Map schematization with circular arcs

We present an algorithm to compute schematic maps with circular arcs. Our algorithm iteratively replaces two consecutive arcs with a single arc to reduce the complexity of the output map and thus to increase its level of abstraction. Our main contribution is a method for replacing arcs that meet at high-degree vertices. This allows us to greatly reduce the output complexity, even for dense networks. We experimentally evaluate the effectiveness of our algorithm in three scenarios: territorial outlines, road networks, and metro maps. For the latter, we combine our approach with an algorithm to more evenly distribute stations. Our experiments show that our algorithm produces high-quality results for territorial outlines and metro maps. However, the lack of caricature (exaggeration of typical features) makes it less useful for road networks

From Network to Web dimension in supply chain management

Cette thèse soutient que la dimension réseau, étant actuellement la portée du domaine de la gestion de chaîne logistique, contraint l’avancement de ce domaine et restreint des innovations conceptuelles et fondamentales capables d’adresser les grands défis économiques, environnementaux et sociaux. Les concepts de chaîne et de réseau ne reflètent pas la complexité des flux physiques, informationnels et financiers générés par les interactions qui ont lieu dans des réseaux interconnectés. Ces concepts n’offrent pas les fondations théoriques pour supporter des interventions allant au-delà d’un seul réseau et laissent échapper des opportunités nécessitant une vision multi-réseau. Ainsi, la dimension “web”, celle des réseaux de réseaux, est proposée comme une extension de la dimension réseau. Cette extension peut être vue comme l’étape naturelle suivante dans la progression qui a commencé par le niveau de gestion des opérations internes, est passée au niveau de la chaîne logistique et se trouve actuellement au niveau du réseau logistique. Après l’investigation théorique des raisons et de la façon d’intégrer la dimension web dans le domaine de la gestion de la chaîne logistique, la thèse étudie des implications importantes de cette intégration sur la collaboration inter-organisationnelle et le processus de prise de décision dans des environnements de webs logistiques. Elle démontre, en exploitant l’exemple des réseaux interconnectés ouverts, des potentialités inimaginables sans une vision web. Une méthodologie de conception d’un modèle de simulation permettant l’évaluation et la comparaison des webs ouverts par rapport aux webs existants est proposée. Puisque l’aide à la décision est une composante importante de la gestion de la chaîne logistique, la thèse contribue à déterminer les besoins des gestionnaires et à identifier les lignes directrices de la conception des outils d’aide à la décision offrant le support adéquat pour faire face aux défis et à la complexité des webs logistiques. Ces lignes directrices ont été compilées dans un cadre de conception des logiciels d’aide à la décision supportant la dimension web. Ce cadre est exploité pour développer quatre applications logicielles offrant aux praticiens et aux chercheurs des outils nécessaires pour étudier, analyser et démêler la complexité des webs logistiques.This thesis argues that the network dimension as the current scope of supply chain management is confining the evolution of this field and restricting the conceptual and fundamental innovations required for addressing the major challenges imposed by the evolution of markets and the increased intricacies of business relationships. The concepts of chain and network are limitative when attempting to represent the complexity of physical, informational and financial flows resulting from the interactions occurring in overlapping networks. They lack the theoretical foundations necessary to explain and encompass initiatives that go beyond a single chain or network. They also lead to overlook substantial opportunities that require beyond a network vision. Therefore, the “web” dimension, as networks of networks, is proposed as an extension to the network dimension in supply chain management. This new scope is the natural next step in the progression from the internal operations management level to the supply chain level and then to the supply network level. After a theoretical investigation of why and how the web dimension should be integrated into the supply chain management field, the thesis studies and discusses important implications of this integration on inter-organisational collaboration and of the decision-making processes in the logistic web environments. It demonstrates through the example of open interconnected logistic webs some of the potentials that cannot be imagined without a web vision. A methodology for designing a simulation model to assess the impact of such open webs versus existing webs is proposed. Since decision support is a key element in supply chain management, the thesis contributes to determine the needs of supply chain managers and identify the important axes for designing decision support systems that provide adequate assistance in dealing with the challenges and complexity presented by logistic web environments. The identified elements result in the establishment of a foundation for designing software solutions required to handle the challenges revealed by the web dimension. This conceptual framework is applied to the prototyping of four applications that have the potential of providing practitioners and researchers with the appropriate understanding and necessary tools to deal with the complexity of logistics webs

Creation, Resistance, and Refacement: Postfuturist Storytelling, Cultural Flows, and the Remix

Constitutive of my dissertation is an exploration of contemporary literature and culture. Vital to my research is the notion and practice of the remix. Originating in music, it is perceived and deployed as a hybrid expressive mode combining textual, audio, and visual components. The text of the dissertation, accompanying photographs, and supplementary video files demonstrate this principal aspect. Focusing on the fusion of quest narratives and social activism, the dissertation looks at critical and creative vernaculars as forms of peaceful/peaceable resistance against multiple oppression. Reflecting some of the permeating modernist and postmodernist concerns, it emphasizes an understanding of postfuturist storytelling as cultural exchange in the intersection of the time axes. Reading the works of Stewart Home, Jeff Noon, and Kathy Acker, alongside critical insights of Terry Eagleton, Richard Rorty, Fredric Jameson, and McKenzie Wark, contextualizes contemporary idiosyncrasies historically, thereby rendering tradition remixable, rather than radically abandoning it. The remix investigates alternating cycles of noise and silence in the communication channel as a basis for the disambiguation of the misconception about the totality of discourse. The approach delineates vision of refacement: rebirth through subtonic solidarity of selfless, yet reindividualized, fellow humans engaged in enduring the hindrances to patient, persistent creation of a free culture based on love and trust

Classifying Christians: Ethnography, Discovery, and the Limits of Knowledge in Late Antiquity

This dissertation analyzes the paradigms Christian writers (150-500 C.E.) used to array, historicize, and polemicize ethnographic data. A study of late antique heresiological literature (orthodox treatises about heretics) demonstrates how the religious practices, doctrinal beliefs, and historical origins of heretics served to define Christian schematizations of the world. In studying heretics, Christian authors defined and ordered the bounds of Christian knowledge and the process by which that knowledge was transmitted

Educating Semiosis: Exploring ecological meaning through pedagogy

This thesis consists of six essays – framed by introduction and conclusion chapters – that develop possibilities for philosophy of education and pedagogy from the lens of bio-semiotics and edu-semiotics (biological and educational semiotics). These transdisciplinary inquiries have found commonality in the concept of learning-as-semiosis, or meaning-making across nature/culture bifurcations. Here, quite distinct branches of research intersect with the American scientist-philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce’s (1839 - 1914) pragmatic semiotics. I argue in these essays that the research pathway suggested by the convergence of edu- and bio-semiotics, reveals possibilities for developing a (non-reductive) theory of learning (and pedagogy generally) that puts meaning-making processes in a central light. A fully semiotic theory of learning implores us to take an ecological and biological view of educational processes. These processes explore the complementarity of organism-environment relations and the relationship between learning and biological adaptation. They also unravel new implications for education through the basic recognition that meaning is implicitly ecological. Understanding semiotic philosophy as an educational foundation allows us to take a broader and less dichotomized view of educational dynamics, such as: learning and teaching, curriculum design, arts and music education, inter/trans-disciplinary education, literacy (including environmental and digital literacy), as well as exploring the relationships and continuities between indigenous/place-based and formal pedagogical processes and practices. From this meaning-based and ecological perspective, what is important in the educational encounter is not psychologic explanations of learning stages, predetermined competencies, or top-down implemented learning-outcomes, but rather meaning and significance and how this changes through time-space and with others (not only human others) in a dynamic and changing environment. As addressed more directly in the conclusion chapter, these essays unravel the implications of this emerging approach to the philosophy of education, pedagogy and learning theory, specifically by providing conceptual/philosophical possibilities for integrating arts education, science education, and indigenous place-based knowledge into holistic educational approaches and programs

Pliny\u27s defense of empire

Despite perennial interest in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History as a record of the prodigious, the quotidian, and the useful in Rome in the first century AD, for over half of a millennium Pliny has been considered little more than an inept compiler of facts and marvels intellectually incapable of formulating a cogent argument supported through the selective marshalling of his materials. It is my contention that Pliny’s encyclopedic text is in fact a first-rate work of political philosophy constituting an apology for Roman imperial expansion grounded in a sophisticated conception of man as the only being capable of passing down its discoveries to its descendants. According to Pliny’s theory of human nature, man is distinguished from the beasts by his ability to acquire new faculties and forms of knowledge through time. Once acquired, man’s capacities for speech and memory provide him with the unique ability to share his discoveries with his children, and the process of development characteristic of the life of the individual is thereby recapitulated at the level of the species as a whole, with the accumulation of discoveries through time uniting men as men across the succession of generations. Prior to the establishment of the Roman Empire, however, political and linguistic boundaries had divided the human race, preventing the inclusion of all men within a single process of species development. Importantly, for Pliny, the supersession of the bounded forms of human order characteristic of the Hellenic and Hellenistic worlds by the unbounded form of the Roman Empire was thus a necessary precondition for the fullest realization of the human animal. Pliny’s Natural History, written in a newly established universal language, incarnates the collective memory of the human race, and in the encyclopedist and his encyclopedia, the process of human development is brought to perfection at both the level of the individual and the level of the species. The publication of Pliny’s text is thus itself the ultimate justification for Rome’s conquest of the world