Charles Darwin proclaimed, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change”. At the time, he probably did not fathom the relevance of his statement to the economy of cities. As the manufacturing sector dissipates, industrial cities strive to adapt by diversifying their local economy. This research provides a narrative of Hamilton’s industrial development and its transformation in search of a new identity. It examines the city’s economical, social and physical decay and its current urban regeneration that is based on the re-appropriation of its cultural landscape. This thesis argues that when cities focus only on the economic dimension of development, it may have an adverse influence on their inherent cultural identity which serves to undermine their ability to adapt and diversify. For Hamilton, a case in point is urban transformation of James Street North in a city that was recently subject to decades of neglect. James Street North has become the centre of a bourgeoning arts scene that is beginning to revitalize its neighbourhood. The thesis proposes the adaptive re-use of a deteriorated yet historically significant urban block within the area. The design intervention advocates an urban intensification intended to materialize a social and aesthetic identity derived from the urban agendas of Jane Jacobs, Charles Landry, and Sharon Zukin. The design synthesis proposes to establish a ‘creative milieu’ that becomes a catalyst for social cohesion, sustainable regeneration and an incubator for creativity. The design strategy consists of a hybrid building typology that is able to intensify diversity, exhibit creativity and engage dialogue among its occupants.

Networked information technologies and especially the internet, have brought about extensive changes and re-arrangements in cultural production, distribution, commercialisation and consumption of creative content. As an attempt to create a type of copyright licenses better suited for the online environment, the Creative Commons (CC) organisation has launched a license suite that allows creators to openly distribute and share their work under varying levels of restrictions. This thesis aim is to explore the motivations, expectations and understandings of both users and non users of CC licenses within the Independent Filmmaking Community. The research maps out the strategies and diverse business models that users of the licenses develop around their implementation but also the problems and conflicts that arise for both users and non users of the licenses. It therefore sheds light on the processes of adoption, implementation and subsequent fragmentation of the socio-legal innovation that is the CC license suite. While Free and Open Source models of software development (FOSS) have been thoroughly researched, little is known about how other content creators incorporate open licensing strategies within their creative fields. This research aims to address this gap in the literature through the examination of the use of CC licenses by Open Content Filmmakers. Building on theoretical and empirical research in Science and Technology Studies my aim is to analyse the legal innovation of CC licenses by focusing on how they are embedded within the everyday practices of open content filmmakers. By applying the Social Shaping of Technology framework and more specifically the Social Learning perspective, I examine the ways different actors ascribe meaning and conceptualise the role and usefulness of the licenses for their creative practices. Filmmakers negotiate the licenses’ significance through their interactions with diverse actors. These negotiations entail conflicting interpretations as different actors often have different agendas, commitments and resources, resulting in the transformation of both the licenses’ stated goals and of the perceived affordances of digital technologies. Drawing on multi-sited ethnography and rich qualitative data, this thesis captures the processes of learning by doing and learning by interaction, as filmmakers seek to find an appropriate way of applying the licenses, situating them within their localised creative endeavours through trial and error practices. The analysis of empirical evidence reveals how independent filmmakers navigate between ideological imperatives and practical considerations in order to form distinct, heterogeneous configurations that work for them, instead of outright adopting a homogeneous generic vision for how copyright should be applied in the digital environment.

Human localisation of sound in enclosed spaces is a cross-disciplinary research topic, with important applications in auditory science, room acoustics, spatial audio and telecommunications. By combining an accelerated model of $3$D sound propagation in rooms with a perceptual model of spatial processing, this thesis provides an integrated framework for studying sound localisation in enclosed spaces on the horizontal plane, with particular emphasis on room acoustics applications. The room model is based on the finite difference time domain (FDTD) method, which has been extended to include physically-constrained sources and binaural receivers based on laser-scanned listener geometries. The underlying algorithms have been optimised to run on parallel graphics hardware, thus allowing for a high spatial resolution, and accordingly, a significant decrease of numerical dispersion evident in the FDTD method. The perceptual stage of the model features a signal processing chain emulating the physiology of the auditory periphery, binaural cue selection based on interaural coherence, and a final decision maker based on supervised learning. The entire model is shown to be capable of imitating human sound localisation in different listening situations, including free field conditions and at the presence of sound occlusion, diffraction and reflection. Results are validated against subjective data found in the literature, and the model's applications to the fields of room acoustics and spatial audio are demonstrated and discussed.

This Creative Writing thesis argues for the need to rethink our understanding of climate change and focuses on the response of creative writers to this phenomenon, whilst also offering its own creative contribution. The critical component aims at articulating a post-climate change poetics. It reviews the mainstream literature in popular science writing, fiction and poetry from the point of view of a political frame-analysis of climate change, to demonstrate how a certain understanding of climate change maps onto conventions of literary genre. The thesis takes the view that many mainstream literary attempts to negotiate climate change are compromised by the teleological way in which they conceive of the phenomenon. As an alternative position, it draws on the work of climatologist Mike Hulme and physicist and cultural theorist Karen Barad to encourage participation in climate change as a condition for negotiating its meaning. Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass is proposed as a model for literary production informed by this poetics and as a model for the author’s own creative practice. The creative component of this thesis is an intra-generic text presenting the fictionalised narrative of a cycle expedition the author made from Salford to the Greek island of Ikaria in the summer of 2010. This substantial work aims to interrogate, imagine, and enquire into the epistemology of a post-climate change world.

About the theme: Public design policies can be explained as sets of principles established by a government intending to apply design into leveraging social, economical, industrial, and regional development. Design policy is an emerging theme in the field of design, and one that has been raising concerns from governments globally. Two aspects drive this interest: the extraordinary growth rates of the creative industries in the past decades; and the ability of Design to be a link between technology, creativity and the user, being a potential unique tool to help innovate and foster economic growth. About the research: The research was proposed responding an observed demand of governments in emerging countries to structure policies to use design to promote industrial and social development. It was structured to analyse current national and regional Design Policies within the framework of common aspects, effective practices and trends; external factors influencing their implementation; general causes of failures; assessment methods; and the influence of coexisting design definitions and trends. The focus is on Brazil, whose government is funding the research, the European Union, and the United Kingdom. In this context the research aims to generate a rationale for planning and assessment of Design Policies based on a review of current effective practices and identified future trends relevant to emerging markets. The main objective of the research is the identification and analysis of the constituent elements, driving forces, impacting factors, expected consequences, assessment methodologies and common failures of design policies. The intended goal is to respond to a demand for new knowledge, data, and tools that could contribute to reduce the current level of uncertainty regarding design policies. Methodology: To acknowledge the established objectives and goal, a comprehensive review of literature was initially carried out, including many reports and other documents from governments and from the EU. Emerging issues from the review informed a two-stage study developed in Brazil. For the first stage, in 2011, thirteen stakeholders were interviewed, from key active governmental programmes and departments. The choice of programmes and departments was validated by questions from the interview itself. The second stage, in 2012, focused on the only currently active design support programme aimed at SMEs in Brazil. During this phase, it was collected archival data and three interviews conducted. Collected data was analysed using descriptive statistic tools. The findings were then filtered using documents and archival data about European effective practices to inform the discussion and recommendations, and further used to generate a modelling framework for design policies. Contribution: The research contribution can be acknowledged in four different levels of outcomes: a comprehensive review of literature (1), combining an assortment of very significant documents and discussing their connections and specific contributions to the field; the application of an interview and archive based case study (2) about design policies in Brazil, corroborating Case Studies as a leading research tool for the area; a discussion on the impacting factors and effective practices of design policies (3); and finally the combined tools Compass Model and Create DP (4) that set together a framework intended to reduce levels of uncertainty in planning design policies.

Classification is one of the primary tasks of data mining and aims to assign a class label to unseen examples by using a model learned from a training dataset. Most of the accepted classifiers are designed to minimize the error rate but in practice data mining involves costs such as the cost of getting the data, and cost of making an error. Hence the following question arises: Among all the available classification algorithms, and in considering a specific type of data and cost, which is the best algorithm for my problem? It is well known to the machine learning community that there is no single algorithm that performs best for all domains. This observation motivates the need to develop an “algorithm selector” which is the work of automating the process of choosing between different algorithms given a specific domain of application. Thus, this research develops a new meta-learning system for recommending cost-sensitive classification methods. The system is based on the idea of applying machine learning to discover knowledge about the performance of different data mining algorithms. It includes components that repeatedly apply different classification methods on data sets and measuring their performance. The characteristics of the data sets, combined with the algorithm and the performance provide the training examples. A decision tree algorithm is applied on the training examples to induce the knowledge which can then be applied to recommend algorithms for new data sets, and then active learning is used to automate the ability to choose the most informative data set that should enter the learning process. This thesis makes contributions to both the fields of meta-learning, and cost sensitive learning in that it develops a new meta-learning approach for recommending cost-sensitive methods. Although, meta-learning is not new, the task of accelerating the learning process remains an open problem, and the thesis develops a novel active learning strategy based on clustering that gives the learner the ability to choose which data to learn from and accordingly, speed up the meta-learning process. Both the meta-learning system and use of active learning are implemented in the WEKA system and evaluated by applying them on different datasets and comparing the results with existing studies available in the literature. The results show that the meta-learning system developed produces better results than METAL, a well-known meta-learning system and that the use of clustering and active learning has a positive effect on accelerating the meta-learning process, where all tested datasets show a decrement of error rate prediction by 75 %.

Nos tempos atuais, cada vez mais tem se discutido sobre a importância da Economia Criativa para países e regiões. De fato, praticamente toda atividade humana utiliza-se em alguma medida da criatividade, por isso, existe um movimento nos últimos anos para reconhecer em determinadas atividades conteúdo intelectual, cultural e artístico que agregam valor a bens e serviços. A partir dos anos 2000 surgiram diversas metodologias cujo objetivo era mensurar a Economia Criativa, isso despertou grande interesse dos governos locais e nacionais, pois isso poderia ser usado para direcionar esforços e investimentos públicos com a finalidade de alavancar o desenvolvimento econômico local. Dentre as metodologias lançadas, uma das primeiras, o Índice das Cidades Criativas desenvolvido por Richard Florida gerou grande repercussão na comunidade acadêmica e civil com a utilização de diversos indicadores divididos em três dimensões, Talento, Tecnologia e Tolerância (os 3 Ts). Diversas outras metodologias desenvolvidas posteriormente com o objetivo de mensurar a Economia Criativa foram fortemente influenciadas pela estrutura dos 3 Ts. Contudo, existe uma grande dificuldade para replicar qualquer uma dessas metodologias para as cidades brasileiras, em razão de diversos motivos, dentre eles a inexistência de dados públicos referentes aos indicadores utilizados. Com o objetivo de equacionar essa dificuldade, esse trabalho se propôs a identificar, a partir de quarto indicadores internacionais pré-selecionados, quais os dados que serão utilizados e compará-los aos existentes no Brasil, através da proposta de um índice chamado de Índice da Economia Criativa Brasileiro (IECBr). Após essa análise, foram escolhidas sete cidades (São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Curitiba, Brasília, Salvador, Fortaleza e Belém) para medir a Economia Criativa dessas regiões. Após o cálculo do IECBr foram utilizadas duas ferramentas estatísticas, o Coeficiente de Correlação de Pearson e a Análise de Clusters. A primeira ferramenta mostrou que existiam alguns indicadores contrários aos demais indicadores da mesma dimensão, por isso, optou-se por calcular novamente o índice sem esses indicadores. Por fim, foi utilizada a segunda ferramenta estatística para mostrar que as cidades escolhidas formariam dois grupos distintos, um grupo contendo as cidades do Sul e Sudeste do país e outro contendo as cidades das outras regiões. / In current times, the discussion around the importance of the creative economy for countries and regions has become notarial high. In fact, virtually all human activity has been used the creativity in some way, so there has been a movement in recent years to recognize certain activities in intellectual, cultural and artistic content that can add value to goods and services. Beginning in the 2000s, several methodologies emerged with the objective of measuring the Creative Economy, bolstered by high levels of interest on the part of local and national governments that are saw an opportunity to use direct efforts and public investments in order to boost local economic development. One of the first methods launched, the Index of Creative Cities, developed by Richard Florida, has generated significant repercussions in both the of academic community and civil society with the use of different indicators divided into three dimensions: Talent, Technology and Tolerance (the 3 T\'s). Several subsequent methodologies, with a similar goal of measuring the Creative Economy, were strongly influenced by the structure of the 3 T\'s. However, great difficulties are encountered when attempting to apply any of these methodologies to Brazilian cities, due to several reasons, most notably the lack of public data relevant to the indicators used. To mitigate this issue, this project aimed to identify, based on four international indexes previously selected, which data could be used to compare against the ones existing in Brazil, by proposing an index called the Brazilian Creative Economy Index (IECBr). After this analysis, we selected seven cities (São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Curitiba, Brasilia, Salvador, Fortaleza and Belem) to measure the Creative Economy. Two statistical tools were used, the Pearson correlation coefficient and Cluster Analysis. The first tool revealed that there were some indicators contradicted other indicators of the same dimension, so it was decided to recalculate the index without these indicators. Lastly, the second statistical tool showed that the chosen cities formed two distinct groups, one group consisting of Southern and Southeastern cities and the other consisting of all other regions.

The acoustic character of a space is often quantified using objective room acoustic parameters. The measurement of these parameters is difficult in occupied conditions and thus measurements are usually performed when the space is un-occupied. This is despite the knowledge that occupancy can impact significantly on the measured parameter value. Within this thesis new methods are developed by which naturalistic signals such as speech and music can be used to perform acoustic parameter measurement. Adoption of naturalistic signals enables passive measurement during orchestral performances and spoken announcements, thus facilitating easy in-situ measurement. Two methods are described within this work; (1) a method utilising artificial neural networks where a network is taught to recognise acoustic parameters from received, reverberated signals and (2) a method based on the maximum likelihood estimation of the decay curve of the room from which parameters are then calculated. (1) The development of the neural network method focuses on a new pre-processor for use with music signals. The pre-processor utilises a narrow band filter bank with centre frequencies chosen based on the equal temperament scale. The success of a machine learning method is linked to the quality of the training data and therefore realistic acoustic simulation algorithms were used to generate a large database of room impulse responses. Room models were defined with realistic randomly generated geometries and surface properties; these models were then used to predict the room impulse responses. (2) In the second approach, a statistical model of the decay of sound in a room was further developed. This model uses a maximum likelihood (ML) framework to yield a number of decay curve estimates from a received reverberant signal. The success of the method depends on a number of stages developed for the algorithm; (a) a pre-processor to select appropriate decay phases for estimation purposes, (b) a rigorous optimisation algorithm to ensure the correct maximum likelihood estimate is found and (c) a method to yield a single optimum decay curve estimate from which the parameters are calculated. The ANN and ML methods were tested using orchestral music and speech signals. The ANN method tended to perform well when estimating the early decay time (EDT), for speech and music signals the error was within the subjective difference limens. However, accuracy was reduced for the reverberation time (Rt) and other parameters. By contrast the ML method performed well for Rt with results for both speech and music within the difference limens for reasonable (<4s) reverberation time. In addition reasonable accuracy was found for EDT, Clarity (C80), Centre time (Ts) and Deutichkeit (D). The ML method is also capable of producing accurate estimates of the binaural parameters Early Lateral Energy Fraction (LEF) and the late lateral strength (LG). A number of real world measurements were carried out in concert halls where the ML accuracy was shown to be sufficient for most parameters. The ML method has the advantage over the ANN method due to its truly blind nature (the ANN method requires a period of learning and is therefore semi-blind). The ML method uses gaps of silence between notes or utterances, when these silence regions are not present the method does not produce an estimate. Accurate estimation requires a long recording (hours of music or many minutes of speech) to ensure that at least some silent regions are present. This thesis shows that, given a sufficiently long recording, accurate estimates of many acoustic parameters can be obtained directly from speech and music. Further extensions to the ML method detailed in this thesis combine the ML estimated decay curve with cepstral methods which detect the locations of early reflections. This improves the accuracy of many of the parameter estimates.

Submitted by JOSIANE SANTOS DE OLIVEIRA (josianeso) on 2018-05-11T13:42:24Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Fernanda Brasil Mendes_.pdf: 3127324 bytes, checksum: 9cd838de5e6acb3c52b236ab03019001 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-05-11T13:42:24Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Fernanda Brasil Mendes_.pdf: 3127324 bytes, checksum: 9cd838de5e6acb3c52b236ab03019001 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2018-04-06 / Nenhuma / Para compreender a inserção de jovens grafiteiros no mercado de trabalho e o processo de construção de suas identidades estéticas e profissionais, investigaram-se os desdobramentos e os novos contornos que eles estão criando para suas inserções no mercado trabalho e divulgação de sua arte. O graffiti passa a ter novas configurações e novos sentidos no âmbito do trabalho, denominado aqui de pós-graffiti. Inicialmente, apresenta-se o contexto histórico do graffiti, suas questões em relação à política e estética, bem como discussões e interpretações em torno do graffiti. Em seguida, analisam-se as questões envolvendo o mundo do trabalho e como este impacta na cultura do graffiti e no perfil dos grafiteiros. Depois, contextualiza-se o pós-graffiti, um produto híbrido, de novas formações sociais e de novas identificações midiatizadas, constituindo-se como um caminho profissional aos grafiteiros. Quais estratégias são utilizadas para inserção e manutenção dos grafiteiros no mercado de trabalho no âmbito do pós-graffiti? Como se dá o processo de construções estéticas e identitárias dos grafiteiros pesquisados? Estas questões são objeto de discussão para que se viabilize a compreensão do processo de transição das identidades estéticas e profissionais de jovens grafiteiros em relação ao mercado de trabalho no âmbito da economia criativa. / To understand the insertion of young graffiti artists in the labor market and the process of construction of their aesthetic and professional identities, were investigated the unfolding and new contours that they are creating for their insertions in the labor market and for the dissemination of their artwork. Graffiti gains new configurations and new meanings in the work context, called here post-graffiti. Initially, is presented the historical context of the graffiti, as well as its issues in relation to politics and aesthetics and the discussions and interpretations around graffiti. Next, are analyzed the issues involving the world of work and how it influences the culture of graffiti and the profile of graffiti artists. Then, post-graffiti is contextualized, being a hybrid product, originated from new social formations and from the dissemination of new identifications, thus being a professional path for graffiti artists. What strategies are used for the insertion and the maintenance of graffiti artists in the post-graffiti labor market? How does the process of constructing the aesthetics and identities of the graffiti artists surveyed take place? These issues are the subject of discussion in order to facilitate the understanding of the process of transition from the aesthetic and professional identities of young graffiti artists in relation to the labor market in the framework of the creative economy.

Para compreender a inserção de jovens grafiteiros no mercado de trabalho e o processo de construção de suas identidades estéticas e profissionais, investigaram-se os desdobramentos e os novos contornos que eles estão criando para suas inserções no mercado trabalho e divulgação de sua arte. O graffiti passa a ter novas configurações e novos sentidos no âmbito do trabalho, denominado aqui de pós-graffiti. Inicialmente, apresenta-se o contexto histórico do graffiti, suas questões em relação à política e estética, bem como discussões e interpretações em torno do graffiti. Em seguida, analisam-se as questões envolvendo o mundo do trabalho e como este impacta na cultura do graffiti e no perfil dos grafiteiros. Depois, contextualiza-se o pós-graffiti, um produto híbrido, de novas formações sociais e de novas identificações midiatizadas, constituindo-se como um caminho profissional aos grafiteiros. Quais estratégias são utilizadas para inserção e manutenção dos grafiteiros no mercado de trabalho no âmbito do pós-graffiti? Como se dá o processo de construções estéticas e identitárias dos grafiteiros pesquisados? Estas questões são objeto de discussão para que se viabilize a compreensão do processo de transição das identidades estéticas e profissionais de jovens grafiteiros em relação ao mercado de trabalho no âmbito da economia criativa. / To understand the insertion of young graffiti artists in the labor market and the process of construction of their aesthetic and professional identities, were investigated the unfolding and new contours that they are creating for their insertions in the labor market and for the dissemination of their artwork. Graffiti gains new configurations and new meanings in the work context, called here post-graffiti. Initially, is presented the historical context of the graffiti, as well as its issues in relation to politics and aesthetics and the discussions and interpretations around graffiti. Next, are analyzed the issues involving the world of work and how it influences the culture of graffiti and the profile of graffiti artists. Then, post-graffiti is contextualized, being a hybrid product, originated from new social formations and from the dissemination of new identifications, thus being a professional path for graffiti artists. What strategies are used for the insertion and the maintenance of graffiti artists in the post-graffiti labor market? How does the process of constructing the aesthetics and identities of the graffiti artists surveyed take place? These issues are the subject of discussion in order to facilitate the understanding of the process of transition from the aesthetic and professional identities of young graffiti artists in relation to the labor market in the framework of the creative economy.