From 1948 to 1989, the newspaper Rudé právo was the central press authority of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Its content that was presented to the public, was ideologically focused in accordance with the current propaganda line of the Communist Party. After the Velvet Revolution in 1989, the situation began to change and, above all, domestic political content began to go through considerable change. This thesis analyzes the domestic political articles that were published in the Rudé právo during 1989 - eleven months before the Velvet Revolution and the period after the Velvet Revolution until the end of 1989. This work captures what topics the texts dealt with, which topics were preferred and which were neglected. The thesis also captures and describes how and when exactly the content of the paper began to change, how the attitudes of editors and the tone of the texts has being changed, which new topics began to appear in the press and how the language and rhetoric of the newspaper have changed.

This diploma thesis from the field of contemporary history evaluates the effect of being a publicly well-known and widely popular person on the overall functioning of their family and individual life stories of other family members. The closest relatives of the actor Petr Čepek were selected for the research purposes of this thesis. The methodological framework of the thesis is composed of the family memory, or the collective memory of Maurice Halbwachs. Petr Čepek was a significant persona of the second half of the twentieth century in the field od Czechoslovak theatre and film. He was at the origin of the phenomenon of Činoherní klub and played an active role in the November 1989 events. His premature death is connected with the film Lekce Faust. The thesis maps out the life stories of individual members of his family, which also serves as an insight into the family life side by side a popular person. .

This thesis is a critical, exploratory analysis of the impacts to the banking industry in South Africa, in light of the wave of technological change and emergence, termed in popular discourse as the Fourth Industrial Revolution or 4IR. The 4IR has been argued to offer the transformative potential to change and disrupt current societal organization and provide opportunities for developing countries such as South Africa to “leapfrog” into development. Many argue that as technology advances and progresses, it can be used to address socio-economic, developmental challenges and deliver services. In the banking sector, particularly in the context of developing countries, as large portions of the population remain excluded from formal financial services, digital banking methods premised on the technologies of the 4IR have emerged as potential “solutions”. What is often understated, however, that this study highlights, is that such technological advancements hold challenges. Moreover, as they are presented as solutions to the socioeconomic difficulties of developing countries, like financial exclusion, it is important that this is understood contextually, and critically and such challenges are presented. Through primarily qualitative case studies of two banks, Standard Bank and TymeBank, the study aimed to uncover the processes of digitisation occurring as well as the social processes that underlie them. Findings show that indeed, tangible examples of “4IR”/digitisation are identified at the two banks through technical application of emerging technologies, such as cloud computing and machine learning. However, more concerning are the social processes and strategic decisions that result in and out of their adoption. The 4IR in the context of this study appears to replicate ongoing social and economic inequalities, through inadequate digital infrastructures, and omni-present interests of neoliberalism presenting as digital capitalism. Additionally, carrying concern of adverse effects to the employment and labour landscape, the 4IR is deconstructed for its rhetorical meaning which contrasts with the reality. Hegemonic representations of a 4IR and its proposed ‘transformative benefits' do not correspond with actual phenomena and risk the neglecting of fundamental social challenges that are deepened by and new ones emerging out of digitisation.

Rebels haven’t always been sexy. In fact, throughout history “fighting the power” has often revealed the ugliest side of human nature. Of course, sometimes rebellion is necessary, even if it isn’t pretty, but it should never be considered lightly. So, under what circumstances is rebellion against authority—particularly a governing authority—morally sound? Is mutiny ever justified? Such questions are difficult, perhaps impossible, to answer, but literature can be a powerful tool for dissecting them. Captain Frederick Marryat (1798-1848), often called the father of naval fiction, used his novels to air these and other morally ambiguous questions for an early Victorian readership. At a time when widespread poverty, food shortages, and social injustices were leading to heated protests, Marryat’s microcosmic ships were a space to think through issues of rebellion, discipline, and the appropriate use of authority. This thesis analyzes two of Marryat’s novels, The King’s Own (1830) and Mr. Midshipman Easy (1836), highlighting themes of authority/discipline and the rhetorical functions of his didactic style. It’s easy to oversimplify Marryat—a patriotic ship captain and veteran of the Napoleonic Wars—as a classic establishment figure, but a close reading of these texts reveals that he was much more than an imperial flag-waver.

This dissertation examines how the complex relations between the problem of the “culture worker” (wenyi gongzuozhe) and the challenges of socialist political economy were articulated and navigated in the Chinese Revolution. The point of historical and conceptual departure for this dissertation is Mao’s Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art in 1942. I argue that the Talks provided a conceptual vocabulary for the problem of cultural production that revolved around the problematic of “life” (shenghuo) as the site of possibility for the fashioning of the culture worker under socialism. The demand that intellectuals “enter into life” (shenru shenghuo) necessitated that writers spend long periods labouring amongst workers and peasants, a demand that sought to suspend an understanding of the masses as a reified abstraction. By the same token, this demand called for a transformation of the culture worker, as well, which was to be felt at the level of subjectivity and embodied experience. The goal was that cultural production might itself be able to intervene in the production of new kinds of social relations, above all relations of labour. The dissertation demonstrates that, across the sustained cultural and economic experiment that was Chinese socialism, the cultural itself became reconfigured as a site of labour as it frequently placed demands upon intellectuals to give up a privileged existence, in order that their bodies and pens might move to a new set of social rhythms and temporalities.

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The Covid-19 pandemic is changing the international business environment. This global event has forced the world into an unbalance, which influences how Swedish SMEs interpret their international operations. Through the international fluctuations, the digitalization has come to partake as an important factor in order to enable the possibility of maintaining an international presence. Therefore, the aim of this thesis is to explore how the Covid-19 pandemic influences the digitalization within Swedish SMEs international operations.        In order to provide a sustainable foundation of the subject, this research have utilized the qualitative strategy. Collecting the data through semi-structured interviews enables a vast set of data, which have been comprehended in relation to chapter 2 Literature review. Through analyzing all gathered data, the outcome of the research illustrates how the pandemic influences the digitalization as well as firms’ international operations. Finally, the thesis conclude that the Covid-19 pandemic accelerates the digitalization within firms, which further influences how firms maintain an international presence. Conclusively, it is contemplated that the Covid-19 pandemic further creates what the authors call “The New Normal”.

Thesis(M.Sc. (Computer Science)) -- University of Limpopo, 2020 / Spectrum scarcity is one of the major problems affecting the advancement of wireless technology. The world is now entering into a new era called the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” and technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain are surfacing at a rapid pace. All these technologies and this new era need high speed network (Internet) connectivity. Internet connectivity is reliant on the availability of spectrum Channels. The Federal Communication Commission (FCC) has emphatically alluded on the urgency of finding quick and effective solutions to the problem of spectrum scarcity because the available spectrum bands are getting depleted at an alarming rate. Cognitive Radio Ad Hoc Networks (CRAHNs) have been introduced to solve the problem of spectrum depletion. CRAHNs are mobile networks which allow for two groups of users: Primary Users (PUs) and Secondary Users (SUs). PUs are the licensed users of the spectrum and SUs are the unlicensed users. The SUs access spectrum bands opportunistically by switching between unused spectrum bands. The current licensed users do not fully utilize their spectrum bands. Some licensed users only use their spectrum bands for short time periods and their bands are left idling for the greater part of time. CRNs take advantage of the periods when spectrum bands are not fully utilized by introducing secondary users to switch between the idle spectrum bands. The CRAHNs technology can be implemented in different types of routing environments including military networks. The military version of CRAHNs is called Military Cognitive Radio Ad Hoc Networks (MCRAHNs). Military networks are more complex than ordinary networks because they are subject to random attacks and possible destruction. This research project investigates the delays experienced in routing packets for MCRAHNs and proposes a new routing algorithm called Spectrum-Aware Transitive Multicasting On Demand Distance Vector (SAT-MAODV) which has been optimized for reducing delays in packet transmission and increasing throughput. In the data transmission process, there are several levels where delays are experienced. Our research project focuses on Routing Path (RP) delay, Spectrum Mobility (SM) delay and Node Relay (NR) delay. This research project proposes techniques for spectrum switching and routing called Time-Based Availability (TBA), Informed Centralized Multicasting (ICM), Node Roaming Area (NRA) and Energy Smart Transitivity (EST). All these techniques have been integrated into SAT-MAODV. SAT-MAODV was simulated and compared with the best performing algorithms in MCRHANs. The results show that SAT-MAODV performs better than its counterparts

This dissertation explores the ethical and aesthetic stakes of readers’ judgments by analyzing mock trials of literary characters that were performed in Soviet Russia and abroad in the 1920s and 1930s. Literary trials were part of a larger craze for public mock trials in the decades after the Russian Revolution. Mock trials functioned as a participatory and educational form of entertainment. Fictional defendants included Lenin, invented characters accused of drunkenness and hooliganism, and the Bible. At the same time as increasingly propagandistic mock trials were being performed, intellectuals staged trials of characters from nineteenth-century and contemporary Russian literature. In émigré communities such as Berlin, Paris, and Prague, literary trials were popular as entertainment and fundraisers through the 1920s and 1930s. My analysis focuses on mock trials of characters from works by Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, whose novels proved especially popular for mock trial adaptations in the 1920 and 1930s. I also consider Nabokov’s participation in a mock trial based on The Kreutzer Sonata as a bridge between Tolstoy’s novella and Nabokov’s later novel Lolita. I read back and forth between the literary works and their mock trial adaptations in order to explore both how trial participants interpreted the texts and how the texts respond to the kinds of judgment at work in the trials. The challenges that Dostoevsky and Tolstoy’s fiction pose to readers became the central questions of mock trial adaptations: What is the relationship between interpretation and truth? Do we have the right to judge others? Does narrative have the power to redeem? I argue that while Soviet and émigré literary trials offer selective, politically motivated readings of the original works, they also enter into dialogue with the works’ major ethical questions and offer new ways of thinking about how truth, judgment, and redemption operate in them. As a result, the mock trials bring together two approaches to literature: a reader-centric approach that interprets the text in order to reveal something about the reader’s current reality, and a text-centric approach that aims to uncover the original meaning. While some of the literary trial interpretations and judgments appear to be misreadings, or bad readings, of the original works, I argue that this kind of reading, which closely attends to textual details while asking the text to speak to the readers’ present, offers a model for an ethically engaged approach to literature.

This work examines relevancy of theoretical aproaches on the subject of democratization processes presented by Francis Fukuyama, Samuel Huntington and Fareed Zakaria, and it discusses a level of relevancy of their theoretical concepts and theses in comparison to the democratization process in Libya, which started in spring 2011. First, the theoretical part of this work presents specific historical, sociocultural, political, religious and economic contexts of Libya from a historical-sociology perspective with a focus on the democratization and liberalization processes in Libya. It discusses democratization factors and reasons, which are applied on the situation in Libya. The empirical part of this work presents reflections and perspectives of the democratization process in Libya from an emical perspective of a Libyan citizen. These reflections are confronted with the theoretical approaches presented in the first part, especially with Huntington's Third Wave. The empirical part reflects the processes of the previous non- democratic regime of Muammar Kaddafi, then the fall of the regime and the revolution situation in Libya, a new democratic regime and finally, the perspectives of consolidation of democracy in Libya.