This thesis investigates ‘the doing’ of the Swedish social insurance program Activity Compensation (AC). AC is an example of disability policies in Western welfare states. These policies have two goals: to ensure financial security and to promote social participation. In 2003 AC replaced Early Retirement Pension for persons aged 19 to 29 years and who, for medical reasons, have reduced work capacity. Three features characterize AC. Young adults are differentiated in a separate system. For them, benefits are time-limited. Benefits include an established right to participate in activities. Doing AC is studied bottom-up. Interviews with two actor groups have provided the empirical base: 1) persons accorded AC and medically certified to have an anxiety and/or a depression diagnosis and 2) the respective administrator(s) at the Swedish Social Insurance Agency. National legislative preparatory texts and legal documents complete the data. The conclusions of this study are three-fold addressing goal displacement and non-contact. Firstly, a discursive change in respect to the denotation of social participation within the politics of principle has appeared throughout OECD countries over the last decennium. This goal displacement obscures the goal of economic security emphasizing the profitability of work. AC explicitly manifests this change in establishing a right to activity participation for beneficiaries. This displacement is without full impact in the politics of practice when actors’ experience of doing AC is examined. Financial security remains the foremost goal in the local politics of practice mirroring the initial function of safeguard for those with reduced work capacity due to certified illness. Relating to this lexical displacement, the study concludes that social participation is revealed as a goal to be realized in a specific form, salaried employment, within a distinct arena, the labor market. Values such as life-quality are neglected as regulatory efforts to get persons on the track to work have been underscored. Finally, the prescribed contact between the insured young adults and their administrator(s) is not consistently present. This contact is a necessary condition for the intended planning of activities to take place. When non-contact prevails, the established regulatory right to participate in activities can not materialize.

The project-based research questions how professionals working in the built environment can engage a broader range of 'others' (students, client, users) in ways of seeing and acting in a meaningful way. It challenges the role of the expert in architecture and urban design and in particular their use of the masterplan, which is often an oversimplified reductive response, laden with generalisations and the ill-considered overlay of inappropriate models. Design methods are designed to enable us to see afresh and respond accordingly. These are demonstrated in three suites of projects that include urban installations such as Five Walks for the Melbourne International Arts Festival, war memorials, lectures, photographs and teaching practice such as Taipei Operations, a student workshop, architectural exhibition, and book. The design research is situated within an expanded field of cross-disciplinary practice that includes art, landscape architecture, urban design, architecture and geography. Tools are developed to enable us to understand the city at many spatial and temporal scales; observations made at a micro scale reveal systems at a macro scale - a bottom-up approach. The application of the methods explored implies that

Research suggests that the human attentional system is biased towards emotional events in the environment. This attentional bias is believed to be an adaptive function that can provide survival benefits for the organisms that possess it. Dispositional optimism is a trait defined as a general expectation that good things will happen in the future. This trait has received interest as an adaptive trait that has a multitude of psychological and physical benefits for the individuals who exhibit it. The aim of this study is to examine whether there is a difference in the attentional bias towards happy and angry facial expressions based on level of dispositional optimism using the dot-probe paradigm. Thirty-two psychologically and neurologically healthy females (mean age = 26.5, SD = 5.8) participated in the study. They completed a questionnaire measuring dispositional optimism and performed the dot-probe task in a laboratory setting in the University of Skövde. In the dot- probe task a short exposure (100 ms) of photographs depicting happy, angry and neutral facial expressions was used as emotional cues. A general bias towards happy faces across all participants was detected. Also, a clear trend towards an interaction between DO and AB to emotional faces was found in the group high in DO displaying and AB towards happy facial expressions. This study implies that for the psychologically and neurologically healthy population, a fast operating and automatic AB for positive stimuli exists, moreover, this AB may be modulated by individual differences in DO.

Thesis deals with the LEADER method as a specific tool for the rural development. Its aim is to detect how is LAG Posázaví fulfilling principles LEADER in its activities and project implementations. The empirical part will be based on a content analysis of all completed projects of LAG Posázaví through programs LEADER CZ, LEADER+ a LEADER(SPL) which will evaluate an extent of particular LEADER principles. The creation of conceptual outsets for the empiric part of the thesis will allow literary research, which puts some theories of rural development and projection into exogenous and endogenous model of rural development. Thesis emphasizes the endogenous rural development and individual principles on which the LEADER approach is based. The research results demostrate the long-term upward trend of implementing the LEADER principles in projects implemented by LAG Posázaví. While the variable "implementation of innovative approaches" is in the long term constant value in the last two reporting periods, the other monitored variables are on a steady growth. The upward trend was surprisingly not evident within the short term development.

I have dealt in my thesis with biomanipulation on the water reservoir Hamry. The reservoir is located near the village Hamry in the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands, it is meso-eutrofního character and its size (about 42 ha of water surface) and an average depth of 2 m is ranked among the smaller, shallow tank. Biomanipulation measures are there implementation and monitored in the long term (since 2008).Biomanipulation implemented in 2015, which mainly consist of removing unwanted species of fish from the reservoir were implemented by different methods at all ontogenetic levels of fish. That means collecting eggs perch Perca fluviatilis, L., seinings of juvenile stages panktivorous species of fish, as well as seinings and elimination of adult unwanted fish species. Part of the seinings were catching spawning shoals of bream Abramis brama, L. and roach Rutilus rutilus, L. With those biomanipalition actions was carried collection and evaluation of samples of zooplankton, phytoplankton, hydrochemical analyzes and physico-chemical parameters of water. Also were investigated phosphorus content in sediments. Some of the data I obtained and evaluated actively (especially zooplankton), other data were evaluated by specialists from ÚBO AV ČR Brno, or employees of the Department of Fisheries and Hydrobiology at the Institute of Zoology, Fisheries, Hydrobiology and Apiculture MENDELU Brno and I have only used this data to compare the efficiency of the imlpemented biomanipulation.

The overall aim of this thesis is to, through a case study of a local disaster organization, study the prerequisites for building functional Hastily Formed Networks in disasters and also how HFN:s can be linked to a proactive disaster organization.The study looks upon HFN:s from the organizational, cognitive aspects of communication – not the network/information technology – and focus on the issue of local empowerment. To set the theoretical framework the thesis makes use of Peter Senge's model on learning organization, Karl Weicks organizational and communication theory of microlevels in systems, commitment and enactment. The method is a case study with interviews and field observation of a proactive disaster organization in Indonesia, in the Sultanate of Yogyakarta on Java. The results shows that Yogyakarta is actively working with a model to take advantage of the experience from earlier catastrophes, spread the learnings to other, integrate community in the learning and trying to build local empowerment including a bottom-up approach. In the interviews topics raised as important to create a good collaboration in a HFN are: 1) Provide local leaders with professional support and coordination based on a common vision. 2) Establishing local empowerment and common visions. 3) Development of the organization and individuals. 4) The need for formal and informal structures and communication. 5) Need for local mandate for coordination and increased competence in local management. The themes all deal with challenges for HFN:s, presented in earlier research, and link strongly to Senge’s theoretical model for learning organization, trying to build trust and also micro committment for uncertain periods. This contributes to the capacity to be prepared for the unprepared.

Although several systems with structure editors have been built, no model exist to formally describe the edit operations used in such editors. This thesis introduces such a model --- a formalism to describe general structure edit operations for text oriented documents. The model allows free bottom-up editing for any tree-based structural document with a textual content. It can also handle attribute and erroneous structures. Some classes of common structures have been identified and structure editor specifications constructed for them, which can be used and combined in the creation of other structure editors.

Context. Video games usually have visual aids guiding the players in 3D-environments. The designers need to know which visual feature is the most effective in attracting a player's gaze and what features are preferred by players as visual aid. Objectives. This study investigates which feature of the bottom-upvisual attention process attracts the gaze faster. Methods. With the use of the Tobii T60 eye tracking system, a user study with 32 participants was conducted in a controlled environment. An experiment was created where each participant looked at a slideshow consisting of 18 pictures with 8 objects on each picture. One object per picture had a bottom-up visual feature applied that made it stand out as different. Video games often have a goal or a task and to connect the experiment to video games a goal was set. This goal was to find the object with the visual feature applied. The eye tracker measured the gaze while the participant was trying to find the object. A survey to determine which visual feature was preferredby the players was also made. Results. The result showed that colour was the visual feature with the shortest time to attract attention. It was closely followed by intensity,motion and a pulsating highlight. Small size had the longest attraction time. Results also showed that the preferred visual feature for visual aid by the players was intensity and the least preferred was orientation. Conclusions. The results show that visual features with contrast changes in the texture seems to draw attention faster, with colour the fastest, than changes on the object itself. These features were also the most preferred as visual aid by the players with intensity the most preferred. If this study was done on a larger scale within a 3D-environment, this experiment could show promise to help designers in decisions regarding visual aid in video games.

The diploma thesis The partnership on examples of joint projects of the local action groups of the Pardubice region approaches one of the forms of cooperation in which decentralization of the decision-making power is at the level of local actors. The theoretical part focuses on rural areas, local rural development actors, the LEADER method, including Community-Led Local Development, partnerships and local action groups. Rural development groups are made up of representatives of public administration, local entrepreneurs, non-profit organizations and the public. Support is provided by the LEADER method, which works on the bottom-up principle. This method contributes to better targeting of support to rural areas to the well-defined local needs of the population. The practical part focuses on local action groups from the region with a focus on the period of 2007-2013 and the implementation of cooperation projects. The aim of the diploma thesis is to identify the attitudes of local development actors towards cooperation projects, to clarify the relations between groups of local events in the Pardubice Region, to evaluate their elementary cooperation and to identify the bottom-up application rate.

The ability to locate symbols on a visual display forms an integral part of the effective use of AAC systems. Characteristics of display design and perceptual features of symbols have been shown to influence rate and accuracy of symbol location (Thistle&Wilkinson, 2009; Wilkinson, Carlin,&Jagaroo, 2006). The current study endeavoured to compare the use of two colour-coded organisational strategies (alphabetical order and categorisation) for their effectiveness in symbol location and to investigate if some bottom-up features influenced the performance of the participants in these tasks. 114 learners in Grade 1 to 3 in a mainstream school were randomly divided into two groups. Both of the groups were exposed to two visual search tests in alternating order. The tests involved searching for 36 visual targets amongst 81 coloured Picture Communication Symbols on a computer screen in one of two colour-coded organizational methods, namely alphabetical order or categorisation. The data from the research task was collected through computer logging of all mouse selections. Findings showed that locating symbols on a computer screen with a categorisation strategy was significantly faster and more accurate than with an alphabetical strategy for the Grade 1 to 3 participants. The rate and accuracy of target symbol location in both the strategies decreased significantly as grade increased, as did the differences between rate and accuracy of target location when using the two strategies. It was also found that although the tests in this study placed heavy top-down processing demands on the participants, there was still evidence of bottom-up factors influencing their performance. Implications for display design in AAC clinical practice were discussed. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Centre for Augmentative and Alternative Communication / unrestricted