This thesis is aiming to describe and understand the access to and evolvement of necral land (burial and crematory grounds) in Dar es Salaam, the largest city in Tanzania and one of the most rapid growing cities in Africa. The study is based on field work conducted in Kinondoni District during the spring of 2010. It could partly be described as intensive research, because it is done like a pioneer study, trying to describe and understand a phenomena; not so much trying to find out how widespread the phenomena is. The data was primarily produced through interviews with persons representing different actors. The result from the field study is that even if there are differences in costs and needs for permits to access the land, it seems like there are ways for everyone to bury or cremate a dead body. One common way of manage costs is to collect financial contributions from friends, family and neighbours. The problem however is the evolvement, where centrally located burial grounds are considered full but still used and the cemetery established by the municipality outside the centre is not used by city dwellers, because of the lack of information and the transportation cost.

The main objective of this study is to understand and asses flood risk perception among people living in Msimbazi Valley in Das es Salaam, Tanzania. Many of the people I have interviewed are experiencing flooding every year but it is rarely considered disastrous. Looked at individually they may not be disasters but cumulatively they may be. The rapid urbanisation, in this part of the world, forces people to live on hazardous but central land because of the livelihood opportunities available there. The government and the local communities are well aware of the risk of floods in the area and are considered as a serious threat to the families. People are still living in these areas because they find the benefits big enough to make up the risks.

This paper is an attempt to describe how two religious edicts by the current Egyptian grand mufti relate to an ongoing theological debate in the Muslim world on the nature of miracles and the state of mankind between life and death. The study illustrates how the mufti adheres to the Sunni theological school of Ash‘ariyya and in what way said school has emerged as a theological middle ground between the literal and interpretative schools of thought. The study also reveals how the Mufti as a guardian of the faith must operate within a secularising context and what strategies are possible for him to utilise if he is to meet the demands of a modernised society whilst retaining a coherent religious explanation. In his office as grand mufti, Ali Goma may well be described as a traditionalist where theological matters are considered even if the governmental institute of Dār al- iftā has been modernised under his supervision and now uses 24 hour phone lines, e-mail, facebook and has an official webpage and translates many of its edicts into other languages than Arabic. This means that Dār al-iftā and Ali Goma are communicating an official Islam not only to the Muslims of Egypt, but has transformed from a national institute to a player in the era of globalisation.

Documentation and formalization of informal settlements ("insitu" i.e. while people continue to live in the settlement) needs appropriate mapping and registration system of real property that can finally lead into integrating an informal city to the formal city. For many years extraction of geospatial data for informal settlement upgrading have been through the use of conventional mapping, which included manual plotting from aerial photographs and the use of classical surveying methods that has proved to be slow because of manual operation, very expensive, and requires well-trained personnel. The use of high-resolution satellite image like QuickBird and GIS tools has recently been gaining popularity to various aspects of urban mapping and planning, thereby opening-up new opportunities for efficient management of rapidly changing environment of informal settlements. This study was based on Manzese informal area in the city of Dar es salaam, Tanzania for which the Ministry of Lands and Human Settlement Development is committed at developing strategic information and decision making tools for upgrading informal areas using digital database, Orthophotos and Quickbird satellite image. A simple prototype approach developed in this study, that is, 'automatic detection and extraction of informal buildings and other urban features', is envisaged to simplify and speedup the process of land cover mapping that can be used by various governmental and private segments in our society. The proposed method, first tests the utility of high resolution QuickBird satellite image to classify the detailed 11 classes of informal buildings and other urban features using different image classification methods like the Box, maximum likelihood and minimum distance classifier, followed by segmentation and finally editing of feature outlines. The overall mapping accuracy achieved for detailed classification of urban land cover was 83%. The output demonstrates the potential application of the proposed approach for urban feature extraction and updating. The study constrains and recommendations for future work are also discussed. / Thesis (M.Env.Dev.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2005.

In Tanzania development has been on the agenda for a long time and one of the steps that has been taken to try to affect change is through communication and information. Under the first president of Tanzania, Julius Nyere, the media was monopolized and utilized as a tool for the government to push its agenda for development. Today, however, the media looks a bit differ-ent from the time of Nyerere, with a majority of privately owned media. Despite the focus on development the situation in public health is still poor, with both communicable diseases (i.e. HIV/AIDS and malaria) and non-communicable diseases (i.e. cancer and diabetes) claiming a lot of premature deaths. This thesis is a minor field study, financed by a scholarship from the Swedish International Development Agency (Sida). Its purpose is to examine the professional ideals of Tanzanian journalism today when it comes to health reporting and the development in public health. To fulfil this purpose interviews were conducted with journalists at three Anglophone daily newspapers (Daily News, The Citizen and The Guardian) in the economic capital, Dar es Salaam. Initially a quantitative content analysis was conducted. How the journalists feel that they can live up to their ideals and what obstacles they see in doing so was also examined. The study showed that the journalists want to contribute to the development, but that their ideals in how to do so differ. The most prevalent ideal was that the media should work to in­form and to educate the public. At the government owned newspaper, Daily News, the united front of the media and the government lived on. They felt responsible to stick to the govern­ment agenda. However, they also expressed that they felt responsible towards the ordinary people. The journalists felt that they could not live up to their ideals, especially the ideal of being the voice of the voiceless, because of the economic situation of the newspaper. The economic situation also affected the privately owned newspapers. The more active role of watchdog was more prevalent at these newspapers but was rarely practiced due to lack of resources. / Minor Field Study (Sida)

An areal numerical simulation has been carried out to investigate effects of below-sea-level (BSL) excavation in the raw material site of a cement factory in Turkey. A finite element model (585 nodes with 534 elements) is formed to solve for the head distribution in the quarry site upon quarry operation planned to be implemented in the near future. The model is calibrated to the field conditions and appropriate boundary conditions and the physical parameters are obtained to be used in future prediction studies. After a successful calibration the model is run to estimate the water levels and the discharge rates required during below sea level quarry operations. Above sea level (ASL) and below sea level (BSL) operations are simulated and water level contour maps are obtained both for above sea level (ASL) production for the 2000-2030 period, and for each BSL (-10m, -20m, -30m) production periods, which would totally take 13 years. Estimation show that the proposed model runs properly and it calculates the water levels and discharge rates accurately for probable future quarry operations. It is clear that quarry operations would not create a serious problem in terms of water discharge from the quarry site.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1980. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 543-548).

Texte remanié de: Diss.--Berlin--Humboldt-Universität, 1995. / Bibliogr. p. 177-193.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Ohio University, August, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis examines the dynamic interplay of the shared legal, personal, and societal commitments of mustaftis (petitioners), and muftis at Cairo's Dar Al-Iftaa, the official fatwa council, where I observed 140 fatwa sessions mostly concerning marital disputes. It focuses on the role and impact of fatwas in preserving social and gender relations in a society with increased religious tendencies and dispositions, such as the Egyptian society. The thesis demonstrates that the study of iftaa within its institutionalized and interactive channels could effectively enhance our understanding of the process of legal interpretation in general, and the power dynamics of social/gender relations in particular. Therefore, the thesis attempts to develop a model for the study of fatwas that gives consideration to petitioners, as agencies of the law; muftis, as social and religious interpreters; and the structures of the society of which fatwas are issued, as an influential, yet influenced element. The thesis demonstrates that Dar Al-Iftaa provides Egyptians with an alternative to courts for religious, marital, and social counseling. It further demonstrates how Dar Al-Iftaa aims at preserving marriages, and, by extension, the societal and gender norms. During the society preservation attempts, muftis adapted to the social patriarchal assumptions that give each married partner privileges in correspondence to their gender position in the society. Hence, I pay closer attention to women's involvement in male-dominated spaces such as religious institutions to negotiate their marital relations and to challenge the hegemonic structures of their society.