This dissertation examines how social inequalities are reinforced over time and in place by addressing a central question: How are power relations maintained and reproduced in space? I outline ways in which social networks contributed to the reproduction of social and economic power in early twentieth-century Toronto. I also pay particular attention to the ways in which particular spaces acted as a nexus for the reproduction of power and unequal social relations. My research captures the dynamism and complexity of social capital networks that stretched across space. These networks demonstrate that Toronto’s Anglo elite and Italian entrepreneurs lived in a world where persons interacted over a number of regions and scales. This study contributes to the body of knowledge in social capital, network and social boundary research. Although this dissertation is largely concerned with early twentieth-century Toronto class and power relations, the results have implications beyond this case study. This research makes a significant contribution to historical geography by providing scholars interested in contemporary power relations and social networks with an empirically rich historical perspective. This study extends previous examinations of social inequality by examining how power relations were reproduced over time and through space. I analyze how social capital can be conceptualized as set of processes that is 1) integral to the acquisition of economic capital, 2) significant in constraining the action of others by redrawing the social boundaries of class and ethnicity, and 3) critical for the building of alliances across space. This research offers a complementary method to the inequality studies of David Ward, Joe Darden, Nan Lin, Richard Harris, James Barrett, and David Harvey by historically situating questions about the reproduction of social inequality through the examination of social networks.

We, as human beings, are unique creatures that have a need to form places. This obsession with claiming spaces and turning them into places starts at a young age. Maybe it is the first time a child goes to the park and claims a corner of the sand pit, because they think the sand is better on the right side. Perhaps it is a specific seat in the bleachers a person sits in at every home football game. Or maybe it is much more significant, like the spot on the path by the curved tree, next to the bike shed where you said good-bye to your family the first day of your freshman year in college.

This dissertation examines how social inequalities are reinforced over time and in place by addressing a central question: How are power relations maintained and reproduced in space? I outline ways in which social networks contributed to the reproduction of social and economic power in early twentieth-century Toronto. I also pay particular attention to the ways in which particular spaces acted as a nexus for the reproduction of power and unequal social relations. My research captures the dynamism and complexity of social capital networks that stretched across space. These networks demonstrate that Toronto’s Anglo elite and Italian entrepreneurs lived in a world where persons interacted over a number of regions and scales. This study contributes to the body of knowledge in social capital, network and social boundary research. Although this dissertation is largely concerned with early twentieth-century Toronto class and power relations, the results have implications beyond this case study. This research makes a significant contribution to historical geography by providing scholars interested in contemporary power relations and social networks with an empirically rich historical perspective. This study extends previous examinations of social inequality by examining how power relations were reproduced over time and through space. I analyze how social capital can be conceptualized as set of processes that is 1) integral to the acquisition of economic capital, 2) significant in constraining the action of others by redrawing the social boundaries of class and ethnicity, and 3) critical for the building of alliances across space. This research offers a complementary method to the inequality studies of David Ward, Joe Darden, Nan Lin, Richard Harris, James Barrett, and David Harvey by historically situating questions about the reproduction of social inequality through the examination of social networks.

The focus of this paper is to examine the determinants explaining the timing of E-commerce adoption in Taiwan manufacturing industries through the use of a duration model. This paper also investigates whether there have any difference in determining the utilization of E-commerce among different industries. And construct the measurement of E-commerce spillover effect, vertical integration and diversification to see how the E-commerce affects the plant¡¦s boundaries and transaction efficiency by changing the transaction costs among plants.

This thesis focuses on the impact of the notion of holiness of nature in ancient Greek thought and its reflection on urbanism and architecture with respect to the transformations that took place during the archaic period. The archaic period represented most fundamentally a shift from an era where everything was on the move to an era of territorialism which culminated in the establishment of the polis and the Greek temple. This shift was prominent in the sense that it pointed not only to a basic modification in the lifestyle of Greeks / but also to the formation of Greek identity as opposed to that of foreigners. In this respect, the thesis first concentrates on the foundation of the polis, followed by the emergence of the temple and lastly the orders of the columns. Doing so, it is aimed to analyze the transformation concerning the understanding of nature which was engendered by the Greek territorialist expansion and its effect on Greek urbanism and architecture.

Diss. (sammanfattning) Stockholm : Univ., 2007. / Härtill 4 uppsatser.

The objective of this Thesis research is to develop algorithms for temporally consistent semantic segmentation in videos. Though many different forms of semantic segmentations exist, this research is focused on the problem of temporally-consistent holistic scene understanding in outdoor videos. Holistic scene understanding requires an understanding of many individual aspects of the scene including 3D layout, objects present, occlusion boundaries, and depth. Such a description of a dynamic scene would be useful for many robotic applications including object reasoning, 3D perception, video analysis, video coding, segmentation, navigation and activity recognition. Scene understanding has been studied with great success for still images. However, scene understanding in videos requires additional approaches to account for the temporal variation, dynamic information, and exploiting causality. As a first step, image-based scene understanding methods can be directly applied to individual video frames to generate a description of the scene. However, these methods do not exploit temporal information across neighboring frames. Further, lacking temporal consistency, image-based methods can result in temporally-inconsistent labels across frames. This inconsistency can impact performance, as scene labels suddenly change between frames. The objective of our this study is to develop temporally consistent scene descriptive algorithms by processing videos efficiently, exploiting causality and data-redundancy, and cater for scene dynamics. Specifically, we achieve our research objectives by (1) extracting geometric context from videos to give broad 3D structure of the scene with all objects present, (2) Detecting occlusion boundaries in videos due to depth discontinuity, (3) Estimating depth in videos by combining monocular and motion features with semantic features and occlusion boundaries.

My current area of exploration questions how objects and materials can come together to create fences or barriers. I am attempting to address ideas of boundaries, divisions, and borders, and how areas and spaces are defined. I am interested in how we build them around ourselves, physically and emotionally, as a method of delineation and defence. Through considerations of boundaries the work expands to explore notions of the everyday, materiality and process.

This research investigated the basis upon which undergraduates construct notions of social honor and the role higher educational institutions play in the consolidation of status group cultures in Mexico. The topics I analyzed included the criteria college students use to evaluate the worthiness of their peers and friends and the meaning they attach to studying at certain higher educational institutions. This study drew primarily on 65 in-depth interviews and four focus group sessions with 15 students enrolled at socioeconomically stratified private and public higher educational institutions in a large city. I also relied on an institutional analysis of the higher educational institutions where I did my research to complement the analysis. The findings of this research show that there are institutional similarities in relation to the moral criteria undergraduates use to evaluate the worthiness of their friends and peers. However, there are important institutional differences showing that Mexico’s system of higher education attracts and trains at least four status groups. The status groups cultures associated with educational credentials show that there are significant cultural and socioeconomic distinctions within the high cost private sector. In particular, there is a clash between an old pedigree status group for which social connections are of outmost importance and a new emerging upper-middle class that competes through the rigorous academic training its undergraduates receive. The other two status groups are composed of lay and large public universities that attract middle-class students and demand-absorption institutions that train students who did not gain admission to public universities or who want to avoid the negative stereotypes associated with public universities. Undergraduates from these two last groups occupy the bottom of the occupational and prestige hierarchy. This research also shows that most of the internal hierarchies undergraduates use to rank their peers do not transcend the walls of a specific college. However, the testimonies of high class students revealed that members from this social stratum determine the worthiness of others based on residential location. This dissertation also shows that socioeconomic and cultural boundaries provide some of the most important sources of symbolic divisions among college students in Mexico. / text

This is a summary report on some existing results and methods regarding the problem of determining the basins of attraction of dynamical systems (in particular, two-dimensional diffeomorphisms) when there is a coexistence of attractors. Based on the work of Helena Nusse and James Yorke, it presents existence and characterization results for a certain kind of basin boundaries (namely, the Wada boundaries). The key feature of their approach is to redefine the idea of a basin boundary by introducing the notion of a `basin cell', which bypasses the problem of exactly locating the attractor of a system, which is often either not well-defined or hard to locate in practice. Moreover, the basin cells and their boundaries are characterized by utilizing the stable and unstable manifolds of the system, which are easier to locate by numerical methods, and thus their method provides both numerically verifiable characteristics and algorithms for computation. / text