This thesis consists of a poetry manuscript and a critical component that considers the poetics and history that inform the writing of that manuscript. Critical Component: Charting the Sea in Caribbean Poetry This thesis focuses on the influence of the sea in constructing identity in the writing of Kamau Brathwaite, Derek Walcott, and Dionne Brand. It is particularly interested in examining how these poets trace identity primarily in The Arrivants, Omeros, and No Language is Neutral through their various employments of the sea and liquidity in those works. I then read selections from two of my poetic forbearers from the British Virgin Islands - Alphaeus Norman and Verna Penn Moll - in order to examine the construction of the sea in their poetry against the canonised work of Brathwaite, Walcott, and Brand. I argue through close contextual readings of the selected works that through engagement of various approaches each poet arrives at a portrait of Caribbean identity that is constructed integrally through the fluid, mutable natures of the sea. The five poets are scrutinised in four chapters, in relation to their personal philosophies regarding national or regional identity through essay writings and interviews but more prominently in close readings of their poetry and in particular their representations of the sea. I begin by arguing that in Brathwaite's The Arrivants (1980), the importance of the sea in the various formations of West Indian identity is represented through the exercising of his tidalectic process in his reconstructions of the archetypes of Legba and Ananse, and his ritualising of cricket and calypso. In Walcott's Omeros (1990), the sea is presented as the embodiment of history itself through which all of Saint Lucia's contemporary inhabitants must access their ancestral memories. Walcott utilises the Atlantic as a creolising force in his reimagining of the Homeric archetypes of Philoctetes, Achilles, Hector, and Helen. Brand however, departs from this metaphorical interpretation of the sea and turns inward, redefining the boundaries of land, sea, and sexual desire in Trinidad through a remapping of that island that is focused on the ocean, waterways, and the bodies of women. Lastly, British Virgin Islander poets Alphaeus Osario Norman and Verna Penn Moll embrace different mythic versions of the sea. Norman's work creates a distinct sailor aesthetic that resonates with classic European naval and militaristic poetry as a way to invoke a national pride, while Penn Moll focuses on performances of cultural and communal waterside rituals to frame narratives of local history and village culture. Ultimately, I argue that the sea is presented variously as a portal through which history and tribal memory can be accessed, and as a supernaturally transformative force for the poet. Creative Component: Make Us All Islands Make Us All Islands is a poetry manuscript based in the British Virgin Islands that explores historical and personal relationships with the sea. The first section revolves around the various arrivals of liberated Africans rescued from slave ships wrecked or captured by the British Navy in the early 1800s. The liberated Africans were not enslaved, but rather forced into indentureship before ultimately being segregated from society and then disappearing from history. The second section is built around the departure of a generation of Tortolan men to work in the sugar plantations of the Dominican Republic at the turn of the following century, alongside other Anglophone Afro-Caribbean migrants. A large portion of these poems are built around accounts of the greatest boating disaster in the islands' history, the loss of a schooner christened Fancy Me which wrecked in a hurricane in 1926 off the coast of the Dominican island Saona. The final movement personalises this exercise and focuses on the poet's interactions with the sea and memory.

O tratamento de Linguagens Naturais requer o emprego de formalismos mais complexos que aqueles normalmente empregados para Linguagens Livre de Contexto. A maioria de tais formalismos são difíceis de serem utilizados, não práticos e sobretudo, associados a um desempenho de elevado custo. Autômatos de pilha estruturados são excelentes para se representar linguagens regulares e aspectos livre de contexto encontrados em Linguagem Natural, uma vez que é possível decompo-los em uma camada reguar (implementada com máquina de estados finitos) e uma livre de contexto (representada por uma pilha). Tais dispositivos aceitam linguagens determinísticas e livre de contexto em tempo linear. Dessa forma, trata-se de um dispositivo adequado para ser empregado como mecanismo subjacente para os autômatos adaptativos, que permitem o tratamento - sem perda de simplicidade e eficiência - de linguagens mais complexas que aquelas livres de contexo Nesta tese, dependências de contexto são tratadas com tecnologia adaptativa. Este trabalho mostra como uma regra de Linguagem Natural descrita com uma metalinguagem pode ser convertida em um autômato de pilha adaptativo. Foi possível verificar que problemas complexos em análise de Linguagem Natural, tais como os não-determinismos e ambigüidades presentes em situações de concordância, subcategorização, coordenação podem ser resolvidos com eficiência. De fato, todos os mecanismos adaptativos para solucionar estes problemas apresentam desempenho O(n). Uma arquitetura para processamento em Linguagem Natural é apresentada. / Since low-complexity language formalisms are too weak to handle NL, stronger formalisms are required, most of them resource demanding, hard to use or unpractical. Structured pushdown automata are excellent to represent regular and context-free aspects on NLs by allowing them to be split into regular layer (implemented as finite-state machines) and a context-free one (represented by a pushdown store). Such devices accepts deterministic context-free languages in linear time, and is suitable as un underlying mechanism for adaptive automata, allowing handling - without loss of simplicity and efficiency - languages more complex than context-free ones. In this thesis context dependency is handled with adaptive technology. This work shows as a Natural Language rule described with a metalanguage can be converted into adaptive structured pushdown automata. It was possible to verify that complex problems in Natural Language parsing e.g., nondeterminisms and ambiguities present in agreement, subcategorization, coordination can be solved with efficiency. In fact, all adaptive mechanisms attached to these problems have O(n) performance. An adaptive architecture for NL Language processing is presented.

The monitoring of project-oriented business processes is difficult because their state is fragmented and represented by the progress of different documents and artifacts being worked on. This observation holds in particular for software development projects in which various developers work on different parts of the software concurrently. Prior contributions in this area have proposed a plethora of techniques to analyze and visualize the current state of the software artifact as a product. It is surprising that these techniques are missing to provide insights into what types of work are conducted at different stages of the project and how they are dependent upon another. In this paper, we address this research gap and present a technique for mining the software process including dependencies between artifacts. Our evaluation of various open-source projects demonstrates the applicability of our technique.

It has long been theorized that, after the so-called critical period has passed, acquiring language becomes a more difficult enterprise. While general differences between adult second language (L2) learners and normally developed child (L1) acquirers have been more or less empirically established, a strand of recent L2 accounts have focused on the specific locus of these differences. The main goal of this dissertation project is to test the predictions of one such account: Clahsen and Felser's Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH; Clahsen & Felser 2006a, 2006b). The SSH places emphasis on the empirical testing of native/non-native language processing asymmetries, which are argued to be due to less detailed L2 grammatical representations. This dissertation tests the predictions of the SSH using a long-distance dependency: Clitic Left Dislocation (CLLD) in L2 Spanish. The study includes on-line and an off-line tasks, which were completed by a control group of native speakers of Spanish and an experimental group constituted by L2 learners of Spanish whose first language was English. In view of the well-known fact that L2 learning outcomes vary widely across individuals, a secondary goal of this dissertation project is to determine whether variability in individual learning abilities, such as inhibitory control and statistical learning predicts variability in L2 learning. Part of L2 learning involves detecting the probabilistic patterns of a language (Saffran, Aslin, & Newport, 1996), such that individuals who are better pattern learners may be better able to learn the structural regularities of the L2 input. Results were analyzed in order to determine whether the predictions of the SSH could account for the patterns present in the data. These results suggest that although the acquisition of long-distance dependencies is a protracted process, both intermediate and advanced L2 learners of Spanish could anticipate (predict) a syntactic element based in previously occurring cues. Thus, these results fail to support the predictions of the SSH. In terms of individual differences, overall, neither statistical learning nor inhibitory control appear to modulate the on-line processing of this particular long-distance dependency in Spanish.

A Workflow is an automation of a business process. In general, it consists of processes and activities, which are represented by well-defined tasks. These include 'Office Automation,' 'Health Care' and service-oriented processes such as 'Online Reservations,' 'Online Bookstores' and 'Insurance Claims,' etc. The entities that execute these tasks are humans, application programs or database management systems. These tasks are related and dependent on one another based on business policies and rules. With rapid increases in application domains that use workflow management systems, there is a need for a framework that can be used to implement these applications. In particular, it is essential to provide a formal technique for defining a problem that can be used by various workflow software product developers. In this work, a formal framework based on finite state automata that facilitate modeling and analysis of workflows is presented. The workflow and its specifications are modeled separately as finite state automata models. We provide a general framework for specifying control flow dependencies in the context of supervisory control theory. We also identify several properties of supervisory control theory and demonstrate their use for conducting the analysis of the workflows.

RUP (Reasoning Utility Package) is a collection of procedures for performing various computations relevant to automated reasoning. RUP contains a truth maintenance system (TMS) which can be used to perform simple propositional deduction (unit clause resolution) to record justifications, to track down underlying assumptions and to perform incremental modifications when premises are changed. This TMS can be used with an automatic premise controller which automatically retracts "assumptions" before "solid facts" when contradictions arise and searches for the most solid proof of an assertion. RUP also contains a procedure for efficiently computing all the relevant consequences of any set of equalities between ground terms. A related utility computes "substitution simplifications" of terms under an arbitrary set of unquantified equalities and a user defined simplicity order. RUP also contains demon writing macros which allow one to write PLANNER like demons that trigger on various types of events in the data base. Finally there is a utility for reasoning about partial orders and arbitrary transitive relations. In writing all of these utilities an attempt has been made to provide a maximally flexible environment for automated reasoning.

Husqvarna is a Swedish company producing products for forestry, park and gardens. Due to harder competition they wish to increase efficacy in production. This can be achieved by shorter lead-times in the complex process of making casting molds. Activities within this process have certain relations and dependencies between each other that can be analyzed by using a Dependence Structure Matrix. The Dependence Structure Matrix is a tool that can improve efficiency by rearranging activities according to how they are dependent of each other. The purpose is to make a Dependence Structure Matrix of activities that Husqvarna can use to analyze dependencies within the process of cast molding. The DSM Matrix will propose restructured activities of the process which can be evaluated to determine if greater efficacy can be reached. To determine the activities within the process of making cast molds a workshop at Husqvarna for the people involved was conducted. A matrix has been constructed based on the information of activities and their dependencies. This information has then been analyzed by the software Multiplan. The process of making casting molds could be analyzed by the DSM/DMM approach. A new order of how to carry out activities is the outcome of the analysis. The result can be analyzed by Husqvarna in order to determine if greater efficacy can be reached.

Complex products are comprised of a large number of tightly integrated components, assemblies and systems resulting in extensive logical and physical interdependences between the constituent parts. Thus a change to one item of a system is highly likely to lead to a change to another item, which in turn can propagate further. The aim of this research therefore is to investigate dependency models that can be used to identify the impact and trace thepropagation of changes in different information domains, such as requirements, physical product architecture or organisation. Cont/d.

<p>Husqvarna is a Swedish company producing products for forestry, park and gardens. Due to harder competition they wish to increase efficacy in production. This can be achieved by shorter lead-times in the complex process of making casting molds. Activities within this process have certain relations and dependencies between each other that can be analyzed by using a Dependence Structure Matrix. The Dependence Structure Matrix is a tool that can improve efficiency by rearranging activities according to how they are dependent of each other.</p><p>The purpose is to make a Dependence Structure Matrix of activities that Husqvarna can use to analyze dependencies within the process of cast molding. The DSM Matrix will propose restructured activities of the process which can be evaluated to determine if greater efficacy can be reached.</p><p>To determine the activities within the process of making cast molds a workshop at Husqvarna for the people involved was conducted. A matrix has been constructed based on the information of activities and their dependencies. This information has then been analyzed by the software Multiplan.</p><p>The process of making casting molds could be analyzed by the DSM/DMM approach. A new order of how to carry out activities is the outcome of the analysis. The result can be analyzed by Husqvarna in order to determine if greater efficacy can be reached.</p>

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 1903. / Published also as Studies in history, economics and public law, vol. 20, no. 2.