The aim of this study is to put forth, examine and understand eight young adult Muslims view of Islam and what it means to be a Muslim in Sweden. The analysed material consists of eight interviews with young adult Muslims, in the age 16 to 19 years old, made in december of 2017. To aid the research three questions were formulated: (1) What is Islam according to young adult Muslims?, (2) What does it mean to be Muslim according to young adult Muslims? and (3) What affect does religion have on the identity of young adult Muslims? In order to answer the questions and fulfill the purpose of this study a qualitative method of semi-structured interviews have been used. Further a theory of strategic and tactic religion along with a theory about self-identification were applied to analyze the result of the interviews. The study shows that young adult Muslims in Sweden, though they are affected of strategic religion, use tactics to individualize Islam in order to align with their every day life. The study also shows that Swedish young Muslims’ identity are affected by religion and that this can be related to categories such as continuity, between cultures, hybrid and deculturation.

This dissertation consists of three independent essays which contribute to the literatures on International Trade and Political Economy. The first essay addresses questions related to the political economy of antidumping (AD). With the remarkable falling in tariff barriers that has characterized the post-World War II period, AD has become the most used non-tariff barrier (NTB).1 Studying the use of AD is thus of great importance, also because the restrictive effects of AD measures on trade can be sizable (see for instance Ruhl, 2014). Moreover, there is an increasing concern that AD has turned to be an industrial policy tool rather than a mean that governments can use to restore the “level-playing field” (Vandenbussche and Zanardi, 2008). This worry is in line with the findings presented in the first chapter of this dissertation, Bureaucrats or Politicians? Political Parties and Antidumping in the US, which shows that the adoption of ADmeasures in the US is heavily shaped by political parties’ interests. I focus on the voting behavior of the International Trade Commission (ITC), a US quasijudicial agency composed by six non-elected commissioners who are supposed to conduct (an important part of the) AD investigations in a fair and objective manner. Using a newly collected dataset containing all ITC commissioners’ votes on AD over the period 1980-2010, I show that political parties can affect the ITC voting behavior in two ways: by selecting ITC commissioners who have a similar stance on trade policy as their own (selection effect) and by influencing them while they are in office (pressure effect). While other studies have emphasised that Congress can put pressure on the ITC, the novelty of this work is to show that this pressure is party-specific. First, I show that Democratic-appointed commissioners are systematically more protectionist than Republican-appointed ones. This effect is sizable (the probability of voting in favor of AD is at least 8 percentage points higher for Democratic-appointed commissioners) and suggests that political parties can play an important role by influencing the choice of ITC commissioners who have a similar preferences on trade. This result is insensitive to several changes in the econometric specifications and to the use of different methodologies. Moreover, commissioners’ votes on AD depend on the trade policy interests of key senators (i.e. Trade subcommittee members) in the party they are associated to.2 In particular, whether (Democratic) Republican-appointed commissioners vote in favor of AD depends crucially on whether the petitioning industry is key (in terms of employment) in the states represented by leading (Democratic) Republican senators at the time. This result is robust to several checks also holds when controlling for any unobserved time-invariant characteristic of ITC commissioners (e.g. the state of origin) that could influence their votes on AD and be correlated with the pressure variables, i.e. when commissioner fixed effects are included in the specifications. In addition, the pressure effect can actually overcome the selection effect, making a Republican-appointed commissioner more protectionist than the average Democratic-appointed one. The second essay, Internationalization and Innovation of Firms: Evidence and Policy, analyzes the link between internationalization and innovation at the firm level.3 The evidence presented Chapter 2 shows that the degrees of involvement in internationalization and innovation activities are inextricably linked. However, the European policy context seems at odds with this evidence: trade-promotion and innovation-enhancing policies are largely unrelated and often carried out through various agencies (see EIM, 2010).4 Thus, understanding the interaction between internationalization and innovation can be crucial for policy makers, especially in a world which is increasingly characterized by global value chains.5 The interplay between internationalization and innovation is investigated in a unique, representative and cross-country comparable sample of manufacturing firms with at least ten employees (EFIGE), across seven European countries (Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Spain, UK) for the year 2008. We find that firms in the sample at hand are quite active in both innovation and internationalization: 87% of firms devote resources to R&D projects, IT solutions, or patent/design/ trademark registrations, while 77% of our firms are active in international trade, cross-border outsourcing relations, or FDI. For modes of internationalization, there is a clear ranking of associated firm performance: FDI makers show the highest productivity, followed by outsourcers and traders. Innovation differences across modes are less clear cut. Moreover, defining internationalization (innovation) intensity as the number of internationalization (innovation) modes in which firms are involved, we show that firms with high innovation intensity tend also to show high internationalization intensity. Instrumenting innovation intensity by the share of firms that have benefitted from R&D financial incentives in a given (NACE 2 digits) industry-country pair and by the share of investment in R&D over the value added in the same industry-country pair, for the years 2002-2006, we are not able to find conclusive evidence of a causal effect of innovation on internationalization. Finally, a positive association between innovation and internationalization intensities appears at both firm level and country-industry (milieu) level, and at country level when average intensity is calculated disregarding the relative numbers of firms in the different industries. If country average intensities are computed weighting by firm numbers in the various industries, the correlation between innovation and internationalization intensities across countries appears weaker, suggesting that innovation matters more than internationalization for driving differences across countries. Based on the evidence we collected, we suggest a higher coordination/integration of internationalization and innovation policies at both the national and EU levels, and propose a bigger coordinating role for EU institutions, in order to reduce the current paradox of generally uncorrelated policies aimed at mostly correlated outcomes. The third essay, Cooperation Among Criminal Organizations: Evidence from Organized Crime in Italy, uncovers new facts about the behavior criminal organizations on the Italian territory. Since Becker (1968) the economic analysis of crime has especially focused on the behavior of individual offenders. Much less attention has been devoted to the activities of criminal organizations, especially from an empirical point of view. Nevertheless, organized crime is a prominent and alarming presence in the world economy: it destroys physical and human capital and deteriorates the business environment, ultimately lowering the growth potential of an economy (Acconcia et al. 2014; Pinotti, 2015). The third chapter of this dissertation contributes to the literature on economics of organized crime by shedding light on the interaction between domestic and foreign organizations in Italy, showing that the probability of cooperation among them depends both on the type of crime committed and on the presence of traditional (incumbent) organizations in some regions of the country. More specifically, cooperation between domestic and foreign criminal organizations is studied using a novel dataset containing information on their activities in the Italian territory during 2007-2010. Italian territory during 2007-2010. We first show that cooperation among Italians and foreigners is skewed towards specific crimes (e.g. counterfeiting activities). We then show that the presence of traditional (incumbent) organizations in some regions reduces the probability of cooperating. Interestingly, in these areas the same probability is higher when cooperation takes place for criminal activities in which foreign organizations can play an important role in providing inputs. / Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

The aim of this thesis is the analysis of a cooperating defendant as a legal instrument of combating organized crime not only in the law regulations of the Czech Republic, but also in the laws of other European countries. This thesis also outlines the origin and development of this institution, both in the international context and in the context of the Czech legislation, including amendments and proposals de lege ferenda. In my work I am also comparing the Czech legislation with specific national legislations. I also mention some interesting legal cases that relate to these issues and present the views of the scientific capacities and respected experts. The thesis is divided into five chapters, which are complemented by introduction and conclusion. The first chapter deals with the historical development of the institute, both in the Czech Republic and in the territories of other states. The second chapter deals with the Czech legislation, the introduction of the institute, and amendments regarding also the laws outside of the Criminal Procedure Code. I also bring up some of the views of experts who evaluate the institute from various angles and express their opinion de lege ferenda. The third chapter presents the problems of organized crime, a topic closely related; institute of cooperating...

Zusammenarbeitende Angeklagte Diese Diplomarbeit befasst sich mit der Problematik des Instituts des "zusammenarbeitenden Angeklagten", dessen Regelung in die strafrechtlichen Vorschriften durch die Novelle des Strafgesetzbuches Nr. 41/2009 Slg. verankert wurde, die am 1. 1. 2010 in Kraft trat. Die Tschechische Republik reagierte hiermit auf die Aufforderungen der internationalen Organisationen, die die Aufnahme der für die Bekämpfung der organisierten Kriminalität nötigen rechtlichen Instrumente verlangten. Das Phänomen des "zusammenarbeitenden Angeklagten", bzw. des Kronzeugen ruft rege Fachdebatten hervor, denn es stellt ein kontroverses Thema dar. Die Straftäter können nämlich für ihre Zusammenarbeit mit den im konkreten Fall tätigen Organen mit bis zur vollständigen Straffreiheit belohnt werden. Vor allem setzt sich diese Arbeit zum Ziel, die wirksame Rechtsregelung des "zusammenarbeitenden Angeklagten" zu beschreiben, auf einige strittige Aspekte aufmerksam zu machen und zu beurteilen, ob die Verankerung dieses Rechtsinstruments als gerecht gesehen werden kann. Die Diplomarbeit besteht aus sechs Grundkapiteln, die weiter aufgegliedert und ausführlicher ausgearbeitet werden. Im ersten Kapitel liegt der Schwerpunkt in der Klassifikation der Begriffe "zusammenarbeitender Angeklagter" und...

My thesis is concerned about organization called "Junak" -- Czech republic union of scouts as the one of the largest organizations in Czech rep. The important part of its program is organizing meetings and creating events which fulfill a definition of an organized tourism. So we can speak about tourism caused by Junak organization, the so called scout tourism. Furthermore my thesis is focused on concrete indicators evaluating content and the structure of the scout tourism.

The thesis deals with insurance fraud on the Czech insurance market. The introductory section describes the actual state of the insurance market. Insurance fraud is presented in terms of legislation, their species and the general alarming indicators. The next section deals with internal fraud and depictures a brief profile of the typical internal fraudster, indicators of their suspicious behavior and ways of prevention. The following chapter describes the external fraud in the life and non-life insurance, and is supplemented by a separate chapter describing organized fraud. The following part is devoted to statistics of insurance fraud, both from the perspective of the Czech Republic as well as some European countries. The final section describes several fraud detection methods used by insurance companies. Finally, the author proposes certain ways of improving the efficiency of the fight against this crime.

This diploma thesis deals with tourism of Czech residents do the United States of America and is focused on comparison of organized and unorganized tourism to this destination. The first part including the first and second chapter defines terms used in the diploma thesis and summarizes main attractions of the United States of America which are suitable for incoming tourism. Possibilities of organized and unorganized tourism -- tourism services and package tours available on the Czech market -- are analyzed in the second part of the thesis (the third and fourth chapter). The last part of the thesis summarizes results of a research which was focused on interest and preferences of different segments of Czech residents regarding organized and unorganized tourism to the United States of America.

<p>NR 20140805</p>

Vários problemas do mundo real podem ser analisados como problemas de otimização. Na bioinformática, em especial, como exemplos podem ser citados o alinhamento múltiplo de sequências, a filogenia, a predição de estruturas de proteínas e RNA, entre outros. As Meta-heurísticas Populacionais (MhP) são técnicas baseadas em interações de conjuntos de soluções candidatas, como elementos de uma população, utilizadas na otimização de funções. Seu uso é especialmente interessante na otimização de problemas onde há conhecimento parcial ou nenhum do espaço de busca. O objetivo deste trabalho é investigar o uso de auto-organização da população de um sistema imunológico artificial (AIS) a fim de aplicá-lo no problema de docking, que pode ser visto como um problema de otimização multimodal complexo. O AIS é um tipo de MhP inspirado na microevolução do sistema imunológico adaptativo de organismos complexos. Neste, as soluções candidatas representam células do sistema imunológico que busca se adaptar para a eliminação de um patógeno. O desenvolvimento do algoritmo foi baseado no opt-aiNet, que utiliza dos princípios das teorias de seleção clonal e maturação de afinidade para realizar a otimização de funções. Adicionalmente, o opt-aiNet, inspirado na teoria de redes imunológicas, realiza uma etapa de supressão, que busca eliminar soluções semelhantes, aumentando assim a diversidade populacional. Esta etapa é computacionalmente custosa, dado que é feito o cálculo da distância entre todos os possíveis pares de células (soluções) afim de eliminar aquelas próximas de acordo com um dado critério. A proposta deste trabalho é o desenvolvimento de um algoritmo de supressão auto-organizável, inspirado no fenômeno da criticalidade auto-organizada, buscando diminuir a influência da seleção de parâmetros e a complexidade da etapa de supressão. O algoritmo proposto foi testado em um conjunto de funções contínuas conhecidas e comumente utilizadas pela comunidade de computação evolutiva. Os resultados obtidos foram comparados com aqueles de uma implementação do opt-aiNet. Em adição, foi proposta a utilização de operadores de mutação com distribuição q-gaussiana nos AISs desenvolvidos. O algoritmo foi também aplicado no problema de docking rígido baseado em complementaridade de superfícies e minimização de colisões, especificamente no docking de proteínas. Os resultados foram comparados com aqueles de um algoritmo genético, resultando em um melhor desempenho obtido pelo algoritmo proposto. / Many real world problems can be described as optimization problems. In bioinformatics in special, there is multiple sequence alignment, filogeny and RNA and Protein structure prediction, among others. Population based metaheuristics are techniques based in the interaction of a set of candidate solutions as elements of a population. Its use is specially interesting in optimization problems where there is little or no knowledge of the search space. The objective of this work is to study the use of self-organization of population in an artificial imune system for use in the docking problem, considered a complex multimodal optimization problem. The artificial imunme system is a type of population based methaheuristics inspired in the microevolution of the adaptive immune system of complex organisms. Candidate solutions represent cells of the immune system adapting its antibodies to eliminate a pathogen. The development of the algorithm was based in the opt-aiNet, based in the principles of clonal selection and affinity maturation for function optimization. Additionally, the opt-aiNet, inspired in theories of immune network, makes a suppression stage to eliminate similiar solutions and control diversity. This stage is computationally expensive as it calculates the distance between every possible pair of cells (solutions) eliminating those closer than a threshold. This work proposes a self-organized suppression algorithm inspired in the self-organized criticality, looking to minimize the influence of parameter selection and complexity of the suppression stage in opt-aiNet. The proposed algorithm was tested in a set of well-known functions in the evolutionary computation community. The results were compared to those of an implementation of the opt-aiNet. In addition, we proposed a mutation operator with q-Gaussian distribution for the artificial immune systems. The algorithm was then applied in the rigid protein docking problem based in surface complementarity and colision avoidance. The results were compared with a genetic algorithm and achieved a better performance.

O presente trabalho tem como objetivo geral estudar o processo de negociação entre Brasil e Paraguai referente à temática dos ilícitos transnacionais e, mais particularmente, sobre a atividade contrabandista na Tríplice Fronteira. O cerne da pesquisa será pensar como o problema dos ilícitos transnacionais é enfrentado pelos atores políticos brasileiros que estão direta ou indiretamente relacionados com o controle e a formulação da agenda externa referente à temática. Com isso, é fito não apenas investigar os efeitos acarretados pela atividade clandestina na economia nacional. Mas também, analisar como a diplomacia e as instituições que trabalham com o tema - Ministério das Relações Exteriores; do Comércio Exterior, Indústria e Transportes; o Itamaraty; a Secretária da Receita Federal; as respectivas Embaixadas e, também; a Polícia Federal - estão reagindo frente a esse quadro de fortalecimento acelerado do crime organizado e, ainda, como se insere a questão do contrabando nas negociações entre Brasil e Paraguai. Primordialmente, o estudo focalizará as posições estratégicas e os princípios defendidos pelo Brasil em relação a essa temática, discutindo questões como a receptividade brasileira às propostas multilaterais e a apresentação de projetos na área, bem como a postura e a consistência na resolução de possíveis impasses no procedimento da barganha. Além disso, a investigação será efetuada partindo de três principais variáveis como: a consolidação do Mercosul, a redemocratização dos países em debate e a expansão do crime organizado global. Julgamos serem estes os fatores fundamentais que nos possibilitarão elucidar sobre a incorporação do tema na agenda bilateral.Enfim, tentaremos destacar a importância de uma abordagem política no tratamento da questão do crime organizado, pois embora se trate de uma velha ameaça que tem convivido com a humanidade ao longo dos anos, na atualidade, esse fenômeno assume características transnacionais, com patamares expressivos de atuação. / The present work has as objective generality to study the process of negotiation between Brazil and Paraguay referring of the illicit transnational thematic and, more particularly, on the activity smuggler in the Tríplice Border. Cerne of the research will be to think as the problem of the illicit transnational is faced by the brazilian politicians actors who are direct or indirectly related with the control and the formularization of the external agenda referring to the thematic one. With this, the objective to investigate the effect caused for the clandestine activity in the national economy. But also, to analyze as the diplomacy and the institutions that work with the subject - Department of State; of the Foreign Commerce, Industry and Transports; the Itamaraty; the Secretary of the Federal Prescription; the respective Embassies and, also; the Federal Policy - they are reacting front to this picture of sped up growth of organized crime and, still, as the question of the contraband in the negotiations between Brazil and Paraguay is inserted. Primordially, the study she will focus the strategical positions and the principles defended for Brazil in relation to this thematic one, arguing questions as the Brazilian receiving to the multilateral proposals and the presentation of projects in the area, as well as the position and the consistency in the resolution of possible problems in the procedure of the bargain. Moreover, the inquiry will be effected leaving of three variable as: the consolidation of the Mercosul, the redemocratization of the countries in discuss and the expansion of the organized crime global. We judge to be these the basic factors that in will make possible them to elucidate at last on the incorporation of the subject in the bilateral agenda. We will try to detach the importance of a boarding politics in the treatment of the question of the organized crime, therefore even so threat of the old problematic that has coexisted the humanity to the long one of the years, in the present time, this phenomenon assumes transnational characteristics, with great performance.