Relationships Between Political Competition and Socioeconomic Status in the United States

Sammanfattning Inom äldreomsorgen ses ibland de äldre sitta ensamma tomt stirrandes. Funderingar kan uppstå om den äldre individen känner livskvalitet. Forskning visar att vad som ger livskvalitet är individuellt, det är därför viktigt att ta hänsyn till individens uppfattning om vad som ger livskvalitet.  Denna kvalitativa studies syfte var att beskriva hur äldre personer som bor i särskilt boende upplever sin livskvalitet. Resultatet bygger på tolv semistrukturerade intervjuer analyserade enligt Granheim & Lundmans metod. Till intervjuerna användes en semistrukturerad frågeguide med 8 öppna frågor.   Ett strategiskt urval användes för studien där inklusionskriterierna var att informanterna skulle vara över 80 år, svensktalande, boende på ett servicehus i Mellansverige som drivs i kommunal regi. Informanterna skulle även vara orienterade till tid, rum och tidigare yrkeserfarenhet var oviktig. Resultat visar att relationen till personalen är betydelsefull för informanterna, men att de ibland upplever sig vara beroende av dem och detta upplevs som negativt. Aktiviteter som ordnas på boendet uppskattas och valmöjligheten att delta eller inte samt kunna påverka utbudet av aktiviteterna upplevs som viktigt. Besvärande fysiska åkommor kan ibland begränsa informanternas deltagande i aktiviteterna, vilket upplevs negativt då aktiviteten ger de äldre individerna glädje och gemenskap. Fysisk träning är viktig, detta gör att de mår bra och känner sig mer självständiga. Besök av familj och vänner uppskattas och ger den äldre glädje, dock finns individer på det särskilda boendet som upplever ensamhet. Även lugna stunder i ensamhet uppskattas då de äldre ibland minns tillbaka i livet. Nyckelord: livskvalitet, särskild boendeform, äldre, kvalitativ studie

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Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong.

<p> Many organizations have a great need for people conversant in foreign languages and cultures. The U.S. Department of Defense operates globally and is always in need of people who can communicate across cultural and linguistic divides, and the gap between what is needed and the personnel who can meet those needs is often considerable. To address this deficit the DOD implemented an incentive pay in the mid 1980s to reward those servicemembers who could prove proficiency in a foreign language. The Foreign Language Proficiency Bonus (FLPB) has gone through numerous changes over the years and this study sought to answer the basic questions, what has been the effect and is it working? How much of an effect does the bonus have on members' actual behavior regarding FL acquisition? This mixed-methods approach analyzed the evolution of policy, conducted a statistical analysis of member testing data, and conducted interviews with 22 current and former recipients of FLPB to see what impact FLPB has had or could have in meeting the DOD goal of increasing FL proficiency within the force. This study focused on the Air Force implementation of the FLPB program, though findings are likely applicable across the military services. Key findings include the rapidly changing nature of FLPB policy, which has caused frustration for many AF members. Further, with numerous stakeholders involved, some points of policy and programs could potentially be working at cross-purposes with overall goals. Statistical analysis found several significant trends; however, many findings do not support FLPB as an effective program in its current form. Many AF members indicated a high desire to use their language skills but are frustrated at the infrequent ability to do so in any official capacity. Several suggestions are offered for how the AF could modify existing policy to achieve its goals for FL proficiency, as well as to maximize scarce financial resources to maximum effect.</p>

<p> The thesis takes as its point of departure the "long-run monetary union" between France and fifteen French-speaking African countries to provide insights into how the rules, mechanisms and practices underlying the monetary dependence of these African states operate. The main objective of the study is to contribute towards a better understanding of the institutions and principles governing the CFA franc zone with the intention of helping policy-makers to take optimal decisions.</p><p> A well-designed monetary policy could generate employment and pro-poor growth. But designing and administering a good policy will depend on the objective of policy designers. In principle, monetary authorities could choose between a fixed exchange regime and a flexible exchange regime. Of this, the above African countries adopted a managed regime with France since 1945. In this study, I examine the relationship between monetary autonomy and poverty reduction in the Franc Zone. The discussion focused on the impact of monetary independence on poverty incidence and poverty gap in the fifteen African nations.</p><p> I utilized two OLS model equations. The functions were estimated using data from a panel of 14 countries (the exception being Equatorial Guinea because insufficient data were available) in the CFA franc zone and covering the 1984-2011 period. Seven predictor variables were forced into the models. With regard to the findings, only four of them such as inflation and, more importantly, credit to private sector, centralization rate, exchange rate and gross national savings are important to headcount index and the depth of poverty reduction in the CFA franc zone.The results therefore suggest that monetary sovereignty measured by the specified variables is a driving force for poverty reduction in the CFA franc zone.</p>

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1975. / Also available in print.

I argue against the claim that normative political theory is 'autonomous' with respect to moral philosophy. I take the simple view that political theory is a form of moral philosophy, and is differentiated by pragmatic rather than theoretically significant criteria. I defend this view by criticizing arguments for the autonomy thesis. In the first three chapters I introduce and analyse the autonomy thesis and provide a framework for understanding the various claims that are made in the literature. In Chapters 4 to 8 I proceed to criticize a series of arguments for the autonomy thesis. In Chapter 4 I explain why Kant's division of morality into ethics and right is not as useful as it may seem to those who wish to defend the autonomy thesis, and argues that Arthur Ripstein gives no reason to think that political philosophy is autonomous that can be endorsed independently of commitment to a Kantian normative theory. In Chapter 5 I examine the political liberal argument for the autonomy thesis, concluding that even if a freestanding political conception of justice can be regarded as autonomous, it does not follow that political philosophy can also. Chapters 6 to 8 tackle various political realist arguments for the autonomy thesis. In Chapter 6 I argue that political theory is not required to deal with empirical facts in any way that distinguishes it from moral philosophy, and any argument for its autonomy that is based on a prior claim about the purpose of political theorizing would be question-begging. In Chapters 7 and 8 I provide various arguments against the idea that there is a distinctively political form of normativity, and diagnose some of the mistaken assumptions about morality that I take to lie at the heart of the realist case. In Chapter 9 I conclude.

Graphical languages offer intuitive and rigorous formalisms for quantum physics. They can be used to simplify expressions, derive equalities, and do computations. Yet in order to replace conventional formalisms, rigour alone is not sufficient: the new formalisms also need to have equivalent deductive power. This requirement is captured by the property of completeness, which means that any equality that can be derived using some standard formalism can also be derived graphically. In this thesis, I consider the ZX-calculus, a graphical language for pure state qubit quantum mechanics. I show that it is complete for pure state stabilizer quantum mechanics, so any problem within this fragment of quantum theory can be fully analysed using graphical methods. This includes questions of central importance in areas such as error-correcting codes or measurement-based quantum computation. Furthermore, I show that the ZX-calculus is complete for the single-qubit Clifford+T group, which is approximately universal: any single-qubit unitary can be approximated to arbitrary accuracy using only Clifford gates and the T-gate. In experimental realisations of quantum computers, operations have to be approximated using some such finite gate set. Therefore this result implies that a wide range of realistic scenarios in quantum computation can be analysed graphically without loss of deductive power. Lastly, I extend the use of rigorous graphical languages outside quantum theory to Spekkens' toy theory, a local hidden variable model that nevertheless exhibits some features commonly associated with quantum mechanics. The toy theory for the simplest possible underlying system closely resembles stabilizer quantum mechanics, which is non-local; it thus offers insights into the similarities and differences between classical and quantum theories. I develop a graphical calculus similar to the ZX-calculus that fully describes Spekkens' toy theory, and show that it is complete. Hence, stabilizer quantum mechanics and Spekkens' toy theory can be fully analysed and compared using graphical formalisms. Intuitive graphical languages can replace conventional formalisms for the analysis of many questions in quantum computation and foundations without loss of mathematical rigour or deductive power.

George Kelly's Personal Construct Theory, especially as subsumed within the “conversational science" paradigm developed by Thomas and Harri-Augstein, is fundamentally a framework for a geometry of personal meaning in which all of the dimensions of distinction within a person’s experience are like the dimensions of geometric space. A person's system of constructs is not just a framework for predicting the attributes of future events; it is a coordinate system for navigating the dimensionality of experience. The work of F. M. Alexander is primarily concerned with the "psycho-physical unity of the individual," and thus with the continuity of experience. The present work has two aims. The first, drawing on the work of Merleau-Ponty and John Dewey, and culminating in the concept of "Conductive Reasoning", is to lay a theoretical foundation for a synthesis of the practical work of Kelly and Alexander. The primary premise is that the act of comprehending is an embodied act, and as such is as subject to the conditions of the coordination of the whole person as is any other act. The second, practical, aim has been to develop a conversational methodology for dealing with learning in a more fully embodied way. This method of "conductive conversation," formally derived from the "Learning Conversation," evolved from the author's teaching experience with the Alexander Technique. Appendix 1, "A Conversational Introduction to Conductive Reasoning," is an interactive conversational structure which incorporates a development of these concepts in the context of personal experiments for generating the kinds of experiences from which the reader may draw something of the intended meaning, and some skill in using the conductive conversational tools for exploring embodied dimensions in their own meaning. It is intended as a piece that will stand on its own as a conversational research instrument for personal scientists.