Functional purity is a fundamental part of the functional programming paradigm. A function is functionally pure if it is side-effect free and deterministic. Pure functions provide many benefits compared to impure ones, including guaranteed thread-safety as well as easier testing, debugging and maintenance. But how can functional purity be measured? This thesis develops a method for statically measuring the level of functional purity in any given C# program. It also investigates problems with determining purity in object-oriented languages, with a focus on C#. Moreover, a prototype of the method is implemented in order to evaluate the method using a benchmark consisting of 11 open source repositories that use C#'s [Pure] attribute. The [Pure] attribute can be placed in front of a method declaration to indicate that it is side-effect free. Due to a number of limitations to the implementation as well as to [Pure]'s definition of functional purity, which excludes determinism, the results of the evaluation appear relatively poor. After normalizing the implementation's classification distribution for each repository, its classification of pure functions has a precision of 65% and recall 17%, and its classification of impure functions has 54% precision and 69% recall. Nevertheless, the prototype still shows the potential of the full analysis method. A complete implementation of the analysis method could potentially yield a fully working system for measuring any C# program's level of functional purity.

Tato práce se zabývá regulovanými gramatikami. Zavádí nové modifikace existujících regulovaných gramatik. Pro tyto modifikace zavádí metody syntaktické analýzi. Diskutuje problémy determinismu v definici gramatik. Studuje sílu nově uvedených modifikací aplikovaných na regulárně regulované gramatiky.

Multidisciplinary contemporary discourse involving science, philosophy and theology has explored themes of creation and human identity. Contemporary critiques of anthropocentricism stem from such discourse. The understanding of human beings as ‘spirited bodies’ rather than embodied spirits, arises from a non-reductionist physicalist standpoint. This is the point of departure for this thesis. The study attempts to explore the understanding of human beings as ‘spirited bodies’ from a non-reductionist physicalist view and as a metaphor for ‘fresh’ perspectives and insights that could potentially inform and/or shape a theologically grounded earth-keeping ethos on a different premise from the traditional dualistic hierarchical viewpoint. Methodologically, this study attempts to reflect a unitary approach to knowledge. The study views the subject through three prisms. Firstly it takes a retrospective look to account for perspectives that have shaped hierarchical views of creation based on a dualistic principle that in turn have shaped the human power-dominion relationship with the rest of creation that is deemed to have led to the devastating eco-crisis the world faces today. Secondly, it considers a non-reductionist physicalist viewpoint that has challenged dualistic anthropological views of being in favour of the conception of human beings as ‘spirited bodies’ and which places human beings in a continuum with the rest creation. Thirdly, it picks up on Moltmann’s Trinitarian and pneumatological views of creation which orient the theological framework anchored on the community and communion within the triune relationship. Human solidarity with the rest of creation is then posited as the nexus that converges the strands of these different perspectives. The juxtaposition of the Genesis 1 creation story with Zambian cosmogony constitutes ‘case studies’ that illustrate how the fresh perspectives on creation and human identity open up an ‘interpretive space’ that could locate human beings in a continuum with the rest of creation and offer insight for an alternative earth-keeping ethos. Human solidarity with the rest of creation thus critiques traditional western dualistic and hierarchical conceptions of creation on one hand, and serves as an orienting concept for the ‘fresh’ earth-keeping ethos this study proposes on the other. / Dissertation (MA Theol)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / gm2014 / Dogmatics and Christian Ethics / unrestricted

The public sector has opened its eyes to the possibilities of artificial intelligence (AI) transforming and streamlining their organizations. However, they are lagging behind the private sector organizations in competency, knowledge, as well as resources, and have difficulties implementing any type of change. While there are studies on change within public sector, along with AI use in such organizations, there is a lack of research concerning perceptions of AI in public organizations, and organizational analysis based on those perceptions. This study aims to address this gap, by studying a department within Umeå Municipality with technology determinism and instrumentalism in mind, examining their attitudes and views of AI, and how those may affect a future implementation. The findings made through the study involve a thorough analysis, showing both deterministic and instrumentalist views, coming from both the municipality and the department. While there is a lack of competency and resources, the employees show an understanding, a need, and motivation for including AI and other digital tools in their work. The study describes possible approaches the department can take, and has contributed to the beginning of filling the mentioned research gap.

(in English): This thesis deals with the sociology of art, its prevailing discourse and the search for other possible ways of taking a sociological approach to art. The text is divided into three complementary sections. The first section addresses the problem of the representation of art through the interpretation of art history as the history of display and the resulting conceptual duality of illusion versus schematicity. In the second section, the focus is on analysing the assumptions underlying the dominant stream of art sociology. These are the social determinations of artistic discourse, the denial of the axiology of art, the legitimisation of art on the basis of its social function, and the unequal approach of the perception of art in society. The relevance of these propositions is, in the present work, parsed in much the same way as the unifying theoretical framework underlying these premises, namely the Marxist aesthetic theory. The work presented in this thesis therefore identifies Marxist materialism as an agent of determinism and the levelling of values in the sociology of art, based on well-founded arguments, and concludes that the Marxist approach to art is unsatisfactory and destructive to sociology. In the end, the work seeks other ways for the sociological reflection of art, through...

The subjective experience of agency is a dimension of inner life that has consequences for motivation and moral judgment. Cognitive psychologists have studied the processes that underlie conscious will and metacognition of agency while social psychologists have examined how comparable constructs, such as autonomy and self-efficacy, relate to human needs and wellbeing. However, the consequences of the transient feeling state that accompanies agential experiences have received less attention. This dissertation examines the consequences of agency for motivation and moral judgment across seven experiments that manipulated feelings of agency via motor control games, episodic simulations, and autobiographical recollections. In its entirety, this work suggests that people seek experiences that confer high feelings of agency while both high- and low-agency experiences influence how we judge others’ actions. Chapter I reviews prior literature on agency and related constructs and introduces the conceptual and theoretical framework. Chapters II – IV discuss how feelings of agency manipulated via proximal, action-oriented cues and distal, outcome-oriented cues affect task preference. Findings suggest that people generally like experiences of high agency, and that motivation is more sensitive to proximal rather than distal disturbances. People tend to make choices to increase their likelihood of experiencing high agency via retention of action control, even at the expense of desired outcomes. Chapters V – VIII explore the relationship between agential experiences and moral judgments of others’ behavior. Results reveal a novel effect such that both high- and low-agency experiences lead to more intense judgments. In addition, people who are most sensitive to factors that influence their sense of agency also tend to deliver the harshest judgments. The findings suggest a two-process model of attributive projection and compensatory control mechanisms. They also imply a self-amplifying effect of extreme agency states such that both experiences of high and low agency may enhance activation of self-related schema, which in turn influence moral judgments. Chapters IX and X summarize the experiments and discuss the broader significance of this work for research on motivation and moral psychology.

The purpose of this thesis is to understand the origins of the enduring differences between the Eastern and Western interpretations of free will and determinism. In my piece, I work to determine the roots of these differences and to what degree these differences have been challenged and disrupted in the 20th century. In this pursuit, I analyze the different philosophies of free will in the East and West and then apply these philosophies to the literature of both regions. For the eastern scholarship, I am using Yukio Mishima's The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea and Motojirō Kajii's "Lemon." For the Western works, I am analyzing Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan and Ursula K. Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." After thoroughly analyzing the pieces, I discuss the possible dialogues between the East and the West to help fully realize the legitimacy of the claim that the two regions continue to harbor distinct interpretations of free will and determinism.

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Today, cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are ubiquitous. Whether it is robotics, electric vehicles, the smart home, autonomous driving, or smart prosthetics, CPSs shape our day-to-day lives. Yet, designing and programming CPSs becomes evermore challenging as the overall complexity of systems increases. CPSs need to interface (potentially distributed) computation with concurrent processes in the physical world while fulfilling strict safety requirements. Modern and popular frameworks for designing CPS applications, such as ROS and AUTOSAR, address the complexity challenges by emphasizing scalability and reactivity. This, however, comes at the cost of compromising determinism and the time predictability of applications, which ultimately compromises safety. This thesis argues that this compromise is not a necessity and demonstrates that scalability can be achieved while ensuring a predictable execution. At the core of this thesis is the novel reactor model of computation (MoC) that promises to provide timed semantics, reactivity, scalability, and determinism. A comprehensive study of related models indicates that there is indeed no other MoC that provides similar properties. The main contribution of this thesis is the introduction of a complete set of tools that make the reactor model accessible for CPS design and a demonstration of their ability to facilitate the development of scalable deterministic software. After introducing the reactor model, we discuss its key principles and utility through an adaptation of reactors in the DEAR framework. This framework integrates reactors with a popular runtime for adaptive automotive applications developed by AUTOSAR. An existing AUTOSAR demonstrator application serves as a case study that exposes the problem of nondeterminism in modern CPS frameworks. We show that the reactor model and its implementation in the DEAR framework are applicable for achieving determinism in industrial use cases. Building on the reactor model, we introduce the polyglot coordination language Lingua Franca (LF), which enables the definition of reactor programs independent of a concrete target programming language. Based on the DEAR framework, we develop a full-fledged C++ reactor runtime and a code generation backend for LF. Various use cases studied throughout the thesis illustrate the general applicability of reactors and LF to CPS design, and a comprehensive performance evaluation using an optimized version of the C++ reactor runtime demonstrates the scalability of LF programs. We also discuss some limitations of the current scheduling mechanisms and show how they can be overcome by partitioning programs. Finally, we consider design space exploration (DSE) techniques to further improve the scalability of LF programs and manage hardware complexity by automating the process of allocating hardware resources to specific components in the program. This thesis contributes the Mocasin framework, which resembles a modular platform for prototyping and researching DSE flows. While a concrete integration with LF remains for future work, Mocasin provides a foundation for exploring DSE in Lingua Franca.