<p>The globalization of political and economic processes is a growing moral concern for theologians and political philosophers alike. My thesis aims to outline, analyze, and compare church studies of globalization with global theories of justice.</p><p>To do this, I draw upon recent studies of globalization made by the World Council of Churches (WCC) and the Lutheran World Federation (LWF). The WCC and LWF are two global reaching church organizations. They have a common aim of uniting churches for ecumenical dialogue and are involved in social, economic, political, and ecological questions. The WCC and LWF analyze globalization by applying biblical and theological principles from the Christian tradition. Out of this analysis comes an invitation to resist globalization and seek economic alternatives. Their work forms a moral discourse about globalization from a theological ethical perspective.</p><p>In comparison, I consider theories of global justice by political philosophers in the liberal tradition (i.e., John Rawls). The two philosophers I draw upon are Thomas Pogge and Kok-Chor Tan. Their recent work forms a moral discourse that attempts to globalize Rawls’s liberal principles of political and economic justice. These principles challenge globalization and build an argument for greater global justice. This argument calls for a restructuring of today’s global political and financial institutions. In my thesis, this work also acts as lens for which to critically analyze the church studies.</p><p>Finally, I consider a potential and positive relationship between these two kinds of global moral discourses, between theological ethics and political philosophy. This relationship helps the church develop ethics for a realistic global citizenship. More importantly, this relationship creates a reasonable and broad based consensus for global justice. Such a consensus is demanded in a global context of plurality and secularity.</p>

Grid computing emerged as a framework for supporting complex operations over large datasets; it enables the harnessing of large numbers of processors working in parallel to solve computing problems that typically spread across various domains. We focus on the problems of data management in a grid/cloud environment. The broader context of designing a services oriented architecture (SOA) for information integration is studied, identifying the main components for realizing this architecture. The BioFederator is a web services-based data federation architecture for bioinformatics applications. Based on collaborations with bioinformatics researchers, several domain-specific data federation challenges and needs are identified. The BioFederator addresses such challenges and provides an architecture that incorporates a series of utility services; these address issues like automatic workflow composition, domain semantics, and the distributed nature of the data. The design also incorporates a series of data-oriented services that facilitate the actual integration of data. Schema integration is a core problem in the BioFederator context. Previous methods for schema integration rely on the exploration, implicit or explicit, of the multiple design choices that are possible for the integrated schema. Such exploration relies heavily on user interaction; thus, it is time consuming and labor intensive. Furthermore, previous methods have ignored the additional information that typically results from the schema matching process, that is, the weights and in some cases the directions that are associated with the correspondences. We propose a more automatic approach to schema integration that is based on the use of directed and weighted correspondences between the concepts that appear in the source schemas. A key component of our approach is a ranking mechanism for the automatic generation of the best candidate schemas. The algorithm gives more weight to schemas that combine the concepts with higher similarity or coverage. Thus, the algorithm makes certain decisions that otherwise would likely be taken by a human expert. We show that the algorithm runs in polynomial time and moreover has good performance in practice. The proposed methods and algorithms are compared to the state of the art approaches. The BioFederator design, services, and usage scenarios are discussed. We demonstrate how our architecture can be leveraged on real world bioinformatics applications. We preformed a whole human genome annotation for nucleosome exclusion regions. The resulting annotations were studied and correlated with tissue specificity, gene density and other important gene regulation features. We also study data processing models on grid environments. MapReduce is one popular parallel programming model that is proven to scale. However, using the low-level MapReduce for general data processing tasks poses the problem of developing, maintaining and reusing custom low-level user code. Several frameworks have emerged to address this problem; these frameworks share a top-down approach, where a high-level language is used to describe the problem semantics, and the framework takes care of translating this problem description into the MapReduce constructs. We highlight several issues in the existing approaches and alternatively propose a novel refined MapReduce model that addresses the maintainability and reusability issues, without sacrificing the low-level controllability offered by directly writing MapReduce code. We present MapReduce-LEGOS (MR-LEGOS), an explicit model for composing MapReduce constructs from simpler components, namely, "Maplets", "Reducelets" and optionally "Combinelets". Maplets and Reducelets are standard MapReduce constructs that can be composed to define aggregated constructs describing the problem semantics. This composition can be viewed as defining a micro-workflow inside the MapReduce job. Using the proposed model, complex problem semantics can be defined in the encompassing micro-workflow provided by MR-LEGOS while keeping the building blocks simple. We discuss the design details, its main features and usage scenarios. Through experimental evaluation, we show that the proposed design is highly scalable and has good performance in practice.

Rund 20 Jahre nach dem Ende der Sowjetunion verharrt ein Großteil ländlich geprägter Regionen in der Russländischen Föderation in einer strukturellen Krise, die sich auf ökonomischer, sozialer und politischer Ebene niederschlägt. Auch wenn sich ländliche Räume als vermeintliche Verlierer der Transformation erwiesen haben, so sind sie doch vielfach in sich differenziert und zeigen verschiedenartige Problemlagen und Entwicklungspfade auf, die vom Umgang mit den Herausforderungen des Systemwechsels zeugen. Beispielhaft wird dies am Deutschen Nationalen Rayon Altai (DNR Altai) dargestellt, dessen Transformationsphase in der vorliegenden Arbeit rekonstruiert wird. Der DNR Altai stellt in vielerlei Hinsicht einen Sonderfall dar, da er als räumlicher Fixpunkt russlanddeutscher Entwicklungspolitik in die bundesdeutsche Förderkulisse eingebettet war. Mit dem allmählichen Rückzug der deutschen Förderinstitutionen stellt sich jedoch die Frage nach nachhaltigen Strukturen, Verstetigung von Projekten und der Zukunft russlanddeutscher Kultur im Altai.

In grids, delegation is a key facility that can be used to authenticate and authorize requests on behalf of disconnected users. In current grid systems,delegation is either performed dynamically, in an unrestricted manner, or by a secure but static method. Unfortunately, the former compromises security and the latter cannot satisfy the requirements of dynamic grid application execution. Therefore, development of a delegation framework that enables a restricted and flexible delegation mechanism becomes increasingly urgent as grids are adopted by new communities and grow in size. The main barriers in development of such a mechanism are the requirements for dynamic execution of grid applications, which make it difficult to anticipate required access rights for completing tasks in advance. Another significant architectural requirement in grids is federated security and trust. A considerable barrier to achieving this is cross-organizational authentication and identification. Organizations participating in Virtual Organizations (VOs) may use different security infrastructures that implement different protocols for authentication and identification; thus, there exists a need to provide an architectural mechanism for lightweight, rapid and interoperable translation of security credentials from an original format to a format understandable by recipients. This thesis contributes the development of a delegation framework that utilizes a mechanism for determining and acquiring only required rights and credentials for completing a task, when they are needed. This is what we call an on-demand delegation framework that realizes a bottom-up delegation model and provides a just-in-time acquisition of rights for restricted and dynamic delegation. In this thesis, we further contribute the development of a credential mapping mechanism using off-the-shelf standards and technologies. This mechanism provides support for an on-the-fly exchange of different types of security credentials used by the security mechanisms of existing grids. / QC 20100622

The globalization of political and economic processes is a growing moral concern for theologians and political philosophers alike. My thesis aims to outline, analyze, and compare church studies of globalization with global theories of justice. To do this, I draw upon recent studies of globalization made by the World Council of Churches (WCC) and the Lutheran World Federation (LWF). The WCC and LWF are two global reaching church organizations. They have a common aim of uniting churches for ecumenical dialogue and are involved in social, economic, political, and ecological questions. The WCC and LWF analyze globalization by applying biblical and theological principles from the Christian tradition. Out of this analysis comes an invitation to resist globalization and seek economic alternatives. Their work forms a moral discourse about globalization from a theological ethical perspective. In comparison, I consider theories of global justice by political philosophers in the liberal tradition (i.e., John Rawls). The two philosophers I draw upon are Thomas Pogge and Kok-Chor Tan. Their recent work forms a moral discourse that attempts to globalize Rawls’s liberal principles of political and economic justice. These principles challenge globalization and build an argument for greater global justice. This argument calls for a restructuring of today’s global political and financial institutions. In my thesis, this work also acts as lens for which to critically analyze the church studies. Finally, I consider a potential and positive relationship between these two kinds of global moral discourses, between theological ethics and political philosophy. This relationship helps the church develop ethics for a realistic global citizenship. More importantly, this relationship creates a reasonable and broad based consensus for global justice. Such a consensus is demanded in a global context of plurality and secularity.

The Red Cross, Red Crescent and Red Crystal Movement is the largest humanitarian movement in the world with 97 million volunteer workers around the globe. The organisation relies on seven fundamental principles, the Neutrality Principle being one of them. The questions of this essay are: *Is it yet possible to provide neutral humanitarian aid in the 21st century? *Have the humanitarian crisis’s changed between the 20th century and the 21st century?

During Soviet Russia, there was an active policy of forced assimilation of minorities into one cultural identity: Russian. This loss of cultural identity came in many forms of resettlement, deportation, discriminatory language policies and economic practices. All of these policies and actions led to large groups of people from the North Caucasus giving up their unique cultural identity and adopting the Russian cultural identity. Many of the policies and actions of the Soviet Union reflected the actions of the United States during the forced assimilation process of the Native Americans. Throughout this process of losing their cultural identity, the people of the North Caucasus could have maintained their unique cultural identity at home or in the local school system, but chose not to for various reasons. This choice to shed their own cultural identity and adopt the Russian identity has had detrimental effect s on the region and some cultures are on the brink of extinction. Not all the people of the North Caucasus willingly assimilated and accepted the Russian way of life; the Chechens have fought the Russians since their first excursion into the North Caucasus and continue to fight to this day for independence and freedom. / text

Poetry by Russian women which has been published since the fall of the Soviet Union reveals that the quest to explore female identity and experience is no longer inviolable in Russian literature. This thesis examines female personae, gender and cultural identity in the work of Russian poets Nina Iskrenko (1951--1994), Tatiana Voltskaia (b. 1960), and Iuliia Kunina (b. 1966). Although the poetics of these writers' texts are broad-ranging, all of their work takes up the subjects of gender and cultural identity. Their poems explore identity as a discursive practice, rather than a fixed construct within the strictures of authoritative metanarratives' binary oppositions (male/female, feminine/masculine, Russian/non-Russian). This lends their poetry to postmodern analysis, an approach that heretofore has rarely been applied to poetry by Russian women. Within this theoretical framework, Judith Butler's formulation of "performativity" and Mikhail Epstein's theory of "transculturalism" are particularly well-suited to the task, as each entails non-essentialist conceptions of identity. Donna Haraway's formulation of "woman" as cyborg" is also a fitting theoretical complement, as it suggests the hybridization of identity, as well as the increasing role of the Internet in contemporary and future developments in Russian literature. The rapid changes in the late- and post-Soviet cultural landscape have engendered in contemporary poetry by Russian women powerful, new expressions of gender and cultural identity, which are resulting in startling subversions of authoritative discourses while at the same time forging coalitional "transmodern" identities.

No abstract available. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1992.

No description available.