This thesis investigates a new model of non-normative prediction that addresses the contribution of width of temporal perspective to intuitive prediction. Intuitive prediction is defined in this thesis as the non-normative prediction of other's behaviour. This new model of intuitive prediction is termed the Temporal Perspective Model (TPM). The notion of temporal perspective expands upon the understanding of intuitive prediction provided by several major social and cognitive theories of the judgement process. TPM asserts that utilisation of the triad of past temporal perspective, present temporal perspective and future temporal perspective increases accuracy of intuitive prediction in judgement contexts. Past and future temporal perspectives are used through the generation and rehearsal of both experience-acquired and novel, possible judgement strategies outside of the actual judgement context (GIOA). Present temporal perspective (PTP) plays a mediating role in the expression of the products of this process within the judgement context. TPM posits that the width of temporal perspective is influenced by perceptions of self-efficacy, which is associated with use of past and future perspectives in the generation of judgement strategies, and also by motivational style, which is associated with engagement of present temporal perspective. Five motivational styles and their associated affects are proposed as influences on present temporal perspective: aggressive motivation, conflict motivation, competitive motivation, cooperative motivation and competence motivation. The context in which TPM has been investigated is the sport environment. The subjects in this study were 118 ice-hockey officials from Vancouver's Lower Mainland. A two by two factorial design was utilised to investigate the major proposition that the temporal perspective model distinguishes individuals in terms of overall achievement in a judgement context. The overall achievement variable was the first principle component derived from an analysis of a set of nine items referring to achieved levels of officiating, number of games assigned and supervisor and peer commendations. This analysis demonstrated significant differences between levels of overall achievement on the following variables: a) engagement of past and future temporal perspectives outside of the judgement context; b) engagement of present temporal perspective within the judgement context; c) the motivational styles of cooperation and competence. Aggressive, conflict and competitive motivations did not significantly distinguish groups in terms of overall achievement. A second two by two design of past-future by present temporal perspective was implemented to investigate the mediation of past-future temporal perspectives by present temporal perspective on the dependent variable of intuitive prediction. The variable of intuitive prediction was the first principle component of an analysis performed on five items relating to peer reports of implementation of successful, creative or original solutions to game problems. This analysis yielded significant main effects for the first factor of past-future temporal perspective and for the second factor of present temporal perspective. A highly significant interaction was found between past-future temporal perspective and present temporal perspective on the dependent variable intuitive prediction. Correlational analyses revealed significant associations between present temporal perspective and motivational style. The results of this study have largely supported the validity of the constructs proposed in TPM. / Arts, Faculty of / Psychology, Department of / Graduate

Intention of this work is to introdukce ideas of lean enterprise in general but also on concrete example of company BENTELER, ČR s.r.o. and take a think on influences and difficulties. Dissertation is divided into theoretical part which describing basic methods and principles of lean enterprise and practical part. In practical part I am introducing company BENTELER, ČR s.r.o. and actions to establish lean production on concrete example in plant Chrastava.

South African metropolitan areas are experiencing rapid growth and require an increase in network infrastructure. Increased congestion negatively impacts both public and freight transport costs. The concept of City Logistics is concerned with the mobility of cities, and entails the process of optimizing urban logistics activities by concerning the social, environmental, economic, financial, and energy impacts of urban freight movement. In a costcompetitive environment, freight transporters often use sophisticated vehicle routing and scheduling applications to improve fleet utilization and reduce the cost of meeting customer demands. In this thesis, the candidate builds on the observation that vehicle routing and scheduling algorithms are inherent problem specific, with no single algorithm providing a dominant solution to all problem environments. Commercial applications mostly deploy a single algorithm in a multitude of environments which would often be better serviced by various different algorithms. This thesis algorithmically implements the ability of human decision makers to choose an appropriate solution algorithm when solving scheduling problems. The intent of the routing agent is to classify the problem as representative of a traditional problem set, based on its characteristics, and then to solve the problem with the most appropriate solution algorithm known for the traditional problem set. A not-so-artificially-intelligent-vehicle-routing-agent™ is proposed and developed in this thesis. To be considered intelligent, an agent is firstly required to be able to recognize its environment. Fuzzy c-means clustering is employed to analyze the geographic dispersion of the customers (nodes) from an unknown routing problem to determine to which traditional problem set it relates best. Cluster validation is used to classify the routing problem into a traditional problem set. Once the routing environment is classified, the agent selects an appropriate metaheuristic to solve the complex variant of the Vehicle Routing Problem. Multiple soft time windows, a heterogeneous fleet, and multiple scheduling are addressed in the presence of time-dependent travel times. A new initial solution heuristic is proposed that exploits the inherent configuration of customer service times through a concept referred to as time window compatibility. A high-quality initial solution is subsequently improved by the Tabu Search metaheuristic through both an adaptive memory, and a self-selection structure. As an alternative to Tabu Search, a Genetic Algorithm is developed in this thesis. Two new crossover mechanisms are proposed that outperform a number of existing crossover mechanisms. The first proposed mechanism successfully uses the concept of time window compatibility, while the second builds on an idea used from a different sweeping-arc heuristic. A neural network is employed to assist the intelligent routing agent to choose, based on its knowledge base, between the two metaheuristic algorithms available to solve the unknown problem at hand. The routing agent then not only solves the complex variant of the problem, but adapts to the problem environment by evaluating its decisions, and updating, or reaffirming its knowledge base to ensure improved decisions are made in future. / Thesis (PhD (Industrial Engineering))--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Industrial and Systems Engineering / PhD / unrestricted

In modern processor architectures, caches are widely used to shorten the gap between the processor speed and memory access time. However, caches are time unpredictable, especially the shared L2 cache used by different cores on multicore processors. Thus, it can significantly increase the complexity of worst-case execution time (WCET) analysis, which is crucial for real-time systems. This dissertation designs several time-predictable scratchpad memory (SPM) based architectures for both VLIW (Very Long InstructionWord) based single-core and multicore processors. First, this dissertation proposes a time predictable two-level SPM based architecture for VLIW based single-core processors, and an ILP (Integer Linear Programming) based static memory objects allocation algorithm is extended to support the multi-level SPMs without harming the time predictability of SPMs. Second, several SPM based architectures for VLIW based multicore processors are designed. To support these architectures, the dynamic memory objects allocation based partition, the static memory objects allocation based partition and the static memory objects allocation based priority L2 SPM strategy are proposed, which retain the characteristic of time predictability. Also, both the WCET and worst-case energy consumption (WCEC) of our SPM based single-core and multicore architectures are completely evaluated in this dissertation. Last, to exploit the load/store latencies that are statically known in this architecture, we study a SPM-aware scheduling method to improve the performance. Our experimental results indicate the strengths and weaknesses of each proposed architecture and allocation method, which offers interesting memory design options to enable real-time computing. The strength of the two-level architecture is its superior performance compared to the one-level architecture, while the strength of the one-level architecture is its simple implementation. Also, the two-level architecture with separated L1 SPM for each core better fits for the data-intensive real-time applications, which not only retains good performance but also achieves a higher bandwidth by accessing both instruction and data SPM at the same time. Compared to the static based strategies, the dynamic allocation based partition L2 SPM strategy offers the better performance on each core because of the reuse of SPM space at the run-time, but has much higher complexity. In addition, the experimental results show that the timing and energy performance of our proposed SPM based architectures are superior to the similar cache based and hybrid architectures. Meanwhile, our architectures can ensure time predictability which is desirable for the real-time systems.

Survival models are used in analysing time-to-event data. This type of data is very common in medical research. The Cox proportional hazard model is commonly used in analysing time-to-event data. However, this model is based on the proportional hazard (PH) assumption. Violation of this assumption often leads to biased results and inferences. Once non-proportionality is established, there is a need to consider time-varying effects of the covariates. Several models have been developed that relax the proportionality assumption making it possible to analyse data with time-varying effects of both baseline and time-updated covariates. I present various approaches for handling time-varying covariates and time-varying effects in time-to-event models. They include the extended Cox model which handles exogenous time-dependent covariates using the counting process formulation introduced by cite{andersen1982cox}. Andersen and Gill accounts for time varying covariates by each individual having multiple observations with the total-at-risk follow up for each individual being further divided into smaller time intervals. The joint models for the longitudinal and time-to-event processes and its extensions (parametrization and multivariate joint models) were used as it handles endogenous time-varying covariates appropriately. Another is the Aalen model, an additive model which accounts for time-varying effects. However, there are situations where all the covariates of interest do not have time-varying effects. Hence, the semi-parametric additive model can be used. In conclusion, comparisons are made on the results of all the fitted models and it shows that choice of a particular model to fit is influenced by the aim and objectives of fitting the model. In 2002, an AntiRetroviral Treatment (ART) service was established in the Cape Town township of Gugulethu, South Africa. These models will be applied to an HIV/AIDS observational dataset obtained from all patients who initiated ART within the programme between September 2002 and June 2007.

There has been an enormous growth in the generation of time series data in the past decade. This trend is caused by widespread adoption of IoT technologies, the data generated by monitoring of cloud computing resources, and cyber physical systems. Although time series data have been a topic of discussion in the domain of data management for several decades, this recent growth has brought the topic to the forefront. Many of the time series management systems available today lack the necessary features to successfully manage and process the sheer amount of time series being generated today. In this today we stive to examine the field and study the prior work in time series management. We then propose a large system capable of handling time series management end to end, from generation to consumption by the end user. Our system is composed of open-source data processing frameworks. Our system has the capability to collect time series data, perform stream processing over it, store it for immediate and future processing and create necessary visualizations. We present the implementation of the system and perform experimentations to show its scalability to handle growing pipelines of incoming data from various sources.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / Most poverty studies ignore the dimension of time and are merely concerned if an individual meets certain money-metric or non-income welfare (e.g., access to services and asset ownership) criteria. They fail to recognise the limited time (24hours per day) available to complete tasks and the added difficulties they have even though there is an abundance of money-metric and asset-related non-money-metric poverty studies. (Kim et al. 2014:1). For example, individuals/households deemed poor by standard measures cannot afford market alternatives to assist them with non-market work (like childcare). Therefore, they find themselves spending all their time in market and non-market work without taking time for rest and improving themselves. Recognising non-market work and the allocation of time allows for a greater understanding into the role of women and Africans whose non-market work are unrecognised by standard economic measures such as GDP (Ferrant 2014:1). There are also only a few in-depth studies on time poverty, but they fail to utilise the most current data. Therefore, this study seeks to provide insights into how household production impacts on South African welfare. It explores the income, time poor and the extent of time allocation differences for various personal characteristics. It estimates the likelihood of time poverty based on an individual’s time schedule and the factors which most likely results in time poverty.

In safety-critical environments, it is crucial to have a backup strategy the system can turn to when facing a potentially unsafe situation. Run-time assurance provides a reliable methodology as a backup strategy. This work introduces a new framework for Run-time assurance, by generating trajectories in real-time using an optimal trajectory generation algorithm, then tracking the trajectory using transverse dynamics to design a feedback control law tailored for each trajectory generated. The generated trajectories are treated as safety backup trajectories that are only executed and followed by the plant if deemed necessary by the Run-time assurance logic. By using the Run-time assurance mechanism the system’s safety is ensured regardless of the behavior of the primary controller for the system with some constraints on the system. The framework assumes full knowledge of the environment and the system dynamics, while treating the trajectory generation part as a black box.

This dissertation seeks to examine the essential nature of time--both the concept in physics, biology, and philosophy, and the phenomenon in life and culture--with the ultimate goal of deepening our understanding of the empirical manifestation of time in human mental experience. It thus engages with both philosophy and with empirical science, natural as well as humanistic, in the paradigms of history, social theory, fundamental (or philosophical) anthropology, as well as with human neuroscience. The central argument is that while time is not an empirical phenomenon in physics - time itself is not an absolute quality of matter - one can make a certain argument for the real existence of time in biology, and still a different argument for a unique, linear phenomenon of time that derives from the specific human, cultural, experience. To make these arguments the dissertation devotes attention to the analysis of both the concept of time and the empirical phenomenon to which it refers successively in physics, biology, philosophy and history/sociology. Arriving at the conclusion that the linear concept of time (the causally significant relationship between the past, present and future) reflects a phenomenon that is uniquely human and suggests the ways in which this experience is necessarily reflected in the brain. / 2022-02-26T00:00:00Z

The present study aimed to evaluate (a) the extent to which different impulsivity measures would be related to each other and to a risk taking measure, (b) the extent to which impulsivity, risk taking, time perception and time perspective are related to each other, and (c) the extent to which these processes differ in Latino and White American students. Experiment I was conducted at Utah State University. One hundred and fortythree participants were exposed to the delay discounting, probability discounting and temporal bisection procedures, and answered the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale (BIS-11) and the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (ZTPI). Results showed that (a) the AUC for delay discounting was related to the scores on the BIS-11 scale, (b) the AUCs for delay and probability discounting were positively and significantly correlated, (c) the mean of the temporal bisection procedure was correlated with the AUC of the delay discounting procedure, (d) the scores on the ZTPI were correlated with the impulsivity measures, and (e) the scores on the ZTPI subscales were also correlated with the risk taking measure. These results suggest that different impulsivity measures may be evaluating similar decision-making processes, that impulsivity and risk taking may be different decision- making processes, and that time perception and time perspective are related to impulsivity and risk taking. Experiment II was conducted at Washington University in St. Louis, with 18 Latinos and 16 White Americans. Results show that while Latinos were more impulsive in the delay discounting procedure, their scores did not differ from the White Americans on the BIS-11. Interestingly, Latinos and White Americans did not differ on time perception, but they did differ on time perspective: Latinos scored higher on fatalism compared to White Americans.