O objetivo principal da tese é examinar se, na filosofia prática de Immanuel Kant, estariam já contidas distintas variantes da ideia de universalizabilidade, mais especificamente as variantes de Richard Mervyn Hare, Kurt Baier, Marcus George Singer e Jürgen Habermas, com vistas a determinar se a teoria do discurso prático racional de Robert Alexy poderia ser designada como kantiana. O objetivo secundário da tese é examinar se a ideia de universalizabilidade, tal como desenvolvida na lógica formal e na ética de orientação kantiana, pode ser empregada com sucesso na fundamentação filosófica do princípio jurídico da igualdade e da vinculatividade dos precedentes judiciais, bem como apresentar argumentos baseados na universalizabilidade e nos precedentes para a solução de três recursos extraordinários, com repercussão geral reconhecida, que estão pendentes de julgamento pelo Supremo Tribunal Federal brasileiro: Recursos Extraordinários no 611.874, no 639.138 e no 710.293. Os métodos empregados foram o lógico-analítico, o hermenêutico e o comparativo, incluindo também pesquisa bibliográfica, jurisprudencial e legislativa. Os principais resultados obtidos foram estes: (i) do ponto de vista da lógica formal, a universalizabilidade pode ser situada no âmbito das regras de operação do cálculo de predicados de primeira ordem; (ii) com relação às diferentes formulações do imperativo categórico de Kant, a Fórmula IIIa (Reino dos Fins) parece a mais abrangente, ao compreender a forma da ação moral (a lei universal) e a matéria da ação moral (as pessoas como fins em si mesmas); (iii) em seus aspectos essenciais, as variantes da universalizabilidade de Hare, Baier, Singer e Habermas podem ser reconduzidas ao imperativo categórico kantiano; (iv) na filosofia do direito e do estado de Kant, a doutrina da dação de leis dupla explica a diferença entre a dação de leis ética e a dação de leis jurídica com base na diferença da “mola propulsora” (Triebfeder); (v) a existência de uma estreita ligação entre os conceitos de direito (incluindo a possibilidade de coerção externa), de universalizabilidade e de igualdade (na aplicação do direito e no estabelecimento do direito) foi demonstrada; (vi) os dois conceitos fundamentais da teoria do precedente – stare decisis e ratio decidendi – podem ser reconduzidos à ideia de universalizabilidade; (vii) tanto os argumentos baseados na utilização de precedentes, quanto o argumento da universalizabilidade, podem oferecer importantes contribuições para a solução de casos concretos, pendentes de julgamento nos tribunais brasileiros. As conclusões alcançadas a partir dos resultados são que as variantes da ideia de universalizabilidade de Hare, Baier, Singer e Habermas podem, em seus aspectos essenciais, ser reconduzidas à filosofia prática de Kant, demonstrando também a compatibilidade da teoria do discurso prático racional de Alexy com esta filosofia. / The main objective of the thesis is to examine whether in Immanuel Kant’s practical philosophy distinct variants of the idea of universalizability are already contained, in particular Richard Mervyn Hare’s, Kurt Baier’s, Marcus George Singer’s and Jürgen Habermas’ variants, with a view to determine whether Robert Alexy’s theory of rational practical discourse could be construed as Kantian. The secondary objective of the thesis is to examine whether the idea of universalizability, such as developed in formal logic and ethics of Kantian orientation, can be employed successfully in the philosophical foundation of the legal principle of equality and of the binding character of judicial precedent, as well as to present arguments based on universalizability and precedent for the solution of three extraordinary appeals, with recognized general repercussion, which are pending judgment in the Brazilian Federal Supreme Court: Extraordinary Appeals n. 611.874, n. 639.138 and n. 710.293. The methods employed were the logical-analytic, the hermeneutic and the comparative, including also bibliographical, case law and legislative review. The main results obtained were as follows: (i) from the viewpoint of formal logic, universalizability can be located within the domain of operation rules of first order predicate calculus; (ii) in relation to the different formulas of Kant’s categorical imperative, the Formula IIIa (Kingdom of Ends) seems the more inclusive, by comprehending the form of moral action (the universal law) and the matter of moral action (the people as ends in themselves); ( (iii) in their essential aspects, Hare’s, Baier’s, Singer’s and Habermas’ variants of universalizability can be reduced to the Kantian categorical imperative; (iv) in Kant’s philosophy of law and state, the double law-giving doctrine explains the difference between the ethical law-giving and legal law-giving based on the difference between “incentive” (Triebfeder); (v) the existence of a close link between the concepts of law (including the possibility of external coercion), universalizability and equality (in the application of law and in the establishment of law) was demonstrated; (vi) the two fundamental concepts of the theory of precedent – stare decisis and ratio decidendi – can be reduced to the idea of universalizability; (vii) both arguments based on the utilization of precedent and the argument of universalizability can offer an important contribution to the solution of concrete cases, pending judgment in Brazilian courts. The conclusions obtained from the results are that Hare’s, Baier’s, Singer’s and Habermas’ variants of the idea of universalizability can, in their essential aspects, be reduced to Kant’s practical philosophy, also demonstrating the compatibility between Alexy’s theory of rational practical discourse and that philosophy.

The thesis "Role of some religious orders in extraparochial evangelization and pastoral care", presents the theme evangelization and pastoral care as a part of the whole life course of man, which it plays an important role in. Evangelization is characterized as a whole life task and mission of each Christian. In connection with the concluding document of the Plenary session of Catholic Church in the Czech Republic, categorical attitude of pastoral care to various groups of people is accentuated as the optimal way of pastoral care. The thesis emphasizes an important role of religious communities in evangelization and pastoral care, including description of extraparochial activities and their contribution at some chosen religious communities. Keywords : Evangelization Pastoral care Categorical Religious Spiritual pastoral care orders exercise

Syftet med vår studie var att söka kunskap om hur specialpedagoger som arbetar mot förskola i en kommun i mellersta Sverige uppfattar det låga antalet specialpedagoger. För att besvara vårt syfte har följande frågeställning utformats; hur uppfattar specialpedagogerna det låga antalet specialpedagoger som arbetar mot förskola? Vi har använt oss av en kvalitativ metod innehållande semistrukturerade intervjuer med fyra specialpedagoger i en kommun i mellersta Sverige för att besvara frågeställningen. Intervjuerna genomfördes via länk på grund av rådande pandemi. De teoretiska utgångspunkterna i studien var den sociokulturella teorin samt det relationella och kategoriska perspektivet. Den sociokulturella teorin har använts med utgångspunkten att individer lär av varandra i en gemensam kontext samt att de relationella och kategoriska perspektiven ökar förståelsen för specialpedagogers arbetsmetoder. Vid genomförandet av studien har Vetenskapsrådets etiska rekommendationer följts. Vår dataanalys resulterade i en kategori med tre underliggande teman som besvarade vår forskningsfråga. I resultatet illustreras de tre teman som framkommit i analysen av citat från intervjuerna med specialpedagoger. Efter resultatavsnittet följer en diskussion angående metodval samt de teman som framkommit i relation till tidigare forskning. I studiens slutsats svarar vi mot studiens syfte utifrån två perspektiv samt att frågeställningen besvaras. Även vidare forskning kommer att beröras i studiens slutsatser.

Syftet med studien var att öka kunskapen om förskollärares olika uppfattningar om inkludering av barn i behov av särskilt stöd i förskolan. Inom förskolan finns det olika utmaningar med att inkludera barn i behov av särskilt stöd. En av utmaningarna handlar om svårigheter med att definiera barn i behov av särskilt stöd. Andra utmaningar är att barngrupperna är för stora och att det finns för lite personal för att arbeta inkluderande. En kvalitativ studie med semistrukturerade intervjuer som datainsamlingsmetod har genomförts för att få reda på förskollärarnas egna uppfattningar om inkludering av barn i behov av särskilt stöd. Intervjuerna genomfördes med åtta legitimerade förskollärare. Det insamlade materialet analyserades utifrån en tematisk analys där teman och underteman framkom. Resultatet i studien visade för det första att förskollärarnadefinierade barn i behov av särskilt stöd utifrån barn med en diagnos, barns svårighet samt barn i behov av tillfälligt stöd. För det andra visade resultatet att några förskollärare uttryckte att inkluderande undervisning kan handla om att undervisa barnen i mindre grupper och låta barnen delta på sina villkor. Andra förskollärare ansågatt barn i behov av särskilt stöd behöver specialundervisning. För det tredje visaderesultatet att förskollärarna uttryckte individuella anpassningar som används för att inkludera barn i behov av särskilt stöd i miljön och undervisningen. Exempel på sådanaanpassningar var specialpedagogiska verktyg som TAKK och bildschema. Några förskollärare uttryckte att individuella anpassningar påverkar den övriga barngruppenoch inte bör genomföras.

Point estimation of several association parameters in categorical data are presented. Typically, a constant is added to the frequency counts before the association measure is computed. We will study the accuracy of these adjusted point estimators based on frequentist and Bayesian methods respectively. In particular, amended estimators for the ratio of independent Poisson rates, relative risk, odds ratio, and the ratio of marginal binomial proportions will be examined in terms of bias and mean squared error.

A huge amount of data is generated daily by digital technologies such as social media, web logs, traffic sensors, on-line transactions, tracking data, videos, and so on. This has led to the archiving and storage of larger and larger datasets, many of which are multi-modal, or contain different types of data which contribute to the problem that is now known as “Big Data”. In the area of Big Data, volume, variety and velocity problems remain difficult to solve. The work presented in this thesis focuses on the variety aspect of Big Data. For example, data can come in various and mixed formats for the same feature(attribute) or different features and can be identified mainly by one of the following data types: real-valued, crisp and linguistic values. The increasing variety and ambiguity of such data are particularly challenging to process and to build accurate machine learning models. Therefore, data heterogeneity requires new methods of analysis and modelling techniques to enable useful information extraction and the modelling of achievable tasks. In this thesis, new approaches are proposed for handling heterogeneous Big Data. these include two techniques for filtering heterogeneous data objects are proposed. The two techniques called Two-Dimensional Similarity Space(2DSS) for data described by numeric and categorical features, and Three-Dimensional Similarity Space(3DSS) for real-valued, crisp and linguistic data are proposed for filtering such data. Both filtering techniques are used in this research to reduce the noise from the initial dataset and make the dataset more homogeneous. Furthermore, a new similarity measure based on intuitionistic fuzzy set theory is proposed. The proposed measure is used to handle the heterogeneity and ambiguity within crisp and linguistic data. In addition, new combine similarity models are proposed which allow for a comparison between the heterogeneous data objects represented by a combination of crisp and linguistic values. Diverse examples are used to illustrate and discuss the efficiency of the proposed similarity models. The thesis also presents modification of the k-Nearest Neighbour classifier, called k-Nearest Neighbour Weighted Average (k-NNWA), to classify the heterogeneous dataset described by real-valued, crisp and linguistic data. Finally, the thesis also introduces a novel classification model, called FCCM (Filter Combined Classification Model), for heterogeneous data classification. The proposed model combines the advantages of the 3DSS and k-NNWA classifier and outperforms the latter algorithm. All the proposed models and techniques have been applied to weather datasets and evaluated using accuracy, Fscore and ROC area measures. The experiments revealed that the proposed filtering techniques are an efficient approach for removing noise from heterogeneous data and improving the performance of classification models. Moreover, the experiments showed that the proposed similarity measure for intuitionistic fuzzy data is capable of handling the fuzziness of heterogeneous data and the intuitionistic fuzzy set theory offers some promise in solving some Big Data problems by handling the uncertainties, and the heterogeneity of the data.

Previous studies have found that behavioral and P300 responses to speech are influenced by linguistic cues in the stimuli. Research has found conflicting data regarding the influence of phonemic characteristics of stimuli in the mismatch negativity (MMN) response. The current investigation is a replication of the study designed by Tampas et al. (2005), which studied the effects of linguistic cues on the MMN response. This current study was designed to determine whether the MMN response is influenced by phonetic or purely acoustic stimuli, and to expand our knowledge of the scalp distribution of processing responses to within- and across-category speech and nonspeech stimuli. The stimuli used in this study consisted of within-category synthetic speech stimuli and corresponding nonspeech frequency glides. Participants consisted of 21 (11 male and 10 female) adults between the ages of 18 and 30 years. A same/different discrimination task was administered to all participants. Data from behavioral responses and event-related potentials (MMN and P300) were recorded. Results provided additional evidence that the MMN response is influenced by linguistic information. MMN responses elicited by the nonspeech contrasts had more negative peak amplitudes and longer latencies than MMN responses elicited by speech contrasts. Brain maps of t scores for speech vs. nonspeech contrasts showed significant differences in areas of cognitive processing for all contrast pairs over the left hemisphere near the temporal and parietal areas. The present investigation confirms that there are significant differences in the cortical processing of speech sounds vs. nonspeech sounds.

An important problem that appears often when analyzing data involves identifying irregular or abnormal data points called outliers. This problem broadly arises under two scenarios: when outliers are to be removed from the data before analysis, and when useful information or knowledge can be extracted by the outliers themselves. Outlier Detection in the context of the second scenario is a research field that has attracted significant attention in a broad range of useful applications. For example, in credit card transaction data, outliers might indicate potential fraud; in network traffic data, outliers might represent potential intrusion attempts. The basis of deciding if a data point is an outlier is often some measure or notion of dissimilarity between the data point under consideration and the rest. Traditional outlier detection methods assume numerical or ordinal data, and compute pair-wise distances between data points. However, the notion of distance or similarity for categorical data is more difficult to define. Moreover, the size of currently available data sets dictates the need for fast and scalable outlier detection methods, thus precluding distance computations. Additionally, these methods must be applicable to data which might be distributed among different locations. In this work, we propose novel strategies to efficiently deal with large distributed data containing mixed-type attributes. Specifically, we first propose a fast and scalable algorithm for categorical data (AVF), and its parallel version based on MapReduce (MR-AVF). We extend AVF and introduce a fast outlier detection algorithm for large distributed data with mixed-type attributes (ODMAD). Finally, we modify ODMAD in order to deal with very high-dimensional categorical data. Experiments with large real-world and synthetic data show that the proposed methods exhibit large performance gains and high scalability compared to the state-of-the-art, while achieving similar accuracy detection rates.

No / Real-world data collections are often heterogeneous (represented by a set of mixed attributes data types: numerical, categorical and fuzzy); since most available similarity measures can only be applied to one type of data, it becomes essential to construct an appropriate similarity measure for comparing such complex data. In this paper, a framework of new and unified similarity measures is proposed for comparing heterogeneous objects described by numerical, categorical and fuzzy attributes. Examples are used to illustrate, compare and discuss the applications and efficiency of the proposed approach to heterogeneous data comparison and clustering.

Starting from the observation that substances and reactions are the central entities of chemistry, I have structured chemical knowledge into a formal space called a directed hypergraph, which arises when substances are connected by their reactions. I call this hypernet chemical space. In this thesis, I explore different levels of description of this space: its evolution over time, its curvature, and categorical models of its compositionality. The vast majority of the chemical literature focuses on investigations of particular aspects of some substances or reactions, which have been systematically recorded in comprehensive databases such as Reaxys for the last 200 years. While complexity science has made important advances in physics, biology, economics, and many other fields, it has somewhat neglected chemistry. In this work, I propose to take a global view of chemistry and to combine complexity science tools, modern data analysis techniques, and geometric and compositional theories to explore chemical space. This provides a novel view of chemistry, its history, and its current status. We argue that a large directed hypergraph, that is, a model of directed relations between sets, underlies chemical space and that a systematic study of this structure is a major challenge for chemistry. Using the Reaxys database as a proxy for chemical space, we search for large-scale changes in a directed hypergraph model of chemical knowledge and present a data-driven approach to navigate through its history and evolution. These investigations focus on the mechanistic features by which this space has been expanding: the role of synthesis and extraction in the production of new substances, patterns in the selection of starting materials, and the frequency with which reactions reach new regions of chemical space. Large-scale patterns that emerged in the last two centuries of chemical history are detected, in particular, in the growth of chemical knowledge, the use of reagents, and the synthesis of products, which reveal both conservatism and sharp transitions in the exploration of the space. Furthermore, since chemical similarity of substances arises from affinity patterns in chemical reactions, we quantify the impact of changes in the diversity of the space on the formulation of the system of chemical elements. In addition, we develop formal tools to probe the local geometry of the resulting directed hypergraph and introduce the Forman-Ricci curvature for directed and undirected hypergraphs. This notion of curvature is characterized by applying it to social and chemical networks with higher order interactions, and then used for the investigation of the structure and dynamics of chemical space. The network model of chemistry is strongly motivated by the observation that the compositional nature of chemical reactions must be captured in order to build a model of chemical reasoning. A step forward towards categorical chemistry, that is, a formalization of all the flavors of compositionality in chemistry, is taken by the construction of a categorical model of directed hypergraphs. We lifted the structure from a lineale (a poset version of a symmetric monoidal closed category) to a category of Petri nets, whose wiring is a bipartite directed graph equivalent to a directed hypergraph. The resulting construction, based on the Dialectica categories introduced by Valeria De Paiva, is a symmetric monoidal closed category with finite products and coproducts, which provides a formal way of composing smaller networks into larger in such a way that the algebraic properties of the components are preserved in the resulting network. Several sets of labels, often used in empirical data modeling, can be given the structure of a lineale, including: stoichiometric coefficients in chemical reaction networks, reaction rates, inhibitor arcs, Boolean interactions, unknown or incomplete data, and probabilities. Therefore, a wide range of empirical data types for chemical substances and reactions can be included in our model.