In August of 2013 the U.S. State Department launched the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives with the objective to foster and promote religious engagements in foreign diplomacy. The language used by the architects and proponents of the initiative suggests that even though religion can be a source of great conflict, religion is also a powerful force for good capable of mitigating conflict and fostering progress. The present optimistic belief of American foreign diplomats that religious engagement will foster beneficial partnerships capable of advancing U.S. foreign interests has led scholars to pose the question, "what will the U.S. engage when it engages religion?" This thesis argues that the language used in the promotion of faith-based initiatives exhibits a commitment to a humanistic theology of religious pluralism. Further, this thesis explains that a humanistic theology of religious pluralism limits religious engagement. In other words, the OFBCI will engage with religious groups only in so far as they fit their definition of religion.

After the open-door policy, those nearly disappeared religions during the Cultural Revolution were arising again in mainland China. Chinese communist government, at the same time, proposed the religious policy, amended the Constitution to make the freedom of religious belief into the Constitution, and enacted the religious regulations. However, Christian house churches were often persecuted by Chinese communist government with illegal reasons. The goal of religious legal system is to achieve the freedom of religious belief, so, why did the religious persecution continue happening in China? Does the legal system need to be amended? That¡¦s the background of this research. This research uses the five major frameworks of administrative law, which includes administrative principles, administrative organization, limitation of administrative power, administrative remedy, and administrative supervision, to exam the operation of the legal system of the Christian house church management in China. Both document analysis and historical narration are the main research method to figure out what are Chinese communist government¡¦s considerations about ruling house church and what are house church¡¦s claims and requests toward the government. As a result, according to the five major frameworks of administrative law whether there are any improvements on¡§the legal system of Christian house church management in mainland China¡¨, and also to provide suggestions to achieve the goal that is protecting the freedom of religious belief and maintain the order of management at the same time. In this research through the five major frameworks of administrative law, the Chinese coummnist government insists the religious organizations must obey the Chinese communist party and the government, which is the base of proceeding religious government and legislation. As a result, only the patriotic religious organizations are legal; the rights of governmental supervision are too strong; the freedom of religious belief was restricted. Christian house church insists the freedom of religious belief should not be interfered by politics. This has made the house churches illegal, and enforces a ban of house churches. The Chinese communist government and Christian house churches had been lacking of communication for a long time, and the government strictly monitors religious organizations. In responding to the external pressure, the house churches developed certain ways to survive that made it even more difficult for the government to manage. This situation highlighted the recent legal system of religious management unsuitable for the house churches. The Chinese communist government should re-exam their policy on house church management, readjust policy thoughts and amending the legal system, and ensure protection of the freedom of religious belief.

In order to promote the reputation, appearance, social position and job achievements of the police, the superior moral is the key factor. It affects the performance of authority and the quality of governance of our government directly. The moral crisis is more or less hidden in the government apparatus. However, the law executor like the police involves a moral case will always be the headlines, it proves ¡§Rotten Apple Theory¡¨, even there is 99¢H law-abiding police officers. The image of the police in the people¡¦s mind should be the incarnation of equity and justice. Nevertheless, the authority is endowed by the police is the best sharp weapon of law-disobeying and discipline-violating. The citizen has the right of the examination and being public employment. According to ¡§Civil Service Employment Act¡¨, the citizen can be a formal police officer by passing the national examination. However, according to ¡§The Statute For Personnel Affairs Involving Police Staff¡¨, counterbalancing a police officer¡¦s prize and punishment are two serious mistakes will be dismissed from office, it seriously takes effects on the police¡¦s right. The superintendents who are responsible for the investigation on the police moral cases should handle matters carefully, administrate legally, obey the rule of procedural justice. To examine the practice and enactment of the investigation on the police moral cases by the administrative legal system is necessary in this studying. The legal system of the investigation on the police moral cases is examined herein by the basic methods of administrative law, namely, the five major frameworks, including administrative principles, administrative organization, limitation of administrative power, administrative relief, and administrative supervision from every respect and viewpoint. Meanwhile, bibliography exploration, historical narration, comparative research, and case analysis are adopted as the principal research approaches to explore whether there¡¦s any improvement required regarding the legal system of the investigation on the police moral cases on the basis of five major frameworks of administrative law. Additionally, practical implementation and suggestions for regulations and actions concerning future investigation on the police moral cases are hereby provided to achieve the goal of protecting procedural justice and the police¡¦s right as well. With the exploration by means of five major frameworks of administrative law, the legal system of the investigation on the police moral cases yet obeys the three administrative principles according to laws and the seven principles of procedural justice and has formed the prototype as that of countries ruled by law. However, problems such as inappropriate system design of special duty and administrative plan , incomplete decrees and laws, uncertain legal concepts, unclear meanings still remained in the existing and getting rid of the traditional concept of ¡§special right relation¡¨. As a whole, restriction exceeds protection. The suspect against ¡§Criminal Code¡¨ is still possessed with legal human rights, the police against administrative law shouldn¡¦t be possessed with human rights procedurally and substantively. Indeed, ¡§ moral is the lifeblood of the police¡¨, since moral is so important, the governor of the police authorities shall view that to be a topic of demanding immediate attention and examine the problems dwelling in the legal system of the investigation on the police moral cases on the basis of five major frameworks of administrative law as soon as possible and further to review and perform modification to be convinced of all the police and promote the police¡¦s appearance and public reliance.

Intermolecular potential energy functions for CO2 have been developed from first principles for use in heterogeneous systems, including one with explicit polarization. The intermolecular potentials have been expressed in a transferable form and parameterized from nearly exact electronic structure calculations. Models with and without explicit many-body polarization effects, known to be important in simulation of interfacial processes, are constructed. The models have been validated on pressure-density isotherms of bulk CO2 and adsorption in three metal-organic framework (MOF) materials. The present models appear to offer advantages over high quality fluid/liquid state potentials in describing CO2 interactions in interfacial environments where sorbates adopt orientations not commonly explored in bulk fluids. Thus, the nonpolar CO2-PHAST and polarizable CO2-PHAST* potentials are recommended for materials/interfacial simulations.

There is a movement in government toward more accountability and higher performance in the delivery of services. Well-managed and documented results are vital to transparency and enhanced decision-making ability for managers. Performance management and measurement is becoming a bigger part of the dialogue in the public sector, even though it has been present for decades in the private sector. One tool that is being adopted by public sector organizations is scorecards or balanced scorecards for performance measurement or management frameworks. Increasingly these tools are being used to satisfy the public’s and legislature’s desire for more accountability among the public sector in service delivery with public funds. These tools can fill the gap between simple budgetary or financial reporting to including more diverse non-financial indicators of performance. They can also provide a framework for better performance management and decision-making ability in addition to reporting on performance measures. This report provides an overview of scorecards and introduces concepts for the public sector that may bridge the gap between simple reporting and incorporating a scorecard for management purposes. It also suggests some non-standard techniques to utilizing cutting edge approaches to enhance the usability of scorecards as a more dynamic reporting and management tool. / text

The logical framework LF and its metalogic Twelf can be used to encode and reason about a wide variety of logics, languages, and other deductive systems in a formal, machine-checkable way. Recent studies have shown that ML-like languages can profitably be extended with a notion of subtyping called refinement types. A refinement type discipline uses an extra layer of term classification above the usual type system to more accurately capture certain properties of terms. I propose that adding refinement types to LF is both useful and practical. To support the claim, I exhibit an extension of LF with refinement types called LFR,work out important details of itsmetatheory, delineate a practical algorithmfor refinement type reconstruction, andpresent several case studies that highlight the utility of refinement types for formalized mathematics. In the end I find that refinement types and LF are a match made in heaven: refinements enable many rich new modes of expression, and the simplicity of LF ensures that they come at a modest cost.

A logical framework and its implementation should serve as a flexible tool for specifying, simulating, and reasoning about formal systems. When the formal systems we are interested in exhibit state and concurrency, however, existing logical frameworks fall short of this goal. Logical frameworks based on a rewriting interpretation of substructural logics, ordered and linear logic in particular, can help. To this end, this dissertation introduces and demonstrates four methodologies for developing and using substructural logical frameworks for specifying and reasoning about stateful and concurrent systems. Structural focalization is a synthesis of ideas from Andreoli’s focused sequent calculi and Watkins’s hereditary substitution. We can use structural focalization to take a logic and define a restricted form of derivations, the focused derivations, that form the basis of a logical framework. We apply this methodology to define SLS, a logical framework for substructural logical specifications, as a fragment of ordered linear lax logic. Logical correspondence is a methodology for relating and inter-deriving different styles of programming language specification in SLS. The styles we connect range from very high-level specification styles like natural semantics, which do not fully specify the control structure of programs, to low-level specification styles like destination-passing, which provide detailed control over concurrency and control flow. We apply this methodology to systematically synthesize a low-level destination-passing semantics for a Mini-ML language extended with stateful and concurrent primitives. The specification is mostly high-level except for the relatively few rules that actually deal with concurrency. Linear logical approximation is a methodology for deriving program analyses by performing abstract analysis on the SLS encoding of the language’s operational semantics. We demonstrate this methodology by deriving a control flow analysis and an alias analysis from suitable programming language specifications. Generative invariants are a powerful generalization of both context-free grammars and LF’s regular worlds that allow us to express invariants of SLS specifications in SLS.We show that generative invariants can form the basis of progress-andpreservation- style reasoning about programming languages encoded in SLS.

The distribution of influence in organizational decisions is analysed in relation to institutional frameworks and characteristics inherent to decision topics. Distribution of influence is defined as the concentration of participants in decision process and their specific capability to influence decision outcomes. This definition encompasses two dimensions which are: participation in the decision processes and effective influence upon the decision outcomes. Institutional frameworks are distinguished according to the loci of their genesis and existence, that are: the focal organization the task-environment and the larger social context. Six characteristics inherent to decision topics are identified as related to variables defined as properties of decision. The analysis is carried out at two distinct stages. At the first stage, it examines the relationships of the institutional frameworks - existing at the organization and the task environment level - and of the properties of decisions with the distribution of influence in decision processes. At the second stage, the patterns of influence that emerged out of the first stage of analysis are analysed in terms of cultural traits prevailing in Brazilian society. The results point to variation in the distribution of influence in decision processes associated with factors of the taskenvironment, of the context of the organizations and characteristics inherent to decision topics. But they do not provide a wholly satisfactory explanation of such variation. A more general pattern of influence in management decisionmahing, characterized by low level of participation and high centre of influence in decision processes, appears as the dominant profile of the distribution of influence in Brazilian organizations. Interpreted in the light of the Brazilian social context, this pattern of influence in management decision making shows pervasive cultural traits, identified in the macro social system. Comparing the patterns of influence in management decisionmaking in Brazil and Britain, similarities and differences come to light. The comparative analysis corroborates the argument that patterns of influence in management decision making are bound to contingent as much as to institutional factors.

Automatic Implementation of Multidisciplinary Design Optimization Architectures Using piMDO Christopher Marriage Masters of Applied Science Graduate Department of Aerospace Engineering University of Toronto 2008 Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO) provides optimal solutions to complex, coupled, multidisciplinary problems. MDO seeks to manage the interactions between disciplinary simulations to produce an optimum, and feasible, design with a minimum of computational effort. Many MDO architectures and approaches have been developed, but usually in isolated situations with little chance for comparison. piMDO was developed to provide a unified framework for the solution of coupled op- timization problems and refinement of MDO approaches. The initial implementation of piMDO showed the benefits of a modular, object oriented, approach and laid the groundwork for future development of MDO architectures. This research furthered the development of piMDO by expanding the suite of available problems, incorporat- ing additional MDO architectures, and extending the object oriented approach to all of the required components for MDO. The end result is a modular, flexible software framework which is user friendly and intuitive to the practitioner. It allows complex problems to be quickly implemented and optimized with a variety of powerful numerical tools and MDO architectures. Importantly, it allows any of its components to be reorganized and sets the stage for future researchers to continue the development of MDO methods.

Automatic Implementation of Multidisciplinary Design Optimization Architectures Using piMDO Christopher Marriage Masters of Applied Science Graduate Department of Aerospace Engineering University of Toronto 2008 Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO) provides optimal solutions to complex, coupled, multidisciplinary problems. MDO seeks to manage the interactions between disciplinary simulations to produce an optimum, and feasible, design with a minimum of computational effort. Many MDO architectures and approaches have been developed, but usually in isolated situations with little chance for comparison. piMDO was developed to provide a unified framework for the solution of coupled op- timization problems and refinement of MDO approaches. The initial implementation of piMDO showed the benefits of a modular, object oriented, approach and laid the groundwork for future development of MDO architectures. This research furthered the development of piMDO by expanding the suite of available problems, incorporat- ing additional MDO architectures, and extending the object oriented approach to all of the required components for MDO. The end result is a modular, flexible software framework which is user friendly and intuitive to the practitioner. It allows complex problems to be quickly implemented and optimized with a variety of powerful numerical tools and MDO architectures. Importantly, it allows any of its components to be reorganized and sets the stage for future researchers to continue the development of MDO methods.