International migration flows and patterns shaped by the determinants, processes and outcomes of social, political, and economic conditions have led to important transformation of society and human geographies. As Canada continues to effectively manage its immigration system and uphold its commitment to international refugee protection and resettlement, it is critical for Canada to do so with an understanding of the changing context of immigration, which are reinforced by shifting policies and their impact, in our contemporary society. In this thesis, the migration trajectory of three groups of newcomers to Canada; international students, Syrian refugees, and refugee youth, are explored by examining policies and conditions that can create group risks and vulnerabilities in immigration, settlement, and integration as groups transition to life in Canada after arrival. As suggested by Castle (2010) migration researchers can advance the field by embedding their work in broader theories of social change to facilitate understanding of the complexity, interconnectedness, variability, contextuality, and multi-mediation of migratory process in the context of rapid change. This thesis employs a geographical lens of place to deepen understanding of processes and outcomes in our contemporary society, while responding to these evolving contexts in one mid-size, post-industrial Canadian city. In three separate research, this thesis examines: 1) economic immigration flow under Express Entry in 2015 and 2016; 2) the role of the voluntary sector during the Syrian Refugee Resettlement Initiative in Hamilton, Ontario in 2016; and 3) the place of school-based settlement in bridging and brokering school-based mental health for newcomer youth. / Thesis / Doctor of Science (PhD) / As Canada continues to effectively manage its immigration system and uphold its commitment to international refugee protection and resettlement, it is critical for Canada to do so with an understanding of the changing context of immigration in our contemporary society. In this thesis, I examine the migration trajectory of three groups of newcomers to Canada; international students, Syrian refugees, and refugee youth, by asking two overarching research questions that explores policies and conditions that can create group risks and vulnerabilities in immigration, settlement, and integration. This thesis seeks to understand how policies could be addressed to improve successful outcome for newcomers. This thesis employs a geographical lens of place to deepen understanding of processes and outcomes in our contemporary society, while responding to these evolving contexts in one mid-size, post-industrial Canadian city.

Clear changes occurred in the field of conventional arms control in the last two decades. States adopted a multitude of norms on especially small arms control in various multilateral control instruments. In addition, non-governmental advocacy actors often established themselves as active participants in control debates with governments. The changes are surprising because they took place in the security sphere and therewith in an area traditionally understood to be the exclusive domain of governments. This research project investigates the significance of the changes for the traditional understanding of security governance. Specifically, it investigates the emergence of control norms and the role and policy impact of non-governmental actors in the promotion of the norms. It asks whether the normative changes and significance of nongovernmental actors therein challenge the understanding of security governance that underpins many established approaches to international relations theory.

The thesis provides basic information on the activities of real estate agent, including accounting and tax solutions for selected topics. The thesis is divided into four chapters. The first chapter describes the real estate market with its basic elements. The second chapter examines the regulation of real estate activities in the Czech Republic and selected legislation relating to contracts in real estate. The section focusing on accounting transactions are shown as a result of the major real estate services, namely, the purchase, sale, rental properties and brokering. The last chapter deals with tax issues, which are selected from the provisions relating to real estate activities.

This study contributes an original, practice-based analysis of knowledge brokering in inter-organisational communities of practice in the not-for-profit sector. Defining characteristics of the not-for-profit sector include its social values, principles and practices. Existing literature understates or overlooks the significance of values and principles that are manifested in and enlivened through every day social practices and practitioner encounters. The study contributes by presenting knowledge brokering as a knowledge sharing intervention which integrates people, processes, values and principles into practice. Knowledge brokering and other practice interventions in the not-for-profit sector have to align with its social mission, if they are to be compatible and effective. This is especially so in multi-agency partnerships and inter-organisational communities of practice where collaboration and co-existence rather than assimilation are the primary objectives. This study finds that values-compatible knowledge brokering interventions, boundary bridging, co-creation, common artefacts and knowledge sharing, enable inter-organisational communities of practice to evolve without sacrificing individual autonomy. Foundational knowledge brokering literature emphasises the structural position of the knowledge broker, their knowledge superiority and the benefits they accrue by operating on the periphery of a social network. The study contributes by arguing that knowledge brokering processes and roles can be examined through an alternative practice lens with the knowledge broker as an internal co-practitioner located within a network. The study was carried out in a new, time-limited multi-agency partnership project in the not-for-profit sector. The partnership constituted an inter-organisational community of practice comprising advice, information and support agencies that had agreed to work collaboratively to improve local services. The author was employed as the project s Knowledge Management Officer and carried out the study over a two year period using an insider action research approach. As an insider practitioner-researcher, the author contributed to the project s objectives, worked collaboratively with practitioners and gathered rich data. Action and research occurred simultaneously and the iterative processes enabled the cumulative learning to inform, develop and analyse the practice. The combination of using insider action research approach, an examination of knowledge brokering as a practice intervention and a multi-agency, not-for-profit setting, makes this a unique practice-based study untapping knowledge management lessons from the not-for-profit sector.

The emergence of Grid computing infrastructures enables researchers to shareresources and collaborate in more efficient ways than before, despite belongingto different organizations and being geographically distributed. While the Gridcomputing paradigm offers new opportunities, it also gives rise to newdifficulties. This thesis investigates methods, architectures, and algorithmsfor a range of topics in the area of Grid resource management. One studiedtopic is how to automate and improve resource selection, despite heterogeneityin Grid hardware, software, availability, ownership, and usage policies.Algorithmical difficulties for this are, e.g., characterization of jobs andresources, prediction of resource performance, and data placementconsiderations. Investigated Quality of Service aspects of resource selectioninclude how to guarantee job start and/or completion times as well as how tosynchronize multiple resources for coordinated use through coallocation.Another explored research topic is architectural considerations for frameworksthat simplify and automate submission, monitoring, and fault handling for largeamounts of jobs. This thesis also investigates suitable Grid interactionpatterns for scientific workflows, studies programming models that enable dataparallelism for such workflows, as well as analyzes how workflow compositiontools should be designed to increase flexibility and expressiveness. We today have the somewhat paradoxical situation where Grids, originally aimed tofederate resources and overcome interoperability problems between differentcomputing platforms, themselves struggle with interoperability problems causedby the wide range of interfaces, protocols, and data formats that are used indifferent environments. This thesis demonstrates how proof-of-concept softwaretools for Grid resource management can, by using (proposed) standard formatsand protocols as well as leveraging state-of-the-art principles fromservice-oriented architectures, be made independent of current Gridinfrastructures. Further interoperability contributions include an in-depthstudy that surveys issues related to the use of Grid resources in scientificworkflows. This study improves our understanding of interoperability amongscientific workflow systems by viewing this topic from three differentperspectives: model of computation, workflow language, and executionenvironment. A final contribution in this thesis is the investigation of how the design ofGrid middleware tools can adopt principles and concepts from softwareengineering in order to improve, e.g., adaptability and interoperability.

Computational grids are distributed systems composed of heterogeneous computing resources which are distributed geographically and administratively. These highly scalable systems are designed to meet the large computational demands of many users from scientific and business orientations. This dissertation address problems related to the allocation of the computing resources which compose a grid. First, the design of a pan-Canadian grid is presented. The design exploits the maturing stability of grid deployment toolkits, and introduces novel services for efficiently allocating the grids resources. The challenges faced by this grid deployment motivate further exploration in optimizing grid resource allocations. The primary contribution of this dissertation is one such technique for allocating grid resources. By applying a utility model to the grid allocation options, it is possible to quantify the relative merits of the various possible scheduling decisions. Indeed, a number of utility heuristics are derived to provide quality-of-service policies on the grid; these implement scheduling policies which favour efficiency and also allow users to intervene with urgent tasks. Using this model, the allocation problem is then formulated as a knapsack problem. Formulation in this manner allows for rapid solution times and results in nearly optimal allocations. The combined utility/knapsack approach to grid resource allocation is first presented in the allocation of single resource type, processors. By evaluating the approach with novel utility heuristics using both random and real workloads, it is shown to result in efficient schedules which have characteristics that match the intended policies. Additionally, two design and analysis techniques are performed to optimize the design of the utility/knapsack scheduler; these techniques play a significant role in practical adoption of the approach. Next, the utility/knapsack approach is extended to the allocation of multiple resource types. This extension generalizes the grid allocation solution a wider variety of resources, including processors, disk storage, and network bandwidth. The general technique, when combined with new heuristics for the varied resource types, is shown to result in improved performance against reference strategies. This dissertation concludes with a novel application of the utility/knapsack approach to fault-tolerant task scheduling. Computational grids typically feature many techniques for providing fault tolerance to the grid tasks, including retrying failed tasks or replicating running tasks. By applying the utility/knapsack approach, the relative merits of these varied techniques can be quantified, and the overall number of failures can be decreased subject to resource cost considerations.

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Contemporary organizations often deal with a procurements process when purchasing system solutions from different suppliers. Many of these organizations either lack the knowledge, experience, or the time needed to successfully manage procurements processes. This research addresses the role of brokers in such processes, i.e., organizations mediating knowledge between customers and IT suppliers. A main concern for these brokers is managing knowledge flow across boundaries between different stakeholders. The management of knowledge is particularly challenging in requirements engineering processes involving different stakeholders who have distinctive understandings and perspectives of information system development. This thesis presents findings from a single case study in which a consulting firm providing broker services for eliciting and translating client's requirements in procurement processes of system solutions has been investigated. The empirical investigation was conducted through interviews with seven consultants from the firm North Consulting. It focused on formal processes, perceived key challenges, and applied problem solving methods. The contributions of the thesis lie primarily in three important findings: identification of competencies required to successfully broker knowledge in procurement processes, challenges in managing such processes, and, explication of methods, tools, and documents applied to overcome the challenges. / <p>The external partner has choosen to cooperate anonymously. / Den externa samarbetspartnern har valt att delta anonymt.</p>

Clear changes occurred in the field of conventional arms control in the last two decades. States adopted a multitude of norms on especially small arms control in various multilateral control instruments. In addition, non-governmental advocacy actors often established themselves as active participants in control debates with governments. The changes are surprising because they took place in the security sphere and therewith in an area traditionally understood to be the exclusive domain of governments. This research project investigates the significance of the changes for the traditional understanding of security governance. Specifically, it investigates the emergence of control norms and the role and policy impact of non-governmental actors in the promotion of the norms. It asks whether the normative changes and significance of nongovernmental actors therein challenge the understanding of security governance that underpins many established approaches to international relations theory.

This study focuses on investigating the dynamics of language brokering as Korean immigrant families experience environmental challenges associated with immigration. This study was conducted with qualitative research design with purposive sampling of Korean immigrant families. Six parent-child dyads were recruited and participating children were between 12 to 16 years old. Semi-structured interviews were conducted separately with parents and children in either English or Korean. Thematic analysis was employed for analyzing the transcribed interviews. The Dedoose software program was applied to assist the coding process. 12 subthemes were revealed under four main themes, which were aligned to the study's research questions. The twelve subthemes included parents' dependence on children, vulnerability and resilience of Korean immigrant families, children's socioemotional development through language brokering, and the role of first-born daughter in the family. Parent and child responses indicated how language brokering affects can be a risk in relation to children's development (i.e., with responsibility of language brokering leading the child to experience stress or experience the responsibility of translation as a burden. Positively, respondents indicated that the parent and child experienced a greater sense of empathy for each other's roles. The results derived from this study were aligned with the results of previous research conducted in the field in that language brokering affects parent-child relationship and the socioemotional development of children. The study adds to the literature with the interviewing both parents and children, thereby hearing both perspectives and experiences of parents and children on language brokering and parent-child relationships could be obtained. This study targeted Korean immigrant families since there is a lack in literature that have studied this population in relation to language brokering.