Thesis--Lund. / Extra t.p. with thesis statement inserted. Summary in English. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2009. / "Graduate Program in Public Administration." Includes bibliographical references (p. 120-127).

Thesis (M.A. in Security Studies)--Naval Postgraduate School, December 2003. / Thesis advisor(s): Robert M. McNab, Karen Guttieri. Includes bibliographical references (p. 103-108). Also available online.

Thesis (M.S.W.)--University of Hong Kong, 1983.

Agents, by definition, (1) are situated in an environment upon which their actions affect changes and (2) have some level of autonomy from the control of humans or other agents. Being situated requires that the agent have a mechanism for sensing the environment as well as actuators for changing the environment. Autonomy implies that each agent has the freedom to make their own decisions. Rational agents are those agents that decide to execute actions that are in their “best interests” according to their desires, using a model of those desires on which they make those decisions. Action selection is complicated due to uncertainty when operating in a dynamic environment or where other actors (agents) can also influence the environment. This dissertation presents an action selection framework and algorithms that are (1) rational with respect to multiple desires and (2) responsive with respect to changing desires. Agents can use the concept of commitments, and the subsequent communication of those commitments, to coordinate their actions and reduce their uncertainty. Coordination is layered on top of this framework by describing and analyzing how commitments affect the agents’ desires in their action selection models. This research uses the domain of UAV surveillance to experimentally explore the balance between under-commitment and over-commitment. Where previous approaches concentrate on the semantics of commitment, this research concentrates on the pragmatics of commitment, describing how to use utility calculations to enable an agent to decide when making a commitment is in its best interests. / text

This report provides a broad technical and pedagogical overview of Paul Rolland's teaching method, as found in The Teaching of Action in String Playing (1974), and accompanying film series of the same title. Through this report, the reader will come to understand important fundamental violin playing techniques, which may be applied at all levels of violin playing. Rolland's unique movement training exercises, called “Action Studies,” present material in a carefully organized sequence of objectives designed to optimize learning and performance in all facets of instruction (Action Studies are distinguished from other tasks by use of quotation and capitalization throughout the report). The Rolland method is pedagogically unique in that it emphasizes basic concepts and ideas and cultivates an acute awareness of the body's movements. While pedagogically innovative, Rolland's violin playing principles drew influence from many great string pedagogues of the past, including Dr. F.A. Steinhausen, Carl Flesch, and Shinichi Suzuki. Additionally, Rolland was greatly influenced by the work of British Speech Teacher Frederick Matthias Alexander, and kinesiology scientist Frances A. Hellebrandt, M.D. For the purpose of accurately expounding Rolland's topical thirty-two unit course of study, this report is organized in sections corresponding with the chapters of The Teaching of Action in String Playing. / text

"Creating Inclusive Institutions: Race-based Affirmative Action Policies in Higher Education in the United States and Brazil" is a comparative analysis examining the impact of race-based policies on university enrollment rates of African-descendants in the United States and Brazil. The report contextualizes the history and use of race-based policy mechanisms at the University of Texas at Austin and the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), and draws parallels between the two case studies. The report finds that, as the United States moves away from race-based policies, U.S. public universities are increasingly pressured to support race-neutral policies that negate the need to correct for structural barriers African-Americans face in their pursuit for a postsecondary education. Race-based policies in the United States survive only because they increase levels of diversity, which have been shown to enhance the educational quality for all students in the classroom regardless of race. As a result, U.S. public universities grow increasingly exclusive, as minority student enrollments decline under race-neutral policies. Meanwhile, Brazil begins a new era embracing race-conscious policies to correct for enduring structural barriers faced by its Afro-Brazilian population in its pursuit for social and economic mobility. As Brazil increases its status as a global economic power, the State has identified an urgent need to quickly integrate its vast Afro-Brazilian population into positions of power. By upholding racial quotas as constitutional in public universities, Brazil creates more inclusive institutions, invests in the future of its citizenry, and improves its chances to sustain economic growth and create a truly shared economic prosperity. / text

This is an essay about reasons for action. It begins with two rather ordinary observations. The first is that these two uses of the term ‘reason’ roughly correspond with the two main roles that a reason can play: the role of favoring a prospective course of action, and the role of explaining action. Each of these roles seems crucial to a philosophical account of reasons, and it is not obvious that either has claim to priority. The second observation is that accommodating each of these roles seems to place restrictions on what we can say about reasons for action, and those who lean toward giving priority to one role rather than the other tend also to give priority to the corresponding set of restrictions. They take that set as given, and then focus their efforts on finding a way to meet the other set if they can. Accommodating the explanatory role has seemed to many to require that a reason bear some relation to the motivations of the agent for whom it is reason. One might wonder: what sense could there be in calling something a reason for me to act if it were not in any way capable of explaining my being moved to act? I argue, however, that accepting this sort of internalist condition on something’s being a reason to act precludes accepting a condition of objectivity that is imposed on us if we wish to accommodate the favoring role: sometimes, at least, when we have a reason to act, we could not cease to have that reason simply by having a (perhaps radically) different set of attitudes. I then consider whether the reverse might be true of externalist theories. Does taking the favoring role as one’s starting point preclude a full account of the explanatory role of reasons? I argue that it does not. I show that an Anscombean conception of intentional action allows for a fairly clean solution to a pair of puzzles that motivate this worry. This approach relieves much of the pressure to think of reasons as being tied to motivational attitudes. / text

This research suggests that the historical context of the 1990s in Brazil provoked the state and the Movimento Negro Unificado (MNU) to undergo specific political transformations with regard to their traditional views, ideologies and preferred strategies for dealing with race and racial inequality. The majority of mainstream literature on affirmative action suggests that the appearance of affirmative action was accompanied by radical shifts in the states policy on race (Gomes 2005, Htun 2004, Medeiros 2005, Mitchell 2006 and Vieira 2005). On the other hand, this literature rarely, if ever, considers the shifts in policies and organizing that occurred in the MNU in order for a policy of affirmative action to become a possibility (Hanchard, 1994). This research corrects for this inefficiency in the mainstream literature by re-centering the significant role that the shifts and ruptures in the MNU had in making affirmative action and other institutional efforts for overcoming inequality and racism in Brazil a possibility. By exploring the historical moment that gave rise to affirmative action, and comparing the state and MNUs traditional posture on racial inequality with the new posture that emerged alongside affirmative action policies, it is possible to re-think the nature of the shifts in the state and the MNU and the ways those shifts made policies like affirmative action a possibility. Therefore, this thesis suggests that opting for a politics of Affirmative action represents a re-articulation of the Movimento Negro, just as much as it represents a shift in the Brazilian states policy and rhetoric on race. Furthermore, this research suggests that affirmative action was a bottom-up policy, nurtured by the dynamics of the historical moment and made possible by the MNUs intense pressure on the state. This research also examines how the shifts in the state and the MNU, which facilitated specific changes in their methods and motivations for dealing with racial inequality, are still shaping the very nature of the current affirmative action debate in Brazil. / text

Investigating the neurophysiology behind our action encoding system offers a way of probing the underlying mechanisms regarding how we understand seen action. The ability to mentally simulate action (motor simulation) is a strong proposal to understand how we interpret others’ actions. The process of how we generate accurate motor simulations is proposed to be reliant on the context of the movement and sensory feedback from the limb. However, the neurophysiological mechanisms behind motor simulation are not yet understood. Known motor physiology for right-handed individuals show there is a left parietal-frontal network for the mental simulation of skilled movements; however, it remains unclear whether this is due to right limb dominance of the observer’s motor system because action simulation research has been focused primarily on right-handed individuals. The goal of this dissertation is to understand the underlying neurophysiology of the motor simulation process during action encoding. Generally, we propose different strategies of action simulation between right and left handed individuals. More specifically, we propose that right-handed individuals rely on their motor dominant left hemisphere for action encoding and motor simulation, while left-handed individuals will rely on their motor dominant right hemisphere. We will test this by evaluating neurobehavioral patterns of potential symmetry and asymmetry of motor simulation and action encoding based on patterns of limb dominance. We will also evaluate how impaired sensory feedback affects motor simulations, which can reveal how limb state affects the simulation process. The results of this series of studies will fill a void in our basic understanding of the motor simulation process and may generalize to populations with upper limb functional loss. Specifically, those with different hand dominance may require different rehabilitation programs in order to retrain an affected limb.