The Unable Individual : The Actantial Analyses of Three Chinese Films and Discussion on Their Representations of the Individual’s Position in Contemporary Chinese Society

The thesis studies three contemporary Chinese films, Incense (Xianghuo 2003), Beijing Bicycle (Shiqi sui de danche, 2001), and South of the Clouds (Yun de nanfang, 2004). The aim of the thesis is to find out how these films represent the individual, his relationships with others, and his possibilities in society. The films all portray a male individual setting out to pursue a goal, facing one obstacle after the other in the process, and in the end failing to achieve his goal. The other characters in the films are also primarily either unable or unwilling to help the lead character. In the thesis these features of the films are analysed by applying A.J. Greimas’s structuralist semiotic theory about the actantial structure of discourses. The questions about the individual’s position are answered by defining which instances in the films actually represent the actantial positions of the sender, receiver, subject, object, helper and opponent. The results of the actantial analyses of the three films are further discussed in the light of theories regarding individualization. The focus is on the theories of Ulrich Beck, Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim and Zygmunt Bauman, who see a development towards individualization in societies following the disintegration of traditional social structures. For the most part, these theories do seem to be applicable to the films’ representations of the individual’s position, especially regarding the increased responsibility of the individual. For example, the position of the family is represented as either insignificant or negative in all of the films, which fits with the description of the individualized society, contradicting the idea of traditional Chinese society. On the other hand, the identities and goals of the characters in the films are not represented as fragmented in the way the theories would suggest.

Conrad Summenhart's theory of individual rights and its medieval background

This study focuses on the theory of individual rights that the German theologian Conrad Summenhart (1455-1502) explicated in his massive work Opus septipartitum de contractibus pro foro conscientiae et theologico. The central question to be studied is: How does Summenhart understand the concept of an individual right and its immediate implications? The basic premiss of this study is that in Opus septipartitum Summenhart composed a comprehensive theory of individual rights as a contribution to the on-going medieval discourse on rights. With this rationale, the first part of the study concentrates on earlier discussions on rights as the background for Summenhart s theory. Special attention is paid to language in which right was defined in terms of power . In the fourteenth century writers like Hervaeus Natalis and William Ockham maintained that right signifies power by which the right-holder can to use material things licitly. It will also be shown how the attempts to describe what is meant by the term right became more specified and cultivated. Gerson followed the implications that the term power had in natural philosophy and attributed rights to animals and other creatures. To secure right as a normative concept, Gerson utilized the ancient ius suum cuique-principle of justice and introduced a definition in which right was seen as derived from justice. The latter part of this study makes effort to reconstructing Summenhart s theory of individual rights in three sections. The first section clarifies Summenhart s discussion of the right of the individual or the concept of an individual right. Summenhart specified Gerson s description of right as power, taking further use of the language of natural philosophy. In this respect, Summenhart s theory managed to bring an end to a particular continuity of thought that was centered upon a view in which right was understood to signify power to licit action. Perhaps the most significant feature of Summenhart s discussion was the way he explicated the implication of liberty that was present in Gerson s language of rights. Summenhart assimilated libertas with the self-mastery or dominion that in the economic context of discussion took the form of (a moderate) self-ownership. Summenhart discussion also introduced two apparent extensions to Gerson s terminology. First, Summenhart classified right as relation, and second, he equated right with dominion. It is distinctive of Summenhart s view that he took action as the primary determinant of right: Everyone has as much rights or dominion in regard to a thing, as much actions it is licit for him to exercise in regard to the thing. The second section elaborates Summenhart s discussion of the species dominion, which delivered an answer to the question of what kind of rights exist, and clarified thereby the implications of the concept of an individual right. The central feature in Summenhart s discussion was his conscious effort to systematize Gerson s language by combining classifications of dominion into a coherent whole. In this respect, his treatement of the natural dominion is emblematic. Summenhart constructed the concept of natural dominion by making use of the concepts of foundation (founded on a natural gift) and law (according to the natural law). In defining natural dominion as dominion founded on a natural gift, Summenhart attributed natural dominion to animals and even to heavenly bodies. In discussing man s natural dominion, Summenhart pointed out that the natural dominion is not sufficiently identified by its foundation, but requires further specification, which Summenhart finds in the idea that natural dominion is appropriate to the subject according to the natural law. This characterization lead him to treat God s dominion as natural dominion. Partly, this was due to Summenhart s specific understanding of the natural law, which made reasonableness as the primary criterion for the natural dominion at the expense of any metaphysical considerations. The third section clarifies Summenhart s discussion of the property rights defined by the positive human law. By delivering an account on juridical property rights Summenhart connected his philosophical and theological theory on rights to the juridical language of his times, and demonstrated that his own language of rights was compatible with current juridical terminology. Summenhart prepared his discussion of property rights with an account of the justification for private property, which gave private property a direct and strong natural law-based justification. Summenhart s discussion of the four property rights usus, usufructus, proprietas, and possession aimed at delivering a detailed report of the usage of these concepts in juridical discourse. His discussion was characterized by extensive use of the juridical source texts, which was more direct and verbal the more his discussion became entangled with the details of juridical doctrine. At the same time he promoted his own language on rights, especially by applying the idea of right as relation. He also showed recognizable effort towards systematizing juridical language related to property rights.

Individual variation in in vitro efficacy of antiplatelet medication - aspirin and clopidogrel

Antiplatelet medication is known to decrease adverse effects in patients with atherothrombotic disease. However, despite ongoing antiplatelet medication considerable number of patients suffer from atherothrombotic events. The aims of the study were 1) to evaluate the individual variability in platelet functions and compare the usability of different methods in detecting it, 2) to assess variability in efficacy of antiplatelet medication with aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid) or the combination of aspirin and clopidogrel and 3) to investigate the main genetic and clinical variables as well as potential underlying mechanisms of variability in efficacy of antiplatelet medication. In comparisons of different platelet function tests in 19 healthy individuals PFA-100® correlated with traditional methods of measuring platelet function and was thus considered appropriate for testing individual variability in platelet activity. Efficacy of ongoing 100mg aspirin daily was studied in 101 patients with coronary artery disease (CAD). Aspirin response was measured with arachidonic acid (AA)-induced platelet aggregation, which reflects cyclo-oxygenase (COX)-1 dependent thromboxane (Tx) A2 formation, and PFA-100®, which evaluates platelet activation under high shear stress in the presence of collagen and epinephrine. Five percent of patients failed to show inhibition of AA-aggregation and 21% of patients had normal PFA-100® results despite aspirin and were thus considered non-responders to aspirin. Interestingly, the two methods of assessing aspirin efficacy, platelet aggregation and PFA-100®, detected different populations as being aspirin non-responders. It could be postulated that PFA-100® actually measures enhanced platelet function, which is not directly associated with TxA2 inhibition exerted by aspirin. Clopidogrel efficacy was assessed in 50 patients who received a 300mg loading dose of clopidogrel 2.5 h prior to percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) and in 51 patients who were given a loading dose of 300mg combined with a five day treatment of 75mg clopidogrel daily mimicking ongoing treatment. Clopidogrel response was assessed with ADP-induced aggregations, due to its mechanism of action as an inhibitor of ADP-induced activation. When patients received only a loading dose of clopidogrel prior to PCI, 40% did not gain measurable inhibition of their ADP-induced platelet activity (inhibition of 10% or less). Prolongation of treatment so that all patients had reached a plateau of inhibition exerted by clopidogrel, decreased the incidence of non-responders to 20%. Polymorphisms of COX-1 and GP VI, as well as diabetes and female gender, were associated with decreased in vitro aspirin efficacy. Diabetes also impaired the in vitro efficacy of short-term clopidogrel. Decreased response to clopidogrel was associated with limited inhibition by ARMX, an antagonist of P2Y12-receptor, suggesting the reason for clopidogrel resistance to be receptor-dependent. Conclusions: Considerable numbers of CAD patients were non-responders either to aspirin, clopidogrel or both. In the future, platelet function tests may be helpful to individually select effective and safe antiplatelet medication for these patients.

Storage and retrieval of individual genomes

A repetitive sequence collection is one where portions of a base sequence of length n are repeated many times with small variations, forming a collection of total length N. Examples of such collections are version control data and genome sequences of individuals, where the differences can be expressed by lists of basic edit operations. Flexible and efficient data analysis on a such typically huge collection is plausible using suffix trees. However, suffix tree occupies O(N log N) bits, which very soon inhibits in-memory analyses. Recent advances in full-text self-indexing reduce the space of suffix tree to O(N log σ) bits, where σ is the alphabet size. In practice, the space reduction is more than 10-fold, for example on suffix tree of Human Genome. However, this reduction factor remains constant when more sequences are added to the collection. We develop a new family of self-indexes suited for the repetitive sequence collection setting. Their expected space requirement depends only on the length n of the base sequence and the number s of variations in its repeated copies. That is, the space reduction factor is no longer constant, but depends on N / n. We believe the structures developed in this work will provide a fundamental basis for storage and retrieval of individual genomes as they become available due to rapid progress in the sequencing technologies.

Microfoundations of HRM effects: Individual and Collective Attitudes and Performance

Previous research on Human Resource Management (HRM) has focused extensively on the potential relationships between the use of HRM practices and organizational performance. Extant research in HRM has been based on the underlying assumption that HRM practices can enhance organizational performance through their impact on positive employee attitudes and performance, that is, employee reactions to HRM. At the current state of research however, it remains unclear how employees come to perceive and react to HRM practices and to what extent employees in organizations, units and teams react to such practices in similar or widely different ways. In fact, recent HRM studies indicate that employee reactions to HRM may be far less homogeneous than assumed. This raises the question of whether or not the linkage between HRM and organizational outcomes can be explained by employee reactions in terms of attitudes and performance, if these reactions are largely idiosyncratic. Accordingly, this thesis aims to shed light on the processes that shape individuals’ reactions to HRM practices and how these processes may influence the variance or sharedness in such reactions among employees in organizations, units and teams. By theoretically developing and empirically examining the effects of employee perceptions of HRM practices from the perspective of ‘HRM as signaling’ and psychological contract theory, the main contributions of this thesis focus on the following research questions: i) How employee perceptions of the HRM practices relate to individual and collective employee attitudes and performance. ii) How employee perceptions of HRM practices relates to variance in employee attitudes and performance. iii) How collective employee performance mediates the relationship between employee perceptions of HRM practices and organizational performance. Regarding the first research questions the findings indicate that individuals do respond positively to HRM practices by adjusting their felt obligations towards the employer. This finding is in line with the idea of HRM as a signaling device where each HRM practice, implicitly or explicitly, sends signals to employees about promised rewards (inducements) and behaviors (obligations) expected in return. The relationship was also confirmed at the group level of analysis. What is more, variance was found to play an important role in that employee groups with more similar perceptions about the HRM system displayed a stronger relationship between HRM and employee obligations. Concerning the second question the findings were somewhat contradictory in that a strong HRM system was found negatively related to variance in employee performance but not employee obligations. Regarding the third question, the findings confirmed linkages between the HRM system and organizational performance at the group level and the HRM system and employee performance at the individual level. Also, the entire chain of links from the HRM system through variance in employee performance, and further through the level of employee performance to organizational performance was significant.