Czech society's attitudes to minorities are relatively negative or xenophobic. Due to globalization is the number of immigrants in our society permanently rising and that's why it's necessary to prepare next generations, via multicultural education, to living in plural society and to respecting different ways of life. That's why I deal with the question, how multicultural education works in practice in my diploma thesis. The aim is trough qualitative research (document analysis and case study) find out activities of state, non-governmental sector and teachers and possible shortcomings in multicultural education. Another aim is to explore results of multicultural education that means knowledge of students and whether the number of minorities in school could affect multicultural education. This hypothesis wasn't validated and the research exposed that different number of minorities in school doesn't affect the education. However, what could negatively affect multicultural education are medium, unsuitable educational materials, unsatisfactory training of teachers and control of multicultural education in practice, causing that students are quite good informed on the one hand, nevertheless they got negative attitudes to minorities on the other hand.

Dissimilarity plays a very important role in object recognition. But, finding perceptual dissimilarity between objects is non-trivial as it is not equivalent to the pixel dissimilarity between the objects (For example, two white noise images appear very similar even when they have different intensity values at every corresponding pixel). However, visual search allows us to reliably measure perceptual dissimilarity between a pair of objects. When the target object is dissimilar to the distracter, visual search becomes easy and it will be difficult otherwise. Even though we can measure perceptual dissimilarity between objects, we still do not understand either the underlying mechanisms or the visual features involved in the computation of dissimilarities. For this thesis, I have explored perceptual dissimilarity in two studies – by looking at known simple features and understanding how they combine, and using computational models to understand or discover complex features. In the first study, we looked at how dissimilarity between two simple objects with known features can be predicted using dissimilarities between individual features. Specifically, we investigated how search for targets differing in multiple features (intensity, length, orientation) from the distracters is related to searches for targets differing in each of the individual features. We found that multiple feature dissimilarities could be predicted as a linear combination of individual feature dissimilarities. Also, we demonstrated for the first time that Aspect ratio of the object emerges as a novel feature in visual search. This work has been published in the Journal of Vision (Pramod & Arun, 2014). Having established in the first study that simple features combine linearly, we devised a second study to investigate dissimilarities in complex shapes. Since it is known that shape is one of the salient and complex features in object representation, we chose silhouettes of animals and abstract objects to explore the nature of dissimilarity computations. We conducted visual search using pairs of these silhouettes on humans to get an estimate of perceptual dissimilarity. We then used various computational models of shape representation (like Fourier Descriptors, Curvature Scale Space, HMAX model etc) to see how well they can predict the observed dissimilarities. We found that many of these computational models were able to predict the perceptual dissimilarities of a large number of object pairs. However, we also observed many cases where computational models failed to predict perceptual dissimilarities. The manuscript related to this study is under preparation.

La presente Tesis Doctoral se encuadra dentro la línea de investigación del lenguaje mediante los métodos basados en corpus, es decir, mediante análisis computacional y cuantitativo. El esencial objetivo ha sido llevar a cabo una comparación y análisis cuantitativo estructural y del léxico de dos textos específicos del género dramático: la cuarta edición en el infolio de Hamlet (1685) de Shakespeare, y la traducción al inglés de Gamlet (1787) [1748], del dramaturgo ruso Aleksandr Sumarokov, traducida del ruso por Richard Fortune en 1970. El análisis, comparación e interpretación de los resultados de los patrones estructurales y temáticos se ha dispuesto por actos, tanto en aquello que se refiere a la intra-obra (en Hamlet y Gamlet, separado), como inter-obras (entre Hamlet y Gamlet) a lo largo de los Capítulos 3º, 4º, 5º y 6º. Para desvelar los propósitos reales de Shakespeare y Sumarokov, especialmente en lo referido a las configuraciones sociales y organizativas estructurales de Hamlet y Gamlet, se utilizaron diversas aplicaciones informáticas e estadísticas. Para ello se administró el análisis cuantitativo de la distribución de los patrones de la presencia, intervención e interacción de todos los personajes, tanto los principales, como los secundarios. Para analizar y comparar las alteraciones temáticas, es decir, las diferencias cualitativas, no simplemente cuantitativas, con respecto a la conceptualización sociopolítica, religiosa, moral, familiar, filosófica y artística, entre Shakespeare y Sumarokov, se aplicaron los métodos cuantitativos y analíticos basados en la lingüística del corpus. A tal fin, se implantó la investigación de los patrones de distribución de las palabras de contenido (open-class ítems), es decir, las palabras con significado léxico, tales como sustantivos, verbos, adjetivos y adverbios, más frecuentes entre ambas obras. Los principales resultados obtenidos revelan importantes disimilitudes entre las estructuras de las obras por actos, es decir, percepciones marcadamente distintas de todos los personajes, de su relevancia en las obras y de complejidad de las relaciones sociales entre ellos. Los resultados de los patrones temáticos señalan las divergencias significativas en los contenidos básicos de ambos textos en relación con los temas más prominentes. Así pues, los resultados confirman diferencias sustanciales en los patrones estructurales y temáticos entre versión original de Hamlet y Gamlet. Resumen: / The main area of research of this PhD dissertation is the study of language by means of corpus-based techniques -in other words, by means of a computational and quantitative analysis. The aim was to carry out quantitative and qualitative structural and lexical analysis and comparison of two specific texts in the genre of drama -The Fourth Folio Edition of The Tragedy of Hamlet Prince of Denmark (1685) by Shakespeare and the English translation of Gamlet (1787) [1748] by the Russian playwright Sumarokov, translated from Russian by Richard Fortune in 1970. The analysis, comparison and interpretation of data related to the structural and thematic patterns were carried out per act: intra-play (in each play, separately) and inter-plays (between Hamlet and Gamlet). Accordingly, various computational tools were applied to reveal the differences in the social and organisational structures of the plays through quantitative and qualitative analysis of the distribution patterns of the presence, intervention and interaction variables of all the characters, both main and secondary. Quantitative and analytical corpus-based methodologies were used to analyse and compare thematic alterations between the two plays -in other words, the (dis)similarities in the authors' religious, socio-political, family, moral, philosophical and artistic conceptions- identified on the basis of the most frequent content words (open-class items), particularly nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. The key findings indicate important differences between the structures of the plays per acts, that is, significant divergences in the authors' perceptions of the characters and the complexity of their relationships. Another essential finding suggests obvious distinctions between both texts' basic contents per act: intra-play and inter-plays. In general, the findings uncover wide-ranging dissimilarities in the structural and thematic patterns in Hamlet versus Gamlet.