This study explores the nature and significance of consumer dispute processes in China. It examines access to consumer justice issues, with particular reference to both consumer experience and the roles that the state, legal professionals and other social actors play in the consumer dispute processes. It focuses on one local area (Shenzhen, China) and uses an in-depth ethnographic approach to offer a realistic picture of consumer dispute resolution in China's socialist market economy. The principal question addressed is: how are consumer disputes resolved in this part of China today? The study analyses consumer dispute resolution practices in terms of various channels, including the handling of cases in the Consumer Council, the regulator's reporting system, the courts, the media, and online platforms. It determines that mediation or tiaojie in Chinese (by whatever provider) continues to be the dominant type of consumer dispute process. However, the style of mediation used - often differs from the approach to mediation in the common law world - is conducted by staff in public bodies and is a didactic process used largely to contain the impact of the dispute. The study also explores 'professional' consumers, who may well see themselves as ordinary consumers or mere citizens, but who develop expertise through repeat asserting of consumer rights in various consumer dispute processes. These professionals are regarded in this study as a modest form of 'consumer citizen' in China, and their activities do encourage reforms, despite sometimes hostile official attitudes. The present work contributes to our understanding of consumer protection and legal developments in China, and through its analysis of the China case offers contributions to the more general literature on dispute resolution, consumers' access to justice, and consumer protection.

Video super-resolution (VSR) aims to give a satisfying estimation of a high-resolution (HR) image from multiple similar low-resolution (LR) images by exploiting their hidden redundancy. The rapid development of convolutional neural network (CNN) techniques provide numerous new possibilities to solve the VSR problem. Recent VSR methods combine CNN with motion compensation to cancel the inconsistencies among the LR images and merge them to an HR images. To compensate the motion, pixels in input frames are warped according to optical-flow-like information. In this procedure, trade-off has to be made between the distraction caused by spatio-temporal inconsistencies and the pixel-wise detail damage caused by the compensation. We proposed a novel VSR method with the name, Video Super-Resolution via Dynamic Local Filter Network, and its upgraded edition, Video Super-Resolution with Compensation in Feature Extraction. Both methods perform motion compensation via a dynamic local filter network, which processes the input images with dynamically generated filter kernels. These kernels are sample-specific and position-specific. Therefore, our proposed methods can eliminate the inter-frame differences during feature extractions without explicitly manipulating pixels. The experimental results demonstrate that our methods outperform the state-of-the-art VSR algorithms in terms of PSNR and SSIM and recover more details with superior visual quality.

<p> Conflict typically is associated with negative and destructive connotations within organizations. However, a shift is taking place in workplaces to view conflict through a positive frame and to consider conflict as an opportunity to establish an environment that is more creative and innovative while identifying ineffective policies, behaviors or actions. This study was developed to examine how organizations can enhance conflict management competencies to empower leaders and employees to manage conflict by employing problem-solving tactics and collaborative approaches. Furthermore, this study was designed to understand what strategies and practices leaders and specialists in the field of Alternative Dispute Resolution utilize to promote conflict management skills. Additionally, the research sought to identify the challenges these individuals encountered when implementing conflict management interventions in organizations, understand how success was measured, and determine recommendations to develop conflict management competencies. Fifteen Alternative Dispute Resolution leaders and specialists participated in this phenomenological study by voluntarily responding to 12 semi-structured interview questions. Based on the participants&rsquo; responses 46 themes emerged across the four research questions. Strategic conflict management planning, engaging stakeholders in the process, consensus building, and convening and inquiry were the top strategies and practices mentioned by the participants in the study. When facing challenges during an implementation of conflict management interventions the theme commonly mentioned was lack of stakeholder engagement and how participants managed obstacles was through being agile and emphasizing positive communication. Measurements of success used by the participants that ranked highest were receiving feedback on process and outcomes, metrics on conflict/issue, and organizational performance metrics. The top theme that surfaced among all participants was how they developed conflict management competencies through a combination of experience and various formal training. The participants indicated the desire to have further conflict management training and education earlier in the career. Based on the research the following three frameworks were developed to enhance conflict management competencies in organizations (a) problem-solving culture framework, (b) conflict management intervention model, and (c) conflict manager competency paradigm. </p><p>

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Abstract Sensory systems are considered to be optimized for their ecological niche. In vision this means highly organised regular structure and function, where nearly identical photoreceptors have graded light responses in order to be able to handle as much information as possible. Instead, cockroach compound eyes show large amounts of irregularities in their optics and structure, and unusually long axons. In this thesis photoreceptors of the cockroach were studied with intracellular recordings of their light responses, biophysical systems analysis, and modelling of the relations between the light stimuli and responses. Cockroaches prefer living in dark or extremely dim environments. However, they have large and complex compound eyes. The aim of this study was to find out the functional properties by which the visual system and especially photoreceptors have adapted to cope with, i.e. to see in, dim light conditions. The function of photoreceptors was found to vary randomly in many respects, and the long axons seemed to utilise action potential coding of visual signals. Through model simulations it was shown that signals of a group of these functionally variable and spiking photoreceptors, when pooled, could provide more reliable coding than signals of identical cells of any experimentally characterised type. This naturally sacrifices spatial resolution. The filtering dynamics of the photoreceptors is matched to low light intensities and their temporal resolution does not markedly improve with increasing light adaptation. Adaptation processes in the photoreceptors saturated near an intensity of about 1000 effective photons/s. These are all both unexpected and novel features of photoreceptor function. Spatial summation of functionally different photoreceptors and reduced temporal resolution and contrast coding abilities can be considered to be permanent optimizations to a dim environment.

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Insight into the biochemical mechanisms utilized by retaining and inverting glycosyltransferase enzymes is an important stepping stone to the directed design of stereospecific inhibitor based drugs. The suitability of proposed mechanisms was probed using site directed mutagenesis of catalytically relevant residues as well as the use of catalytically inactive substrate analogs UMP-PO2-CH2-D-Gal and α-L-Fuc-(1→2)-β-D-(3-deoxy)-Gal-O(CH2)5CH3 with the retaining human enzyme a specific α-1,3-N-acetylglucosaminyltransferase (GTA) in conjunction with kinetic and structural approaches including two dozen high resolution X-ray structures and a 2.5 Å resolution neutron structure. The neutron structure depicts a remarkably non-polar active site which lacks suitably positioned hydrogen atoms to support a dissociative mechanism. Site directed mutagenesis of residues which should be essential to initiate and stabilize a dissociative oxocarbenium ion do not abolish enzyme activity. The catalytically inactive substrate analogs depict the acceptor nucleophile to lay very close to the anomeric carbon (2.5 Å), which is considerably closer than the closest observed enzymatic dipoles (4.8 Å). This is an indication that the active site architecture is more suited to facilitate a mechanism initiating with nucleophilic attack than dissociation. To ensure that these observations are applicable to other glycosyltransferases, in depth geometric analysis of all published liganded structures of GT-A fold glycosyltransferase enzymes are reported that display conserved architectures in which the acceptor nucleophile approach is closer than enzymatic dipoles required for dissociation for both inverting and retaining enzymes. Inverting and retaining enzymes present the donor sugar through different conserved geometries about the divalent cation cofactor: all inverting enzymes position the donor for inline nucleophilic attack by the acceptor, the retaining enzymes position the sugar to be attacked from an orthogonal angle. Such an orthogonal associative mechanism is the most direct proposed approach, and seems supported by all available evidence. / Graduate

No description available.

LEGALITY OF THE INTERVENTION DURING LIBYAN CIVIL WAR Abstract The main purpose of this paper is to answer the questuion, if the NATO intervention in Libya during Libyan civil war in 2011 was in accordance with the international law. To achieve this purpose, the paper is divided into three parts. The first one, represented by chapters 1-5, describes self-defence and armed actions of the Security Council under the chap. VII of the UN Charter, which are legal and quite controversial concept of the humanitarian intervention and R2P concept. The role of regional arrangements in peacekeeping is also mentioned. The second part, represented by chap. 6, contains a case study whose object is the Libyan civil war in 2011 between col. Gaddafi's forces and the rebels supported by the NATO. The chapter 6 contains a detailed summary of various demonstrations, battles and campaigns, including the operation Unified Protector. The third part, chap. 7, is pointed on the question of legality of the NATO intervention. Albeit authorisation by the Resolution 1973, the legality of the intervention is questionable. The first air strikes, of 19 March, aimed on Libyan armed forces attacking Benghazi, can be classified as protection of civilians mentioned by the Resolution 1973. Following NATO air strikes supported the rebels in a...

The objective of this study was to explore the link between school climate and bullying behaviour through a case study of two high schools. Grade 10 students received the two day Cross-Cultural Conflict Resolution (XCCR) Module initiated by YOUCAN. Phase I of this study involved the development of an XCCR Logic Model, which aimed to clarify the objectives and key elements of the XCCR Module. Phase II involved the in depth analysis of the XCCR Module through an 84-item survey and qualitative semi-structured interviews with school and program staff. Data from this study did not indicate any changes in bullying behaviour or school climate between pre-and post-implementation. This study highlights a need to incorporate measures for program adherence and program fidelity in future studies. The results of this study provided two practical contributions, an XCCR Logic Model and information about bullying and school climate for the participating schools.