<p>Recent trends in community development efforts rely on social capital to solve issues at the local level through consensus building, increasing capacity and citizen empowerment. The asset based community development (ABCD) approach assumes relationships and partnerships built on networks of trust and shared norms build communities beneficial for all members. The current community capacity building approach blurs political interests and supports the current neoliberal agenda of the state and private interests to shift the responsibility and management of social problems to the community. This project calls in to question the potential of an assets based community development strategy as it has been attempted in Hamilton, Ontario to lead to long-term structural change in addressing social issues at the root. Findings suggest that despite the number of community projects appearing on the ground, there is little evidence to support asset based community development and social capital that leads to long-term structural change in communities, or economic prosperity to the extent proponents suggest. Furthermore, contrary to the claim of resident leadership, the findings suggest models that attempt to include resident participation are still managed, funded, and administered by professionals in organizations in a ‘top down’ manner. Additional discussion will explore how social capital and capacity can be used toward meeting social justice outcomes in communities.</p> / Master of Social Work (MSW)

Quantum computing is a form of computation that exploits quantum mechanical phenomena for information processing, with promising applications (among others) in optimization and machine learning. Indeed, quantum machine learning is currently one of the most popular directions of research in quantum computing, offering solutions with an at-least-theoretical advantage compared to the classical counterparts. Nevertheless, the quantum devices available in the current Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era are limited in the number of qubits and significantly affected by noise. An interesting alternative to the current prototypes of general-purpose quantum devices is represented by quantum annealers, specific-purpose quantum machines implementing the heuristic search for solving optimization problems known as quantum annealing. However, despite the higher number of qubits, the current quantum annealers are characterised by very sparse topologies. These practical issues have led to the development of hybrid classical-quantum schemes, aiming at leveraging the strengths of both paradigms while circumventing some of the limitations of the available devices. In this thesis, several hybrid classical-quantum algorithms for optimization and machine learning are introduced and/or empirically assessed, as the empirical evaluation is a fundamental part of algorithmic research. The quantum computing models taken into account are both quantum annealing and circuit-based universal quantum computing. The results obtained have shown the effectiveness of most of the proposed approaches.

This project is a story of findings. The main intention is to design a workstation for nautical archeologists who are excavating and researching the ruins of the oldest known shipwreck of the world. The use of the building is projected to change over time to house the findings of the research and exhibit this world heritage and the process that brought it into light. Permanence as a concept is the subject of the major inquiry of the architectural investigation through the project. The means to achieve longevity in architecture are explored. Self-sustainability, interrelation of structure and space, lightness, and locality are the issues that are studied pertaining to the question of "temporariness" and "permanence" in architecture. / Master of Architecture

Dans ce mémoire, je démontre que la distribution de probabilités de l'état quantique Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) sous l'action locale de mesures de von Neumann indépendantes sur chaque qubit suit une distribution qui est une combinaison convexe de deux distributions. Les coefficients de la combinaison sont reliés aux parties équatoriales des mesures et les distributions associées à ces coefficients sont reliées aux parties réelles des mesures. Une application possible du résultat est qu'il permet de scinder en deux la simulation de l'état GHZ. Simuler, en pire cas ou en moyenne, un état quantique comme GHZ avec des ressources aléatoires, partagées ou privées, et des ressources classiques de communication, ou même des ressources fantaisistes comme les boîtes non locales, est un problème important en complexité de la communication quantique. On peut penser à ce problème de simulation comme un problème où plusieurs personnes obtiennent chacune une mesure de von Neumann à appliquer sur le sous-système de l'état GHZ qu'il partage avec les autres personnes. Chaque personne ne connaît que les données décrivant sa mesure et d'aucune façon une personne ne connaît les données décrivant la mesure d'une autre personne. Chaque personne obtient un résultat aléatoire classique. La distribution conjointe de ces résultats aléatoires classiques suit la distribution de probabilités trouvée dans ce mémoire. Le but est de simuler classiquement la distribution de probabilités de l'état GHZ. Mon résultat indique une marche à suivre qui consiste d'abord à simuler les parties équatoriales des mesures pour pouvoir ensuite savoir laquelle des distributions associées aux parties réelles des mesures il faut simuler. D'autres chercheurs ont trouvé comment simuler les parties équatoriales des mesures de von Neumann avec de la communication classique dans le cas de 3 personnes, mais la simulation des parties réelles résiste encore et toujours. / In this Master's thesis, I show that the probability distribution of the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger quantum state (GHZ) under local action of independent von Neumann measurements follows a convex distribution of two distributions.The coefficients of the combination are related to the equatorial parts of the measurements, and the distributions associated with those coefficients are associated with the real parts of the measurements. One possible application of my result is that it allows one to split into two pieces the simulation of the GHZ state. Simulating, in worst case or in average, a quantum state like the GHZ state with random resources, shared or private, as well as with classical communication resources or even odd resources like nonlocal boxes is a very important in the theory of quantum communication complexity. We can think of this simulation problem as a problem in which many people get the description of a von Neumann measurement. Each party does not know the description of any other measurements belonging to the other parties. Each party after having applied his measurement on the subsystem of the state that he shares with the others gets a classical outcome. The joint distribution of the outcomes of every parties follows the distribution studied in this thesis in the case of the GHZ state. My result indicates that in order to simulate the distribution, we can first simulate the equatorial parts of the measurements in order to know which distribution associated to the real parts of the measurements to simulate. Other researchers have found how to simulate the equatorial parts of the von Neumann measurements with classical resources in the case of 3 parties, but it is still unknown how to simulate the real parts.

This thesis deals with one of the fresh trend in media production which caught attention of both scholars and laic public. It concerns phenomenon of hyper local media. Theoretical base of this work lies in appropriation of "locality"as a distinctive attribute in terms of globalization processes. It operates with such terms as spatio- temporal changes, localization, globalization, human and place, authority and social integrity trying to contextualize these terms with media studies. Further it attempts to enlighten what are hyper local media, where can we find its roots in the field of journalism, how do they work and which advantages and disadvantages they have. Research part of the thesis studies particular Czech hyper local project of PPF Investment Company combining case study and quantitative content analysis. Main intention is to find out whether the concept of hyper local journalism is sustainable in Czech media landscape (and under which conditions) and whether it has got working business model. We are also interested in its ability of capturing and keeping new audience and delivering the different content in comparison with another available and comparable media. Keywords hyper local media - Naše adresa - PPF Media - Futuroom - locality - globalization - local and regional press -...

THE ATTITUDES OF SOCIALLY EXLUDED FAMILIES TOWARDS EDUCATION Abstract This graduation thesis is concerned with the families living in the localities of social exclusion and with their attitudes towards education. The main purpose of this work is to study attitudes towards education and to design potential solutions to existing problems. The theoretical part of the diploma thesis describes the basic concepts related to the topic, deals with the problems concerning education of people with the social and cultural disadvantage and describes the characteristcs of the locality of social exlusion Náhlov. The practical part is divided into the research part which explores attitudes of Náhlov families towards education and the project part which describes an attempt to solve some of the existing problems.

In this thesis, I deal with the Zero tolerance policy in its perspective of theory, records and application. I regard it as a disciplining policy, which leads to polarization and consequent deepening of problems in absence in of indications of social issues by their proper names. Answer to the issue of work is evidence of a practical example in a foreign surrounding and subsequent in-depth qualitative analysis of the two urban cases of region Ústí nad Labem - Duchcov and Litvínov. The data were processed by qualitative methods and techniques of sociological research in support partial statistics and hard data. This combined methodology aims to grasp the topic in the field of urban sociology and on that basis try for plasticity research based on interdisciplinarity. Based on research confirmed that the Zero tolerance policy in Duchcov and Litvínov is not recommendable manual for dealing with long-term social and deteriorating security situation. found that the appointment of politicians do not address the causes of incurred to shape the long-term problems. Furthemore been found the named policy do not address the causes of incurred to shape the long-term problems. Vice versa, reverses the logic of cause and effect - the cause of the decline in the quality of life in cities. In thus considered the...

The topic of the master thesis is Special education support for children from socially excluded localities in education in preschools and primary schools. The thesis deals with the topic of social disadvantage of children of pre-school and elementary school age. The theoretical part is focused on defining the terms social disadvantage and socially excluded area. Furthermore, the thesis deals with the influence of the families on social learning of children and the consequences of social disadvantage on the children's development and education. Two chapters of the thesis deal with the possibilities of support for socially disadvantaged children. One of them is devoted to the provision of support measures at schools, the other one defines some strategies and programs aimed at the development of the children. The practical part analyses the results of a research survey mapping the level of development of particular selected functions in children from socially excluded areas. The used research method was testing. The research involved testing of 10 children from socially excluded areas and their results were compared to the testing results of other 10 children who were not from socially excluded areas. The research survey confirmed that socially disadvantaged pupils show poorer results in tests....

Data mining is an area to find valid, novel, potentially useful, and ultimately understandable abstractions in a data. Frequent itemset mining is one of the important data mining approaches to find those abstractions in the form of patterns. Frequent Closed itemsets provide complete and condensed information for non-redundant association rules generation. For many applications mining all the frequent itemsets is not necessary, and mining frequent Closed itemsets are adequate. Compared to frequent itemset mining, frequent Closed itemset mining generates less number of itemsets, and therefore improves the efficiency and effectiveness of these tasks. Recently, much research has been done on Closed itemsets mining, but it is mainly for traditional databases where multiple scans are needed, and whenever new transactions arrive, additional scans must be performed on the updated transaction database; therefore, they are not suitable for data stream mining. Mining frequent itemsets from data streams has many potential and broad applications. Some of the emerging applications of data streams that require association rule mining are network traffic monitoring and web click streams analysis. Different from data in traditional static databases, data streams typically arrive continuously in high speed with huge amount and changing data distribution. This raises new issues that need to be considered when developing association rule mining techniques for stream data. Recent works on data stream mining based on sliding window method slide the window by one transaction at a time. But when the window size is large and support threshold is low, the existing methods consume significant time and lead to a large increase in user response time. In our first work, we propose a novel algorithm Stream-Close based on sliding window model to mine frequent Closed itemsets from the data streams within the current sliding window. We enhance the scalabality of the algorithm by introducing several optimization techniques such as sliding the window by multiple transactions at a time and novel pruning techniques which lead to a considerable reduction in the number of candidate itemsets to be examined for closure checking. Our experimental studies show that the proposed algorithm scales well with large data sets. Still the notion of frequent closed itemsets generates a huge number of closed itemsets in some applications. This drawback makes frequent closed itemsets mining infeasible in many applications since users cannot interpret the large volume of output (which sometimes will be greater than the data itself when support threshold is low) and may lead to an overhead to develop extra applications which post processes the output of original algorithm to reduce the size of the output. Recent work on clustering of itemsets considers strictly either expression(consists of items present in itemset) or support of the itemsets or partially both to reduce the number of itemsets. But the drawback of the above approaches is that in some situations, number of itemsets does not reduce due to their restricted view of either considering expressions or support. So we propose a new notion of frequent itemsets called clustered itemsets which considers both expressions and support of the itemsets in summarizing the output. We introduce a new distance measure w.r.t expressions and also prove the problem of mining clustered itemsets to be NP-hard. In our second work, we propose a deterministic locality sensitive hashing based classifier using clustered itemsets. Locality sensitive hashing(LSH)is a technique for efficiently finding a nearest neighbour in high dimensional data sets. The idea of locality sensitive hashing is to hash the points using several hash functions to ensure that for each function the probability of collision is much higher for objects that are close to each other than those that are far apart. We propose a LSH based approximate nearest neighbour classification strategy. But the problem with LSH is, it randomly chooses hash functions and the estimation of a large number of hash functions could lead to an increase in query time. From Classification point of view, since LSH chooses randomly from a family of hash functions the buckets may contain points belonging to other classes which may affect classification accuracy. So, in order to overcome these problems we propose to use class association rules based hash functions which ensure that buckets corresponding to the class association rules contain points from the same class. But associative classification involves generation and examination of large number of candidate class association rules. So, we use the clustered itemsets which reduce the number of class association rules to be examined. We also establish formal connection between clustering parameter(delta used in the generation of clustered frequent itemsets) and discriminative measure such as Information gain. Our experimental studies show that the proposed method achieves an increase in accuracy over LSH based near neighbour classification strategy.

Two codes have been developed and implemented for use on massively parallelsuper computers to simulate two-dimensional and quasi-geostrophic turbulence.The codes have been found to scale well with increasing resolution and width ofthe simulations. This has allowed for the highest resolution simulations of twodimensionaland quasi-geostrophic turbulence so far reported in the literature.The direct numerical simulations have focused on the statistical characteristicsof turbulent cascades of energy and enstrophy, the role of coherent vorticesand departures from universal scaling laws, theoretized more than 40 yearsago. In particular, the investigations have concerned the enstrophy and energycascades in forced and decaying two-dimensional turbulence. Furthermore, theapplicability of Charney’s hypotheses on quasi-geostrophic turbulence has beentested. The results have shed light on the flow evolution at very large Reynoldsnumbers. The most important results are the robustness of the enstrophycascade in forced and decaying two-dimensional turbulence, the sensitivity toan infrared Reynolds number in the spectral scaling of the energy spectrumin the inverse energy cascade range, and the validation of Charney’s predictionson the dynamics of quasi-geostrophic turbulence. It has also been shownthat the scaling of the energy spectrum in the enstrophy cascade is insensitiveto intermittency in higher order statistics, but that corrections apply to the”universal” Batchelor-Kraichnan constant, as a consequence of large-scale dissipationanomalies following a classical remark by Landau (Landau &amp; Lifshitz1987). Another finding is that the inverse energy cascade is maintained bynonlocal triad interactions, which is in contradiction with the classical localityassumption. / QC 20101029