This thesis offers a comparative analysis of the poetic identities of Christopher Smart (1722-71), William Cowper (1731-1800) and William Blake (1757) in the context of contemporary understandings of madness and changing ideas of personal and spiritual identity from c.1750-1820. Critical attention is focused on the chameleonic status of madness in its various manifestations, of which melancholy, particularly in its religious guise, is particularly important. This thesis adopts an historicist approach that emphasizes poetic voice, and registers a close analysis of the arguments and diction employed in poetry, prose and medical writing associated with eighteenth-century madness. Rather than assuming a pathological status for these poets, I have paid close attention to the way in which madness is represented in the work itself and drawn contrasts with significant contemporary ideas in influential medical discourse. The thesis looks at key long poems including Smart's Jubilate Agno (written c.1758-63), Cowper's series of moral satires in Poems (1782), and Blake's The Four Zoas (written c.1797-1807), as well as some prose writing and letters, all of which contend with issues that underlie the public and medical scrutiny of madness in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: the line between madness and strong religious convictions; the relationship between the body and the soul; anxieties about the social order and the national character; and a burgeoning individualism. The argument is attentive to the importance of language in medicine as well as poetry, and analyses the diction employed by several eighteenth century mad-doctors, most notably the St. Luke's physician, William Battie (1703-1776); the cleric, physician, and poet, Nathaniel Cotton (1707-1788); and the controversial Bethlem apothecary and prolific medical writer, John Haslam (1764-1844). Although historically grounded, the thesis makes connections between the eighteenth-century culture of madness and contemporary understandings of mental disturbance.

One statistical approach with a long history in the social sciences is a multivariate method called Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). The development of SEM followed the evolution of factor and path analyses, multiple regression analysis and MACOVA. One of the key innovations of factor analysis and SEM is that they group a set of multivariate statistical approaches that condense variability among a set of variables in fewer latent (unobserved) factors. Most biological systems are multivariate, which are not easily dissected into their component parts. However, most biologists use only univariate statistical methods, which have definitive limitations in accounting for more than a few variables simultaneously. Therefore, the implementation of methodologies like SEM into biological research is necessary. However, SEM cannot be applied directly to most biological datasets or generalized across species because of the hierarchical pattern of evolutionary history (i.e., phylogenetic non-independence or signal). This report includes the theoretical grounds for the development of Phylogenetic SEM in preparation of the development of utilitarian algorithms. I have divided this report in six parts: (1) a brief introduction to factor analysis and SEM from historical perspective and a brief description of its utility; (2) a summary of the implications of using biological data and the underlying hierarchical structure due to shared common ancestry or phylogeny; (3) a summary of the two most common comparative methods to incorporate the phylogeny in univariate analyses (i.e., phylogenetic independent contrasts and phylogenetic generalized least squares); (4) I describe how some intermediate output from both comparative methods can be used to estimate the variance–covariance matrix that has been corrected for phylogenetic signal; (5) I describe how to perform a exploratory factor analysis, specifically principal component analysis, with the corrected variance–covariance matrix; and (6) I describe the development of the phylogenetic confirmatory factor analysis and phylogenetic SEM. I hope that this report encourages other researchers to develop adequate multivariate analysis that incorporate the evolutionary principles in its analyses. / text

This study combines qualitative and quantitative procedures  in order to make possible a Most Different Systems Design (MDSD) analysis which systematically compares two countries in order to identify factors which play a role in coup d’état occurrences after the Cold War. By developing a systems framework that lays the ground for subsequent analysis, an encompassing view of the potential underlying conditions of the coup occurrence are taken into account. This systems framework is subsequently operationalized for a sample of 35 countries which all experienced coup d’état between 1990 and 2010. In order to use MDSD, the most different countries are identified using Boolean distances. Ethiopia and Honduras were found to be the most different and were compared and contrasted according to the systems framework. The study concludes that for coup occurrences in Honduras and Ethiopia, the lack of an external national threat, secularizing tendencies, and past coup occurrences played a major role.  Democratizing tendencies after the coups in both countries were a vital signal that the influence of global democratic norms does create incentives for countries to hold elections after a coup. Interestingly, the political system of the country and demographic factors such as ethnicity, religion and language did not appear as important for the coup outcome in these countries.

The purpose of this study is to analyze comparatively the New York Times and China Daily’s 2011 news coverage regarding the portrayal of the Chinese government. The study is positioned in international communication studies. The research employs a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods: content analysis and discourse analysis. 252 news articles from the China Daily and 324 from the New York Times during 01-01-2011 to 31-12-2011 were selected for the content analysis in order to compare the theme of news, news sources, comments on the Chinese government. Furthermore, six news articles on three cases were selected for the discourse analysis to further examine the representation of the Chinese government and the framing types embedded in the news coverage of the two newspapers. The study suggests that although the two newspapers share some similarities regarding the portrayal of the Chinese government, differences can be obviously observed. In particular, the New York Times tends to apply an anti-Chinese government frame while a pro-government frame is common in the China Daily. As a result, the Chinese government is represented as “other” by the New York Times and as “us” by the China Daily.

<p>This study combines qualitative and quantitative procedures  in order to make possible a Most Different Systems Design (MDSD) analysis which systematically compares two countries in order to identify factors which play a role in coup d’état occurrences after the Cold War. By developing a systems framework that lays the ground for subsequent analysis, an encompassing view of the potential underlying conditions of the coup occurrence are taken into account. This systems framework is subsequently operationalized for a sample of 35 countries which all experienced coup d’état between 1990 and 2010. In order to use MDSD, the most different countries are identified using Boolean distances. Ethiopia and Honduras were found to be the most different and were compared and contrasted according to the systems framework. The study concludes that for coup occurrences in Honduras and Ethiopia, the lack of an external national threat, secularizing tendencies, and past coup occurrences played a major role.  Democratizing tendencies after the coups in both countries were a vital signal that the influence of global democratic norms does create incentives for countries to hold elections after a coup. Interestingly, the political system of the country and demographic factors such as ethnicity, religion and language did not appear as important for the coup outcome in these countries.</p>

Yes / Public sector state funded organisations were initially constructed to deliver much needed services to their immediate community. Designed to meet the needs of societies and populations, public sector operations focussed originally on the provision of health, welfare and social services, which were often free at the point of delivery or incurred a nominal charge. Today the effectiveness of public sector service organisations is constantly challenged and threatened by factors such as funding cuts, austerity measures, competition from private providers and political changes (e.g. the departure of the UK from the European Union and the shrinking of the state in many countries). With a focus on public sector efficiency and economic gains, the boundaries between public and private operations are becoming increasingly blurred, fuzzy and complex. To maintain economically sustainable services, public providers need to become more strategic, transparent and innovative in their decision-making, funds allocation and expenditure, workforce development and operations management, whilst acting in an ethical and responsible manner to maintain public confidence and trust.

Recent research and popular discourse offers evidence of a significant number of people in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world that self-identify as both "spiritual" and "not religious." Based on the conventional religious paradigm that has previously been supported by western scholarship, spirituality is a factor of religious involvement and such an identity combination should be rare in societies where people overwhelmingly participate in church activities. However, these new empirical data challenge this supposition. This quandary has renewed an interest among academics in understanding the relationship between spirituality and religion and in identifying mechanisms that have an impact on variance on particular combinations of the two. This dissertation explores the antecedent nature of certain combinations of structural conditions across nation states in association with substantial aggregations of "spiritual but not religious" populations in an effort to offer empirical evidence that can be used to support theoretical arguments about the cross-national variation of this population. Using fuzzy set qualitative comparative methods and data from 32 nation states, this analysis explores the necessity and sufficiency of individual demographic and economic conditions, church and state relations, and popular attitudes about church involvement in politics while examining the consistency of their presence in paths that lead to "spiritual non-religious" identification. The results suggest that in the midst of an atmosphere of attitudes that oppose the involvement of religious organizations in politics that is related to the size of the institutional religious canopy, a nation's structural economic forces may be driving the variance in religious identification that is associated with spiritual identification. However, a full understanding of this relationship can only be gained through combining tests offered in this work with future qualitative cross-national studies that also consider subjective meaning.

This thesis deals with transfer pricing, namely the documentation. It tries to map the legislative standards and procedures of transfer pricing documentation that could be applied in the Czech Republic. The main objective of this thesis is a compilation of documentation for a specific company in the Czech Republic in accordance with those procedures. The thesis contains three main chapters. The first section mainly covers the basic theoretical concepts and actual legislation regarding transfer pricing. This is the minimum necessary for initiation into the issue. The second chapter deals specifically with the theoretical process of creating documentation. The final, third part of the thesis includes the application of the theory to a specific company.

Walkability research has broadened in the past few years, being performed by researchers in different fields such as urban planning, public health, and transportation planning. Definitions of walkability and methods of operationalizing the concept vary widely. Since the results of studies that incorporate walkability may well have policy implications, it is important to consider the potential impacts of different definitions and methods of measurement. This thesis investigates to what extent walkability indices may differ when either the composition of the indices is changed or when different quantitative methods of standardization are used to summarize their component measures. The association of these different walkability indices with socio-demographic variables is also investigated to determine the variability in such associations. The thesis also investigates to what extent changing the spatial extent of a study area, in this case the definition of an urbanized area, may also lead to differences in how walkability measures may be associated with socio-demographic variables. In the analysis process, several methodological innovations were developed such as applying new detailed GIS analysis, developing two accessibility measures and two accessibility indices, creating a comprehensive walkability index, and applying the latest methods from spatial econometrics. The results from investigating the research questions showed that even though walkability scores across the study area are different based on index compositions or index standardization methods, their association with socio-demographics is fairly consistent. When investigated for areas with different extents, the association between walkability and socio-demographics differed more.

This study provides a comparative analysis of the branding environment of Taiwan and China. The objective of this study is to analyze the similarity and dissimilarity between these two adjacent markets and to further provide recommendations on how to create a more favorable branding environment and how to do branding in China market. It is observed that dissimilarity plays a more significant role in terms of 1) the influence of non-government organizations, 2) award and selections, 3) government regulations, and 4) support on specific enterprise.