This work entitled "Legal and internal regulations in Czech armed forces" endeavours to tackle the relation between legal and internal regulations in public administration focusing on their hierarchy, quantity, liability in specific area of armed forces. At first sight military service is independent on legal code, because there is wide range and amount of relatively autonomous service regulations and official channels. Career soldiers and civil employees have to obey not only the texts of legislation composed of laws, govermental directions etc., but also must maintain discipline and work rules founded on internal orders, guidelines and advices. All commanders and managers as military superiors are obliged to enforce their authority through this regulations. Relation between legal and internal level is not clear. There are many doubts and questions based on facts regarding for instance these features and issues of any internal system of rules: delegation of authority to creation and publishing; verification of compatibility and harmony with legal framework; persistence, integrity, perpetual modifications and amendments.

Most Canadian adults do not meet recommended levels of physical activity; this phenomenon has persisted for many years and is associated with health concerns and chronic disease. These trends appear to affect Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) personnel who have heightened mandates around physical activity. CAF operational mandates combined with these trends highlight the importance of addressing divides between expectation and reality. Traditionally the CAF has used approaches targeted to individuals to manage activity levels; however, there have been no studies exploring the relationship between the environment and activity levels among CAF personnel which has the potential to affect far more people. This dissertation examined built environments where CAF personnel live and explored the relationship between the built environment and active living among CAF personnel. There are two studies in this work. The first study developed a scale with and for the CAF and used this to examine the built environments where CAF personnel live. The results indicated a factor solution and demonstrated good-to-strong psychometric properties. Among the environments, it highlighted areas of strength and potential areas of improvement. These findings contribute to a better understanding of the built environments where CAF personnel live. The second study used data from several sources at individual and neighbourhood levels to conduct a hierarchical linear model analysis to explore the relationship between the built environment and physical activity among CAF personnel. The findings revealed information about the different relationships between active living (measured by physical activity level) of CAF personnel and individual and neighbourhood characteristics. The findings in this dissertation provide novel evidence about the relationship of the built environment and active living among CAF personnel. The aim of this research was to provide evidence and information to decisionmakers that serves to meaningfully contribute to the pursuit of the overall health and wellbeing of CAF members. The findings provided meaningful information to help guide and inform Canadian Forces Morale and Welfare Services (CFMWS) policy, programming, and resource decisions that affect CAF personnel.

Western countries are regarded as open democracies where free speech is viewed assomething that people have fought and died for throughout history; several westernmilitary forces label themselves as defenders of (liberal) democratic values, wherethe citizens’ right to speak is held as utmost importance. Swedish military officershave a unique, compared with other countries, right to participate in public debatesand voice their opinions in news media and on the internet. However, throughouthistory, there have been events that indicate that soldiers do not enjoy the samerights as other citizens. This thesis explores how the Swedish Armed Forces handlefreedom of expression within its ranks and define the perceived existence of a“sphere of unsuitability”. All reviewed cases refer to a situation where the individualpublicly contradicts the organisations’ own expressed views and interests. Thisthesis has identified the existence of a “sphere of unsuitability” that, together withambiguous messages from the Swedish Armed Forces, has led to military personnelwithdrawing from public debates, even under anonymity. The conflict between theindividual’s freedom of expression and military interests occurs on several levelswhen criticism lies outside what the Armed Forces perceive as acceptable.In summary, the tentative conclusion is that although loyalty and reliabilitymay be called into question by the military, it is when the Armed Forces’ labels anexpression or opinion as unsuitable that the individual may lose any furtheropportunities of a career. The study makes two main research contributions. First,addressing how the Swedish Armed Forces deal with freedom of expression withinits organisation provides an empirical investigation of a critical democratic issue.Second, by identifying a perceived “sphere of unsuitability”, including how such asphere is constructed, the thesis adds theoretical substance to a developing researchfield.

This research critically examines the international protection of children education during the Syrian armed conflict since 2011. It identifies the reasons behind the failure of the international community in providing the necessary protection and its impacts on the Syrian children education. It analyzes the legal protection available to children education in situations of armed conflict in accordance with the international law. In order to evaluate the reluctance of the international community humanitarian intervention under the principle of Responsibility to Protect, this research used the textual analysis method and the realism and liberalism theories. Altogether, during the eight years of the ongoing Syrian conflict, children right to education have been violated throughout Syria, and millions have been out of schools, and many are at high risk to dropout. The research concludes that the vetoes in the Security Council and political and economic considerations among the superpowers have overcome the legal protection.

Online decision making is a kind of machine learning problems where decisions are made in a sequential manner so as to accumulate as many rewards as possible. Typical examples include multi-armed bandit (MAB) problems where an agent needs to decide which arm to pull in each round, and network routing problems where each router needs to decide the next hop for each packet. Thompson sampling (TS) is an efficient and effective algorithm for online decision making problems. Although TS has been proposed for a long time, it was not until recent years that the theoretical guarantees for TS in the standard MAB were given. In this thesis, we first analyze the performance of TS both theoretically and practically in a special MAB called combinatorial MAB with sleeping arms and long-term fairness constraints (CSMAB-F). Then, we apply TS to a novel reactive network routing problem, called \emph{opportunistic routing without link metrics known a priori}, and use the proof techniques we developed for CSMAB-F to analyze the performance. / Graduate

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A research report submitted to the Faculty of Management, University of the Witwatersrand, in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree Master of Management (in the field of Public and Development Management) 2016 / The purpose of this research study was to obtain the views and perceptions of Namibia veterans of the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia (PLAN), the armed wingof SWAPO, on compensation as a part of the disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) process. This process compensates former freedom fighters as a reward for having contributed to the liberation struggle. DDR is one of the most important peace stabilising tools that is internationally recognised and the UN has adopted it as a pre-requisite for any peace agreement process in countrieswhich had experienced violent conflict. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the war veterans’ perception regarding ‘compensation’ being paid as a reward to former fighters of the Namibia liberation struggle by the Ministry of Veterans’ Affairs.Structured interviews were conducted to collect data, and data analysis was done by identifying themes.Microsoft Excel statistics functions were used to calculate the totals, produce tables, graphs and pie charts. The main finding of the study was that the former freedom fighters were facing many challenges and the government was far from addressing these challenges in their totality. The study found that the government was committed to address the plight of the former freedom fighters; however, the implementation of such a programme was fraught with challenges, such as the lack of resources and good governance. Moreover, the study established that the reintegration process was not addressing the issues of both groups of ex-combatants in Namibia. / GR2018

Stochastic bandit algorithms are increasingly being used in the domain of recommender systems, when the environment is very dynamic and the items to recommend are frequently changing over time. While traditional approaches consider a single bandit instance which assumes all users to be equal, recent developments in the literature showed that the quality of recommendations can be improved when individual bandit instances for different users are considered and clustering techniques are used. In this work we develop an algorithm which clusters users based on the context at disposal using a Bayesian framework called Thompson Sampling, opposed to a similar algorithm called CAB recently presented at ICML 2017 (International Conference on Machine Learning), which uses a deterministic strategy. We show extensively through experiments on synthetic and real world data that the perfor- mance of our algorithm is in line with its deterministic version CAB when it comes to the quality of recommendations. On the other hand, our approach is relatively faster when considering running time. / Stokastiska bandit-algoritmer används allt mer för rekommenderande system där omgivningen är väldigt dynamisk och de rekommenderade föremålen ständigt byts ut. Medan traditionella tillvägagångssätt använder en enkel bandit-instans som antar alla användare att vara likadana, har litteraturen under senare tid visat att kvaliteten av rekommendationerna kan förhöjas med användarspecifika bandit-instanser och med hjälp av klustringsalgoritmer. I detta projekt har en algoritm utvecklats som klustrar användare baserat på kontexten för disposition genom att använda ett Bayesianskt ramverk som kallas Thompson-sampling, till skillnad från den liknande algoritmen CAD som nyligen presenterades vid ICML 2017 (International Conference on Machine Learning), som använder en deterministisk strategi. Projektet visar med stor omfattning, med hjälp av experiment som använt både syntetiska och reella data, att den framtagna algoritmens genererade rekommendationer håller likvärdig kvalitet som den deterministiska varianten av CAB. Däremot ger vårt presenterade tillvägagångssätt högre prestanda avseende tidsåtgång.

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This diploma thesis is puzzled with influence of NATO on Army of Czech Republic (ACR)'s armaments and if this influence is key factor in decision making regarding new acquisition projects or if other factors have bigger impact on decision making in question. NATO with the USA as its main sponsor is more benevolent than Warsaw Pact of which The Czech Republic was part during Cold War. Even though we can observe attempts to force member states into increasing their defense budgets from position of power, the main principle in new armament acquisition is standardization, which is based on semi-voluntary bases. However, in case of The Czech Republic standardization is not starting factor for new acquisition project. Change in security environment after Russian aggression in Ukraine in 2014 forced states to into increasing their defense budgets, which was manifested itself in summit in Wales in 2014, where NATO member states promised to allocate 2% of GDP by 2024. However, it was observed that not all states will meet this deadline and that size of state do not play significant role. Increasing of defense budget allowed ACR to start long awaited modernization projects. This diploma thesis found that not NATO but outdated equipment with fear from being dependent on Russian provisioning plays a key role.