Aristotle's own solution is treated as a series of responses to his predecessors. His dialectical character and his subtle understanding of the complexity of human condition enable him to reach a dialectical and dynamic mean between these two extremes solutions. Aristotle objects Plato's attack of rhetoric, acknowledges its value, and secures its legitimate status in political life. But he also realizes the innate limitations of rhetoric. His theoretical solution to the tension lies in his theory of virtue and happiness. According to his ethics, virtue bridges these two series of goods, and in a virtuous person the tension does not exist. But this theory also has the same limitation of rhetoric in general, i.e., the lack of compulsory power. Therefore Aristotle, like Plato, tries to establish an ideal city, habituating the people to be truly virtuous through a series of legislative efforts. Good as it is, legislation cannot solve the tension permanently either, due to the universality of law. Therefore, when facing new situations or in critical moments, the system of law needs the supplement of decent and prudent politicians and through rhetoric. Thus, Aristotle establishes a virtuous circle between rhetoric and legislation, and such a dynamic system will give enough flexibility to deal with the complexity of human political life, and enables him to solve this tension successfully. / The first part presents two solutions given by Aristotle's predecessors. On the one hand, Gorgias, the representative rhetorician of that time began to reflect and champion the power of rhetoric. Such a theoretical reflection brought huge impact on Athenian political life. I treat Pericles and Alcibiades under Thucydides' depiction as spiritual heirs of Gorgias. They both try to solve the tension through rhetoric. On the other hand, Plato, fully realizing the limitation of rhetoric, attacks it in his Gorgias, and further in his Republic tries to solve this tension through legislation. / The tension between private and cornmon good is a problem for any human political society, and a central question for any political philosophy. This thesis tries to examine some attempts of solving this tension in ancient Greek context, and focuses on Aristotle's practical philosophy. / Liu, Wei. / Adviser: Qingjie Wang. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 73-03, Section: A, page: . / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2010. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 254-266). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [201-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstract also in Chinese.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1980. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ENGINEERING. / Bibliography: leaves 263-276. / by Roger William Wicke. / Ph.D.

Human influence on the environment is becoming increasingly pervasive across the globe, and can drastically impact ecological patterns and processes. For many terrestrial wildlife species, human influence can fragment critical habitat, increase mortality, and threaten habitat connectivity and ultimately the persistence of wildlife populations. This dissertation aims to use multiple conservation ecology methods and tools to test the impact of human influence on the population dynamics of a large carnivore in a human-dominated landscape. To assess the impact of human activity on carnivore ecology, a series of empirical studies were conducted on a small population of American black bear (Ursus americanus) in the Western Great Basin, USA. A long-term dataset including geographic locations of animal habitat choices as well as mortality locations were used in multiple statistical models that tested the response of black bears to human activity. These analyses were conducted at multiple spatial and temporal resolutions to reveal nuances potentially overlooked if analyses were limited to a single resolution. Individual studies, presented as dissertation chapters, examine the relationships between human activity and carnivore ecology. Collectively, the results of these studies find black bear ecology to be highly sensitive to the magnitude and spatial composition of human activity in the Lake Tahoe Basin, observable at both coarse and fine spatial resolutions. The results presented in this study on the influence of human activity on large carnivore population dynamics allow for a more thorough understanding of the various ways common conservation ecology methods and tools can be used to evaluate human-wildlife relationships.

Predicting and understanding the dynamic of human motion has many applications such as motion synthesis, augmented reality, security, education, reinforcement learning, autonomous vehicles, and many others. In this thesis, we create a novel end-to-end pipeline that can predict multiple future poses from the same input, and, in addition, can classify the entire sequence. Our focus is on the following two aspects of human motion understanding: Probabilistic human action prediction: Given a sequence of human poses as input, we sample multiple possible future poses from the same input sequence using a new GAN-based network. Human motion understanding: Given a sequence of human poses as input, we classify the actual action performed in the sequence and improve the classification performance using the presentation learned from the prediction network. We also demonstrate how to improve model training from noisy labels, using facial expression recognition as an example. More specifically, we have 10 taggers to label each input image, and compare four different approaches: majority voting, multi-label learning, probabilistic label drawing, and cross-entropy loss. We show that the traditional majority voting scheme does not perform as well as the last two approaches that fully leverage the label distribution. We shared the enhanced FER+ data set with multiple labels for each face image with the research community (https://github.com/Microsoft/FERPlus). For predicting and understanding of human motion, we propose a novel sequence-to-sequence model trained with an improved version of generative adversarial networks (GAN). Our model, which we call HP-GAN2, learns a probability density function of future human poses conditioned on previous poses. It predicts multiple sequences of possible future human poses, each from the same input sequence but seeded with a different vector z drawn from a random distribution. Moreover, to quantify the quality of the non-deterministic predictions, we simultaneously train a motion-quality-assessment model that learns the probability that a given skeleton pose sequence is a real or fake human motion. In order to classify the action performed in a video clip, we took two approaches. In the first approach, we train on a sequence of skeleton poses from scratch using random parameters initialization with the same network architecture used in the discriminator of the HP-GAN2 model. For the second approach, we use the discriminator of the HP-GAN2 network, extend it with an action classification branch, and fine tune the end-to-end model on the classification tasks, since the discriminator in HP-GAN2 learned to differentiate between fake and real human motion. So, our hypothesis is that if the discriminator network can differentiate between synthetic and real skeleton poses, then it also has learned some of the dynamics of a real human motion, and that those dynamics are useful in classification as well. We will show through multiple experiments that that is indeed the case. Therefore, our model learns to predict multiple future sequences of human poses from the same input sequence. We also show that the discriminator learns a general representation of human motion by using the learned features in an action recognition task. And we train a motion-quality-assessment network that measure the probability of a given sequence of poses are valid human poses or not. We test our model on two of the largest human pose datasets: NTURGB-D, and Human3.6M. We train on both single and multiple action types. The predictive power of our model for motion estimation is demonstrated by generating multiple plausible futures from the same input and showing the effect of each of the several loss functions in the ablation study. We also show the advantage of switching to GAN from WGAN-GP, which we used in our previous work. Furthermore, we show that it takes less than half the number of epochs to train an activity recognition network by using the features learned from the discriminator.

O presente estudo teve como objetivo analisar artigos científicos na área de saúde pública, que envolviam direta e indiretamente seres humanos, publicados anteriormente à Resolução 196/96. Analisamos artigos científicos da Revista de Saúde Pública e Cadernos de Saúde Pública de 1990 a 1996. Baseamos nossa análise em categorias retiradas da Resolução 196/96 previamente estabelecidas: consentimento do sujeito de Pesquisa, sujeitos com autonomia reduzida, proteção de sujeitos e grupos vulneráveis e legalmente incapazes, confidencialidade, privacidade, proteção da imagem, estigmatização, benefícios do retorno da pesquisa. A análise dos dados foi efetuada em dois momentos: caracterização das revistas analisadas e análise de conteúdo. Os resultados encontrados foram: 568 artigos levantados, 384 (67,6%) da Revista da Saúde Pública e 184 (32,4%) dos Cadernos de Saúde Pública. Destes, 296 (52,1%) envolviam direta ou indiretamente sujeitos humanos que foram objeto de nossa análise. Instituições mais utilizadas para o desenvolvimento de pesquisas: serviços de saúde 134 (23,6%), empresas, indústrias, escritórios e instituições públicas 52 (9,2%), residências 42 (7,4), lazer e assistência social somam 6 (10%). Tipos de pesquisa: epidemiológica 121 (21,3%), biológica 59 (10,4%), psicológica 10 (1,8%), nutricional 42 (7,4%), ambiental 9 (1,6%). Analisamos qualitativamente trechos de artigos baseando nossa análise na Resolução 196/96. Consideramos que antes da elaboração da resolução 196/95, talvez não existisse um interesse / The present study objective is analyse the scientific articles in the public health area, involving human beings directly and indirectly, published prior to the enforcement of Resolution 196/96. [It was researched all the published articles in the Revista de Saúde Pública and Cadernos de Saúde Pública Journals from 1990 to 1996]. The articles were analysed based on categories previously established by Resolution 196/96: subjects consent, subjects with little autonomy, protection of vulnerable and legally incapable groups, confidentiality, privacy, protection of the image, stigma, benefits, social return of the research. The analysis were divided in two moments: 1st moment: caractherization of the two periodicals and 2nd moment, qualitative analysis of the articles content analysis. The results were as follows: 568 scientific articles, 384 (67,6%) from Revista de Saúde Pública and 184 (32,4%) from Cadernos de Saúde Pública. Of these, 296 (52,1%) involved human beings direct or indirectly and that was the objective of the analysis. The institutions used for research: The health system 134 (23,6%); industries, offices and state institutions 52 (9,2%); residences 42 (7,4%), places of leisure and social services added 6 (10%). Type of research: Epidemiological 121 (21,3%), biological 59 (10,4%), psichological 10 (1,8%), nutritional 42 (7,4%), ambiental 21 (3,7%), social 20 (3,5%), services and programs evaluation 9 (1,6%). Extracts from articles were analysed qualitatively based on the Resolution 196/96. Bearing in mind that at the time of such publication 1990/1996 the concept of giving explanatory approach to the subject of research were not common practice, but with the enforcement of the Resolution this culture is being gradually changed.

It is unclear whether accounting for the number of rare taxa or differentiating live (cells with visible chloroplasts) and dead (empty cells) diatoms would enhance the accuracy and precision of diatom-based stream bioassessment. My dissertation research examines whether the number of rare taxa and percentage (%) live diatoms can be used as indicators of human disturbance in streams/rivers. To address my objectives, I analyzed two datasets collected at different spatial scales. The large scale dataset was collected over the course of five years and included more than 1300 sites and over 200 environmental variables from 12 Western US states (US EPA's Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program). The small scale dataset included 25 streams from the Oregon Coast Range. My findings revealed that rarity definition is important in bioassessment. Rural taxa richness (number of taxa with high occurrence and low abundance) was the only rarity metric that distinguished least disturbed (reference) sites from the most disturbed (impacted) ones. Neither of the other two rarity metrics, satellite (taxa with low occurrence and abundance) and urban (taxa with low occurrence and high abundance) taxa richness, was able to do that. Results from regression tree analysis revealed that rural taxa richness increased with human disturbance, but it was significantly higher at impacted sites only in the Mountains ecoregion (t-test, p0.05). Percentage live diatoms distinguished reference from impacted sites only in the Mountains ecoregion (t-test, p=0.02) and somewhat in the Plains (t-test, p=0.05). However, % live diatoms exhibited opposite patterns in the two ecoregions. They increased with disturbance in the Mountains and decreased in the Plains. The results from the small scale study in the Oregon Coast Range revealed similar species compositions between live and live+dead diatom assemblages (non-metric multidimensional scaling) and similar relationships with their environmental variables (linear fitting). Both assemblages correlated well with in-stream physical habitat conditions (e.g., channel dimensions, substrate types, and canopy cover). Both rural taxa richness and % live diatoms can be used as indicators of human disturbance in streams/rivers, especially in the Mountains ecoregion, dependent on specific assessment objectives.

It is widely believed that Australian Aboriginals utilised fire to manage various landscapes however to what extent this impacted on Australia???s ecosystems remains uncertain. The late Pleistocene/Holocene fire history from three sites within the Sydney Basin, Gooches Swamp, Lake Baraba and Kings Waterhole, were compared with archaeological and palaeoclimatic data using a novel method of quantifying macroscopic charcoal, which is presented in this study. The palynology and other palaeoecological proxies were also investigated at the three sites. The Gooches Swamp fire record appeared to be most influenced by climate and there was an abrupt increase in fire activity from the mid-Holocene perhaps associated with the onset of modern El Ni??o dominated conditions. The Kings Waterhole site also displayed an abrupt increase in charcoal at this time however there was a marked decrease in charcoal from ~3 ka. Lake Baraba similarly had displayed low levels of charcoal in the late Holocene. At both Kings Waterhole and Lake Baraba archaeological evidence suggests intensified human activity in the late Holocene during this period of lower and less variable charcoal. It is hence likely that at these sites Aboriginal people controlled fire activity in the late Holocene perhaps in response to the increased risk of large intense fires under an ENSO-dominated climate. The fire history of the Sydney Basin varies temporally and spatially and therefore it is not possible to make generalisations about pre-historic fire regimes. It is also not possible to use ideas about Aboriginal fire regimes or pre-historic activity as a management objective. The study demonstrates that increased fire activity is related to climatic variation and this is likely to be of significance under various enhanced Greenhouse scenarios. There were no major changes in the composition of the flora at all sites throughout late Pleistocene/Holocene although there were some changes in the relative abundance of different taxa. It is suggested that the Sydney Sandstone flora, which surrounds the sites, is relatively resistant to environmental changes. Casuarinaceae was present at Lake Baraba during the Last Glacial Maximum and therefore the site may have acted as a potential refugium for more mesic communities. There was a notable decline in Casuarinaceae during the Holocene at Lake Baraba and Kings Waterhole, a trend that has been found at a number of sites from southeastern Australia.

<p>“Trafficking” is not a thing. It is not an event. You cannot point a finger at it or take a photograph of it. “Trafficking” is a convenient, simple and useful label attached not to a single phenomenon but to a complex series of states and events that individually may or may not be harmful or wrong.”1Increasing attention has been given to the issue of trafficking in human beings worldwide because it is a gross violation of human dignity and human rights. Hundreds of thousands of women and children are now commodities sold on an international market to be exploited in prostitution, pornography and forced labour. No country is immune because trafficking is a problem that goes beyond national borders. This thesis focuses on the example of one country, namely Georgia, and its position in the fight against trafficking in human beings. The thesis employs a qualitative research strategy and a case study research design. As a developing country, Georgia greatly depends on assistance from various stakeholders from the international community and local civil society. Thus, the thesis examines a network of cooperation for the formulation of anti-trafficking policy with the help of foreign governments, international organizations and local non-governmental organizations. The conclusions drawn from the conducted research can be summarized as follows: anti-trafficking policy is a specific policy area where issue experts having knowledge about various aspects of this phenomenon count as much as establishments possessing political, economic and organizational power. Thus, anti-trafficking policy formulation and development in Georgia can serve as an example of an issue network.</p>

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1972. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 361-366).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 1929. / Vita. Published also as Teachers college, Columbia university, Contributions to education, no. 366. Bibliography: p. 106-108.