Protein structure prediction has been a fundamental challenge in the biological field. In this post-genomic era, the need for automated protein structure prediction has never been more evident and researchers are now focusing on developing computational techniques to predict three-dimensional structures with high throughput. Consensus-based protein structure prediction methods are state-of-the-art in automatic protein structure prediction. A consensus-based server combines the outputs of several individual servers and tends to generate better predictions than any individual server. Consensus-based methods have proved to be successful in recent CASP (Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction). In this thesis, a Support Vector Machine (SVM) regression-based consensus method is proposed for protein fold recognition, a key component for high throughput protein structure prediction and protein function annotation. The SVM first extracts the features of a structural model by comparing the model to the other models produced by all the individual servers. Then, the SVM predicts the quality of each model. The experimental results from several LiveBench data sets confirm that our proposed consensus method, SVM regression, consistently performs better than any individual server. Based on this method, we developed a meta server, the Alignment by Consensus Estimation (ACE).

This thesis examines the current Chinese foreign policy, planning and practice in terms of the strategic cultural studies which was developed and used by the United States during the cold war to accurately interpret the strategic thinking of the Soviet Union. The studies, after 30 years of evolution has made its contribution to the interpretation of national strategic behavior as well. The strategic cultural studies, however, has also aroused widespread concern because it entirely breaks the traditional boundaries of disciplines, science and culture, philosophy and strategic research, trying to interpret the strategic phenomenon in terms of ideology and culture, and clarifying the relevance of the phenomenon¡¦s past, present, and future. More importantly, the strategic culture studies questions the concept of structure of realism that a nation is a single, common, non-historical, and rational actor, but assumes that the strategic environment and its response are the results of historical building and social learning. The establishment of China¡¦s national policy at different times has been determined by two factors: the ever-changing domestic and international environments and the influence of its national leader. So after four national leaders and from the perspective of China¡¦s national strategy, the CPC foreign policy can be basically divided into two periods: prior and post reform and opening up. Before the 1978 reform, China was forced to deal with the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, and the then national leader Mao Zedong decided to adopt its foreign policy largely based on the "war and revolution,". As a result, China classed all the countries around the world by means of international class struggle, and utilized the strategy of the united front to confront them. While it helped China to raise its national self-esteem, national unity and morale , most of the time the nation had to pay a painful price due to the ignorance of reality . Since China began to adopt the policy of reforming and opening up in 1980s, the nation has changed its strategic development course from politics to economy, making it necessary to ponder its foreign policy rationally; therefore, the national interest has become the fundamental directives of it. International observers note that China has moved from the "war and revolution" to "peace and development", and the peripheral peace has become the core issue of the nation¡¦s foreign policy. Ruled by Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, China¡¦s comprehensive national strength has risen rapidly, and its regional and even global influence has been increasing at the same time. The responsibility of a great power and the national image have become increasingly important to China., so based on Deng Xiaoping's diplomatic policy , Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, in response to domestic and international evolution of the situation, have continued to put forward such diplomatic discourses as "great power diplomacy", "new security concept", "peaceful rise", and "harmonious world", with particular emphasis on culture. It can be perceived that while enhancing the traditional national strength, China also emphasizes on the influence that culture has exerted on international community. And the PRC has been stressing "Chinese characteristics", which has made a great impact on the international community dominated by the Western values . "Beijing Consensus" and "China threat " are the direct reflection of this trend. Contrary to the Cold War, military forces nowadays can not completely reflect a nation's influence. In the 21st century, A nation¡¦s influence has a new name: an international image, which can only be obtained through moral, intellectual, scientific, artistic, economic, cultural and other achievements by a nation. They can be perceived as an ideal projection of international image. This development has made the CCP's foreign policy, regardless of political, economic, security and cultural aspects, change from isolation to participation and cooperation with other countries. As China¡¦s comprehensive national strength increases, its demand for the international responsibility and authority will increase accordingly, which is a correct way a nation should act diplomatically. However, this will inevitably lead to restructuring of the international authority, causing the counter-attack of the old forces. An all-out confrontation will eventually arise in the cognition of both power and values. Thus, the reaction of powers like the United States will become the restrictions and challenges of CPC's foreign policy. Facing the rise of Chinese influence and intertwined with the power struggle of the United States and China, Taiwan has to deal with these complicated issues with maximum discretion, and it will surely become a major issue in developing our own foreign policy .

Phylogenetic analysis can produce easily tens of thousands of equally plausible evolutionary trees. Consensus trees and topological distance matrices are often used to summarize the evolutionary relationships among the trees of interest. However, current approaches are not designed to analyze very large tree collections. In this dissertation, we present two fast algorithms— HashCS and HashRF —for analyzing large collections of evolutionary trees based on a novel hash table data structure, which provides a convenient and fast approach to store and access the bipartition information collected from the tree collections. Our HashCS algorithm is a fast ( ) technique for constructing consensus trees, where is the number of taxa and is the number of trees. By reprocessing the bipartition information in our hash table, HashCS constructs strict and majority consensus trees. In addition to a consensus algorithm, we design a fast topological distance algorithm called HashRF to compute the × Robinson-Foulds distance matrix, which requires ( ^ 2) running time. A RF distance matrix provides plenty of data-mining opportunities to help researchers understand the evolutionary relationships contained in their collection of trees. We also introduce a series of extensions based on HashRF to provide researchers with more convenient set of tools for analyzing their trees. We provide extensive experimentation regarding the practical performance of our hash-based algorithms across a diverse collection of biological and artificial trees. Our results show that both algorithms easily outperform existing consensus and RF matrix implementations. For example, on our biological trees, HashCS and HashRF are 1.8 and 100 times faster than PAUP*, respectively. We show two real-world applications of our fast hashing algorithms: (i) comparing phylogenetic heuristic implementations, and (ii) clustering and visualizing trees. In our first application, we design novel methods to compare the PaupRat and Rec-I-DCM3, two popular phylogenetic heuristics that use the Maximum Parsimony criterion, and show that RF distances are more effective than parsimony scores at identifying heterogeneity within a collection of trees. In our second application, we empirically show how to determine the distinct clusters of trees within large tree collections. We use two different techniques to identify distinct tree groups. Both techniques show that partitioning the trees into distinct groups and summarizing each group separately is a better representation of the data. Additional benefits of our approach are better consensus trees as well as insightful information regarding the convergence behavior of phylogenetic heuristics. Our fast hash-based algorithms provide scientists with a very powerful tools for analyzing the relationships within their large phylogenetic tree collections in new and exciting ways. Our work has many opportunities for future work including detecting convergence and designing better heuristics. Furthermore, our hash tables have lots of potential future extensions. For example, we can also use our novel hashing structure to design algorithms for computing other distance metrics such as Nearest Neighbor Interchange (NNI), Subtree Pruning and Regrafting (SPR), and Tree Bisection and Reconnection (TBR) distances.

The Asian Crash of 1997 gave final closure to the era of Cold War geoeconomics. For decades American liberal capitalism had maintained an oddly symbiotic relationship with East Asia¡¦s far more centrist economies. The end of the Cold War, however, opened the door for full-thrust globalization on Washington¡¦s terms. At first, foreign investment and money market speculation stoked what looked like a new super-miracle on the Pacific Rim. Few took serious notice of how the lending binge of the mid-1990s recklessly expanded foreign debt relative to reserves. When the bubble broke in 1997, massive capital exodus sent the region into a ruinous plunge. The IMF took its time in responding, and finally applied a dubious rescue formula that helped to turn the Crash into a protracted Crisis. Taking the Crisis as a window on the politics of globalization, this study builds on the development theory of Amartya Sen. It follows from Sen¡¦s axiom of ¡§development as freedom¡¨ that just and sustainable development is best achieved where economic and political priorities are balanced in what I term the ¡§concurrence¡¨ approach to development. From this vantage the post-Crisis condition of the Rim was hardly more conducive to political development than was the pre-Crisis situation, for poverty can be as much a developmental roadblock as authoritarianism is. Neoliberal globalism could no longer hide behind the democratic veneer of ¡§third wave¡¨ or ¡§end of history¡¨ determinism. By the mid-1990s the specter of cultural anarchy already haunted much of the developing world outside the Rim, and the Crash threatened to expunge that crucial exception. Nor was this just a Third World dilemma. The socioeconomic efficacy of the whole capitalist system was on trial. In Sen¡¦s view, the Asian Crisis spotlighted the high cost of undemocratic governance. Asian exceptionalists held that Western liberal democracy was not needed in this high-growth sphere, and indeed would be a hindrance. Sen argues, however, that the cultivation of freedom, as both an end and means, is not just a Western imperative. Indeed, his expansive view of social well-being is rooted in Asian values. In lieu of the statist economism that was falsely identified as Asian values during the ¡§miracle¡¨ years, Sen proposes an ¡§Eastern strategy¡¨ that draws on the more humane dimensions of Asian development. He credits state interventions such as public education and land reform as major contributions not only to the ¡§Asian miracle¡¨ but to all sustainable development. Much more is involved in the Senian model than the slightly modified economism that has appropriated the ¡§Third Way¡¨ label. This study draws positive and negative cases in point from the development records of the Philippines, Indonesia and South Korea. While all three countries were hard hit by the Crash and the subsequent Crisis, each reacted in its own way. What they had in common, however, was the undertow effect of neoliberal globalization, whereby foreign capital and policy constraints eroded their effective autonomy. Unfortunately, Sen¡¦s attention to the glaring inequalities of global capitalism is not matched by much attention to the transnational corporations (TNCs) that dominate the global economy. Likewise he has tended to neglect crucial postmaterial issues such as cultural and environmental sustainability. Useful as his informational strategies are for averting social catastrophies such as famine, he fails to adequately contest the political, cultural, and environmental inroads of globalization. For that it is necessary to move beyond the pallid globalism of Sen¡¦s own politics. The paradoxical task of this study, therefore, is to free the Senian model from Sen himself.

The concept of Public Participation comes from democratic theory. The core assumes that people are interested in public affairs and participate constructively. The consensus conference is developed to solve democratic problems. IT invites people without specialized knowledge to discuss controversial issues before they read related data. They set important problems in the domain and ask the experts in public. they debate controversial issues and make a decision. The youth consensus conference is the promise of President Chen in April. It provides youth the opportunity to participate social democracy. And we discuss the comment response adequately, conference satisfy, and conclusion reachable to make sure the difference between experts and participators. 61.1% participators thought comment response adequately is important and better. 55.6% participators thought that the conference satisfy is important and positive. The great conclusion is anticipated. 44.1% participator had different comment in conclusion reachable. Because about half people thought conclusion reachable was not easy to achieve. The experts had almost the same opinion in comment response and they believed the existence of sufficient comment reachable system. It makes everybody would say everything. A part of experts the topics influence consensus. The experts thought the conclusions was not possible adopt by the government. The point is the knowledge gained and the process of discussion.

.

The aim of this project is to study the level of paradigm development in the domain of social media studies. Based on the works of Kuhn (1970), Pfeffer (1993), and Thompson and Tuden (1959), the level of paradigm development was defined as the degree of consensus regarding: research topics, methods, and theories used in a given field of study. A sample of social media research articles was studied to analyze the level paradigm development within this domain of study. The sample consisted of a group of social media research articles that were published in the top ten journals of communication studies in the last five years. Content analysis methodology was used to analyze the research articles and clusters analysis was utilized in order to investigate the level of paradigm development in this field of study. The analysis confirmed the lack of consensus in the social sciences (Pfeffer, 1993). The level of agreement regarding research methods, theoretical concepts, and research topics used in social media studies was quite low. The lack of consensus in this new domain of study may be explained by two factors. Social media as an academic field is still in its infancy (Van Osch and Coursaris, 2014), and thus it lacks of a shared body of theoretical knowledge that can be used to analyze the phenomenon of social media (Van Osch and Coursaris, 2014; Chong and Xie, 2011; and Khang, Ki, and Ye, 2012). In conclusion, this project suggests that social media studies should aim to develop a high level of paradigm development, since academic fields with high levels of consensus are better organized, have fewer power conflicts, and get more funding (Beyer and Lodhl, 1976; Pfeffer, 1993).

This dissertation addresses three diverse research problems pertaining to rigid body attitude stabilization and control. The problems addressed result in theoretical development for the topics of cooperative control, delayed feedback, and state estimation, through the formulation of a novel class of switching observers. In the area of consensus management for cooperative control, the problem of designing torque control laws that synchronize the attitude of a team of rigid bodies under constant, unknown communication time delays is addressed. Directed communication graphs are considered, which encompass both leader-follower and leaderless architectures. A feedback linearization result involving the Modified Rodrigues parameter (MRP) representation of attitude kinematics reduces the attitude dynamics equations to double integrator agents and the remainder of the control effort achieves position consensus. New necessary and sufficient delay dependent stability conditions for the system of double integrator agents are presented. This dissertation also considers the problem of stabilizing attitude dynamics with unknown piecewise-constant delayed feedback. The problem is addressed through stability analysis of switched linear time-invariant and nonlinear timedelay systems. In the case of linear systems with switched delay feedback, a new sufficiency condition for average dwell time result is presented using a complete type Lyapunov-Krasovskii (L-K) functional approach. Further, the corresponding switched system with nonlinear perturbations is proven to be exponentially stable inside a well characterized region of attraction for an appropriately chosen average dwell time. Finally, this dissertation provides a new switching angular velocity observer formulation to the classical problem of rigid body attitude tracking in the absence of angular rate measurements. Exponential convergence of the angular velocity state estimation errors is proven independent of control design by using a novel error signal definition through this switching-type observer. The switching ensures C0 continuity for all the estimated states. Further, the maximum number of switches required by the observer is shown to be finite and that zeno-type behavior cannot occur. A “separation property” type result in the absence of actual angular rate measurements is established, wherein a linear and nonlinear controller utilizes angular velocity estimates from the proposed observer to achieve attitude tracking. / text

In spring 1958, the political work of developing a new pension system stalled, after they conducted the negotiations between the government and the opposition stranded. The Social Democratic government was keen to get through a pension proposition and chose to submit its proposal to the Parliament, in the hope that members of the opposition would abandon their party line. The government previously lost its majority in the second chamber, since the Center Party left the government because they were of a different opinion than the Social Democrats. The Social Democrats Party of Prime Minister Tage Erlander in the forefront plunged to govern in minority. On April 26, conducted the vote in parliament vote which rejected the Social Democrats' proposals and Prime Minister Tage Erlander announced that he would seek the King to dissolve parliament because it then would be new elections to the parliament lower house on June 1. There came an dissolution and an election campaign was to wait before the Swedes would go to the polls. In the study, the campaign portrayed the basis of the Dagens Nyheter, Arbetet and Svenska dagbladet conveys the image of news articles and editorials. An election campaign that was dominated by the issue of pensions in the first place but also the People's struggle for a consensus and a opposition hope of a change of power. Keywords: Pension, consensus, social security, government option and election campaign

Freedom is a fundamental concept for anarchism; but what does that mean, exactly? What sort of freedom do anarchists seek, and how do they hope to realise this freedom? Starting with the premise that such questions, though vital to the anarchist project, have mostly been ignored, this thesis argues that the basic libertarian impulse of anarchism is in need of a critical analysis. Such an analysis, however, highlights a number of problems with the anarchist demand for a world without domination, so anarchist understandings of ethics, and of power, are explored in search for answers. However, anarchist approaches to ethics and power prove to be equally problematic, and serious doubts are raised about the potential for anarchism to provide a world where freedom is absolute, and, conversely, where all forms of coercion are rejected. One possible response to this is to be found in the contemporary support for consensus-decision making, which many anarchists argue has the potential to resolve conflict; however, it is argued that far from offering a response to the concerns raised in previous chapters, the possibilities of consensus must be seen to be greatly reduced, once such concerns are properly taken into account. Unable to live up to its libertarian promises, anarchism may appear to have reached a dead-end. However, the thesis concludes by arguing that anarchism s prefigurative approach to politics, as well as its sustained critique of hierarchy, offer both radical and realisable possibilities for creating a world of much greater equality and freedom even if such freedom can never be absolute. In accepting the limits of anarchism, its possibilities can be seen more clearly.