O monitoramento automático de pacientes é um recurso essencial em hospitais para o bom gerenciamento de cuidados médicos. Enquanto que alarmes devido a condições fisiológicas anormais são importantes para o rápido tratamento, estes também podem ser uma fonte de ruídos desnecessários devido a falsos alarmes causados por interferência eletromagnética ou movimentação de sensores. Uma fonte significativa de falsos alarmes é relacionada com a frequência cardíaca, o qual é disparado quando o ritmo cardíaco do paciente está muito rápido ou muito lento. Neste trabalho, a fusão de diferentes sensores fisiológicos é explorada para fazer uma estimativa robusta de frequência cardíaca. Um conjunto de algoritmos utilizando índice de variabilidade cardíaca, inferência bayesiana, redes neurais, lógica fuzzy e votador majoritário são propostos para fundir a informação do eletrocardiograma, pressão sanguínea e fotopletismograma. Três informações básicas são extraídas de cada sensor: variabilidade cardíaca, a diferença de frequência cardíaca entre os sensores e a análise espectral. Estas informações são usadas como entradas para os algoritmos. Quarenta gravações selecionadas do banco de dados MIMIC são usadas para validar o sistema. Finalmente, a frequência cardíaca calculada é comparada com as anotações do banco de dados. Resultados mostram que a fusão utilizando redes neurais apresenta a melhor redução de falsos alarmes de 89.33%, enquanto que a técnica bayesiana apresenta uma redução de 83.76%. A lógica fuzzy mostrou uma redução de 77.96%, o votador majoritário 61.25% e o índice de variabilidade cardíaca de 65.43%. Portanto, os algoritmos propostos mostraram bom desempenho e podem ser muito úteis em monitores de sinais vitais modernos. / Automatic patient monitoring is an essential resource in hospitals for good health care management. While alarms due to abnormal physiological conditions are important to deliver fast treatment, it can be also a source of unnecessary noise due to false alarms caused by electromagnetic interference or motion artifacts. One significant source of false alarms are those related to heart rate, which is triggered when the heart rhythm of the patient is too fast or too slow. In this work, the fusion of different physiological sensors is explored in order to create a robust heart rate estimation. A set of algorithms using heart rate variability index, bayesian inference, neural networks, fuzzy logic and majority voting is proposed to fuse information from electrocardiogram, arterial blood pressure and photoplethysmogram. Three basic informations are extracted from each source, namely, heart rate variability, the heart rate difference between sensors and the spectral analysis. These informations are used as inputs to the algorithms. Forty selected recordings from MIMIC database was used to validate the system. Finally, the calculated heart rate is compared with the database annotation. Results show that neural networks fusion presents the best false alarms reduction of 89.33%, while the bayesian technique presents an error reduction of 83.76%. Fuzzy logic showed an error reduction of 77.96%, majority voting 61.25% and the heart rate variability index 65.43%. Therefore, the proposed algorithms showed good performance and can be very useful for modern bedside monitors.

Por mais que a negociação do voto em troca dos mais variados benefícios tenha desembarcado no país junto da coroa portuguesa ao início do século XIX, se percebe que ela não definhou na história política brasileira. Nem a queda da monarquia e instauração da república e seus valores, a perda de poder dos coronéis de terras, a implantação de punições eleitorais mais duras aos negociantes do voto, ou mesmo a introdução do voto eletrônico para dificultar a prestação de contas do eleitor cliente ao político patrão ao final do século XX foram capazes de conter o desenvolvimento do fenômeno político denominado clientelismo. Um tipo de prática difícil de mensurar, sobretudo, porque para confirmar a troca do voto por algum benefício é necessário que o eleitor admita ter participado desse tipo de transação, ou que o candidato admita ter proposto esse tipo de situação aos eleitores. A confissão é pouco provável de ocorrer, principalmente em decorrência das punições eleitorais e jurídicas que recaem sobre ambos. Para contornar essa dificuldade se optou por tomar apenas o eleitor brasileiro como objeto de análise, e questionar se suas características demográficas, socioeconômicas ou culturais favorecem o clientelismo no Brasil? A delimitação temporal consistiu no período com início no ano de 2000 e término no ano de 2010. Se decidiu trabalhar com duas linhas de investigação: a) mensurar a oferta do clientelismo pelo político ao eleitor; b) mensurar a aprovação do eleitor para uma situação específica de clientelismo vivenciada por si ou por outros. As hipóteses adotadas de início foram: (H1) residir em município de pequeno porte populacional aumenta a probabilidade da oferta clientelista ao eleitor brasileiro; (H2) possuir pouca renda mensal aumenta o risco da oferta e da aprovação ao clientelismo no Brasil; (H3) possuir uma cultura política paroquial aumenta a probabilidade da aprovação do clientelismo pelo eleitor brasileiro. Os resultados obtidos ao final da tese desmentem a maioria das afirmações embasadas no senso comum, algumas realizadas por pesquisadores da área, e todas as hipóteses da tese. Eles demonstram que a região de residência do eleitor e sua idade foram significativas para a ocorrência da oferta clientelista, e que nenhuma das características da população de eleitores foi capaz de influenciar em sua aprovação ao clientelismo na primeira década de 2000. / Even though the negotiation of the vote in exchange of the most varied benefits has landed in the country along with the Portuguese crown at the beginning of the XIX century, it is noticed that it does not decreased in Brazilian political History. Not even the fall of the monarchy and instauration of the Republic and their values, the loss of the power of the colonels, the implementation of harsher electoral punishments to the voting dealers or even the introduction of eletronic voting to difficult the accountability of the cliente elector to the political boss at the end of the 20th century were able to contain the development of the political phenomenon called clientelism. A type of practice that is difficult to measure because to confirm the exchange of votes for some benefits is necessary that the voter admits to having participated of this type of transaction or that the candidate admits that he has proposed this type of situation to the voters. The confession is unlikely to occur mainly due to electoral and legal punishments that fall in both. To get around this difficulty, it was decided to take only Brazilian voter as the object of analysis and question whether if their demographic, socioeconomic and cultural characteristics favor clientelism in Brazil. The temporal delimitation constitutes in the period beginning in the year 2000 and finish in the year 2010. It was decided to work with two lines of research: a) measure the offer of the clientelismo by the politician to the voter; b) measure the voter approval for a specific situation experienced by itself or others. The hypotheses adopted at the beginning were: (H1) inhabit in the municipality of small population increases the probability of clientelist offer to the Brazilian voter; (H2) having a small monthly income increases the risk; (H3) have a parochial political culture increases the probability of the clientelism approval by the Brazilian voter. The results obtained at the end of the thesis disprove most of the common sense affirmations, some performed by researchers in the área and all hypotheses of the thesis. They demonstrate that the region of residence to the voter and his age were significant for the occurence of clientelistic and that none of the characteristics of the population of the voters was able to influence their approval to the clientelism in the first decade of 2000.

The dynamics on networks and the dynamics of networks are usually entangled with each other in many highly connected systems, where the former means the evolution of state and the latter means the adaptation of structure. In this thesis, we will study the coupled dynamics through analytical and computational approaches, where the adaptive networks are driven by learning of various complexities. Firstly, we investigate information diffusion on networks through an adaptive voter model, where two opinions are competing for the dominance. Two types of dynamics facilitate the agreement between neighbours: one is pairwise imitation and the other is link rewiring. As the rewiring strength increases, the network of voters will transform from consensus to fragmentation. By exploring various strategies for structure adaptation and state evolution, our results suggest that network configuration is highly influenced by range-based rewiring and biased imitation. In particular, some approximation techniques are proposed to capture the dynamics analytically through moment-closure differential equations. Secondly, we study an evolutionary model under the framework of natural selection. In a structured community made up of cooperators and cheaters (or defectors), a new-born player will adopt a strategy and reorganise its neighbourhood based on social inheritance. Starting from a cooperative population, an invading cheater may spread in the population occasionally leading to the collapse of cooperation. Such a collapse unfolds rapidly with the change of external conditions, bearing the traits of a critical transition. In order to detect the risk of invasions, some indicators based on population composition and network structure are proposed to signal the fragility of communities. Through the analyses of consistency and accuracy, our results suggest possible avenues for detecting the loss of cooperation in evolving networks. Lastly, we incorporate distributed learning into adaptive agents coordination, which emerges as a consequence of rational individual behaviours. A generic framework of work-learn-adapt (WLA) is proposed to foster the success of agents organisation. To gain higher organisation performance, the division of labour is achieved by a series of events of state evolution and structure adaptation. Importantly, agents are able to adjust their states and structures through quantitative information obtained from distributed learning. The adaptive networks driven by explicit learning pave the way for a better understanding of intelligent organisations in real world.

Por mais que a negociação do voto em troca dos mais variados benefícios tenha desembarcado no país junto da coroa portuguesa ao início do século XIX, se percebe que ela não definhou na história política brasileira. Nem a queda da monarquia e instauração da república e seus valores, a perda de poder dos coronéis de terras, a implantação de punições eleitorais mais duras aos negociantes do voto, ou mesmo a introdução do voto eletrônico para dificultar a prestação de contas do eleitor cliente ao político patrão ao final do século XX foram capazes de conter o desenvolvimento do fenômeno político denominado clientelismo. Um tipo de prática difícil de mensurar, sobretudo, porque para confirmar a troca do voto por algum benefício é necessário que o eleitor admita ter participado desse tipo de transação, ou que o candidato admita ter proposto esse tipo de situação aos eleitores. A confissão é pouco provável de ocorrer, principalmente em decorrência das punições eleitorais e jurídicas que recaem sobre ambos. Para contornar essa dificuldade se optou por tomar apenas o eleitor brasileiro como objeto de análise, e questionar se suas características demográficas, socioeconômicas ou culturais favorecem o clientelismo no Brasil? A delimitação temporal consistiu no período com início no ano de 2000 e término no ano de 2010. Se decidiu trabalhar com duas linhas de investigação: a) mensurar a oferta do clientelismo pelo político ao eleitor; b) mensurar a aprovação do eleitor para uma situação específica de clientelismo vivenciada por si ou por outros. As hipóteses adotadas de início foram: (H1) residir em município de pequeno porte populacional aumenta a probabilidade da oferta clientelista ao eleitor brasileiro; (H2) possuir pouca renda mensal aumenta o risco da oferta e da aprovação ao clientelismo no Brasil; (H3) possuir uma cultura política paroquial aumenta a probabilidade da aprovação do clientelismo pelo eleitor brasileiro. Os resultados obtidos ao final da tese desmentem a maioria das afirmações embasadas no senso comum, algumas realizadas por pesquisadores da área, e todas as hipóteses da tese. Eles demonstram que a região de residência do eleitor e sua idade foram significativas para a ocorrência da oferta clientelista, e que nenhuma das características da população de eleitores foi capaz de influenciar em sua aprovação ao clientelismo na primeira década de 2000. / Even though the negotiation of the vote in exchange of the most varied benefits has landed in the country along with the Portuguese crown at the beginning of the XIX century, it is noticed that it does not decreased in Brazilian political History. Not even the fall of the monarchy and instauration of the Republic and their values, the loss of the power of the colonels, the implementation of harsher electoral punishments to the voting dealers or even the introduction of eletronic voting to difficult the accountability of the cliente elector to the political boss at the end of the 20th century were able to contain the development of the political phenomenon called clientelism. A type of practice that is difficult to measure because to confirm the exchange of votes for some benefits is necessary that the voter admits to having participated of this type of transaction or that the candidate admits that he has proposed this type of situation to the voters. The confession is unlikely to occur mainly due to electoral and legal punishments that fall in both. To get around this difficulty, it was decided to take only Brazilian voter as the object of analysis and question whether if their demographic, socioeconomic and cultural characteristics favor clientelism in Brazil. The temporal delimitation constitutes in the period beginning in the year 2000 and finish in the year 2010. It was decided to work with two lines of research: a) measure the offer of the clientelismo by the politician to the voter; b) measure the voter approval for a specific situation experienced by itself or others. The hypotheses adopted at the beginning were: (H1) inhabit in the municipality of small population increases the probability of clientelist offer to the Brazilian voter; (H2) having a small monthly income increases the risk; (H3) have a parochial political culture increases the probability of the clientelism approval by the Brazilian voter. The results obtained at the end of the thesis disprove most of the common sense affirmations, some performed by researchers in the área and all hypotheses of the thesis. They demonstrate that the region of residence to the voter and his age were significant for the occurence of clientelistic and that none of the characteristics of the population of the voters was able to influence their approval to the clientelism in the first decade of 2000.

O monitoramento automático de pacientes é um recurso essencial em hospitais para o bom gerenciamento de cuidados médicos. Enquanto que alarmes devido a condições fisiológicas anormais são importantes para o rápido tratamento, estes também podem ser uma fonte de ruídos desnecessários devido a falsos alarmes causados por interferência eletromagnética ou movimentação de sensores. Uma fonte significativa de falsos alarmes é relacionada com a frequência cardíaca, o qual é disparado quando o ritmo cardíaco do paciente está muito rápido ou muito lento. Neste trabalho, a fusão de diferentes sensores fisiológicos é explorada para fazer uma estimativa robusta de frequência cardíaca. Um conjunto de algoritmos utilizando índice de variabilidade cardíaca, inferência bayesiana, redes neurais, lógica fuzzy e votador majoritário são propostos para fundir a informação do eletrocardiograma, pressão sanguínea e fotopletismograma. Três informações básicas são extraídas de cada sensor: variabilidade cardíaca, a diferença de frequência cardíaca entre os sensores e a análise espectral. Estas informações são usadas como entradas para os algoritmos. Quarenta gravações selecionadas do banco de dados MIMIC são usadas para validar o sistema. Finalmente, a frequência cardíaca calculada é comparada com as anotações do banco de dados. Resultados mostram que a fusão utilizando redes neurais apresenta a melhor redução de falsos alarmes de 89.33%, enquanto que a técnica bayesiana apresenta uma redução de 83.76%. A lógica fuzzy mostrou uma redução de 77.96%, o votador majoritário 61.25% e o índice de variabilidade cardíaca de 65.43%. Portanto, os algoritmos propostos mostraram bom desempenho e podem ser muito úteis em monitores de sinais vitais modernos. / Automatic patient monitoring is an essential resource in hospitals for good health care management. While alarms due to abnormal physiological conditions are important to deliver fast treatment, it can be also a source of unnecessary noise due to false alarms caused by electromagnetic interference or motion artifacts. One significant source of false alarms are those related to heart rate, which is triggered when the heart rhythm of the patient is too fast or too slow. In this work, the fusion of different physiological sensors is explored in order to create a robust heart rate estimation. A set of algorithms using heart rate variability index, bayesian inference, neural networks, fuzzy logic and majority voting is proposed to fuse information from electrocardiogram, arterial blood pressure and photoplethysmogram. Three basic informations are extracted from each source, namely, heart rate variability, the heart rate difference between sensors and the spectral analysis. These informations are used as inputs to the algorithms. Forty selected recordings from MIMIC database was used to validate the system. Finally, the calculated heart rate is compared with the database annotation. Results show that neural networks fusion presents the best false alarms reduction of 89.33%, while the bayesian technique presents an error reduction of 83.76%. Fuzzy logic showed an error reduction of 77.96%, majority voting 61.25% and the heart rate variability index 65.43%. Therefore, the proposed algorithms showed good performance and can be very useful for modern bedside monitors.

We introduce an electoral pollster in a two-candidate costly voting model to study the incentives that pollsters have regarding the release of poll results. In our model, the pollster has private knowledge about the distribution of citizens\' preferences, but it may report false information to the public. If this happens, we say the pollster is misreporting the poll. An often heard criticism about pollsters is that they might manipulate in order to benefit some candidate. We show that they have incentives to misreport even in the absence of ideological motives. Moreover, misreported polls are welfare-improving relative to truthful polls. / Introduz-se um instituto de pesquisa eleitoral em um modelo de voto custoso a fim de estudar quais incentivos os institutos possuem ao divulgarem suas pesquisas. No nosso modelo, o instituto possui informação privada a respeito da distribuição de preferências da sociedade sobre os candidatos, mas pode escolher reportar incorretamente essa informação ao público. Se isso acontece, diremos que o instituto manipulou a pesquisa eleitoral. Uma preocupação comum das pessoas em relação aos institutos de pesquisa é a possibilidade de eles manipularem uma pesquisa eleitoral com o objetivo direto de beneficiar um determinado candidato. Nós mostramos que eles possuem incentivos para manipular a pesquisa mesmo na ausência de motivações partidárias. Ainda, essa manipulação aumenta o bem-estar da sociedade, em comparação com pesquisas verdadeiras.

The Master's Thesis deals with a potential impact of an introduction of the electronic voting on voter turnout of university students. First section focuses on theoretical foundation and academic debate of this subject. Additionally the current level of implementation of the electronic voting in the Czech Republic, Estonia and worldwide is explored. The hypothesis is formulated as a question whether the introduction of the electronic voting could potentially influence voter turnout of university students. The study is based on a questionnaire survey.

The present work concentrates on a segment of information whose socio-political importance is steadily increasing. Theoretical framework of the study is centred on conceptualization of the term 'information' and social significance of information in the contemporary world. The main part of this study focuses on first-time voters in the elections to the Chamber of Deputies of the Parliament of the Czech Republic that will take place in 2014. The necessary data about this specific group of future voters were acquired through printed, quantitative questioning based questionnaires. The questionnaires were distributed to the first-time voters by their teachers during regular lessons in various types of secondary schools. Subsequently, the collected data served as a basis for confirmation of the pre-stated hypotheses and for conceptualization of the 'model' average first-time voter in the 2014 elections to the Lower House of the Parliament of the Czech Republic. As was revealed by the research, the attitude of the future first-time voters towards politics and political affairs is to a large degree lukewarm. In forming their own political views and opinions they prefer information acquired through internet and television over alternative sources such as school or family. These and many other findings are the result of this study. They can and should serve to public institutions, political representatives, general public and first-time voters themselves as a basis for introducing such measures that would increase participation of younger age-groups in the political discourse. In this respect some elementary suggestions are offered in the end of this paper.

The main goal of this thesis is to find out if the Christian Democratic Movement is able to become a leader of the right wing parties within the Slovak party system. This question is the result of the last election in March 2012 when the former leader Slovak Christian and Democratic Union failed. The work is divided in three chapters. The first chapter analyses consolidation of the Slovak party system and classify it according to the theoretical part about party systems and conception of cleavages. The second part testifies belonging of Christian Democratic Movement to the family of Christian Democratic parties according to the evolution, membership in multinational groups and programmatic. The third chapter analyses social- demographic and value profile of Christian Democratic Movement followers, the credibility of the movement and the voter's movements between parties.

Previous research of the theory of Affective Intelligence holds that anxiety in individuals causes learning behavior. If people are anxious they will actively seek new information. This new information gathered while anxious will cause each individual person to cease acting habitually and begin acting in a manner in line with rational choice models. This thesis addresses three hypotheses; (1) that people who feel anxiety engage in greater information seeking behavior and (2) when people feel anxious they will use information sources that are readily available and efficient to use and (3) anxious individuals will turnout to vote more often than those who are not anxious. I began with the replication of the original research methods of Marcus and MacKuen (1993) and Marcus, Neuman and MacKuen (2000). I then tested hypothesis 1 using new measurements of anxiety in order to address the concerns originally posited by Ladd and Lenz (2008) and Valentino et al. (2008). My final test of hypothesis 1 used revised measurements of anxiety and information derived from 2000-2002 NES Panel data, much in the same manner as Marcus, Neuman and MacKuen (2000). I then tested hypothesis 2 using the same 2000-2002 NES Panel data and an information source change variable. I tested my final hypothesis using pooled NES data from 1984, 1988 and 2000. My findings suggest that as Affective Intelligence predicts, people who feel anxious do tend to seek information. Moreover, when anxious, people will use readily available and efficient information sources. My final finding suggests that although people tend to seek information when anxious this does not necessarily translate into greater participation. Finally, I conclude that the theory of Affective Intelligence is generally correct, but, further research using methods that can better demonstrate the causal direction needs to be undertaken to fully validate Affective Intelligence and more testing of the effect of anxiety on political participation is necessary.