A investigação O Discurso de Celestina tem a finalidade de estabelecer dialogicamente as relações entre representações sociais, ideologia e elementos linguísticos que unem a protagonista Celestina à enunciação. Essas relações se concretizam no seio das esferas literária e histórico-social. Com esse propósito foi feito um recorte na perspectiva discursiva, espaço em que se efetiva uma série de relações de poder por intermédio das ações de Celestina. O discurso deste personagem, persuasivo por excelência, emerge da crise dos valores renascentistas, na obra La Celestina, editada pela primeira vez em 1499 e escrita por Fernando de Rojas, judeu converso, em Salamanca, Espanha. O discurso desta protagonista parece revelar a voz do autor que ora desvenda, ora encobre suas intenções, seus interesses e contextos. Seu conteúdo é redefinido e ou esvaziado, o que valoriza seu caráter paradoxal e irônico, como reflexo da cultura humanística de Rojas. Recorremos à Análise do Discurso para abordar os elementos da Nova Retórica que dessem conta do éthos discursivo de Celestina e, no seio dessa análise, nos deparamos com elementos dos mais diversos campos de estudo; destacamos, dentre eles, a parte da que analisa a reformulação textual da segunda carta de Sêneca a Lucílio sobre a diversidade da leitura e a parte que identifica os elementos do esperpento de Valle Inclán. Para concluir, reconhecemos que a persuasão é a principal característica do discurso de Celestina para alcançar seus objetivos pessoais e que ela é um personagem que se constrói e se destrói em seu discurso e por intermédio dele. / The research The Celestina speech aims to establish a dialogue relations between social representation, ideology and linguistic elements that unite the enunciation to the protagonist Celestina. These relationships are materialized within the ball literary, social historical. For this purpose a cut was made in view discursive space in which an effective series of power relations though the Celestinas actions. The speech of this character, persuasive par excellence, emerging from the transition period to the Renaissance. The book La Celestina was written around 1498 in Salamanca, Spain, by Fernando de Rojas, a Jewish convert. This speech is the real protagonist, as it reveals the authors voice, that sometimes unravels and conceals his intentions, interest and backgrounds. Its contest is reset or empty and that values its ironic and paradoxical character, reflecting that episodic memory. We appeal to the discourse analysis to address the elements of the New Rhetoric devised to address the discursive ethos of Celestina and within this analysis, we encounter elements of many fields of study, we have emphasized, among them the part of the research that identifies elements of Valle Inclán Esperpento and textual study of the reformulation of the second Senecas letter to Lucilius about the diversity of reading. To conclude, we recognize that persuasion is the hallmark of Celestinas speech to achieve her personal goals and she is a character who builds and destroys in her speech and through it.

-&gt;Context. Optical Character Recognition (OCR), having a computer recognize text from an image, is not as intuitive as human recognition. Even small (to human eyes) degradations can thwart the OCR result. The problem is that random unknown degradations are unavoidable in a real-world setting. -&gt;Objectives. The noise tolerance of Tesseract, a state-of-the-art OCR engine, is evaluated in relation to how well it handles salt and pepper noise, a type of image degradation. Noise tolerance is measured as the percentage of aberrant pixels when comparing two images (one with noise and the other without noise). -&gt;Methods. A novel systematic approach for finding the noise tolerance of an OCR engine is presented. A simulated environment is developed, where the test parameters, called test cases (font, font size, text string), can be modified. The simulation program creates a text string image (white background, black text), degrades it iteratively using salt and pepper noise, and lets Tesseract perform OCR on it, in each iteration. The iteration process is stopped when the comparison between the image text string and the OCR result of Tesseract mismatches. -&gt;Results. Simulation results are given as changed pixels percentage (noise tolerance) between the clean text string image and the text string image the degradation iteration before Tesseract OCR failed to recognize all characters in the text string image. The results include 14400 test cases: 4 fonts (Arial, Calibri, Courier and Georgia), 100 font sizes (1-100) and 36 different strings (4*100*36=14400), resulting in about 1.8 million OCR attempts performed by Tesseract. -&gt;Conclusions. The noise tolerance depended on the test parameters. Font sizes smaller than 7 were not recognized at all, even without noise applied. The font size interval 13-22 was the peak performance interval, i.e. the font size interval that had the highest noise tolerance, except for the only monospaced font tested, Courier, which had lower noise tolerance in the peak performance interval. The noise tolerance trend for the font size interval 22-100 was that the noise tolerance decreased for larger font sizes. The noise tolerance of Tesseract as a whole, given the experiment results, was circa 6.21 %, i.e. if 6.21 % of the pixel in the image has changed Tesseract can still recognize all text in the image. / <p>42</p>

A hypothesised association between personality and emotional processing was investigated within the framework of Cloninger’s psychobiological theory. According to this model, personality development is based on the interaction between two domains: temperament and character. A non-experimental, correlational design was applied, using existing data from a sample of 630 South African first year psychology students who completed the Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI) and the University of Pennsylvania Computerised Neuropsychological Test Battery (PennCNP). Canonical correlation analysis yielded significant associations between character variables Self-Directedness, Cooperativeness, and Self-Transcendence as measured and defined by the TCI and items from Penn Facial Memory Test (CPF) and Penn Emotion Discrimination Task (ED40), respectively. In this exploratory study participants lower in Self-Directedness and Cooperativeness were more efficient in facial recognition compared to participants higher in these dimensions. Conversely, individuals higher in Self-Directedness and Cooperativeness were more accurate in the discrimination of happy and sad emotions, respectively. Participants with higher Self-Transcendence performed better in facial recognition but were less accurate in discriminating between happy and sad faces. These results affirm the importance of further research into the association between temperament and character and emotional processing. / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / gm2013 / Psychology / unrestricted

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>Magister Scientiae - MSc / The aim of this dissertation is to calculate character tables of group extensions. There are several well developed methods for calculating the character tables of some selected group extensions. The method we study in this dissertation, is a standard application of Clifford theory, made efficient by the use of Fischer-Clifford matrices, as introduced by Fischer. We consider only extensions Ḡ of the normal subgroup N by the subgroup G with the property that every irreducible character of N can be extended to an irreducible character of its inertia group in Ḡ , if N is abelian. This is indeed the case if Ḡ is a split extension, by a well known theorem of Mackey. A brief outline of the classical theory of characters pertinent to this study, is followed by a discussion on the calculation of the conjugacy classes of extension groups by the method of coset analysis. The Clifford theory which provide the basis for the theory of Fischer-Clifford matrices is discussed in detail. Some of the properties of these Fischer-Clifford matrices which make their calculation much easier, are also given. We restrict ourselves to split extension groups Ḡ = N:G in which N is always an elementary abelian 2-group. In this thesis we are concerned with the construction of the character tables (by means of the technique of Fischer-Clifford matrices) of certain extension groups which are associated with the orthogonal group O+10(2), the automorphism groups U₆(2):2, U₆(2):3 of the unitary group U₆(2) and the smallest Fischer sporadic simple group Fi₂₂. These groups are of the type type 2⁸:(U₄(2):2), (2⁹ : L₃(4)):2, (2⁹:L₃(4)):3 and 2⁶:(2⁵:S₆).

The subject of machine recognition of connected characters is investigated. A generic single character recognizer (SCR) assumes there is only one character in the image. The goal of this project is to design a connected character segmentation algorithm (CCSA) without the above assumption. The newly designed CCSA will make use of a readily available SCR. The input image (e.g. a word with touching letters) is first transformed (thinned) into its skeletal form. The CCSA will then extract the image features (nodes and branches) and store them in a hierarchical form. The hierarchy stems from the left-to-right rule of writing of the English language. The CCSA will first attempt to recognize the first letter. When this is done, the first letter is deleted and the algorithm repeats. After extracting the image features, the CCSA starts to create a set of test images from the beginning of the word (i.e. beginning of the description). Each test image contains one more feature than its predecessor. The number of test images in the set is constrained by a predetermined fixed width or a fixed total number of features. The SCR is then called to examine each test image. The recognizable test image(s) in the set are extracted. Let each recognizable test image be denoted by C₁. For each C₁, a string of letters C₂, C₃, CL is formed. C₂ is the best recognized test image in a set of test images created after the deletion of C₁ from the beginning of the current word. C₃ through CL are created by the same method. All such strings are examined to determine which string contains the best recognized C₁. Experimental results on test images with two characters yield a recognition rate of 72.66%. Examples with more than two characters are also shown. Furthermore, the experimental results suggested that topologically simple test images can be more difficult to recognize than those which are topologically more complex. / Applied Science, Faculty of / Electrical and Computer Engineering, Department of / Graduate

Segundo John Stuart Mill, a maximização da felicidade está intimamente relacionada ao desenvolvimento do caráter das pessoas. O filósofo defende que a educação e a opinião têm uma influência tão grande sobre o caráter humano que se este for desenvolvido a partir da filosofia utilitarista seria possível estabelecer na mente das pessoas uma associação indissolúvel entre a felicidade individual e a felicidade de todos. Com a finalidade de aprofundar o entendimento dessa relação o tema desse trabalho é o utilitarismo de Mill e a formação do caráter moral. Para alcançar esse objetivo foi utilizada a metodologia de pesquisa bibliográfica, analisando a literatura já publicada sobre os conceitos que norteiam o tema proposto, observando e utilizando a abordagem metodológica analítico-interpretativa. A dissertação apresenta as principais ideias dos filósofos clássicos do utilitarismo, investiga a concepção de utilitarismo de Mill analisando a relação do princípio de utilidade e o princípio de liberdade e observa as noções de Mill acerca da constituição do caráter do moral. Os resultados da pesquisa permitem ponderar que Mill considera as noções de virtude, justiça, diversidade, tolerância e empatia valores inseparáveis da concepção de felicidade. Concluiu-se que hedonismo qualitativo de Mill configura-se em um utilitarismo indireto, oferecendo mais espaço para aceitação de máximas não utilitárias, sem abandonar o princípio da utilidade / According to John Stuart Mill, maximizing happiness is closely related to the development of people's character. The philosopher argues that education and opinion have such a great influence on human character that if it were developed from utilitarian philosophy it would be possible to establish in the minds of people an indissoluble association between individual happiness and the happiness of all. In order to deepen the understanding of this relation the theme of this work is the utilitarianism of Mill and the formation of the moral character. In order to reach this goal, a bibliographical research methodology was used, analyzing the already published literature on the concepts that guide the proposed theme, observing and using the analytical-interpretative methodological approach. The dissertation presents the main ideas of the classical philosophers of utilitarianism, investigates Mill conception of utilitarianism by analyzing the relation of the utility principle and the principle of freedom and observes Mill notions about the constitution of the character of morality. The results of the research allow us to consider that Mill considers the notions of virtue, justice, diversity, tolerance and empathy values inseparable from the conception of happiness. It was concluded that Mill qualitative hedonism is an indirect utilitarianism, offering more space for the acceptance of non-utilitarian maxims, without abandoning the principle of utility

This text is a written articulation of my M.F.A. Thesis show titled, The Newlywed wherein description of the work produced and my artistic process is present. This body of work is explored through a fictional character, a newlywed, who acts as an outlet for my recent experiences living in western Massachusetts. The sculptures are made up of collections of the everyday, mundane objects that surround me and that propel me to contemplate where they came from, and what their histories were. The objects then become instruments for the creation of new stories.

This study examines morally ambiguous characters in television dramas and they represent their respect brand. The goal of the study is to examine how these MACs define their respective brands, specifically the brands, AMC and Showtime. Recent studies observed people chose brands based on their affective disposition and social cognition towards specific influencers. These theories could inform how people relate to characters from TV shows and brands. An observation and narrative analysis of four characters promotional videos from AMC were Don Draper (Mad Men), Saul Goodman (Better Call Saul) and from Showtime Jackie Peyton (Nurse Jackie) and Dexter Morgan (Dexter). Interviews were conducted with 13 people about their views of the character's moral ambiguity and brand interest. Promo videos were observed along with videos of characters in their environment. Results found MACs defined their brand and their overall character arc appealed to the audience's interests in their brands.

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