Financing low-income housing in Windhoek, Namibia : assessing the loan scheme of the decentralised Built-Together Program using the Balance Scorecard

Includes bibliographical referencesThe purpose of this mini dissertation is to review the adequacy of Built-Together Program loan funds for the large-scale delivery of adequate housing for low-income groups and to assess the performance of the loan scheme using the concept Balance Scorecard as an assessment tool. The research method employ s interview and survey methods to collect data. Data was collected and analyzed from a n administrator and beneficiary perspective to understand the workings and the main characteristics of the program. The primary beneficiaries of the Built-Together Program are the vulnerable in society and comprise primarily of women and single parents. It is therefore critical that the efficiency and sustainability of the loan scheme be improved to ensure that the needy in society continue to benefit. One of the major findings of the research is that the Built-Together Program is inadequate to deliver the most basic low-income house. It is therefore not surprising to hear and read about the dissatisfaction about the Built Together Program expressed by the Namibian Government, local and regional councils and beneficiaries in the local media. The research recommended that the authorities review the Program and bring it in line with the critical successes requirements for national housing policies and strategies

Bayard Taylor and his Transatlantic Representations of Germany: A Nineteenth-Century American Encounter

Bayard Taylor was a nineteenth-century American writer, traveler, lecturer, and diplomat well-known in his lifetime. Although active in many areas, he acquired fame chiefly through his adventures as a globetrotting news correspondent to exotic non-western regions at a time in which the United States was becoming aware of itself as a nation in a global context. In the process, his travels and representations of foreign lands contributed to the formation of nineteenth-century American national identity. Taylors American identity defined who he and his American readers were and also informed what and how he observed societies and cultures in his travel writings. His travel-related writings on and connection to German-speaking Central Europe from1844-1878 are of particular interest in relation to his American identity. Although typical in his male Euro-American views, Taylor gained a reputation as a transatlantic figure through frequent contact with Europe as part of his American traveler image. This dissertation examines one prominent feature of Taylor\u27s transatlantic persona — his place as an American everyman inside Germany who believed that the United States and Europe shared a common heritage and thereby recognized similarities and made connections with German activities and developments in his travel-related writings and representations in ways that illuminated layers of his American national identity. Taylor\u27s individual American encounter with German society, culture, and politics at a time of momentous change for both Germany and the United States is historically significant because it is inscribed within and, in a conspicuous way, touches many contact points of the broader German-American encounter during the nineteenth century. In the process, his representations reflected how Americans imagined themselves as a nation from a transatlantic perspective

Intersections Between the Life Stories of Internationally-Trained Immigrant Women and Institutional Narratives of Immigrant Success in Ontario

The following dissertation compares the life stories (Linde, 1993) of six internationally trained immigrant women, successful in finding employment in their fields of post-secondary teaching, with video success stories available on a government webpage for bridge training in Ontario and with national and provincial immigration and integration policy. Using Lindes (2009) institutional narrative to conceptualize how these video stories of successful bridge training graduates can serve as templates and tools of socialization for skilled immigrants who are seeking to re-enter their fields in Ontario, the analysis focusses on the representations of the integration process, the role of language learning and teaching in these narratives, and the ways that the six participants life stories (Linde, 1993) may take up the same discourses circulated in the institutional narrative. In order to understand the impact these institutional narratives of integration have on the life stories of individual immigrant women, the analysis makes use of Foucaults (1991; 1994) theoretical frameworks of technology of the self and governmentality. Seen through this lens, narrative becomes a tool for the construction of a self that is both in line with dominant discourses of self-responsibility and a self that is morally acceptable to the individual. The analysis finds that both the video success stories and the life stories of the six participants incorporate neoliberal discourses of self-sufficiency and lifelong learning that emphasize economic over social integration and allow for acceptance of the need for further training, in this case bridge training. Both the participants and the video success story protagonists accept the need to learn higher level professional communication skills and behaviour that places the burden for successful communication solely on the immigrant. In addition, both institutional and personal narratives make use of discourses of diversity and multiculturalism, accomplishing an alignment with established Canadian values on one hand, but also a separation of immigrant groups from the dominant white settler class (Bannerji, 2000; Thobani, 2007), relegating them to a peripheral position long after they have attained citizenship. Recommendations are made to include critical multicultural education (Kubota 2004a, 2004b) into the bridge training classroom

Service-oriented computing: concepts, characteristics and directions

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) is the computing paradigm that utilizes services as fundamental elements for developing applications/solutions. To build the service model, SOC relies on the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), which is a way of reorganizing software applications and infrastructure into a set of interacting services. However, the basic SOA does not address overarching concerns such as management, service orchestration, service transaction management and coordination, security, and other concerns that apply to all components in a services architecture. In this paper we introduce an Extended Service Oriented Architecture that provides separate tiers for composing and coordinating services and for managing services in an open marketplace by employing grid services.

Thesauri and Semantic Web: Discussion of the Evolution of Thesauri toward their Integration With the Semantic Web

15 p.Thesauri are Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS), that arise from the consensus of wide communities. They have been in use for many years and are regularly updated. Whereas in the past thesauri were designed for information professionals for indexing and searching, today there is a demand for conceptual vocabularies that enable inferencing by machines. The development of the Semantic Web has brought a new opportunity for thesauri, but thesauri also face the challenge of proving that they add value to it. The evolution of thesauri toward their integration with the Semantic Web is examined. Elements and structures in the thesaurus standard, ISO 25964, and SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System), the Semantic Web standard for representing KOS, are reviewed and compared. Moreover, the integrity rules of thesauri are contrasted with the axioms of SKOS. How SKOS has been applied to represent some real thesauri is taken into account. Three thesauri are chosen for this aim: AGROVOC, EuroVoc and the UNESCO Thesaurus. Based on the results of this comparison and analysis, the benefits that Semantic Web technologies offer to thesauri, how thesauri can contribute to the Semantic Web, and the challenges that would help to improve their integration with the Semantic Web are discussed.S

Digital ecosystems : a distributed service oriented approach for business transactions

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

The origins of the second American party system, the Ohio evidence

The cleavage in voter loyalties that was to sustain the Second Party System in Ohio was created in the thirty years before 1830. Its origins are to be found in the national disputes of the 17908, which by 1802 had become involved with the issue of Ohio statehood. These early divisions were more deep-rooted than commonly assumed, dictating political behaviour for over a decade and providing political experiences that became controlling influences on later developments. However, the more immediate origin of the divisions established by the 1830s was the many-sided crisis of 1819-22, which made men look to politics for the solution of their problems, break with older loyalties and create new ones. In Ohio the demands for a non-slave-holding President and positive federal economic legislation melded into what became the National Republican and Whig parties, though a minority of Ohioans - for reasons peculiar to particular localities and particular ethnocultural groups - insisted on supporting Andrew Jackson in 1824 and subsequent years. The contest between these two groupings drew unprecedented numbers of new voters to the polls in 1828, most of whom committed themselves to Jackson, thus establishing the balanced distribution of party strength that was to persist for decades. Jackson's advantage in 1828 came from neither superior party organization nor the "rise of democracy," but from the opportunity to harness social resentments of long standing which had previously disrupted rather than reinforced party ties. Jackson's partisans could also call upon old-party loyalties that dated back to the War of 1812, and so created a party that bore some resemblance to the Jeffersonian Democrats, even if the crisis of the early 1820s had forged a nationalist opposition party far more powerful electorally in Ohio than the Federalists had ever been

Artificial Intelligence-based Cybersecurity for Connected and Automated Vehicles

The damaging effects of cyberattacks to an industry like the Cooperative Connected and Automated Mobility (CCAM) can be tremendous. From the least important to the worst ones, one can mention for example the damage in the reputation of vehicle manufacturers, the increased denial of customers to adopt CCAM, the loss of working hours (having direct impact on the European GDP), material damages, increased environmental pollution due e.g., to traffic jams or malicious modifications in sensors’ firmware, and ultimately, the great danger for human lives, either they are drivers, passengers or pedestrians. Connected vehicles will soon become a reality on our roads, bringing along new services and capabilities, but also technical challenges and security threats. To overcome these risks, the CARAMEL project has developed several anti-hacking solutions for the new generation of vehicles. CARAMEL (Artificial Intelligence-based Cybersecurity for Connected and Automated Vehicles), a research project co-funded by the European Union under the Horizon 2020 framework programme, is a project consortium with 15 organizations from 8 European countries together with 3 Korean partners. The project applies a proactive approach based on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning techniques to detect and prevent potential cybersecurity threats to autonomous and connected vehicles. This approach has been addressed based on four fundamental pillars, namely: Autonomous Mobility, Connected Mobility, Electromobility, and Remote Control Vehicle. This book presents theory and results from each of these technical directions

Evaluation of an Early Intervention System at a Law Enforcement Agency

Evaluation of an Early Intervention System at a Law Enforcement Agency. Robert Scott Russell, 2014: Applied Dissertation, Nova Southeastern University, Abraham S. Fischler School of Education. ERIC Descriptors: Computer Software Evaluation, Crime Prevention, Law Enforcement, Police Community Relationship, Program Evaluation. The problem addressed through this program evaluation was that no formal study had been conducted regarding the implementation and effectiveness of the BlueTeam Program (BTP) within the law enforcement agency (LEA) serving as the study site. The BTP is a program that utilizes a computer application to track officer behaviors and alert administrators to potential trends in officer misconduct and complaints against officers. The program evaluation was guided by the process and product segments of Stufflebeam\u27s (2003) content, input, process, and product model. To conduct the evaluation, the researcher used a mixed methods approach for analyzing both qualitative and quantitative data. The perceptions of LEA stakeholders regarding the BTP, such as the sufficiency of staffing, budget, training, and ongoing support for effective implementation, were first collected. Quantitative data, consisting of archived, deidentified indicators of officer misconduct and complaints against officers acquired through the BTP, were then analyzed. Findings of the study were that the BTP was effective in reducing incidents of officer misconduct and complaints against officers and for use in identifying which alerts were valid indicators of misconduct and complaints against officers. The one concern of stakeholders involving the BTP was limited nighttime vision; the recommendation for program improvement is that this shortcoming be addressed to determine possible solutions. Recommendations for future research involve the need for initial determinations, as well as formative evaluations, pertaining to the following three areas: (a) ascertaining the way in which the early intervention system will be used, (b) identifying the indicators of misconduct that will be tracked, and (c) determining the threshold at which the system will issue an alert