In law as well as in ordinary life, it matters what rules societies have; but what does it mean for a society to have a rule? HLA Hart’s famous answer is that for a society to have a rule is for there to be a certain social practice in that society, consisting of an external, behavioural aspect and an internal, attitudinal aspect. Hart’s ‘practice theory’ dominates thinking in jurisprudence about social rules, but, I argue, there are serious problems with it. It would be better to adopt what I call the ‘acceptance theory’. In the early chapters of this thesis, I argue that the practice theory is both overinclusive and underinclusive. It is overinclusive because Hart’s description of the ‘internal aspect’ is too general. It is underinclusive because the ‘external aspect’ is unnecessary. Once these criticisms are taken into account, what remains of the practice theory is the idea that a society has a rule because its members have a certain attitude. I spend much of this thesis determining the features of this attitude. Ultimately, I focus on the attitude known as “acceptance” in the philosophy of action. Acceptance of a proposition simulates belief in that proposition, though it may be held independently of that belief. I argue that a person or society has a rule when that person, or that society’s members, accept that some action ought to be performed, whatever their beliefs about the matter. This theory incorporates the plausible core of the practice theory, while avoiding its problems.

The thesis investigates the deep conceptual structure of the distinction between creation and application of law. Legal philosophers either take the distinction for granted (and so do the vast majority of legal scholars in general) or, when they address it directly, it is so for the only purpose of criticising it as just another upshot of legal formalism. The latter approach suggests the distinction is either unsound or, at the very least, useless. The thesis argues that supporters of this stance do not realise the implications of their positions – which transcend legal-theoretical discourse and raise serious problems in both political and constitutional theory. The thesis’s first chapter purports to show that our models of constitutional democracy – as a complex set of institutional power-constraining mechanisms - are ultimately grounded on the distinction between creation and application of law. Hence the theoretical unsoundness of the distinction would undermine the very foundations of such democracies. The thesis argues that if judges are always creating the law, it follows that nothing like the ‘application of law’ is possible and, as a result, there is little or no justification for the practice of having statutes and other institutionalised forms of law. In this regard, Chapter 2 argues that realist theories of adjudication cannot make sense of one of law’s most important features, namely its normativity. More generally, undergirding a certain conception of our current adjudicative practices is the idea of (judicial) discretion, which is an essentially legal concept. In Chapter 3 I discuss this idea, comparing how it is conceived and used in both jurisprudence and administrative law (where such notion has been originally developed, at least in civil-law jurisdictions). The chapter aims at showing that an appropriate conception of discretion plays a pivotal role in grounding an analytical distinction between creation and application of law. Chapter 4 fleshes out the deeper philosophical assumptions of such distinction and, more specifically, it puts forward a conception of ‘law as communication’ which highlights the inescapable relation between law and language, and the parallel relation between philosophy of law and philosophy of language. In this chapter, I also argue that philosophy of language can and should play a role in understanding what law is, but that, at the same time, law is a unique communicative phenomenon, whose characteristics call for an original theoretical analysis. Finally, Chapter 5 brings together the several threads of the argument and presents the analytical model of the distinction between creation and application of law. The conclusion is that the creation/application distinction, thus conceived, is necessary not just in order to defend our liberal political practices - but more fundamentally, to account for law’s own raison d'être as a power-constraining device.

During the development of many diseases such as cancer and diabetes, the pattern of gene expression within certain cells changes. A vital part of understanding these diseases will come from understanding the factors governing gene expression. This thesis work focused on mining association rules in the context of gene expression. We designed and developed a tool that enables domain experts to interactively analyze association rules that describe relationships in genetic data. Association rules in their native form deal with sets of items and associations among them. But domain experts hypothesize that additional factors like relative ordering and spacing of these items are important aspects governing gene expression. We proposed hypothesis-based specializations of association rules to identify biologically significant relationships. Our approach also alleviates the limitations inherent in the conventional association rule mining that uses a support-confidence framework by providing filtering and reordering of association rules according to other measures of interestingness in addition to support and confidence. Our tool supports visualization of genetic data in the context of a rule, which facilitates rule analysis and rule specialization. The improvement in different measures of interestingness (e.g., confidence, lift, and p-value) enabled by our approach is used to evaluate the significance of the specialized rules.

Previous research has demonstrated that intuitive judgments of timeloss are often biased: overestimated when a high speed is slowed down and underestimated when a low speed is decreased further. Yet, no findings provide cognitive explanations of the bias. The present study (a) collected numerical judgments of time-loss by assigning participants to seven speed matching problems, and (b) collected verbal protocols of participants judgment processes. To identify different decision rules on the individual level, a spectral analysis of judgments was used. The findings show that the ratio rule was most frequently used and similar to the well researched time-saving bias, a ratio heuristic and a difference heuristic could model a majority of the timeloss bias. The validity of the method is supported by a significant correspondence between the spectral analysis measure and the qualitative analysis for consistent participants. By including affect as a third variable, future research could get a closer understanding of the bias effect in real life and consequently develop strategies that can improve road safety.

In the field of machine learning, methods for learning from single-table data have received much more attention than those for learning from multi-table, or relational data, which are generally more computationally complex. However, a significant amount of the world's data is relational. This indicates a need for algorithms that can operate efficiently on relational data and exploit the larger body of work produced in the area of single-table techniques. This thesis presents algorithms for learning from relational data that mitigate, to some extent, the complexity normally associated with such learning. All algorithms in this thesis are based on the generation of random relational rules. The assumption is that random rules enable efficient and effective relational learning, and this thesis presents evidence that this is indeed the case. To this end, a system for generating random relational rules is described, and algorithms using these rules are evaluated. These algorithms include direct classification, classification by propositionalisation, clustering, semi-supervised learning and generating random forests. The experimental results show that these algorithms perform competitively with previously published results for the datasets used, while often exhibiting lower runtime than other tested systems. This demonstrates that sufficient information for classification and clustering is retained in the rule generation process and that learning with random rules is efficient. Further applications of random rules are investigated. Propositionalisation allows single-table algorithms for classification and clustering to be applied to the resulting data, reducing the amount of relational processing required. Further results show that techniques for utilising additional unlabeled training data improve accuracy of classification in the semi-supervised setting. The thesis also develops a novel algorithm for building random forests by making efficient use of random rules to generate trees and leaves in parallel.

Romantic relationships are assumed to be guided by norms and rules, however research in the field of personal relationships has not directly addressed the area of relationship rules in romantic relationships, but has investigated their violations, with a specific focus on examples such as infidelity and deception. The present research program provides the first comprehensive study of rules and expectations in romantic relationships. The overall aim of the research is to explore the types of rules and expectations, or relational standards that exist in romantic relationships, how they come to exist, and their function within relationships. Given the lack of research on relational standards, a program of four studies, utilising both qualitative and quantitative methods was proposed to address the research aims. A combination of methods was deemed appropriate as qualitative methods would allow exploration of the types of relational standards that exist in romantic relationships, while quantitative methods could be used to explore their structure, function, and potential correlates. An initial study of the use of deception was based on previous work by the author. This study aimed to combine research on the strategies of deceptive use, with the motivations that are provided for engaging in deception, in order to further understand how deception is used in romantic relationships. A survey of 152 individuals currently in romantic relationships demonstrated that individuals tend to use multiple strategies when they engage in deception, and prefer to use less overt strategies than lying. Consistent with research on victim and perpetrator accounts, individuals believed their partners would view the deception as more serious than they themselves would. Deception can be viewed as one example of the violation of major relationship rules and expectations regarding trust and honesty, which prompted the question of what other rules and expectations exist in romantic relationships. This question provided the impetus for the subsequent studies, the aims of which were to explore what rules and expectations exist in romantic relationship, and how they come to exist. A qualitative study using focus groups and interviews with couples enabled the development of 16 categories about which rules and expectations typically exist. These categories described both the emotional aspects of a relationship, such as loyalty, fidelity, help and support, and the day-to-day functioning of a relationship, such as those regarding roles and time allocation. A third study, using quantitative methods, presented the 16 categories to 106 individuals in order to validate the categories, investigate how they come to exist (whether they are discussed or exist as expectations) and explore their function in terms of their importance to the relationship and levels of threat and (un)forgivability when they are violated. It also sought to explore whether relational standards were related to a measure of adjustment, specifically one.s self-restraint. All 16 categories were endorsed, and were generally seen as being common in most relationships, and important to a relationship.s functioning. The categories differed in their importance, threat and unforgivability, with rules and expectations about the emotional aspects of a relationship consistently rated as more important than rules and expectations about the procedural aspects of a relationship. The number of rules endorsed, and the types of rules discussed and expected, were not related to an individual.s adjustment. A final study of 45 couples aimed to replicate the results from the third study, as well as explore whether there was agreement in partners. responses. The final study also investigated whether relational standards were related to individual factors such as adjustment, personality, and the tendency to betray, and relationship variables such as trust, satisfaction and commitment. The results confirmed the pattern of endorsement found in the third study, that rules and expectations regarding the emotional aspects of relationship are regarded as the most important, and the most threatening and unforgivable when violated. Rules and expectations regarding the procedural aspects or the day-to-day functioning of the relationship are seen as least important to therelationship, and least threatening and easily forgiven when violated. The present research program demonstrated that there are identifiable areas about which couples have rules and expectations, and that these form a hierarchy based on their importance to the relationship. No differences were found in the way that relational standards come to exist, and relational standards were not found to be related to either individual or relationship factors. The identification of rule and expectation categories may help couples clarify their expectations of each other, and reduce potential areas of conflict. They also provide a starting point from which to further explore the importance of relational standards to relationship functioning.

The maintenance of large-scale software systems without trace information between development artifacts is a challenging task. This thesis focuses on the problem of supporting software maintenance through a mechanism for establishing traceability relations between the system requirements and its code elements. The core of the proposed solution is a set of design rules that regulates the positional (e.g., package), structural (e.g., class), and behavioral (e.g., method) aspects of the system elements, thus establishing traceability between requirements and code. We identify several types of requirements each of which can be supported by design rules. We introduce a rule-based approach to software construction and demonstrate that such a process can support maintainability through two mechanisms: (a) traceability and (b) reduction of defect rate. We distinguish our work from traditional traceability approaches in that we regard traceability as an intrinsic structural property of software systems. This view of traceability is in contrast to traditional traceability approaches where traceability is achieved extrinsically through creating maps such as the traceability matrices or allocation tables. The approach presented in this thesis has been evaluated through conducting several empirical studies as well as building a proof-of-concept system. The results we obtained demonstrate the effectiveness and usefulness of our approach.

A wireless ad hoc network is a collection of wireless mobile nodes forming a temporary network without the aid of any established infrastructure or centralized administration. A connection is achieved between two nodes through a single hop transmission if they are directly connected or multi-hop transmission if they are not. The wireless networks face challenges to form an optimal routing protocol. Some approaches are based on a dominating set, which has all the nodes either in the set or within its neighborhood. The proposed algorithm is an enhancement of the distributed algorithm proposed by Wu and Li. The simulation results from the new algorithm are compared to results from Wu and Li’s algorithm. The simulation results show that the average dominating set of nodes decreased considerable after applying the new algorithm. The decrease in number of dominate set nodes is not very much noticeable in low density space.

The maintenance of large-scale software systems without trace information between development artifacts is a challenging task. This thesis focuses on the problem of supporting software maintenance through a mechanism for establishing traceability relations between the system requirements and its code elements. The core of the proposed solution is a set of design rules that regulates the positional (e.g., package), structural (e.g., class), and behavioral (e.g., method) aspects of the system elements, thus establishing traceability between requirements and code. We identify several types of requirements each of which can be supported by design rules. We introduce a rule-based approach to software construction and demonstrate that such a process can support maintainability through two mechanisms: (a) traceability and (b) reduction of defect rate. We distinguish our work from traditional traceability approaches in that we regard traceability as an intrinsic structural property of software systems. This view of traceability is in contrast to traditional traceability approaches where traceability is achieved extrinsically through creating maps such as the traceability matrices or allocation tables. The approach presented in this thesis has been evaluated through conducting several empirical studies as well as building a proof-of-concept system. The results we obtained demonstrate the effectiveness and usefulness of our approach.

Mining frequent itemsets and association rules is a popular and well researched approach to discovering interesting relationships between variables in large databases. The R package arules presented in this paper provides a basic infrastructure for creating and manipulating input data sets and for analyzing the resulting itemsets and rules. The package also includes interfaces to two fast mining algorithms, the popular C implementations of Apriori and Eclat by Christian Borgelt. These algorithms can be used to mine frequent itemsets, maximal frequent itemsets, closed frequent itemsets and association rules. (author's abstract) / Series: Research Report Series / Department of Statistics and Mathematics