Thesis (Department Honors) - Franklin & Marshall College, 2009. / Double click the URL for full text access. Includes bibliography pg. 73-76.

The goal of this thesis is the development of a fast and robust algorithm that is able to detect patterns in flow fields independent from their orientation and adequately visualize the results for a human user. This thesis is an interdisciplinary work in the field of vector field visualization and the field of pattern recognition. A vector field can be best imagined as an area or a volume containing a lot of arrows. The direction of the arrow describes the direction of a flow or force at the point where it starts and the length its velocity or strength. This builds a bridge to vector field visualization, because drawing these arrows is one of the fundamental techniques to illustrate a vector field. The main challenge of vector field visualization is to decide which of them should be drawn. If you do not draw enough arrows, you may miss the feature you are interested in. If you draw too many arrows, your image will be black all over. We assume that the user is interested in a certain feature of the vector field: a certain pattern. To prevent clutter and occlusion of the interesting parts, we first look for this pattern and then apply a visualization that emphasizes its occurrences. In general, the user wants to find all instances of the interesting pattern, no matter if they are smaller or bigger, weaker or stronger or oriented in some other direction than his reference input pattern. But looking for all these transformed versions would take far too long. That is why, we look for an algorithm that detects the occurrences of the pattern independent from these transformations. In the second part of this thesis, we work with moment invariants. Moments are the projections of a function to a function space basis. In order to compare the functions, it is sufficient to compare their moments. Normalization is the act of transforming a function into a predefined standard position. Moment invariants are characteristic numbers like fingerprints that are constructed from moments and do not change under certain transformations. They can be produced by normalization, because if all the functions are in one standard position, their prior position has no influence on their normalized moments. With this technique, we were able to solve the pattern detection task for 2D and 3D flow fields by mathematically proving the invariance of the moments with respect to translation, rotation, and scaling. In practical applications, this invariance is disturbed by the discretization. We applied our method to several analytic and real world data sets and showed that it works on discrete fields in a robust way.

This thesis is organised into two chapters and an appendix. The first chapter explores the significant American expatriate movement in France in the early part of the twentieth century, in an effort to answer the question ―Why France?‖ The second chapter examines the life and work of Natalie Clifford Barney, an American expatriate writer in Paris, who wrote predominantly in French and ran an important weekly salon for over sixty years. Specifically, her aesthetic and subject matter, her life, and her fraught publishing history are considered. The appendix is a translation of Barney's 1910 book of aphorisms entitled Éparpillements. / v, 110 leaves ; 29 cm

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Montana, 2007. / Title from title screen. Description based on contents viewed Aug. 1, 2007. Includes bibliographical references (p. 102-106).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--West Virginia University, 2007. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains viii, 284 p. : port. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 238-253).

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:23:37Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2004-04-02Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T18:09:59Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 malheiros_ps_me_mar.pdf: 245224 bytes, checksum: fb97e8447039d008867b42c98ec72be7 (MD5) / A antropologia, enquanto ciência do homem, sempre se defrontou com o paradoxo da unidade biológica do homem frente à diversidade cultural. A dissertação aborda esta importante questão: como definir um objeto, o Homem, se em toda parte o que se encontram são homens? Qual a especificidade e a singularidade do homem como objeto de estudos frente à pluralidade cultural? Não é uma questão fácil, nem tão pouco resolvida pela antropologia, o dilema perpassa o pensamento de diversos autores, e não apenas em obras antropológica, mas também filosóficas e psicológicas. Especificamente a questão é tratada aqui a partir do pensamento de dois expressivos antropólogos, Malinowski, com formação inicial em ciências exatas, que produziu sua obra na primeira metade do século XX e Geertz, que se graduou em filosofia e inglês e produziu sua obra na segunda metade do século XX. São considerados alguns aspectos da vida e da obra de ambos os autores, procurando evidenciar a importância do momento histórico em que viveram e das influências teóricas que receberam. Percebe-se a partir daí que a problemática toma rumos diversos, pois enquanto Malinowski argumenta que a cultura surge para atender a necessidades biológicas e derivadas e nos fala em uma natureza humana entendida em termos biológicos, Geertz entende que o homem é um artefato cultural em um duplo sentido, a cultura interferiu no processo evolutivo da nossa espécie e ela se constitui de um conjunto de mecanismos de controle que governa o comportamento e dá sentido à existência humana. / The anthropology, as a manþs science, has always faced the paradox of biological unity of man in front of cultural diversity. The dissertation approaches this important question: how to define an object, the Man, if in everywhere what we find are men? Which is the specificity and singularity of man as object of studies in front of cultural plurality? It is not an easy question, neither solved by anthropology, the dilemma goes through several authorsþ thought, and not only in anthropological, but also philosophical and psychological works. The question here is specifically treated from the thought of two expressive anthropologists, Malinowski, with initial formation in exact science, producing his work in the first half of 20th century and Geertz, graduated in philosophy and english, producing his work in the second half of 20th century. Some aspects of life and work of both authors are considered, bringing to evidence the importance of historical moment in which they lived and theoretical influences received. It is perceived from this that the problem takes several ways, because as Malinowski argues that the culture arises to attend biological and derived needs and tells us about a human nature comprehended in biological terms, Geertz understands that the man is a cultural artefact in a double way: the culture has interfered in the evolutive process of our species and it is constituted of a group of control mechanisms that guides the behavior and gives sense to the human existence.

Master of Music / Department of Music / Jennifer R. Edwards / This report consists of extended program notes and translations for programmed songs and arias presented in recital by Elizabeth Ann Rodina on April 22, 2008 at 7:30 p.m. in All Faith's Chapel on the Kansas State University campus. Included on the recital were works by George Frideric Handel, Franz Schubert, Reynaldo Hahn, Jules Massenet, Clifford Shaw, and Giacomo Puccini. The program notes include biographical information about the composers and a textual and musical analysis of their works.

My dissertation examines the representations of materialism -- a philosophy stereotypically associated with a reductive, anti-theological and mechanistic world-picture -- in the published prose and (typically) unpublished poetry of several figures central to scientific discourse in the latter half of the nineteenth century, most notably W. K. Clifford, a mathematician, and John Tyndall, a physicist and media-savvy ‘champion of science’. These engagements, and representations, were not merely on the level of ‘direct’ argumentation, however. A self-consciously allusive, even polyphonous tone was far from uncommon in the many literatures arising from mid-Victorian scientific encounter, and this openness of form permitted both popularisers and critics of materialism to choose the vocabularies in which to relate their observations –- the texts with which they would engage –- towards specific ends. As I argue, such was a task they performed with great care and an often astonishing felicity: an essay on cosmology, after all, acquires quite a different colouration when interleaved with the cadences of Milton, another again if illustrated with quotations from Whitman or an epigram from ‘Tintern Abbey’. My 1st chapter provides a broader context for those that follow, analysing both changing nineteenth-century ideas of materialism and also a range of potential reactions to -– and inter alia a variety of the contrasting vernaculars used in illustration of –- contemporary metaphysical or ‘methodological’ materialism. My 2nd chapter offers a reading of Tyndall’s August 1874 Belfast Address, the locus classicus for practically all later elaborations of materialistic belief. My 3rd chapter contrasts the theologically orthodox position of James Clerk Maxwell (buttressed by allusions to the theologically doctrinaire George Herbert) with the radically atheistic and materialistic philosophy of Clifford (underpinned by the similarly atheistic Algernon Charles Swinburne). My 4th and 5th chapters are paired studies in the ‘private’ nuances of Tyndall’s ideology, elaborating on my 2nd chapter’s scrutiny of its more public attributes. The former discusses his notions of cosmic connectedness, ironically derived from the non-materialistic works of Carlyle. The latter examines both the exultancy and the despair explicit in Tyndall’s poetry and implicit in his prose. As I note in conclusion, such contrary emotions, phrased with striking clarity in Tyndall, are common in mid-Victorian writings concerning materialism, directly or indirectly. They are rooted in the hopes afforded by materialism’s explanatory prowess, on the one hand, and the ‘atrophy of spirit’ born of its austere, even dehumanising, epistemology, on the other; that is to say, in a salutary awareness of both power and pitfalls.

The study deals with the problem of applicability of two anthropological theories, structural functionalism and interpretive anthropology of Clifford Geertz. By applicability is meant what concrete difference using of one or the other theory brings about in ethnography. Each of the theories is at first thoroughly examined with emphasis on its possible aims, assumptions, and consequences for an ethnographer. Then each theory is put to test in examination of one particular ethnography associated with the theory. Evans-Pritchard's The Nuer serves as an instance of structural functionalism. Clifford Geertz's Negara as an example of interpretative analysis. Structural functionalism is shown to provide an ethnographer with a much more definite guidance which contributes to better possibilities of verification and comparability of the results than interpretive anthropology. Apart from the main subject, the study is concerned with more general questions, especially related to non-existence of a paradigm in anthropology and some of its causes.

Pour d non puissance d'un nombre premier, le nombre maximal de bases deux à deux décorrélées d'un espace de Hilbert de dimension d n'est pas encore connu. Dans ce mémoire, nous commençons par donner une construction de bases décorrélées en lien avec une famille de représentations irréductibles de l'algèbre de Lie su(2) et faisant appel aux sommes de Gauss.<br /> Puis nous étudions de façon systématique la possibilité de construire de telles bases au moyen des opérateurs de Pauli. 1) L'étude de la droite projective sur (Z_d)^m montre que, pour obtenir des ensembles maximaux de bases décorrélées à l'aide d'opérateurs de Pauli, il est nécessaire de considérer des produits tensoriels de ces opérateurs. 2) Les sous-modules lagrangiens de (Z_d)^2n, dont nous donnons une classification complète, rendent compte des ensembles maximalement commutant d'opérateurs de Pauli. Cette classification permet de savoir lesquels de ces ensembles sont susceptibles de donner des bases décorrélées : ils correspondent aux demi-modules lagrangiens, qui s'interprètent encore comme les points isotropes de la droite projective (P(Mat(n, Z_d)^2),ω). Nous explicitons alors un isomorphisme entre les bases décorrélées ainsi obtenues et les demi-modules lagrangiens distants, ce qui précise aussi la correspondance entre sommes de Gauss et bases décorrélées. 3) Des corollaires sur le groupe de Clifford et l'espace des phases discret sont alors développés.<br /> Enfin, nous présentons quelques outils inspirés de l'étude précédente. Nous traitons ainsi du rapport anharmonique sur la sphère de Bloch, de géométrie projective en dimension supérieure, des opérateurs de Pauli continus et nous comparons l'entropie de von Neumann à une mesure de l'intrication par calcul d'un déterminant.