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Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

The aim of the thesis is an analysis of vulnerable groups of population in the Czech labour market, focusing on their characteristics, causes of their riskiness and proposed solutions. The theoretical part of the thesis includes evaluation of the role of The Bureau of Labour and temporary help agencies in mediation of employment to individuals at risk. In the empirical part of the thesis, which is aiming at the group of people under 25 years of age and graduates, the development of youth unemployment in the Czech Republic and EU member states is analysed on the basis of evaluation of Eurostat statistical data. To determine the profile of the aforementioned group and to confirm or refute the presumed causes of riskiness of this group (mentioned in theoretical part), a questionnaire survey has been conducted through The Bureau of Labour in the three regions of the Czech Republic. The benefit of this thesis is recommendation of appropriate policy to remedy the unsatisfactory position of youth in the labour market. From the methodological point of view a method of analysis of statistical data, a method of comparison, a method of structured interviews with experts and questionnaire survey has been used.

There are indications of concern by governments for public opinion even centuries ago. The use of scientific research though, was only introduced by governments to enhance the effectiveness of government communication and the dissemination of government information during the last few decades of the twentieth century. The main aim with this research is to contribute towards improving the research used in South Africa by the Government Communication and Information System (GCIS) in order to enhance the effectiveness of government communication and the dissemination of government information. As research can contribute towards enhancing the effectiveness of government communication and the dissemination of government information, it is considered as being of critical importance to contribute towards improving the quality of relevant research in South Africa. No research has been conducted before in South Africa regarding the use of research to enhance the effectiveness of government communication and the dissemination of government information. The methodology used to address the aim and objectives of this research was that of a qualitative, non-empirical study conducted by means of a literature review. The research provides a brief theoretic overview of research in communication. It records the use of communication research by government in South Africa since 1936 as well as the process of transforming government communication after 1994. Furthermore, it records government communication and information dissemination in other countries, with specific reference to the use of research. Various conclusions derive from this research. Among these is a clear indication of the necessity of conducting communication research in a scientific way, by applying sound theoretical principles. It also indicates that there is a good platform and strategic framework from which government communication research in South Africa can be improved further, and that South Africa can learn from relevant research conducted by governments in other countries. The researcher presents a wide range of recommendations for consideration, as well as potential areas for further research regarding this broader theme. / Thesis (MA (Information Science))--University of Pretoria, 2001. / Information Science / unrestricted

This thesis is an examination and description of the United States Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management's program for the management of cultural resources in the State of Oregon. The author has worked for the Bureau from March, 1975 to the present as a District cultural resource specialist. The major emphasis of the thesis is a description and explanation of the Bureau's cultural resource management program and its major problems in relation to the taxpayer and archaeologists.

This study examines major American maternal and children’s healthcare initiatives in the backdrop of international and national crises from 1917 to 1969. During these crises, maternal and child welfare reformers used the rhetoric of citizenship and democracy to garner support for new maternal and child healthcare policies at the national level. While the dissertation focuses on national policies, it also explores how state public health officials from Alabama, Mississippi, and New York implemented these programs and laws locally. The dissertation chapters study regional similarities and differences in maternal and child healthcare by highlighting how economy, culture, and politics influenced how national programs operated in different states. By utilizing White House Conference on Children and Youth Series sources, state public health records, and newspapers, this dissertation argues that by using rhetoric about protecting mothers, children, and American democracy, the Children’s Bureau (CB) members claimed and maintained control of maternal and child health care for over fifty years. CB leaders used World War I draft anxieties as a rallying call to reduce infant mortality and improve children’s health. In the following decades, maternal and children’s healthcare advocates met at the White House Conference on Children and Youth Series to discuss policies and influence legislation relating to maternal and child hygiene. The Sheppard-Towner Program, Title V or the Maternal and Children’s Health Section of the Social Security Act, and the Emergency Maternity and Infancy Care Program reflect policies debated at these White House conferences. By the 1950s, child welfare advocates associated mental health with a child’s overall health and the CB leaders and other child welfare reformers linked happy personalities to winning the Cold War. In the 1960s, the CB members and child welfare advocates’ attention shifted to focusing on low socio-economic mothers and children or children with intellectual disabilities. By 1969, the Children’s Bureau no longer managed national maternal and child healthcare programs and could not “safeguard the health of mothers and children.”

In this dissertation I study the benefits that machine learning can bring to problems of Sustainable Development in the field of hydrology. Specifically, in Chapter 1 I investigate how predictable groundwater depletion is across India and to what extent we can learn from the model’s predictions about underlying drivers. In Chapter 2, I joined a competition to predict the amount of water in snow in the western United States using satellite imagery and convolutional neural networks. Lastly, in Chapter 3 I examine how cloud cover impacts the machine learning model’s predictions and explore how cloudiness impacts the successes and limitation of the popular uncertainty quantification method known as Monte Carlo dropout. Food production in many parts of the world relies on groundwater resources. In many regions, groundwater levels are declining due to a combination of anthropogenic abstraction, localized meteorological and geological characteristics, and climate change. Groundwater in India is characteristic of this global trend, with an agricultural sector that is highly dependent on groundwater and increasingly threatened by abstraction far in excess of recharge. The complexity of inputs makes groundwater depletion highly heterogeneous across space and time. However, modeling this heterogeneity has thus far proven difficult. In Chapter 1 using random forest models and high-resolution feature importance methods, we demonstrate a recent shift in the predictors of groundwater depletion in India and show an improved ability to make predictions at the district-level across seasons. We find that, as groundwater depletion begins to accelerate across India, deep-well irrigation use becomes 250% more important from 1996-2014, becoming the most important predictor of depletion in the majority of districts in northern and central India. At the same time, even many of the districts that show gains in groundwater levels show an increasing importance of deep irrigation. Analysis shows widespread decreases in crop yields per unit of irrigation over our time period, suggesting decreasing marginal returns for the largely increasing quantities of groundwater irrigation used. Because anthropogenic and natural drivers of groundwater recharge are highly localized, understanding the relationship between multiple variables across space and time is inferentially challenging, yet extremely important. Our granular, district-focused models of groundwater depletion rates can inform decision-making across diverse hydrological conditions and water use needs across space, time, and groups of constituents. In Chapter 2 I reflect on competing in the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s snow water equivalent prediction competition (Snowcast Showdown). This project was a joint effort with Isabella Smythe and we ended the competition scoring roughly 45th out of over 1000 teams on the public leaderboard. In this chapter I outline our approach and discuss the competition format, model building, and examine alternative approaches taken by other competitors. Similarly I consider the success and limitations of our own satellite-based approach and consider future improvements to iterate upon our model. In Chapter 3 I study the black-box deep learning model built on MODIS imagery to estimate snow water equivalent (SWE) made for the competition discussed in Chapter 2. Specifically, I here investigate a major component of uncertainty in my remotely-sensed images: cloud cover which completely disrupts viewing of the surface in the visible spectrum. To understand the impact of cloud-driven missingness, I document how and where clouds occur in the dataset. I then use Monte Carlo dropout - a popular method of quantifying uncertainty in deep learning models - to learn how well the method captures the aleatoric errors unique to remote sensing with cloud cover. Next, I investigate how the underlying filters of the convolutional neural network appear using the guided backprop technique and draw conclusions regarding what features in the images the model was using to make its predictions. Lastly, I investigate what forms of validation best estimated the true generalization error in Chapter 2 using ordinary least squares (OLS) and the elastic-net technique. These three chapters show that machine learning has an important place in the future of hydrology, however the tools that it brings are still difficult to interpret. Moreover, future work is still needed to bring these predictive advancements to scientific standards of understanding. This said, the increases to accuracy brought by the new techniques can currently make a difference to people’s lives who will face greater water scarcity as climate change accelerates.

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Au Québec et ailleurs, certains projets de développement sont soumis à un processus public d’évaluation pendant lequel des citoyens présentent des arguments liés à différentes valeurs, au sens éthique de bien commun. La commission chargée d’entendre les participants produit ensuite un rapport dans lequel elle fait des recommandations au gouvernement. Comment la commission tient-elle compte des arguments des participants ? Afin de répondre à cette question, nous proposons une méthodologie nouvelle : nous procédons à l’analyse d’un corpus de textes provenant d’un cas afin d’identifier les arguments et les valeurs qui s’y trouvent ; nous utilisons un modèle argumentatif computationnel pour calculer des décisions hypothétiques que nous comparons avec celle rendue par la commission. Cela nous permet de décrire les préférences de la commission, son attitude face à l’incohérence entre les arguments des participants et aussi d’évaluer la capacité de reproduire les décisions réelles de certains modes de raisonnement argumentatif. / In Quebec and elsewhere, some projects are subject to a social evaluation procedure where citizens bring forward arguments relating to several values, in the ethical sense of a fundamental good. A commission hears them and make recommendations to the government. How does the commission take into account these arguments? To answer this question, we develop a new methodology: we analyse a corpus of texts produced during a case to extract the arguments and the values that they contain; we use a computational model of arguments to calculate hypothetical decisions that we compare with the commission’s decision. This leads us to describe the preferences of the commission over the values, to describe her attitude towards the incoherence in the participants’ arguments and to say something about the ability to reproduce human decisions of several argumentative reasoning methods.

From its formation, the American federal government partnered with private organizations to accomplish state goals. With little formal organizational capacity, the American state relied on the resources and credibility of private organizations. This thesis investigates the success of public-private partnerships in American state-building. By looking at alternative enforcement mechanisms, this thesis adds to theories of state-building and private power. The American experience helps us conceive a more nuanced perspective on state formation that recognizes the state’s varying tools rather than focusing solely on the development of formal organizational capacity. The questions driving this thesis are: How can public-private partnerships expand state capacity? Are there systematic differences in the outcomes and purposes of partnerships based on the branch of government – whether legislative, presidential, bureaucratic, or judicial – that mediates the partnership? My case studies examine the use of partnerships in the early state’s interactions with American Indian tribes. The cases put these general questions into more focus by examining if these partnerships expanded state capacity to dictate the terms of engagement and the content of racial orders. When these partnerships expand capacity, I explore the ways in which this state goal is accomplished. However, I remain acutely aware of the potential for partnerships to both fail to build capacity or become merely means to service a private interest.