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The literature on democratization emphasises how authoritarian constraints usually lead genuine opposition parties and movements to form alliances in order to make demands for reform to the authoritarian regime. There is significant empirical evidence to support this theoretical point. While this trend is partly visible in the Middle East and North Africa, such coalitions are usually short-lived and limited to a single issue, never reaching the stage of formal and organic alliances. This article, using the case of Morocco, seeks to explain this puzzle by focusing on ideological and strategic differences that exist between the Islamist and the secular/liberal sectors of civil society, where significant opposition politics occurs. In addition, this article also aims to explain how pro-democracy strategies of the European Union further wi...
In recent years digital cameras have seen an enormous rise
in popularity, leading to a huge increase in the quantity of
digital photos being taken. This brings with it the challenge of organising these large collections. The MediAssist project uses date/time and GPS location for the
organisation of personal collections. However, this context
information is not always sufficient to support retrieval
when faced with a large, shared, archive made up of
photos from a number of users. We present work in this
paper which retrieves photos of known objects (buildings,
monuments) using both location information and content-based
retrieval tools from the AceToolbox. We show that
for this retrieval scenario, where a user is searching for
photos of a known building or monument in a large shared
collection, content-based techniques can ...
Control of fermentation processes is a complex problem due to the inherent non-lineanties and time varying characterstics of the process. The application of conventional single loop analogue controllers provides poor control due to problems in tuning individual loops and the lack of ability to implement complex controllers. The application of standard optimal techniques is compounded both by the complexity of the process and the lack of adequate models as a result of poorly understood dynamics. The lack of important transducers for product measurement coupled with the time varying parameters in a fermentation process provides a natural test for adaptive control techniques.
This thesis includes details of modelling and simulation studies earned out on a Bakers Yeast fermentation process. A mathematical model of the growth of Saccharo...
We control the surplus process of a non-life insurance company by dynamic proportional reinsurance. The objective is to maximize expected (utility of the) surplus under the worst-case claim development. In the large claim case with a worst-case upper limit on claim numbers and claim sizes, we find the optimal reinsurance strategy in a differential game setting where the insurance company plays against mother nature. We analyze the resulting strategy and illustrate its characteristics numerically. A crucial feature of our result is that the optimal strategy is robust to claim number and size modeling and robust to the choice of utility function. This robustness makes a strong case for our approach. Numerical examples illustrate the characteristics of the new approach. We analyze the optimal strategy, e.g. in terms of the more convention...
In the context of a knowledge-based agenda understanding the dynamics of the collaborative process between universities and industry becomes critical. This paper
develops an analytical framework for examining the processes underpinning the collaborative capabilities of University Research Centres (URCs). Drawing on the lens of collaborative communities, this multi-level framework provides a useful basis for understanding in more detail the unique motives, relational dynamics and negotiated orders informing and shaping the formation and sustenance of research collaboration in URCs. Implications for the management of scientific and technical (S&T) human capital are discussed.
The ever increasing demand for in situ monitoring of health, environment and security has created a need for reliable, miniaturised sensing devices. To achieve this,
appropriate analytical devices are required that possess operating characteristics of reliability, low power consumption, low cost, autonomous operation capability and
compatibility with wireless communications systems. The use of light emitting diodes (LEDs) as light sources is one strategy, which has been successfully applied in chemical
sensing. This paper summarises the development and advancement of LED based chemical sensors and sensing devices in terms of their configuration and application, with the focus on transmittance and reflectance absorptiometric measurements.
The current temporal research agenda in time and organizations emphasizes the importance of continuity and change. This research sought to examine the coexistence of continuity and change in time perspective using the model proposed by (Zimbardo and Boyd, 1999).
The research sought answers to the following four research questions:
1. Do time perspectives demonstrate differential continuity?
2. Do time perspectives demonstrate mean level continuity?
3. Do time perspectives demonstrate interindividual differences
in intraindividual change?
4. Do individuals demonstrate individual change in their time perspectives?
Survey data were collected from 128 youth workers across three measurement occasions using a twelve month prospective longitudinal panel design and measurement occasions were separated by a four month interval. Data were...
In this paper we examine the effects of noise when creating a real-world weblog corpus for information retrieval. We focus on the DiffPost (Lee et al. 2008) approach to noise removal from blog pages, examining the difficulties encountered when crawling the blogosphere during the creation of a real-world corpus of blog pages. We introduce and evaluate a number of enhancements to the original DiffPost approach in order to increase the robustness of the algorithm. We then extend DiffPost by looking at the anchor-text to text ratio, and dis- cover that the time-interval between crawls is more impor- tant to the successful application of noise-removal algorithms within the blog context, than any additional improvements to the removal algorithm itself.
In the modern age methods for the calibration of sensors have become particularly important. Situations can arise where the deployment of sensors in the field, particularly in bulk, could be augmented to a very useful degree through the application of some form of autonomous monitoring system. This system would ideally be capable of taking a measurement, relaying the data to a central database and then re-setting the sensor to a default form. Inherently conducting polymers (ICPs) are useful in modem research due to their highly conductive properties when doped, and their concurrent mechanical flexibility. The ICP polypyrrole can be prepared as an electromechanical actuator, capable of operation under low applied power.
Through the application of colorimetric dyes to the polypyrrole actuators simple sensors can be developed with the ...
