This diploma thesis deals with access to environmental information and access to justice in environmental matters introduced by Aarhus Convention in the specific conditions of Czech Republic and Ireland. These rights are considered to be very important tools for environmental protection. At a time when people threaten their own existence by negative interference with the environment it is necessary that effective means for its protection exist. These means are access to environmental information and access to justice in environmental matters, which together can be called as environmental procedural rights. The first chapter of this thesis presents the sources of environmental procedural law and observes the development of law at international, European and national level. The most important international document in this field is the Aarhus Convention that was adopted in 1998 by most of the European countries and that provides for access to environmental information, access to justice and public participation in environmental decision-making. This convention has largely affected the law of the European Union, where several directives has been adopted, including most importantly the Directive 2003/4/EC on access to environmental information and the Directive 2003/35/EC on public participation in...

Adequate access to affordable, healthy food has long been a public health concern and has become a more pressing societal issue following the Great Recession and rising incidents of diet-related diseases. In response, research and government efforts have largely focused on identifying disadvantaged areas with poor food access and formulating policies to improve accessibility. However, the approaches that have been widely relied upon by researchers and practitioners for food access assessment are severely flawed, which may lead to inconsistent research findings or neglect of the needs of under-served/un-served neighborhoods. This dissertation identifies three important aspects of food access for improvement: the appropriate scale/neighborhoods for analysis, the use of food outlets as a proxy for affordable, healthy food; and the assessment method. In particular, three studies are conducted to: (1) examine how varying spatial scales and aggregation methods affect accessibility assessments; (2) explore the role of independent grocers, which have been neglected in previous food access studies as elements of the food landscape that may change the perception of food deserts; and (3) investigate how individual-level food access patterns compare to the widely used, area-based neighborhood measures of expected accessibility. While the dissertation discusses and addresses theoretical challenges in food access, the empirical studies conducted in the Tucson, Arizona metropolitan area contribute to a better understanding of the real-world complexity of food access. The results shed light on some predicaments identified in recent studies and have important policy implications for how best to efficiently and effectively design strategies and initiatives to enhance food-provision access.

Student Number 9705165A Master of Arts in Forced Migration Studies Faculty of Humanities / Objective: To identify and investigate barriers faced by Somali forced migrants when accessing health care in Johannesburg. In particular, the study seeks to compare perceptions of health personnel and migrants as to the nature of such access constraints. Design and Methods: The study made use of semi-structured and in-depth interviews with a snowball sample of health personnel and migrants. Ten health personnel were interviewed and twenty migrants (ten male and ten female). Results: Constraints of language and xenophobia were identified by both health personnel and forced migrant interviewed. Constraints related to the shortage of resources and the poor functioning of the referral system are experienced by all users of the public health system, irrespective of their nationality. No mention was made of traditional or allopathic medicine. Conclusions: There exists a gap between the access to health care guaranteed in the Refugees Act and practices at facility level. There are many similarities across interviews in the constraints identified by migrants and some agreement in the constraints identified by migrants and health personnel. These results confirm that migrants experience a fairly severe level of constraint when attempting to utilize formal health care services in Johannesburg.

Term rewriting -- an expressive language based on equational logic -- can be used to author and analyze policies that are part of an access control system. Maude is a simple, yet powerful, reflective programming language based on term rewriting that models systems along with the subjects, objects and actions within them. We specify the behavior of the system as a theory defined by conditional rewrite rules, and define the access control policy as an equational theory in a separate module. The tools that Maude provides, such as the Maude Model Checker and the Sufficient Completeness Checker, are used to reason about the behavior and verify properties of access control systems in an automated manner.

Open access has played a significant part in the development of scholarlycommunication. Today, several research funding agencies around the worldrequires that the results of the research it supports must be published openaccess where the underlying idea is that publicly funded research should befree and available to all users. The purpose of this thesis is to discuss the issueof open access publishing from the perspective of researchers in the field ofodontology, focused on their attitudes, behaviors and publishing experienceswith open access. Through a qualitative interview study with fiveodontological researchers, the results have been compared to previous studieson researchers' attitudes and experiences with open access. The results showthat both knowledge and experience with open access publishing is fairly lowamong the participating scientists. Generally, a positive attitude towards openaccess in other research areas can be identified among odontologicalresearchers, but when it comes to publishing within their own discipline openaccess is considered to be insignificant, so due to the availability of journalsamong the researchers considered to be adequate to cover their informationneeds. The results also identifies a negative view of open access publishingthrough institutional repositories, as these are not considered to add any valueto their career development. A quantitative study would have given a moregeneral view of researchers' attitudes and experiences of open accesspublishing. The results of this paper should therefore not be generalized andconsidered as representative of all researchers within the odontologicalresearch discipline. / Program: Bibliotekarie

The aim of this bachelor-thesis is to study how postgraduates approach open access during times of change within scholarly communication. Our theoretical framework is based upon Knorr Cetinas epistemic cultures and Cullen & Chawners theory that there is a paradigmatic conflict within scholarly communication due to the fact that open access has failed to reach the same level of prominence among researchers as it has within research libraries. We interviewed six postgraduates at Malmö högskola in order to find answers to our research questions. We identified a shared epistemic culture among the postgraduates, which can be explained by the fact that being postgraduates, they all share similar experiences and values. We chose to call this epistemic culture the horizontal epistemic culture. During the interviews institution-specific cultures were expressed as well. These institution-specific cultures we chose to call the vertical epistemic cultures. Our study shows that the basic principle of the open access movement, namely to make all research freely available, has encountered difficulties when it comes to being incorporated within both the horizontal and the vertical epistemic culture. The statements of the postgraduates unanimously show that open access is viewed neither as a concept nor as a real publishing-alternative for them. We can conclude that the statements of the postgraduates show a similar conflict between the traditional publishing system and open access publishing that Cullen and Chawner identified. Research libraries should be aware of these cultures in order to be able to collaborate more efficiently with the postgraduates. / Program: Bibliotekarie

Motivated by the fact that the contention graph associated with ICN is a Markov random field (MRF) with respect to the probability distribution of its system states, and that the belief propagation algorithm (BP) is an efficient way to solve "inference" problems in graphical models such as MRF, we study how to apply BP algorithms to the analysis and control of CSMA wireless networks. We investigate three applications: (1) computation of link throughputs given link access intensities; (2) computation of link access intensities required to meet target link throughputs; and (3) optimization of network utility via the control of link access intensities. We show that BP solves the three problems with exact results in tree networks and has manageable computation errors in a network with loopy contention graph. In particular, we show how a generalized version of BP, GBP, can be designed to solve the three problems above with higher accuracy. Importantly, we show how the BP and GBP algorithms can be implemented in a distributed manner, making them useful in practical CSMA network operation. / The above studies focus on computation and control of "equilibrium" link throughputs. Besides throughputs, an important performance measure in CSMA networks is the propensity for starvation. In this thesis, we show that links in CSMA wireless networks are particularly susceptible to "temporal" starvation. Specifically, certain links may have good equilibrium throughputs, yet they can still receive no throughput for extended periods from time to time. We develop a "trap theory" to analyze temporal throughput fluctuations. The trap theory serves two functions. First, it allows us to derive new mathematical results that shed light on the transient behavior of CSMA networks. Second, we can develop automated analytical tools for computing the "degrees of starvation" for CSMA networks to aid network design. We believe that the ability to identify and characterize temporal starvation as established in this thesis will serve as an important first step toward the design of effective remedies for it. / This thesis investigates the performance and control of CSMA wireless networks. To this end, an analytical model of CSMA wireless networks that captures the essence of their operation is important. We propose an Ideal CSMA Network (ICN) model to characterize the dynamic of the interactions and dependency of links in CSMA wireless networks. This model allows us to address various issues related to performance and control of CSMA networks. / We show that the throughput distributions of links in ICN can be computed from a continuous-time Markov chain and are insensitive to the distributions of the transmission time (packet duration) and the backoff countdown time in the CSMA MAC protocol given the ratio of their means rho, referred to as the access intensity. An outcome of the ICN model is a Back-of-the-Envelope (BoE) approximate computation method that allows us to bypass complicated stochastic analysis to compute link throughputs in many network configurations quickly. The BoE computation method emerges from ICN in the limit rho → infinity. Our results indicate that BoE is a good approximation technique for modest-size networks such as those typically seen in 802.11 deployments. Beyond serving as the foundation for BoE, the theoretical framework of ICN is also a foundation for understanding and optimization of large CSMA networks. / Kai, Caihong. / Adviser: Soung Chang Liew. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 73-03, Section: B, page: . / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2010. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 180-183). / 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.

New approaches and algorithms are developed for the identification and estimation of low order models that represent multipath channel effects in Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) communication systems. Based on these parsimonious channel models, low complexity receivers such as RAKE receivers are considered to exploit these propagation effects and enhance the system performance. We consider the scenario where multipath is frequency selective slowly fading and where the channel components including delays and attenuation coefficients are assumed to be constant over one or few signalling intervals. We model the channel as a long FIR-like filter (or a tapped delay line filter) with the number of taps related to the ratio between the channel delay-spread and the chip duration. Due to the high data rate of new CDMA systems, the channel length in terms of the chip duration will be very large. With classical channel estimation techniques this will result in poor estimates of many of the channel parameters where most of them are zero leading to a reduction in the system performance. Unlike classical techniques which estimate directly the channel response given the number of taps or given an estimate of the channel length, the proposed techniques in this work will firstly identify the significant multipath parameters using model selection techniques, then estimate these identified parameters. Statistical tests are proposed to determine whether or not each individual parameter is significant. A low complexity RAKE receiver is then considered based on estimates of these identified parameters only. The level of significance with which we will make this assertion will be controlled based on statistical tests such as multiple hypothesis tests. Frequency and time domain based approaches and model selection techniques are proposed to achieve the above proposed objectives. / The frequency domain approach for parsimonious channel estimation results in an efficient implementation of RAKE receivers in DS-CDMA systems. In this approach, we consider a training based strategy and estimate the channel delays and attenuation using the averaged periodogram and modified time delay estimation techniques. We then use model selection techniques such as the sphericity test and multiple hypotheses tests based on F-Statistics to identify the model order and select the significant channel paths. Simulations show that for a pre-defined level of significance, the proposed technique correctly identifies the significant channel parameters and the parsimonious RAKE receiver shows improved statistical as well as computational performance over classical methods. The time domain approach is based on the Bootstrap which is appropriate for the case when the distribution of the test statistics required by the multiple hypothesis tests is unknown. In this approach we also use short training data and model the channel response as an FIR filter with unknown length. Model parameters are then estimated using low complexity algorithms in the time domain. Based on these estimates, bootstrap based multiple hypotheses tests are applied to identify the non-zero coefficients of the FIR filter. Simulation results demonstrate the power of this technique for RAKE receivers in unknown noise environments. Finally we propose adaptive blind channel estimation algorithms for CDMA systems. Using only the spreading code of the user of interest and the received data sequence, four different adaptive blind estimation algorithms are proposed to estimate the impulse response of frequency selective and frequency non-selective fading channels. Also the idea is based on minimum variance receiver techniques. Tracking of a frequency selective varying fading channel is also considered. / A blind based hierarchical MDL model selection method is also proposed to select non-zero parameters of the channel response. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithms perform better than previously proposed algorithms. They have lower complexity and have a faster convergence rate. The proposed algorithms can also be applied to the design of adaptive blind channel estimation based RAKE receivers.

The focus of this thesis is on the resource allocation problems in wireless sensor and cooperative networks. Typically, wireless sensor networks operate with limited energy and bandwidth are often required to meet some specified Quality-of-Service (QoS) constraints. The ultimate objective for the majority of the problems considered in this thesis is to save battery energy and maximize the network lifetime. / In the first part of this thesis, we employ complex mathematical models to emulate a variety of power drains in wireless sensor nodes. In the first instance, we address a lifetime optimization problem of a wireless TDMA/CDMA sensor network for joint transmit power and rate allocations. The effect of fast fading is captured by including rate outage and link outage constraints on each link. After that, a single-hop wireless sensor network is deployed for a certain application - to estimate a Gaussian source within a pre-specified distortion threshold. In this part, we consider lifetime maximization, in different multiple access protocols such as TDMA, an interference limited non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and an idealized Gaussian multiple access channel. This problem is further studied in a multi-hop scenario where sensing and receiving powers are also included in addition to transmission power. Finally, we investigate a balancing problem between the source coding and transmission power for video wireless sensor systems where the sensor node is required to send the collected video clips, through wireless media, to a base station within a corresponding distortion threshold. All these energy saving and lifetime optimization problems in sensor networks can be formulated via nonlinear nonconvex optimization problems, which are generally hard to solve. However, with favourable variable substitution and reasonable approximation, most of these problems are shown to be convex. The only exception is the Gaussian source esitmation problem in NOMA scenario for which we provide a simple successive convex approximation based algorithm for the NOMA case that converges fast to a suboptimal solution. / In the second part of the thesis, we propose an optimal power allocation scheme with a K-block coding delay constraint on data transmission using a three node cooperative relay network assuming a block fading channel model. Channel information is fed back to the transmitter only in a causal fashion, so that the optimal power allocation strategy is only based on the current and past channel gains. We consider the two simplest schemes for information transmission using a three node (a source, a relay and a destination) relay network, namely the amplify and forward (AF) and decode and forward (DF) protocols. We use the dynamic programming methodology to solve the (K-block delay constrained) expected capacity maximization problem and the outage probability minimization problem with a short term sum power (total transmission power of the source and the relay) constraint. / The main contribution of the thesis is a comprehensive suite of power minimization and lifetime maximization methods that can be used in wireless sensor networks. We present several such applications and extensive numerical examples at the end of each chapter.

<p>Open access to scientific literature on Internet is a concept which is supposed to change librarians' work. The aim of the thesis was to examine librarians' perception of Open access. A questionnaire survey was conducted among librarians at libraries with specialisation in technique, natural sciences, medicine and pharmacy in Sweden. Even though Open access can be regarded as an alarming for librarians' work, the results of the survey showed that the future of the librarians' profession can be positive if they flexibly adopt their work routines according to changes in publication forms and library users' needs.</p>