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Modern architecture is a creation of the West. In a non-Western context, it normally reflects a direct intervention of Western powers through colonization. Thailand, formerly known as Siam, is an exception. Thai people have argued that they adopted and assimilated modern architecture into their unique cultural tradition without being physically colonized. The shift toward Western culture and Modernity is evident in 19th and 20th century Thai architecture, particularly in the capitol city of Bangkok. Major public buildings signify the country's domestic political circum...

The strategy team have technology ideas and frameworks that represent the best body of knowledge for creating real business value from technology, but only other teams not the strategy team can create the value, by broadly completing the strategy team s ideas. The delivery teams often ignore the ideas. Sometimes real conflict emerges. It feels like the other teams think differently in a deeply rooted way. Could differences in organisational culture be to blame? This dissertation examines the organisational culture perceived within BP's energy trading technology team known as Integrated Su...

‘Nervous shock’ cases form an area of law, which illustrates well the operation of judicial policy. It is possible from such cases to trace the changing attitudes of lawyers, doctors and of society in general to psychiatric injury over the last century. These cases also highlight the changing judicial attitudes to the scope of duty of care and to the whole issue of policy decisions.The recognition of nervous shock similarly illustrates the development of medical knowledge in relation to psychiatric injury. The recognition of Post traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD) has been a relatively new an...

The majority of scientific research on teen magazines has been conducted from a single-country perspective, even though the experience of sex and sexuality is known to vary by country. Moreover, no research to date has analyzed the sexual content of teen magazines and directly linked it to how young people think or feel about sex. In response to these shortcomings, this book analyzes the topics of sexual desire, sexual danger, virginity loss, pregnancy, and the hook-up culture in the most popular teen magazines of the United States and the Netherlands. Results are then linked to US and Dutch y...

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the organisational problems, and in particular the leadership problems, of self-help groups in Japan for parents whose children have intractable diseases. Since 1993, I have been involved with these parent groups, and have conducted three sorts of qualitative interview: thirteen informal conversational interviews, six focus group interviews, and fourteen guided interviews, involving the members of twenty-one parent groups. Part of the research was carried out as participa...

Modality is a grammatical, or semantic-grammatical, category. It is an important component of human languages. This is at least the case in most European languages. To what extent is it a near-universal? This thesis is to contribute to the question. It focuses on modal verbs in English and Chinese, two genetically and geographically unrelated languages, and analyzes what these two languages have in common and how they differ in their systems of modality. To achieve the aim, the thesis adopts the theoretical framework proposed by van der Auwera (1996, 1998 with Plungian, 2001) for the typol...

In an effort to extend traditional human-computer interfaces research has introduced embodied agents to utilize the modalities of everyday human-human communication, like facial expression, gestures and body postures. However, giving computer agents a human-like body introduces new challenges. Since human users are very sensitive and critical concerning bodily behavior the agents must act naturally and individually in order to be believable. This dissertation focuses on conversational gestures. It shows how to generate conversational gestures for an animated embodied ag...

This text marks a little milestone in the understanding of the democratic peace theory in transitional states. It brings in a much needed perspective on the achievements and limitations of democracy in Sub-Saharan Africa, and the role it plays or could play in the search for solutions to conflicts in the sub-region. The author provides a differentiated view of the traditional Western notions of democracy and its role in the search for political stability and nation-building. A series of fragile democratic developments in contemporary politics in the continent have set in processes of change...

Neutron stars are invaluable tools for exploring stellar death, the physics of ultra-dense matter, and the effects of extremely strong magnetic fields. The observed population of neutron stars is dominated by the >1000 radio pulsars, but there are distinct sub-populations that, while fewer in number, can have significant impact on our understanding of the issues mentioned above. These populations are the nearby, isolated neutron stars discovered by ROSAT, and the central compact objects in supernova remnants. The studies of both of these populations have been greatly accelera...

This study focused on factors that have positively influenced the model of economic success for commercial and thrift megabanks involved in merger and acquisition activities for the period 1990 - 1997, a period characterized by an unprecedented flurry of merger and acquisition activities among megabanks in the United States. This study identified and measured key independent variables for identifiable mergers and acquisitions among megabanks and tested the extent to which, such independent variables influenced abnormal returns for underlying equities traded in capital markets. This study also ...