<p>Previous studies have reported inconsistent results for people with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) in both biological motion and Navon tasks. Each of these tasks require both local and global processing and were used in this study to compare processing styles of both ASD and typical groups. In the biological motion study, the ASD and the typical groups completed an emotion and a direction-discrimination experiment with happy and angry point-light walkers, which were presented in four different stimulus conditions: upright, inverted, scrambled and random. Overall, the ASD group had higher reaction times and lower accuracy, but the effect of condition did not differ between groups. Both groups performed worse in terms of accuracy and reaction times in the scrambled (i.e., local information only) conditions, therefore revealing a global bias in the processing of biological motion information. In the Navon task study with the same participants, typical individuals exhibited a global precedence effect, manifested as lower reaction times for global stimuli as well as global interference in “look for only local digits” task. However, individuals in the ASD group did not, on average, show a local or a global bias. In a subsequent analysis, the ASD group was divided into locally-biased and globally-biased sub-groups. Now, when a three way analysis between typical and the two ASD groups was performed, the globally-biased group’s performance was not distinguishable from that of the typical group, while no global bias was observed for the locally-biased group. When these two groups were compared on the Biological Motion study, the locally-biased group had no reaction time difference across conditions including both biological motion and Navon tasks, unlike the globally-biased group, who displayed higher reaction times for the scrambled condition, just like the typical group did. Therefore, it is possible that the inconsistencies in the local-global processing literature of individuals with ASD may have resulted because the studies did not account for individual differences in processing styles within the ASD groups that may be variable, unlike typical individuals who have a global bias for most tasks.</p> / Master of Science (MSc)

La relation entre immigrations et espace urbain connaît actuellement de profondes recompositions dans le contexte athénien. Des nouvelles territorialités voient le jour, induites surtout par des vagues migratoires récemment arrivées. Le but de cette thèse est d'étudier comment l'immigration chinoise, tout en faisant partie de ces vagues migratoires, se différencie et trace des parcours économiques et sociospatiaux autres. Le principal quartier d'installation des ces migrants, situé dans la partie ouest du centre d'Athènes, est au coeur de notre recherche. La question centrale de notre thèse est, d'une part, d'identifier les caractéristiques du tissu social et urbain qui ont permit ce regroupement et, d'autre part, de voir quelles mutations découlent de la présence chinoise dans le quartier. La méthodologie adoptée fait appel à quatre outils principaux : entretiens semi-directifs avec des commerçants et habitants chinois et non chinois, enquête par questionnaire sur deux immeubles du terrain d'étude, relevés et observations du quartier en question, enfin, recueil et traitement des données encore non publiées. Ce travail a suggéré qu'un « quartier chinois », tourné sur l'activité du commerce de gros, est en effet apparu. À côté de sa forte dimension économique, il s'agit d'un lieu de référence pour la population étudiée. Nous montrerons que ce regroupement ethnique coexiste avec d'autres dynamiques qui se manifestent dans le même espace. Les migrants chinois contribuent aux réhabilitations atypiques que connaît leur quartier d'installation, tandis que leur contribution procède de l'imbrication de l'échelle globale et de l'échelle locale. Faisant partie de la diaspora chinoise, ils mobilisent des réseaux transnationaux dans le processus de leur installation. En même temps, le quartier d'installation se transforme aussi pour devenir un nouveau pôle au sein de la toile migratoire chinoise. Finalement, cette étude a montré la nécessité de changer de regard sur la présence des migrants dans l'espace urbain. Contrairement au discours qui associe les migrants au déclin urbain, nous mettons l'accent sur l'aspect positif de leur rôle en tant qu'acteurs du changement urbain. / The relation between migration flows and urban space is experiencing significant recompositions in Athens. Recently arrived migration flows follow new territorialities in the city, thus reshaping its social and urban fabric. Aim of the thesis is to study the Chinese migration as part of those international flows and to further demonstrate the distinct sociospatial trajectories that the latter follow. The central neighborhood of their establishment, located in the west part of the city center, is at the core of our study. The principal question is, on the one hand, to identify the sociospatial characteristics of the neighborhood that allowed their establishment and, on the other hand, to analyze the visible changes of the area of establishment carried out by the Chinese presence. The research combines four methodological approaches: in depth interviews carried out with shopkeepers and inhabitants, both Chinese and non Chinese, survey by questionnaire in neighborhoods' apartment buildings, in situ observation and systematic mapping of the commercial activities and finally, gathering and processing of secondary data, such as population census and business registries. The thesis argues that Chinese migrants, mainly focused on wholesale commercial activities, formed a distinct “Chinese” area in Athens' city center. Next to its dominant economic dimension, the area also constitutes a meeting place for the majority of the Chinese migratory group, which proved to be highly heterogeneous in socioeconomic terms. The thesis further pointed out that this ethnic establishment coexists with the concomitant urban dynamics of the neighborhood. Further on, we showed that they do not only coexist, but they actively contribute to the atypical rehabilitation processes of Metaxourgio area. Their contribution is better understood as an outcome of the local / global scale intertwining. In fact, Chinese migrants, as integral part of a larger diaspora, mobilized transnational social networks in the process of their establishment. This process gave finally rise to a new "pole" of the Chinese diaspora in southern Europe. Following the study's findings, the thesis highlights the necessity of a theoretical shift towards the understanding of migrants' presence and role in the urban space. Contrary to the dominant, discriminating discourses that link migrants' presence to urban decline, this thesis, ultimately, manages to underline the positive effects of Chinese migrants their active role as agents of the urban change.

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This dissertation proposes a modular fast direct (MFD) analysis method for a class of problems involving a large fixed platform region and a smaller, variable design region. A modular solution algorithm is obtained by first decomposing the problem geometry into platform and design regions. The two regions are effectively detached from one another using basic equivalence concepts. Equivalence principles allow the total system model to be constructed in terms of independent interaction modules associated with the platform and design regions. These modules include interactions with the equivalent surface that bounds the design region. This dissertation discusses how to analyze (fill and factor) each of these modules separately and how to subsequently compose the solution to the original system using the separately analyzed modules. The focus of this effort is on surface integral equation formulations of electromagnetic scattering from conductors and dielectrics. In order to treat large problems, it is necessary to work with sparse representations of the underlying system matrix and other, related matrices. Fortunately, a number of such representations are available. In the following, we will primarily use the adaptive cross approximation (ACA) to fill the multilevel simply sparse method (MLSSM) representation of the system matrix. The MLSSM provides a sparse representation that is similar to the multilevel fast multipole method. Solutions to the linear systems obtained using the modular analysis strategies described above are obtained using direct methods based on the local-global solution (LOGOS) method. In particular, the LOGOS factorization provides a data sparse factorization of the MLSSM representation of the system matrix. In addition, the LOGOS solver also provides an approximate sparse factorization of the inverse of the system matrix. The availability of the inverse eases the development of the MFD method. Because the behavior of the LOGOS factorization is critical to the development of the proposed MFD method, a significant part of this dissertation is devoted to providing additional analyses, improvements, and characterizations of LOGOS-based direct solution methods. These further developments of the LOGOS factorization algorithms and their application to the development of the MFD method comprise the most significant contributions of this dissertation.

This dissertation develops surface integral equations using constraint-based Helmholtz decompositions for electromagnetic modeling. This new approach is applied to the electric field integral equation (EFIE), and it incorporates a Helmholtz decomposition (HD) of the current. For this reason, the new formulation is referred to as the EFIE-hd. The HD of the current is accomplished herein via appropriate surface integral constraints, and leads to a stable linear system. This strategy provides accurate solutions for the electric and magnetic fields at both high and low frequencies, it allows for the use of a locally corrected Nyström (LCN) discretization method for the resulting formulation, it is compatible with the local global solution framework, and it can be used with non-conformal meshes. To address large-scale and complex electromagnetic problems, an overlapped localizing local-global (OL-LOGOS) factorization is used to factorize the system matrix obtained from an LCN discretization of the augmented EFIE (AEFIE). The OL-LOGOS algorithm provides good asymptotic performance and error control when used with the AEFIE. This application is used to demonstrate the importance of using a well-conditioned formulation to obtain efficient performance from the factorization algorithm.

Dans l'Espagne de la fin du franquisme à nos jours, l'histoire socio-politique mouvementée dessine une ligne qui, de la dictature franquiste à la démocratie retrouvée, permet l'émergence d'une identité labile de la photographie espagnole oscillant entre l'alignement sur des modèles esthétiques et critiques dérivés de la postmodernité nord ­européenne et américaine et la valorisation de spécificités créatives forgées par la culture péninsulaire. Dans ce processus de quête identitaire, nous avons déterminé trois phases : d'abord, dans les dernières heures du franquisme et le début de la transition démocratique, sous l'égide de la revue Nueva Lente, s'affirme une génération militante de photographes qui s'ouvrent à la création internationale et à l'esthétique postmoderniste et dont le paroxysme en Espagne sera la Movida ; puis, de la fin des années 80 et jusqu'au milieu des années 90, l'apport critique de la revue Photo Vision et en parallèle l'atomisation des pratiques photographiques du fait de l'essor des communautés autonomes suscite une réévaluation du modèle postmoderne; enfin, au début du XXIème siècle, la redécouverte d'une filiation territoriale avec les pays du Sud et l'avènement de l'ère digitale, génèrent chez les photographes ibériques de nouveaux déterminants idiosyncrasiques à même de privilégier une forme de transterritorialité. / In Spain from the end of Francoism to nowadays, the animated sociopolitical history draws a line which, from the Franco dictatorship to the refound democracy, allows the emergence of an unstable identity of the Spanish photography oscillating between the alignment on esthetic and critical models derived of the north-European and American postmodernity and the promotion of creative specificities forged by the Peninsular culture. In this process of search for identity, we determined three phases: at first, in the last hours of the Francoism and the beginning of the democratic transition, under the aegis of the magazine Nueva Lente, a militant generation of photographers assert themselves and open to the international creation and to the postmodernist esthetics, paroxysm of which will be in Spain the Movida ; then, from the end of the 80s till the middle of the 90s, the critical impact of the review PhotoVisi6n and, in parallel, the atomization of the photographic practices because of the development of autonomous communities arouses a revaluation of the postmodernist mode); finally, at the beginning of the XXIth century, the rediscovery of a territorial filiation with the countries of the South and the advent of the digital era, generate for the Iberian photographers new idiosyncratic determiners taking the shape of a transterritoriality.

In this Thesis, we present a fault recovery mechanism by considering both local and global repairs for real-time traffic conveyed over MPLS networks. To meet the end-to-end time constraints of real-time traffic flows, once a link failure occurs, the real-time packets are sent via the most nearby local repair path if one can be identified, while at the same time the probe packets are sent to the Egress router over every possible local repair paths. By monitoring all of the incoming probe packets, the Egress router can determine which path is the most suitable repair path using the minimum-delay-deviation criterion and then sends out all the remaining packets over the new path. To fulfill the delay requirements of real-time flows whenever link failures occur, the probe packets need to be periodically sent out to reflect the dynamic change of traffic loads on the pre-established LSPs. The simulation results, after running on the MSN, have demonstrated that our recovery scheme not only forwards the packets of real-time flows in time over the local repair paths, but also prevents them from possible out-of-order situations. Besides, the proposed scheme of dynamic rerouting assist us in achieving the end-to-end delay guarantee for real-time traffic on MPLS networks.

This dissertation investigates the case of world music in Turkey as an illustration of the discursive mechanisms involved in the production of a global cultural form from what the globality has defined as the &lsquo / local&rsquo / . The study attempts to show the complicated nature of the process by examining how the musical forms and themes supposedly belonging to the &lsquo / local&rsquo / are incorporated into and appropriated in the discourses associated with world music and into the corresponding strategies of the actors. The discursive compilations, articulations and dislocations taking place in the subspecies of the commercial category of world music in a particular locality are investigated by mapping the discursive topographies on the imaginary continuum from the global to the local. This study views locality as a space where a repertoire of discourses are contested and articulated in the production and consumption of global cultural commodities. In line with this understanding, this dissertation also investigates what is the local as it is produced through the particular brand of world music in Turkey. The study also aims to contribute to the theoretical discussions in the literature on the interaction between the global and the local by looking at the production of a global cultural form in a particular locality.

The argument that the world has been witnessing a transformation from national developmentalism towards a new form of developmentalism especially after the 1980s has increasingly become more widespread in the development literature. Moreover, the concerned literature has recently been dominated by the provocative claim that the notion of development itself is no longer operational and meaningful. However, it is still very ambiguous as to how this new form of development which is primarily implemented by the hands of the international corporations and institutions rather than the nation-states is being conceptualized with regard to the existing models of development and how to name it. This dissertation advances the claim that the national developmentalism has given way to what will be called as the &lsquo / global developmentalism&rsquo / in this context and it operates through the notions of the locality and particularity, which are conceptual elements intrinsic to the global capitalism. This dissertation will also attempt to reveal that the logic of global developmentalism no longer depends on the main conceptual categories of the notion of development / thus it can no longer be regarded as a form of developmentalism. The field research of this dissertation involves the analysis of several major and minor projects which are thought to be implemented within either national developmentalism or global developmentalism, or intermediate forms between these two. This dissertation will advance a discussion on the transformation from national developmentalism to global developmentalism and make a discourse analysis of these two forms of developmentalism by interpreting the data obtained from the deep interviews with experts that have worked in these projects, the local inhabitants in the project-affected areas, and from analysis of the observable consequences of these projects.

This thesis consists of three chapters. Chapter 1 explains how the research problems considered in this thesis fit into the investigation of local-global principle in the diophantine geometry, as well as gives a unified sketch of the proofs of the two main results in this thesis. Chapter 2 establishes a similar conclusion to Theorem B of a paper by Poonen and Voloch in another settings. Chapter 3 relates to the object considered in the main result of Chapter 2 to an old conjecture proposed by Skolem and solves some cases of its analog. / text