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The establishment of alternative education, private foundations, and networks linked to socio-political and spiritual advocacies distinguishes the Thai social movement in this research. This research is a qualitative study that has made use of historical accounts to associate with data gathered from extensive interviews and case studies in order to inquire as to whether alternative education represents an historical spiritual tradition of opposition to reform hegemony, and whether it has had an impact on state reform efforts. Also investigated was whether there are some historical patterns ass...

In recent years there has been a clear rise in scientific collaboration, as well as in studies on the subject. While most scholars examine disciplines traditionally known to be collaborative, such as physics and space research, this book focuses on biology. It investigates the growing collaboration in the life sciences, or the emergence of what is called 'big biology'. While the Human Genome Project is often presented as the first large-scale research project in biology, cooperation in the life sciences has a longer history. A comparison between centralised 'big physics' and 'big biology' reve...

Trends and perspectives in dynamic environments point towards a need for optimal operating levels in reconfigurable manufacturing activities. Central to the goal of meeting this need is the issue of appropriate techniques for manufacturing process planning optimization in reconfigurable manufacturing, i.e. (i) what decision making models and (ii) what computational techniques, provide an optimal manufacturing process planning solution in a multidimensional decision variables space? Conventional optimization techniques are not robust, hence; they are not suitable for handling multidimensional s...

In this research, the author analyzes Derrida's understanding of the way society is created out of a collection of individuals, how the individuals preserve their singularity and freedom within a social system and the meaning of ethics, as it comes out in his early writings. In this work, the researcher used a phenomenological method of research and Cassirer's way of analyzing the symbolic forms as a framework to analyze the early writing of Derrida. Although it is not a common approach to combine Derrida's philosophy with that of Cassirer's, the researcher found that Cassirer's ideas help to...

International commercial contracts in the context of increasing globalization of the national markets have posed some of the most difficult questions of the legal theory as developed since the emergence of nation states; those are, whether it is possible or desirable to allow international commercial contracts to be governed by the law merchant or, in its medieval name, lex mercatoria, a body of rules which has not been derived from the will of sovereign states, but mainly from transnational trade usages and practices, and to what extent those rules should govern transnational transactions. Th...

Staphylococcus epidermidis is the leading cause of hospital-acquired infections associated with implanted medical devices. Likewise, Proteus mirabilis is one of the leading causes of nosocomial Urinary Tract Infections (UTIs) and is associated with urinary catheter blockage. Both organisms produce biofilms, which make them less susceptible to antibiotics. Therefore, these infections are often notoriously difficult to treat and in many cases lead to complications. Preventing biofilm formation or killing a pre-existing biofilm would be useful solutions since biofilm formation is a phenomenon com...

The purpose of this study was to identify the factors associated with the utilization of preadjudicatory detention among juveniles in the United States. Specifically, this study identified: (a) the philosophical basis associated with the utilization of the preadjudicatory detention of juveniles, (b) the legal origins of the preadjudicatory detention of juveniles, (c) a number of theoretical perspectives associated with the use of preadjudicatory detention of juveniles, and (d) whether legal (i.e., prior record, offense, etc.) or extralegal factors (i.e., race, gender, etc.) were associated wit...

This dissertation presents a study on the acquisition of telicity by Spanish and English native speakers. In addition to the study of acquisition, it investigates the syntactic and semantic properties of locatum constructions (e.g., the water filled the bucket), which are sentences that contain two internal arguments and whose subject is non-agentive. This dissertation explores the syntactic and semantic properties of elements of the verb phrase that had not been previously considered in the interpretation of telicity, such as the role of non-agentive subjects and the type of movement that tak...

In the last two decades, a concern on how federal forests in the United States are managed has provoked concerns among different stakeholders, including NGOs. The purpose of this thesis is to contribute to the understanding of NGO influence on forest management legislation. Eight aspects were selected and compared in different study cases referring to legislative proposals dealing with forest management in order to define success criteria for a legislative initiative. The study indicates that the following criteria are particularly important to fulfill in order to influence forest management l...

This work focuses on contemporary Zimbabwean Stone Sculpture - widely known until the early 1990s as "Shona Sculpture" - from the perspective of a critical anthropological analysis of cultural identity and representation. The analysis frames the inception of this art movement within the colonial socio-historical circumstances of its genesis, where discourse about the producers of this art form ("Shona discourse") was created. Drawing from the social context of inequality and racial (spatial) segregation, and from the concepts of the "primitive" in art and anthropology, the author aims to show ...