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Australian cultural identity as a symbolic construction
Šafaříková, Jana ; Soukup, Martin (referee) ; Soukup, Václav (advisor)
Despite its geographical position within the Asia-Pacific region, Australia puts a great deal of effort into recreating a cultural environment that would resemble the one of Europe and the United States, rather than the one of its neighbouring countries. Australia's cultural identity, however, due to the immigrant past of its very diverse population, have had to be invented from scratch during the past two centuries, and the process of its formation continues to these days. This gives us an exceptional opportunity to study the processes of cultural identity construction in an almost direct transmission. Based on the bibliographical research, the thesis assumes that the roots can be identified in the following areas: (1) cultural traditions of the Australian Aboriginal societies, (2) recent cultural stereotypes that emerged during the past two centuries, and (3) specific natural and climatic conditions coupled with the presence of unique animal and plant species. This thesis will focus on the broadest, yet most significant area: Aboriginal culture in both its past and present state, and on its existence within the context of contemporary Australian society. The area of contemporary cultural stereotypes, of which many are related to Aboriginal cultural tradition, will also be briefly discussed. Australian...
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Forensic ballistics
Hoznour, Ondřej ; Štourač, Petr (advisor) ; Musil, Jan (referee)
Criminalistic ballistics The aim of my thesis is to analyse criminalistic ballistics, which is a technical criminalistic method enabling to convict many offenders. The thesis is composed of five parts, each of them dealing with several aspects of ballistics. The introductory part describes the history of criminalistic ballistics from the end of the eighteenth century to the present. This part deals with the development of criminalistic ballistics not only in the world, but also in the Czech Republic. Part Two explains the concept of criminalistic ballistics and deals with its dividing into four relatively independent areas. These four areas are internal, transient, external and terminal ballistics. The following part concentrates on objects that are explored by criminalistic balllistics. The most imported explored objects are guns, their segments and classification, next it is the ammunition, its segments and types of cartridges followed by subjects which are hit by bullets and last but not least are gunshot residues. Part Four focuses on the origin and occurrence of ballistic traces which are created by particular functional gun's segments during the process of gunshot. This part also deals with searching for carriers of ballistic traces, i.e. bullets, cartridge cases and subjects with traces of...
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Forensic theory of a crime victim - victimology
Kálal, Ondřej ; Štourač, Petr (referee) ; Musil, Jan (advisor)
Presented diploma paper is concerned with victims of criminal offences. The accent is mainly put on the criminalistic point of view, especiallly in the second, special part of the paper. Criminalistic point of view means to look at the crime victims as an important source of information which is leading to the capturing the offender and his reasonable punishement. Criminalistic victimology is relatively young discipline and its basics can be found in general victimology together with criminal science. It's development is not finished yet. Formerly the victims were definitely not in the criminalists center of focus, it was the offender who grabbed the main part of attention. But since 50's of last century, with the developement of victimology, the situation of crime victims is slowly getting better and their importance is more and more appreciated. Regarding to its roots in genaral victimology, the first part of the diploma paper is dealing with fundamental victimologic notions such as victimity or victimization, which are important to understand the whole area of victimology. In this fist, common part, sensitive behaviour and help to the victims are accented as well. Victimologic surveys and legal situation of victims in Czech Republic are also mentioned. The second part of the paper contains several...
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The symbolism of flowers in the Hindu ritual
Duda, Petr ; Marková, Dagmar (referee) ; Vacek, Jaroslav (advisor)
Plants and flowers play a relatively important role in the Hindu ritual and the elaborated system of rules concerning the suitability and unsuitability of particular flowers for particular gods offers an interesting subject of study in the field of ritual symbolism. This thesis attempts to describe the use of plants in the Hindu pj ritual and their possible symbolic functions. After summing up the present knowledge about the origin of the worship of deities in India in the last centuries of the period of Brahmanism within the Vedic domestic ritual tradition and stating the general similarities and differences between the temple and the domestic versions of the studied ritual, the thesis focuses on the latter, simpler version. A comparison of several primary materials has shown that the structure of the individual ritual acts during the ceremony is fixed and identical for all deities. The pjs for the individual gods and goddesses primarily differ on the level of the pronounced mantras. However, some specifics can be found with the offerings as well, while the most extensive instructions concerning the suitable and unsuitable offerings are those dealing with flowers. The analysis of more than three dozens of such passages has shown that besides a group of flowers which can be used for the worship of deities...
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financial analysis of hotel
Kondrashov, Alexey ; Petrů, Zdenka (advisor) ; Indrová, Jarmila (referee)
This Master's thesis is focused on financial analysis of joint-stock company Recoop Tour for the period 2004-2007, which owns one of the luxury hotels in Prague Diplomat. This hotel has a rich tradition of providing accommodation and catering services, the organization of international symposia, fairs and conferences. The company Recoop Tour is attractive for the purposes of financial analysis because it is a relatively new corporation, which was actually created for the construction and operation of one of the most luxurious hotels in Prague. The company uses a bank loans from its very beginning and therefore has negative equity. However, the results of economic activity show a continuous reduction of negative values of foreign capital. Development of indices of financial analysis suggests that the situation in corporate finances needs to adopt a number of measures such as a raise of common stock and certain other management decisions, which will increase the overall performance and achievement of economic profit.
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History and Development of Artificial Inteligence
Kraitz, Petr ; Jirků, Petr (advisor) ; Berka, Petr (referee)
This work describes relatively short history of the field of Artificial Intelligence. It contains main obstacles and challenges, which scientists in the past and present solved and still have to solve, as well as a description of methods how to deal with those challenges and which possibilities are there for the future development of the field. The main focus of the work was not to present a full picture of the field of Artificial Intelligence, but to introduce this interesting field, its founders and nowadays scientists, main problems and related disciplines of science. The work is divided into chapters describing the history of the field artificial intelligence in the last century and related fields of informatics, biology, psychology, economy and hardware technology. Next chapter presents to the reader the main problems of the field, which were and still are being solved in the top research and development laboratories in the world. Next two chapters introduce two approaches to dealing with said problems, namely neural networks and evolutional algorithms and expert systems as an example of the oldest application of Artificial Intelligence in "Good Old-fashioned Artificial Intelligence" way as defined by John Haugeland. The last chapter is just an outline how the next few years in the filed may look like and what can we await in the next years.
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Early mediaeval stronghold of Libice nad Cidlinou and its hinterland
Mařík, Jan ; Sláma, Jiří (advisor) ; Macháček, Jiří (referee) ; Moždzioch, Slawomir (referee)
Early medieval strongholds (fortified centres) were dominating elements in early medieval society. They usually served as multi-functional centres of political power, administration, trade, cult, military organization, etc. There were many people residing in such strongholds who did not take part on agricultural production, for example the ducal family, soldiers, and craftsmen. Strongholds played an important role in the process of the formation of early medieval Czech state in the 9th and the 10th century. The early medieval centre is assumed to have been a great consumer of food (non-productive elites), human labour (construction of fortification), raw materials (wood, iron ore), etc. The needs of early medieval strongholds are usually characterised as "very large", but always without any proper context of comparison. It is impossible to understand the economy of a centre without a knowledge of its needs and capacity of its hinterland. The centre and its hinterland is one indivisible system, which has to be balanced.
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D. C. Dennett's Approach: on the way to explanation of consciousness
Vraný, Martin ; Peregrin, Jaroslav (advisor) ; Palkoska, Jan (referee)
l'vEnd-Body problem has been a perpetual philosophical issue ever since the dawn of science, and the discussion of Descartes's dualism was the paradigmatic showroom of post:lible solutions for a long time. It wasn't perhaps until the mid-20th century that the debate underwent a considerable conceptual transformation thanks to two impctllses from science: the boom in brainscanning experiments and the boom in computing devices and informatics. The former provided philosophers and scientists with abundance of evidence of correlations between brain activity and mental states. The latter showed how higher mental activities, like pattern recognition Ol' playing chess, could be performed by fast computing machines running a relatively simple programme. Besides these two, there is another important source ať infiuence (only as far as the methodology is concerned) behaviourism. Despite its decline in 1960s marked by renewed interest in the study of mind, theorists were reluctant to rehabilitate the concept of consciousness.
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Relatives' visits at intensive care units relatives'and staff's view
Kovalová, Lenka ; Havel, Eduard (advisor) ; Pečenková, Jaroslava (referee) ; Cerman, Jaroslav (referee)
It is desired to know the meaning on relatives visits liberalization on intensive care unit in the view of visitors and the staff. Questionnaires about the visits possible problems were filled up by visitors (53 persons) and intensive care nurses (60 persons). The next results are formulated: The visits of relatives at intensive care unite are obvious and is the obligatory part of treatment process. It is not routine practise to know the patient's wish about the plan visit before the visit. Nobody of visitors was discouraged from visiting the patient on intensive care unit. It is necessary to construct the unites with the better possibility of privacy. The relatives prefer the long duration of visit. The relatives means, that a comatose patient can hear them and the visit helps the patient in healing process. The intensive care unit staff must allow relatives to presence during some therapeutic and diagnostic procedures.
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Analysis of impact of Fundamental news on movement of index VIX
Koráb, Pavel ; Fičura, Milan (advisor) ; Vacek, Vladislav (referee)
The thesis investigates the impact of the fundamental news announcements on the movements of the VIX volatility index and the VIX Futures prices. The theoretical part of the thesis explains the construction of the VIX Index and the VIX Futures, describes the most important fundamental news for the US economy and presents a methodology for the modelling of the relationship between the news announcements and the VIX index movements with a simple linear regression model. In the empirical part of the thesis, we analyze the impact of 105 US fundamental news, from the Reuters Eikon database, on the VIX Index movements on theday of the news announcements as well as on the subsequent day. We find a strong relationship between the surprise component of the news and the VIX Index movements on the day of the news announcement, with the statistically significant news explaining 5-10% of the total return variance (for news with small number of observations up to 30-50%) on the announcement day. In the second part of the empirical study, simple trading system is proposed in order to utilize the possible impact of the economic news on the next-day (after announcement) returns of VIX futures in order to achieve speculative profits. Although the models seem to possess some limited out-sample profitability for some of the news, the results are for most of the cases statistically insignificant and the potential profits from the news trading seem to be relatively low.
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