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This thesis studies for-profit hybrid corporations, which are dual-purpose corporations pursuing mandatory social goals along with the for-profit goal. Rights to incorporate such dual-purpose entities have been provided in various international jurisdictions as a mechanism to enhance corporate social responsibility and accountability of for-profit businesses. Examining for-profit hybrid corporations as enabled in Bangladesh and examining primary data collected from their stakeholders, the thesis explains the emergence, impact, social responsibility, and accountability of for-profit hybrid corporations in Bangladesh and explains similar characteristics of such corporations around the world.

Up until the recent oil and commodity price crash in 2015, there has been exponential growth in global shipping and trade, and this increase means that prompt action is required to reduce vessel-sourced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Future projections suggest that maritime CO2 emissions will increase substantially by between 50% and 250%. However, there is currently no international instrument holding global shipping corporations accountable for their vessels' performance in emissions reduction. This article critically assesses the current accountability practices and regulations in place for these corporations. It suggests that stakeholders in this industry need to further explore the market based mechanisms (MBMs) that can encourage and even demand that these corporations systematically disclose their vessels' emissions reduction performance in an accurate and timely manner. Developing such mechanisms is vital to assist in the reduction of GHG emissions since a comprehensive international instrument is unlikely to be implemented soon.

Corporations' commitment to their social responsibilities has long been a global concern with reference to sustainability, transparency and fair practice, which is of great concern to stakeholders. Corporations are expected to be responsible to the society they operate within and do business in a socially responsible manner.

The paper investigates whether there is any ethical dilemma for the retailers of tobacco products to sell cigarettes to minors or not. With the study of secondary data and primary data coming from 60 retailers and 20 experts from Khulna City, Dhaka City, and Savar, the research concludes that in addition to the focus on retailers, policy makers have to think about mass awareness, mass education, proper implementation of laws, and availability of tobacco products to minors in order to reduce smoking by minors. Though not spontaneous, around 80 percent retailers find it unethical to sell cigarette to minors who is now 37 percent of the total market with 16 percent growth rate per year. Keywords: Retailers, Ethics, Smoking, Minor Smoker, Tobacco Market, Bangladesh

The paper investigates whether there is any ethical dilemma for the retailers of tobacco products to sell cigarettes to minors or not. With the study of secondary data and primary data coming from 60 retailers and 20 experts from Khulna City, Dhaka City, and Savar, the research concludes that in addition to the focus on retailers, policy makers have to think about mass awareness, mass education, proper implementation of laws, and availability of tobacco products to minors in order to reduce smoking by minors. Though not spontaneous, around 80 percent retailers find it unethical to sell cigarette to minors who is now 37 percent of the total market with 16 percent growth rate per year. Keywords: Retailers, Ethics, Smoking, Minor Smoker, Tobacco Market, Bangladesh

Push-to-talk (PTT) is one class of voice communication system generally employed in cellular phone services. Today's PTT services mainly rely on infrastructure and require stable end-to-end path for successful communication. But users with PTT enabled mobile devices may travel in challenged environments where infrastructure is not available or end-to-end path is highly unreliable. In such cases those PTT services may exhibit poor performance or may even fail completely. Even though some existing PTT solutions allow users to communicate in an ad-hoc fashion, they need sufficient node density to establish end-to-end path and eventually fail to communicate in sparse mobile ad-hoc environments. Delay-Tolerant Networking (DTN) is an emerging research area that addresses the communication requirements specfic to challenged networks. In this thesis we develop a voice communication system (DT-Talkie) which enables both individual and group users to communicate over infrastructure-less and challenged networks in the walkie-talkie fashion. The DTN concept of asynchronous message forwarding is applied to the DT-Talkie in order to transmit voice messages reliably. We employ variable-length fragmentation mechanism in the application layer with the vision to speed-up session interactivity in stable scenarios. Some approaches to resolve codec interoperability issues are implied in this thesis. To validate the concepts of the DT-Talkie, we implement an application for Maemo based Nokia Internet Tablets, leveraging the DTN reference implementation developed in the DTN Research Group. Moreover in this thesis we evaluate the performance of the DT-Talkie through conducting a set of simulations using several DTN routing protocols and using different mobility models.