No / Since the election of Hugo Chávez Frías to the Venezuelan presidency in 1998 on a platform of 'revolutionary' change, the country has been wracked by political turmoil and violence between pro- and anti-government groups. While the political crisis has been reported and portrayed as a new phenomenon that has emerged as a result of Chávez's policy programme and style of government, this article argues that the conflict has deep historical roots and that it has been shaped by the legacy of political organisation in the pre-Chávez period.

A dramatized account of my discovery, research and inclusion into the subculture of cybersuicide. / text

Nowadays, although MapReduce is applied to the parallel processing on big data, it has some limitations: for instance, lack of generic but efficient and richly functional primitive parallel methods, incapability of entering multiple input parameters on the entry of parallel methods, and inefficiency in the way of handling iterative algorithms. Spark and Stratosphere are developed to deal with (partly) the shortcoming of MapReduce. The goal of this thesis is to evaluate Spark and Stratosphere both from the point of view of theoretical programming model and practical execution on specified application algorithms. In the introductory section of comparative programming models, we mainly explore and compare the features of Spark and Stratosphere that overcome the limitation of MapReduce. After the comparison in theoretical programming model, we further evaluate their practical performance by running three different classes of applications and assessing usage of computing resources and execution time. It is concluded that Spark has promising features for iterative algorithms in theory but it may not achieve the expected performance improvement to run iterative applications if the amount of memory used for cached operations is close to the actual available memory in the cluster environment. In that case, the reason for the poor results in performance is because larger amount of memory participates in the caching operation and in turn, only a small amount memory is available for computing operations of actual algorithms. Stratosphere shows favorable characteristics as a general parallel computing framework, but it has no support for iterative algorithms and spends more computing resources than Spark for the same amount of work. In another aspect, applications based on Stratosphere can achieve benefits by manually setting compiler hints when developing the code, whereas Spark has no corresponding functionality.

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Ett centralt problem i strävan efter att minska energianvändningen i hushåll genom beteendeförändringar är att energi till stora delar är en osynlig produkt. Avhandlingen strävar efter att utveckla kunskap som kan bidra till mer hållbar utveckling genom att analysera tre företeelser som på ett konkret sätt synliggör energi och energirelaterat beteende: ett lokalt värmesystem, en s.k. Power Aware Cord och en dagboksmetod. Hur människor förstår sin energianvändning analyseras med hjälp av en modifierad version av den domesticeringsteori som utvecklats av Silverstone et al (1992). I centrum står paradoxen att de visualiserande företeelserna riskerar att själva osynliggöras genom att de domesticeras. Värmesystemet har haft en bristande funktion, vilket har varit den faktor som mest effektivt visualiserat systemet. Solfångarnas visuella dominans i områdets arkitektur har bidragit till att medvetandegöra solen som energikälla. Ett teknikrum och olika experter har också medvetandegjort själva värmesystemets existens. Såväl systemet som helhet som hushållens egen del i detta har visualiserats. Power Aware Cord liknar en vanlig grendosa, men den visar elanvändningen (effekten) hos den utrustning som kopplas till den. Energin visualiseras med hjälp av ett blått ljus i sladden vars intensitet anpassas efter watttalet som passerar genom sladden. Power Aware Cords styrka ligger i att den bidrar till att apparaters energianvändning visualiseras. Tidsdagboken visualiserar hushållsmedlemmarnas vardagliga aktiviteter på ett bredare plan än enbart i relation till energianvändning. Analysen visar att den redan osynliga resursen energi, som blivit än mer osynliggjort genom domesticering, kan avdomesticeras genom olika former för visualisering. Visualiseringsformerna riskerar dock att själva domesticeras. För att dessa ska ha varaktig effekt behövs strategier för att undvika detta. / One problem in promoting sustainable energy use is that energy is taken for granted. Energy as resource needs to be made visible. This dissertation aims to develop knowledge that can contribute to more sustainable development by analyzing different ways to visualize domestic energy systems. Three different forms of visualization are analyzed: a locally situated heating-system, the Power Aware Cord, and a diary method. How people understand their energy use is analyzed using a modified version of domestication theory as developed by Silverstone et al. (1992). Another focus is the paradox that forms of visualization themselves risk becoming invisible by virtue of being domesticated. The heating system still does not function as intended, and the non-functioning of the heating system has been the most effective means of visualizing the system. The solar collectors are visible and are a dominant element of the area’s architecture; this has helped visualize, make people aware of, and confer an understanding of the sun as an energy source. A technical control room and technicians have also helped visualize the existence of the heating system. The system as a whole, and the households’ own parts of it, has been visualized. The Power Aware Cord is the general shape of an extendable power strip, with the additional integration of voltage-measuring electronics and electroluminescent wire. This additional wire contains a phosphor layer that glows when an altering current is introduced. The cords’ strength lies in visualizing the household energy use of particular electrical devices. The time diary method visualizes the household members’ individual and inter-related ctivity patterns in a broader, more general way. The analysis shows that the already invisible resource energy, which has been made doubly invisible through domestication, can be de-domesticated through the domestication of forms of visualization. At the same time, the forms of visualization themselves risk being made invisible by being domesticated; for forms of visualization to have any lasting effect, strategies for avoiding this must be developed.

By the end of the twentieth century, the generous German public pay-as-you-go pension system had been struggling with a serious deficit due to the country’s ageing population. In 2001, the German government enacted the “Riester” pension reform, named after Mr. Walter Riester, the Labour Minister brokering it, which reduced the level of publicly provided pensions, and strengthened the funded occupational and private pillars in order to replace the loss in retirement income. This thesis investigates the role and structure of occupational pensions during the Riester-reform and in its aftermath, using an economic geography perspective. In doing so, it discusses the role of trade unions and employer associations (social partners) in moulding the structure of the occupational system, and investigates the geography of occupational pensions both at employer and at employee level. Empirically, the thesis is based on an in-depth interview with Mr. Walter Riester, and a unique, proprietary data-set of a German occupational pension provider, containing information on 332 thousand employees and over 12 thousand employers. The results show that the internal division of social partners played a critical role in leaving occupational pensions voluntary, but they have been successful in setting standards on the occupational pension market by means of collective bargaining. Employers and employees show systematic spatiotemporal patterns in their pension-related decisions, confirming the importance of local relationships and local contexts in implementing social partners’ measures and in the transformation of the welfare state. It is finally pointed out that the Riester-reform was a part of a gradual transition, which has been reducing employers’ autonomy in order to reinforce the social role of occupational pensions. To achieve that and to catalyse the reform process, employers’ and employees’ risk exposure has been mitigated in the hope that old-age poverty can be avoided.

This thesis studies ritual interactions between saints and the landscape, animals and elements during a three-hundred year period from 410 AD. Such interactions include negotiations about and with birds and other animals, exorcism of the sea, lakes and rivers, and immersion in these natural bodies of water for devotional purposes. Although writers of the period lacked a term such as 'nature' to describe this sphere of activity, it is demonstrated that the natural world was regarded as a dimension of creation distinctively responsive to Christian ritual. Systematic study of the context in which these rituals were performed finds close connection with missionary negotiations aimed at lay people. It further reveals that three British writers borrowed from Sulpicius Severus' accounts of eastern hermits, reworking older narratives to suggest that non-human aspects of creation were not only attracted to saints but were changed by and participated in Christian ritual and worship. Natural bodies of water attracted particularly intense interaction in the form of exorcism and bathing, sufficiently widely documented to indicate a number of discrete families of ritual were developed. In northern Britain, acute anxieties can be detected about the cultural and spiritual associations of open water, requiring missionary intervention to challenge pre-Christian narratives through biblical and liturgical resources, most notably baptism. Such a cosmological stretch appears to have informed a 'Celtic' deviation in baptismal practice that emphasised exorcism and bodily sacrifice. Nature rituals were a systematic response to the challenges of the British intellectual and physical landscapes, revealing the shape of an underlying missionary strategy based on mainstream patristic theology about the marred relationship between humans and the rest of creation. St Ambrose emerges as the most influential theologian at the time when the early church was shaping its British inculturation, most notably led by St Germanus' mission in 429.