Advance directives are instructions given by patients – or potential patients – specifying what actions ought to be taken for their health in the event that they are no longer capable to make decisions due to illness or incapacity. Over the last decades, there has been a rising tide in favour of advance directives: not only is the use of such directives recommended by most medical and advisory bodies, they are also gaining increasing legal recognition in many parts of the world. This book, however, takes as its point of departure one of the most commonly discussed medical-ethical arguments against granting advance directives moral force: the Objection from Personal Identity. The adherers of this objection basically asserts that when there is lacking psychological continuity between the person who formulated the advance directive and the later patient to whom it supposedly applies, this seriously threatens the directive’s moral authority. And, further, that this is so because lacking sufficient psychological continuity implies that the author of the advance directive is numerically distinct from the later patient. Although this argument has some initial appeal, most philosophers in the advance directives debate maintain that the Objection from Personal Identity fails, but suggest different reasons as to why. Whereas some argue that the objection has no force because it rests on faulty beliefs about personal identity, others argue that we ought to grant advance directives moral authority even if the author and the later patient are numerically distinct beings. This book investigates some of the most influential of these arguments and reaches the conclusion that the Objection from Personal Identity has more to it than is usually recognized in the medical-ethical debate. Lacking sufficient psychological continuity between author and later patient, it is concluded, does threaten the moral authority of the advance directive.

The study is set out to contribute to an increased understanding of the structural problems that cause difficulties for the European Union to achieve common action, and contests the assumption that a permanent presidency of the European Council will solve these issues. This study describes the European Union as a meta-organisation and through organisational theory to understand the issue. It also reviews the original purpose of the European Coal and Steel Community to provide a historical understanding of the European Union as a meta-organisation. This study finds that the issues causing difficulties to achieve common action and to speak with one voice stems from inherent conflict of autonomy between the EU and its member states. The European Union’s misguided assumptions that increased authority through the appointment of a President will increase its decision-making abilities. As this research shows the European Union’s attempts to increase its authority is constantly met with member states unwillingness to give the increased authority at the price of their autonomy.

The relationship between earnings management and tax manipulation has been discussed in academia recently. We contribute to this discussion by using a list of tax evader companies, to test the relationship. The list was supplied by the Swedish Tax Agency and consists of public companies from the Swedish stock exchanges. Our findings show that tax evader companies are more prone to manage their earnings and that they do it by reporting small earnings. The effect of labelling the companies as tax manipulators does also not change the extent that they manipulate their earnings in the future. There is therefore no disciplinary effect from the tax evader fine on a manipulating company to behave more credible in the future. Out of our results the most unexpected was however that when we compare the NASDAQ companies with the ones listed on less liquid stock exchanges the NASDAQ ones were more pervasive in managing their earnings. This goes against our own hypothesis as well as previous literature and shows that investors have to be careful also when investing in premium markets.

This Report examines the “paradox” of physician privacy: while physician privacy has been explicitly or implicitly invoked over the last century to defend physicians against greater transparency, proposals that might cause them economic harm, or interference by government or corporate entities, there has been little comprehensive work done to examine the substance and source of any privacy rights physicians may actually enjoy. This Report attempts to make three primary contributions with respect to physician privacy. First, the Report examines the current state of physician privacy and the legal framework that governs it. Second, the Report argues that physician “privacy” is not, and should not be considered, a unitary concept encompassing a singular meaning. Rather it is a broad umbrella term that encompasses not only a variety of legal protections for privacy, but guards against a variety of very different perceived harms. As a result, this Report argues that in evaluating policy initiatives, discussions about “privacy” implications can be counterproductive because the term obscures the real values, concerns, and policy judgments at play. To address this, the Report’s third aim is the proposal of an analytical framework that policymakers and others may use to consider the impact of various initiatives on the values and concerns that physician “privacy” actually protects: professional autonomy; economic considerations; personal dignity; and practical difficulties. / text

As Internet communities such as question-answer (Q&A) forums and online social networks (OSNs) grow in prominence as knowledge sources, traditional editorial filters are unable to scale to their size and pace. This absence hinders the exchange of knowledge online, by creating an understandable lack of trust in information. This mistrust can be partially overcome by a forum by consistently providing reliable information, thus establishing itself as a reliable source. This work investigates how algorithmic approaches can contribute to building such a community of voluntary experts willing to contribute authoritative information. This work identifies two approaches: a) reducing the cost of participation for experts via matching user queries to experts (question recommendation), and b) identifying authoritative contributors for incentivization (authority estimation). The question recommendation problem is addressed by extending existing approaches via a new generative model that augments textual data with expert preference information among different questions. Another contribution to this domain is the introduction of a set of formalized metrics to include the expert's experience besides the questioner's. This is essential for expert retention in a voluntary community, and has not been addressed by previous work. The authority estimation problem is addressed by observing that the global graph structure of user interactions, results from two factors: a user's performance in local one-to-one interactions, and their activity levels. By positing an intrinsic authority 'strength' for each user node in the graph that governs the outcome of individual interactions via the Bradley-Terry model for pairwise comparison, this research establishes a relationship between intrinsic user authority, and global measures of influence. This approach overcomes many drawbacks of current measures of node importance in OSNs by naturally correcting for user activity levels, and providing an explanation for the frequent disconnect between real world reputation and online influence. Also, while existing research has been restricted to node ranking on a single OSN graph, this work demonstrates that co-ranking across multiple endorsement graphs drawn from the same OSN is a highly effective approach for aggregating complementary graph information. A new scalable co-ranking framework is introduced for this task. The resulting algorithms are evaluated on data from various online communities, and empirically shown to outperform existing approaches by a large margin. / text

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M. Tech. Education / The purpose of this study was to determine how delegation, as a management tool, is being used in primary schools in the Tshwane West District. There are indications in Tshwane West District primary schools which suggest that delegation is improperly employed or not used at all. In some cases, workloads become so unbearable that many people even at management level resign their posts. Many of the primary schools in Tshwane West District have been identified as underperforming primary schools by the GDE through the Gauteng Province Literacy Strategy. The study therefore endeavoured to determine the use of this most important tool in the daily duties of school managers.

Artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM) continues to grow in more than 70 countries in the developing world, creating thriving local rural economies but also causing significant environmental contamination and health issues, with one particularly problematic issue involving the use of mercury in the gold extraction process. With the advent of the United Nations Minamata Convention on Mercury in 2009, a legally binding treaty aimed at reducing and where feasible eliminating mercury use, countries with significant ASGM populations require solutions for this sector. In April 2014, a mixed-methods rapid appraisal study was carried out over a three week period in the gold mining region of Kedougou, Senegal. During this time 80 structured interviews, 120 household surveys, physical measurements, observations and numerous informal interviews were utilized in conjunction with a comparative data analysis in order to create a national inventory of the ASGM sector for Senegal, to explore the sector’s socio-economic contribution to rural development in Senegal, and to provide a basis for discussing policy approaches needed to improve the sector. The results of this study show a thriving ASGM sector composed of approximately 67,000 people, producing an estimated 4.5 tonnes of gold per year and releasing approximately 5.2 tonnes of mercury into the environment. The methodologies used to create these estimates also provide in-depth information that illustrates an ASGM sector that is highly inter-connected with customary tenure practices and traditional agrarian livelihoods, and that is important for rural inhabitants in Senegal and other countries. This information can be utilized by the Senegalese and other governments to inform the policies that are being developed for the ASGM sector as they implement the obligations created by the Minimata Convention. / Graduate / 0503 / 0366 / 0617 / persaud.anthonyw@gmail.com

My dissertation develops and defends a contemporary Aristotelian form of political liberalism. I articulate an Aristotelian interpretation of individual autonomy as excellence in deliberating about ends, and develop a decision-theoretic model for representing this type of deliberation. I then provide a precise characterization of individual freedom, building on Amartya Sen’s neo-Aristotelian theory of freedom as capability. I argue that we should understand individual liberty, the guiding value of political liberalism, as a compound of autonomy and freedom as I have articulated these notions. I then argue that liberty in this sense is the proper focus of a liberal theory of distributive justice. I provide a teleological justification of the state’s authority to pursue a liberty-based program of distributive justice, and argue for a liberty-based interpretation of the harm principle as the appropriate limitation on state action. / text

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