Les œuvres de l'écrivain française Lydie Salvayre et des cinéastes américains Tim Burton et Terry Gilliam présentent une même dénonciation de la société du simulacre à travers une esthétique grotesque. Ils contestent dans leurs œuvres la pratique de la novlangue, celle du politiquement correct et le mélange de la réalité avec la fiction. Le fonctionnement dialectique du grotesque et sa capacité à procurer un vertige étonnant lui permet de rendre visible ces contradictions. La modification de l'imaginaire par la société de consommation et du simulacre les préoccupent particulièrement, car les auteurs observent que la transformation des signes en simples signifiants, dont le postmodernisme illustre le fonctionnement, conduisent l'individu à avoir un rapport déformé à la réalité, à la conscience historique et au symbole. Le grotesque est cette esthétique qui leur permet de former des mélanges dans leurs œuvres en préservant l'identité des signifiés et de restaurer ainsi un rapport à l'Histoire et au symbole. Le grotesque est cette esthétique qui permet le mélange sans équivalence, car elle donne à voir les contraires et leur confère du sens. Les auteurs lient leurs œuvres grotesques au mythe, cette fiction particulière qui permet d'avoir un rapport instinctif à la connaissance par le biais d'images particulièrement fortes. Le grotesque, dans sa dimension anthropologique et ontologique, réhabilite en définitive des fictions qui échappent aux problématiques du simulacre. / The works of Lydie Salvayre, American movie directors Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam present a similar criticism of a society of simulacrum, by their use of the aesthetically grotesque. In their work, they question the use of newspeak, of the politically correct, and the mixing of reality and fiction. The dialectical working of the grotesque and its ability to produce an astonishing sense of vertigo enables it to bring out these contradictions. They are particularly concerned by the extent to which a society of consumption and simulacrum has modified the imaginary. These autors have observed that the transformation of signs into mere signifiers, something the workings of which are demonstrated in postmodernism, leads the individual to have a distorted relationship with reality, historical awareness and the symbol. The grotesque is that aesthetic form which allows them to make mixes in their work whilst preserving the meaning of the signified and which thereby allows them to restore a relationship to history and the symbol. The grotesque is that esthetic form which allows them to make mixes with no equivalent, since it shows opposites whilst conferring sense on them. The autors link their grotesque works to myth, that kind of fiction which enables us to have a instinctive relationship to knowledge by the means of particularly strong images. When all is said and done, the grotesque, in its anthropological and ontological dimension, reinstates a fiction which avoids the problems of simulacrum.

Arthritis is one of the most common manifestations of aging and is the single largest cause of disability in the UK, US, Australia, and Canada among people age 30 years and older. Osteoarthritis of appendicular joint surfaces exhibits alterations of bony tissue in and around the joint surface. The degree to which osteoarthritis of articular surfaces occurs as a function of age and sex can be resolved with cemetery populations of known individuals, such as the Terry (19-20th century) and Spitalfields (17-18th century) collections upon which I report (n = 322; 162 males and 160 females). Using the five point scoring system 0-4 of lipping from the Chicago Standards Guide I ask whether (1) age has an influence on the accumulation of OA; (2) sex differences are present in patterns of OA; and (3) population origin is responsible for explaining intensity of OA.

Ce mémoire est composé de deux sections, une de création et l’autre de réflexion. La première consiste d’un roman de fantaisie satirique, Incompetent Gods (écrit en anglais) et la deuxième d’un essai à propos de ce genre. Incompetent Gods - Dans une dimension parallèle, créée par les dieux écœurés de l’athéisme régnant dans la nôtre, immortels et mortels vivent ensemble en cacophonie. Leurs relations sont étroitement surveillées par la compagnie Dieux Inc. qui emploie et contrôle la plupart des divinités. Son PDG, la reine Louhi Pohjola, court un grave danger car Goblin et son souverain-fifre Japhet essaient de se débarrasser d’elle afin de conquérir le monde. Ce récit satirique, en utilisant la transvalorisation de mythes anciens, la parodie de lieux communs présents en fantaisie, la transposition de dieux dans un contexte corporatif et des jeux de langage, se veut une critique de notre société, de nos valeurs et de nos utopies. Effets de miroirs. De la satire en fantaisie - Cet essai présente une étude littéraire de l’œuvre de Terry Pratchett, un des géniteurs de la fantaisie satirique contemporaine, suivie d’une réflexion sur le processus de création. Cela dans le but de répondre à deux questions : comment se moquer d’une chose alors qu’on en évoque une autre? Et comment créer un effet de reconnaissance entre le merveilleux et le réel? Idéalement, ceci permettra d’offrir une nouvelle perspective sur ce genre si mal apprécié. / This thesis is made up of two parts. The first one, Incompetent Gods, is a short satirical fantasy novel written in English. The second part consists of an essay about the genre. Incompetent Gods - In a parallel world, created by the gods sickened with the atheism in our dimension, mortals and immortals live together in cacophony. Their relations are monitored by Gods Inc., a huge multinational that employs and controls most divinities. Its CEO, Queen Louhi Pohjola, is in grave danger, for in order to conquer the world, Goblin and his side-king Japhet are doing all they can to get rid of her. By devaluing old myths, parodying the clichés of fantasy, transposing gods into a corporate context and playing with language, this satirical fable aims to critique our society, our values and our utopias. Effets de miroirs. De la satire en fantaisie - This essay (in French) presents a literary study of the works of Terry Pratchett, one of the most famed authors of contemporary satirical fantasy, and a reflection on the creative process that answers two questions: how to ridicule one thing while evoking another? And how to create a mirror of reality through the use of fantasy? Ideally, this will give new insights into this badly perceived genre.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Wyoming, 2009. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on July 29, 2010). Includes bibliographical references (p. 61-64).

Ranking a set of candidates or items from pair-wise comparisons is a fundamental problem that arises in many settings such as elections, recommendation systems, sports team rankings, document rankings and so on. Indeed it is well known in the psychology literature that when a large number of items are to be ranked, it is easier for humans to give pair-wise comparisons as opposed to complete rankings. The problem of ranking from pair-wise comparisons has been studied in multiple communities such as machine learning, operations research, linear algebra, statistics etc., and several algorithms (both classic and recent) have been proposed. However, it is not well under-stood under what conditions these different algorithms perform well. In this thesis, we aim to fill this fundamental gap, by elucidating precise conditions under which different algorithms perform well, as well as giving new algorithms that provably perform well under broader conditions. In particular, we consider a natural statistical model wherein for every pair of items (i; j), there is a probability Pij such that each time items i and j are compared, item j beats item i with probability Pij . Such models, which we summarize through a matrix containing all these pair-wise probabilities, have been used explicitly or implicitly in much previous work in the area; we refer to the resulting matrix as the pair-wise preference matrix, and elucidate clearly the crucial role it plays in determining the performance of various algorithms. In the first part of the thesis, we consider a natural generative model where all pairs of items can be sampled and where the underlying preferences are assumed to be acyclic. Under this setting, we elucidate the conditions on the pair-wise preference matrix under which popular algorithms such as matrix Borda, spectral ranking, least squares and maximum likelihood under a Bradley-Terry-Luce (BTL) model produce optimal rankings that minimize the pair-wise disagreement error. Specifically, we derive explicit sample complexity bounds for each of these algorithms to output an optimal ranking under interesting subclasses of the class of all acyclic pair-wise preference matrices. We show that none of these popular algorithms is guaranteed to produce optimal rankings for all acyclic preference matrices. We then pro-pose a novel support vector machine based rank aggregation algorithm that provably does so. In the second part of the thesis, we consider the setting where preferences may contain cycles. Here, finding a ranking that minimizes the pairwise disagreement error is in general NP-hard. However, even in the presence of cycles, one may wish to rank 'good' items ahead of the rest. We develop a framework for this setting using notions of winners based on tournament solution concepts from social choice theory. We first show that none of the existing algorithms are guaranteed to rank winners ahead of the rest for popular tournament solution based winners such as top cycle, Copeland set, Markov set etc. We propose three algorithms - matrix Copeland, unweighted Markov and parametric Markov - which provably rank winners at the top for these popular tournament solutions. In addition to ranking winners at the top, we show that the rankings output by the matrix Copeland and the parametric Markov algorithms also minimize the pair-wise disagreement error for certain classes of acyclic preference matrices. Finally, in the third part of the thesis, we consider the setting where the number of items to be ranked is large and it is impractical to obtain comparisons among all pairs. Here, one samples a small set of pairs uniformly at random and compares each pair a fixed number of times; in particular, the goal is to come up with good algorithms that sample comparisons among only O(nlog(n)) item pairs (where n is the number of items). Unlike existing results for such settings, where one either assumes a noisy permutation model (under which there is a true underlying ranking and the outcome of every comparison differs from the true ranking with some fixed probability) or assumes a BTL or Thurstone model, we develop a general algorithmic framework based on ideas from matrix completion, termed low-rank pair-wise ranking, which provably produces an good ranking by comparing only O(nlog(n)) pairs, O(log(n)) times each, not only for popular classes of models such as BTL and Thurstone, but also for much more general classes of models wherein a suitable transform of the pair-wise probabilities leads to a low-rank matrix; this subsumes the guarantees of many previous algorithms in this setting. Overall, our results help to understand at a fundamental level the statistical properties of various algorithms for the problem of ranking from pair-wise comparisons, and under various natural settings, lead to novel algorithms with improved statistical guarantees compared to existing algorithms for this problem.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-12-17T15:07:11Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 AndrewYSM_DISSERT.pdf: 1257696 bytes, checksum: 309b05179e3d4e5c72b883b5c4785af1 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-05-28 / Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cient?fico e Tecnol?gico / The literary critic Terry Eagleton obtained notoriety in academic circles when he was recognized intellectually for his bestselling book Literary Theory: An Introduction. In this book, the English author boldly proposes the end of literature and literary criticism. However, Eagleton proposed years before, in his book Criticism and Ideology (1976), a scientific system of analysis of literary texts, which seemed less radical, both in theory and in method, than in his later theoretical proposal. Based on this, the objective of this dissertation is to present the English literary critic?s initial method, explaining the reasons that led him to abandon his initial project - of develop a method of analysis of the literary text on a Marxist scientific perspective - and to propose, in the following years, in his most famous book and others, a revolutionary vision that would go beyond textual analysis and make literary texts have a practical intervention in society. Finally, we explain what would be his idea of revolutionary criticism / O cr?tico liter?rio Terry Eagleton obteve notoriedade no meio acad?mico ao ser reconhecido intelectualmente com seu livro best-seller Teoria da Literatura: uma introdu??o. Nesse livro, o autor ingl?s prop?e, ousadamente, o fim da literatura e da cr?tica liter?ria. Contudo, anos antes, Eagleton prop?s, no livro Criticism and Ideology (1976), um sistema cient?fico de an?lise do texto liter?rio aparentemente menos radical, tanto em teoria quanto no m?todo, que sua proposta te?rica posterior. Com base nisso, o objetivo dessa disserta??o ? apresentar o m?todo inicial do cr?tico liter?rio ingl?s, explicitar os motivos que o levaram a abandonar seu projeto inicial de elaborar um m?todo de an?lise do texto liter?rio sobre uma ?tica cient?fica marxista e a propor, nos anos seguintes, em seu livro mais famoso e em outros, uma vis?o revolucion?ria, que iria muito al?m de an?lises textuais e faria os textos liter?rios terem uma interven??o pr?tica na sociedade. Por fim, explicitaremos qual seria sua ideia de cr?tica revolucion?ria

In this analysis of Terry Pratchett’s Wyrd Sisters, I argue that performance of the witch is the most important part of witchcraft on Discworld, and, indeed, what drives the story. To underpin this position, I understand Wyrd Sisters as a work of metafiction and parody, examine witch tropes and stories on Discworld and draw parallels to the weird sisters of Shakespeare's Macbeth. Using Pratchett's own theory of narrative causality and Judith Butler's theory of performativity, I show that there is no witch essence on Discworld, but that the witches' performances are imitations of imitations. I also show how the witches' performances of themselves and theatre performance interact and amplify each other, as theatre is a key theme in the novel. / I den här analysen av Terry Pratchetts Häxkonster argumenterar jag för att de roller häxorna ikläder sig är den viktigaste aspekten av deras magi på Skivvärlden, och att iscensättandet av häxan i sig är vad som driver berättelsen framåt. Som bevis för min tes läser jag Häxkonster som metafiktion och parodi, går igenom stereotyper av häxor på Skivvärlden och drar paralleller till de tre häxorna från Shakespeares Macbeth. Jag använder Pratchetts egen teori om narrativ kausalitet och Judith Butlers teori om performativitet för att visa att ”häxan” inte har någon essens på Skivvärlden; häxornas iklädande av roller är istället imitationer av andra imitationer. Jag visar också hur teateruppträdande och häxornas iscensättande av sig själva samspelar och förstärker varandra, då romanen har ett starkt teatertema.

In this essay, I am analyzing how recognition occurs through humor in the two novels: Mort, by Terry Pratchett, and A Dirty Job, by Christopher Moore. This is with the intention to add more ways of using literature to speak about difficult topics such as death, in the Swedish secondary school. Throughout the analysis, I am connecting humor and recognition to each other to initiate a position where a teacher can move towards the subject through the duality of seriousness and comedy. The result has shown that an understanding of life’s duality, and human existence, plays an important role in how recognition occurs through humor. / Uppsatsens syfte har varit att analysera hur igenkänning uppstår genom humor i de två verken: Mort av Terry Pratchett och A Dirty Job av Christopher Moore. Uppsatsen har skrivits med intentionen att tillföra fler alternativ till hur lärare kan samtala om svåra ämnen så som döden genom litteraturen i klassrummet. Genomgående i analysen drar jag paralleller mellan humor och igenkänning för att visa på olika vägar kring hur man kan närma sig ämnet via den dubbelhet som finns mellan bland annat allvar och komedi. Resultatet har visat att en förståelse för livets dubbelhet och mänsklig existens spelar en viktig roll för hur igenkänning uppstår via humor.

Animator-producer Paul Houlton Terry has been portrayed as having little passion for the animation he produced and being more concerned with making a profit than producing entertaining cartoons with high production values. The purpose of the dissertation is to re-evaluate Terry‘s legacy to animated cartooning by analyzing his business philosophies, production values, and studio practices. Application of four psychodynamic factors to the early life and career of Terry, 1887-1929, found that his economic decision making was characterized by: an external locus of control, risk-averse financial behaviour, extreme saving behaviour through precaution, and shrewd money management practices. Based on Terry‘s historical responses to twelve major economic, technological, or institutional forces of change for the period 1929-1955, the psychodynamic factors were found to provide accurate explanations for his studio practices and production decisions. There was no evidence to support the conclusion that three early career disappointments undermined Terry‘s intrinsic motivation to create animated cartoons. Rather, Terry‘s lack of risk taking, external locus of control, tight studio production schedule, desire to compete with neighbour studio Fleischer, difficulty in separating financial rewards from creative processes in animation, and practice of undertaking surveillance measures on staff may have undermined his and his studio‘s creativity. Archival research found Terry to possess strong passions for and to have made significant creative contributions to the field of animation. Biographical research found that Terry retained a stable nucleus of highly talented artists who dedicated a significant portion of their working careers to the studio. An analysis of the cel aesthetics of a random sample of animated cartoons produced during the years 1930-1955 found that Terry created animated cartoons with above average cel aesthetics when compared to the other studios thereby supporting an inference that Terry was motivated to producing quality crafted animation. Further research is suggested into the role psychodynamic factors and economic decision-making play in the film production process and a clarification of Terry‘s legacy to the field of animated cartoons.

Each year millions of dollars are wagered on the NFL during the season. A few people make some money, but most often the only real winner is the sports book. In this project, the effect of data transformation on the paired comparison model of Glickman and Stern (1998) is explored. Usual transformations such as logarithm and square-root are used as well as a transformation involving a threshold. The motivation for each of the transformations if to reduce the influence of blowouts on future predictions. Data from the 2003 and 2004 NFL seasons are examined to see if these transformations aid in improving model fit and prediction rate against a point spread. Strategies for model-based wagering are also explored.