Diploma thesis "Czechoslovak-US Relations, 1977-1981" examines the nature and development of bilateral relations between these two states primarily during Carter's period. The thesis describes foreign policy of the United States towards communist countries of Eastern Europe in the late 70's and early 80's of the 20th century and compares this policy with foreign policy of Nixon's and Ford's administrations. The paper briefly describes prevailing situation in the USA in the late 70's, impact of Carter's administration activities on global development of USA-SSSR relations and influence of changes on international field on Czechoslovak-American relations. The main attention is drawn to the nature of Czechoslovak-U.S. relations, matters of mutual interest and to the friction areas among the states. Political and diplomatic relations as well as economic and cultural relations are observed. The thesis also analyzes Carter's initiative to enhance human rights throughout the world and to fulfil the Helsinki commitments, which had essential importance for further developement of U.S. relations with the Soviet bloc states. Key words: Czechoslovak-American relations, The United States, Czechoslovakia, The Soviet Union, Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, human rights, détente, differentiation policy

The Historic John and Landon Carter Mansion, a satellite property of Sycamore Shoals State Historic Area in Elizabethton, Tennessee, is one of Tennessee's earliest historic homes. Because the house is not open year-round, the state park service has expressed a need for an interpretive kiosk to stand on the property and provide visitors with information on the Carter Mansion. This project represents an effort to summarize existing knowledge on the house, to address common misconceptions, and to create an interpretive kiosk design based on historical research.

Cette thèse est mue par la volonté de son auteur (et de son promoteur) de mettre en évidence combien le concept d'ingéniérie actuarielle est non seulement un concept actuel mais également porteur d'avenir pour l'actuariat. Dans ingéniérie, on entend ingénieur, soit un individu formé à l'application des sciences, dans le but de résoudre des problèmes technologiques concrets et complexes. Ces compétences, traditionnellement plutôt utilisées par l'industrie, sont ici mises au service de l'Actuariat. Nous espérons montrer combien un actuaire ouvert aux techniques récentes de la Statistique peut enrichir sa panoplie d'outils pour répondre aux questions toujours plus variées que pose la pratique. Car là est aussi un des messages de ce travail: montrer que ces développements récents sont loin d'être de pures gymnastiques intellectuelles mais offrent de réelles solutions ou alternatives valables à des problèmes connus. Avec pour bagage les modèles de régression non linéaires, nous nous promenons dans les différents domaines de l'Actuariat, abordant tout d'abord un aspect méthodologique. Ensuite, nous traitons de deux problèmes liés à la branche Non Vie : tarification géographique et échelles bonus-malus. Enfin, nous voyons comment des perspectives nouvelles peuvent également s'inscrire dans la branche Vie, à travers la problématique de la modélisation de la mortalité future. Il ne s'agit en aucun cas d'un inventaire exhaustif des possibilités récentes offertes par la Statistique à l'Actuariat, mais bien d'un tour d'horizon qui entend ouvrir des portes dans des domaines variés. Cette thèse est composée d'articles (rédigés en anglais) publiés dans des revues nationales et internationales.

The incarceration rate in the United States has increased dramatically in the period since 1945. How did the United States move from having stable incarceration rates in line with global norms to the largest system of incarceration in the world? This study examines the political and intellectual aspects of incarceration and theories of criminal justice by looking at the contributions of journalists, intellectuals and policy makers to the debate on whether the purpose of the justice system is rehabilitation, vengeance, deterrence or incapacitation. This thesis finds that justice and the institution of the prison itself are not immutable facts of modern civilization, but are human institutions vulnerable to the influence of politics, culture and current events.

This study concerns the complete oeuvre by the British author Helen Zahavi: Dirty Weekend (1991), True Romance (1994), and Donna and the Fatman (1998). Her novels are here read as a trilogy dealing with the dialectics of gender and violence in 20th century discourse, drawing on theories of how the construction of subjects is produced by power, of the relation between power and sexuality. The heroines of Zahavi’s novels try their best to move about in a world where their freedom of movement is limited to their female identity. In Dirty Weekend the protagonist tries to shoot her way out, claiming revenge on every man that is forcing himself upon her. She gains some freedom of movement by refusing subordination, but does not really change the order of power. The protagonist in True Romance instead finds salvation in love of the master. She learns to love the man who keeps her as a sex slave in his apartment, and when confronted with the choice between the freedom by violent action and submission by passive acceptance, she chooses the latter. The protagonist in Donna and the Fatman manage to refuse both superiority and submission. She has a debt to settle with the gangster boss Henry, but in the end blows both herself and her opponent to pieces. I argue that by doing this, Donna breaks out of the order of language. The order of power presented in Zahavi’s novels is a tyranneous dichotomy which cathegorize individuals as either victims or perpertrators. This construction is seemingly a natural order which we have to accept, but the actions of Zahavi’s last protagonist eventually proves it to be nothing but a mask, a lie. This lie is, in the words of one of Zahavi’s characters, a tenacious lie, and the only way to break out of the construction of power is to break out of the construction of the order of power. Thus the blowing up of both victim and perpertrator may enable a new world to be born.

A repeated theme in the fiction of Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson is the use of domestic space as a tool for defining socially acceptable versions of female sexuality. Four novels that crystallize this theme are the focus of this dissertation: Winterson??s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) and Art and Lies (1994) and Carter??s The Magic Toyshop (1967) and Nights at the Circus (1984). Each chapter examines both authors?? treatments of a specific room in the house. Chapter II, "Parlor Games: Spatial Literacy in Formal Rooms," discusses how rooms used for formal occasions project a desirable public image of a family. More insidiously, however, the rooms protect the sexual order of the household, which often privileges male sexuality. Using the term spatial literacy to describe how characters interpret rooms, the chapter argues that characters with a high spatial literacy can detect not only the overt messages of these formal rooms, but also what underlies those messages. Chapter III, "Making Meals, Breaking Deals: Mothers, Daughters, and Kitchens," discusses the kitchen as the site of the production of domestic comfort. An analysis of who has primary responsibility for the production of comfort and whose comfort is privileged often reveals the power hierarchy of a given household. The chapter also examines the kitchen as a volatile space that can erupt with violence and the expression of repressed emotions and repressed sexuality. Finally, the kitchen is analyzed as a space of intimacy between mothers and daughters. Chapter IV, "Bedtime Stories: Assaulting Sexuality in the Bedroom," argues that the privacy of the adolescent bedroom is often disrupted by the surveillance of family members trying to control the sexual identity of the room??s occupant. The chapter also examines how social prescriptions encourage women to tolerate the interruption of their privacy. Each of the protagonists from these four novels has opportunities to learn about subverting the discursive constructions of domestic space, and several characters enact that subversion. This ability for subversion suggests the possibility for agency, a possibility that postmodernist thought often rejects, but one that Carter and Winterson allow.

From angry torch-swinging Parisians attacking the Bastille and Russian workers rising up against the Tsar to outraged Chinese peasants exacting revenge on their landlords and Cuban guerrillas battling Batista’s army, revolutions without violence have in the past been near inconceivable. But when unarmed Iranians after an extended popular struggle forced Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, the last king of Iran, to flee Tehran on January 16, 1979, they had gifted the world a new and seemingly paradoxical phenomenon: a nonviolent revolution. Far from a historical oddity, such revolutions have since occurred on almost every continent. Over the past thirty years the function of guerrilla tactics, military coups, and civil war has increasingly been replaced by demonstrations, boycotts, and strikes. How can social scientists account for this “evolution of revolution” that have so altered the appearance of the phenomenon that by Arendt’s definition events in places like Iran, the Philippines, Chile, Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine may not even qualify as revolutions? Yet, the popular overthrows of authoritarian regimes in each and every one of those countries were nothing less than revolutionary. The dissertation seeks to understand this recent development in the nature of revolutions by historically examining the phenomenon’s signal case, the Iranian Revolution. The core question asked is: what are the structural and historical forces that caused the Iranian Revolution to be the world’s first nonviolent revolution? The central argument is that both the emergence and success of the nonviolent Iranian Revolution can be explained by its internationalization. In other words, the Iranian Revolution turned out to be successfully nonviolent because, unlike previous revolutions, it was a global affair in which the revolutionaries intentionally and strategically sought to bring the world into their struggle against the state. Indirectly, the aim of this study is to generate the genesis of a theoretical framework that can explain more broadly the emergence and success of nonviolent revolutions in the late 1970s and beyond. / text

Η παρούσα διπλωματική εργασία πραγματοποιήθηκε κατά το διάστημα 2012-2013 στο Εργαστήριο Συστημάτων Υπολογιστών (CSL) του Πανεπιστημίου Πατρών. Στόχος της εργασίας είναι η επίλυση ενός συνόλου προβλημάτων χρονοπρογραμματισμού εξετάσεων (ETP, Carter Dataset), με χρήση πληροφορημένου γενετικού αλγορίθμου. Στην εργασία αυτή θα παρουσιαστούν, τα βασικά μοντέλα λειτουργίας των γενετικών αλγορίθμων, του ETP καθώς και παρουσίαση βασικών εννοιών των παράλληλων συστημάτων. Τέλος παρουσιάζεται ο σειριακός κώδικας που υλοποιήθηκε σε ANSI-C και στην συνέχεια γίνεται σύγκριση με τον παράλληλο κώδικα που υλοποιήθηκε με MPI-C και παρουσιάζονται τα αποτελέσματα της σύγκρισης μεταξύ των δύο. / The Aim of this thesis which was completed during the 2012/2013 academic year at the Computer Systems Laboratory (CSL) at the University of Patras is to solve a set of Examination Timetabling Problems (Carter Dataset,ETP) with the aid of an informed genetic algorithm. I will present the basic model under which the genetic algorithms operate and some information about the ETP and general parallel systems. To conclude we will present our serial ANSI-C code and compare it with the parallel MPI-C code that we build and compare the two results.

This thesis constitutes an investigation into contemporary writing--both fictional and philosophical. More specifically, it is a comparative analysis of the work of British novelist Angela Carter, and French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, in the light of the concept of synthetic authenticity. It is divided into three chapters, "Becomings", "Events", and "Machines", and each chapter presents the work of both Carter and Deleuze and Guattari, respectively, in light of one of these topics. Chapter Two, however, focuses closely on Angela Carter's first novel, Shadow Dance, as it relates to the concept 'event'. And Chapter Three focuses on Carter's novel The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, as it relates to and differs from the schizoanalytic notion of desiring machines.

Satisfying a campaign pledge to the National Education Association (NEA), President Jimmy Carter pushed for a federal Department of Education in 1978 and 1979. In the ensuing legislative battle, Carter confronted opposition from states’ rights, social, and religious conservatives that were beginning to form the nucleus of the New Right in the Republican Party. Using divisive racial and religious issues, these conservatives tried, and failed, to thwart the Department of Education project. Congressional testimony, the Carter administration’s internal documents, and newspaper editorials illustrate that the Department of Education battle foreshadowed the Reagan Revolution of 1980.