In general, the Internet represents an unsecured medium of data transfer. Besides the rising popularity of the Internet, the matters of safety are getting to the foreground of importance. Anybody would be able to gain access to the computer network or to other valuable information if no algorithm of verifying the genuineness of identity were used. It is necessary to secure not only the access to the documents but also the content itself, which could be modified during the transfer through an unsecured medium. Last but not least, without the discretion provided by cryptography, the information may become literally public. To provide security and protection for the communicating participants the problems mentioned above are solved with the help of cryptographic techniques. The verification of the identity and the integrity of messages, the credibility of document’s ownership and safe data transfer through an unsecured medium are all the aspects, which the field of communication security on the Internet, thus the public key infrastructure, deals with. The electronic signature, as a part of the security area, is one of many advertised themes nowadays in Czech Republic. The aim of this master’s thesis is to acquaint the reader with the necessary technological procedures of digital signature, such as cryptographic techniques, public key infrastructure and timestamp. The practical part of this thesis consists of a suggested implementation of a web application in the programming language ASP.NET, which forms a certification authority with an opportunity of claiming a timestamp to authorize timestamps. After the problematic of cryptography was explained in the first chapter, the term of electronic signature has been introduced in the second chapter. Very important information, as far as the electronic signature of documents is concerned, is the time of the document’s creation and the subsequent signature verification by an appropriate authority. So the following part of the thesis is dedicated to the timestamp and to the authority of its verification. The fourth section deals with the large scale of public key infrastructure. The fifth part focuses on the description of the support for the whole problem mentioned so far using Microsoft’s programming language ASP.NET. The final sixth chapter represents the practical part of the thesis, namely the web application itself, where the individual modules of the application with its functions are described.

Cette thèse examine le rapport stylistique et esthétique entre l'original et la traduction : l'écrivain et le traducteur écrivent chacun leur version de l'œuvre, l'une auctoriale, l'autre allographe. Le terme « auctorial » peut donc aussi s'appliquer au traducteur, auteur de la traduction et juridiquement reconnu comme tel. En partant du principe qu'à la lecture, un auteur peut s'identifier à son style d'écriture, il s'agit de montrer en quoi le traducteur a un style propre se démarquant de celui de l'auteur de l'original, en termes de créativité et de faits de style. Cela posé, il restera à déterminer dans quelle mesure l'un ou l'autre de ces deux auteurs, par son style, s'approprie l'œuvre, autrement dit, à qui revient l'autorité en ce qui concerne l'œuvre, en prenant en compte l'action des autres parties prenantes dans l'écriture, comme l'éditeur et même le lecteur : on verra ainsi que l'autorité est une variable. On peut dire que l'écrivain et le traducteur entreprennent une coopération, au sens étymologique, pour l'écriture de l'œuvre. Pour identifier le style d'un traducteur, on s'intéressera au style qu'un même écrivain développe dans différentes productions, et à celui qu'un même traducteur utilise dans différentes traductions. On essaiera d'en déduire quelle évolution stylistique a lieu d'une production à une autre, et d'une traduction à une autre. À la suite de ces analyses, on cherchera à en tirer des enseignements sur l'apprentissage du style en traduction, dans le cadre de la co-écriture de l'œuvre. Cela nous mènera à une réflexion sur la perception subjective de « fautes » de style dans la traduction et sur l'impossibilité d'une version « définitive » de l'œuvre. / This thesis is about style in translation and its implications for both authoriality and authority. It examines the stylistic and esthetic relationship between the original text and its translation: the writer and the translator write different versions of the literary work; one is authorial, the other is allographic, in the etymological sense of the term. The term "authorial" may actually also refer to the translator as the author of the translation, recognized as such by French copyright law. On the assumption that the reader will identify an author by their writing style, the goal is to show in what way the translator's own style sets off from the original author's in terms of creativity and stylistic features. Then we will aim to determine to what extent either of these two authors can stylistically claim the literary work; in other words, which of these two authors has the authority related to the literary work, taking into account those involved in the writing process, such as the editor or even the reader: we will see that the authority is a variable. The writer and the translator can be said to undertake cooperation for the writing of the literary work. In order to identify the style of the translator, the focus will be placed on the style a writer develops in various productions and on the style a translator uses in various translations. We will also try to infer what stylistic evolution takes place from one production to another and from one translation to another. Following those analyses we will seek ways to develop one's writing style in translation in the context of the co-writing of the literary work. This will lead us to reflect on the subjective perception of stylistic "flaws" in the translation and on the impossibility of a "definitive" version of the literary work.

In this paper, I will argue that given a choice between a global epistocracy and a global democracy, we ought to choose epistocracy. The reason for this is the need for stopping the ongoing climatic change that will cause a massive amount of suffering and death. Accordingly, I will demonstrate why the democratic process is inadequate in preventing the future climate disaster, and why an epistocracy have a better chance to succeed in this endeavour. My argumentation relies on four steps. First, I shall start with some initial housekeeping that explains why the outcome of continuing climate change is so repugnant. Secondly, I will demonstrate why implementing policies that halt climate change is something we ought to do and why it takes priority over other political concerns. Thirdly, I will argue that given psychological barriers coupled with the Condorcet Jury Theorem we have reason to believe a global democracy will fail to implement these necessary policies. Finally, I shall defend some fundamental claims that the epistocratic method relies on. This I do for two reasons: first, to give some moral credence to the epistocratic method and as a consequent close the door to radical authoritarianism. I do this because even if our priority is to prevent the impending climate disaster, we need to safeguard against a decision-making process that possibly could enact morally repugnant policies (perhaps in other political areas), e.g., bestow only one person with all political power.  Secondly, the defence of epistocracy will demonstrate why a proceduralist argumentation for democracy does not yield a great moral advantage vis-à-vis the epistocratic method.

The frequent occurrences of natural and technological disasters have incurred grave loss of life and damage to property. For mitigating the miserable aftermaths, multi-robot teleoperation systems have been developed and deployed to cooperate with human rescuers in post-earthquake scenarios, and to sample, monitor and clean pollutants in marine environments. With a bidirectional communication channel, human users can deliver commands/requests to guide the motions of the remote robots, and can receive visual/audio feedback to supervise the status of the remote environment, throughout multi-robot teleoperation. Furthermore, the remote robots can send force feedback to human operators to improve their situational awareness and task performance. This way, a closed-loop multi-robot teleoperation system becomes bilateral in which coordinated robots physically interact and exchange energy with human users, and hence needs to be rendered passive for safe human-robot interaction. Beyond guaranteeing closed-loop passivity, the control of a bilateral multi-robot teleoperation system faces two challenging problems: preserving the communication connectivity of the remote robots; and dispatching the teleoperation authority to multiple human users. Because wireless transmission of radio/acoustic signals between the remote robots is constrained by their distances, bilateral multi-robot teleoperation control must coordinate the motions of the remote robots appropriately so as to maintain their communication network connected. Further, multiple human users can send possibly conflicting teleoperation commands to the remote robots, a distributed authority dispatch algorithm is thus needed for the remote robot network to recognize and follow the most urgent user commands at runtime. This thesis develops an energy shaping strategy to preserve the connectivity of the remote robots, and to dispatch control authority over the remote robots to human users, during bilateral multi-robot teleoperation. Chapter 1 introduces the application background of multi-robot teleoperation as well as the state-of-the-art development in related research areas. In Chapter 2, a dynamic interconnection and damping strategy is proposed to reduce and constrain the position error between the local and remote robots to any prescribed bound during bilateral teleoperation. Chapter 3 derives a gradient plus damping control from a bounded potential function and then unifies it into an indirect coupling framework to preserve all communication links of an autonomous multi-robot system with time-varying delays and bounded actuation. On these bases, Chapter 4 develops a dynamic feedforward-feedback passivation strategy to preserve all communication links and thus the connectivity of the tree network of the remote robots while rendering the bilateral multi-robot teleoperation close loop passive. Specifically, by blending the sliding variable in Chapter 2 with the bounded potential function in Chapter 3, the dynamic passivation strategy decomposes the dynamics of the remote robots into a power-preserving interconnection of two subsystems, and regulates the energy behaviour of each subsystem to preserve the tree communication connectivity of the remote robots. To handle time-varying communication delays, the strategy further transforms the communication channels between the local and remote robots into a dynamic controller for passivating bilateral teleoperation. Superior to existing controls, the strategy using a bounded potential function can circumvent numerical instability, reduce noise sensitivity and facilitate future extensions to accommodate robot actuator saturation. On the other side, Chapter 5 designs a distributed and exponentially convergent winners-take-all authority dispatch algorithm that activates the teleoperation of only human users with the most urgent requests in real time. After formulating the problem as a constrained quadratic program, we employ an exact penalty function method to construct a distributed primal-dual dynamical system that can solve the problem at an exponential rate. Because the equilibrium of the system changes with user requests, we then interconnect the dynamical system with physical robot dynamics in a power-preserving way, and passivate closed-loop multi-robot teleoperation using multiple storage functions from a switched system perspective. Finally, Chapter 6 provides some conclusive remarks and two problems regarding connectivity preservation and authority dispatch for future study. / Graduate

The effects that each sibling's relative cognitive and physical abilities may have on the quality of sibling interaction are not clearly understood in either nonhandicapped or handicapped sibling dyads. A measure of sibling authority based on behavioral observations of sibling interaction was developed that represents how sibling abilities are translated into sibling power within handicapped and nonhandicapped sibling dyads. This measure of sibling authority was related to the occurrence of prosocial and aggressive behaviors in sibling dyads with and without a child with handicaps. Ninety-three sibling dyads participated. Included were 34 nonhandicapped sibling dyads, 12 sibling dyads in which the older sibling had a handicapping condition, and 47 sibling dyads in which the younger sibling had a handicapping condition. The handicapping conditions were Down Syndrome, mental retardation, or severe hearing impairment. Results indicate that although the older sibling had greater authority overall, younger siblings had greater authority in over half of all sibling dyads. Sibling authority was not found to be dependent specifically on the presence of the handicapping conditions represented in this study nor upon the gender composition of the sibling dyads. Small differences in authority scores between siblings were associated with a greater frequency of prosocial behavior in both siblings. However, there were no significant differences between groups or siblings on the occurrence of either prosocial or aggressive behaviors. Both siblings contributed equally to the positive or negative nature of their interaction regardless of handicapping condition.

Inaction in Proceedings before the Administrative Authorities - abstract The dissertation thesis deals with the issue of inactivity of administrative authorities in proceedings before them, which from the point of view of legal doctrine and application practice represents the most widespread form of inactivity in public administration. It can be considered as one of the most serious negative phenomena in public administration and its execution. Public administration is primarily seen as an executive (active) activity aimed at fulfilling its tasks set by or based on the legal order and carried out within its limits. As a rule, both legislation and scholarly literature contain material concerning public administration activities and their forms. The issue of inactivity often remains neglected, while in application practice it is a relatively common undesirable phenomenon, which the addressees of public administration encounter relatively often. The dissertation thus represents another source of reflection on this topic. The author interconnected two levels - theoretical and application, which allowed him to examine the issue of inactivity of administrative bodies in a broader context. There are often fundamental differences in approaches to legal doctrine and practice, but there is no reason to always have...

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Numerous studies show biblicist Christianity, religiosity, and conservative political identity are strong predictors of Americans holding skeptical attitudes toward publicly controversial aspects of science, such as human evolution. We show that Christian nationalism—meaning the desire to see particularistic and exclusivist versions of Christian symbols, values, and policies enshrined as the established religion of the United States—is a strong and consistent predictor of Americans’ attitudes about science above and beyond other religious and political characteristics. Further, a majority of the overall effect of political ideology on skepticism about the moral authority of science is mediated through Christian nationalism, indicating that political conservatives are more likely to be concerned with particular aspects of science primarily because they are more likely to be Christian nationalists. Likewise, substantial proportions of the well‐documented associations between religiosity and biblical “literalism” with views of science are mediated through Christian nationalism. Because Christian nationalism seeks to establish a particular and exclusivist vision of Christianity as the dominant moral order, adherents feel threatened by challenges to the epistemic authority undergirding that order, including by aspects of science perceived as challenging the supremacy of biblicist authority.

This thesis is a project which investigates the science of stylometry and wordprints; the analysis of writing style characteristics. The focus is placed on reexamining a wordprint study done by Wayne Larsen and Alvin Rencher wherein the Book of Mormon was analyzed against texts by those who are purported to have written it. The difference in this study from the first was that new wordprint definitions were developed using a junction grammar program created by Eldon Lytle, the 1830 edition of the Book of Mormon was employed as the base text, the phrase "it came to pass" was deleted and the texts used in analysis were divided into narrative and discourse groups and analyzed separately.The results of the thesis show conclusively that the idea of wordprints being able to identify uniqueness in authors is indeed valid. The tests on the control groups show this. This was then applied to the Book of Mormon authors and a test made which was significant; indicating that no one individual could have authored the text. This was true not only for the wordprint as defined in the Larsen/Rencher study, but for each new definition derived from the junction grammar program. Other tests were performed which showed that Joseph Smith could not have authored any part of the Book of Mormon.