A national study of clinical dietitians was undertaken to determine: (1) current clinical activities performed, (2) techniques used to influence physicians and (3) level of confidence for successfully influencing physicians in seven areas of practice. Questionnaires were received from 458 (77%) of the dietitians. Data indicate dietitians are less likely to participate on patient care teams and attend medical/surgical rounds, but more likely to check meal trays than their 1982 counterparts. Factor analysis of clinical activities revealed three postures: diet oriented, physician oriented and case oriented. Factor analysis of the influence techniques, identified five postures: block/threaten, ingratiation, coalitions, assertive and the most used posture, rationality. Multiple regression analysis found associations between age and education and the use of rationality and ingratiating postures and between age and the assertive posture. Frequency analysis of confidence levels found dietitians most confident influencing the physician in the area of food consistency modification and least confident in nutritional laboratory data.

The end of Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union created new dynamics in international arena. The events of the new restructured world show us decline and rise of powers’ capabilities on the global and regional levels. Powers such as China and Russia started to reconsider their global and regional capabilities to define their position in international arena. The new sovereign states of Central Asian region have strengthened their capabilities with those powers who maneuver in the region in the fields of economy, politics and security. They all try to improve their interstate relations in the framework of mutual understanding, mutual trust, interaction and mutual profits. China, Russia and Central Asian Republics are pursuing the peace and stability as their strategic interests. Overall, the challenges of instability and contradictions in the region still exist. This should be an important question for future research of security studies of Central Asia region.

<p>The underlying rational behind the protection of intellectual property rights is to strike a balance between the interests of intellectual property rights holders on the one hand and users of protected knowledge on the other hand. This thesis sought to achieve the following objectives: to create a good understanding of the historical development of the primary and secondary legal instruments related to the intellectual property rights/public health debate / to determine to what extent a balance is struck by the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights with reference to the flexibilities provided for in the Treaty, read together with the subsequent World Trade Organization Ministerial Declarations and TRIPS Council Decisions / to evaluate the extent to which selected developing and least developed country members of the World Trade Organization have taken measures to implement the said flexibilities, taking cognizance of their relevant strengths and weaknesses / to suggest ways in which select countries in the developing world specifically India and Zambia can take greater advantage of the flexibilities to promote better access to medicines which taking into consideration various opportunities and threats that are foreseeable / to identify public health aspects of TRIPS that the developing country and least developed countries World Trade Organization members would do well to address in further negotiations.</p>

<p>This paper sought to discuss the questions whether refugees have the right to return to their country of origin and whether their participation in the political life of that country may be used as a means to realise their right to return.</p>

This thesis seeks to explore the potential role of cooperation over water resources between Israel, Jordan and Palestine in facilitating the peacemaking process in the region. This was done by conducting an analysis of the Good Water Neighbors (GWN) project, an initiative launched by Friends of the Earth Middle East (FoEME) in 2001 to raise awareness of the shared water problems that exist between the three conflicting parties. The primary data for this research was obtained through interviews with three FoEME’s employees, who are involved in the GWN initiative in Israel, Jordan and Palestine. It was concluded that while water cooperation at the NGO level can serve as a starting point for dialogue, it does not generate enough spillover into a wider political peace process in the Middle East at the moment. However, water cooperation at the NGO level has a bigger chance to contribute to peacemaking in the long term by gradually replacing politically defined and historically distrustful identities with a concept of a common environmental community, provided that development of shared perceptions and experiences through the means of the GWN project continues to be fostered. By significantly reducing the animosity and hostility, which have been mutually reinforced by the conflicting parties, the formation of the common identity through water cooperation would give stable ground to the traditional diplomacy, engaged in the region, to be able to continue the peacemaking efforts through conventional means of dialogue, mediation and negotiations in a more efficient and effective way. The success of the transition of the joint water management from simple cooperation at the NGO level to the peacemaking tool largely depends on whether the people in the region choose to harness the positive effects from water cooperation for the peace process in the Middle East.

In this thesis, two questions are analysed: (1) why have National Human Rights Institutions (NHRIs) become so widely disseminated among contemporary states? And, (2) what explains the variable institutionalisation of NHRIs once activated? The thesis first traces the diffusion of NHRIs across political regimes in general, with particular attention to unstable democratic regimes. It argues that NHRI creation can be attributed to three principal diffusion mechanisms: coercion, acculturation, and persuasion. These three explanatory models, however, lack precision. Linking each mechanism to recent processes of diffusion in Latin America, the analysis identifies how the diffusion of an Iberian variant to the generic NHRI category - the Defensorfa del Pueblo - corresponds to three intermediate categories: compulsion, material inducement and framing of ideas. The initial political circumstance of Defensoria creation in Latin America, in turn, has significant implications for their institutionalisation. A domestic level of analysis is necessary to explain the institutionalisation of Defensorias operating in the democratic regimes of Latin America. The standard explanation correlates performance with structural form. While this thesis recognises the development of formal design principles is important in explaining institutionalisation, it adds a major qualification. It shows that the informal dimension of Defensorias' relations with organised state and social actors and rules of access across accountability arenas is often decisive. A typological framework is generated to assess the impact of these two dimensions on Defensorias when formal rules are enforced in a variable manner and tend to lack stability over time. This comparative analysis highlights the accountability gap which these institutions attempt, importantly, to address. By explaining how Defensorias actually work, including when and why they matter, this thesis goes beyond narrow institutionalism as suggested by the political accountability literature.

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems have recently emerged as one of the most significant wireless techniques, as they can greatly improve the channel capacity and link reliability of wireless communications. These benefits have encouraged extensive research on a virtual MIMO system where the transmitter has multiple antennas and each of the receivers has a single antenna. Single-antenna receivers can work together to form a virtual antenna array and reap some performance benefits of MIMO systems. The idea of receiver-side local cooperation is attractive for wireless networks since a wireless receiver may not have multiple antennas due to size and cost limitations. In this thesis we investigate a virtual-MIMO wireless system using the receiver-side cooperation with the compress-and-forward (CF) protocol. Firstly, to perform CF at the relay, we propose to use standard source coding techniques, based on the analysis of its expected rate bound and the tightness of the bound. We state upper bounds on the system error probabilities over block fading channels. With sufficient source coding rates, the cooperation of the receivers enables the virtual-MIMO system to achieve almost ideal MIMO performance. A comparison of ideal and non-ideal conference links within the receiver group is also investigated. Considering the short-range communication and using a channel-aware adaptive CF scheme, the impact of the non-ideal cooperation link is too slight to impair the system performance significantly. It is also evident that the practicality of CF cooperation will be greatly enhanced if a efficient source coding technique can be used at the relay. It is even more desirable that CF cooperation should not be unduly sensitive to carrier frequency offsets (CFOs). Thus this thesis then presents a practical study of these two issues. Codebook designs of the Voronoi VQ and the tree-structure vector quantization (TSVQ) to enable CF cooperation at the relay are firstly described. A comparison in terms of the codebook design complexity and encoding complexity is presented. It is shown that the TSVQ is much simpler to design and operate, and can achieve a favourable performance-complexity tradeoff. We then demonstrate that CFO can lead to significant performance degradation for the virtual MIMO system. To overcome it, it is proposed to maintain clock synchronization and jointly estimate the CFO between the relay and the destination. This approach is shown to provide a significant performance improvement. Finally, we extend the study to the minimum mean square error (MMSE) detection, as it has a lower complexity compared to maximum likelihood (ML) detection. A closed-form upper bound for the system error probability is derived, based on which we prove that the smallest singular value of the cooperative channel matrix determines the system error performance. Accordingly, an adaptive modulation and cooperation scheme is proposed, which uses the smallest singular value as the threshold strategy. Depending on the instantaneous channel conditions, the system could therefore adapt to choose a suitable modulation type for transmission and an appropriate quantization rate to perform CF cooperation. The adaptive modulation and cooperation scheme not only enables the system to achieve comparable performance to the case with fixed quantization rates, but also eliminates unnecessary complexity for quantization operations and conference link communication.

In this thesis, I use an experimental model to investigate the role of social pressures in stimulating language divergence. Research into the evolution of cooperation has emphasised the usefulness of ingroup markers for swiftly identifying outsiders, who pose a threat to cooperative networks. Mechanisms for avoiding cheats and freeriders, which tend to rely on reputation, or on (explicit and implicit) contracts between individuals, are considerably less effective against short-term visitors. Outsiders, moreover, may behave according to different social norms, which may adversely affect cooperative interactions with them. There are many sources of markers by which insiders and outsiders can be distinguished, but language is a particularly impressive one. If human beings exploit linguistic variation for this purpose, we might expect the exploitation to have an influence on the cultural evolution of language, and to be involved in language divergence, since it introduces a selective pressure, by which linguistic variants are selected on the basis of their social significance. However, there is also a neutral, mechanistic model of dialect formation that relies on unconscious accommodation between interlocutors, coupled with variation in the frequency of interaction, to account for divergence. In studies of real-world communities, these factors are difficult to tease apart. The model described in this thesis put real speakers in the artificial environment of a computer game. A game consisted of a series of rounds in which players were paired up with each other in a pseudo-random order. During a round, pairs of players exchanged typed messages in a highly restricted artificial "alien language". Each player began the game with a certain number of points, distributed between various resources, and the purpose of sending messages was to negotiate to exchange these resources. Any points given away were worth double to the receiver, so, by exchanging resources, players could accumulate points for their team. However, the pairings were anonymous: until the end of a round, players were not told who they had been paired with. This basic paradigm allowed the investigation of the major factors influencing language divergence, as well as the small-scale individual strategies that contribute to it. Two major factors were manipulated: frequency of interaction and competitiveness. In one condition, all players in a game were working together; in another condition, players were put into teams, such that giving away resources to teammates was advantageous, but giving them to opponents was not. This put a pressure on players to use variation in the alien language to mark identity. A combination of this pressure and a minimum level of interaction between teammates was found to be sufficient for the alien language to diverge into "dialects". Neither factor was sufficient on its own. The results of these experiments suggest that a pressure for the socially based selection of linguistic variants can lead to divergence in a very short time, given sufficient levels of interaction between members of a group.

Leading philosophical accounts of joint activity, such as Michael Bratman’s account of ‘shared intentional activity’, take joint activity to be the outcome of two or more agents having a ‘shared intention’, where this is a certain pattern of mutually known prior intentions (plans) that are directed toward a common goal. With Bratman’s account as a foil, I address two lacunas that are relatively unexplored in the philosophical literature. The first lacuna concerns how to make sense of the apparently joint cooperative activities of agents that lack the capacities for planning and “mindreading” that one must have in order to be a party to a shared intention (consider, for example, the social play of young children or the cooperative hunting of non-human primates or social carnivores). The second lacuna concerns how participants (including adult human agents) are able to coordinate their actions “online”—that is, during action execution as a joint activity unfolds—without recourse to plans that specify in advance what they should do (consider the coordination involved when two friends meet and do a “high five”). Chapters 2 and 3 focus on the first lacuna, while chapters 4 and 5 focus on the second. In chapter 2, I focus on why participants must have mutual or common knowledge of each other’s intentions and beliefs in order to have a shared intention: Why must these attitudes be “out in the open”? I argue that, if participants lack the concept of belief, then one of the two main motivations for the common knowledge requirement—to filter out certain cases that intuitively aren’t cases of genuine joint activity—actually dissipates. Furthermore, a kind of “openness” that only requires of participants that they have the concept of goal but not that of belief can satisfy the other main motivation, to make sense of the idea that joint activities are non-accidentally coordinated. In chapter 3, I offer an account of a kind of joint activity in which agents such as young children and some non-human primates could participate, given what we know about their socio-cognitive capacities. In chapter 4, I argue that ‘shared intention’-accounts are unable to say much about spontaneous or skilful joint action because of the following widely accepted constraint on what one can intend: while an agent might intend—in the sense of commit to a plan—that “we” do something together, an agent cannot intend to perform “our” joint action. I reject this constraint and argue that some joint actions (such as a joint manoeuvre performed by two figure skaters) are joint in virtue of each participant having what I call ‘socially extended intention-in-action’ that overlap. In chapter 5, I review empirical work on subpersonal enabling mechanisms for the coordination of joint action. The review provides clues to what it is that enables participants to successfully coordinate their actions in the absence of plan-like intentions or beyond what such intentions specify. While what I address are lacunas rather than problems, an upshot of this thesis is that leading philosophical accounts of joint activity may have less explanatory scope than one might otherwise be led to believe. The accounts of joint activity and joint action that are presented in this thesis are arguably applicable to many of the joint activities and joint actions of adult human beings. The account also helps us avoid the false dichotomy between a very robust form of joint activity and a mere concatenation of purely individualistic actions—a dichotomy that accounts such as Bratman’s arguably invite us to adopt.

In eusocial insects, the ability to discriminate nest-mates from non-nest-mates is widespread and ensures that altruistic actions are directed towards kin and agonistic actions are directed towards non-relatives. Most tests of nest-mate recognition have focused on hymenopterans, and suggest that cooperation typically evolves in tandem with strong antagonism towards non-nest-mates. Here, we present evidence from a phylogenetically and behaviourally basal termite species that workers discriminate members of foreign colonies. However, contrary to our expectations, foreign intruders were the recipients of more rather than less cooperative behaviour and were not subjected to elevated aggression. We suggest that relationships between groups may be much more peaceable in basal termites compared with eusocial hymenoptera, owing to energetic and temporal constraints on colony growth, and the reduced incentive that totipotent workers (who may inherit breeding status) have to contribute to self-sacrificial intergroup conflict.