[pt] Embora comércio internacional e práticas organizacionais sejam conhecidos determinantes da produtividade de firmas, a evidência empírica sobre a relação entre ambos é escassa. Este artigo explora variação exógena crível em redução tarifárias em setores da indústria para mostrar que firmas no Brasil, após o choque, são menos organizadas em termos de hierarquias. Consistente com a literatura de hierarquias baseadas em conhecimento, aumento de concorrência estrangeira reduz significativamente a parcela de gerentes e o número de camadas organizacionais em uma firma. Além disso, nós encontramos movimentos composicionais importantes dentro dos setores: apesar de possuírem tamanhos similares, firmas entrantes possuem menos gerentes e camadas do que as que deixam o mercado. Usando dados abrangentes com identificação mais crível que trabalhos anteriores na literatura, nosso artigo documenta fatos estilizados da organização de firmas em um país subdesenvolvido, assim como contribui para o estudo de um determinante potencialmente importante da produtividade no agregado. / [en] While it is known that international trade and organizational practices are determinants of firm productivity, empirical evidence on their relation to each other is scarce. This paper explores credible exogenous variation in tariff reductions across manufacturing sectors to show that firms in Brazil are less structured in terms of hierarchies following the shock. Consistent with the literature on knowledge-based hierarchies, increased foreign competition reduces significantly the share of managers and the number of organizational layers on a firm. Besides, we find notable compositional movements within sectors: although similarly sized, entrant firms have fewer managers and layers than leavers. By using comprehensive data with more credible identification than previous work in the literature, our paper documents stylized facts on firms organization in a developing country, as well as contributes to the study of a potentially important determinant of aggregate productivity.

CPU cache hierarchies are the central solution in bridging the memory wall. A proper understanding of how to trade-off their high cost against performance can lead to cost-savings without sacrificing performance.Due to the combinatorial nature of the problem, there exist a large number of configurations to investigate, making design space exploration slow and cumbersome. To improve this process, this Thesis develops and evaluates a model for optimally trading-off cost and performance of CPU cache hierarchies, named the Optimal Cache Problem (OCP), in the form of a Non-linear Integer Problem. A second goal of this work is the development of an efficient solver for the OCP, which was found to be a branch & bound algorithm and proven to function correctly. Experiments were conducted to empirically analyse and validate the model and to showcase possible use-cases. There, it was possible to ascribe the model outputs on measurable performance metrics. The model succeeded in formalising the inherent trade-off between cost and performance in a way that allows for an efficient and complete search of the configuration space of possible cache hierarchies. In future work, the model needs to be refined and extended to allow for the simultaneous analysis of multiple programs.

Through non-human animals, humans have come to understand ways of living in this world and simultaneously animals have provided the resources for humans to claim this living. But through this progression and time humans have become detached from the origin of the resources. By this separation it becomes possible for humans to turn a blind eye to cruelty and the environmental impact that the claim to non-human animals convey. With the aim is to evoke reflection on the human ruling of the non-human animals, this project aims to design objects and furniture that are uncanny, familiar and ordinary but at the same time off-putting and maybe strange. By examining phycology and consumer culture theory, seek to find habits in the Swedish everyday life which are intimate and recognizable such as fredagsmys, a placeholder for consumption and hierarchies. Then through the analyse of critical animal studies, design objects and furniture that challenge these habits and positions of consumption and hierarchy.

We have a tendency to want to sort our surroundings, we set things against each other, value them and place them in a hierarchical order.Where something goes up, something else goes down.We attribute different properties to materials, techniques and spaces and load them with values. Our perception of the environment is based on a collective construction. Textiles are sorted among the home, women and decoration while glass is associated with exclusivity, traditional masculine craftsmanship and architecture.Where something goes up, something else goes down.Textile can be defined as material, like fiber, or as technique, like weaving, knitting, sewing. Threads that together form a composition by running over and under each other.Where something goes up, something else goes downCan I disrupt the hierarchical order between textile and glass by merging them? Because, I would like to change our view of how we can use textiles in a spatial context.My experience is that textiles in spatial and architectural contexts are often something added afterwards to adjust things that the building process has not considered. But other materials such as glass have an obvious position as part of the definition of space.

As the transport industry shifts towards Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs) the need for accurate route planning rises. BEVs have reduced range compared to traditional fuel based vehicles, and the range can vary greatly depending on ambient conditions and vehicle load. Existing research focuses more on the theoretical algorithms, and often have none or very simple vehicle models, leaning towards consumer cars instead of heavy duty trucks. Vehicle Route Planning (VRP) is a wide research area, and this thesis focuses on the Shortest Path subproblem. Contraction Hierarchies (CHs) is a commonly used family of algorithms for finding shortest paths in road networks, and is prevalent in the research frontier. CHs however comes with certain drawbacks, such as having to perform a costly preprocessing phase whenever metrics change, and not being able to share map data between multiple vehicles in a fleet. This thesis extends CHs to support a mixed fleet, with fast metric updates and support for more detailed cost optimization goals. This is done by implementing Customizable Contraction Hierarchies (CCHs), but with custom data structures and customization phase. This implementation allows map data to be shared between vehicles in a fleet, and keeps each vehicle's edge weights separate. The edge weights can be updated quickly, as the customization phase scales linearly with the size of the map. The implementation also supports edge weights that do not adhere to triangle inequality, which the previous research did not. Experiments are executed on a map of Stockholm and a synthetic map, to test the algorithm's performance, verify correctness, and stress the importance of accurate metrics for optimization goals. The CCH performed as expected, if not better, and its correctness is upheld. The implementation is fit to be integrated into a route planner, but further research should be conducted to see how it meshes with other parts of VRP, such as time windows, turn costs, and charging stations. / När transportindustrin övergår till batterielektriska fordon ökar behovet av rigorös ruttplanering. Batterielektriska fordon har minskad räckvidd jämfört med traditionella bränslebaserade fordon, och räckvidden kan variera stort beroende på omgivningsförhållanden och fordonets belastning. Existerande forskning fokuserar mer på de teoretiska algoritmerna och har ofta inga eller mycket enkla fordonsmodeller, som liknar mer konsumentbilar istället för tunga lastbilar. Ruttplanering är ett brett forskningsområde, och denna avhandling fokuserar på underproblemet att hitta kortaste vägen. Kontraktionshierarkier är en välanvänd familj av algoritmer för att hitta kortaste vägen i ett vägnät, och är prevalent i forskningsfronten. Kontraktionshierarkier har dock vissa nackdelar, som att de behöver utföra en kostsam förbehandlingsfas när parametrar ändras, och att kartdatan inte kan delas mellan flera fordon i en flotta. Den här avhandlingen utökar Kontraktionshierarkier för att stödja en blandad fordonsflotta, med snabba uppdateringar av parametrar och stöd för mer detaljerade optimeringsmål. Detta görs genom att implementera Anpassningsbara Kontraktionsierarkier, men med anpassade datastrukturer och anpassningsfas. Denna implementering tillåter att kartdata delas mellan fordonen i en flotta, och håller varje fordons kantvikter separat. Kantvikterna kan uppdateras snabbt, eftersom anpassningsfasen skalas linjärt med storleken på kartan. Implementationen stöder också kantvikter som inte följer triangelojämlikheten, vilket den tidigare forskningen inte gjorde. Experiment utförs på en karta över Stockholm och en syntetisk karta, för att testa algoritmens prestanda, verifiera korrekthet, och betona vikten av detaljerade parametrar i optimeringsmål. Anpassningsbara Kontraktionshierarkier presterade som förväntat, om inte bättre, och dess korrekthet uppehölls. Implementeringen är lämplig för att integreras i en ruttplanerare, men ytterligare forskning bör genomföras för att se hur den passar ihop med andra delar av ruttplaneringsproblemet, så som tidsfönster, svängkostnader och laddstationer.

This study investigates how the members of four different role-playing communities on the online platform Second Life perform social as well as dramatic roles within their community. The trajectories of power influencing these roles are my main focus. Theoretically I am relying primarily on performance studies scholar Richard Schechner, sociologist Erving Goffman, and post-structuralists Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Felìx Guattari. My methodological stance has its origin primarily within literature studies using text analysis as my preferred method, but I also draw on the (cyber)ethnographical works of primarily T.L. Taylor, Celia Pearce, and Mikael Jakobsson. In this dissertation my focus is the relationship of the role-player to their chosen role especially in terms of the boundary between being in character, and as such removed from ”reality,” and the popping out of character, which instead highlights the negotiations of the social, sometimes make-belief, roles. Destabilising and problematising the dichotomy between the notion of the online as virtual and the offline as real, as well as the idea that everything is ”real” regardless of context, my aim is to understand role-play in a digital realm in a new way, in which two modes of performance, dramatic and social, take place in a digital context online — or inworld as many SL residents call it.

In a large number of applications, the processing relies on objects or area of interests, and the pixel-based image representation is notwell adapted. These applications would benefit from a region-based processing. Early examples of region-based processing can be found in the area of image segmentation, such as the quad tree. Recently, in mathematical morphology, the connected operators have received much attention. They are region-based filtering tools that act by merging flat zones. They have good contour preservation properties in the sense that they do not create any new boundaries, neither do they shift the existing ones. One popular implementation for connected operators relies on tree-based image representations, notably threshold decomposition representations and hierarchical representations. Those tree-based image representations are widely used in many image processing and computer vision applications. Tree-based connected operators consist in constructing a set of nested or disjoint connected components, followed by a filtering of these connected components based on an attribute function characterizing each connected component. Finally, the filtered image is reconstructed from the simplified tree composed of the remaining connected components. In the work presented in this thesis, we propose to expand the ideas of tree-based connected operators. We introduce the notion of tree-based shape spaces, built from tree-based image representations. Many state-of-the-art methods relying on tree-based image representations consist of analyzing this shape space. A first consequence of this change of point of view is our proposition of a local feature detector, called the tree-based Morse regions (TBMR). It can be seen as a variant of the MSER method. The selection of TBMRs is based on topological information, and hence it extracts the regions independently of the contrast, which makes it truly contrast invariant and quasi parameters free. The accuracy and robustness of the TBMR approach are demonstrated by the repeatability test and by applications to image registration and 3D reconstruction, as compared to some state-of-the-art methods. The basic idea of the main proposition in this thesis is to apply connected filters on the shape space. Such a processing is called the framework of shape-based morphology. It is a versatile framework that deals with region-based image representations. It has three main consequences. 1) For filtering purpose, it is a generalization of the existing tree-based connected operators. Indeed, the framework encompasses classical existing connected operators by attributes. Besides, It also allows us to propose two classes of novel connected operators: shape-based lower/upper levelings and shapings. 2) This framework can be used to object detection/segmentation by selecting relevant points in the shape space. 3) We can also use this framework to transform the hierarchies using the extinction values, so that a hierarchical simplification or segmentation is obtained. Some applications are developed using the framework of shape-based morphology to demonstrate its usefulness. The applications of the shape-based filtering to retinal image analysis show that a mere filtering step that we compare to more evolved processings, achieves state-of-the-art results. An efficient shaping used for image simplification is proposed by minimizing Mumford-Shah functional subordinated to the topographic map. For object detection/segmentation, we proposed a context-based energy estimator that is suitable to characterize object meaningfulness. Last, we extend the hierarchy of constrained connectivity using the aspect of hierarchy transformation of constrained connectivity using the aspect ofhierarchy transformation.

Sabang used to be a small, marginalized Philippine fishing village that in the span of three decades became a well-known international sex tourism site. This thesis deals with the implications of tourism (including sex tourism) and how it has become embedded in the daily life in today’s Sabang. The thesis highlights the local populations’ diverse reactions to the various changes associated with tourism growth, in particular how various symbolic, moral, and spatial boundaries are constructed and maintained. The ethnographic material examined in this thesis builds on several periods of fieldwork, in total 18 months, that were carried out between 2003 and 2015. Analytical tools found in tourism anthropology and in particular the branch of postcolonial tourism studies has guided the discussion and analysis of the socio-cultural effects of becoming a tourism town. This thesis argues that complex networks of boundaries are significant in maintaining a sense of order and social cohesion in times of change. Notions of cultural differences are expressed through the narratives and behaviors of the various inhabitants, and contribute to the maintaining of boundaries within and between groups. From the beginning of tourism growth commercial sex has been central and has become a significant factor in the tourism economy. While residents acknowledge their dependency on the go-go bars, the business of the night is framed so as not to defeat the inhabitants’ struggles to maintain local community’s sense of morality, or at least to set up boundaries between the outsiders’ immorality and insiders’ morality. Tourism has also offered opportunities to challenge conventional social hierarchies and local seats of power, and there are also recurrent discussions about who has the right to control resources and who can claim entitlement to a place now shared by people from all over the world.

Dans le travail présenté dans cette thèse, nous proposons d'élargir les idées des opérateurs connexes à base d'arbres. Nous introduisons la notion d'espaces de formes à base d'arbres, construit à partir des représentations d'image à base d'arbres. De nombreuses méthodes de l'état de l'art, s'appuyant sur ces représentations d'images à base d'arbres, consistent à analyser cet espace de forme. Une première conséquence de ce changement de point de vue est notre proposition d'un détecteur de caractéristiques locales, appelé les « tree-based Morse regions » (TBMR). Cette approche peut être considérée comme une variante de la méthode des MSER. La sélection des TBMRs est basée sur des informations topologiques, et donc extrait les régions indépendamment du contraste, ce qui la rend vraiment invariante aux changements de contraste; de plus, la méthode peut être considérée sans paramètres. La précision et la robustesse de l'approche TBMR sont démontrées par le test de reproductibilité et par des applications au recalage d'image et à la reconstruction 3D, en comparaison des méthodes de l'état de l'art. L'idée de base de la proposition principale dans cette thèse est d'appliquer les opérateurs connexes à l'espace des formes. Un tel traitement est appelé la morphologie basée sur la forme. Ce cadre polyvalent traite des représentations d'images à base de région. Il a trois conséquences principales. 1) Dans un but de filtrage, il s'agit d'une généralisation des opérateurs connexes à base d'arbres. En effet, le cadre englobe les opérateurs connexes classiques par attributs. En outre, il permet également de proposer deux nouvelles classes d'opérateurs connexes: nivellements inférieurs/supérieurs à base de forme et shapings. 2) Ce cadre peut être utilisé pour la détection/segmentation d'objets en sélectionnant les points pertinents dans l'espace des formes. 3) Nous pouvons également utiliser ce cadre pour transformer les hiérarchies en utilisant les valeurs d'extinction, obtenant ainsi une simplification/segmentation hiérarchique. Afin de montrer l'utilité de l'approche proposée, plusieurs applications sont développées. Les applications à l'analyse d'images rétinenne de filtrage basé sur la forme montrent qu'une simple étape de filtrage, comparée à des traitements plus évolués, réalise des résultats au niveau de l'état de l'art. Une application de shaping pour la simplification d'image est proposée, fondée sur une minimisation de la fonctionnelle de Mumford-Shah subordonnée à l'arbre de formes. Pour la détection/segmentation d'objets, nous proposons un estimateur de l'énergie basée sur le contexte. Cet estimateur est approprié pour caractériser la signification d'objet. Enfin, nous étendons le cadre de la connectivité contrainte en utilisant l'aspect de transformation de hiérarchie / In a large number of applications, the processing relies on objects or area of interests, and the pixel-based image representation is notwell adapted. These applications would benefit from a region-based processing. Early examples of region-based processing can be found in the area of image segmentation, such as the quad tree. Recently, in mathematical morphology, the connected operators have received much attention. They are region-based filtering tools that act by merging flat zones. They have good contour preservation properties in the sense that they do not create any new boundaries, neither do they shift the existing ones. One popular implementation for connected operators relies on tree-based image representations, notably threshold decomposition representations and hierarchical representations. Those tree-based image representations are widely used in many image processing and computer vision applications. Tree-based connected operators consist in constructing a set of nested or disjoint connected components, followed by a filtering of these connected components based on an attribute function characterizing each connected component. Finally, the filtered image is reconstructed from the simplified tree composed of the remaining connected components. In the work presented in this thesis, we propose to expand the ideas of tree-based connected operators. We introduce the notion of tree-based shape spaces, built from tree-based image representations. Many state-of-the-art methods relying on tree-based image representations consist of analyzing this shape space. A first consequence of this change of point of view is our proposition of a local feature detector, called the tree-based Morse regions (TBMR). It can be seen as a variant of the MSER method. The selection of TBMRs is based on topological information, and hence it extracts the regions independently of the contrast, which makes it truly contrast invariant and quasi parameters free. The accuracy and robustness of the TBMR approach are demonstrated by the repeatability test and by applications to image registration and 3D reconstruction, as compared to some state-of-the-art methods. The basic idea of the main proposition in this thesis is to apply connected filters on the shape space. Such a processing is called the framework of shape-based morphology. It is a versatile framework that deals with region-based image representations. It has three main consequences. 1) For filtering purpose, it is a generalization of the existing tree-based connected operators. Indeed, the framework encompasses classical existing connected operators by attributes. Besides, It also allows us to propose two classes of novel connected operators: shape-based lower/upper levelings and shapings. 2) This framework can be used to object detection/segmentation by selecting relevant points in the shape space. 3) We can also use this framework to transform the hierarchies using the extinction values, so that a hierarchical simplification or segmentation is obtained. Some applications are developed using the framework of shape-based morphology to demonstrate its usefulness. The applications of the shape-based filtering to retinal image analysis show that a mere filtering step that we compare to more evolved processings, achieves state-of-the-art results. An efficient shaping used for image simplification is proposed by minimizing Mumford-Shah functional subordinated to the topographic map. For object detection/segmentation, we proposed a context-based energy estimator that is suitable to characterize object meaningfulness. Last, we extend the hierarchy of constrained connectivity using the aspect of hierarchy transformation of constrained connectivity using the aspect ofhierarchy transformation.

Une nouvelle borne supérieure sur le cardinal des codes de sous-espaces d'un espace vectoriel fini est établie grâce à la méthode de la programmation semidéfinie positive. Ces codes sont d'intérêt dans le cadre du codage de réseau (network coding). Ensuite, par la même méthode, l'on démontre une borne sur le cardinal des ensembles qui évitent une distance donnée dans l'espace de Johnson et qui est obtenue par une variante d'un programme de Schrijver. Les résultats numériques permettent d'améliorer les bornes existantes sur le nombre chromatique mesurable de l'espace Euclidien. Une hiérarchie de programmes semidéfinis positifs est construite à partir de certaines matrices issues des complexes simpliciaux. Ces programmes permettent d'obtenir une borne supérieure sur le nombre d'indépendance d'un graphe. Aussi, cette hiérarchie partage certaines propriétés importantes avec d'autres hiérarchies classiques. A titre d'exemple, le problème de déterminer le nombre d'indépendance des graphes de Paley est analysé. / We apply the semidefinite programming method to obtain a new upper bound on the cardinality of codes made of subspaces of a linear vector space over a finite field. Such codes are of interest in network coding.Next, with the same method, we prove an upper bound on the cardinality of sets avoiding one distance in the Johnson space, which is essentially Schrijver semidefinite program. This bound is used to improve existing results on the measurable chromatic number of the Euclidean space.We build a new hierarchy of semidefinite programs whose optimal values give upper bounds on the independence number of a graph. This hierarchy is based on matrices arising from simplicial complexes. We show some properties that our hierarchy shares with other classical ones. As an example, we show its application to the problem of determining the independence number of Paley graphs.