In addition to demonstrating the judiciary’s role in constitutional adjudication and an application of the federal trade and commerce power, judicial determination of Parliament’s constitutional jurisdiction to enact securities legislation is noteworthy also due to the vast policy debates that are involved. Though such determinations routinely invite a process removed from the contemplation of desirable policy, the ‘General Motors test’ used to define and apply the relevant constitutional power here seems to implicitly allow it. The choice between ‘categorization’ and ‘balancing’ in constitutional analysis is therefore significant, in terms of its juxtaposed tolerance for policy considerations. With these analytical options in mind, this thesis considers Parliament’s proposal, so to identify a reasonable process for determining its constitutionality. It argues that balancing relevant policy concerns is necessary and justifiable in the application of the legal norms in question. Crucial, however, is lending the process structure, so that its shortcomings are mitigated.

In addition to demonstrating the judiciary’s role in constitutional adjudication and an application of the federal trade and commerce power, judicial determination of Parliament’s constitutional jurisdiction to enact securities legislation is noteworthy also due to the vast policy debates that are involved. Though such determinations routinely invite a process removed from the contemplation of desirable policy, the ‘General Motors test’ used to define and apply the relevant constitutional power here seems to implicitly allow it. The choice between ‘categorization’ and ‘balancing’ in constitutional analysis is therefore significant, in terms of its juxtaposed tolerance for policy considerations. With these analytical options in mind, this thesis considers Parliament’s proposal, so to identify a reasonable process for determining its constitutionality. It argues that balancing relevant policy concerns is necessary and justifiable in the application of the legal norms in question. Crucial, however, is lending the process structure, so that its shortcomings are mitigated.

This dissertation attempts to trace the shifting relationship between the fields of Rhetoric and Poetry in Western culture by focusing on poetry contests and competitions during several different historical eras. In order to examine how the distinction between the two fields is contingent on a variety of local factors, this study makes use of research in contemporary cognitive neuroscience, particularly work in categorization and cognitive linguistics, to emphasize the provisional nature of conceptual thought; that is, on the type of mental activity that gives rise to conceptualizations such as “Rhetoric” and “Poetry.” The final portions of the research attempt to use some modeling techniques derived from cognitive linguistics as invention strategies for producing stylistically idiosyncratic academic knowledge, and for examining the relationship between the stylistic markers we associate with each of the two aforementioned fields.

Sport im Allgemeinen und Fußball im Besonderen erfreuen sich nicht nur unter aktiven Sportlern, sondern auch unter Zuschauern aktuell hoher Beliebtheit. Angesichts teils enormer Einschaltquoten scheint es wahrscheinlich, dass Fußballspiele nicht nur von Fans der beteiligten Mannschaften verfolgt werden. Dies kann sowohl gänzlich neutrale Zuschauer als auch Anhänger anderer Teams betreffen. Während Fans allerdings durch die Literatur bereits ausführliche Aufmerksamkeit erfahren haben und durch relativ eindeutige und verlässliche Denk- und Verhaltensweisen gekennzeichnet scheinen, bleibt dies für ‚sonstige‘ Zuschauer bisher unbeleuchtet. Aufbauend auf der Theorie der Selbstkategorisierung (Turner et al. 1987) widmet sich die vorliegende Arbeit deshalb – ohne explizite Einschränkung auf Anhänger einer Mannschaft – der Zuordnung von Zuschauern zu den beteiligten Teams eines Fußballspiels und beleuchtet, inwieweit diese teambezogenen Kategorien als Grundlage für das Denken und Handeln herangezogen werden. Hierfür werden theoretische Annahmen über eine Selbstkategorisierung zweiter Ordnung formuliert, welche das Entstehen salienter Selbstkategorien auch ohne das Vorliegen hoher Identifikation mit dem Team erklären. Die durchgeführten empirischen Studien stützen die Annahmen und zeigen, dass auch von Spiel zu Spiel wechselnde Selbstzuordnungen auftreten können.

Despite the many researches made on emergent strategies and project portfolio management, one can hardly find studies on the link between them. It can easily be assumed that emergent strategies and market dynamics have considerable effect on the portfolio of projects in organizations and, supposedly, give rise to emergent projects. We defined emergent projects to be untypical or irregular projects for the organization which are at the borderline or even outside the mainstream of the current portfolio of projects. These types of projects impact the company’s strategy with the aim to increase the organizations competitiveness. This study will try to find out the possible distinct characteristics and strategic impact of emergent projects on large organizations so that these kinds of projects can be properly recognized for what they really are and managed effectively.   We used a semi-structured interview method to collect data from six international companies in four countries. The countries are Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, and Taiwan. Using template analysis method, we analyzed the collected data. The analysis confirmed our assumption that there is a correlation between emergent strategies and project portfolio management. Moreover, we found out some of the characteristics and strategic impacts of emergent projects. The results of the study, therefore, shows that emergent projects are kinds of strategic projects which have bigger significance and bring a higher sense of urgency to organizations than the normal projects in their portfolio. Furthermore, the study indicated that emergent projects do not need any different project management methodology than typical projects do. Nonetheless, emergent projects are characterized by rarity, disrupting routine operations, enhancing company-customer relationship, causing resource reallocation, bringing profit, demanding higher budget, opening both internal and external new opportunities, posing risk due to shorter planning phase and limited implementation time, and capturing higher attention from top management. The major result we have found out in the research about the strategic impact of emergent projects is that they have a higher potential to bring profit and new business opportunities which in total make organizations more competitive in their respective markets. The theoretical and managerial implications of our research have a common idea that emergent projects should be recognized and categorized as strategic projects of organizations. Further studies should be carried out on how the dynamic situations of business environments and emergent strategies affect the project portfolio of organizations. Moreover, it is worth researching on how the idea of emergent projects are dealt in the studies of strategic project management and project categorization both in the academic and practitioners world. Overall, the study has brought the linkage between emergent strategies and project portfolio management into light through the discussion on emergent projects.

In this thesis we investigate visual place categorization by combining successful global image descriptors with a method of visual attention in order to automatically detect meaningful objects for places. The idea behind this is to incorporate information about typical objects for place categorization without the need for tedious labelling of important objects. Instead, the applied attention mechanism is intended to find the objects a human observer would focus first, so that the algorithm can use their discriminative power to conclude the place category. Besides this object-based place categorization approach we employ the Gist and the Centrist descriptor as holistic image descriptors. To access the power of all these descriptors we employ SVM-DAS (discriminative accumulation scheme) for cue integration and furthermore smooth the output trajectory with a delayed Hidden Markov Model. For the classification of the variety of descriptors we present and evaluate several classification methods. Among them is a joint probability modelling approach with two approximations as well as a modified KNN classifier, AdaBoost and SVM. The latter two classifiers are enhanced for multi-class use with a probabilistic computation scheme which treats the individual classifiers as peers and not as a hierarchical sequence. We check and tweak the different descriptors and classifiers in extensive tests mainly with a dataset of six homes. After these experiments we extend the basic algorithm with further filtering and tracking methods and evaluate their influence on the performance. Finally, we also test our algorithm within a university environment and on a real robot within a home environment.

This dissertation addresses the problem of Machine Translation (MT), which is defined as an automated translation of a document written in one language (the source language) to another (the target language) by a computer. The MT task requires various types of knowledge of both the source and target language, e.g., linguistic rules and linguistic exceptions. Traditional MT systems rely on an extensive parsing strategy to decode the linguistic rules and use a knowledge base to encode those linguistic exceptions. However, the construction of the knowledge base becomes an issue as the translation system grows. To overcome this difficulty, real translation examples are used instead of a manually-crafted knowledge base. This design strategy is known as the Example-Based Machine Translation (EBMT) principle. Traditional EBMT systems utilize a database of word or phrase translation pairs. The main challenge of this approach is the difficulty of combining the word or phrase translation units into a meaningful and fluent target text. A novel Retrieval-Based Machine Translation (RBMT) system, which uses a sentence-level translation unit, is proposed in this study. An advantage of using the sentence-level translation unit is that the boundary of a sentence is explicitly defined and the semantic, or meaning, is precise in both the source and target language. The main challenge of using a sentential translation unit is the limited coverage, i.e., the difficulty of finding an exact match between a user query and sentences in the source database. Using an electronic dictionary and a topic modeling procedure, we develop a procedure to obtain clusters of sensible variations for each example in the source database. The coverage of our MT system improves because an input query text is matched against a cluster of sensible variations of translation examples instead of being matched against an original source example. In addition, pattern recognition techniques are used to improve the matching procedure, i.e., the design of optimal pattern classifiers and the incorporation of subjective judgments. A high performance statistical pattern classifier is used to identify the target sentences from an input query sentence in our MT system. The proposed classifier is different from the conventional classifier in terms of the way it addresses the generalization capability. A conventional classifier addresses the generalization issue using the parsimony principle and may encounter the possibility of choosing an oversimplified statistical model. The proposed classifier directly addresses the generalization issue in terms of training (empirical) data. Our classifier is expected to generalize better than the conventional classifiers because our classifier is less likely to use over-simplified statistical models based on the available training data. We further improve the matching procedure by the incorporation of subjective judgments. We formulate a novel cost function that combines subjective judgments and the degree of matching between translation examples and an input query. In addition, we provide an optimization strategy for the novel cost function so that the statistical model can be optimized according to the subjective judgments.

I outline a framework for researching the effects of practice schedule on skill acquisition, based upon stage theories of information processing and stage theories of skill acquisition. Skilled performance requires stimulus identification, response selection, and response execution. I hypothesize that practice schedule affects learning in two types of information processing stages: stimulus-oriented and response-oriented stages. The loci of these effects differ based on the stage. In stimulus-oriented stages, practice schedule affects concept and categorization learning via contiguity of exemplars and feature saliency. In response-oriented stages, practice schedule affects the efficiency with which individuals produce a response by affecting response preparation. I evaluated this framework and theory with 4 experiments that manipulated practice schedule and amount of practice, in 2 domains with different information processing demands. Experiments~1~and~2 focused on response-oriented stages via a task that required participants to execute a multisegment movement according to a target time. Experiments~3~and~4 focused on stimulus-oriented stages via a task that required participants to categorize football play diagrams. Within the 2 task domains the amount of acquisition practice was manipulated to test whether different durations of acquisition training changed how practice schedules affected retention and transfer performance. The practice schedule manipulation had reliable effects on performance and learning when task performance involved either response preparation or induction of categorization rules. Practice schedule did not affect performance or learning when task performance involved categorization decisions, after the rules had been learned. Additionally, I report a novel method for quantifying amount of practice that allows comparisons across task domains.

In this dissertation I investigate how individuals group others into sexual orientation (SO) categories based on a target's known sexual behaviors and romantic interests. I hypothesize that individuals known to have any non-heterosexual sexual or romantic interests are more likely to be perceived as "gay" (and not "straight") even when there is clear evidence of heterosexual interests and behaviors as well. This phenomenon has been termed "heterosexual exclusivity" in this work. In the process, I examine relevant writings and research on SO, including works related to SO in history, the conceptualization and measurement of SO, determinants of and influences on SO, the essentialism and social constructionism debate with regard to SO, innate bisexuality, and bisexual erasure. Additionally, I give specific focus to how and why men are affected by, as well as perpetuate heterosexual exclusivity. In doing so, I examine writings and research on the role and construction of masculinity as well as homophobia and the overlap of the two. I hypothesize that adherence to traditional masculinity and increased homophobia are predictive of increased heterosexual exclusivity in men. I also hypothesize that men are more likely to be the primary agents and targets of heterosexual [exclusivity]. The results supported most of these hypotheses. / text

Social enterprises are in some contexts considered to be a solution of social exclusion. Studies have tried to reach a deeper understanding of the relatively new phenomenon 'work-integrating social enterprises' by asking questions like 'what is a social enterprise?'. The purpose of this research is to create a greater understanding of how social enterprises can enable and/or restrict work-integration. Data is collected through qualitative interviews conducted on six social enterprise managers. The research focuses on how and to what extent organizational structure components (including functions, target group, leadership and control, along with recruitment and specialization) can lead to work-integration. The research shows a discrepancy of what the social enterprises say they are and what they say they do. I find it to be an effect depending on them being similar to other common enterprises. This is evident in their being located on the regular labor market, having the same demands in competitive and effective production. This research shows how social enterprises restrict individuals just as a common enterprise. By only recruiting individuals with desired abilities and knowledge, the social enterprises reproduces exclusion of individuals and thereby restrict work-integration for the most marginalized individuals. The research also shows that by actually giving a chance of work-integration to marginalized individuals (even if it is a limited chance), social enterprises are an alternative to common enterprises. / I flera sammanhang anses sociala företag vara en lösning på utanförskapet. Tidigare studier har sökt en djupare förståelse av det relativt nya fenomenet "arbetsintegrerande sociala företag" genom att ställa sig frågor som "vad är ett socialt företag?". Syftet med denna studie är att skapa en större förståelse för hur sociala företag kan möjliggöra och/eller begränsa arbetsintegration. I studien har en kvalitativ metod använts i form av intervjuer med sex verksamhetsledare på olika sociala företag. Studien fokuserar på hur och i vilken utsträckning som organisationsstrukturens komponenter (funktion, målgrupp, ledarskap, kontroll samt rekrytering och specialisering) kan leda till arbetsintegration. Studien visar hur sociala företag begränsar individer precis som ett vanligt företag. Genom att bara rekrytera individer med efterfrågade förmågor och kunskaper reproducerar de sociala företagen exklusionen av individer och därmed begränsar de arbetsintegration för de mest marginaliserade individerna. Resultatet visar också att genom att de sociala företagen faktiskt ger en chans till arbetsintegrering för marginaliserade individer (även om det är en begränsad sådan), så är de ändå ett alternativ till de vanliga företagen för individerna.