Robert Greene began collaborating with Thomas Nashe as English prose was turning away from the style and subject matter of Lyly's Euphues (1578) and Sidney's Arcadia (1590). When Greene and Nashe came together in London, the two writers appear to have set the tone for the pamphleteers who would establish the realistic tradition that contributed to the development of the novel. Greene's Menaphon (1589) may be a satire representing his abandonment of courtly fiction. The influence of the Marprelate controversy is reflected in Greene's appeals to the pragmatic character of the emerging literate middle class. Greene's Vision (1592) appears to be Greene's affirmation of his critical philosophy at a point of stress in the authors' relationship.

Efficient algorithms exist for finding optimal strategies in extensive-form games. However human scale problems, such as poker, are typically so large that computation of these strategies remain infeasible with current technology. State space abstraction techniques allow us to derive a smaller abstract game, in which an optimal strategy can be computed and then used in the real game. This thesis introduces state of the art abstraction techniques. Most of these techniques do not deal with public information. We present a new automatic public state space abstraction technique. We examine the quality of this technique in the domain of poker. Our experimental results show that the new technique brings significant performance improvement. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

Troupers: Essays in Three Rings is a collection of fourteen essays focused mainly on variety entertainers (including the author). It leads the reader through a menagerie of the author's own enthusiasms--from clowning and circus elephants, to hot jazz and the ukulele. While the primary occupation of the "troupers"spotlighted here has always been to delight audiences, many of them--both human and animal--could not escape the hardscrabble, the sundered relations, the violence of everyday life. The author tells the stories of these "troupers" here, stories that reveal both their suffering and their refusal to suffer.

A competitive electricity market has been established in many European countries including the Czech Republic. The electricity market includes a limited number of significant producers and traders, which can be described by oligopoly model. Since the electricity transmission and distribution are regulated, I consider two types of players performing in the electricity market: producers of electricity and traders, who buy electricity from producers and sell it to final customers. I derive oligopoly model with producers and traders "a la Cournot" and calculate a formula of equilibrium strategies. I use these theoretical findings to build a dynamic oligopoly model Ele. Ele is formulated as a mixed complementary problem and calibrated on data for the Czech Republic and neighbor states for several scenarios. The model was specified and calculated in GAMS software by the PATH solver. The results represent a Nash equilibrium. That means for individual producers: electricity generation, investment in new power plants construction and emission permits purchases. For traders the results are: equilibrium purchases, sales and cross-border transfers of electricity in each particular time period. Ele derives also equilibrium regional wholesale and retail electricity prices, emission permit prices and prices of cross-border auctions. Ele results point to an economic profitability of new nuclear power plants constructions. Further, I formulate a game in short-term electricity market, where I advise to Czech market participants, subjects of settlement, how much and in which circumstances to buy or sell electricity. Equilibrium results obtained through simulations based on the principle of a fictive game show that the current payment system of imbalance in the Czech Republic does not increase the risk of instability of electricity networks.

No description available.

In the field of VLSI circuit optimization, the scaling of semiconductor devices has led to the miniaturization of the feature sizes resulting in a significant increase in the integration density and size of the circuits. At the nanometer level, due to the effects of manufacturing process variations, the design optimization process has transitioned from the deterministic domain to the stochastic domain, and the inter-relationships among the specification parameters like delay, power, reliability, noise and area have become more intricate. New methods are required to examine these metrics in a unified manner, thus necessitating the need for multi-metric optimization. The optimization algorithms need to be accurate and efficient enough to handle large circuits. As the size of an optimization problem increases significantly, the ability to cluster the design metrics or the parameters of the problem for computational efficiency as well as better analysis of possible trade-offs becomes critical. In this dissertation research, several utilitarian methods are investigated for variation aware multi-metric optimization in VLSI circuit design and spatial pattern clustering. A novel algorithm based on the concepts of utility theory and risk minimization is developed for variation aware multi-metric optimization of delay, power and crosstalk noise, through gate sizing. The algorithm can model device and interconnect variations independent of the underlying distributions and works by identifying a deterministic linear equivalent model from a fundamentally stochastic optimization problem. Furthermore, a multi-metric gate sizing optimization framework is developed that is independent of the optimization methodology, and can be implemented using any mathematical programming approach. It is generalized and reconfigurable such that the metrics can be selected, removed, or prioritized for relative importance depending upon the design requirements. In multi-objective optimization, the existence of multiple conflicting objectives makes the clustering problem challenging. Since game theory provides a natural framework for examining conflicting situations, a game theoretic algorithm for multi-objective clustering is introduced in this dissertation research. The problem of multi-metric clustering is formulated as a normal form multi-step game and solved using Nash equilibrium theory. This algorithm has useful applications in several engineering and multi-disciplinary domains which is illustrated by its mapping to the problem of robot team formation in the field in multi-emergency search and rescue. The various algorithms developed in this dissertation achieve significantly better optimization and run times as compared to other methods, ensure high utility levels, are deterministic in nature and hence can be applied to very large designs. The algorithms have been rigorously tested on the appropriate benchmarks and data sets to establish their efficacy as feasible solution methods. Various quantitative sensitivity analysis have been performed to identify the inter-relationships between the various design parameters.

Une chaîne logistique est composée d'entreprises fabriquant et distribuant des produits aux consommateurs. En modélisant chacune de ses entreprises comme un agent intelligent, nous étudions l'effet "coup de fouet" (Bullwhip effect) qui s'y propage. Cet effet est une amplification de la variabilité de la demande lorsque l'on s'éloigne du client final. On peut aussi voir ce phénomène comme un cas particulier de fluctuations des flux dans un système distribué. Ces fluctuations réduisent l'efficacité de la chaîne logistique, principalement du fait de l'élévation des niveaux d'inventaire et de la réduction de l'agilité. On estime que ce phénomène coûterait de 40 à 60 millions USD pour une papetière de 300 kilotonnes.<br /> <br />L'effet coup de fouet étant provoqué par un manque de coordination entre les agents, nous proposons deux principes qui doivent inspirer tout mécanisme de coordination, à savoir : (i) commander ce que l'on nous commande élimine l'effet coup de fouet mais ne gère pas les inventaires, et (ii) les entreprises ne devraient réagir qu'une seule fois à chaque changement dans la consommation du marché. Afin de valider ces deux principes, nous simulons une chaîne logistique forestière appelée le Jeu du Bois Québécois. Ce jeu permet d'enseigner ce qu'est l'effet coup de fouet. Chaque joueur-entreprise y est modélisé par un agent intelligent appliquant une stratégie donnée pour passer ses commandes. À cet effet, nous avons conçu deux stratégies suivant nos deux principes.<br /><br />Dans un premier temps, nous comparons expérimentalement l'efficacité de ces deux stratégies avec cinq autres stratégies. Nous supposons ici que la chaîne logistique est homogène, c'est-à-dire que toutes ses entreprises utilisent la même stratégie de commande. Nous vérifions ainsi que nos deux mécanismes de coordination, implémentés sous la forme de stratégies, sont efficaces pour la chaîne logistique dans son ensemble.<br /><br />Dans un second temps, nous cessons de supposer la chaîne homogène pour faire davantage de simulations nous permettant de construire un jeu. En analysant ce jeu avec la Théorie de Jeux, nous vérifions que les entreprises n'ont pas intérêt d'arrêter unilatéralement d'utiliser nos deux mécanismes de coordination (équilibre de Nash).

<p>This thesis consists of a summary and four papers. The first two papers address political economy and indus-trial organization aspects of agricultural policy, and the last two international aspects of environmental policy.</p><p>Paper [I] explains Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) subsidies to farmers by the influence of farmer interest-groups with an EU-wide membership. The analysis is based on panel-data for fifteen commodities over the period 1986-2003. Because the CAP is set as an overall EU policy, effective lobbying presents a collective ac-tion problem to the farmers in the EU as a whole. Indicators of lobbying, which are based on this perception, are found to explain part of the variation in agricultural support.</p><p>In Paper [II], the Bresnahan-Lau framework is used to analyze whether policy reforms, i.e. the two-price sys-tem (an input quota, 1986-1991) and a general deregulation of dairy policy (1991-1994) had any market power effects on the Swedish butter market. The results show that the null hypothesis of no market power cannot be rejected, for any of the specific policy reforms, at any reasonable significance level.</p><p>Paper [III] concerns the welfare consequences of environmental policy cooperation. It is assumed that coun-tries finance their public expenditures by using distortionary taxes, and that they differ with respect to compe-tition in the labor market. It is shown how the welfare effect of an increase in the expenditures on abatement depends on changes in the environmental damage, employment and work hours. The welfare effect is also related to the strategic interaction among the countries in the prereform equilibrium.</p><p>In Paper [IV] environmental policy in an economic federation, where each national government faces a mixed tax problem, is addressed. It is assumed that the federal government sets emission targets, which are imple-mented at the national level. It is also assumed that the economic federation is decentralized. The results high-light a strategic role of income and commodity taxation, i.e. each country uses its policy instruments, at least in part, to influence the emission target.</p>

Une antenne à réflecteur est un dispositif largement utilisé pour la communication satellite. La durée de vie d'un tel dispositif est étroitement liée à la fatigue due à la consommation d'énergie pour émettre le signal. Un des enjeux de la conception optimale d'une antenne revient donc à produire des systèmes dont le rendement est le meilleur possible par rapport à une tâche donnée. La particularité d'une antenne à réflecteur se traduit par la présence de surfaces rayonnantes dont la géométrie constitue le paramètre principal pour assumer cette tâche. Sur la base de la simulation de la propagation d'une onde électromagnétique en espace libre et en régime harmonique, on est capable de développer des méthodes d'optimisation numérique de la forme de surfaces rayonnantes. On cherche à minimiser un critère qui traduit en terme mathématique la tâche à effectuer d'un point de vue énergétique. Cependant, les méthodes utilisées sont souvent soumis à des difficultés liées au fait que ces problèmes sont mal posés et numériquement raides. Le contrôle étant géométrique, on a examiné dans cette thèse les contributions potentielles de représentations hiérarchiques afin d'étendre les performances d'algorithmes classiques d'optimisation. Ces extensions empruntent ses fondements aux méthodes multigrilles pour la résolution d'EDP. Un exemple théorique d'optimisation de forme permet d'assoir les stratégies appliquées à l'optimisation d'antennes. Puis des expériences numériques d'optimisation montrent que les algorithmes de bases sont améliorés en terme de robustesse comme en terme de vitesse de convergence.

This thesis consists of a summary and four papers. The first two papers address political economy and indus-trial organization aspects of agricultural policy, and the last two international aspects of environmental policy. Paper [I] explains Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) subsidies to farmers by the influence of farmer interest-groups with an EU-wide membership. The analysis is based on panel-data for fifteen commodities over the period 1986-2003. Because the CAP is set as an overall EU policy, effective lobbying presents a collective ac-tion problem to the farmers in the EU as a whole. Indicators of lobbying, which are based on this perception, are found to explain part of the variation in agricultural support. In Paper [II], the Bresnahan-Lau framework is used to analyze whether policy reforms, i.e. the two-price sys-tem (an input quota, 1986-1991) and a general deregulation of dairy policy (1991-1994) had any market power effects on the Swedish butter market. The results show that the null hypothesis of no market power cannot be rejected, for any of the specific policy reforms, at any reasonable significance level. Paper [III] concerns the welfare consequences of environmental policy cooperation. It is assumed that coun-tries finance their public expenditures by using distortionary taxes, and that they differ with respect to compe-tition in the labor market. It is shown how the welfare effect of an increase in the expenditures on abatement depends on changes in the environmental damage, employment and work hours. The welfare effect is also related to the strategic interaction among the countries in the prereform equilibrium. In Paper [IV] environmental policy in an economic federation, where each national government faces a mixed tax problem, is addressed. It is assumed that the federal government sets emission targets, which are imple-mented at the national level. It is also assumed that the economic federation is decentralized. The results high-light a strategic role of income and commodity taxation, i.e. each country uses its policy instruments, at least in part, to influence the emission target.