This Dissertation analyzes the conditions, problems and potential of rural women&rsquo / s empowerment through a sample of rural women&rsquo / s organizations (two women&rsquo / s cooperative, seven rural development cooperative and one village women associaton) with interpreting DAWN iniative and GAD approach with a socialist feminist perspective. In this study, it is stated that the agricultural sector policies and rural development policy were constructed in relation with the conditions of underdevelopment and thus, in relation with the agreements with IMF, WTO and IPARD Programme of EU which enforced the decreasing of agricultural sector subsidies. It is notable that these policies are formulated with an aim of increasing the influence and significance of capitalist relations in agricultural sector and rural areas without taking precautions for the survival of small sized farming households in rural areas. Despite these general influences of underdevelopment to Turkish Agricultural Sector and patriarchal gender assumptions, these women&rsquo / s organizations could be successful to some extent empowering their members with the recognized dimensions of empowerment such as / psychological, economical, social, organizational and political. All these dimensions are interrelated with each other. In this study, it was observed that while economic empowerment and psychological empowerment is the base of all other dimensions of empowerment, social empowerment and organizational empowerment are the most dynamic processes of empowerment and political empowerment is hardest dimension or outcome to achieve.

Spiritual organizations have historically played an important role in social and civil movements (Aminzade & Perry 2007). This research is one investigation of how spiritual organizations may benefit sustainability initiatives and contribute to increased community resilience. Based on a case study of the Transition Towns movement in the United Kingdom, the research also addresses how to minimize anticipated and actual pitfalls of spiritual organization involvement. Research was conducted through the use of semi-structured telephone interviews with key-informants within Transition Towns in the United Kingdom and with affiliated spiritual organizations. An analysis of themes discussed by participants and relevant literature suggests that the benefits of involving spiritual organizations in sustainability initiatives include the following: institutional (benefits derived from well established institutions such as churches); normative (benefits derived from a non-pragmatic based rationale for committing to social change as well as assigning intrinsic values to Nature); motivational (benefits derived from the ability of spiritual organizations to motivate people); leadership/influence (the influence and leadership that individuals with spiritual background can have in sustainability initiatives); bonding/ bridging (benefits to social capital derived from the strengthened community ties that spiritual organizations can create). Of these, the benefit of normative values was identified as most important by interviewees. Based on these findings, this research argues that spiritual capital is an important social capital resource for sustainability initiatives. Anticipated pitfalls of involving spiritual organizations in sustainability initiatives reported by interviewees included: fears of division (concern that involvement of spiritual organization could divide members along theological lines); belief that explicit reference to spirituality is “off putting” (people from diverse spiritual backgrounds or who identified as non-spiritual might be less likely to take part in situations identified with one or more specific spiritual groups or traditions) and structural or institutional barriers (based on belief, or traditions of practice, spiritual organizations might be unlikely to take part). A key finding was that Transition Town members were not experiencing these pitfalls. Another key finding was that the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) were very involved in the Transition Towns movement. It was concluded based on these findings that spiritual organizations have been able to benefit Transition Towns sustainability initiatives in the UK. Findings suggest that spiritual organizations which are most able to act as important sources of ‘spiritual capital’ for sustainability and community resilience initiatives are identified with the following characteristics: non-proselytizing, socially and theologically inclusive, and emphasizing social and/or environmental justice. By being a source of spiritual capital, spiritual organizations can offer the beneficial components of normative values that motivate, influence and bind communities.

With the development of economic globalization, the threat of international financial crisis is rising. In order to address the challenge of financial crisis, the regional financial cooperation is becoming important mechanism for political elite in East Asia. Although Taiwan has important status of international economics and trade in East Asia and close economic and trade relations with China, but it is still difficult for Taiwan to join East Asia financial cooperation due to Cross-Strait political factor. This thesis analyses the political consensus of political elite in East Asia through the perspective of ¡§Neo-functionalism¡¨ on the impact of two stages of East Asia financial cooperation after international financial crisis in 1997 and 2008, and on the difficulty for Taiwan to take part in regional financial cooperation of ASEAN+3 with China¡¦s increasing political and economic influence in East Asia. Therefore this thesis analyses above issues for providing advices to Taiwan government regarding policymaking on participation in East Asia financial cooperation.

ANKARA, 1923-1950: THE SOCIO-SPATIAL MANIFESTATION OF REPUBLICAN WILL Tak, Ahmet Ph. D., Department of Sociology Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Yusuf Ziya &Ouml / zcan February 2007, 248 pages The social, cultural, aesthetic, and spatial aspects of the urban transformation in its specific relationship with a certain ideology is examined in the study. Ankara, as the capital city of a new state, is regarded as a materialized reflection of the modernization program of the Kemalist ideology which defined the main foundations of the Republic and shaped its formation. The formation process of Ankara is tried to be understood in a historical deepness. Therefore, in order to comprehend the nature of the social transformation, in a historical context, Istanbul is taken into consideration as a model for the traditional Ottoman city because it had represented the Ottoman urban ideals with its social, cultural and aesthetic aspects. From the Ottoman period to the Republican, the structural transformation of the cities is tried to be studied with referring to a notion of crisis which has covered the cultural area. Ankara had been the most important place where the endeavors of the Republican elite to build a nation and to create a national culture and identity had became manifest explicitly and in the most pure form. Therefore, the creation process of Ankara presents us an important exemple to understand social and cultural dimensions of the Turkish modernization in the Republican period. In the context of Ankara, the process of establishing a modern and national high culture and identity in the tensions between modernity and traditionalism and its consequences are examined in the study.

The increasing ubiquity of networked mobile devices such as cell phones and PDAs has created new opportunities for the transmission and display of multimedia content. However, any mobile device has inherent resource constraints: low network bandwidth, small screen sizes, limited input methods, and low commitment viewing. Mobile systems that provide information display and access thus need to mitigate these various constraints. Despite progress in information retrieval and content recommendation, there has been less focus on issues arising from a network-oriented and mobile perspective. This dissertation investigates a coordinated design approach to networked multimedia on mobile devices, and considers the abovementioned system perspectives. Within the context of accessing news video on mobile devices, the goal is to provide a cognitively palatable stream of videos and a seamless, low-latency user experience. Mixed-initiative---a method whereby intelligent services and users collaborate efficiently to achieve the user's goals, is the cornerstone of the system design and integrates user relevance feedback with a content recommendation engine and a content- and network-aware video buffer prefetching technique. These various components have otherwise been considered independently in other prior system designs. To overcome limited interactivity, a mixed-initiative user interface was used to present a sequence of news video clips to the user, along with operations to vote-up or vote-down a video to indicate its relevance. On-screen gesture equivalents of these operations were also implemented to reduce user interface elements occupying the screen. Semantic relevancy was then improved by extracting and indexing the content of each video clip as text features, and using a Na"ive Bayesian content recommendation strategy that harnessed the user relevance feedback to tailor the subsequent video recommendations. With the system's knowledge of relevant videos, a content-aware video buffer prefetching scheme was then integrated, using the abovementioned feedback to lower the user perceived latency on the client-end. As an information retrieval system consists of many interacting components, a client-server video streaming model is first developed for clarity and simplicity. Using a CNN news video clip database, experiments were then conducted using this model to simulate user scenarios. As the aim of improving semantic relevancy sometimes opposes user interface tools for interactivity and user perceived latency, a quantitative evaluation was done to observe the tradeoffs between bandwidth, semantic relevance, and user perceived latency. Performance tradeoffs involving semantic relevancy and user perceived latency were then predicted. In addition, complementary human user subjective tests are conducted with actual mobile phone hardware running on the Google Android platform. These experiments suggest that a mixed-initiative approach is helpful for recommending news video content on a mobile device for overcoming the mobile limitations of user interface tools for interactivity and client-end perceived latency. Users desired interactivity and responsiveness while viewing videos, and were willing to sacrifice some content relevancy in order gain lower perceived latency. Recommended future work includes expanding the content recommendation to incorporate viewing data from a large population, and the creation of a global hybrid content-based and collaborative filtering algorithm for better results. Also, based on existing user behaviour, users were reluctant to provide more input than necessary. Additional user experiments can be designed to quantify user attention and interest during video watching on a mobile device, and for better definition and incorporation of implicit user feedback.

<p>På bara ett par år har elektronisk handel potential att radikalt förändra de ekonomiska och sociala förhållanden i samhället. Internets snabba tillväxt kopplar samman individer och organisationer till ett stort globalt nätverk som representerar enorma möjligheter. Det talas om ett nätverkssamhälle och en nätverksekonomi.</p><p>Elektronisk handel driver företag mot att bedriva affärer på ett fundamentalt nytt sätt. Behovet av att dela information i realtid ökar tillsammans med förändringarna i värdekedjan.</p><p>Syftet med studien är att kartlägga elektronisk handel i allmänhet. Studien fokuseras på hur elektronisk handel används för att länka samman företag, stora som små, från råmaterial till konsumenten. Arbetet belyser hinder och krav i samband med elektronisk handel och det sätt de hanteras på.</p><p>Företagen i undersökningen visar ingen tydlig strävan mot att uppnå en totalt integrerad värdekedja. Grundliga affärsprocesser flyttas mot Internet för att utnyttja nätverkets fördelar. Främst används EDI och online-tjänster som Internetbutiker för elektronisk handel.</p>

<p>The history of environmental reporting began in the early 1990’s when some companies included the environmental issue in their annual report. The increased interest of ethical and sustainable investments and demands from different stakeholders conjure a change of the report design. To develop the environmental reports and create design guidance for sustainability reports an organisation called Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) was born. The GRI is environmental reporting taken to another level, a level that is according to sustainable development. This qualitative study concerns sustainability reporting in general and the GRI-guidelines in particular. The question is why the Swedish companies, which are already using the guidelines, have chosen to use the guidelines and what type of behavioral changes within the company it has lead to? From my study, I have found that the GRI-report could help corporations to be able to see what actually has been done in the organisation. My conclusion is that the GRI-guideline is a potential tool for gaining control and visibility of the triple bottom line on a corporate level, and it highlights the importance of collecting internal information.</p>

As a result of the recent findings of the Women's Health Initiative (WHI), many women who have been on hormone replacement therapies (HRT) have begun to renegotiate their understandings and strategies of this stage of their lives. The WHI findings suggested that the risks of HRT outweighed the benefits for healthy menopausal women. This study examined women's emerging sensemaking regarding HRT and menopause in light of the WHI findings. Seven women in the Tampa Bay area, who were in various stages of menopause, participated in three focus group sessions and two one-on-one interviews to discuss their lives in menopause. Based upon the women's conversations, I constructed individual stories about each of the women. I included my voice in each step of the process, both participating in the focus group and interview discussions and inserting my voice in the women's stories as an interview and focus group participant. I analyzed the stories to determine categories in the w omen's emerging sensemaking. A theme of change emerged in terms of loss, decay, and decline. The women talked about change while discussing personal issues such as children, their bodies, aging, health concerns, and sex. Throughout their discussions, the women spoke about the contradictions and dilemmas they faced as they tried to sort through the conflicting and sometimes contradictory information they have been receiving about the effects of menopause and HRT on their bodies. Emily Martin's medical metaphors, Michel Foucault's ideas on discourse, and Watzlawick, Weakland, and Fisch's theory of change helped me understand the women's sensemaking. Many of the women framed their sensemaking within the biomedical model of health care, using what Martin called the body-as-machine metaphor, thereby making a first-order change, even though they changed from one HRT formula to another, from "synthetic" to "natural" HRT, or stopped taking HRT entirely. One woman appeared to make a secon d-order change. Overall, the women felt they had little to guide them as they determined how to take care of themselves in the menopausal stage of their lives.

Syftet med denna uppsats var att kartlägga de projekt för elektronisk publicering, där forskningsbiblioteken är inblandade. Detta genomfördes genom en studie över vad det är som styr utvecklingen av alternativa publiceringssystem. Det var både svenska och utländska projekt som undersöktes, fast tonvikten lades på situationen i Sverige och det nystartade DiVA-projektet. DiVA-projektet är ett projekt som bygger upp ett gemensamt biblioteksarkiv för vetenskapliga dokument, där man inledningsvis e-publicerar avhandlingar. Forskningsbiblioteken antar i dessa projekt en ny roll, den som förläggare av lärosätenas vetenskapliga information. Undersökningen gjordes dels genom en analys av artiklar, debatter o.d. om DiVA-projektet, dels genom en kvalitativ intervju med den ansvarige för DiVA-projektet vid Umeå universitet och dels genom en analys av artiklar, debatter o.d. om andra projekt för elektronisk publicering. Resultatet visade att det är forskarnas värderingar samt organisatoriska, tekniska och ekonomiska styrmedel, som är tänkbara orsaker till initieringen av projekten och utvecklingen av alternativa publiceringssystem. Forskarsamhällets värderingar för en fullgod vetenskaplig kommunikation, definierade av Robert K. Merton, säger att forskaren utan baktankar ska sprida sina dokument och få dem kritiskt granskade. Forskarsamhället i stort menar emellertid att de alternativa publiceringssystemen som finns brister i beständighet, tillgänglighet och tillförlitlighet. Därför fungerar inte den vetenskapliga kommunikationen som den ska. Detta tvingar mer eller mindre fram utvecklingen av alternativa publiceringssystem och forskningsbiblioteken måste ta sitt ansvar för att bidra till en lösning på problemen. Internet underlättar utvecklingen, i och med att informationssamhället mer och mer utvecklas till ett nätverkssamhälle, något som Manuel Castells poängterar. Nätverksorganisationer kan enligt Castells skapas, som tillsammans kan utveckla mer tekniskt utvecklade alternativa publiceringssystem och på samma gång sänka kostnaderna för spridningen och bevarandet av vetenskaplig information. Av de fyra drivkrafterna bakom utvecklingen av alternativa publiceringssystem verkar den ekonomiska drivkraften vara den allra starkaste ur forskningsbibliotekens synvinkel, eftersom dessa har mycket att vinna ekonomiskt genom denna utveckling och är därför mycket aktiva i utvecklingsarbetet.

Tiriamajame darbe autorius siekia atskleisti teorinius bendro pobūdžio klausimus: apibrėžti darbo sutarties pasibaigimo ir nutraukimo sąvokas. Autoriaus nagrinėjami darbo sutarties nutraukimo darbdavio iniciatyva, kai nėra darbuotojo kaltės, pagrindai. Analizuojamas įspėjimas apie darbo sutarties nutraukimą. Lyginamuoju metodu pateikiamas tarptautinių dokumentų ir ES teisės normų, reguliuojančių darbo sutarties nutraukimą, reglamentavimas. Tiriamajame darbe pateikiamas garantijų ir apribojimų reglamentavimas, atsirandantis nutraukiant darbo sutartį darbdavio iniciatyvą, kai nėra darbuotojo kaltės. Pateikiamas teisminės praktikos apibendrinimas, reikšmingas teisingai aiškinant ir tinkamai taikant teisės normas, reglamentuojančias darbo sutarties nutraukimą darbdavio iniciatyva, kai nėra darbuotojo kaltės. / In this research work an author seeks to educe the theoretical character of questions: to define the conceptions of the expiry or the termination of an employment contract. Author analyses the grounds for the termination of an employment contract on the initiative of an employer without any fault on the part of an employee. Author analyses the notice of the termination of an employment contract. The regulation of the legal rules of international documents and EU presents by the comparable method. The regulation of the guarantees and limitations represents in this research work, which give effect to the termination of an employment contract on the initiative of an employer without any fault on the part of an employee. Author educes the generalization of judiciary practice, which is essential justly to interpret and properly to use rules of the termination of an employment contract on the initiative of an employer without any fault on the part of an employee.