Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2006. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 177-182

Thesis (M. Hous. M.)--University of Hong Kong, 2007.

(M.A.)--Villanova University, 2007. / Political Science Dept. Includes bibliographical references.

Two topologies (Z,L) and (Z,L1) for the family of the non-degenerate convex curves in the projective plane are considered, where (Z,L) is the topology from the Lane's neighborhood system and (Z,L1) is the topology from the parabolic neighborhood system. It is shown that the definition of convexity in the affine plane can be extended to the projective plane so that the Blaschke selection theorem remains true for the projective convex sets. With the help of this theorem, the topological space (Z,L) is compactified by adding Lane's compactifying elements. Furthermore, it is shown that (Z,L) is metrizable but (Z,L1) is not metrizable. The Lane's topology (X,L), as a subspace of (Z,L) for the non-degenerate conics, is both metrizable and separable. A subspace (X,τ) of (Z,L1) is studied which is metrizable but not separable. / Science, Faculty of / Mathematics, Department of / Graduate

Internet domains and legal protection of domain names are enjoying a rapid growth in awareness among businesses and individuals not only world-wide, but also in the Czech Republic. Undoubtedly it is the internet, what has been the biggest change in our lives in past 15 years. Originally a military project, which turned to be "something" more than anticipated. Internet alone is a brand new world and therefore there must be certain rules to run and to control it. Thanks to rapid improvement of connectivity, above all after broadband connections had been implemented with vast majority of citizens, this medium has become a mass medium and the law enforcement of rules has become more important and common. The goal of this diploma thesis is to create a view of field of internet domains and related law issues, above all concerning the protection of the names of domains. The essential part of the thesis is so called ADR part. It handles the way of resolution of disputes. Information in this thesis is based both on professional sources and on own experience which I gained with my internet projects or even with domain disputes. This document is not intended to be solely an academic text but also a practical guide that will help "everyday users" of internet. This diploma thesis is divided into theoretical beginning and then it focuses on practical law part. Chapters are made of sections which build together a complex overview of the field of law issues. In the end of the thesis there is described so called "ADR" with ".eu" domains. The whole law framework in the thesis is supplemented by real examples from real life and therefore the thesis has the ambition to improve the readers' (law) knowledge in this field.

Domain adaptation on semantic segmentation generally refers to the procedures for narrowing the distribution gap between source and target data, which is vital for developing the automatic vehicle system. It requires a large amount of data with well-labelled ground truth at the pixel level. Labelling this scale of data is extremely costly due to the lot of human effort required. Also, manually labelling often comes with label noises that are harmful to automatic vehicle system development. In this case, solving the above problem utilizes computer-generated data and ground truth for development. However, a notorious problem exists when a system is trained with synthetic data but deployed in a real-world environment, which results from the distribution (domain) difference between these two kinds of data, and domain adaptation helps solve this issue. In the thesis, the limitation of conventional batch normalization layer on adversarial learning based domain adaptation methods is mentioned and discussed. From the view of the limitation, we propose replacing the Sharing Affine Transformation with our proposed Separate Affine Transformation (SEAT) to improve the domain adapting performance. The proposed SEAT is simple, easily implemented, and integrated into existing adversarial learning-based unsupervised domain adaptation methods. Also, to further improve the adaptation quality on lower-level features, we introduce multi-level adaptation by adding the lower-level features to the higher-level ones before feeding them to the discriminator, which is different from others by adding extra discriminators. Finally, a simple training strategy, self-training, is adopted to improve the model performance further. Extensive experiments show that our proposed method is able to get comparable results with other domain adaptation methods with simpler design.

Fourteen word frequency metrics were tested to evaluate their effectiveness in identifying vocabulary in a domain. Fifteen domain engineering projects were examined to measure how closely the vocabularies selected by the fourteen word frequency metrics were to the vocabularies produced by domain engineers. Six filtering mechanisms were also evaluated to measure their impact on selecting proper vocabulary terms. The results of the experiment show that stemming and stop word removal do improve overlap scores and that term frequency is a valuable contributor to overlap. Variations on term frequency are not always significant improvers of overlap. / Master of Science

Domain names are much discussed issue these days yet not that well understood by Internet users. Diploma thesis Qualitative factors affecting the value of a domain name, as the title suggests, focuses on technical and marketing elements of the domain together with the content of websites and their influence on the value of domain names. In the first part there are different factors and their influence described in theory, the practical part then applies to a specific case for domain Nemovitosti.cz. This domain was compared in terms of market, competition and their technical and marketing site. To support factors related to website content, statistics put inside the website were used as well as freely available online tools. After evaluation of all factors Nemovitosti.cz domain, the author concludes that the domain is valuable in its field and its value in the future due to investigated factors will increase.

All human beings are endowed with unique talents and potentialities, and are able to bring to life the hidden gifts or the talisman within them. Being in the prime of their lives, youth should be engaged in developing themselves, acquiring virtues, and striving for excellence. Reports from schools and other sources, however, indicate that many South African youth have become prey to various social ills, such as teenage pregnancy, violence, crime, and drugs and alcohol abuse, which inhibit them from achieving their talisman. In response to this situation, a life skills programme was designed to awaken the sense of talisman in youth. Believing that all human beings are gifted with special talents and potentialities, the Youth Enrichment Programme (YEP) aims to improve and transform the cognitive, social, and moral behaviour of youth, thus bringing them closer to the state of talisman. The programme intends to equip youth with values and skills that improve their social, moral and cognitive behaviour, so that they can become responsible citizens in a united and peaceful society. It pays special attention to the moral and spiritual aspects of the learners, aspects severely neglected by most education systems. The principles of YEP are founded on the spiritual nature of man, the oneness of mankind, unity in diversity, and equality. The programme adopts transformational and multi-domain teaching strategies to transform learners through interactive critical assessment of values in the context of real-life moral and social issues. The main purpose of this study was to analyse and evaluate YEP in terms of its influence on the cognitive, social, and moral behaviour of adolescent learners and to determine its strengths and weaknesses. Various aspects of the programme were investigated, including its underlying theoretical principles, methodological approaches and design characteristics. The researcher evaluated the influence of the programme on the behaviour of adolescent learners in five institutions in two provinces. The qualitative and quantitative data from the learners, teachers and facilitators in the five case studies showed that the programme had a positive influence on the learners in the cognitive, social and moral domains. It broadened their view of life and developed problem solving skills in the cognitive domain, enhanced their communication skills and co-operation in social domain, and improved their general moral behaviour especially in the areas of trust and respect in the moral domain. Overall, the effect of the programme was most prominent in transforming the moral behaviour of the learners, bringing some of them closer to their state of talisman. The study also discovered three unexpected phenomena - the beneficial role of peer learning facilitation, the positive effect of facilitation on the young facilitators, and the salutary effect of the programme on the general learning atmosphere in the schools. All human beings are endowed with unique talents and potentialities, and are able to bring to life the hidden gifts or the talisman within them. Being in the prime of their lives, youth should be engaged in developing themselves, acquiring virtues, and striving for excellence. Reports from schools and other sources, however, indicate that many South African youth have become prey to various social ills, such as teenage pregnancy, violence, crime, and drugs and alcohol abuse, which inhibit them from achieving their talisman. In response to this situation, a life skills programme was designed to awaken the sense of talisman in youth. Believing that all human beings are gifted with special talents and potentialities, the Youth Enrichment Programme (YEP) aims to improve and transform the cognitive, social, and moral behaviour of youth, thus bringing them closer to the state of talisman. The programme intends to equip youth with values and skills that improve their social, moral and cognitive behaviour, so that they can become responsible citizens in a united and peaceful society. It pays special attention to the moral and spiritual aspects of the learners, aspects severely neglected by most education systems. The principles of YEP are founded on the spiritual nature of man, the oneness of mankind, unity in diversity, and equality. The programme adopts transformational and multi-domain teaching strategies to transform learners through interactive critical assessment of values in the context of real-life moral and social issues. The main purpose of this study was to analyse and evaluate YEP in terms of its influence on the cognitive, social, and moral behaviour of adolescent learners and to determine its strengths and weaknesses. Various aspects of the programme were investigated, including its underlying theoretical principles, methodological approaches and design characteristics. The researcher evaluated the influence of the programme on the behaviour of adolescent learners in five institutions in two provinces. The qualitative and quantitative data from the learners, teachers and facilitators in the five case studies showed that the programme had a positive influence on the learners in the cognitive, social and moral domains. It broadened their view of life and developed problem solving skills in the cognitive domain, enhanced their communication skills and co-operation in social domain, and improved their general moral behaviour especially in the areas of trust and respect in the moral domain. Overall, the effect of the programme was most prominent in transforming the moral behaviour of the learners, bringing some of them closer to their state of talisman. The study also discovered three unexpected phenomena - the beneficial role of peer learning facilitation, the positive effect of facilitation on the young facilitators, and the salutary effect of the programme on the general learning atmosphere in the schools. / Dissertation (PhD (Curriculum Studies))--University of Pretoria, 2004. / Curriculum Studies / unrestricted

The world’s increasing interconnectedness and the recent increase in the number of notable regional and international events pose greater and greater challenges for political decision-making, especially the decision to strengthen bilateral economic relationships between friendly nations. Typically, such critical decisions are influenced by certain factors and variables that are based on heterogeneous and vague information that exists in different domains. A serious problem that the decision-maker faces is the difficulty in building efficient political decision support systems (DSS) with heterogeneous factors. One must take many factors into account, for example, language (natural or human language), the availability, or lack thereof, of precise data (vague information), and possible consequences (rule conclusions). The basic concept is a linguistic variable whose values are words rather than numbers and are therefore closer to human intuition. A common language is thus needed to describe such information which requires human knowledge for interpretation. To achieve robustness and efficiency of interpretation, we need to apply a method that can be used to generate high-level knowledge and information integration. Fuzzy logic is based on natural language and is tolerant of imprecise data. Fuzzy logic’s greatest strength lies in its ability to handle imprecise data, and it is perfectly suited for this situation. In this thesis, we propose to use ontology to integrate the scattered information resources from the political and investment domains. The process started with understanding each concept and extracting key ideas and relationships between sets of information by constructing object paradigm ontology. Re-engineering according to the object-paradigm (OP) provided quality for the developed ontology where conceptualization can provide more expressive, reusable object and temporal ontology. Then fuzzy logic has been integrated with ontology. And a fuzzy ontology membership value that reflects the strength of an inter-concept relationship to represent pairs of concepts across ontology has been consistently used. Each concept is assigned a fixed numerical value representing the concept consistency. Concept consistency is computed as a function of strength of all the relationships associated with the concept. Fuzzy expert systems enable one to weigh the consequences (rule conclusions) of certain choices based on vague information. Rule conclusions follow from rules composed of two parts, the if antecedent (input) and the then consequent (output). With fuzzy expert systems, one uses fuzzy logic toolbox graphical user interface (GUI) tools to build up a fuzzy inference system (FIS) to aid in decision-making. This research includes four main phases to develop a prototype architecture for an intelligent DSS that can help top political decision makers.