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Thesis (SJD) -- Bond University, 2006. / "This thesis is submitted to Bond University in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Legal Science"-- t.p. Bibliography: pages 117-125. Also available via the World Wide Web.

Within the span of less than a decade, Russian teachers have lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of Communist rule, the emergence of a free market economy and levels of inflation which have pushed much of the population into poverty. Restrictive government poliies have been replaced with an infrastructure often described as corrupt and infeffective. New laws on education now allow for innovative curriculums and methodology, but economic restrictions have limited much possiblity for change. The purpose of this descriptive study is to examine the perceptions of Moscow educators regarding public educaion and society in Russia. Selected teachers were surveyed and interviewed about their perceptions of recent soical, political and economic changes within Russia; communism and the future of communism in Russia; democracy in Russia; schooling, students and teachers in general in Moscow; the creditation and training of educators in Russia; their responsibilities as educators in Russia; and the future of their individual professional lives. The study discusses the context of education and schooling in Moscow, provides data from a Likert type quesitonnaire and personal interviews, discusses the quantitative and qualitative data and uses a one way analysis of variance (ANOVA) with teachers' age as the variable. Major findings include teachers' perceptions that the political and economic changes in Russia are "inevitable." Teachers' lives continue to be restricted, however, that restriction is dictated by economics as opposed to political repression. The fall of the communist state is considered desirable and teachers are unsure if the communist party will ever again form the government of Russia. Teachers do not consider themselves to be "free" or Russia to be a true democracy, and most are undecided if Russia will become a true democracy in their lifetime. As well, the quality of public education is seen to have suffered since the end of the Soviet state with severe underfunding limiting the opportunities for innovative practice. Teachers, however, believe that educators in Russia are well- prepared to be professional teachers in post-communist Russia. They also believe that teachers are responsible for fostering a sense of Russian nationalism and instilling proper values in students. They have an important role to play in shaping Russian society in the future and are optimistic about the future of the teaching profession and the role they will play in determing that future. / 1 v. (various pagings) ; 29 cm.

The concepts of power and state - particularly embedded in the idea of the Great Power, with a geopolitical perspective and a profoundly aggressive character - are tantamount in importance to the Russia's elite political ideology. However, the existence of different emphases within such a political ideology, ranging from the active-obstructive to the passive stances, brings into question the factors of variation that might be responsible for the elite's level of determination to pursue these concepts over an internal or foreign policy development. In addressing this query, two tasks are set: descriptive - involving a survey of the content of Russian aggressive political ideology over different periods in history; and explanatory - determining circumstances that might account for the empowerment of one or other option of Russian aggressive political ideology. Therefore, the thesis includes a comparison of historical periods with similar relevance to the Russian state. The concern here is in relation to shifting factors of variations of aggressive political ideology acting in the space-frame of one state, but in different time-frame. Resting on these frames the thesis explores the shaping of the Russian elite's defining principles of state internal and foreign policy development and traces the factors of variation responsible for the empowerment of one or other particular form of the aggressive political ideology. The factors of variation discussed in the thesis are different in nature and intensity. The primary impetus for variation in the form that aggressive political ideology would take is determined by the factor of national distress. Other factors (regime volatility, political and economic motivations, information dissemination, and challenges within the international system) are responsible for the depth and extent to which aggressive ideology is going to resonate. No factor could create the variation by itself. The argument is that a specific set of factors is required to create the conditions for variations in the form the aggressive political ideology would take and to determine whether aggressive ideology would generate or not an obstructive political decision.

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The Web of Data has grown enormously over the last years. Currently, it comprises a large compendium of linked and distributed datasets from multiple domains. Due to the decentralised architecture of the Web of Data, several of these datasets contain complementary data. Running complex queries on this compendium thus often requires accessing data from different data sources within one query. The abundance of datasets and the need for running complex query has thus motivated a considerable body of work on SPARQL query federation systems, the dedicated means to access data distributed over the Web of Data. This thesis addresses two key areas of federated SPARQL query processing: (1) efficient source selection, and (2) comprehensive SPARQL benchmarks to test and ranked federated SPARQL engines as well as triple stores. Efficient Source Selection: Efficient source selection is one of the most important optimization steps in federated SPARQL query processing. An overestimation of query relevant data sources increases the network traffic, result in irrelevant intermediate results, and can significantly affect the overall query processing time. Previous works have focused on generating optimized query execution plans for fast result retrieval. However, devising source selection approaches beyond triple pattern-wise source selection has not received much attention. Similarly, only little attention has been paid to the effect of duplicated data on federated querying. This thesis presents HiBISCuS and TBSS, novel hypergraph-based source selection approaches, and DAW, a duplicate-aware source selection approach to federated querying over the Web of Data. Each of these approaches can be combined directly with existing SPARQL query federation engines to achieve the same recall while querying fewer data sources. We combined the three (HiBISCuS, DAW, and TBSS) source selections approaches with query rewriting to form a complete SPARQL query federation engine named Quetsal. Furthermore, we present TopFed, a Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) tailored federated query processing engine that exploits the data distribution to perform intelligent source selection while querying over large TCGA SPARQL endpoints. Finally, we address the issue of rights managements and privacy while accessing sensitive resources. To this end, we present SAFE: a global source selection approach that enables decentralised, policy-aware access to sensitive clinical information represented as distributed RDF Data Cubes. Comprehensive SPARQL Benchmarks: Benchmarking is indispensable when aiming to assess technologies with respect to their suitability for given tasks. While several benchmarks and benchmark generation frameworks have been developed to evaluate federated SPARQL engines and triple stores, they mostly provide a one-fits-all solution to the benchmarking problem. This approach to benchmarking is however unsuitable to evaluate the performance of a triple store for a given application with particular requirements. The fitness of current SPARQL query federation approaches for real applications is difficult to evaluate with current benchmarks as current benchmarks are either synthetic or too small in size and complexity. Furthermore, state-of-the-art federated SPARQL benchmarks mostly focused on a single performance criterion, i.e., the overall query runtime. Thus, they cannot provide a fine-grained evaluation of the systems. We address these drawbacks by presenting FEASIBLE, an automatic approach for the generation of benchmarks out of the query history of applications, i.e., query logs and LargeRDFBench, a billion-triple benchmark for SPARQL query federation which encompasses real data as well as real queries pertaining to real bio-medical use cases. Our evaluation results show that HiBISCuS, TBSS, TopFed, DAW, and SAFE all can significantly reduce the total number of sources selected and thus improve the overall query performance. In particular, TBSS is the first source selection approach to remain under 5% overall relevant sources overestimation. Quetsal has reduced the number of sources selected (without losing recall), the source selection time as well as the overall query runtime as compared to state-of-the-art federation engines. The LargeRDFBench evaluation results suggests that the performance of current SPARQL query federation systems on simple queries does not reflect the systems\\\' performance on more complex queries. Moreover, current federation systems seem unable to deal with many of the challenges that await them in the age of Big Data. Finally, the FEASIBLE\\\'s evaluation results shows that it generates better sample queries than the state-of-the-art. In addition, the better query selection and the larger set of query types used lead to triple store rankings which partly differ from the rankings generated by previous works.

Diploma thesis "Constitutional transformation and dissolution of Czechoslovak Federation after November 1989" is focused on legislative reflection of political changes in a federation in which one of the two nations' state-law ambitions have never been sufficiently fulfilled. This situation resulted into the dissolution of the federation that happened as an outcome of political negotiations of either republic's political representations that have endeavored to proceed with as legal means as possible, however mostly created ad hoc. The aim of this thesis is to describe these legal means of legal dissolution of a state since their political formulation, through their origination until their final acceptance. First part of this diploma thesis describes the origination of Czechoslovak Federation in 1968, interruption of the federalization processes in the times of so-called normalizations and continuance of this process after the changes in 1989 including drafts of a communist constitution and an opposition constitution towards the end of this year. Second part of this diploma thesis describes transformation of the Czechoslovak Federation as it happened in the first year after the Velvet revolution. This part also includes disquisition about integrating elements of a federative state as well as it is...

Thesis (M.A.)--Naval Postgraduate School, 2002. / Cover title. "June 2002." AD-A404 622. Includes bibliographical references. Also available via the World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph.D.) - Carleton University, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 293-308). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Carleton University, 2001. / Also available in electronic format on the Internet.