What is the influence that state-level nationalism exerts on dynamics of threat perception? The primary goal of this research is to investigate in what ways and to what extent state-level nationalism is used as an indicator of states’ intentions by governments in order to reduce uncertainty about the possible motivations and behaviors of other countries, informing their processes of threat assessment. The main objective of this research is to investigate if the type of state-level nationalism displayed by a specific state (civic/cultural/ethnic) affects the perceptions of threat developed by other countries. The hypothesis advanced here is that the further away a country is from the civic variety of nationalism, the higher the level of threat perception developed by others. In order to assess this hypothesis, a strategy that allies case-study qualitative research with large-scale quantitative analysis is applied. Three comparative case studies are performed, focusing on how the United States, France and Great Britain perceived the changes in the nationalisms of Germany and Italy from 1934 to 1938, and if these changes informed in any way their assessment of threat during the interwar period. In addition to this, the final part of this dissertation encompasses a quantitative analysis designed to look into the main question addressed by this project from a different perspective, in an attempt to seek for the possible objective basis of the threat perceptions investigated in the case studies.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-10-09T12:53:11Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 / Made available in DSpace on 2014-10-09T13:59:02Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 / Dissertação (Mestrado) / IPEN/D / Instituto de Pesquisas Energeticas e Nucleares - IPEN/CNEN-SP

Made available in DSpace on 2014-10-09T12:53:11Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 / Made available in DSpace on 2014-10-09T13:59:02Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 / A avaliação metrológica da incerteza da medição, apesar de estar normalizada internacionalmente (ISO-GUM, 1995) desde a metade dos anos 90, só agora está se popularizando nas indústrias, nas escolas técnicas e de engenharia. Em algumas áreas, como na metrologia dimensional, está avançada e em outras, como na medição de variáveis de processos industriais tais como vazão, pressão e temperatura, ainda está numa fase intermediara. Um dos principais entraves para essa popularização é a falta de padronização da nomenclatura nas especificações técnicas dos instrumentos de medição, onde se declara a incerteza, por exemplo, de 1% de ?acurácia? sem definir se é percentual da leitura, da faixa calibrada ou da faixa máxima. Ou ainda, sem definir se a probabilidade de abrangência é 68, 95 ou 99,7%. Esse trabalho entra nesse cenário com a pretensão de clarificar e simplificar esses conceitos, começando pelo histórico da evolução do pensamento que transformou a incerteza numa variável quantitativa com sua avaliação efetuada de uma maneira padronizada e internacionalmente aceita. Em seguida é feita uma descrição conceitual sucinta do método ISO-GUM e também é desvendado o intrincado jogo de palavras e fórmulas das declarações de incertezas dos fabricantes de instrumentos de medição. Com o domínio desses conceitos, partimos para efetuar dois exemplos numéricos de avaliação metrológica de incertezas na medição de vazão, usando um conjuntos de fórmulas semelhantes Ás publicadas por renomados fabricantes de instrumentos de medição. No primeiro exemplo usando a medição de vazão por pressão diferencial com placa de orifício e no segundo usando um medidor volumétrico, nos quais são identificadas e quantificadas todas as potenciais fontes de incerteza. A visualização e a analise é feita através de gráficos e planilhas em Excel. / Dissertação (Mestrado) / IPEN/D / Instituto de Pesquisas Energeticas e Nucleares - IPEN/CNEN-SP

Recent years have seen a significant increase in the number of ventilator-dependent children being discharged from the hospital. There is a wealth of literature describing the issues surrounding the complex discharge process required for these children however there has been limited exploration of the experiences of parents during their child’s admission to hospital. Interpretive phenomenology based on Heideggerian research philosophy was used to explore the lived experiences of hospital for parents of children commenced on invasive long-term ventilation (I-LTV). Purposive sampling was utilised to select parents of children who had been cared for at one NHS hospital trust. Eight in-depth, unstructured qualitative interviews involving sixteen parents (eight couples) were conducted over a six month period during 2014 to gather data about the parent’s recollections of the time spent with their child in hospital. Most children were cared for on both the paediatric intensive care (PIC) and high dependency units (HDU) with the majority having been discharged from hospital at the time of the interviews. All interviews were transcribed verbatim, and analysed using a modified van Manen (1990) approach. Thematic analysis provided an insight in to the lived world of the parents caring for their technology-dependent child, with two over-arching concepts of uncertainty and transitions characterising the parents’ journeys. The findings revealed multiple transitions in a world of complexity and uncertainty with four main themes emerging from the data; 1) Going in to the Unknown, 2) This wasn’t what we wanted, 3) Safer at Home, and 4) Clawing every little bit back. Parents were required to develop coping strategies to deal with the transitions and uncertainties experienced and establish new roles and identities as they became experts in caring for their technology-dependent child. As a result of the findings a new framework combining the concepts of uncertainty and transitions was derived identifying areas for consideration including: health-illness, psycho-social, situational and developmental transitions together with existential, biographical, environmental, relational and temporal uncertainties. Strategies for facilitating coping and adaptation towards healthier outcomes were identified and a strong argument emerged for the development of more effective management of transitions and uncertainty delivered within an environment more conducive to family-centred care.

Recent years have been marked by an enormous growth of wireless communication networks and an extensive use of wireless applications. In return, this phenomenal expansion induced more concerns about the privacy and the security of the users. Physical layer security is one of the most promising solutions that were proposed to enhance the security of next generation wireless systems. The fundamental idea behind this technique is to exploit the randomness and the fluctuations of the wireless channel to achieve security without conditional assumptions on the computational capabilities of the eavesdropper. In fact, while these elements have traditionally been associated with signal deterioration, physical layer security uses them to ensure the confidentiality of the users. Nevertheless, these technical virtues rely heavily on perhaps idealistic channel state information assumptions. In that regard, the aim of this thesis is to look at the physical layer security paradigm from the channel uncertainty perspective. In particular, we discuss the ergodic secrecy capacity of different wiretap channels when the transmitter is hampered by the imperfect knowledge of the channel state information (CSI). We consider two prevalent causes of uncertainty for the CSI at transmitter (CSIT); either an error of estimation occurs at the transmitter and he can only base his coding and the transmission strategies on a noisy version of the CSI, or the CSI feedback link has a limited capacity and the legitimate receivers can only inform the transmitter about the quantized CSI. We investigate both the single-user multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wiretap channel and the multi-user broadcast wiretap channel. In the latter scenario, we distinguish between two situations: multiple messages transmission and common message transmission. We also discuss the broadcast channel with confidential messages (BCCM) where the transmitter has one common message to be transmitted to two users and one secret message intended to only one of them. In all cases, we show that by appropriately designing the coding and the transmission schemes, a secure communication can still be achieved even with an imperfect knowledge of the CSIT.

How do organizations build trust under varying degrees of uncertainty? In this article, we propose that different degrees of uncertainty require different bases of trust. We distinguish between three different forms of trust production (process-based, characteristics-based and institution-based) and develop hypotheses regarding their relative effectiveness under low versus high levels of product and performance uncertainty. Using survey data on 392 interorganizational buyer-seller relationships, we find support for our position that a high degree of uncertainty favours process-based trust production, whereas characteristics-based trust production is relatively more effective when uncertainty is low. The effectiveness of institution-based trust production is not significantly affected by uncertainty. We derive implications for organizational trust production under different degrees of uncertainty, which should encourage new research on trust.

Background: The number of patients dying with advanced liver disease is rising dramatically. However, little is known about the experiences of these patients and their families in respect of their care and everyday life with the disease. Palliative care services are traditionally focused on cancer and more recently on other types of organ failure, but liver disease is relatively neglected. Aim and objectives: This study aimed to broaden our understanding of the experience of living and dying with advanced liver disease. Specifically, it sought to explore the dynamic physical, psychosocial, existential and information needs of patients and their lay and professional carers, and to review their use of health, social and voluntary services. Additionally, this study examined the utility of a qualitative longitudinal, multi-perspective methodology in end-of-life research. Methods: This study employed qualitative, multi-perspective serial in-depth interviews. Patients with different aetiologies of liver disease were recruited in hospital. They and their lay carers were interviewed up to three times over one year. Single interviews were undertaken with case-linked professionals. Interviews were recorded, transcribed and analysed using grounded theory techniques and NVivo 9. Results: 15 patients, 11 lay carers and 11 professional carers were recruited, and 53 interviews conducted. Uncertainty was the key experience at all stages of the illness, across all domains, and for all participants: patients, lay carers and professionals. This uncertainty related to the nature of the illness, the unpredictability of disease pathway and prognosis, poor communication and information-sharing, and complexities of care. Coping strategies demonstrated a continuous quest to manage uncertainty. Current care arrangements were a poor fit with the high levels of physical and psychosocial need identified. The ubiquitous uncertainty meant that a care planning approach was difficult to introduce. Employing a qualitative longitudinal, multi-perspective approach emerged as a useful and effective way in which to conduct research with this patient group and contributed new learning with regard to its application in end-of-life research. Conclusion: This study identified uncertainty as the central pervasive factor in the experiences of patients, lay and professional carers. The needs of this patient group are currently poorly met from diagnosis to bereavement. Uncertainty makes advance care planning important, but difficult to know when to start. More needs to be done to ensure that people living and dying with advanced liver disease and their families benefit from appropriate and timely supportive and palliative care.

En utilisant des amers visuels géoréférencés. Le processus d’appariement de flux d’images avec ces amers est guidé par les incertitudes des poses. On ajoute des contraintes absolues dans le système d’équations de l’ajustement de faisceaux. La dérive de la trajectoire du véhicule de cartographie est très fortement réduite.  Chaque étape de l’algorithme est évaluée sur des séquences d’images réelles avec une vérité terrain. Le véhicule de cartographie est le processus de collecte des données géo-spatiales. Ces véhicules sont souvent équipés de deux types de capteurs: télédétection (caméras, Lidar, Radar) et géolocalisation (GNSS, IMU, Odomètre). Le géoréférencement des données précis et robuste constitue un enjeu majeur pour la mise en œuvre des systèmes de cartographie mobile. En effet, en milieux urbains denses, les phénomènes de masquages GNSS et de trajets multiples pertubent les mesures de GNSS et conduisent à des erreurs de localisations importantes. Les centrales inertielles de grandes précisions permettent de combler les manques de localisation GNSS. Elles garantissent une dérive de position suffisamment faible pour obtenir la qualité de géoréférencement nécessaire pour la numérisation à des fins cartographiques. Aujourd’hui, la maturité des systèmes de géolocalisation hybride (GNSS/IMU/Odomètre) offre des solutions industrielles fiables pour la collecte de données géoréférencées. Les agences de cartographie nationales et privées ont commencées à faire des acquisitions de données nécessaires à la constitution de données géo-spatiales à très grande échelle. Cependant, le coût très onéreux des systèmes de géolocalisation intégrant des centrales inertielles de grandes précisions restreint leur utilisation à la constitution de données géoréferencées. Une solution plus abordable est nécessaire pour équiper les véhicules  employés pour les mises à jour régulières de ces données.L’objectif de cette thèse est de proposer une solution abordable de géolocalisation utilisable sur un grand nombre de véhicules pouvant être mobilisés pour la mise à jour de données géoréferencées.Nous proposons d’utiliser une ou plusieurs caméras sur un véhicule comme un système de géoréférencement. En effet la trajectoire du véhicule peut être estimée par une technique d’odométrie visuelle. Pour limiter la dérive de la trajectoire due à l’accumulation des erreurs, nous proposons de le recaler sur un ensemble d’amers visuels précisément géoréférencés. Ces amers sont reconstruits en utilisant les données géoréferencées générées par des systèmes de cartographies précis et onéreux. Les caractéristiques de route telles que les signalisations horizontales et verticales ont été choisi en tant que amers visuels.Un algorithme d’ajustement de faisceaux local a été adapté pour estimer la pose des caméras en utilisant un flux d’images acquis par un ou plusieurs caméras embarquées sur celui-ci. Une méthode rigoureuse de prise en compte des incertitudes permet de pondérer de manière automatique les différents types de contraintes dans le système d’équations de l’ajustement et d’estimer les incertitudes des paramètres. Ces dernières sont utilisées dans une approche appelée appariement par propagation qui permet d’accélérer le processus de suivi des points d’intérêt entre les images et d’éliminer un grand nombre de faux appariements. Cela réduit très fortement la dérive du véhicule en diminuant les sources des erreurs. Chaque étape de l'algorithme est évaluée sur des séquences d'images réelles avec des vérités terrains / Mobile mapping is the process of collecting geospatial data with a moving vehicle. These vehicles are often equipped with two types of sensors: remote sensing (cameras, lidar, radar) and geo-localization (GNSS, IMU, odometer). Precise and robust georeferencing has been a major challenge for the implementation of mobile mapping systems. Indeed, in dense urban environments, the masks of signals and multipath errors corrupt the measurements and lead to big positioning errors. High precision IMUs enable to bridge the gaps of positioning and ensure a drift low enough to fulfil the requirements of mapping in terms of accuracy. Nowadays, the hybrid positioning systems (GNSS / IMU / Odometer) are mature enough to provide reliable industrial solutions for the collection of geo-referenced data. National and private mapping agencies have started to collect the required row data for building geospatial repositories at very large scales. However, the very high cost of positioning systems incorporating high precisions IMUs restricts their use to the establishment of geospatial reference data and more affordable positioning solutions are needed for map updating purpose.The objective of this thesis is to provide a low cost positioning solution that can be used on a large number of map updating vehicles.We propose to use one or more cameras on a vehicle as a georeferencing system. Indeed, the vehicle’s trajectory can be estimated using visual odometry techniques. To limit the drift of the trajectory due to the accumulation of errors, we propose a registration on a set of visual landmarks that are precisely georeferenced. These landmarks are reconstructed using the reference data generated by precise and expensive mapping systems. Natural road features such as road markings and traffic signs were chosen as visual landmarks.A local bundle adjustment algorithm has been adapted to estimate the pose of the vehicle using a sequence of images acquired by one or more embedded cameras. A rigorous approach that takes into account the uncertainties enables to tune automatically the weights of every constraint in the equation system of the adjustment and to estimate the uncertainties of the parameters. They are used in a propagation based matching algorithm that accelerates the process of tracking the interest points between the images and eliminate many false matches. This significantly reduces the drift of the visual odometry by reducing the sources of errors. The remaining part of the drift is removed using georeferenced visual landmarks. The process of matching the image sequence with the landmarks is guided by the uncertainty of the poses. It adds a set of absolute constraints in the equation system of bundle adjustment. The drift is drastically reduced. Each step of the algorithm is evaluated on real image sequences with ground truths

The dissertation looks at three topics that involve experimental economics methods or individual decision making under risk: how do people make educational decisions when facing the risk of drop out; which models best characterize individuals' decision processes under risk; how can physicians improve discharge decisions to reduce the risk of unplanned readmissions. In the first chapter, I introduce the risk of dropout into Spence’s job market signaling model and test the modified model in the laboratory. I look at equilibria in the labor market and discuss the refinement based on the Cho-Kreps Intuitive Criterion. I derive the condition under which a separating equilibrium is the only perfect Bayesian equilibrium that survives the refinement and discuss the effects of workers' risk preferences on these equilibrium predictions. The data from lab experiments show that the market reaches the separating equilibrium more often when it is the only intuitive equilibrium. I also observe that, when the share of the low-ability type in the worker population decreases, or the cost to pursue a degree increases, the size of the wage premium for having the degree generally decreases. In the experiments, I use binary lottery tasks to elicit subjects' risk preferences to explain their strategies in the signaling games, and the analyses partially confirm the prediction that more risk-averse individuals pursue a higher degree less frequently in the presence of dropout risks. In the second chapter, as part of a joint project with Dr. Glenn W. Harrison and Dr. Rusty Tchernis, we apply the Bayesian econometric method to estimation of individual preferences under risk. We estimate a mixture model of Expected Utility Theory and Cumulative Prospect Theory using both simulated and observed binary lottery choices. We develop Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithms to sample from the posterior distribution of parameters in the mixture model and compare the performances of different algorithms. The algorithms generally recover the true parameters used in the simulation, although some algorithms outperformed others in terms of efficiency. We also apply the algorithms to estimation using actual choice data. We find that 56.5% of the subjects can be characterized as consistent with Expected Utility Theory and 43.5% with Cumulative Prospect Theory. We find modest risk aversion among Expected Utility maximizers, and overweighting on the probabilities of extreme outcomes with very mild loss aversion among Cumulative Prospective Utility maximizers. In the third chapter, coauthored with Dr. Ira L. Leeds, Dr. Vjollca Sadiraj, Dr. James C. Cox, Dr. Timothy M. Pawlik, Dr. Kurt E. Schnier and Dr. John F. Sweeney, we sought to define the association between information used for hospital discharge and patients' subsequent risk of unplanned readmission. De-identified data for patients from a tertiary academic medical center's surgical services were analyzed using a time-to-event model to identify criteria that statistically explained the timing of discharges. The data were subsequently used to develop a prediction model of unplanned hospital readmissions. Comparison of discharge behaviors versus the predictive readmission model suggested important discordance with certain clinical measures not being accounted for to optimize discharges. We suggest that decision-support tools for discharge may utilize variables that are not routinely considered by healthcare providers.

Master of Arts / Department of Communications Studies / Natalie Pennington / Interpersonal conflict is common before; during and after romantic relationships develop. A structured framework is needed to understand the causes, implications, and contexts of interpersonal conflict within interpersonal relationships. This in-depth literature review of current scholarly work is compiled to provide a roadmap for understanding the Relational Turbulence Model (Solomon & Knobloch, 2004) and the contexts that have been studied using this framework. Also provided is a discussion of future directions for scholars to pursue and advance the application of the model, with the hope that future scholars will pick up where others have left off, expanding on what is known about interpersonal conflict generally, communication processes, and relational turbulence specifically.