Although federal circuit and district court judges are placed within a federal hierarchy, and receive legal and judicial training that emphasizes the importance of the judicial framework and its structure, such judges are also subjected to other pressures such as the types of litigants within the courtrooms as well as their local political environment. Furthermore, such judges are apt to form their own views about politics and legal policy and are often appointed by presidents who approve of their ideological leanings. Thus, federal courts are caught between competing goals such as their willingness to maximize their preferred legal policy, and their place within the judicial hierarchy. This dissertation applies hierarchy and impact theory to assess the importance of the judicial framework and its socialization, by analyzing both the judicial opinions and votes of federal circuit and district court judges in obscenity cases during a four-decade period (1957-1998). The research presented here finds the influence of higher court precedent to correspond in part with the conception of a judicial hierarchy. An analysis of citations of Supreme Court precedent (Roth v. United States (1957) and Miller v. California (1973)) in lower court majority opinions suggests low levels of compliance: lower courts at the circuit and district court level do not signal to the Supreme Court their acceptance of High Court doctrine; thus, except for 'factual' cases, most circuit and district court decisions do not comply formally with higher court precedent. An analysis of judicial votes, however, suggests that a Supreme Court doctrinal shift (to Miller v. California) influences lower court decisions only at the circuit court level. Further investigation suggests that Supreme Court precedent has a greater influence in circuit courts than in district courts: not only is the magnitude greater for circuit (versus district) court decisions, such results occur when controlling for such factors as the appointing president, regional variations, various constitutional claims and types of litigants. Thus, it appears that the influence of Supreme Court doctrine is much stronger in the circuit courts (only one step removed from the Supreme Court) than in district courts yet the hierarchy is influential nonetheless.

The German government is experiencing difficulties housing and assimilating Syrian refugees in its borders. Erecting temporary shelters on location is one way to deal with the current crises. This thesis attempts to use Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to determine the optimum combination of materials and construction methods to be used in the shelter’s walls in order to improve the living conditions of the refugees and to ensure that the cost is acceptable to the German government. This thesis compares six existing wall panel products from China, which have the lowest cost on the worldwide market. The R-value, strength, price, weight, durability, ease of assembly, assembly time, maintenance costs, comfort, resale value, and appearance were evaluated. Assumptions were made on what the German government would require and on standard building practices in Europe and America. The analysis indicates that the steel frame house from YONGYANG Steel best satisfies the needs in this situation. This thesis produced an AHP template, which is flexible. This model that was developed for the German scenario can be effectively applied to differing emergent situations in other parts of the world.

The manner in which public servants are held to account and the purposes of accountability at the bureaucratic level is a relatively unexplored field. This dissertation is comprised of three separate studies investigating hierarchical accountability, the accounting officer system in Canada, and accountability among public servants. Together, they address critical questions: i) how can existing theory on accountability be reconciled with hierarchy and the delegation of authority; ii) the principles and practices of the accounting officer system; and iii) internal public service accountability mechanisms. This dissertation explores whether we can develop — and implement — a systematic approach to empirically investigating how accountability is practiced, as a means of advancing our theoretical and practical understanding of accountability. The three studies draw on evidence collected over a four-year period, including interviews with public servants conducted in Australia, Canada, and the Netherlands. Some of the key theoretical perspectives evaluated include an adapted version of Aucoin and Heintzman’s (2000) framework on accountability and performance management and, Bovens, Schillemans and ’t Hart’s (2008) practices and purposes of accountability framework. The conclusions of the dissertation are threefold: first, that while overall the normative purposes of accountability as described in the frameworks (democratic control, assurance, learning and results) are, to a substantial degree, observed in practice, there are nonetheless some serious deficiencies in our understanding of the purposes of accountability; second, there is considerable variation in practices from jurisdiction to jurisdiction and, within each specific jurisdiction, specific practices are shaped to a considerable degree by the institutionalized context in which these practices are carried out; and third, an empirical approach to studying accountability practices offers a promising way to address the lack of empirical knowledge, and a way to bolster both our theoretical and practical understanding of actual accountability practices. / Graduate / 0617 / 0615

The purpose of this study has been to identify how the work is conducted in five municipal homes for care and accommodation for unaccompanied refugee youths. Five qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with six respondents who work as staff in the youth accommodation for unaccompanied refugee youths. The results were analyzed based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The results showed a spread among the youths where some had difficulties with the most basic needs such as eating and sleeping, while other young people had worked their way up in the hierarchy and were on the top of the stairs working for self-actualization. / Syftet med den här studien har varit att kartlägga hur arbetet ser ut på fem kommunala hem för vård och boende för ensamkommande flyktingungdomar. Fem kvalitativa semistrukturerade intervjuer har genomförts med sex respondenter som arbetar som personal på ungdomsboenden för ensamkommande flyktingungdomar. Resultatet analyserades med utgångspunkt i Maslows behovstrappa. Resultatet visade en spridning bland ungdomarna där en del har svårigheter med de mest grundläggande behoven såsom matintag och sömn, medan andra ungdomar har arbetat sig upp till behovstrappans högsta punkt och arbetar för självförverkligande.

Providing a consistent view of the shared memory based on precise and well-defined semantics—memory consistency model—has been an enabling factor in the widespread acceptance and commercial success of shared-memory architectures. Moreover, cache coherence protocols have been employed by the hardware to remove from the programmers the burden of dealing with the memory inconsistency that emerges in the presence of the private caches. The principle behind all such cache coherence protocols is to guarantee that consistent values are read from the private caches at all times. In its most stringent form, a cache coherence protocol eagerly enforces two invariants before each data modification: i) no other core has a copy of the data in its private caches, and ii) all other cores know where to receive the consistent data should they need the data later. Nevertheless, by partly transferring the responsibility for maintaining those invariants to the programmers, commercial multicores have adopted weaker memory consistency models, namely the Total Store Order (TSO), in order to optimize the performance for more common cases. Moreover, memory models with more relaxed invariants have been proposed based on the observation that more and more software is written in compliance with the Data-Race-Free (DRF) semantics. The semantics of DRF software can be leveraged by the hardware to infer when data in the private caches might be inconsistent. As a result, hardware ignores the inconsistent data and retrieves the consistent data from the shared memory. DRF semantics therefore removes from the hardware the burden of eagerly enforcing the strong consistency invariants before each data modification. Instead, consistency is guaranteed only when needed. This results in manifold optimizations, such as reducing the energy consumption and improving the performance and scalability. The efficiency of detecting and discarding the inconsistent data is an important factor affecting the efficiency of such coherence protocols. For instance, discarding the consistent data does not affect the correctness, but results in performance loss and increased energy consumption. In this thesis we show how data classification can be leveraged as an effective tool to simplify the cache coherence based on the DRF semantics. In particular, we introduce simple but efficient hardware-based private/shared data classification techniques that can be used to efficiently detect the inconsistent data, thus enabling low-overhead and scalable cache coherence solutions based on the DRF semantics.

En el presente estudio aplicamos la perspectiva poscolonial a dos novelas peruanas de temática afroperuana: Matalaché (1928) de Enrique López Albújar y Malambo (2001) de Lucía Charún-Illescas con el fin de aportar conocimientos sobre ellas. Dentro del marco de nuestro análisis queremos identificar cómo las caracterizaciones de los personajes, y la influencia de algunos factores determinantes relacionados a ellos, se diferencian según el grupo al que pertenecen dentro de la jerarquía colonial. Partimos de la premisa de que la literatura poscolonial tiene diferentes etapas de distanciamiento de la colonialidad y que las novelas escogidas pertenecen a dos etapas distintas. Consecuentemente, el análisis busca revelar las diversas formas en las que las caracterizaciones de los personajes, la influencia de los factores determinantes y la imagen de la jerarquía colonial, se distinguen entre las dos obras. El análisis señala que los personajes pueden ser caracterizados a base del tipo de personaje retratado, del nombre del personaje, del uso de títulos y el trato personal, del lenguaje, y a través de la influencia de los factores determinantes religión, raza, clase, economía y trabajo, y género. A base de los resultados encontrados en el análisis concluimos que las caracterizaciones y la influencia de los factores determinantes en las imágenes de los personajes en las novelas manifiestan una valoración que define a qué grupo social pertenecen estos personajes. Además, identificamos una valoración de los grupos de personajes que influye en el posicionamiento de los mismos en la jerarquía colonial. Finalmente concluimos que las caracterizaciones en Matalaché (1928) se acercan más a la estructura colonial que las caracterizaciones en Malambo (2001), lo que, por consiguiente, indica que ambas novelas sí pertenecen a diferentes etapas de distanciamiento de la colonialidad dentro de la literatura poscolonial peruana de temática afroperuana. / In this investigation, we apply a postcolonial perspective on two novels with afro-peruvian thematics: Matalaché (1928) by Enrique López Albújar and Malambo (2001) by Lucía Charún-Illescas, aiming to contribute to an increased understanding of these novels. Within the framework of our analysis we try to identify how the characterizations of the characters, and the influence of some determining factors relating to these, vary depending on the group they belong to within the colonial hierarchy. As a starting point, we assume that the postcolonial literature has different stages in which it distances itself from its colonial past, and that the chosen novels belong to two different stages. The analysis tries to reveal the different forms in which the characterizations of the characters, the influence of the determining factors and the image of the colonial hierarchy differs between the two novels. The analysis shows that characters can be characterized through the way they are depicted, the name of the characters, the use of titles and the way they are addressed, and through their language, also through the influence of the determining factors religion, race, class, economy and labor, and gender. Considering the results encountered in the analysis we conclude that the characterizations and the influence of the determining factors in the images of the characters in the texts shows a valuation that defines in which social group these characters belong. We also identify a valuation of the character groups that influences the positioning of said groups in the colonial hierarchy. Finally, we conclude that the characterizations in Matalaché (1928) more closely resembles those of the colonial structure than the characterizations in Malambo (2001). This indicates that the novels do belong to different stages of distance to colonialism within the peruvian postcolonial literature with afro-peruvian thematics.

The Myth of the Old South, like all myths, contains some elements of truth, but like all myths, it contains some things that are not true. Faulkner has used those parts of the Myth that are true, but he has repudiated and in many cases destroyed those parts of the Myth which he has found to be the product of imagination rather than history.

The most of existing text compression methods is based on the same base concept. First the Input text is divided into sequence of text units. These text units cat be single symbols, syllables or words. When compressing large text files, searching for redundancies over longer text units is usually more effective than searching over the shorter ones. But if we choose words as base units we cannot anymore catch redundancies over symbols and syllables. In this paper we propose a new text compression method called Hierarchical compresssion. It constructs hierarchical grammar to store redundancies over syllables, words and upper levels of text. The code of the text then consists of code of this grammer. We proposed a strategy for constructing hierarchical grammar for concrete input text and we proposed an effective way how to encode it. Above mentioned our proposed method is compared with some other common methods of text compression.

The main goal of my thesis is to map the legal regulation of municipal waste management in the Czech Republic. The reason for the study of the legal regulation is to establish whether the regulation has sufficient instruments to treat the municipal waste in compliance of the waste management hierarchy that is grounded in the European Union's Waste Framework Directive. The thesis also deals with the different concept of the municipal waste in Czech and European legislation. It mentions the differences that would be carried out to the field of municipal waste by the planned legislation.

The purpose of this study is to find out from a didactic perspective, how traditional gender roles emerge in the classroom and the conceptions of traditional gender roles. This is explored from a student’s perspective. The theoretical frame of this study is gender system, which consists of the principles of separation and hierarchy. The survey is conducted in two classes in third grade. This study answers following questions: How do traditional gender roles appear in the classroom from a student´s perspective? Which conception exist about traditional gender roles from a student's perspective? The study is based on observations and interviews, which is analysed of the gender system theory and the theoretical concept traditional gender roles. The results of this study show that the students' behavior in the classroom and their thinking are mostly based on the traditional gender roles, which is characterized mostly by the principles of separation and hierarchy.  However, some situations and statements show a change, in which the principles of separation and hierarchy are questioned. The individual situations reflect that the transfer of the gender contract is minimized from one generation to another.