It is known that an arbitrary smooth, oriented four-manifold admits the structure of what is called a broken Lefschetz fibration. Given a broken Lefschetz fibration, there are certain modifications, realized as homotopies of the fibration map, that enable one to construct infinitely many distinct fibrations of the same manifold. The aim of this paper is to prove that these modifications are sufficient to obtain every broken Lefschetz fibration in a given homotopy class of smooth maps. One notable application is that adding an additional projection move generates all broken Lefschetz fibrations, regardless of homotopy class. The paper ends with further applications and open problems. / text

Estruturas de dados volumétricas são de extrema utilidade em várias aplicações, e em particular na área de Visualização Científica. Essas estruturas são úteis em duas etapas do processo de visualização. A primeira é na representação de dados, isto é, de informações associadas aos valores, medidos ou simulados, os quais se deseja visualizar. A outra fase que necessita de uma estrutura de dados é a fase de exploração, ou seja, o modelo criado é usado tanto para exploração interativa quanto para a realização de simulações sobre o mesmo, por exemplo, numa cirurgia virtual. Está em desenvolvimento no ICMC, uma estrutura de dados volumétrica, chamada Singular Half-Face, que tem como característica a modelagem explícita das singularidades presentes no modelo, além de outros elementos topológicos. Este trabalho de mestrado visa testar a viabilidade da estrutura num contexto de visualização em fluxo de dados, incorporando-a à biblioteca gráfica de visualização Visualization ToolKit (VTK), que possui definição extremamente pobre da topologia dos objetos que representa. Adicionando essa nova classe e realizando sobre ela técnicas convencionais de visualização e exploração de dados, é estudada sua capacidade de apoiar todas as fases do processo de visualização. / Volumetric data structures are of extreme utility in various applications, and particularly in the area of Scientific Visualization. These structures are useful in two stages of the visualization process. The first one is in data representation, that is, in the organization of information associated with the values, measured or simulated, to be visualized. The other phase of the visualization data flow that needs a data structure is the exploration phase. It would be useful to have a model designed to be used both for interactive exploration and for simulation in a number of application, for example, in virtual surgery. A volumetric data structure, named Singular Half-Face (SHF) is being developed at the ICMC, that has as its main characteristic the explicit modeling of singularities present in the model, besides other essential topological elements. This dissertation aims at testing the viability of this structure in a context of visualization in data flow, by incorporating it in the Visualization ToolKit (VTK) class library, whose data structures are extremely poor in definition of the topology of the objects that they represent. By adding SHF to this library and carrying out conventional visualization and data exploration on it, we wish to study its support to all the phases of the visualization process.

The most-discussed pairing symmetry in Sr₂RuO₄ is chiral p-wave, pₓ ± p[sub]y, whose degeneracy is protected by the lattice symmetry. When the lattice symmetry is lowered by the application of a symmetry-breaking field, the degeneracy can be lifted, potentially leading to a splitting of the superconducting transition. To lift the degeneracy, the symmetry breaking field used in this study is uniaxial stress. Uniaxial stress generated by a piezo-electric actuator can continuously tune the electronic structure and in situ lower the tetragonal symmetry in Sr₂RuO₄. Previous studies of magnetic susceptibility and resistivity under uniaxial stress have revealed that there is a strong peak in T[sub]c when the stress is applied along the a-axis of Sr₂RuO₄. In addition, it has been proposed that the peak in T[sub]c coincides with a van Hove singularity in the band structure, and measurements of Hc₂ at the maximum T[sub]c indicate the possibility of an even parity condensate for Sr₂RuO₄ at the peak in Tc. In this thesis, the heat capacity approach is used to study the thermodynamic behavior of Sr₂RuO₄ under uniaxial stress applied along the crystallographic a-axis of Sr₂RuO₄. The first thermodynamic evidence for the peak in T[sub]c is obtained, proving that is a bulk property. However, the experimental data show no clear evidence for splitting of the superconducting transition; only one phase transition can be identified within the experimental resolution. The results impose strong constraints on the existence of a second phase transition, i.e. the size of the second heat capacity jump would be small or the second T[sub]c would have to be very close to the first transition. In addition to these results, I will present heat capacity data from the normal state of Sr₂RuO₄. The experimental results indicate that there is an enhancement of specific heat at the peak in T[sub]c, consistent with the existence of the van Hove singularity. The possibility of even parity superconductivity at the maximum T[sub]c has also been investigated. However, the heat capacity measurements are shown to be relatively insensitive to such a change, so it has not been possible to obtain strong and unambiguous evidence for whether it takes place or not.

La notion "lifestyle" représente un nouveau stade de l'évolution de l'entrepreneur. Cette approche a été mise en évidence par des travaux anglophones et plus particulièrement présentée par Johannisson (2004) sans être jusqu'à ce jour étudiée. C'est pourquoi par ce travail de thèse nous avons tenté de comprendre le processus entrepreneurial de l'entrepreneur "lifestyle". Pour ce faire, nous avons conduit une étude exploratoire sur 8 cas permettant de mettre en évidence un phénomène émergent. Le cours de notre recherche nous a donc permis de définir le "lifestyle" par opposition au "classique" et de mettre en évidence ses caractéristiques. En outre, un objet ne pouvant être étudié en dehors de tout contexte, il nous a paru essentiel de définir l'hypermodernité qui est le terme utilisé (en sociologie notamment, Aubert et alii, 2005) pour désigner l'ère sociétale dans laquelle nous nous trouvons. L'hypermodernité représente une dualité composée de l'exploitation marchande et de valeurs humanistes. Dans cette mesure, l'entrepreneur lifestyle empreint de quêtes de valeurs construit un modèle économique lui permettant d'être en accord avec ses principes. / Lifestyle is representative of a new entrepreneurial phasis. The aim of this thesis is to conduct an exploratory survey based on 8 lifestyle entrepreneurs cases to describe an emergent phenomenon. Our research introduces the differences between the "classical entrepreneur" and the "lifestyle"one definition and argue the caracteristics of lifestyle entrepreneurship. As we consider the thesis object as an "embedded" one, we present the hypermodern society as the context research. Hypermodernity suggests a dual vision of our society and is composed of business exploitation and humanist values. Therefore, the Lifesytle entrepreneur who is looking for individual and collective values build an economical system which is an entrepreneurial one in adequation with its own assets.

Esta dissertação é um estudo exploratório que parte de uma proposta de tomar elementos discursivos de entrevistas realizadas com educadoras que trabalham em escolas de educação infantil da cidade de São Paulo, para constituí-los como indicadores de sucesso da educação inclusiva. Parte-se de uma revisão de literatura a respeito das incidências da inclusão escolar e constata-se que, embora noções de sucesso não tenham sido mencionadas nos trabalhos analisados, há uma preocupação latente quanto ao sucesso e ao fracasso dos processos de inclusão escolar. Tomando este cenário como ponto de partida, buscamos abordar a maneira pela qual a educação inclusiva é entendida na atualidade, tecendo problematizações entre algumas das diferentes perspectivas que embasam esse tema, dentre as quais a psicanalítica mostrou-se uma significativa ferramenta para discutir a natureza das diferentes ocorrências da inclusão escolar, entre elas, os indicadores de sucesso. Procuramos situar indicador quanto ao seu conceito e realizamos uma breve apresentação da origem da utilização de indicadores nas pesquisas psicanalíticas. Esse material nos permitiu realizar uma analogia na elaboração dos indicadores de sucesso da inclusão escolar, o objetivo principal deste estudo. A partir do referencial teórico psicanalítico, mais precisamente a teoria lacaniana dos quatro discursos, pesquisamos, a partir de relatos colhidos com educadoras de educação infantil tomados como elementos discursivos os aspectos referentes a situações de sucesso dos processos inclusivos mencionados, para elaborar indicadores de sucesso da inclusão escolar. Os aspectos colhidos nas entrevistas nos mostram que se os educadores encontram-se implicados com o que é possível realizar no dia-a-dia e no aprendizado com a criança no que é possível ser feito , o processo inclusivo é caracterizado como bem sucedido. As entrevistas, portanto, fornecem dados que nos servem para a caracterização do possível como um indicador de sucesso da inclusão escolar / This dissertation is an exploratory study based on a proposal to take discursive elements from interviews conducted with educators who work in children\'s education schools in the city of São Paulo, and to establish them as indicators of success for inclusive education. It begins with a literature review concerning incidences of school inclusion and it ascertains that, although notions of success have not been mentioned in the studies analyzed, there is latent concern regarding success and failure of school inclusion processes. Using this as a starting point, we seek to address how inclusive education is understood today, weaving problems among some of the different perspectives that are the foundation for this theme, among which psychoanalysis proved to be an important tool for discussing the nature of the different occurrences of school inclusion, including, success indicators. We tried to situate the \"indicator in relation to its concept and we conducted a brief presentation of the origin of indicator use in psychoanalytical studies. This material allowed us to make an analogy in the elaboration of success indicators for school inclusion, this studys main objective. Based on the psychoanalytic theoretical reference, more precisely the Lacanian theory of four discourses, we have researched, based on reports gathered from child education educators taken as discoursives elements the aspects that refer to situations of success for the inclusive processes mentioned, in order to develop indicators of success in school inclusion. The aspects collected from the interviews show us that, if educators are concerned with what is possible to do on their daily activities and on what they learn with the children on what is possible to be done the inclusive process is characterized as successful. The interviews, therefore, provide us with data that distinguishes the feasible as a success indicator of school inclusion

Através dessa dissertação propõe-se uma análise sobre os temas morte e poder em dois romances, do autor português José Saramago, Todos os Nomes (1997) e As Intermitências da Morte (2004). Escritos e publicados em épocas distintas, distinguem-se do conjunto da obra desse autor pela relação que estabelecem entre si e os temas supracitados. Esses dois romances foram tomados como objeto de estudo desta pesquisa, que foi executada através da utilização da metodologia da literatura comparada. Como base teórica, foram usados os seguintes conceitos do filósofo Martin Heidegger: ser-para-morte e angústia, que norteiam o pensamento sobre as possibilidades de uma autenticidade do ser frente ao cotidiano, marcado por repetições e controles. É através do acaso e das escolhas feitas pelos dois protagonistas dessas obras que se construiu uma reflexão sobre a dicotomia vivos e mortos. A partir dessa análise, buscou-se realizar a leitura em espelho desses romances, nos quais a maior semelhança é entender a vida como uma busca e a morte como inerente ao ser, tornando-o uma singularidade / This dissertation proposes an analysis about the themes death and power contained in two novels from the Portuguese author, José Saramago, Todos os Nomes (1997) and As Intermitências da Morte (2004). Written and published in distinct times, they are different from the body of work of this author due to the relation established between themselves and the aforesaid themes. These two novels were taken as the study object of this research, which has been executed through the utilization of compared literature methodology. The following concepts of the philosopher Martin Heidegger were used as theoretical basis: Sein zum Tode and anguish that guide the thought about possibilities of an authenticity of being opposite to the daily, mainly characterized by repetitions and controls. Through fortune and the choices made by the two main characters of these books it was possible to build a reflection about the alive and dead dichotomy. From this analisys, it looked to realize the reading as a mirror from these novels, in witch the biggest similarity is to understand life as a seek and death as inherent to the being, turning it into a singularity

A spectre is haunting contemporary technoculture: the spectre of Singularity. Ten years into a century thus far characterized chiefly by the catastrophic failure of global economic and political systems, deepening ecological anxieties, and slow-motion social crisis, the only sector of our collective cultural myth of Progress still vibrantly intact is the technological - a project which, in vivid contrast to the systemic failure that seemingly prevails at nearly every other level, continues to charge forward at breakneck speed. Since the late twentieth century, prompted by the all-but-exponential growth of machine intelligence and global information networks, and by the still largely obscure but increasingly profound-seeming implications of emerging nanotechnology, futurists and fabulists alike have postulated an imminent historical threshold whereupon the nature of human existence will be radically and irrevocably transformed in a sudden explosion of technological development. This moment of transcendence, it is supposed, is at most only a few years off; indeed, some say, it may have already begun. The "Singularity" - a term coined in 1986 by the mathematician and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, and subsequently adopted throughout technocultural discourse - is at present the primary site of interpenetration between technoscientific and science-fictional figurations of the future, an area in which the longstanding binary distinctions between science and SF, and between present and future, are rapidly dissolving. As much as the Singularity thesis implies a total reorganization of society and of the self - which posthumanist cultural studies and cyborg theory have already begun mapping - it also poses a daunting existential challenge to the enterprise of SF itself, to the extent that the Singularity imposes what Vinge has described as "an opaque wall across the future," an impenetrable cognitive obstacle beyond which the extrapolative imagination cannot glimpse. For a genre long defined by its efforts to assert, through the narrative technique of extrapolation, a meaningful continuity between present and future, the Singularity presents a thorny problem indeed, demanding both a reevaluation of SF's conception of and orientation toward the future, and a new narrative model capable of grappling with the alien and often paradoxical complexity of the postsingular. This study is an inquiry into the properties and problematics of Singularity across fictional and nonfictional discourses, and as such it operates on two levels. Reading Singularitarian literature against a broadly articulated context of fringe-science and transhumanist movements, consumer culture, political and economic theory, and related areas of contemporary cyber- and technoculture, I examine how the metaphor of Singularity structures and signifies the aspirations and anxieties of late-twentieth and early twenty-first century technocivilization. As a project of literary criticism specifically, the study works to identify and theorize a grouping of texts that is emerging from cyberpunk and postcyberpunk tendencies in contemporary SF, organized around the premises of Singularity and the posthuman, and classifiable primarily in terms of an attempt to mount a response to the formal and conceptual problems Vinge has identified. Primary readings are drawn from a wide-ranging selection of twentieth- and twenty-first-century technocultural fiction, with emphasis on SF works by Charles Stross, Cory Doctorow, Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, Rudy Rucker, and William Gibson.

Aujourd’hui notre société met à l’écart les personnes désignées « vulnérables ». Cette mise à l’écart traduit dans les faits un rejet plus global de tout ce qui renvoie à la vulnérabilité. Considérant que celle-ci est une dimension impensée de notre culture, une grande partie de cette thèse consistera à montrer ce qu’il en est de la vulnérabilité et par quels chemins il est possible de la penser. L’exclusion de cette vulnérabilité, qui nous est pourtant constitutive, n’est que le revers de l’identité que chacun veut préciser du haut de sa conscience assurée d’elle-même. Avec Emmanuel Levinas, il s’agit de penser la vulnérabilité comme sens-sensibilité PAR l’autre en égard POUR l’autre, plaçant la rencontre comme condition d’un évidement désidentificateur. L’altérité est ma première ressource, elle me convoque à l’accueil de l’étrangeté de l’autre et cet accueil me révèle à moi-même bien plus que ce que j’en décide. Ce petit déplacement qui propose à chacun d’habiter sa vulnérabilité, ce presque-rien qui ne se commande pas mais qui opère dans l’altération, telle est la « phénoménologie du soi affecté par l’autre que soi » (P. Ricœur) que nous avons tenté de penser. A partir de là, une autre société peut s’envisager, une « société des singularités » qui fait toute sa place à nos in-suffisances dans une qualité de « socialité » (E. Levinas). Ce terreau permet de revisiter l’État, le singulier et l’universel, l’hospitalité, la fraternité, l’économique, le lien entre éthique et politique pour faire éclater le besoin individuel d’une coupure entre un « moi-nous » et un « tout-eux ». Habiter sa vulnérabilité c’est alors rester à l’endroit intenable de la non coupure. / Nowadays our society sets aside people pointed out as "vulnerable". This sidelining translates in the facts a more global discharge of anything sending back to vulnerability. Considering vulnerability as un unthought dimension of our culture, a large part of this thesis will consist in showing what the situation is regarding vulnerability and through which ways it is poile possible to think it out. The excluding of this vulnerability, which is nevertheless essential to us, is only the backhand of an identity which each of us wants to specify from his own insured consciousness. With Emmanuel Levinas, the matter is to think out vulnerability as sensitivity THROUGH the other in consideration FOR the other, where the encounter turns to be the condition of à desidentifying hollowing out. Otherness is my first resource, it convenes me to receive the otherone's strangeness and this reception is giving me a self awareness much more than what I decide. That small shift suggests to each one to inhabit his own vulnerability, that uncontrolled futility but which operates in change, such is the "phenomenology of the one, modified by the other than one " that we tried to think. From that prospect point, another society can be considered, a "society of singularities" giving room to our insufficiencies within the "sociality quality ". That breeding ground gîtes lies the opportunity to re-visit the Nation, the singular and the universal, hospitality, fraternity, economics, the link between ethics and politics, in order to blow up the individual need of a cut between " me-us " and " whole-them ". To live into its own vulnerability is then to stay into the unbereable place of a non cut.

The main objective of this thesis is to study the behavior of black objects in external fields, for example black holes and black strings in 4 and 5-dimensional spacetimes respectively. In particular, to analyze how external fields affect horizons and the internal structure of such objects, to study their properties, and tocunderstand how the spacetime fabric works. The thesis contains three chapters. In Chapters 1 and 2 we study the interior of 4-dimensional static, axisymmetric, electrically neutral and electrically charged distorted black holes. We analyze how external static and axisymmetric distortions affect the interior of such black holes. In particular, we study the behavior of the interior solution of an electrically neutral black hole near its horizon and singularity. The analysis shows that there exists a certain duality between the event horizon and the singularity. As a special example, we study the interior of a compactified 4-dimensional Schwarzschild black hole. In the case of an electrically charged black hole, a similar duality exists between its event and Cauchy horizons. The duality implies that the Cauchy horizon remains regular, provided the distortion is regular at the event horizon. Extension of the general theory of relativity to higher dimensional spacetimes brings a large variety of black objects whose boundary, the event horizon, may be of a complicated structure. One such object is a black string. In Chapter 3 we discuss the so-called Gregory-Laflamme instability of 5-dimensional black strings in a spacetime with one compact dimension and their topological phase transitions. Here we consider black strings with electric or magnetic charge. Linear static perturbations of these objects indicate the presence of a threshold unstable mode. An analysis of such mode shows that an electrically charged black string is less stable than a neutral one. The situation is opposite for a magnetically charged black string. An analysis of 5-dimensional extremal black string with electric charge shows a continuous spectrum of unstable threshold modes. The results presented in this thesis may have applications in the theory of classical 4-dimensional black holes and in the modern theoretical models of higher dimensions.

In the early 70's Parshin introduced his notion of the multidimensional residues of meromorphic top-forms on algebraic varieties. Parshin's theory is a generalization of the classical one-dimensional residue theory. The main difference between the Parshin's definition and the one-dimensional case is that in higher dimensions one computes the residue not at a point but at a complete flag of irreducible subvarieties. Parshin, Beilinson, and Lomadze also proved the Reciprocity Law for residues: if one fixes all elements of the flag, except for one, and consider all possible choices of the missing element, then only finitely many of these choices give non-zero residues, and the sum of these residues is zero. Parshin's constructions are completely algebraic. In fact, they work in very general settings, not only over complex numbers. However, in the complex case one would expect a more geometric variant of the theory. In my thesis I study Parshin residues from the geometric point of view. In particular, the residue is expressed in terms of the integral over a smooth cycle. Parshin-Lomadze Reciprocity Law for residues in the complex case is proved via a homological relation on these cycles. The thesis consists of two parts. In the first part the theory of Leray coboundary operators for stratified spaces is developed. These operators are used to construct the cycle and prove the homological relation. In the second part resolution of singularities techniques are applied to study the local geometry near a complete flag of subvarieties.