Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Dallas, 2006. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 95-99).

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2004. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 206-213).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Computer Science, August 1997. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Modèles de développement, capitalisme et industrialisme sont de grandes dynamiques du risque par leur capacité à transformer le social. Au niveau des firmes, l’innovation continue et la concurrence obligent à l’ajustement permanent. Soumises aux propriétaires, les firmes se focalisent sur le risque financier. Les autres risques lui sont subordonnés. Les dynamiques internes du risque évoluent au rythme d’impératifs externes. La compétition justifie réductions de coûts et réorganisations déstabilisantes. La sécurité a pour objectif la limitation des conditions de réalisation des risques. Construction sociale complexe, la sécurité voit localement la fusion d’hommes, d’outils dans une organisation. Globalement, l’enjeu de la sécurité est la maîtrise du niveau de risque et son coût. Comme pour l’armateur du navire, la direction de l’unité possède les clés de la sécurité. Elle arbitre entre les budgets et joue la concurrence entre les territoires. En assurant l’impunité, l’équivalence et la non-discrimination, le droit international garantit une mise en concurrence de tous les États. Avec la Mondialisation, nous entrons dans l’ère de la sécurité de marché. La sécurité est vue comme un facteur de production. Dans la concurrence, les dirigeants l’intègrent dans leurs stratégies, notamment lors des choix d’implantation géographique et des répartitions budgétaires. En sélectionnant les participants, la direction produit une représentation univoque de la sécurité en phase avec ses paradigmes. La rénovation de la sécurité dans les unités productives se joue localement mais aussi globalement en découvrant les complexités des dynamiques du risque et de la construction de la sécurité. / Models of development, capitalism and industrialism are also big dynamics of risk by their ability altering social world. At the level of firms, innovation and competition requires ongoing adjustment. Subject to their owners, companies focus on financial risk. Other risks are subordinate to the primary target. The dynamics of risk are changing the firm at the rate of external demands. The competition justifies harmful cost reductions and destabilizing re-engineering. The aim of safety is to reduce the uprising conditions of risk. Safety is a complex social building. Locally, safety seems a melt of man and tools within an organization. Overall, control of the safety is a challenge between risk and cost in the unit. Between cost and efficiency, management makes its own choice. As the shipowner and his vessel, the factory management has the keys to safety. It arbitrates between budgets and plays competition between territories. Ensuring impunity, equivalence and non-discrimination, international law guarantees competition between all States and flags. With globalization, we entered the era of the safety market. Safety is one of the production factors in global competition. Business leaders incorporate it into their overall strategies. With this factor in mind they choose their factories geographical location but also the allocation of budgets inside the firm. In selecting safety participants, the Executive create a unique picture of what safety is that corresponds to their paradigms. The rebuilding of safety in production units is played locally but also globally and by discovering the complexities of the dynamics of risk and the way of building safety.

In the design of material handling systems with complex and unpredictable dynamics, conventional search and optimization approaches that are based only on performance measures offer little guarantee of robustness. Using evidence from research into complex systems, the use of behavior-based optimization is proposed, which takes advantage of observed relationships between complexity and optimality with respect to both performance and robustness. Based on theoretical complexity measures, particularly algorithmic complexity, several simple complexity measures are created. The relationships between these measures and both performance and robustness are examined, using a model of a directly connected material handling system as a backdrop. The fundamental causes of the relationships and their applicability in the proposed behavior-based optimization approach are discussed. / Ph. D.

Thesis (DPhil (Philosophy))--Stellenbosch University, 2008. / This thesis argues that the study of the brain as a system, which includes the disciplines of cognitive science and neuroscience, is a kind of textual exegesis, like literary criticism. Through research in scientific modeling in the 20th and early 21st centuries, anong with the advances of nonlinear science, and both cognitive science and neuroscience, along with the work of Aristotle, Saussure, and Paul Ricoeur, I argue that the parts of the brain have multiple functions, like words have multiple uses. Ricoeur, through Aristotle, argues that words only have meaning in the act of predication, the sentence. Likewise, a brain act must corporately employ a certain set of parts in the brain system. Using Aristotle, I make the case that human cognition cannot be reduced to mere brain events because the parts, the whole, and the context are integrally important to understanding the function of any given brain process. It follows then that to understand any given brain event we need to know the fullness of human experience as lived experience, not lab experience. Science should progress from what is best known to what is least known. The methodology of reductionist neuroscience does the exact opposite, at times leading to the denial of personhood or even intelligence. I advocate that the relationship between the phenomenology of human experience (which Merleau-Ponty explored famously) and brain science should be that of data to model. When neuroscience interprets the brain as separated from the lived human world, it “reads into the text” in a sense. The lived human world must intersect intimately with whatever the brain and body are doing. The cognitive science research project has traditionally required the researcher to artificially segment human experience into it pure material constituents and then reassemble it. Is the creature reanimated at the end of the dissections really human consciousness? I will suggest that we not assemble the whole out of the parts; rather human brain science should be an exegesis inward. So, brain activities are aspects of human acts, because they are performed by humans, as humans, and interpreting them is a human activity.

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