<p> There are studies that have touched on the question of whether sanctions are effective or not. Some argue that sanctions are effective in achieving their goals, while others argue that they are ineffective. Some adopt the opinion that sanctions are effective with other foreign policy tools in specific conditions conducted with them. But there are not many who write about the adverse effects of sanctions on the target country's internal politics after their failure to achieve their goals as a separate subject. </p><p> This study highlights the counterproductivity of sanctions imposed on the authoritarian regimes that aim to pressure them into changing their policies or bring them down. The paper goes beyond the ineffectiveness of sanctions to argue that sanctions that target the authoritarian regimes help to strengthen the position of the authoritarian leaders instead of bringing political change. That happens in two different ways: If the sanctions are smart they either provoke the masses or unite them, which in turn shifts the public opinion in favor of the target regime or the target regime led by its charismatic leader will manipulate and exaggerate their effects for the purposes of furthering his power. If sanctions are comprehensive, however, they cause economic crisis and devastation of socioeconomic structures that hit the whole society and ensure the regime's continuity by limiting the capacity of the public to organize. In both situations the imposition of the sanctions would strengthen the sanctioned authoritarian regime. In this study, Libya and Eritrea were selected to examine the hypothesis on smart sanctions on the authoritarian regime while Iraq was chosen to examine the hypothesis on comprehensive sanctions.</p>

<p> This research develops and tests models to predict continuance intention on social networking sites. The models adds new factors which are relevant to social networking sites continuance intention. The social networking site continuance model adds five factors: personal innovativeness, habit, attitude toward alternatives, interpersonal influence, and consumer switching costs to enhance the predictive power of information systems continuance. Interpersonal influence, alternative perceptions and procedural and relational costs are theorized to have a direct effect on continuance intention. Personal innovativeness and habit are theorized to have a direct and moderating effects on continuance intention. The results have a large positive effect of the explanatory power in explaining more of the variance of continuance intention on a social networking site. The information systems (IS) continuance model explains approximately 66.8% of the variance and the social networking site continuance model with the five added factors explains 76.7% of the variance and is considered to have a large effect in the explained variance. All of the factors have statistical significance; the factors with the largest path coefficients are, in order, satisfaction &amp; perceived usefulness (<i>&beta;</i> = 0.3686), consumer switching costs (&beta; = 0.2496), alternative perceptions (<i>&beta;</i> = -0.2069), habit (<i>&beta;</i> = 0.1642), personal innovativeness (<i>&beta;</i> = -0.0589) and interpersonal influence (<i>&beta;</i> = -0.0451). Habit and personal innovativeness, as moderators, were not statistically significant and did not substantially aid in the interpretation of the factors. The research helps explains the relevant factors for why users of social networking sites will continue to use or abandon a site.</p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2007. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-11, Section: A, page: 4523. Adviser: Caroline Haythornthwaite. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 164-174) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 69-05, Section: A, page: 1583. Adviser: Christine A. Jenkins. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 214-227) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Computer Science, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on Jul 20, 2010). Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-12, Section: B, page: 7684. Adviser: Filippo Menczer.

<p> This project explores the constructions of gender, intimacy, and race and the ways these issues are informed by history and the law. The idea of consent, while originally described in texts as a legal concept between citizens, transformed into a way to navigate intimate relationships in the private sphere. This muddied the ways women and men were understood to form relationships and the limits of those relationships. In the same ways that gender was arbitrated through legal language, race is often ensnared in the same processes and institutions. Tolerance has been offered as one approach, but instead of mitigating this violence, it has more firmly entrenched it into the democratic process. Hannah Arendt&rsquo;s description of the social frames an understanding of intimacy and narratives. Arendt&rsquo;s work critically creates a space for the category of the social, something found around but outside of the public and private. Instead of working to make the private seen as a sphere for political action, I will focus on the potential of the social as a method of political action. While Arendt has obvious racial bias, I will use her own response to anti-semitism to develop a different approach to Black politics that allow for identity-based responses. Lauren Berlant&rsquo;s <i>Intimate Publics</i> addresses the potential for coalition building in the social. Using the sorority system as a way of teasing out notions of femininity, discipline, sexual violence, and intimacy, I will describe the ways that a woman subject is produced and how this then works to shape our notions of race. Women&rsquo;s identities, particularly white women, are constructed through an association with race and sexuality, by unpacking this development, its possible to see how this is socially and institutionally enforced. Part of this enforcement will focus on the narratives of sexual violence. Rape is an issue that not only confronts legal questions, but also the nature of a woman&rsquo;s ability to participate in democracy. Tying this together will be the importance of political theory. This serves to define the contemporary issues, solutions that have been offered and new potential approaches to intimate violence.</p><p>

<p> This qualitative, descriptive case study explored the social learning process within complex systems as described by product support managers (PSMs) assigned to acquisition programs within the Naval Air Systems Command. The research questions asked how individuals, as influenced by their values and structure, shape their interactions and behavior in a complex environment. Nine PSMs for major acquisition and sustainment programs were referred by senior leaders and participated in the study.</p><p> Data were collected through in-depth interviews that were transcribed to capture the PSMs&rsquo; experiences and then synthesized into contextual and social learning profiles. The findings resulted in seven themes. (1) PSMs operate in complex, dynamic, and variably resourced environments that are highly dependent on interaction and result in uniquely executed programs. (2) The highly structured environment and functionally oriented structure diminish the authority of the individual and present barriers to interaction. (3) The highly structured and boundary-rich environment limits information flow and presents difficulty in communication and developing routines that align meanings, value orientations, and shared understanding across those boundaries. (4) PSMs attempt to adjust, increase, and routinize interactions but often react to emerging needs with limited authority and resources, which often leaves short-term and least helpful alternatives. (5) PSMs leverage key relationships as bridges of information but often receive limited feedback to resolve short-term issues to complete tasks. (6) PSMs are aligned with organizational goals and values to improve user outcomes and speed of delivering products, but there is value incongruency between expectations and what they want to do to achieve those outcomes. (7) PSMs experience role ambiguity, as they are torn between how much they want to develop the team and interactions versus becoming an expert and accomplishing tasks.</p><p> The study concluded that PSMs are effectively <i>leveraging different operating system</i> views to maximize the variety of the small alternatives they have; <i>countering the power of the system</i> through meaning making, developing their unique abilities (as well as their team&rsquo;s) and trying to reduce their isolation; and <i>increasing the available space for social learning</i> to make progress through trial and error and satisficing.</p><p>

<p> This thesis analyzes the political genesis of Brazil&rsquo;s recent reform of its upper-secondary education system, the Novo Ensino M&eacute;dio Reform. This latest reform has been highly controversial and linked by many to the government of President Michel Temer. However, this argues that the reform is much larger than the Temer administration that produced it. This reform, that creates a seven-hour school day and allows upper-secondary students to choose an area of specialization, is a continuation of a history of incremental reform that has taken place against the backdrop of shifting educational priorities. This reform coincided with a shift towards a human capital centric ideology that is heavily influenced by international organizations, such as the World Bank. Furthermore, the reform is also largely the result of a bipartisan commission whose work preceded the Temer administration. The impeachment of Dilma Rousseff brought President Temer to power and allowed for the construction of a new majority. The new administration in turn adopted the already existing proposal for reform of upper-secondary education and modified it to fit their agenda of market friendliness and public burden reduction. The new majority was largely supportive of the reform but the reform also found support amongst the opposition who saw the reform as the logical next step in Brazil&rsquo;s long march towards universalization of upper-secondary education.</p><p>

<p> The objective of this thesis was to explore the topic of scalable web development, and it answered the question, &ldquo;How do you scale a website to handle more traffic at peak times without wasting resources?&rdquo; This is important research to any web company that has issues with rising costs as demand for their website increases. It would be wise for every online business to be prepared for more web traffic, before it occurs, without spending the budget of a multi-million user web company in low traffic periods. The last thing you want is an error as your customer base starts to arrive, giving them a bad experience for their first impressions, which would result in lost revenue.</p><p> Scalable software development architectures, including microservices, big data, and Kubernetes were studied, in addition to similar web service companies including Facebook, Twitter, and Match.com. A scalable architecture was designed for a social media web service, MeAndYou, using the big data configuration with a shared Aurora database, which was configured using an auto-scaling group attached to a load balancer in Amazon Web Services (AWS). It was tested using a custom threaded Selenium-based Python script that applied simulated user load to the servers. As the load was applied, AWS added more Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances running a virtual disk image of the web server. After the load was removed, the instances were terminated automatically by AWS to save costs.</p><p> Countless steps were taken to make the web service bigger and more scalable than it originally was, before testing, including adding more fields to user profiles, adding more search types, and separating the layers of code into different Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) files in the front-end. A version control system was configured on the servers using GitHub and rsync. The systems architecture designed suggests the Match Engine should use a stream processing message queue, which would allow the system to factor searches one at a time as they are created, with horizontal scaling capabilities, rather than grabbing the entire database and storing it in memory. The backend Match Engine was also tested for accuracy using Structured Query Language (SQL) injection, which determined how the match algorithm should be improved in the future.</p><p>

<p> This dissertation focuses on the everyday life information practices of teens in the Nerdfighter online fan community known as Nerdfighteria. Nerdfighteria is the community of fans of vloggers John and Hank Green. This study examines aspects of everyday life information seeking (ELIS) by 1) focusing on an understudied demographic, teens between the ages of 13 to 17; 2) focusing on a fan community, Nerdfighteria, which has many members, but has been rarely studied in the academic literature; and 3) investigating everyday life information practices using a single community that utilizes multiple online platforms (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, Discord, and YouTube), rather than centering on a single platform. </p><p> This dissertation is a case study incorporating a survey of 241 teens and semi-structured interviews with 15 teens about their experiences in Nerdfighteria, followed by a month-long diary activities. The study also included observations of public communities and review of documents related to the Nerdfighter community. Data analysis was iterative and incorporated grounded theory techniques. </p><p> This study finds that teen Nerdfighters use their fan community to engage in a wide variety of everyday life information seeking around topics that are related to their personal development. Social, cognitive, emotional, and fan topics were predominant. Teen Nerdfighters engaged across platforms and were likely to switch platforms to find the optimal technical affordances while staying in Nerdfighteria. The teens viewed these changes as staying within the community rather than changing from one platform to another&mdash;illustrating the primacy of the community to the teens in meeting their information needs. Teens were drawn to Nerdfighteria because they believed it to be a unique place on the Internet, which valued intellectualism, positivity, and kindness. In many cases, teens preferred to observe other&rsquo;s interactions in order to gain the information they needed or wanted, and waited to engage via posting or responding when certain criteria were met. These findings describe the complicated interplay of the ELIS topics sought, the preferred practices for meeting an information need, and the reasons for choosing one community over another.</p><p>