The creative industries have recently been identified as an exemplar of enterprising activity with workers in the sector being described as a 'creative class of entrepreneurs'. The digital sector is seen at the heart of these debates as political and media rhetoric has illustrated the wealth of opportunity, flexibility, freedom and control available to digital workers willing to take up entrepreneurial activity. However, contrasting accounts of enterprise are apparent in the creative industries that highlight unstable and insecure labour market conditions for all but 'star' performers. High levels of job insecurity prevalent in the creative industries are also visible in the digital games sector as project work, flexible employment models, and changes in the structure of the sector leave employment in the sector, at best, fragile and unstable for many workers. In the context of contrasting accounts of the impact of precarious labour market conditions on creative workers, the aim of this thesis is to examine the experiences of a cohort of digital game developers in the North West of England, in a sector that is, by contemporary prescription, both creatively empowered and entrepreneurial. Using in-depth interviews and an ethnography of networking events it will consider the consequences for work and employment in the local sectoral labour market. Empirical research reveals the exploitative and precarious nature of work in the experiences of self-employed digital game developers and charts the responses of developers to unstable and insecure working conditions. It is clear that the typical response to increasing instability in the labour market is to adopt more enterprising and entrepreneurial behaviour in order to find work. Using the Pongratz and Voß (2003) framework of the 'entreployee' this work illustrates the consequences for developers by highlighting examples of self-exploitation which has been fuelled by a passion and a dedication to the work but at the same time has led to long working hours, unpaid work, and a blurring of work-life boundaries. Faced with accounts which explain individuals' acceptance of self-exploitation through self-actualisation, a love of their craft, or a gift of autonomy, this thesis offers an additional understanding of self-exploitation by examining how individualistic values of passion, self-discipline, enterprise, and a strong sense of belonging have acted as a control structure and have given a convincing rationale for individuals to engage in these self-exploitative practices. Furthermore, this thesis demonstrates how the occupational community socialises developers' motivations towards sociality, altruism and enterprise. It is argued that the unintended consequences of these motivations have led to the normalisation and acceptance of self-exploitative practices.

Organizational transformations, such as mergers and acquisitions, disrupt the steady state of organizational daily life. Under some conditions, these kinds of disruptions may actually alter the organizational and occupational structure of everyday work. However, current theories of organizational learning and knowledge governance, such as the so-called ‘knowledge- or capability-based view of the firm’, are inadequate when it comes to the potential number of structural variations inherent in an organizational transformation taking place in non-commercial organizational settings such as higher education institutions. In an exploratory case study of a university merger, this dissertation inductively examines how governance structures in universities impact the creation and exploitation of knowledge, both in core academic activities (research and teaching) and in related and supporting administrative tasks. This setting provides an institutional configuration that differs considerably from that which has informed most previous research on the creation, sharing and exploitation of knowledge, but in which there are prominent institutional locales for the governance of knowledge processes. Taking a practice lens, this study proposes a finer-grained picture of those structural variations by depicting the recursive relationship between changes in knowledge content (ostensive aspects) and knowledge-use practices (performative aspects) in the academic merger. Similarities and differences in relation to knowledge governance in firms are also identified. The findings suggest a classification of the micro-processes by which organizational and competence-based capabilities are recreated, improving our understanding of knowledge-based capabilities (re)creation at different levels of organization and through different stages of merger implementation.

The accurate identification of children from facial photographs could provide a great attribute in the fight against child sexual exploitation, and may also aid in the detection of missing juveniles where comparative material is available. The European Commission is actively pursuing a global alliance for the identification of the victims of child sexual abuse; a task which is considered to be of the utmost importance. Images of child sexual abuse are shared, copied, and distributed online and their origin can be difficult to trace. Current investigations attempting to identify the children within such images appear to focus on the determination of places or geographical regions depicted in these images, from which victims can subsequently be tracked down and identified. Cutting edge technology is also used to detect duplicate images in order to decrease the workload of human operators and dedicate more time to the identification of new victims. Present investigations do not appear to focus on facial information for victim identification. Methods of facial identification already exist for adult individuals, consisting of both automated facial recognition algorithms and manual facial comparison techniques carried out by human operators. Human operator image comparison is presently the only method considered accurate enough to verify a face identity. It is only recently that researchers involved in automated facial recognition have begun to concern themselves with identification spanning childhood. Methods focus on age simulation to match query images with the age of the target database, rather than discrimination of individual faces over age progression. As far as can be determined, this is the first attempt to assess the manual comparison of juvenile faces. This study aimed to create a database of children’s faces from which identification accuracy could be tested using both automated facial recognition and manual facial comparison methods, which already exist for the identification of adults. A state-of-the-art facial recognition algorithm was employed and manual facial comparison was based on current recommendations by the Facial Identification Scientific Working Group (FISWG). It was not known if methods based on adult faces could be successfully extrapolated to juvenile faces, particularly as facial identification is highly susceptible to errors when there is an age difference between images of an individual. In children, the face changes much more rapidly than adults over ageing, due to the rapid growth and development of the juvenile face. The results of this study are in agreement with comparisons of automated and human performance in the identification of adult faces. Overall the automated facial recognition algorithm superseded human ability for identification of juvenile faces, however human performance was higher for the most difficult face pairs. The average accuracy for human image comparison was 61%. There was no significant difference in juvenile identification between individuals with prior experience of adult facial comparison and those with no prior experience. For automated facial recognition a correct identification rate of 71% was achieved at a false acceptance rate of 9%. Despite using methods created for adult facial identification, the results of this study are promising, particularly as they are based on a set of images acquired under uncontrolled conditions, which is known to increase error rates. With further augmentation of the database and investigation into child-specific identification techniques, the ability to accurately identify children from facial images is certainly a future possibility.

The solid phase of an aquifer has an effect on the aqueous phase; if groundwater quality is degraded by the solid phase of an aquifer this is referred to as geogenic pollution. In this study, the Piney Point aquifer in the Virginia Coastal Plain was assessed for mechanisms that may release anions from the solid to aqueous phases and effect water quality. This was done by conducting leaching experiments modified from Balintova et al. (2013). Piney Point aquifer sediments and groundwaters were also analyzed to give a baseline for these experiments. Sedimentary analysis was found to be consistent with McFarland (2017) and groundwater anion concentrations were found to be less than the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) established Maximum Contaminant Levels (MCL). Leaching experiments found that low pH environments may lead to the release of fluoride in association with phosphorus in sediments and general release of chloride. Nitrate release mechanisms in confined aquifers require further study, but it appeared as total inorganic carbon was dissolved, sedimentary total nitrogen concentrations increased. Sulfate concentrations in leaching experiments were found to be associated with sulfur concentrations in the solid phases. Furthermore, leaching experiments showed that when sediments are exposed to oxic environments then re-exposed to groundwater, higher concentrations of anions were released to the aqueous phases. This could be a particular issue with sulfate concentrations, which were above the EPA MCL in the majority of sediment samples in all leachate treatments.

Une des préoccupations majeures du monde industriel est d'avoir une exploitation performante permettant de garantir au mieux la qualité des missions réalisées, le respect des délais demandés et la minimisation des coûts d'exploitation. Toutefois, aujourd'hui la concurrence accrue et la complexité des systèmes conduit les industriels à développer des approches qui permettent la maîtrise de la disponibilité et en particulier à prendre en compte ce paramètre pour l'élaboration de la politique de maintenance. L'objectif de ce manuscrit est de proposer des éléments méthodologiques permettant de caractériser le concept de disponibilité pour en assurer la maîtrise. Nous proposons une méthode de modélisation d'une exploitation en vue d'évaluer les performances en termes de disponibilité. Les résultats de cette évaluation permettent entre autres d'identifier les leviers d'amélioration pouvant agir sur les performances de l'exploitation. Ensuite, nous nous sommes focalisés, dans cette thèse, sur un de ces leviers, à savoir le réordonnancement de la maintenance programmée permettant de répondre au besoin du partenaire industriel. Dans cette optique, nous avons proposé une méthode permettant d'améliorer le réordonnancement d'un programme de maintenance en vue d'optimiser la disponibilité d'un système voire d'un ensemble de systèmes. Dans le cadre de cette méthode, nous avons proposé des heuristiques permettant de réordonnancer les opérations de maintenance en fonction des opportunités d'un exploitant de système. Nous chercherons dans ce manuscrit à apporter des éléments méthodologiques expérimentées chez la société Eurocopter, reposant sur des principes opérationnels et basés sur des approches par scénario.

Eleven percent of Georgians and 13.3% of all Americans are currently over the age of 65. The segment of elderly adults in the United States is the fastest growing subpopulation, attributed to both average lifespan increases and a significant aging of "the baby boomer generation". Thus it is increasingly important that health and policy professionals give attention to issues of health and well-being faced by the aging population. One such issue, financial exploitation of the elderly, has received a large amount of media attention and public concern over the last several years, due to a large increase in the recorded prevalence of the problem. It has been estimated by some studies that financial exploitation of the elderly occurs in 4-5% of the aged population. A variety of legislation, both state and federal, has attempted to address and curb the problem. Like many states, Georgia has successfully passed and implemented such legislation; however as numbers of exploitation continue to increase, it is clear that all states still require a number of policy changes in order to truly eliminate the problem. The purpose of this capstone project is to synthesize scientific research dedicated to financial exploitation of the elderly and, describe current policies in place to address this problem. Finally, policy recommendations for the State of Georgia will be offered so that response and prevention systems effectively reduce the occurrence of this crime.

China has been heavily investing in new energy. With the Chinese government encouragement as well as huge demand from domestic, a lot of MNCs set up subsidiaries in China to enter Chinese market. The new energy industry in China is under rapid and prosperous development. This study adopts qualitative approach, through interviewing with three new energy companies as well as secondary data collection to understand in such changing environment, how MNC¡¦s subsidiary in China can manage the dynamics and build up capability to achieve initiative is the objective this study attempt to understand. The findings show that under different strategies, exploitation and exploration, of developing dynamic capability in China, there will be corresponding HR, R&D, and marketing practices in subsidiary. And these practices will lead to different result of subsidiary initiatives - local and global initiative.

Canada’s 1991 ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) means that policies to eliminate commercial sexual exploitation should be implemented equally for all children, without discrimination. However, Aboriginal peoples are disproportionately represented among Canada’s population of commercially sexually exploited children and youth. They are also more likely to experience the primary risk factors for commercial sexual exploitation – poverty, exposure to violence, and involvement in the child welfare system. I conducted a policy analysis examining the implementation in Canada of the CRC Articles related to the primary predictors of commercial sexual exploitation of children, to determine whether they are being implemented differentially for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal children. The findings revealed that although Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal children obtained identical scores on the quantitative measures, the implementation of the relevant rights standards differed substantially across the two populations, as evident in differential funding and service provision for the two groups.

Background: An organization cannot only rely on how they have been accustomed to doing things in the past, rather they have to be willing to change and adapt in order to be successful in the present as well as the future by achieving and sustaining a competitive advantage. The ability to have a successful core business, be profitable today and also be able to predict future possibilities is a key for organizations that aim at being successful in the long term. Ambidexterity deals with these issues. An ambidextrous organization aims to balance the capability to exploit the present and exploring the future simultaneously. Therefore, it is an essential factor for the long term survival of firms. Aim: The purpose of this thesis is to study ambidexterity with regard to SMEs in the service sector. Completion: This study is based on a qualitative research which is conducted as a single case study on Mediakonsulterna as a firm. Conclusions: The study shows that ambidexterity can be applied in a SME in the service sector. Furthermore, there are different approaches as to how ambidexterity can be applied as discussed in this study. More specifically, the study concludes that a contextual approach to ambidexterity is viable when firms lack the resources and size for implementing ambidexterity through structural measures. This means that a SME in the service sector can conduct ambidexterity on an individual level throughout the company rather than relying on a structural division of separate units. In order to apply ambidexterity, SMEs rely to a large amount on individuals to balance the different activities such as exploitation and exploration

Thesis (M.A. (Human Rights))--Mahidol University, 2006. / LICL has E-Thesis 0018 ; please contact computer services.