No description available.

During 1963-78 the governments and the top universities of Chile and California undertook three programs of binational development assistance and cooperation. The programs built on a long historical relationship between the two regions, marked by their striking similarities in physical geography and natural resources, despite being 1,000s of miles apart on opposite sides of the Equator. The first program was for technical development assistance to Chile in the framework of the Alliance for Progress, and involved the three governments of Chile, California, and the United States. Water resources and river basin development planning were a primary emphasis, and led to building Chile's largest dual-purpose reservoir (Colbun). The second program was for graduate-level academic exchange and involved the two leading public university systems, the University of Chile and the University of California. This comprehensive program was funded for more than a decade by the Ford Foundation, with agriculture, natural sciences, and engineering the dominant fields. The third program was a separate effort to reform Chilean legal education, led by Stanford Law School and funded by the Ford Foundation. This Chile Law Program was a leading international example of the "law and development" movement in the 1960s, which overlapped closely with the early years of the "law and society" movement in the U.S. Both university and law school programs ended after the Chilean military coup in 1973. What were the impacts of these programs on water, law, and society in both Chile and California? What lessons can we learn today from those historical experiences? We answer these questions with an historical overview and synthesis of diverse documents and evidence. In focusing on water, law, and society, we aim to contribute to the interdisciplinary synthesis of different fields of development studies.

The 1990s saw a growing awareness of the relationship between aid and conflict, which included a better understanding of the potential impact of aid in terms of ameliorating or exacerbating conflict. Recognizing that aid, at a minimum, should 'do no harm', the challenge now exists for humanitarian aid organizations to apply and mainstream this understanding. This thesis presents a case study of the implementation phase of such a Peace and Conflict Impact Assessment (PCIA) methodology, the Better Programming Initiative (BPI), as applied by the Honduran Red Cross in a situation of high social violence in the community of Ciudad Espafia. Several months were spent in Honduras in order to develop an understanding of the implementation of BPI through participating in and assisting with the facilitation of BPI training and a program analysis of the project. The study was based on individual interviews, participant feedback from written workshop evaluations, participant observation, and participation in NGO training and evaluation activities as well as secondary data sources including research and project reports. Lessons learned during the implementation process are outlined, as well as suggestions for enhancing the BPI training and program analysis process are provided. Areas for further research are also identified.

Ninety percent of Canadian food aid donations were tied to domestic procurement sources until 2005. Procurement restrictions were reduced to 50% in 2005 and were eliminated in 2008. Implementing agencies are now free to procure commodities of their choice in locations of their choice. This study investigates whether the untying of Canadian food aid procurement in 2008 has made procurement decisions more responsive to changes in the relative prices of wheat, maize, and rice in Canadian cereal food aid baskets. It applies a pooled empirical model with regional fixed effects to regional price data and data on Canadian government-funded food aid shipments to five recipient regions. The results are mainly counterintuitive, which is partly attributable to a number of data and model limitations. Consequently, this study does not provide empirical evidence of cereal commodity substitution after the untying of Canadian food aid in 2008. However, there is still reason to believe that donor agencies substitute between cereal food aid commodities, especially after the elimination formal procurement restrictions. Further research is however needed to generate empirical evidence for this. / May 2017

Ce travail est une contribution à l'analyse des situations de travail à distance, dans une perspective psychosociale. Il porte, en particulier, sur l'étude de situations d'assistance-dépannage informatique, et notamment de conversations téléphoniques entre experts et utilisateurs. L'assistance-dépannage informatique par téléphone désigne, en fait, le support ou l'aide aux utilisateurs, et consiste à « réparer à travers l'usage du langage ». L'objectif de cette étude est, à la fois, de mieux comprendre ces situations de travail, et cette nouvelle professionnalité « être dépanneur à distance » ; et également de mettre en évidence les mécanismes en jeu dans les conversations entre experts et utilisateurs. Nous nous intéressons donc, ici, à la structure générale des appels et aux différentes séquences qui les composent ; à la façon dont l'expert s'adapte à son interlocuteur ; aux activités de gestion du problème et à celles de gestion du dialogue ; aux connaissances et aux compétences des partenaires de cet échange. / The dissertation offers a contribution from a psychosocial perspective to the analysis of distant work situations. It is concerned with situations in informatics involving helpdesk and support service, and focuses on telephone conversations between experts and users. Telephone-based helpdesk in informatics refers to a service of help and support and actually consists in "repairing through the use of language". The aim of this study is both to understand these particular working situations better, and to stress the mechanisms involved in an expert-user relationship. The point of interest is therefore the general structure of the different phone calls and of the different sequences composing those calls. In particular, the analysis is concerned with the way the expert adapt himself to the client in the conversation, with the various activities of problem management on a technical level and of dialogue management on a relational level, and with the skills and knowledge of the two participants in the exchange.

Personlig assistans kan anses som unikt i Sverige i sitt utförande och ges till personer med funktionsnedsättning. Huvuduppgiften för en assistent är att stödja individen till ett aktivt liv utefter dennes behov och vilja. KASAM tas upp som en viktig del då teorin utgår från att alla individer ska ha en meningsfull tillvaro. Studiens syfte var att undersöka hur personliga assistenter ser på sin yrkesroll idag. Sju kvinnor och en man intervjuades från samma organisation under 35 minuter vardera. Intervjuerna meningskoncentrerades sedan och ur analysen framkom fyra centrala teman som resultatet sedan baserades på: 1) motivation, roll och yrkets innebörd, 2) bemötande och förhållningssätt, 3) arbetets innehåll, samt 4) socialt stöd och trygghet. Yrkesrollen för en assistent handlar om: (1) känna sig behövd, (2) fungera som ett stöd, (3) inget genomtänkt arbetssätt finns, (4) rutinmässig vardag, (5) bristfälligt chefsstöd, (6) anställningstrygghet. Ingen samhörighet bland assistenterna inom organisationen finns.

Acquisition in Own Shares and Financial Assistance Abstract This thesis called "Acquisition in Own Shares and Financial Assistance" deals with the phenomenon of trading in own shares and financial assistance using a comparison of legal requirements on trading in own shares by the relatively "private" company and by the public company with listed shares with relation to the practical needs of different nature of both the types of companies and using the same sort of comparison with relation to the same sort of needs of the same types of companies in the business transactions involving financial assistance. The thesis focuses at European law approach to the phenomenon seeking to describe either the particular characteristics of the legislation either overall concept. The thesis provides with a critical evaluation of European law approach to the phenomenon based on the criticism of relative ignoring the practical characteristics and needs of the public companies with listed shares differing significantly from the practical characteristics and needs of the relatively "private" companies. Particularly, the first part of thesis deals with the market instrument - open market repurchases. It seeks to formulate fundamental characteristics including related risks to the fairness of markets. The thesis deals with a...

Manoeuvring a vehicle with additionally attached trailers is a tedious task. Albeit driver assistance systems support the driver in nearly any situation in these days, tools facilitating the manoeuvring process of extended vehicles can only rarely be found in research and especially in the market. This thesis deals with the prototypical implementation of a rear view camera parking assistance system. In particular, the visualisation of the predicted driving path of the tractor-trailer combination in the camera image is emphasised, following the representation of existing parking assistance systems for individual vehicles. A general approach is aiming at the portability of the system to nearly any kind of trailer. The superimposed guidelines are based on a state space model, which is derived on top of assumptions agreeing with results found in the literature. Due to the strong assumptions and simplifications, the model is tested in three different ways and moreover for different types of trailers. All underlying methods are described in detail and furthermore tested in several scenarios, if necessary. Special importance is attached to the comparison of the actual driven paths with their previous predictions, for which a new method has been derived, implemented and tested successfully. Beside the implementation of the guideline projection to the camera’s image, the human-machine interface is augmented by a Bird’s Eye view animation, too. A final test of the integrated system for different types of trailers shows the proper operation of the overall system during parking situations.

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-01

Focusing on humanitarian aid to refugees in the Nyarugusu Refugee Camp in Western Tanzania, this dissertation argues that humanitarianism has shifted from the care of the bodily and immediate material needs to a form of moral care inflected by contemporary human rights discourse. The camp, in operation for over 17 years, became the site of a pedagogical intervention aimed at teaching refugees human rights. Informed by essentialist understandings of Congolese culture, aid agencies enforce a version of human rights in which only women’s rights are human rights. Refugees respond to this in a variety of ways, by contesting, appropriating, or exiting the framework of rights entirely. In reading human rights discourse as a site for an anthropology of ethics, this dissertation argues against simply understanding humanitarian confinement in terms of biopolitics, and looks to black feminist theorizations of the “human” to gesture beyond human rights. It shows how Nyarugusu residents make claims based on bodily vulnerability to decolonize the “human” of “human rights,” and how, in doing so, they point us towards a politics of vulnerability grounded in an ethics of sincerity.