ESL has been applied in only a handful cases, according to the Planning and Building review (SOU, 2005).   The purpose has been to examine the process of development cooperation and its potential and limitations. Furthermore, the application of ESL in the survey process and communication between the various actors in development cooperation was studied. The methods used in the work are literature review, case studies and interviews.   The potential offered to individual property owners in development cooperation was to implement development with other property owners and development cooperation can take place regardless of property boundaries. It is essential that property owners have a good knowledge of the planning process and are interested in development to drive the project forward. The restrictions were that compulsory acquisition can be done despite the fact that property owners do not participate in development cooperation. Implementation perceived complexity and probably do not the property owners know the possibility of development cooperation.   InSweden, land parcels for development are widely available and as a result land values are low, but regardless of location development costs are high. Although a positive factor in itself, the equitable distribution of development rights becomes less of a deciding factor in the absence of valuable land in the area. It is more attractive with development cooperation in areas with high land values where development needs and the potential gain is large.

Religious congregations and social work have long been a neglected field of research. Although the number of studies have increased during the last twenty years. With a starting point in the situation in this field of research and in the current public debate in Sweden the focus of this study will be on how Christian and Muslim congregations view cooperating with the municipalities, organizations, the religious community to whom which the congregation belongs and how the congregations view cooperating with other religious communities. Qualitative method of research was used. Representatives of four religious congregations was interviewed; a deacon in a congregation in the Swedish Lutheran Church, a pastor in a congregation belonging to the Mission Covenent Church of Sweden, the chairman in a the board of a Muslim congregation and volunteerleader in another Muslim congregation. For analyzing the transcribed interviews the method of sentence – categorization was used and institutional theory, political opportunity structure and Bauböcks theory of integration was applied. The result showed the degree and form of cooperation varies between the congregations but all four congregations are overall positive towards cooperating with the municipality, organizations, the own religious community and other religious communities.

Credit through cooperatives in India