How can architects let their buildings interact with the water while protecting occupants from the potential danger? The two intents are very different and often compete with one, either protection or recreation, as the primary program in one project. Water draws people, everyone likes being near water. People visit waterfalls and the beach just to experience moving water, they go boating and kayaking just to be on the water. Water views and access are considered an amenity that drive up prices in buildings. Whenever possible architects should strive to connect their architecture and water and to let occupants interact with the water. However, water can be dangerous too. Overfull rivers wash away roads and cars. Floods inundate entire cities, and hurricanes devastate huge islands. In addition to catastrophic damage sea levels are rising around the world causing damage and rendering low lying land uninhabitable. Architects must protect against these dangers. If designed correctly buildings can offer shelter from storms and resist rising water of all kinds. For my thesis I decided to study how to reconcile these two conflicting approaches to water. / Master of Architecture / Water draws people,everyone likes being near water. People visit waterfalls and the beach just to experience moving water, they go boating and kayaking just to be on the water. Water views and access are considered an amenity that drive up prices in buildings and resturants. However, water can be dangerous too. Overfull rivers wash away roads and cars. Floods inundate entire cities, and hurricanes devastate huge islands. In addition to catastrophic destruction sea levels are rising around the world causing damage and rendering low lying land uninhabitable. For my thesis I decided to study how to reconcile these two conflicting approaches to water.

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Ce mémoire vise à mieux comprendre l'utilisation du concept d'autarcie à l'oeuvre dans les écrits d'Aristote et, ce faisant, à nous amener à une meilleure compréhension du lien entre l'éthique et la politique dans la pensée aristotélicienne. Pour ce faire, nous commençons tout d'abord par distinguer deux types d'autarcie, à savoir ce que nous appellerons dans la suite l'autarcie divine et l'autarcie humaine. L'autarcie divine doit être comprise comme le fait de se suffire pleinement à soi-même de la manière la plus rigoureuse qui soit et cette autarcie n'est, à proprement parler, attribuable qu'au divin. L'autarcie humaine, quant à elle, est celle qui est à l'oeuvre dans la définition que donne Aristote de la cité, à savoir qu'elle est un regroupement autarcique de personnes visant à vivre et à bien vivre. Par la suite, nous montrons que la pratique de la philosophie, qui est décrite comme une pratique autarcique en EN, X, est difficilement conciliable avec les activités de la cité et la constitution d'une communauté politique. En effet, comme c'est le besoin qui doit jouer le rôle de ciment de la cité, il est difficile de voir comment la philosophie peut s'insérer dans le cadre étatique de la cité, étant donné qu'elle n'est d'aucune utilité et qu'elle est recherchée pour elle-même. Toutefois, puisqu'Aristote ne présente jamais la cohabitation de la philosophie avec les autres activités de la cité comme problématique, nous tentons de voir comment il est possible de concilier la pratique de la philosophie avec la nécessité pour l'individu de vivre en cité. C'est en examinant la notion de loisir que nous en venons à conclure que la philosophie doit y être reléguée afin de pouvoir être pratiquée. C'est aussi en associant la philosophie au loisir et en étudiant le rôle que celui-ci doit jouer au sein de la cité que nous sommes en mesure de voir se dessiner le lien entre l'éthique et la politique. / This dissertation tries to gain a better understanding of the concept of autarkeia which is present in the writings of Aristotle. Doing this, we are also able to get a clearer idea of the link between ethics and politics in the aristotelian thought. In order to achieve this, we start by distinguishing two types of self-sufficiency : the divine self-sufficiency and the human self-sufficiency. The divine self-sufficiency is to be understood as the fact of being fully self-sufficient in the most rigorous way. Strictly speaking, it is only the divine that can be granted of such a self-sufficiency. On the other hand, the human self-sufficiency is the one effective in the aristotelian definition of the polis, which is the self-sufficient grouping of persons aiming at living and good living. After that, we show that the practice of philosophy, which is described as a self-sufficient activity in NE, X, is hardly possible as an activity of the polis and cannot participate in bringing a polis to life. This is founded in the fact that for Aristotle, it is the needs that keep people together, united in a polis, and considering that, it is difficult to see how philosophy could be part of this, because it is totally useless and searched for itself. However, we try to see how it would be possible to conciliate the practice of philosophy with the necessity for a human to live in a polis, because Aristotle never speaks of it as being problematic. The answer of this so-called problem is to be found in the notion of leisure, by relegating philosophy to this part of a human life in order for it to be practiced. It is also by associating philosophy and leisure that we can draw the link between ethics and politics.

Once the boundary in global investment does no longer exist, a substantial number of multinational corporations (MNCs) seek for the lower-cost countries such as developing countries or emerging countries to be their production bases. It is undeniable to say that these recipient countries will benefit abundantly in several aspects namely: capital and technical knowledge, employment boost and economic development stimulation. However, the disadvantages that occur may not be worth the trade-off in a long run whether it is economic inflation, impact to the environment and disappearance of small-scale business. Hence, sustainable business approaches concerning every involved stakeholder is vital, some firms might view that adjusting entire activities in the value chain does increase the costs, but some realizes that aligning their practices with along Sustainable Development Goals is the only way to gain profit, and save people and the planet simultaneously.Nevertheless, there are billions of poor people at the Base of the Pyramid (BoP) who are consumers and entrepreneurs especially in the developing countries. Part of the theorizers believes that producing products and service that respond to the grassroots turns out to be new opportunities for MNCs to develop new types of businesses; bring prosperity to the firms; enhance the poor by offering them knowledge and alternative solutions, shaping their aspirations and improving the accessibility of the products. On the other hand, the other part of the theorizers argued that this method does not only harm the poor since these people are vulnerable consumers, it also has less emphasis on legal, regulatory and social mechanisms. In a nutshell, nothing can guarantee that this approach will enventually take us closer to sustainability.In our study, we have seen that there are some MNCs looking at the BoP market with different perspectives. For instance, the arrival of MNCs in term of modern trade business in Thailand caused a severe effect to traditional retail stores or ‘Mom & Pop1 stores’ in the country. Unilever is one of the MNCs that have a major engagement with local small businesses through their new business model which does not only alleviate Mom & Pop store owners to retrieve their businesses, but it also creates a win-win situation between Unilever and these owners concurrently, allowing them to be self-reliance and operate their businesses sustainability in the days to come.The purpose of this master’s thesis is to understand and assess sustainable development theory, particularly in corporate social responsibility thinking in the BoP perspective based on sufficiency economy. Qualitative research and case study of Unilever Thailand were chosen as appropriate research methods to conduct this thesis.

O objetivo principal deste trabalho foi analisar o controverso conceito de informação em estatística. Para tal, primeiramente foi estudado o conceito de informação dado por Basu. A seguir, a análise foi dividida em três partes: informação nos dados, informação no experimento e diagramas de influência. Nas duas primeiras etapas, sempre se tentou definir propriedades que uma função de informação deveria satisfazer para se enquadrar ao conceito. Na primeira etapa, foi estudado como o princípio da verossimilhança é uma classe de equivalência decorrente de acreditar que experimentos triviais não trazem informação. Também foram apresentadas métricas que satisfazem o princípio da verossimilhança e estas foram usadas para avaliar um exemplo intuitivo. Na segunda etapa, passamos para o problema da informação de um experimento. Foi apresentada a relação da suficiência de Blackwell com experimentos triviais e o conceito usual de suficiência. Também foi analisada a equivalência de Blackwell e a sua relação com o Princípio da Verossimilhança anteriormente estudado. Além disso, as métricas apresentadas para medir a informação de conjuntos de dados foram adaptadas para também medir a informação de um experimento. Finalmente, observou-se que nas etapas anteriores uma série de simetrias mostraram-se como elementos essenciais do conceito de informação. Para ganhar intuição sobre elas, estas foram reescritas através da ferramenta gráfica dos diagramas de influência. Assim, definições como suficiência, suficiência de Blackwell, suficiência mínima e completude foram reapresentadas apenas usando essa ferramenta. / The main objective of this work is to analyze the controversial concept of information in Statistics. To do so, firstly the concept of information according to Basu is presented. Next, the analysis is divided in three parts: information in a data set, information in an experiment and influence diagrams. In the first two parts, we always tried to define properties an information function should satisfy in order to be in accordance to the concept of Basu. In the first part, it was studied how the likelihood principle is an equivalence class which follows from believing that trivial experiments do not bring information. Metrics which satisfy the likelihood principle were also presented and used to analyze an intuitive example. In the second part, the problem became that of determining information of a particular experiment. The relation between Blackwell\'s suciency, trivial experiments and classical suciency was presented. Blackwell\'s equivalence was also analyzed and its relationship with the Likelihood Principle was exposed. The metrics presented to evaluate the information in a data set were also adapted to do so with experiments. Finally, in the first parts a number of symmetries were shown as essencial elements of the concept of information. To gain more intuition about these elements, we tried to rewrite them using the graphic tool of influence diagrams. Therefore, definitions as sufficiency, Blackwell\'s sufficiency, minimal sufficiency and completeness were shown again, only using influence diagrams.

Military Forward Operating Base Camps (FOBs) support and enable sustained military operations abroad by providing safe locations for soldiers and supporting contractors to eat, sleep, and maintain personal hygiene. FOBs need some amount of energy and water to provide these services but are often located in austere environments that do not have access to grid utilities. Off-grid FOBs are not self-sufficient; they are dependent on supply chains for the services they provide to camp occupants. The challenge of supplying FOBs with fuel and water and removing waste (resource resupply and waste removal comprise logistical requirements) is associated with very high human, monetary, strategic, and environmental costs. There are many research efforts across the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) that seek to reduce FOB logistical requirements, but it is currently very difficult to identify the research efforts that are most beneficial to DoD goals. There are also many factors that make designing FOBs to be more self-sufficient challenging including varying missions, environments, and legacy equipment at currently-fielded FOBs, a lack of baseline data on FOB logistical requirements, an unclear relationship between design changes and resource use behavior, and an unclear valuation of saved resources. This research seeks to develop computer tools and contribute to a methodology that can be used to design FOBs that are more self-sufficient. More self-sufficient FOBs provide high quality services to occupants but do so with mitigated logistical requirements. To this end, a detailed computer model of specific type of FOB (a single 150-person Force Provider module) is developed, and baseline levels of resource requirements are established. Potentially resource-saving devices and other design changes are incorporated into the FOB model and simulated to assess each design change's effect on resource use and waste production. Then, estimated resource savings are weighed against required investment for each design change to arrive at design recommendations. The results of this research effort are specific design recommendations for making the Force Provider system more self-sufficient, as well as computer tools and a methodology that are applicable to other off-grid habitation redesign problems. / text

Ce mémoire vise à mieux comprendre l'utilisation du concept d'autarcie à l'oeuvre dans les écrits d'Aristote et, ce faisant, à nous amener à une meilleure compréhension du lien entre l'éthique et la politique dans la pensée aristotélicienne. Pour ce faire, nous commençons tout d'abord par distinguer deux types d'autarcie, à savoir ce que nous appellerons dans la suite l'autarcie divine et l'autarcie humaine. L'autarcie divine doit être comprise comme le fait de se suffire pleinement à soi-même de la manière la plus rigoureuse qui soit et cette autarcie n'est, à proprement parler, attribuable qu'au divin. L'autarcie humaine, quant à elle, est celle qui est à l'oeuvre dans la définition que donne Aristote de la cité, à savoir qu'elle est un regroupement autarcique de personnes visant à vivre et à bien vivre. Par la suite, nous montrons que la pratique de la philosophie, qui est décrite comme une pratique autarcique en EN, X, est difficilement conciliable avec les activités de la cité et la constitution d'une communauté politique. En effet, comme c'est le besoin qui doit jouer le rôle de ciment de la cité, il est difficile de voir comment la philosophie peut s'insérer dans le cadre étatique de la cité, étant donné qu'elle n'est d'aucune utilité et qu'elle est recherchée pour elle-même. Toutefois, puisqu'Aristote ne présente jamais la cohabitation de la philosophie avec les autres activités de la cité comme problématique, nous tentons de voir comment il est possible de concilier la pratique de la philosophie avec la nécessité pour l'individu de vivre en cité. C'est en examinant la notion de loisir que nous en venons à conclure que la philosophie doit y être reléguée afin de pouvoir être pratiquée. C'est aussi en associant la philosophie au loisir et en étudiant le rôle que celui-ci doit jouer au sein de la cité que nous sommes en mesure de voir se dessiner le lien entre l'éthique et la politique. / This dissertation tries to gain a better understanding of the concept of autarkeia which is present in the writings of Aristotle. Doing this, we are also able to get a clearer idea of the link between ethics and politics in the aristotelian thought. In order to achieve this, we start by distinguishing two types of self-sufficiency : the divine self-sufficiency and the human self-sufficiency. The divine self-sufficiency is to be understood as the fact of being fully self-sufficient in the most rigorous way. Strictly speaking, it is only the divine that can be granted of such a self-sufficiency. On the other hand, the human self-sufficiency is the one effective in the aristotelian definition of the polis, which is the self-sufficient grouping of persons aiming at living and good living. After that, we show that the practice of philosophy, which is described as a self-sufficient activity in NE, X, is hardly possible as an activity of the polis and cannot participate in bringing a polis to life. This is founded in the fact that for Aristotle, it is the needs that keep people together, united in a polis, and considering that, it is difficult to see how philosophy could be part of this, because it is totally useless and searched for itself. However, we try to see how it would be possible to conciliate the practice of philosophy with the necessity for a human to live in a polis, because Aristotle never speaks of it as being problematic. The answer of this so-called problem is to be found in the notion of leisure, by relegating philosophy to this part of a human life in order for it to be practiced. It is also by associating philosophy and leisure that we can draw the link between ethics and politics.

Research object – Banking system. Research subject –The institutes of banking system, their briefs and indexs. Research aim – To rate the banking system in Lithuania. Objectives: 1) To analyze the banking system in Lithuania. 2) To survey indexes, which are describing brief of banks. 3) To formulate method of brief analysis.. Research methods – monographical, analysis and synthesis, comparison methods.

We discuss efficient Bayesian estimation of dynamic covariance matrices in multivariate time series through a factor stochastic volatility model. In particular, we propose two interweaving strategies (Yu and Meng, Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, 20(3), 531-570, 2011) to substantially accelerate convergence and mixing of standard MCMC approaches. Similar to marginal data augmentation techniques, the proposed acceleration procedures exploit non-identifiability issues which frequently arise in factor models. Our new interweaving strategies are easy to implement and come at almost no extra computational cost; nevertheless, they can boost estimation efficiency by several orders of magnitude as is shown in extensive simulation studies. To conclude, the application of our algorithm to a 26-dimensional exchange rate data set illustrates the superior performance of the new approach for real-world data. / Series: Research Report Series / Department of Statistics and Mathematics

Theoretical foundation: Rheumatoid arthritis is a chronic system disease manifesting itself particularly by inflammatory joint impairment. The main problems confronting daily the patient include pains of the motor system and fatigue. The disease has typically long, progressive development, and although it does not cause directly the patients' death, it reduces their life by some ten years on average. The serious character of the disease consists in the fact that the motor abilities of the individual are gradually impaired. At the beginning the patients must avoid major physical activity, often give up their hobbies and sometimes even their jobs. In the most serious cases, the disease may even prevent the patients from performing basic self-service activities. Goal of the thesis: The goal of the thesis consists in mapping the level of problems of rheumatoid arthritis patients at performing daily activities. Hypotheses - H1: Rheumatoid arthritis patients feel discomfort when performing common daily activities, H2: Rheumatoid arthritis patients make use of supporting and compensation aids when performing common daily activities, H3: Rheumatoid arthritis patients make use of another person's assistance when performing common daily activities. Methodology: The research part of the thesis was implemented based on quantitative inquiry within the grant Project No. 120/2012/S ?Reflection of life quality in nursing?. The actual research made use of HAQ standardized questionnaire, distributed among the rheumatoid arthritis patients. The size of the research set was set at 200 rheumatoid arthritis patients from all over the Czech Republic. The respondents were chosen based on quota selection, striving to observe the proportion of men to women at 3:1, i.e. 150 women and 50 men. When searching the respondents, organizations associating patients with the respective diagnosis were first approached. All results obtained were statistically processed in the SASD (Statistical Analysis of Social Data) program. Descriptive statistics were used. Results: The results can be divided into three areas, by the related hypotheses. The first part of the results gave information on the degree of discomfort felt by the individuals when performing specific common daily activities. It was found out that the patients see the most difficult activity in taking down an item from a place above their head and bathing in the bathtub. The second area brought information on the aids used to perform common daily activities. The respondents named dressing aids or handgrips at the bathtub most frequently. The third and last area brought the answer to the question what activities require another person's help. The patients named reaching or opening of things most frequently. But an essential part of the patients stated not to need any help of another person in common daily activities. Based on the results, the hypotheses were evaluated as follows: H1 - Rheumatoid arthritis patients feel discomfort when performing common daily activities - confirmed, H2 - Rheumatoid patients make use of supporting and compensation aids when performing common daily activities - confirmed and H3 - Rheumatoid arthritis patients make use of another's person when performing common daily activities - not confirmed. Conclusion: The thesis provides a detailed and comprehensive view on the issues of performing common daily activities in rheumatoid arthritis patients. The results can be used both by practical nurses and by students of nursing and related disciplines. The thesis can also constitute foundation for further research. The thesis results will be also presented and published.