Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2007. / The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on March 3, 2008) Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

With the increasingly salient role of business in development, the bottom of the pyramid (BOP) approach is sparking great interest in multinational corporations, donor agencies, and academic circles. The BOP proposition holds that profit-generating enterprise-based ventures – typically led by multinational corporations – can reduce poverty and improve the standard of living by offering goods and services to the poor or integrating them in the value chain. BOP as a development strategy is predicated on the “inclusion” of the poor into market to enable them to reap the benefits of greater wealth and prosperity. This thesis critically investigates to what extent BOP interventions contribute to the social inclusion of marginalized groups in developing countries like Bangladesh. The thesis analyzes the case of public access information and communication technologies (ICTs) venues such as telecentres. Such venues provide access to ICTs such as Internet that enable people to access, use and share information and knowledge at an unprecedented level, offering great potential for socio-economic development. Overall, the thesis reveals the limitations in the BOP approach in contributing to inclusion, by showing the contradictions between the economic logic of business and the social imperative of inclusion. Through focusing on a broader view of inclusion, the findings highlight the complex relationship between digital inclusion and social inclusion in developing countries. In particular, the thesis problematizes the notion of “inclusive business”, which, by aiming to integrate the poor as consumers and women as entrepreneurs, serves the purpose of extending the reach of business. Thus inclusive business is rather different from a view of inclusion towards meaningfully contributing to one’s social and economic advancement. The thesis also argues that the various dimensions of inclusion are highly contingent on the business strategies and motivations of corporations as well as meso-level organizational formations. The analysis of corporate strategies uncovers how revenue making considerations are driving BOP interventions at the cost of accountability towards their stakeholders. By interrogating some of the issues silent in the discussions on business and development, such as inequality and exclusion, the work provides a counter narrative to the BOP discourse, raising questions about the uncritical repositioning of business as a development agent.

Fraud targeting the elderly has in recent years received more and more attention, although fraudulent behavior against the elderly only constitute a small part of all reported fraud offences the fact that perpetrators intentionally and systematically utilizing their vulnerability should be taken seriously. It is therefore considered important to expand the knowledge regarding elderly exposure to fraud, but not because of the volume of crime rather because of the particular vulnerability the elderly possesses. The present study intends to examine how perpetrators of fraud find the elderly victims and whether or not the principle of public access to information affects elderly exposure to this type of crime. The study has been conducted through semi-structured interviews with individuals from the Swedish police authorities, all with connections to fraud and crime against elderly in different ways. Trough the thematic analysis, it emerged that perpetrators find their intended victims with the help of websites that mass-publish personal information and that this mainly takes place within the framework of organized crime. The principle of public access to information therefore tends to be an important phenomenon to consider in the work of making elderly less suitable targets of fraud.

This research project investigates the possibility of a public programme-overlay at the Union Buildings, situated on Meintjieskop on the western edge of the Pretoria inner city. The design of the Buildings was commissioned to Sir Herbert Baker to celebrate the newly formed Union of South Africa in 1910. The buildings were completed in 1913 and this research project attempts to commemorate the centenary of this landmark. The buildings’ current state does not allow for public participation and this seems unfortunate for both the public and the buildings. This dissertation attempts to reintroduce the Union Buildings to South Africans, the Pretoria public as well as international tourists by recording the memory of the buildings. The intervention is an interpretative archive to the life of the Union Buildings. The static, stereotomic nature of the buildings has ironically been shaped and forced into many different symbolic meanings through the ever-changing political and cultural dynamics of South Africa. The life of the buildings has been interpreted into five distinguishing symbolic-eras: Birth, Union, Oppression, Democracy and Power. The new intervention attempts to make these layered eras public. This project will also explore the relationship between architecture and craft. This study understands that architecture is more than ever becoming a two dimensional experience and this is believed to be a direct result of the dimension in which it is explored - between pen and paper. The investigation will contest this current condition in which architecture finds itself. Moreover the focus of this study will be to explore architecture in its final dimension, thus exploring the relationship between architecture and craft. In the true sense this is a study of the tekton. / Dissertation (MArch(Prof))--University of Pretoria 2012. / Architecture / MArch(Prof) / Unrestricted

This study focused on the televisual and cultural practices of Iranians via public access television in Dallas, Texas. It includes analysis of format and content. It combines demographic, structural, and statistical information with a culturalist and interpretive viewpoint in examining the efforts of Iranians, via access television programs, in preserving their culture and the formation of a coherent and active community in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex.

There is a great need for digital libraries that are flexible, scalable, and reliable. Few such systems exist. Little is known about how to build them. This thesis addresses these problems by enhancing a prototype digital library system with the aim of making it more flexible, scalable, and reliable. We hypothesize that: 1) adding a new (user information) layer and maintaining weak coupling in the design of a digital library system can help achieve system flexibility; 2) optimizing network connection usage and facilitating distribution of computation and disk operations in system design can help achieve system scalability; and 3) applying good software processes can help university students produce a very reliable system. Approaches based on the above hypothesis were used in the project of Reengineering the MARIAN System in Java. The results of the project and experiments verified the correctness of the hypothesis. The results of this thesis may help inform future digital library design and implementation projects to produce flexible, scalable, and reliable systems. / Master of Science

There exist two assumptions that may well be connected. The first is that in an increasingly global and technological world, language barriers have fallen. Online machine translation services are monetarily free for everyone to use. So why is working with multilingual material so difficult in the library context? The second assumption is that the library catalogue is a technical fossil that has long been surpassed by the search and retrieval performance of the World Wide Web. Isn't the library catalogue simply a technical necessity of little interest? This study addresses the challenges and opportunities of the multilingual Online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC) as a key interface between librarians and end-users. The multilingual OPAC as interface definesaccess (for whom, to what, where). The competences, technology, and standards that come into play in an OPAC to access library references irrespective of the query language are investigated. The study combines a case study looking at the Swedish library context, its multilingual acquisition, and cataloguing workflows, with an evaluation of three selected OPACs to assess if and to which extent an OPAC can perform across languages.

Though largely overlooked in academia, Manhattan public access television became a forum that allowed a variety of behaviors, sexualities, and genders to invade a highly controlled hegemonic apparatus in the 1970s and early 1980s. In this thesis, I argue that Anton Perich’s Anton Perich Presents (1973-c.1978) and Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party (1978-1982) worked to actively queer the form and content of television. Since these shows grew from rather exclusive underground communities, I argue that the broadcasting of these fringe personalities, genders, sexualities, and behaviors to a broader, cable-viewing public formed unique queer counterpublics. I situate Anton Perich Presents and TV Party in relation to the norms of broadcast television in order to establish the limits, norms, and codes of these diverse genres and in order to ascertain viewer’s expectations of them. By positioning Anton Perich Presents and TV Party in conversation with mainstream television shows, I identify a queerness these public access shows lent to television and its viewers through their deliberate manipulations of the medium. / text

The purpose of this study was twofold. Primarily, the study was conducted to establish the extent to which the local public access television programs produced by the Wayne County Health Department, Richmond, Indiana had been an effective source of health information in helping raise health awareness for adult residents who have access to cable television. The secondary purpose of the study was to gather information for the department's future television programming. Five face-to-face interview participants and twenty-five telephone survey participants responded to seventeen questions. The questions concerned health information acquired by watching public access television programs, participants' preferences for certain health topics and formats for the television presentations, and whether they had taken any specific actions that were a result of the health related information gained through watching the public access television programs. In addition, the participants were asked about their respective demographic characteristics.The study produced two major findings regarding the adult participants' opinions or whether they obtained health information through public access television and how their demographic characteristics correlated to previous research done regarding viewing habits and the utilization of television as a source of health information.1. The majority of the Wayne County adults interviewed both in person and by telephone reported at least one piece of health information acquired by watching public access television health programs.2. The demographic findings were mixed as it pertained to some of the major research related to this study.The results of this study indicated that adult or public health educators may, where appropriate, consider the use of public access television as a method to help raise health awareness with adults. It is suggested that additional research should be done on this particular topic because of the dearth of previous research done on this specific topic. / Department of Educational Leadership

The topic studied in this thesis is the right of public access as a legal institution. In that connection, several questions which are different from each other are raised. The thesis focuses to a great extent on the interaction between questions of a practical-legal nature and those whose character is more connected to legal theory. The point of departure of the discussion in the thesis is that some of the legal norms that are incorporated in the institution of the right of public access are customary law. Thus, the concept customary law is particularly considered, and the question of in what way the customary law can be filled with content raises special interest. A hypothesis is put forward in the thesis, which is that the right of public access constitutes part of those regulations whose purpose is that land should be used appropriately - seen from the societal perspective that land is a limited natural resource which should be used expediently, for the husbanding of resources. What is advocated in this thesis, is that in both the jurisprudential discussion about the right of public access and in the argumentation that is conducted in the practical legal application, the three subjects, the Actual User, the Canalizer and the Actual User in the Collective and their different use of the land, are separated. Further, it is advocated that the discussion as to which activities are allowed by the right of public access should be based on a consciousness that the activities can concern “everyday use” or “recreation” and that, depending on whether the activities are considered to concern the one or the other, different conclusions regarding the permissibility of the activities will be drawn. Furthermore, it is shown in the thesis that in conflicts between different means of using land, the courts seem to presume that all land is covered by the right of public access - a presumption that does not hold if the land is a part of somebody’s zone of home privacy, is needed for certain business or constitute biologically sensitive land. / I denna avhandling studeras allemansrätten som rättsinstitut. Därvid aktualiseras flera sinsemellan olikartade frågeställningar. Avhandlingen fokuserar i stor utsträckning på samspelet mellan frågor av praktisk-juridiskt slag och sådana av mer rättsteoretiskt slag. Diskussionen i avhandlingen utgår från att vissa av de i institutet allemansrätten ingående rättsliga normerna är sedvanerätt. Därför diskuteras sedvanerättsbegreppet särskilt, varvid frågan hur sedvanerätt kan fyllas med ett innehåll väcker särskilt intresse. I avhandlingen uppställs en hypotes om att allemansrätten är en del av en reglering syftande till lämplig markanvändning - sett ur den samhälleliga synvinkeln att mark är en begränsad naturresurs som bör nyttjas ändamålsenligt, för hushållning med resurser. I avhandlingen förespråkas att man i såväl den rättsvetenskapliga diskussionen om allemansrätten, som i den argumentation som förs i den praktiska rättstillämpningen, särskiljer de tre subjekten utövaren, kanalisatören och utövaren i kollektivet och deras skilda nyttjande. Vidare förespråkas att diskussionen, om vilka aktiviteter som är allemansrättsligt tillåtna, sker utifrån en medvetenhet om att aktiviteterna kan avse ”vardagsnytta” eller ”rekreation” och att, beroende av om aktiviteterna antas avse det ena eller det andra, olika slutsatser angående aktiviteternas tillåtlighet kommer att dras. Därtill visas i avhandlingen att domstolen, i konflikter mellan olika sätt att nyttja marken, tycks presumera att all mark är allemansrättsligt tillgänglig - en presumtion som bryts om marken ingår i någons hemfridszon, behövs för vissa näringar eller utgör biologiskt känslig mark.