This thesis has been submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2016 / This study assesses agonism's practical possibilities for constructive, rather than destructive, outcomes arising from state-society strife, by drawing on the case of the Johannesburg city administration. / GR2017

Thesis advisor: Paul G. Spagnoli / On October 5, 1789, several hundred women first converged on the Parisian municipal government, then marched undeterred on Versailles to demand the king's aid in relieving the dire bread shortage in the city. By the end of the next day however, the women returned triumphantly to the capital not only with bread, but with the entire royal family, the National Guard, and National Assembly's promise to relocate to Paris as well. This revolutionary journée is referred to as the October Days, and this thesis seeks to address its spontaneous and premeditated origins. I argue that although the journée was not the result of an overarching conspiracy, its themes and actions had precursors in the early months of the Revolution and the years before. Also, by undertaking a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the ensuing judicial investigation of the movement, I have attempted to provide a grounding for the October Day's most important primary source through which some of the journée's most controversial aspects can be examined. Finally, I argue that this judicial inquiry significantly contributed to the polarization of the National Assembly as le peuple forced the political elites to take sides over the investigation. Thus, between October 5, 1789 and October 1, 1790 le peuple continued its struggle to reinforce the sovereignty with which it had been endowed. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2007. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-26T18:14:35Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Wagner Correa.pdf: 3984394 bytes, checksum: 8ab2e25e701aed7531757b4ae84e8d92 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-10-22 / This analysis aims at investigating the protests through crosses that occur on Copacabana Beach. The events, organized from the 2000s, do not rely on the presence of protesters, diverging from the traditional form of protest involving overcrowding, banners with messages, slogans and interrupt flows. NGOs, associations and civic groups are responsible for organizing the demonstrations, which always manage spaces in the media. It seeks the origins of this form of protest and its relation to the space where it occurs. It will also raise a history of Copacabana Beach, taking into account the dialectic between the meanings of life and death of some of its most important symbols. Furthermore, the work analyzes the dynamics embedded in the daily ritual space, the subjective aspects relevant to political and religious practices conducted in a location that propagates the utopian picture of the perfect place. The core question of this research is to find out why this type of event that has little to do with local hedonistic feature can attract attention. The assumptions lead us to believe that Copacabana Beach works as a media of far-reaching impact where the protests by crosses are staged. To support this analysis we use extensive bibliography of authors such as Michel Foucault, Paul Zumthor, Mikhail Bakhtin, Yuri Lotman and Manuel Castells / Esta análise tem por objetivo investigar as manifestações de protesto por meio de cruzes que ocorrem na Praia de Copacabana. Os eventos, organizados a partir da década de 2000, não contam com a presença de manifestantes, destoando da forma tradicional de protesto, que envolve aglomeração de pessoas, faixas com mensagens, palavras de ordem e interrupção de fluxos. ONGs, entidades de classe e grupos de civis são os responsáveis pela organização das manifestações, que sempre conseguem espaços na mídia. Buscaremos as origens desse formato de protesto e sua relação com o espaço onde ele ocorre. Levantaremos também um histórico da Praia de Copacabana, levando em consideração a dialética entre as pulsões de vida e de morte de alguns de seus símbolos mais importantes. Analisaremos ainda a dinâmica de ritual embutida no cotidiano do espaço, os aspectos subjetivos pertinentes às práticas políticas e religiosas exercidas em um local que propaga a imagem utópica de lugar perfeito no mundo todo. A questão central desta investigação é descobrir por que esse tipo de manifestação, que pouco tem a ver com a característica hedonista local, consegue chamar a atenção. As hipóteses nos levam a crer que a Praia de Copacabana é uma mídia de grande potencial e as manifestações por meio de cruzes referem-se a um modelo de encenação. Para embasar esta análise utilizaremos vasta bibliografia de autores como Michel Foucault, Paul Zumthor, Mikhail Bakhtin, Iuri Lotman e Manuel Castells

Imitation learning refers to an agent's ability to mimic a desired behaviour by learning from observations. The field is rapidly gaining attention due to recent advances in computational and communication capabilities as well as rising demand for intelligent applications. The goal of imitation learning is to describe the desired behaviour by providing demonstrations rather than instructions. This enables agents to learn complex behaviours with general learning methods that require minimal task specific information. However, imitation learning faces many challenges. The objective of this thesis is to advance the state of the art in imitation learning by adopting deep learning methods to address two major challenges of learning from demonstrations. Firstly, representing the demonstrations in a manner that is adequate for learning. We propose novel Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) based methods to automatically extract feature representations from raw visual demonstrations and learn to replicate the demonstrated behaviour. This alleviates the need for task specific feature extraction and provides a general learning process that is adequate for multiple problems. The second challenge is generalizing a policy over unseen situations in the training demonstrations. This is a common problem because demonstrations typically show the best way to perform a task and don't offer any information about recovering from suboptimal actions. Several methods are investigated to improve the agent's generalization ability based on its initial performance. Our contributions in this area are three fold. Firstly, we propose an active data aggregation method that queries the demonstrator in situations of low confidence. Secondly, we investigate combining learning from demonstrations and reinforcement learning. A deep reward shaping method is proposed that learns a potential reward function from demonstrations. Finally, memory architectures in deep neural networks are investigated to provide context to the agent when taking actions. Using recurrent neural networks addresses the dependency between the state-action sequences taken by the agent. The experiments are conducted in simulated environments on 2D and 3D navigation tasks that are learned from raw visual data, as well as a 2D soccer simulator. The proposed methods are compared to state of the art deep reinforcement learning methods. The results show that deep learning architectures can learn suitable representations from raw visual data and effectively map them to atomic actions. The proposed methods for addressing generalization show improvements over using supervised learning and reinforcement learning alone. The results are thoroughly analysed to identify the benefits of each approach and situations in which it is most suitable.

Submitted by Rosivalda Pereira (mrs.pereira@ufma.br) on 2017-09-12T20:44:07Z No. of bitstreams: 1 RaimundoVelozoNeto.pdf: 872870 bytes, checksum: ccaffc749ed9ed23b543712ba5273285 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-09-12T20:44:07Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 RaimundoVelozoNeto.pdf: 872870 bytes, checksum: ccaffc749ed9ed23b543712ba5273285 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-06-01 / This work deals with the Method of Mathematical Induction, in particular, its use with a view to the solution of geometric problems. It initially some considerations are made about the expression "inductive reasoning" whose it meaning, as appropriately must be explained in the text, that differs from that of "mathematical induction". We prove the proposition that guarantees the use of the method based on its foundation, namely the axiom of mathematical induction (one of the postulates that characterize the natural numbers). It exhibited some examples of its use of Algebra and the Theory of Numbers. And then, some applications of the method of mathematical induction to the problems of Geometry are explored to obtain a geometric measure in terms of another(s), either for the demonstration of a proposition that insinuates itself true, or for the stages of construction of a figure given / Este trabalho trata do Método de Indução Matemática, em especial, de seu uso com vistas à solução de problemas geométricos. Inicialmente, são feitas algumas considerações acerca da expressão "raciocínio indutivo", cujo sentido, conforme apropriadamente explicado no texto, difere do de "indução matemática". É provada a proposição que garante o uso do método com base em seu fundamento, a saber, o axioma de indução matemática (um dos postulados que caracterizam os números naturais) e exibidos alguns exemplos de sua utilização em Álgebra e Teoria dos Números. Em seguida, são exploradas algumas aplicações do método de indução matemática à problemas de Geometria, seja para a obtenção de uma medida geométrica em termos de outra(s), para a demonstração de uma proposição que se insinua verdadeira, ou para a exibição das etapas de construção de uma dada figura.

Cette thèse étudie comment l'intégration du calcul dans les démonstrations peut les simplifier. Nous nous intéressons pour cela à la déduction modulo et à la surdéduction, deux formalismes proches dans lesquels le calcul est incorporé dans les démonstrations via un système de réécriture. Pour améliorer la recherche mécanisée de démonstration, nous considérons trois critères de simplicité.<br /><br />L'admissibilité des coupures permet de restreindre l'espace de recherche des démonstrations, mais elle n'est pas toujours assurée en déduction modulo. Nous définissons une procédure qui complète le système de réécriture pour, au final, admettre les coupures. Au passage, nous montrons comment transformer toute théorie pour l'intégrer à la partie calculatoire des démonstrations.<br /><br />Nous montrons ensuite comment la déduction modulo permet de réduire arbitrairement la taille des démonstrations, en transférant des étapes de déduction dans le calcul. En particulier, nous appliquons ceci à l'arithmétique d'ordre supérieur pour démontrer que les réductions de taille qui sont possibles en augmentant l'ordre dans lequel on se place disparaissent si on travaille en déduction modulo. <br /><br />Suite à ce dernier résultat, nous avons recherchés quels sont les systèmes d'ordre supérieur pouvant être simulés au premier ordre, en déduction modulo. Nous nous sommes intéressés aux systèmes de type purs et nous montrons comment ils peuvent être encodés en surdéduction, ce qui offre de nouvelles perspectives concernant leur normalisation et la recherche de démonstration dans ceux-ci. Nous développons également une méthodologie qui permet d'utiliser la surdéduction pour spécifier des systèmes de déduction.

No description available.

This dissertation centers around an empirical and mathematically oriented analysis of conflict events in 19 Latin American countries in the period 1946-1975. The events are three types of protest (riots, demonstrations, and political strikes) and one type of coercion (mass arrests). The study is divided in seven chapters, i.e., (1) Collective conflict as a concept (7 pp.); (2) Theories of collective conflict (28 pp.); (3) Models of collective conflict (15 pp.); (4) Methodology (13 pp.); (5) Preliminary data analyses (16 pp.); (6) Collective conflicts in Latin America (37 pp.); and (7) Summary and conclusions (12 pp.). Much of the evidence is presented in 19 tables and 9 figures. A FORTRAN program which was used for computations is listed in an appendix. In Chapter 1 regimes and oppositions are identified as parties in conflict. Mobilization processes that are going on within these parties are distinguished from the confrontation process between the parties. In Chapter 2 a set of theoretical distinctions (i.e., strain theory, control theory, cultural deviation theory, conflict theory, and social learning theory) is borrowed from delinquency theory to summarize the findings of prior research on collective conflict. In Chapter 3 three mathematical models are treated, which describe conflict events: (1) a linear model, closely related to Richardson's arms race model, (2) a perceptual model, based on Hamblin's arms race model, and (3) a nonlinear model, in which elements of (1) and (2) are combined. In Chapter 4 a discussion is presented of the problems and potentials of using cross-temporal as well as cross-national data to estimate the mathematical models. In Chapter 5 some preliminary issues are settled. One of these issues is that the Cuban Revolution did not cause a structural change in other Latin American countries. The difference between the slope parameters in the periods 1946-1959 and 1960-1973 is statistically not significant. In Chapter 6 it is shown mathematically that forms of dissident behavior and governmental repression have the tendency to return to the same level of equilibrium over and over again. In "direction fields" of the riot-arrest system, it is illustrated how these equilibrium levels are reached through time. In Chapter 7 the findings are evaluated and suggestions made for future research. This study of political instability can not escape agreement with the observation that, indeed, "Latin American history is a kind of Eternal Recurrence."

No description available.

No description available.