The Promise and (Im)Possibility of the Debt-Free Student: A Qualitative Analysis

While debt is most commonly associated with financial liability, scholars have also started to consider other, non-financial ways debt can manifest. Financial debts require repayment in dollars, while non-financial debts might require ‘repayment’ not in money, but in feeling, conduct, attitude, or sense of obligation, for example. When more than the association of money is considered, it is possible to contemplate the other ways that debt, both financial and non-financial, might work to affect individual decision making across multiple temporalities. Much has been written about the foreclosing aspects of debt theoretically, but little empirical research has been conducted in this area. This study highlights how low-income students in a promise program understand and make meaning of their present and future decision making in relation to perceptions of their own debt. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with thirteen low-income college students who qualified for a need-based promise program. Transcripts of each interview were analyzed to identify themes relevant to each research question. The results of this study suggest that the participants in this sample experienced not only financial debts with attending college, but non-financial debts as well. Specifically, students discussed their experiences navigating non-financial emotional, social, and racial/ethnic debts, among others, as they “paid” for the opportunity to attend college. Additionally, many of the students in this sample experienced the foreclosing aspects of these non-financial debts as they navigated the college decision making process including where they felt they could attend and what major to pursue. These non-financial debts were not only foreclosing. Many of the students expressed the opportunities they were able to pursue as a result of the commitments and non-financial debts they felt they “owed” their families, highlighting the both the foreclosing and opportunity creating nature of these non-financial debts

German Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalism

This book presents a new history of German film from 1980-2010, a period that witnessed rapid transformations, including intensified globalization, a restructured world economy, geopolitical realignment, and technological change, all of which have affected cinema in fundamental ways. Rethinking the conventional periodization of German film history, Baer posits 1980-rather than 1989-as a crucial turning point for German cinema's embrace of a new market orientation and move away from the state-sponsored film culture that characterized both DEFA and the New German Cinema. Reading films from East, West, and post-unification Germany together, Baer argues that contemporary German cinema is characterized most strongly by its origins in and responses to advanced capitalism. Informed by a feminist approach and in dialogue with prominent theories of contemporary film, the book places a special focus on how German films make visible the neoliberal recasting of gender and national identities around the new millennium

Knowledge management for self-organised resource allocation

Many open systems, such as networks, distributed computing and socio-technical systems address a common problem of how to define knowledge management processes to structure and guide decision-making, coordination and learning. While participation is an essential and desirable feature of such systems, the amount of information produced by its individual agents can often be overwhelming and intractable. The challenge, thus, is how to organise and process such information, so it is transformed into productive knowledge used for the resolution of collective action problems. To address this problem, we consider a study of classical Athenian democracy which investigates how the governance model of the city-state flourished. The work suggests that exceptional knowledge management, i.e. making information available for socially productive purposes, played a crucial role in sustaining its democracy for nearly 200 years, by creating processes for aggregation, alignment and codification of knowledge. We therefore examine the proposition that some properties of this historical experience can be generalised and applied to computational systems, so we establish a set of design principles intended to make knowledge management processes open, inclusive, transparent and effective in self-governed social technical systems. We operationalise three of these principles in the context of a collective action situation, namely self-organised common-pool resource allocation, exploring four governance problems: (a) how fairness can be perceived; (b) how resources can be distributed; (c) how policies should be enforced and (d) how tyranny can be opposed. By applying this operationalisation of the design principles for knowledge management processes as a complement to institutional approaches to governance, we demonstrate empirically how it can guide solutions that satisfice shared values, distribute power fairly, apply "common sense" in dealing with rule violations, and protect agents against abuse of power. We conclude by arguing that this approach to the design of open systems can provide the foundations for sustainable and democratic self-governance in socio-technical systems.Open Acces

Survey of Template-Based Code Generation

L'automatisation de la génération des artefacts textuels à partir des modèles est une étape critique dans l'Ingénierie Dirigée par les Modèles (IDM). C'est une transformation de modèles utile pour générer le code source, sérialiser les modèles dans de stockages persistents, générer les rapports ou encore la documentation. Parmi les différents paradigmes de transformation de modèle-au-texte, la génération de code basée sur les templates (TBCG) est la plus utilisée en IDM. La TBCG est une technique de génération qui produit du code à partir des spécifications de haut niveau appelées templates. Compte tenu de la diversité des outils et des approches, il est nécessaire de classifier et de comparer les techniques de TBCG existantes afin d'apporter un soutien approprié aux développeurs. L'objectif de ce mémoire est de mieux comprendre les caractéristiques des techniques de TBCG, identifier les tendances dans la recherche, et éxaminer l'importance du rôle de l'IDM par rapport à cette approche. J'évalue également l'expressivité, la performance et la mise à l'échelle des outils associés selon une série de modèles. Je propose une étude systématique de cartographie de la littérature qui décrit une intéressante vue d'ensemble de la TBCG et une étude comparitive des outils de la TBCG pour mieux guider les dévloppeurs dans leur choix. Cette étude montre que les outils basés sur les modèles offrent plus d'expressivité tandis que les outils basés sur le code sont les plus performants. Enfin, Xtend2 offre le meilleur compromis entre l'expressivité et la performance.A critical step in model-driven engineering (MDE) is the automatic synthesis of a textual artifact from models. This is a very useful model transformation to generate application code, to serialize the model in persistent storage, generate documentation or reports. Among the various model-to-text transformation paradigms, Template-Based Code Generation (TBCG) is the most popular in MDE. TBCG is a synthesis technique that produces code from high-level specifications, called templates. It is a popular technique in MDE given that they both emphasize abstraction and automation. Given the diversity of tools and approaches, it is necessary to classify and compare existing TBCG techniques to provide appropriate support to developers. The goal of this thesis is to better understand the characteristics of TBCG techniques, identify research trends, and assess the importance of the role of MDE in this code synthesis approach. We also evaluate the expressiveness, performance and scalability of the associated tools based on a range of models that implement critical patterns. To this end, we conduct a systematic mapping study of the literature that paints an interesting overview of TBCG and a comparative study on TBCG tools to better guide developers in their choices. This study shows that model-based tools offer more expressiveness whereas code-based tools performed much faster. Xtend2 offers the best compromise between the expressiveness and the performance

ソフトウェア無線プラットフォームの実装戦略を用いた超小型衛星通信システムの最適化

In nano-satellite missions, Software Defined Radios (SDR) have been widely used in the implementation of communication subsystems in order to increase the flexibilization both in the space segment and on the ground stations. Also, Commercial Off-The-Shelf components (COTS) are widely used to develop subsystems for nano-satellite missions in order to reduce development costs and because those are relatively easy to purchase especially for developing countries. However, COTS components are not space-certified and it becomes a problem when satellites are wanted to be used in high reliability missions. An example of that is Ten-Koh, a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) environment observation satellite developed in the Kyushu Institute of Technology in Japan, in which one of the top-level mission requirements was to re-use as much as possible the components utilized on a previous successful mission (Shinen-2) in order to mitigate the failure risks by using non-certified/non-space heritage components and to decrease the development time following the lean satellite design methodology. In this research, an SDR implementation for the space segment is proposed in order to optimize the communication system designed for Ten-Koh satellite. The proposed implementation consists of the integration of two COTS modules (a single-board computer with a radio frequency module) using embedded Linux, Python and GNU radio developing tools. The purpose is to demonstrate that the proposed system can be used safely in future satellite missions overcoming the design constraints, limitations and issues experimented during the Ten-Koh design and operation phases showing the improvements in terms of performance, flexibility, cost and development time. In addition to above, this research shows the on-orbit issues presented in the Ten-Koh mission due to the radiation effects and describes the facilities, equipment, methodology and results of a radiation test performed for the main processor used in the Ten-Koh mission and for the single-board computer used in the proposed SDR system in order to find the possible causes of the failures presented on-orbit and to compare the results for verifying if the proposed system can be used safely in the radiation environment on LEO orbit.九州工業大学博士学位論文 学位記番号：工博甲第498号 学位授与年月日：令和2年3月25日1 - INTRODUCTION|2 - TEN-KOH MISSION OVERVIEW|3 - TEN-KOH COMMUNICATION SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE|4 - PROPOSED SDR IMPLEMENTATION|5 - RESULTS AND DISCUSSION|6 - RADIATION TEST|7 - CONCLUSION九州工業大学令和元年

Call centers e sindicatos : uma revisão da literatura

Orientador: Hugo Miguel Oliveira Rodrigues DiasDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de EconomiaResumo: Esta dissertação foca a indústria de call center e sua crescente importância nos países desenvolvidos e em desenvolvimento no que diz respeito ao esforço de sindicalização nessa área. Call centers estão localizados principalmente em países em desenvolvimento. E isso pode ser favorável para estes países, pois pode trazer emprego, mas tenho certeza de que não é favorável para os trabalhadores no que diz respeito às condições de trabalho. Infelizmente, o setor oferece predominantemente empregos de baixa qualificação, baixos salários e altamente flexíveis em termos de horas de trabalho e duração dos contratos. Como muitos países ao redor do mundo oferecem serviço de call center, o tipo de trabalho de call center, a força de trabalho e a qualidade de vida no trabalho e sindicalização dos trabalhadores de call center têm se tornado cada vez mais importante e gerado interesse crescente, tanto no mundo acadêmico como sindical. O objetivo deste estudo foi descobrir o interesse sobre as atividades da organização sindical na literatura acadêmica relevante. Neste contexto, este estudo procurou analisar a expansão dos call centers, características do trabalho de call center e força de trabalho, bem como a distribuição geográfica dos centros e sindicalização em call centers através da revisão da literatura acadêmica relevanteAbstract: This dissertation focused on the call center industry and its growing importance in developed and developing countries in respect to unionization effort in that area. Call centers are mostly located in developing countries. And it may be favorable for these countries because it might bring employment, but sure that it is not favorable for workers in respect to working conditions. Unfortunately, the sector predominantly offers low-skilled, low-waged and highly flexible jobs in terms of working hours and term of contracts. As many countries around the globe provide call center service, type of the call center work, workforce, and quality of work life issues, and unionization of call center workers have become growing importance and growing interest both in the academic and union world. The objective of this study was to find out the interest on the activities of union organizing in the relevant academic literature. In this context this study attempted to examine the expansion of call centers, features of call center work and workforce as well as geographical distribution of centers and unionization in call centers through reviewing relevant academic literatureMestradoEconomia Social e do TrabalhoMestra em Desenvolvimento Econômico550019/2012-0CNPq

German Cinema in the Age of Neoliberalism

Partial funding for Open Access provided by the UMD Libraries' Open Access Publishing Fund.This book presents a new history of German film from 1980-2010, a period that witnessed rapid transformations, including intensified globalization, a restructured world economy, geopolitical realignment, and technological change, all of which have affected cinema in fundamental ways. Rethinking the conventional periodization of German film history, Baer posits 1980-rather than 1989-as a crucial turning point for German cinema's embrace of a new market orientation and move away from the state-sponsored film culture that characterized both DEFA and the New German Cinema. Reading films from East, West, and post-unification Germany together, Baer argues that contemporary German cinema is characterized most strongly by its origins in and responses to advanced capitalism. Informed by a feminist approach and in dialogue with prominent theories of contemporary film, the book places a special focus on how German films make visible the neoliberal recasting of gender and national identities around the new millennium.https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1hp5hn

What Can State Talk Tell Us About Punitiveness? A Comparison of Responses to Political Mass Shootings in The United States and Norway

Highlighting the culturally contingent nature of state reactions to crime, the present work focuses on state talk issued by the U.S. and Norwegian governments in the aftermath of politically motivated mass shootings. The research is guided by the question: how does state talk—conditioned by economic, political, and cultural forces—facilitate or constrain punitive responses to political mass shootings? Here, the focus is on the January 8th 2011 shooting of U.S. representative Gabrielle Giffords and her constituents and the July 22nd 2011 bombing of a government building and shooting of a youth political camp in Norway. These two cases illustrate how state talk can either help to escalate or moderate responses to horrific events. Situating state discourse in the context of American exceptionalism in the case of the United States and Scandinavian Exceptionalism in the case of Norway, the present study argues that state talk reflects and reinforces both the United States notably precarious and competitive social order and Norway’s comparatively less volatile and more cooperative social order. Analysis of both more and less incendiary government talk and the cultural factors that uphold the tone and content of such state talk is needed to better understand the role of government rhetoric in shaping responses to tragedy. The present work, relying on qualitative content analysis, examines government press releases, speech transcripts, and op-eds posted to government websites. Here, themes thought to constrain or facilitate punitive responses, derived from criminological literature, were applied to the state talk data. This approach reveals the divergent ways in which states talk about tragedy across cultures. I then link divergent state talk findings to politics and social life after January 8th and July 22nd to paint a picture of the dissimilar effects of state talk. In conclusion, I discuss policy considerations in light of these findings and future avenues of research