Thesis--Lund. / "Literature": p. [289]-295.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1964. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Bibliography: l. 74-78.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 187-194).

This study identifies permanence, the search for it and its attainment, as the most important variable influencing social, economic and demographic behaviour in rural society. The dissertation examines the interaction between families and land between 1820 and 1890 in a rural mid-Victorian Upper Canadian community, Toronto Gore township. The Gore of Toronto, one of the prime wheat producing townships in nineteenth century Ontario, is a wedge-shaped tract of land of some nineteen thousand acres situated fifteen miles northwest of Toronto. The theoretical underpinning for the study is Richard Easterlin's consumption/inheritance model for the behaviour of rural societies. This is butressed by historical studies of the American midwest as well as studies of rural Ontario by David Gagan, Marvin Mclnnis and Lorne Tepperman. These studies, as well as the data for Toronto Gore, are used to demonstrate that the processes of social change in rural society were related to incursions of economic stress arising out of land and population pressure. Stress was accompanied by demonstrable changes in demographic and economic behaviour at the household level. Toronto Gore was subjected to two forms of economic stress during the period. The first arose from agricultural change and the demands for land made by immigrants and a maturing younger generation. The second was a crisis of shorter term that began in 1857 with the collapse of the wheat market and was exacerbated two years later by a drastic decline in land values. In responding to these crises the younger generation postponed marriage and family formation. The older generation limited marital fertility and adopted devices for the distributuon of property that would protect the productivity and profitability of the land. These changes, which conform to the broad outlines of the Easterlin model and the actual historical experience of populations elsewhere, suggest that the Gore's households were not unusual in their behaviour. The major thrust of the dissertation, however, is that permanence was the most important variable influencing the timing and degree of change. The foundation for permanence was laid during the settlement phase when approximately one hundred families put down roots. Three generations later most of those families were still represented among the township's householders. Others have identified core populations during the settlement phase but thus far no one has systematically studied their behaviour. For Toronto Gore, techniques of family reconstitution developed by French and English demographers are used to reconstruct the population and family relationships. In three generations, intermarriage knit the permanent families into a cohesive group. They owned the largest farms, had the largest households, and were the leaders of the principal social and political institutions. Their children had the best opportunities of acquiring places for themsleves in the township. They maintained their relative prosperity because,. as a group, they were more sensitive to economic change. In times of economic stress they reacted quickly to protect what they had. Their neighbours responded much more slowly and adjustments in their demographic behaviour appeared almost a decade later. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Mémoire diffusé initialement dans le cadre d'un projet pilote des Presses de l'Université de Montréal/Centre d'édition numérique UdeM (1997-2008) avec l'autorisation de l'auteur.

Mémoire diffusé initialement dans le cadre d'un projet pilote des Presses de l'Université de Montréal/Centre d'édition numérique UdeM (1997-2008) avec l'autorisation de l'auteur.

With the large amount of content being posted on the Internet every day, moderators, investigators, and analysts can be exposed to hateful, pornographic, or graphic content as part of their work. Exposure to this kind of content can have a severe impact on the mental health of these individuals. Hence, measures must be taken to lessen their mental health burden. Significant effort has been made to find and censor pornographic content; gore has not been researched to the same extent. Research in this domain has focused on protecting the public from seeing graphic content in images, movies, or online videos. However, these solutions do little to flag this content for employees who need to review such footage as part of their work. In this thesis, we aim to address this problem by creating a full image processing pipeline to find and censor gore in images. This involves creating a dataset, as none are publicly available, training and testing different machine learning solutions to automatically censor gore content. We propose an Image Processing Pipeline consisting of two models: a classification model which aims to find whether the image contains gore, and a segmentation model to censor the gore in the image. The classification results can be used to reduce accidental exposure to gore, by blurring the image in the search results for example. It can also be used to reduce processing time and storage space by ensuring the segmentation model does not need to generate a censored image for every image submitted to the pipeline. Both models use pretrained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures and weights as part of their design and are fine-tuned using Machine Learning (ML). We have done so to maximize the performance on the small dataset we gathered for these two tasks. The segmentation dataset contains 737 training images while the classification dataset contains 3830 images. We explored various variations on the proposed models that are inspired from existing solutions in similar domains, such as pornographic content detection and censoring and medical wound segmentation. These variations include Multiple Instance Learning (MIL), Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Mask R-CNN. The best classification model we trained is a voting ensemble that combines the results of 4 classification models. This model achieved a 91.92% Double F1-Score, 87.30% precision, and 90.66% recall on the testing set. Our highest performing segmentation model achieved a testing Intersection over Union (IoU) value of 56.75%. However, when we employed the proposed Image Processing Pipeline (classification followed by segmentation), we achieved a testing IoU of 69.95%.

Magíster en Gestión y Políticas Públicas / La presente investigación aborda desde una perspectiva cuantitativa, la eficiencia con la cual se ha hecho uso de los recursos provenientes del FRIL (Fondo Regional de Iniciativa Local), en la Región de Valparaíso y la oportunidad con que la que han ejecutado las obras correspondientes. El FRIL corresponde a un recurso contemplado en la Ley de Presupuestos y que está destinado a mantener o conservar infraestructura pública, las que se deben someter a los procedimientos establecidos en el oficio circular Nº 33 del Ministerio de Hacienda. Para ello se desarrolló un análisis de la información disponible en el Departamento de Inversiones del Gobierno Regional (GORE) de Valparaíso, identificando los tipos de proyectos priorizados por el Consejo Regional, sus montos y los tiempos de ejecución de ellos, determinando de esta manera la eficiencia con la cual los municipios hacen uso de esta fuente de financiamiento y la oportunidad con la que ponen a disposición de la comunidad los productos alcanzados con la ejecución de los proyectos. Se tomaron también opiniones expertas de funcionarios del Gobierno Regional, mismas que se incorporan en la investigación, sirviendo de guía para su desarrollo, de forma anónima. La hipótesis analizada apunta a demostrar que la incorporación del Gobierno Regional de la Región de Valparaíso, en el proceso de revisión de proyectos, es la principal causa del retraso de la ejecución de proyectos de inversión pública en la Región de Valparaíso. Se concluye no obstante que esta hipótesis resulta ser no del todo cierta. Si bien se determinó responsabilidad del GORE en el lento avance del gasto anual, el problema resultó ser mucho más complejo incluyendo actores y políticas públicas no esperadas al inicio de la investigación. En este mismo sentido, las conclusiones y propuestas son amplias y abarcan una serie de elementos que pueden parecer muy extensos, disimiles e incluso dispersos. Sin embargo la propia naturaleza del problema lleva a ese resultado, siendo difícil centrar las conclusiones y propuestas en un tema central. Las conclusiones centrales van en el sentido de que el problema de lentitud en la ejecución del gasto no es el único problema ni es únicamente responsabilidad del GORE, sino que existen otros involucrados, siendo uno de los más importantes los municipios. Estos seleccionan proyectos de bajo impacto y de rápida ejecución, lo que combinado con el interés principal del GORE en gastar los recursos han desviado el objetivo principal de la inversión pública, que es propender a la mejora de la calidad de vida de las personas, a un interés principal de aumentar el porcentaje del gasto, sin importar la calidad de la inversión, llegándose a utilizar los recursos en adquisiciones cuyos costos de operación y mantención no pueden ser sostenidos por los municipios llevándolos a un rápido deterioro. Como propuestas principales se apunta a una generación de iniciativas menos influenciadas por la política partidista, alejándola del clientelismo y la captura política. Una forma es el apego a los planes de desarrollo, tanto regional como comunal, dado que en su elaboración, en especial de este último, participan múltiples actores, que generan una imagen-objetivo consensuada de la comuna. Al priorizar las inversiones de acuerdo a estos planes se separaría la decisión exclusiva del Alcalde de turno y sus Concejales, y la acercaría más al ideal de desarrollo visualizado por la sociedad en su conjunto.

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