5,631 research outputs found

    UMSL Bulletin 2023-2024

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    The 2023-2024 Bulletin and Course Catalog for the University of Missouri St. Louis.https://irl.umsl.edu/bulletin/1088/thumbnail.jp

    Utilitarianism and the Social Nature of Persons

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    This thesis defends utilitarianism: the view that as far as morality goes, one ought to choose the option which will result in the most overall well-being. Utilitarianism is widely rejected by philosophers today, largely because of a number of influential objections. In this thesis I deal with three of them. Each is found in Bernard Williams’s ‘A Critique of Utilitarianism’ (1973). The first is the Integrity Objection, an intervention that has been influential whilst being subject to a wide variety of interpretations. In Chapter Two I give my interpretation of Williams’s Integrity objection; in Chapter Three I discuss one common response to it, and in Chapters Four and Five I give my own defence of utilitarianism against it. In Chapter Six I discuss a second objection: the problem of pre-emption. This problem is also found in Williams, but has received greater attention through the work of other authors in recent years. It suggests that utilitarianism is unable to deal with some of the modern world’s most pressing moral problems, and raises an internal tension between the twin utilitarian aims of making a difference and achieving the best outcomes. In Chapter Seven I discuss a third objection: that utilitarianism is insufficiently egalitarian. I find this claim to be unwarranted, in light of recent social science and philosophy. My responses to Williams’s objections draw upon resources from the socialist tradition – in particular, that tradition’s emphasis on the importance of social connections between individuals. Socialists have often been hostile to utilitarianism, in part for socialist-inflected versions of Williams’s objections. Thus, in responding to these objections I aim to demonstrate that socialist thought contains the means to defuse not only mainstream philosophy’s rejection of utilitarianism but also its own, and thus to re-open the possibilities for a productive engagement between the two traditions

    List Construction in Finland-Swedish Sign Language

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    Finland-Swedish Sign Language (FinSSL) is an endangered minority signed language used by approximately 90 deaf and 100 hearing persons in Finland and a smaller group of users in Sweden. Finland-Swedish Sign Language is in need of revitalization, and this study contributes to this with a detailed description of the form and usage of list construction in informational monologues published between 2014 and 2019. This study examines the use of list constructions in FinSSL. In list construction and its basic form, the non-dominant hand ‘counts’ and its fingertips are associated with entities while the dominant hand is used for pointing at these non-dominant hand’s fingers. In previous studies, list constructions have been called, for example, digital enumeration, finger(tip) loci or enumeration, and list buoys. List constructions have been described as a simultaneous expression involving the use of a numeral sign, since the non-dominant list hand often borrows its handshape from a corresponding numeral sign. The list hand can be held in place throughout a stretch of discourse (perseverating) or the hand can alternate between perseveration, simultaneous presentation of list fingers, sequential presentation of the list fingers, and various mixed versions of these. This study focuses on how FinSSL signers use list constructions in informational videos published on Teckeneko (www.teckeneko.fi). Teckeneko is a web-based information channel and broadcast service administered by the association Finlandssvenska teckensprĂ„kiga rf and the media company Moxio AB. The data for this study consists of 48 videos (2 hours and 16 minutes) where the list construction was used 241 times by seven different signers. The data was first annotated with the ELAN annotation program, and then the usage-events were analyzed by using Cognitive Grammar as the theoretical framework. In this analysis, list constructions consist of a list hand and a pointing device. The list hand and its fingers represent the different listed entities. The other hand acts as the pointing device and directs attention to the referents on the list hand fingers. The results of this study are the detailed description of the list construction usage in informational videos signed in FinSSL. The signers were found to use list construction, e.g., in enumerating topics in the video in question or for a project, events, dates, program numbers, participants, and organizations. The signers also used list construction for grouping the enumerated entities and for referring to the group of entities instead of individual entities. The results show a more nuanced understanding of the use of list constructions in FinSSL and in signed languages in general but also a need for further research on list constructions in other types of data.Listakonstruktio suomenruotsalaisessa viittomakielessĂ€ TĂ€mĂ€ vĂ€itöstutkimus kĂ€sittelee listakonstruktiota suomenruotsalaisessa viittomakielessĂ€. Suomenruotsalainen viittomakieli on toinen Suomessa kĂ€ytettĂ€vistĂ€ viittomakielistĂ€. Se on vakavasti uhanalainen kieli, jolla on Suomessa noin sata natiivia kielenkĂ€yttĂ€jÀÀ. TĂ€mĂ€ on ensimmĂ€inen vĂ€itöstutkimus suomenruotsalaisen viittomakielen kieliopista. Tutkimus on deskriptiivinen, ja se on teoreettiselta viitekehykseltÀÀn kognitiivisen kieliopin alalta. Työn teoreettiseen osaan on kerĂ€tty laajalti kuvauksia listakonstruktiosta ja sen kĂ€ytöstĂ€ ja tutkimuksesta muista viittomakielistĂ€ ympĂ€ri maailmaa. Listakonstruktiossa viittoja ojentaa toisesta kĂ€destÀÀn (nk. listakĂ€si) yhdestĂ€ viiteen sormea ja toisella kĂ€dellÀÀn (nk. osoitin) osoittaa joko yhteen tai useampaan nĂ€istĂ€ ojennetuista sormista. Listakonstruktiota kĂ€ytetÀÀn, kun viittoja listaa asioita ja paikantaa listattavat asiat nĂ€ihin listakĂ€den sormiin. ListakĂ€den ojennettujen sormien lukumÀÀrĂ€ riippuu siitĂ€, montako asiaa viittojan listalla on. Tarvittavat sormet voidaan ojentaa joko kaikki kerralla (nk. simultaaninen lista) tai yksitellen listan edetessĂ€ (nk. sekventiaalinen lista). ListakĂ€si voi myös olla joko nĂ€kyvillĂ€, listasormet ojennettuina, koko sen ajan, kun listakonstruktiota tuotetaan (nk. pysyvĂ€ lista), tai listakĂ€si voi osallistua listattavien asioiden viittomiseen ja ottaa listamuodon, kun on seuraavan listasormiin tehtĂ€vĂ€n osoituksen vuoro. VĂ€itöstutkimuksessa kuvataan, kuinka suomenruotsalaista viittomakieltĂ€ kĂ€yttĂ€vĂ€t hyödyntĂ€vĂ€t listakonstruktiota informatiivisissa monologeissa, jotka on julkaistu Teckeneko-sivustolla (teckeneko.fi) ja todetaan, ettĂ€ kĂ€yttö on monipuolista ja luovaa. Osoittavan kĂ€den kĂ€simuoto ja sen tekemĂ€ liike nimittĂ€in poikkeaa usein prototyyppisestĂ€, pelkĂ€llĂ€ etusormella tehtĂ€vĂ€stĂ€ osoituksesta ja kosketuksesta yhden listakĂ€den sormenpÀÀstĂ€. Osoittava kĂ€simuoto voi sisĂ€ltÀÀ sekĂ€ etu- ettĂ€ keskisormet ja tĂ€ten on mahdollista koskettaa kahta listakĂ€den sormenpÀÀtĂ€ yhtĂ€ aikaa ja nĂ€in viitata kahteen listan kohtaan simultaanisesti. Osoittava kĂ€si voi myös melkein suoran liikkeen ja pienen kosketuksen sijaan tehdĂ€ pyörĂ€htĂ€vĂ€n liikkeen listakĂ€den ojennettujen sormien ympĂ€ri tai linjamaisen liikkeen ojennettujen sormenpĂ€iden yli tai vieressĂ€. TĂ€llĂ€ pyörĂ€htĂ€vĂ€llĂ€ tai linjamaisella liikkeellĂ€ viittoja viittaa listan asioihin yhtenĂ€ ryhmĂ€nĂ€, tai jos linjamainen liike ei kosketakaan kaikkia listakĂ€den ojennettujen sormien sormenpĂ€itĂ€, viittoja voi ryhmitellĂ€ listan asiat kahdeksi ryhmĂ€ksi: nĂ€mĂ€, joihin koskettiin, ja nuo, joihin ei koskettu. Listkonstruktionen i finlandssvenskt teckensprĂ„k Doktorsavhandlingen behandlar om listkonstruktionen i finlandssvenskt teckensprĂ„k som Ă€r ett av de tvĂ„ teckensprĂ„ken i Finland. Det finlandssvenska teckensprĂ„ket Ă€r ett allvarligt hotat sprĂ„k med ungefĂ€r hundra nativa sprĂ„kanvĂ€ndare i Finland. Det hĂ€r Ă€r den första doktorsavhandlingen som fokuserar det finlandssvenska teckensprĂ„kets grammatik. Studien Ă€r deskriptiv och har kognitiv lingvistik som sin teoretiska ram. I avhandlingens teoretiska del har samlats beskrivningar av hur listkonstruktionen Ă€r beskriven och hur den anvĂ€nds i flera teckensprĂ„k runt omkring i vĂ€rlden. DĂ„ en person tecknar en listkonstruktion, visar hen med ena handen (den s.k. listhanden) ett till fem utstrĂ€ckta fingrar och pekar med den andra handen (den s.k. pekhanden) antingen pĂ„ ett eller flera av listhandens fingrar. Listkonstruktionen anvĂ€nds dĂ„ man listar olika saker eller enheter och dessa listenheter placeras pĂ„ listhandens fingrar. Antalet utstrĂ€ckta listfingrar beror pĂ„ antalet enheter pĂ„ listan. Dessa fingrar kan strĂ€ckas ut antigen alla pĂ„ en gĂ„ng (s.k. simultan lista) eller i tur och ordning dĂ„ listan framskrider (s.k. sekventiell lista). Listhanden kan ocksĂ„ hĂ„llas kvar i listformen under hela den tiden som listkonstruktionen produceras (s.k. permanent lista), eller listhanden kan förlora listformen under den tiden listhanden deltar i tecknandet av de listade sakerna och kan Ă„teruppta listformen dĂ„ det Ă€r dags för följande pekning pĂ„ listfingrarna. I den hĂ€r doktorsavhandlingen beskrivs hur de som tecknar finlandssvenskt teckensprĂ„k utnyttjar listkonstruktionen i informativa monologer som Ă€r publicerade pĂ„ Teckeneko (teckeneko.fi). Studien visar att anvĂ€ndningen Ă€r mĂ„ngsidig och kreativ. NĂ€mligen, pekhandens handform och rörelsen den handen gör skiljer sig ofta frĂ„n den prototypiska pekningen. Den prototypiska pekningen görs med ett pekfinger och rörelsen Ă€r mot ett listfinger och slutar med kontakt mellan ett av listhandens fingrar och pekhanden. Studien visar att pekhandens handform kan innehĂ„lla bĂ„de pek- och mittfingret vilket möjliggör att ha kontakt med tvĂ„ listfingrar samtidigt och dĂ€rmed hĂ€nvisa till tvĂ„ listpunkter simultant. Pekhanden kan ocksĂ„ göra en cirkulĂ€r rörelse runtomkring eller en nĂ€stan rak linjerörelse över eller nĂ€ra de utstrĂ€ckta listfingrarna i stĂ€llet för en rörelse till ett finger. Den som tecknar kan med denna cirkulĂ€ra eller linjĂ€ra rörelse hĂ€nvisa till de listade enheterna i en grupp, eller gruppera enheterna i tvĂ„ grupper om nĂ„got finger lĂ€mnas utanför den linjĂ€ra rörelsen: de som den pekande handen rörde vid och de som den pekande handen inte rörde vid

    Resource Management in Mobile Edge Computing for Compute-intensive Application

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    With current and future mobile applications (e.g., healthcare, connected vehicles, and smart grids) becoming increasingly compute-intensive for many mission-critical use cases, the energy and computing capacities of embedded mobile devices are proving to be insufficient to handle all in-device computation. To address the energy and computing shortages of mobile devices, mobile edge computing (MEC) has emerged as a major distributed computing paradigm. Compared to traditional cloud-based computing, MEC integrates network control, distributed computing, and storage to customizable, fast, reliable, and secure edge services that are closer to the user and data sites. However, the diversity of applications and a variety of user specified requirements (viz., latency, scalability, availability, and reliability) add additional complications to the system and application optimization problems in terms of resource management. In this thesis dissertation, we aim to develop customized and intelligent placement and provisioning strategies that are needed to handle edge resource management problems for different challenging use cases: i) Firstly, we propose an energy-efficient framework to address the resource allocation problem of generic compute-intensive applications, such as Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) based applications. We design partial task offloading and server selection strategies with the purpose of minimizing the transmission cost. Our experiment and simulation results indicate that partial task offloading provides considerable energy savings, especially for resource-constrained edge systems. ii) Secondly, to address the dynamism edge environments, we propose solutions that integrate Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) and Cooperative Spectrum Sensing (CSS) with fine-grained task offloading schemes. Similarly, we show the high efficiency of the proposed strategy in capturing dynamic channel states and enforcing intelligent channel sensing and task offloading decisions. iii) Finally, application-specific long-term optimization frameworks are proposed for two representative applications: a) multi-view 3D reconstruction and b) Deep Neural Network (DNN) inference. Here, in order to eliminate redundant and unnecessary reconstruction processing, we introduce key-frame and resolution selection incorporated with task assignment, quality prediction, and pipeline parallelization. The proposed framework is able to provide a flexible balance between reconstruction time and quality satisfaction. As for DNN inference, a joint resource allocation and DNN partitioning framework is proposed. The outcomes of this research seek to benefit the future distributed computing, smart applications, and data-intensive science communities to build effective, efficient, and robust MEC environments

    Towards a framework for the study of ongoing socio-technical transitions: explored through the UK self-driving car paradigm

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    The UK government set out to see self-driving cars on roads by 2021. The idea of a self-driving car has been around for almost a century, and more recent technological developments have made self-driving cars a real-life possibility. While a fully self-driving automobility system is some distance away, real-life testing is bringing autonomous driving closer to consumers. Some claim this to be the biggest disruption to mobility systems since the invention of the car. Claims about the potential of self-driving mobility range from economic and social benefits to environmental improvements. A significant ambiguity however remains concerning how they will be deployed and how the technological innovation will affect mobility aims and related transport and infrastructure systems. So far, the vast majority of studies on AVs have focused on the technology aspect of this transition lacking contributions that address this from a broader socio-technical perspective. With the accelerated adoption of new technologies, Sustainability Transitions has come to prominence as a research area that seeks to understand and guide socio-technical transitions toward sustainable trajectories. Socio-technical transitions theoretical framework has been used to understand historical transitions in the majority of empirical applications. The ability to apply the same framework to ongoing transitions and to guide these towards sustainable outcomes remains unsubstantiated. To address this gap this thesis examines the foundations of multi-level perspective (MLP) – a socio-technical transitions analytical framework – and develops an analytical framework (SRPM – System Rules Pathways Mechanisms) that is appropriate for the study of ongoing transitions. The refocused framework incorporates critical realism to focus analysis on causation and causal mechanisms. It is used to analyse the ongoing socio-technical transition to self-driving cars in the UK through a four-step analytical process. The study is framed as a case-based process mechanism study. The four steps are: i) contextualisation of the ongoing transition to AVs in the UK as a socio-technical transition based on the MLP theoretical framework; ii) identification of internal and external structural relations within the transition through the notion of rules and the morphogenetic cycle; iii) aligning observed processes with transition pathways to theorise about the trajectories of the transition; iv) identification of causal mechanisms in the observed processes through identification of demi-regularities through data analysis of grey literature and theorisation about mechanisms through the development of mechanism sketches and schemata. The thesis makes two contributions to knowledge: i) methodological and ii) empirical. The methodological contribution is the development of the SRPM analytical framework to study an ongoing socio-technical transition, and the empirical contribution is the application of this framework to the study of the ongoing transition to driverless cars in the UK

    Economic Essays on Learning, Inflation Beliefs, and Happiness

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    Doctoral thesis including six chapters on various topics concerning learning, inflation beleifs and measures of happiness

    Routing protocol for V2X communications for Urban VANETs

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    Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs) have been attracting tremendous attention in both academia and industry due to emerging applications that pave the way towards safer enjoyable journeys and inclusive digital partnerships. Undoubtedly, these ITS applications will demand robust routing protocols that not only focus on Inter-Vehicle Communications but also on providing fast, reliable, and secure access to the infrastructure. This thesis aims mainly to introduce the challenges of data packets routing through urban environment using the help of infrastructure. Broadcasting transmission is an essential operational technique that serves a broad range of applications which demand different restrictive QoS provisioning levels. Although broadcast communication has been investigated widely in highway vehicular networks, it is undoubtedly still a challenge in the urban environment due to the obstacles, such as high buildings. In this thesis, the Road-Topology based Broadcast Protocol (RTBP) is proposed, a distance and contention-based forwarding scheme suitable for both urban and highway vehicular environments. RTBP aims at assigning the highest forwarding priority to a vehicle, called a mobile repeater, having the greatest capability to send the packet in multiple directions. In this way, RTBP effectively reduces the number of competing vehicles and minimises the number of hops required to retransmit the broadcast packets around the intersections to cover the targeted area. By investigating the RTBP under realistic urban scenarios against well-known broadcast protocols, eMDR and TAF, that are dedicated to retransmitting the packets around intersections, the results showed the superiority of the RTBP in delivering the most critical warning information for 90% of vehicles with significantly lower delay of 58% and 70% compared to eMDR and TAF. The validation of this performance was clear when the increase in the number of vehicles. Secondly, a Fast and Reliable Hybrid routing (FRHR) protocol is introduced for efficient infrastructure access which is capable of handling efficient vehicle to vehicle communications. Interface to infrastructure is provided by carefully placed RoadSide Units (RSUs) which broadcast beacons in a multi-hop fashion in constrained areas. This enables vehicles proactively to maintain fresh minimum-delay routes to other RSUs while reactively discovering routes to nearby vehicles. The proposed protocol utilizes RSUs connected to the wired backbone network to relay packets toward remote vehicles. A vehicle selects an RSU to register with according to the expected mean delay instead of the device’s remoteness. The FRHR performance is evaluated against established infrastructure routing protocols, Trafroute, IGSR and RBVT-R that are dedicated to for urban environment, the results showed an improvement of 20% to 33% in terms of packet delivery ratio and lower latency particularly in sparse networks due to its rapid response to changes in network connectivity. Thirdly, focusing on increasing FRHR’s capability to provide more stable and durable routes to support the QoS requirements of expected wide-range ITS applications on the urban environment, a new route selection mechanism is introduced, aiming at selecting highly connected crossroads. The new protocol is called, Stable Infrastructure Routing Protocol (SIRP). Intensive simulation results showed that SIRP offers low end-to-end delay and high delivery ratio with varying traffic density, while resolving the problem of frequent link failures

    Mainstreaming of Nature-Based Solutions for the mitigation of hydro-meteorological hazard: governance analysis of a socio- technical change

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    The Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) concept and approach were developed to simultaneously face challenges such as risk mitigation and biodiversity conservation and restoration. NBSs have been endorsed by major International Organizations such as the EU, the FAO and World Bank that are pushing to enable a mainstreaming process. However, a shift from traditional engineering “grey” solutions to wider and standard adoption of NBS encounters technical, social, cultural, and normative barriers that have been identified with a qualitative content analysis of policy documents, reports and expert interviews. The case of the region Emilia-Romagna was studied by developing an analytical framework that brought together the social-ecological context, the governance system and the characteristics of specific NBSs

    Fitting Blame without Blameworthiness

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    Fitting blame is commonly thought to require a blameworthy actor who is in some robust sense ‘at fault’ for their objectionable behavior. When we cannot be warranted in making this judgment of fault about a person, we cannot be warranted in blaming them. When we cannot be warranted in blaming a person, we also cannot make room for genuinely forgiving them—at best, we can make sense of how we may excuse them or simply let go of our blame. However, in life, we often find ourselves blaming, striving to forgive, and sometimes succeeding in forgiving a person both (i) when we cannot reasonably judge whether they are blameworthy and (ii) when we can reasonably judge that they are not blameworthy. I argue that we should not dismiss our phenomenology of blaming and forgiving people in these types of cases, despite it being rendered incoherent or unwarranted in a conventional framework. By introducing a pluralistic picture of blame and a species of blame without fault, in which warranted blame does not require a warranted judgment of fault within an actor, I provide the resources to illuminate and support our experiences that play a vital role in our individual, interpersonal, and social lives.Doctor of Philosoph

    LIPIcs, Volume 274, ESA 2023, Complete Volume

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    LIPIcs, Volume 274, ESA 2023, Complete Volum
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