De största konsekvenserna av föräldrarnas beslut att gå skilda vägar bär tredje part i familjen – barnen. Samtidigt är det de som har rätt till en trygg uppväxt och utveckling som skall tillgodoses av föräldrarna. Hur kan barnperspektiv framhållas och inte hamna i skuggan av de vuxnas perspektiv? Finns det klara linjer för hur barnperspektiv ska framhållas? Av vem kan barnen förvänta sig stöd under den svåra tiden? Hur kan den laddade situationen mellan föräldrarna som utspelas i vårdnads, boende och umgängestvister minskas? Syftet med uppsatsen är att utreda vilken ställning barn som grupp har efter lagändringarna i föräldrabalken (FB) 1 juli 2006 i frågor/tvister rörande dem själva gällande vårdnad, boende och umgänge. I samband med det syftar jag också att utreda vem som ger familjen inklusive barnen stöd under den jobbiga perioden och vad som är de yrkesprofessionellas åsikter. Rätten till båda sina föräldrar, genom gemensam vårdnad eller växelvis boende, var och är en del av offentliga retoriken om barns uppväxt. Forskningsresultaten tvingar oss att inse att barn inte mår bra av att vara underställda föräldrarnas rättigheter framför deras skyldigheter och domstolsbeslut, på grund av att barn och föräldrarnas oenighet inte synliggörs och barn har ingen yttranderätt i civilrättsliga mål om vårdnad, boende och umgänge. Jag har valt en kvalitativ design och ett icke- sannolikhets, målinriktad urval, halvstrukturerade intervju med yrkesprofessionella för att undersöka uppsatsens frågor.  Jag har använt rationell val teorin, kognitiva teorin, Meads rollövertagande teori och social konstruktivism teorin för resultatanalys. Man kan konstatera att barn som grupp fick mer inflytande efter lagändringar i FB 1 juli 2006 i frågor/tvister rörande dem själva om vårdnad, boende och umgänge, men detta inflytande är inte tillräckligt för att barnperspektivet inte riskerar att underställas de vuxnas perspektiv. För att förebygga detta behövs först och främst en tydlig definition av barns bästa och riktlinjer för att tolka denna. Tolkning är ett viktigt moment och omfattar barns rättsäkerhet. Tolkningen ska sammanfalla med barns bästa i slutändan men så är det inte alltid idag. Stödet från samhället för kärnfamiljer inklusive barn räcker inte till som både min studie och tidigare forskning har visat. / The biggest consequence of the parents’ decision to go separate ways bears the third part of the family- the children. Still it is they who have the right to a safe upbringing and development that should be satisfied by their parents. How can children's perspectives be stressed and not end up in the shadow of the parents perspective? Are there clear lines of how the child's perspective should be emphasized?  By whom can the children expect support during the difficult time? How can the ill-tempered situation between the parents concerning custody, housing and socializing disputes be reduced? The purpose of the paper is to investigate the status of children as a group, after legislative changes in the “Föräldrabalken” (FB) July 1, 2006 on matters /disputes relating to concerning custody, housing and socializing. In that context I also aims to investigate who gives the family (including children) support during the hard period and what are the opinion of the professionals. The right of both parents, joint custody and alternately living was and is a part of the public rhetoric about children's upbringing. The results of the research forces us to recognize that children do not feel well to be subject to the rights of parents over their obligations and court decisions, because the children and parents' disagreement is not visible and there are no rights for children to speak in civil cases concerning the custody, housing, socializing. I chose a qualitative design and a non-probability, purposeful sampling, semi-structured interview with professionals to examine the paper’s issues. I have used rational choice theory, cognitive theory, Meads taking over the role theory and social constructionist theory for performance analysis. It can be noted that children as a group had more influences after the legislative changes in “FB” July 1, 2006 in matters /disputes relating them about custody, housing and socializing, but this influence is not sufficient so the child's perspective will not likely to be overran by the adults perspective. To prevent this we first and foremost need a clear definition of the child's best and guidelines who to interpret it. Interpretation is an important moment, and includes children's legal rights. Interpretation should coincide with the children's best in the end, but it is not always the case today. The support today from society to families (including children) is not enough and that is shown both in my study and in previous research.

<p><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size:12.0pt / font-family:&quot / Times New Roman&quot / ,&quot / serif&quot / mso-fareast-font-family:&quot / Times New Roman&quot / mso-ansi-language:EN-GB / mso-fareast-language: EN-ZA">Literature shows that cataracts are the leading cause of blindness globally and nationally. Retinal detachment has also been a substantial problem both globally and nationally. Both of these conditions are prevalent in patients of 50 years and older. The treatment for both conditions is for surgery to be performed. In the Western Cape the three leading hospitals do not have ophthalmic pre-operative and post-operative protocols<span style="mso-bidi-font-weight:bold">.</span>Review question:What are the best practices to manage pre-operative and post-operative nursing care in patients waiting for cataract and retinal detachment surgery? bjectives:1. To determine the best practice in pre-operative and post-operative care in patients who have undergone cataract and/or retinal detachment surgery regarding: health education offered by nurses, counselling to prevent psychological effects, and positioning to prevent physical complications. 2. To develop a framework based on systematic reviews for pre-operative and post-operative ophthalmic nursing care in South Africa. Methodology: </span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 12.0pt / font-family:&quot / Times New Roman&quot / ,&quot / serif&quot / mso-ansi-language:EN-GB">A systematic review using the guide by the Centre for Reviews and Dissemination was done, and <span style="mso-bidi-font-weight:bold">studies were </span>identified by searching various electronic databases and visually scanning reference lists from the relevant studies. Studies that were included were evidence-based. All study types were considered and the studies were selected based on the title and, where available, the abstract. These were then assessed against the inclusion criteria. A narrative synthesis was used. Finally the evidence was summarised and a framework was drawn up, focusing on pre-operative and post-operative nursing care for cataract and retinal detachment surgery</span></p> <p>&nbsp / </p>

The efficient high-throughput VLSI implementation of near-optimal multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) detectors for 4x4 MIMO systems in high-order quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) schemes has been a major challenge in the literature. To address this challenge, this thesis introduces a novel scalable pipelined VLSI architecture for a 4x4 64-QAM MIMO receiver based on K-Best lattice decoders. The key contribution is a means of expanding/visiting the intermediate nodes of the search tree on-demand, rather than exhaustively along with three types of distributed sorters operating in a pipelined structure. The combined expansion and sorting cores are able to find the K best candidates in K clock cycles. The proposed architecture has a fixed critical path independent of the constellation order, on-demand expansion scheme, efficient distributed sorters, and is scalable to a higher number of antennas/constellation orders. Fabricated in 0.13um CMOS, it operates at a significantly higher throughput (5.8x better) than currently reported schemes and occupies 0.95 mm2 core area. Operating at 282 MHz clock frequency, it dissipates 135 mW at 1.3 V supply with no performance loss. It achieves an SNR-independent decoding throughput of 675 Mbps satisfying the requirements of IEEE 802.16m and Long Term Evolution (LTE) systems. The measurements confirm that this design consumes 3.0x less energy/bit compared to the previous best design.

This dissertation is an examination of Aristotle’s political science. The first part begins by comparing the Aristotelian conception of the human being as a political animal with subsequent conceptions, notably in the political thought of Cicero, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau. This comparative analysis shows that human nature is increasingly conceived as apolitical, a major consequence of which is a rejection of the Aristotelian conception of logos (speech, reason) as a natural capacity for reasoning about justice and injustice. It is then demonstrated that modern political science rejects Aristotle’s argument that there is a good for human beings as such which is constitutive of their end (telos), in the same way that modern science abandoned Aristotelian natural teleology. While contemporary currents of political thought, including neo-Aristotelianism, republicanism and communitarianism, make use of certain elements of Aristotle’s thought, they largely fail to recover the critical notions of action and nature. Having cleared major obstacles that bar our access to Aristotle’s political science, the dissertation moves, in the second part, to a textual analysis of the Politics, which, it is argued, constitutes not a work fractured between its “realistic” and “idealistic” parts, but a unified inquiry into both defective political regimes and the best regime, the guiding question of which is: how to render human beings good. The analysis begins by a consideration of the naturalness of the city and examines the various ways in which the notion of “nature” is used by Aristotle. It is then argued that, according to Aristotle’s presentation, political life is the fulfillment of human nature insofar as it represents the possibility of an ethical and moral life. Accordingly, political science, and legislative or “architectonic” science in particular, is to be devoted to moral education. Aristotle is critical of an education that neglects the virtues necessary for leisure in favour of military virtues alone, while acknowledging that cities must be prepared for war. Through an examination of the legislative science and political prudence, it is shown that Aristotle’s political science is capable of providing action with a moral orientation, without having recourse to metaphysical cosmology.

This dissertation consists of two independent essays on public economics. The first essay studies the consequences of fiscal decentralization on poverty and income inequalities. This essay describes the possible channels through which fiscal decentralization might affect poverty and income inequalities, and carries out an empirical analysis with data of a large number of countries at different stages of development, for the period 1971-2000. Fiscal decentralization is found to have significant effects on poverty and income inequalities. These findings are important because they suggest, contrary to the traditional public finance theory, that sub-national governments can play an important role in the reduction of poverty and income inequalities. The second essay studies the second best solution to the public expenditures’ problem in the presence of a proportional labor income tax. By allowing the tax base to vary with the taxpayers’ behavioral responses to taxation, we derive the “effective” budget constraint faced by the government, which describes the set of affordable combinations of public and private goods. We show that the optimal solution to the government problem corresponds to the point of tangency between the effective budget constraint and the highest attainable social indifference curve. The traditional normative prescription for public expenditures under a second-best scenario does not satisfy this condition, and therefore it provides a suboptimal solution. Finally, we use the same analytical framework in order to explain the flypaper effect, an empirical regularity that has for long challenged the conventional theory.

The optimum values for the section variables like channel side slope,bottom width,depth and radius for triangular,rectangular, trapezoidal and circular channels are computed by minimizing the cost of the channel section.Manning &rsquo / s uniform flow formula is treated as a constraint for the optimization model.The cost function is arranged to include the cost of lining,cost of earthwork and the increment in the cost of earthwork with the depth below the ground surface.The optimum values of section variables are expressed as simple functions of unit cost terms.Unique values of optimum section variables are obtained for the case of minimum area or minimum wetted perimeter problems.

Addressing climate change is a major undertaking. Agricultural soil has the potential to assist in decreasing the concentration of GHGs in the atmosphere by storing CO2 in the soil. Carbon offset markets have been suggested as a cost effective means of reducing GHG emissions. Farmers can increase their soil sink potential by applying Beneficial Management Practices (BMPs) that enhance carbon sequestration through improvements to soil, nutrient and livestock management practices (Fulton et. al., 2005). Whether or not a market for carbon offsets will emerge depends on a number of factors which mainly are related to the profitability of the BMPs and the costs of implementing a carbon contract. Provided that a market for carbon offsets emerges, the effectiveness of the market depends, in part, on the degree to which buyers and sellers in the market comply with the terms of the contracts they sign. The resource costs associated with monitoring and verification may result in incomplete monitoring. As long as monitoring is not perfect, non-compliance will be an issue. <p>The analysis that will be performed in this thesis introduces non-compliance in the economic analysis of carbon-offset market. The purpose of this work is to examine the overall cost effectiveness of the carbon-offset market when introducing non-compliance. <p>Firstly the theoretical model investigates the incentives for different farmers to participate in the carbon offsets market as well as incentives for engaging in cheating. The model recognizes farmers heterogeneity with respect to cost differences and examines the economic determinants of farmers non-compliance as well as the consequences of non-compliance on the performance of the carbon-offset market. Results support the standard finding that the extent of producers non-compliance decreases with an increase in the audit probability and/or an increase in the penalty per unit of non-compliance. In addition, the number of producers participating in the carbon offsets market is shown to increase with an increase in the carbon-offset price.<p> The analysis then introduces intermediaries in the market that will take care of trading carbon offsets as well as monitoring producers. The traders role in this study is played by an IOF (investor owned-firm) or a PA (producers association). Within the IOF, the analysis focuses on the monopoly and oligopoly structures. The key role of the traders is to guarantee, based on the amount of monitoring that is undertaken, that the emitters purchase only carbon offsets that actually correspond to sequestered carbon. The analysis then examines three cases for the group that monitors farmers compliance a group owned by for-profit traders, a government-run agency and a group owned by the PA trader. This part of the thesis examines what impact the involvement of the traders in the carbon-offset market has on non-compliance, as well as how the structure of the monitoring group affects non-compliance and the amount of carbon offsets traded in the market. The results of the analysis show that the monitoring groups always undertake sufficient monitoring to ensure that full compliance is achieved thus, while non-compliance is possible, it does not occur in equilibrium. The finding suggests that the formation of a government monitoring agency can potentially increase traded output and lower the price paid by emitters, still these changes are likely to be small, particularly when the trading sector is monopolistic. The overall analysis in this chapter shows that the optimal amount of enforcement, and as a result the cost effectiveness of a carbon-offset market, depends on the nature of the organization that undertakes the enforcement. <p>The next consideration of the thesis is the heterogeneity attributed to the timing of sequestration by different farmers. The analysis focuses on the carbon offsets pooling by considering two structures for the aggregator: a for-profit aggregator and a producers association. Pooling resources enables the farmers to benefit from economies of scale. The pricing schedule used by the aggregator is a two-part tariff. The two-part tariff is used as a way of providing an incentive for the farmers sequestering large amounts of carbon to participate in the pool. The study considers two alternatives for the coefficients that might be used to decide on the amount of carbon offsets to which each farmer will be entitled: default coefficient and custom coefficients. Each situation is modeled in a principal agent framework. <p>The analysis examines how the aggregator will target the monitoring service for different group of farmers. The investigation reveals that, under different scenarios, a PA or a FPA (for-profit aggregator) might lead to the formation of a heterogeneous pool or a homogeneous pool of each type. <p>The last issue investigated in this dissertation is the coexistence of a FPA and a PA in the default coefficient case. The analysis show that both aggregator structures can exist together in the market in the same time if the savings in the monitoring costs made possible by the PA are smaller than the cost of organizing the pool. If this condition is not satisfied the FPA cannot survive in the market and the producers association will dominate. <p>In addition to providing a better understanding of how the carbon-offset market may perform when introducing non-compliance, the results of this study can assist in assessing the cost effectiveness of the carbon-offset market when enforcement is undertaken by different organizations. Furthermore, the last consideration of the pooling option might help in selecting which type of pool a heterogeneous or a homogeneous one might perform better under different alternatives.

This dissertation is an examination of Aristotle’s political science. The first part begins by comparing the Aristotelian conception of the human being as a political animal with subsequent conceptions, notably in the political thought of Cicero, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau. This comparative analysis shows that human nature is increasingly conceived as apolitical, a major consequence of which is a rejection of the Aristotelian conception of logos (speech, reason) as a natural capacity for reasoning about justice and injustice. It is then demonstrated that modern political science rejects Aristotle’s argument that there is a good for human beings as such which is constitutive of their end (telos), in the same way that modern science abandoned Aristotelian natural teleology. While contemporary currents of political thought, including neo-Aristotelianism, republicanism and communitarianism, make use of certain elements of Aristotle’s thought, they largely fail to recover the critical notions of action and nature. Having cleared major obstacles that bar our access to Aristotle’s political science, the dissertation moves, in the second part, to a textual analysis of the Politics, which, it is argued, constitutes not a work fractured between its “realistic” and “idealistic” parts, but a unified inquiry into both defective political regimes and the best regime, the guiding question of which is: how to render human beings good. The analysis begins by a consideration of the naturalness of the city and examines the various ways in which the notion of “nature” is used by Aristotle. It is then argued that, according to Aristotle’s presentation, political life is the fulfillment of human nature insofar as it represents the possibility of an ethical and moral life. Accordingly, political science, and legislative or “architectonic” science in particular, is to be devoted to moral education. Aristotle is critical of an education that neglects the virtues necessary for leisure in favour of military virtues alone, while acknowledging that cities must be prepared for war. Through an examination of the legislative science and political prudence, it is shown that Aristotle’s political science is capable of providing action with a moral orientation, without having recourse to metaphysical cosmology.

The efficient high-throughput VLSI implementation of near-optimal multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) detectors for 4x4 MIMO systems in high-order quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) schemes has been a major challenge in the literature. To address this challenge, this thesis introduces a novel scalable pipelined VLSI architecture for a 4x4 64-QAM MIMO receiver based on K-Best lattice decoders. The key contribution is a means of expanding/visiting the intermediate nodes of the search tree on-demand, rather than exhaustively along with three types of distributed sorters operating in a pipelined structure. The combined expansion and sorting cores are able to find the K best candidates in K clock cycles. The proposed architecture has a fixed critical path independent of the constellation order, on-demand expansion scheme, efficient distributed sorters, and is scalable to a higher number of antennas/constellation orders. Fabricated in 0.13um CMOS, it operates at a significantly higher throughput (5.8x better) than currently reported schemes and occupies 0.95 mm2 core area. Operating at 282 MHz clock frequency, it dissipates 135 mW at 1.3 V supply with no performance loss. It achieves an SNR-independent decoding throughput of 675 Mbps satisfying the requirements of IEEE 802.16m and Long Term Evolution (LTE) systems. The measurements confirm that this design consumes 3.0x less energy/bit compared to the previous best design.

Since 1995, a thrombolytic therapy, rt-PA, has been approved for use with acute stroke that significantly reduces, and sometimes reverses, neurological damage. Treatment has to be given within a few hours of the start of symptoms and can only commence once a CT-scan has confirmed a particular type of stroke. In the evidence-based medicine and knowledge translation literature, variations in practice are constituted as a problem to be solved. It is assumed that a physician decides whether or not to use this therapy based on his/her evaluation of the scientific evidence. In this thesis, I demonstrate that what are less evident in many of these claims are issues related to the social production of knowledge. Little attention is paid to who conducts research, who promotes its findings, and who is expected to implement them. The positivist discourse of evidence-based medicine assumes that research produces knowledge that is neutral and can be translated into treatment that is in the patient’s best interest. Yet these assumptions remain empirically unexamined, despite social science critiques of these processes. Institutional Ethnography is an approach in sociology developed by Dorothy Smith. Based on Smith’s understanding of the social organization of knowledge, it allows for an examination of the complex social relations organizing people’s experiences of their everyday working lives. Beginning in the experiences of physicians who provide acute stroke services, this dissertation explores an example of how best practice medicine is developed, translated, and taken up in practice across various sites in the province of Ontario. For Smith, texts mediate and organize people’s experiences. In my study, the discourses of both evidence-based medicine and knowledge translation, designed to improve patient care, come into view as managerial tools designed to control the delivery of care. I render visible how in fact things work as they do in real life settings in a way that links back actual people to the texts, or discourse, organizing their experiences. In so doing, I am able to uncover some of the assumptions and hidden priorities underlying the current emphasis on translating scientific knowledge in medicine into practice.