The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between manifest anxiety and orality as related to smokers and non-smokers as indicated on the Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale and the Blaky Pitres Test (4). From the above theoretical background, the following relationships are hypothesized: Hypothesis I: Smokers will show more anxiety than nonsmokers. hypothesis 2: Female smokers will show more anxiety than male smokers. Hypothesis 3: Among the high anxiety group smokers will show more orality than non-smokers.

Assessment of BEE progress in the petroleum industry and its role in creating value for the players within the industry.

Regionalistic Issues in textbooks of Civic Education after 1989 Summary This thesis focuses on civic education textbooks in the period after 1989 to the present. It includes recapitulation of the development of civic education as school subject and of the regional approach too. Contains a list of all the civics textbooks authorized the Ministry of Education for use in primary schools and grammar schools, including textbooks for pupils with special educational needs. The main topic of this thesis is to analyze the status of regionalist curriculum in basic education, while focusing on the 2nd degree and equivalent years of grammar school. In this context, it recapitulated the last major curriculum change in the Czech education system in the form of general educational program with emphasis on the status of regionalist curriculum. The last purpose of the work and its practical aspect is the identification and analysis of the historical homeland of the current contents of civics textbooks, its comparison with the current state of historical knowledge and pointing out the frequent historical inaccuracies and stereotypes, which are topics of regional history in the historical content of the curriculum of civics occur. The conclusion is devoted to recommendations which will be used in the creation of civics textbooks.

More and more devices and sensors are around us in today's world. There is an increasing tendency to connect devices and sensors to the Internet. We call such network the Internet of Things. As the cost of computing power continues to decrease, data collection and analysis becomes cheaper. Thus, we are able to get much better insight into different domains. This could be a problem in commercial sector, where we do not want to compromise proprietary know how or data. Especially big concerns are around personal data. We can now analyse behavior of people or get access to personal information such as health or spending patterns. This thesis addresses these privacy issues. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

This dissertation aims to investigate the bases of partisan differentiation and degree of polarization since Taiwan's 2000 presidential election. By employing American concepts and theories of partisan polarization, I analyze Taiwan's party politics at both the elite and mass levels. At the elite level, I examine whether inter‐party antagonism has become more intense in Taiwan's legislature and what types of issues contribute most to party conflict since 2000. At the mass level, I examine public perceptions of the parties, analyze whether any political issues divide the Taiwanese public along partisan lines, and explore the social and demographic bases of partisan divisions. The findings suggest that political elites became polarized along partisan lines after 2000, as observed in roll‐call voting behavior in the Legislative Yuan. This resulted from the formation of a divided government and the confrontation of two party coalitions after the 2000 presidential election. Furthermore, this polarization is mainly due to the opposite positions of the two party coalitions on the issue of the relationship with China. The pan‐blue party coalition favors reunification and closer interaction with China, whereas its counterpart, the pan‐green party coalition, favors Taiwanese independence and limited interaction with China. The issues of social reform vs. stability, social welfare vs. lower taxes, and environmental protection vs. economic development are less polarizing and less consistently divisive than the issue of Taiwan's relations with China. Partisan polarization is less evident among ordinary citizens than among political elites. The only issue dividing Taiwanese significantly is the China relationship issue (independence or unification with China). In addition, demographic factors may lead to partisan division among citizens. Nevertheless, this polarization is more moderate than that of political elites because the number of partisan independents is high and has not decreased significantly. In short, partisan polarization in Taiwan is not as intense as some political scientists claim. Taiwan's partisan polarization at the mass level is closer to the concept of "sorting", referring to the process of people gradually affiliating with the party that best reflects their policy preferences, even if those preferences are more moderate than extreme.

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The appearance of Voice over IP (VoIP) revolutionized the telecommunications word, this technology delivers voice communications over the internet protocol (IP) networks instead of the public switched telephone network (PSTN), calls can be made between two VoIP phones as well as between a VoIP phone and an analog phone connected to a VoIP adapter [1]. The use of this technology gives access to more communication options compared to the conventional telephony but the users face different problems, mostly connectivity and performance issues related to different factors such as latency and jitter [2], these factors affect directly the call quality and can result in choppy voice, echoes, or even in a call failure. The main objective of this work was to create a tool for automatic analysis and evaluation from packet traces, identify connectivity and performance issues, reconstruct the audio streams and estimate the call quality. The results of this work showed that the objectives sated above are met, where a tool that automatically analyzes VoIP calls is created, this tool takes non encrypted pcap files as input and returns a list of calls with different parameters related to connectivity and performance such as delay and jitter, it does as well reconstruct the audio of every VoIP stream and plots the waveform and spectrum of the reconstructed audio for evaluation purposes.

Contemporary population displacement trends are impacting cities located in developing countries in unprecedented ways. This scenario is reflected in the Mexican border town of Tijuana, which from May 2016 to January of 2017, experienced the massive arrival of Haitians seeking asylum in the United States. My thesis addresses the Haitians’ patterns of displacement and the actors involved in their migratory processes including governmental and non-governmental authorities in Mexico and the United States. Because of the complexity of displacement today, I argue that in order to comprehend patterns and responses to displacement, it is necessary to use a multi-scalar global perspective that addresses the relationship between time and space as well as the relationship between politics and power. Furthermore, I argue that the Haitians' arrival to the U.S.-Mexico border is an illustration of crisis migration, which views displacement as the result of a combination of social, political, economic, and environmental crises.

La coopération portée par les dernières réformes législatives a été préférée à d'autres outils de restructuration. Pourtant, au début des années 2000, il apparait que les coopérations entre établissements publics et privés de santé ne sont pas véritablement satisfaisantes. Avec la loi de santé du 26 janvier 2016 une rupture est faite. Cette loi, en plus d'apporter des modifications au groupement de coopération sanitaire permet la création d'un nouvel outil : le groupement hospitalier de territoire. Tous les établissements publics de santé doivent, sauf exception, être membre d'un groupement hospitalier de territoire. On pense "parcours" et "projet médical partagé" à l'échelle d'un territoire de santé. Pourtant, dans la pratique il est apparu que le groupement hospitalier de territoire n'était pas encore un outil pleinement opérationnel. Il a alors été nécessaire d'adopter une démarche prospective et d'émettre des propositions d'évolution pour que la coopération entre établissements de santé puisse véritablement être considérée comme un levier majeur permettant d’avoir un système de santé plus efficient / The cooperation of recent legislative reforms has been preferred to other restructuring tools. However, in the early 2000s, it appears that cooperation between public and private health facilities is not really satisfactory. With the law of health a break is made. This law, in addition to making changes to the sanitary cooperation grouping tool allows the creation of a new tool: the territorial hospital grouping. All public health establishments must, except in exceptional cases, be members of a regional hospital group. One thinks "course" and "shared medical project" at the scale of a territory of health. However, in practice it became clear that the territorial hospital grouping was not yet a fully convincing tool. It was then necessary to adopt a forward-looking approach and make proposals for changes so that cooperation between health care institutions could truly be considered as a major lever for a more efficient health system

The quest towards sustainable development, both nationally and globally, puts the construction industry in the foreground as the main consumer of natural resources. The industry has profound economic, social and environmental impacts. Sustainable construction is one of the most important challenges faced by the construction industry today. In the UK, sustainability is being driven and enforced by the government through stringent fiscal policies and regulations, voluntary initiatives combined with naming and shaming strategies. Stakeholders are becoming more aware of the global challenges and are using their power to exert pressure on companies. Increasingly, construction clients are demanding that their business partners submit: their corporate sustainability policies with tender packages to demonstrate their performance in dealing with opportunities and risks stemming from economic, environmental and social aspect of sustainability. However, the lack of understanding of the concept and its practical application has been a recurrent problem. The conceptual confusion; its vagueness and ambiguity, the complexity of the myriad of challenges and fluidity of the sustainability concept, compounded with the myopic attitude of the industry, lack of clear-cut and practical framework are causing frustration in the construction industry. Consequently, a number of sustainability management frameworks have been proposed. There are probably more than one hundred frameworks for sustainable business strategy. However, the majority of these are either complicated to implement or lack sound theoretical base, effective change management and completeness. These, therefore, do not make the situation any easier. Many are still baffled as to what they should do and how they should go about affecting change. Corporate sustainability in the construction industry is a challenge to many companies. The industry is still under-performing in each of the key themes of sustainable construction and this has lead to a 'blame culture' where each sector of the industry allocates responsibility for its current failings to others (CIRIA C563, 2001). Such a situation poses a need for a comprehensive, practical and easy to use tool that would aid the implementation and management of sustainability at the core of business process. The tool will complement the existing frameworks, which breaks down the strategic and management issues into manageable components. This will enable companies to focus on individual areas and identify actions needed to facilitate change. The problem is that such a tool is virtually non-existent. The main focal point of this research is the development of a tool to facilitate the implementation, management and integration of sustainability issues at the strategic level and promote wider uptake of the concept in the construction industry. This requires a thorough understanding of the concepts of sustainable development, sustainable construction and related issues as well as drivers, benefits, barriers and enablers for achieving corporate sustainability. It also demands an examination of existing management frameworks and collation of case studies from the early adopters to establish critical factors for strategic and management issues involved in achieving corporate sustainability. Through, diverse research epistemologies (quantitative, qualitative and triangulation methods), the research established four main critical factors and thirty-six sub-critical factors for achieving corporate sustainability. These factors underpinned the development of a web-based prototype software (ConPass). This thesis presents the development and evaluation ConPass Model and the prototype software.