Brazil has been one of the most active actors in international environmental negotiations and is an up-and-coming developing country with huge reserves of natural resources, biodiversity, and ecosystems that are of interest to the rest of the world, such as the Amazon rainforest. This pa- per provides an analysis of Brazilian foreign policy in the area of environment. By studying three major, international environmental conferences – Stockholm 1972, Rio 1992, and the COP 15 in Copenhagen, in 2009 – from a liberal-constructivist perspective, the objective is to inves- tigate how Brazil has contributed to, as well as has been affected by, the international environ- mental regime over time. With the Rio+20 conference around the corner, this paper can provide important insights to what processes are behind Brazil’s action and position in these issues. The paper takes an eclectic approach and analyzes the national and international contexts and the positions Brazil took at the time of each conference, in the light of a framework that emphasizes the reciprocal relationship between domestic and international structure and agent. The conclu- sion is that there is a clear trend of Brazil going from being defensive and confrontational to being open to cooperation and taking initiatives. The changes in Brazilian attitude at each of the three conferences can be connected to great transformations in national as well as international context. The social and material reality in which Brazil has found itself has affected the way it interprets its capabilities, as well as how it identifies its interests. Furthermore, it is identified that tradition in foreign policy has played an important part in constraining some alternatives and promoting others.

This paper analyzes the extent of foreign exchange rate exposure in Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore in both firm level and industry level in the period of January 1996 to January 2011 by regressing the stock return of a particular industry or firm on exchange rate changes while controlling for overall stock market movements. It is found that exchange rate movements do affect firm and industry value in a manner consistent with expectation and the extract of unexpected exchange rate changes from actual exchange rate changes have little influence on the testing results of exposure. It is also proved that exchange rate regime plays an irreplaceable role in drawing the structure of exchange rate exposure of a country.

This paper deploy the logit approach model and collect annual data from 1974 to 2004 in 22 OECD countries. It can examine that the option of exchange rate regime may cause the replacements of the governor of central banks during his tenure of office. According to prior empirical studies shows that the rightist parties favor low inflation, they may choose fixed exchange rate regime for holding monetary stability; otherwise, the leftist parties prefer low unemployment and high production, they may adopt the flexible exchange rate regime to maintain independent monetary policy and to achieve their macroeconomic objectives. Due to diverse political preferences, Does the choice of exchange rate regime disobeyed the political ideology of ruling party will cause that the central bank governors lose their job? Our results manifest that these chairmen of central banks can independently insist and defend their exchange rate regimes in OECD countries.

The explosive growth of digital data collection and processing demands a new approach to the historical engineering methods of data correlation and model creation. A new prediction methodology based on high dimensional data has been developed. Since most high dimensional data resides on a low dimensional manifold, the new prediction methodology is one of dimensional reduction with embedding into a diffusion space that allows optimal distribution along the manifold. The resulting data manifold space is then used to produce a probability density function which uses spatial weighting to influence predictions i.e. data nearer the query have greater importance than data further away. The methodology also allows data of differing phenomenology e.g. color, shape, temperature, etc to be handled by regression or clustering classification. The new methodology is first developed, validated, then applied to common engineering situations, such as critical heat flux prediction and shuttle pitch angle determination. A number of illustrative examples are given with a significant focus placed on the objective identification of two-phase flow regimes. It is shown that the new methodology is robust through accurate predictions with even a small number of data points in the diffusion space as well as flexible in the ability to handle a wide range of engineering problems.

The crystallization kinetics and the melting behavior of a random copolyester with equal amounts of ethylene- and trimethylene- terephthalate units were studied by using a modulated differential scanning calorimeter in both conventional mode (DSC) and modulated mode (TMDSC). Polarizing light microscope (PLM) was used to study the spherulite growth rates and spherulite patterns. Isothermal crystallization was performed at temperatures (TC) between 115 and 142¢J. The Avrami exponents, n1, were found to increase from 3.00 to 3.22 with an increasing TC. At the highest TC, it should be a sporadic nucleation with spherical growth, i.e. n1 = 4. The value of n1 less than 4 and the slow rate of crystallization indicate that both primary and secondary crystallization occurs in parallel rather than in series. Triple- and double- melting peaks were observed for the melting behavior of DSC at 10¢J/min and of TMDSC at 2¢J/min. The results of WAXD, DSC and TMDSC indicate the coexistence of two melting mechanisms, i.e., dual morphologies and the recrystallization process. The Hoffman-Weeks plot gave an equilibrium melting temperature of 176.6¢J from the reversing curves of TMDSC. In this study, the regime II¡÷III transition temperature can be estimated from the inverse of the half-time of crystallization as overall growth rate and the growth rate. Meanwhile, a clear change in morphology from negative regular to banded spherulites was also observed around 132¢J by using PLM. The heat of fusion of polymer is customarily evaluated through the melting point depression measurements with the thermodynamic melting points. Application of the Flory equation to the PET/PTT random copolyesters diluted with di-n-butyl phthalate gave the values of the heat of fusion to be 4.48, 3.43 and 3.07 kcal/mole, respectively, for the random copolyesters containing 28, 38 and 50 mole % of ethylene terephthalate unit. The corresponded values of the interaction energy of mixing at infinite dilution were 3.90, 2.85 and 2.75 cal/cc.

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In retrospect, telecommunication technology and services have seen incessant renovation and development. The wave of liberalization is also the inexorable trend in the global telecommunications industry, the telecommunications industry in Taiwan can not be excluded itself from the trend. The telecommunications industry in Taiwan has been opened by degrees and sought to establish a fair competitive environment. In the meantime, there are several important changes no matter in facets of regulatory regimes, industrial structure, technology, or market demand, etc. The environment of telecommunications industry became more volatile than the monopoly one's. We extend the opinion of Noam (2006) who observed the long-term upturn and downturn in the American telecommunications industry and concluded that that volatility and cyclicality will be an inherent part of the telecommunication sector in the future. First, in our thesis we explore the cyclical behavior of Taiwan telecommunications industry. As the turning point of the telecommunications industry may be obscure, we adopt a Markov Regime-Switching model with two regimes representing contraction and expansion. This nonlinear, two states, regime-switching model shows that Taiwan telecommunications industry has suffered from the cyclic fluctuation since the liberalization had been followed out. We focus on the mobile phone industry thereafter in this study. Since three telecommunication-related laws passed in 1996, the mobile phone industry is the first industry implemented the liberalization policy. In the process of the mobile phone industry's evolution, the carriers in this industry all experience the rapid growth in the mobile phone penetration rate and the fierce competition. Hence, to identify the main explanatory factors of the mobile phone industry fluctuation and cycles we introduce an 11-variable vector autoregressive (VAR) model. The empirical results confirm that the mobile phone industry' output can be influenced by five factors mainly including the macroeconomic status, demand, network effect, relative equipment import price, and output price, and furthermore, the impetus of the liberalization policy and the progress of the technology also play an important role beyond the five main factors in terms of the separate carriers' analysis.

To the progress of social development, the middle-class has the ability to maintain the stable of social order development and the promotion of rational revolution. Among them, the location of labor is an important influential factor to the structure and change of classes. After the social change like industrialization and land reform, the middle-class in Taiwan appeared highly developed. However, with the circulation of the global capital, the employment position of labor markets had a division into two opposing extremes, which had cause the danger and anxiety among the middle-class. In this study, we take the view point of public employment regime to discuss how the State using the administrative power to stimulate labor, and how did they enforce social reform from the middle-class to reduce the opposition and confliction among classes. First, we take an observation on the long term Taiwan employment situation transition. We found out that, in order to promote the middle-class, we should place importance on the individual employment problems to provide education and employment training courses to reduce the long term unemployment. Second, we take the operation of the ¡¥short term employment promotion project¡¦ for consideration. We realized that in order to positively promote labor. We should think over the ¡¥lawful long term employment service¡¦ to enforce the employment service ability by ensuring the accountability and responsibility of administration departments by law; guarantee the occupation training; and enforce the ability of employment service department. Our suggestion is that, we should face squarely on the roles of Taiwan's middle-classes played on the autonomy and public sphere, and focus on the moderate social forces they had to avoid confliction and opposition to establish harmonious and mutually beneficial society.

This report explores the role medical professionals played in state-sponsored torture during the Brazilian military rule. Between 1964 and 1985, counterinsurgency agencies imprisoned an estimated 50,000 people, many of them without a trial, and tortured at least 20,000 suspected of ‘subversive conduct’. Scholars often describe the implementation of torture as the exclusive work of ‘infamous interrogators’ belonging to repressive agencies of the security forces. They were not, however, the sole perpetrators of human rights violations. A large body of medical experts played a significant role in administering and justifying the regime’s mechanism of oppression. While the evidence pointing to these collaborations exists in diverse sources, scholarship dealing with this aspect of regime’s repression is scarce. The report unveils the particular roles of doctors in the torture mechanism, and places their history within two larger historiographical frameworks. Engaging with literature on Latin America’s Cold War, the study traces the history of the National Security Doctrine and examines the final form it took in Brazil in the 1960s and 1970s. It then utilizes the scholarship on torture to contextualize and illuminate the regime’s practice of inflicting pain. Finally, the report turns to studies from other disciplines to offer theoretical and conceptual frameworks elucidating professionals’ complicity in torture. / text

Defense lawyers are portrayed as performing non-emotional work and their education does not train them for the social dimensions of handling clients and present in court. Despite this general picture of the legal profession, studies show that the work performed by lawyers comprises comprehensive emotion work. This study is based on ten semi-structured interviews and complementary observations of court hearings with criminal defense lawyers with variation in sex, age and work experiences. The main findings show that lawyers submit to the legal emotional regime characterized by a distance to emotions in court, but that the preparation for such a presentation requires substantial emotion work with the client before and after the court hearing. Client contact can be seen as a guided tour through the legal process undertaken by the lawyer with a focus on three aspects: (1) to dampen distress, (2) to prepare, produce and represent the client's expressions of emotion in court, and (3) to turn the everyday narrative of the event into legal codes, and vice versa. Empathy stands out an important tool in the emotion work performed by lawyers. Furthermore, the performance of objectivity is constructed socially through emotion work via the concept of professionalism. / Emotioner i domstol