Costuma-se identificar uma relação positiva entre uma infraestrutura de qualidade e o nível de desenvolvimento de uma região. Embora frequentes as análises que buscam quantificar os impactos econômicos e sociais positivos da infraestrutura, pouco esforço tem sido feito para avaliar as políticas não estritamente econômicas elaboradas para esse setor, especialmente em termos de política externa. Além disso, estudos na área focam no aspecto discursivo, havendo uma lacuna de estudos comparativos entre o discurso e a prática da execução dos projetos. Este trabalho busca preencher essa lacuna analisando como evoluiu, nesse início de século, a política externa brasileira para infraestrutura, especialmente sob a perspectiva da integração regional, em comparação com as dotações orçamentárias do governo federal destinadas ao setor. Os resultados sugerem que houve uma queda na abordagem regional do tema ao longo do período, bem como um distanciamento entre o discurso e a prática, especialmente no período posterior a 2010, quando a presença relativa da infraestrutura no discurso passou a crescer, enquanto os gastos empenhados no setor diminuíam. / It is common to identify in the literature a positive relation between quality infrastructure and the development level of certain region. Although many scholars have worked on quantifying economic and social impacts of infrastructure, little effort has been made to evaluate non-economic policies drafted for this area, especially regarding foreign policy. Moreover, studies in this field tend to focus on discourse analysis, leaving a gap in terms of comparative studies between discourse and the practical execution of projects. This work intends to fill this gap by analyzing the evolution of Brazilian foreign policy on infrastructure, especially from a regional integration perspective in comparison with Brazilian federal government\'s budgetary allocation to the area at the beginning of this century. Results suggests there was a reduction in the regional integration perspective throughout the period analyzed, as well as a widening in the distance between discourse and practice, especially after 2010, when the relative importance of the infrastructure on the discourse started to grow as expenditure in the area diminished.

<p>The following thesis is dedicated to the investigation of the comparative gender discourse of two of the current South American female Presidents: Michelle Bachelet, the first woman elected President in Chile for a four year term, in 2006 and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the first woman elected President in Argentina also for a four year term, but in 2007. Using secondary sources and critical discourse analysis, the study attempts to characterize their agenda on gender both before and after their election campaigns. Recognizing that a candidate must balance between many actors, as one of the principles of social constructivism runs, the essay presents a short history of the feminist movement in both countries and the current state that the movement finds itself in, either institutionalized or absorbed and fragmented by party politics. The conclusions that the study arrives to are that, of the two subjects, the one who has presented a more concrete and convincing stand on gender thanks to her political views, the space created for feminism by her coalition and the climate of her country, is Michelle Bachelet.</p>

The presence of nonlinear dependence and chaos has strong implications for predictive modeling and the analysis of dominant processes in hydrology and climate. Analysis of extremes may aid in developing predictive models in hydro-climatology by giving enhanced understanding of processes driving the extremes and perhaps delineate possible anthropogenic or natural causes. This dissertation develops and utilizes different set of tools for predictive modeling, specifically nonlinear dependence, extreme, and chaos, and tests the viability of these tools on the real data. Commonly used dependence measures, such as linear correlation, cross-correlogram or Kendall's tau, cannot capture the complete dependence structure in data unless the structure is restricted to linear, periodic or monotonic. Mutual information (MI) has been frequently utilized for capturing the complete dependence structure including nonlinear dependence. Since the geophysical data are generally finite and noisy, this dissertation attempts to address a key gap in the literature, specifically, the evaluation of recently proposed MI-estimation methods to choose the best method for capturing nonlinear dependence, particularly in terms of their robustness for short and noisy data. The performance of kernel density estimators (KDE) and k-nearest neighbors (KNN) are the best for 100 data points at high and low noise-to-signal levels, respectively, whereas KNN is the best for 1000 data points consistently across noise levels. One real application of nonlinear dependence based on MI is to capture extrabasinal connections between El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and river flows in the tropics and subtropics, specifically the Nile, Amazon, Congo, Parana, and Ganges rivers which reveals 20-70% higher dependence than those suggested so far by linear correlations. For extremes analysis, this dissertation develops a new measure precipitation extremes volatility index (PEVI), which measures the variability of extremes, is defined as the ratio of return levels. Spatio-temporal variability of PEVI, based on the Poisson-generalized Pareto (Poisson-GP) model, is investigated on weekly maxima observations available at 2.5 degree grids for 1940-2004 in South America. From 1965-2004, the PEVI shows increasing trends in few parts of the Amazon basin and the Brazilian highlands, north-west Venezuela including Caracas, north Argentina, Uruguay, Rio De Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Asuncion, and Cayenne. Catingas, few parts of the Brazilian highlands, Sao Paulo and Cayenne experience increasing number of consecutive 2- and 3-days extremes from 1965-2004. This dissertation also addresses the ability to detect the chaotic signal from a finite time series observation of hydrologic systems. Tests with simulated data demonstrate the presence of thresholds, in terms of noise to chaotic-signal and seasonality to chaotic-signal ratios, beyond which the set of currently available tools is not able to detect the chaotic component. Our results indicate that the decomposition of a simulated time series into the corresponding random, seasonal and chaotic components is possible from finite data. Real streamflow data from the Arkansas and Colorado rivers do not exhibit chaos. While a chaotic component can be extracted from the Arkansas data, such a component is either not present or can not be extracted from the Colorado data.

Ziel dieser Arbeit ist die Vereinheitlichung der in Südamerika existierenden Höhensysteme, die sich auf verschiedene Meerespegel beziehen, in einem globalen vertikalen Referenzsystem, das die Erfordernisse moderner geodätischer Verfahren erfüllt. Dabei werden folgende Themen bearbeitet: a) Alternativen für die Definition und Realisierung eines konventionellen Welthöhensystems; b) Diagnostik und Standardisierung der südamerikanischen Höhensysteme; c) Strategien für die genaue Transformation der lokalen Höhensysteme in das Welthöhensystem. Unter der Voraussetzung, dass ein modernes Höhensystem die genaue Kombination von physikalischen und geometrischen Höhen unterstützen muss, werden zwei Komponenten betrachtet: a) eine geometrische Komponente bestehend aus ellipsoidischen Höhen als Koordinaten und ein Niveauellipsoid als Referenzfläche und b) eine physikalische Komponente bestehend aus geopotentiellen Koten als Koordinaten und eine durch einen bestimmten W0-Wert definierte Äquipotentialfläche als Referenzniveau. Die physikalische Komponente wird durch Potentialparameter definiert, damit sie als Bezug für jeden Typ von physikalischen Höhen (d.h. orthometrische Höhen, Normalhöhen, usw.) dienen kann. Die Umwandlung von geopotentiellen Koten in metrische Höhen und die Modellierung der Bezugsfläche (Geoid- bzw. Quasigeoid-Bestimmung) werden als ein Teil der Realisierung betrachtet. Da das ganze Konzept sich auf die Kombination von geometrischen und physikalischen Parametern bezieht, war es nötig, eine Inventur der zurzeit angewendeten Konventionen zu machen und diese zu analysieren, um systematische Fehler zu reduzieren und die zeitlichen Veränderungen der verschiedenen Daten zu berücksichtigen. Hauptprodukte dieser Arbeit sind: a) Detaillierte Beschreibung der Charakteristiken des Festpunktfeldes, das das globale vertikale Bezugsystem realisieren soll. Diese Beschreibung enthält genaue Formulierungen für die Berücksichtigung der notwendigen Konventionen und die Bereitstellung von Normalgleichungssystemen der nationalen Höhennetze, um ihre Kombination durch überregionale Ausgleichungen zu ermöglichen. b) Bestimmung eines W0-Referenzwertes unter Anwendung verschiedener Ansätze und der Kombination neuester Modelle der Erdoberfläche und des Erdschwerefeldes. Dabei wurde besonders auf die rigorose Fehlerfortpflanzung der Rechnungen geachtet, um die Zuverlässigkeit dieses Wertes zu schätzen. c) Formulierung der Bobachtungsgleichungen für die Bestimmung der Niveaudifferenzen zwischen den lokalen Höhensystemen und dem Welthöhenbezugssystem. Dies wurde in drei Ansätzen betrachtet: ein Ozean-Ansatz (im Meeresgebiet um die Referenzpegel), ein Küsten-Ansatz (auf dem Festland an den Referenzpegeln) und ein Kontinent-Ansatz (mit kontinentalen Festpunktfeldern des geometrischen Referenzsystems). d) Vereinheitlichung der existierenden Höhensysteme Südamerikas in dem globalen vertikalen Referenzsystem. Die Genauigkeit der Ergebnisse liegt derzeit um ±5 cm für die Gebiete mit der größten Anzahl von Beobachtungen (Argentinien, Brasilien-Imbituba, Kolumbien, Ecuador, Uruguay und Venezuela) und um ±2 … 3 dm für Gebiete mit geringer Verfügbarkeit und großer Unsicherheit der Daten (Brasilien-Santana, Bolivien, Peru und Chile). Die geschätzten Höhenniveaus sind größtenteils positiv, d.h. die lokalen vertikalen Datums liegen über dem globalen Referenzwert W0. Dieses sowie auch der Nord-Süd-Anstieg am Atlantik und der Süd-Nord-Anstieg am Pazifik spiegelt die Meeresoberflächentopographie in der Region wieder. e) Vorschläge zur Fortführung der Arbeiten mit zusätzlichen Daten in den einzelnen Ländern. / The objective of this study is the unification of the South American height systems into a global vertical reference system satisfying the requirements of modern Geodesy. The following topics are discussed: a) Definition and realisation of a conventional global vertical reference system; b) Review and standardisation of the geodetic data referring to the South American height systems; c) Strategies for the precise transformation of the local height datums into the global vertical reference system. It is expected that a modern vertical reference system supports the combination of physical and geometric heights with high accuracy globally. Therefore, two components are considered: a) A geometric component consisting of ellipsoidal heights as coordinates and a level ellipsoid as the reference surface, and b) A physical component comprising geopotential numbers as coordinates and an equipotential surface defined by a conventional W0 value as the reference surface. The definition of the physical component is based on potential parameters in order to provide reference to any type of physical heights (normal, orthometric, etc.). The conversion of geopotential numbers into metric heights and the modelling of the reference surface (geoid or quasigeoid determination) are considered as steps of the realisation. Since the approach developed in this study is based on the combination of geometric and physical parameters, it was necessary to include an inventory of the standards used in the determination of the vertical coordinates. This inventory is the basis for the identification and consequent removal of systematic errors caused by the application of different models and methods in the generation of the data available for this study. The main results of this study are: a) A detailed description of the characteristics to be satisfied by the reference stations realising the global vertical reference system. This description includes the needed conventions for the standardisation of the vertical coordinates and the computation of normal equations for the national levelling networks. These equations are required to integrate the local height systems into the global one. b) Estimation of the reference value W0 following different approaches and applying the latest geodetic models of the Earth\'s surface and gravity field. This procedure also includes a rigorous error propagation analysis to assess the reliability of the W0 estimate. c) Observation equations for the determination of the level discrepancies between the local height datums and the global W0. This is performed in three approaches: in the ocean areas around the reference tide gauges (ocean approach), at the reference tide gauges (coastal approach), and at the reference stations of the geocentric reference system (continental approach). d) Vertical datum parameters for the unification of the South American height systems into a global vertical reference system. The accuracy is assessed to be about ±5 cm for those countries with a good coverage of measurements (Argentina, Brazil-Imbituba, Colombia, Ecuador, Uruguay, and Venezuela). For those regions with poor data coverage or high uncertainties in the data quality (Brazil-Santana, Bolivia, Peru, and Chile), the accuracy is estimated to be about ±2 … 3 dm. The obtained level differences are in general positive, i.e., local vertical datums are above the global reference level W0. This and the north-south increase along the Atlantic coast and the south-north increase along the Pacific coast reflect well the behaviour of the sea surface topography in these regions. e) A description of the further activities to be developed by each country to improve the results of this study.

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Until relatively recently, the view of Late Pleistocene hunter-gatherers in the Americas was dominated by the “Clovis-first” paradigm. However, recent discoveries have challenged traditional views and forced reconsiderations of the timing, processes, and scales used in modeling the settlement of the Americas. Chief among these discoveries has been the recognition of a wide range of early cultural diversity throughout the Americas that is inconsistent with previously held notions of cultural homogeneity. During the Late Pleistocene-Early Holocene, the development of widely varying economic, technological and mobility strategies in distinct environments is suggestive of a range of different adaptations and traditions. It is argued that colonization was a disjointed process involving alternative, perhaps competing strategies at local and regional levels. Individual groups likely employed distinct strategies for settling new landscapes. These different strategies are reflected in the cultural variability that has been documented in the Late Pleistocene-Early Holocene archaeological records of South and North America. A scalar framework for conceptualizing and modeling this variability on local, regional, and continental scales is introduced. Although primarily focused on local and regional reconstructions, the results can be integrated with other regional studies to generate more comprehensive, continental-scale models of the peopling of the New World. This research provides insight into the local and regional variability—in terms of settlement patterns and economic and technological strategies—present in the archaeological record of at least two formally recognized Late Pleistocene-Early Holocene complexes (Fishtail and Paiján complexes) in the Quebradas del Batán and Talambo of the lower Jequetepeque Valley, northern Perú. Results of extensive survey, excavation, and materials analyses are used to characterize mobility strategies and settlement organization. This research indicates that two distinct patterns of site types, settlement, subsistence, and technology existed at the local level between the Fishtail (ca. 11,200-10,200 B.P.) and Paiján (ca. 10,800-9,000 B.P.); these patterns are indicative of differing regional strategies of colonization. Lastly, it is suggested that the adaptations and behaviors pursued during regional settlement, particularly by Paiján groups, set in motion an increasing reliance on plant foods and an early trend toward sedentism that carried forward into the Holocene period.

Thesis (M.A)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Department of Anthropology, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität Bonn, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Auburn University, 2005. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 164-173).

Thesis (doctoral)--Uppsala University, 1986. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 292-304).