Will Central and Eastern European Countries Dismantle the European Union? Contrasting European Developments to Current Trends in the US

This paper analyzes the historical background of the current developments in Central Eastern Europe, in other parts of Eastern Europe and in previously member countries of the former Soviet Union. The author concludes that the political and economic transformation of these countries to a solid democracy and well-functioning market economy have not been successful for most of them yet, and this may have serious consequences on the European Union, too.The paper contrasts these trends with what we can observe in the United States now. The author turns to the “hard facts” next, when he discusses the different factors of human and economic development and the issue of migration in the Central and East European post-socialist countries and in a selected group of advanced countries

Efficient Mining Support-Confidence Based Framework Generalized Association Rules

Mining association rules are one of the most critical data mining problems, intensively studied since their inception. Several approaches have been proposed in the literature to extend the basic association rule framework to extract more general rules, including the negation operator. Thereby, this extension is expected to bring valuable knowledge about an examined dataset to the user. However, the efficient extraction of such rules is challenging, especially for sparse datasets. This paper focuses on the extraction of literalsets, i.e., a set of present and absent items. By consequence, generalized association rules can be straightforwardly derived from these literalsets. To this end, we introduce and prove the soundness of a theorem that paves the way to speed up the costly computation of the support of a literalist. Furthermore, we introduce FasterIE, an efficient algorithm that puts the proved theorem at work to efficiently extract the whole set of frequent literalets. Thus, the FasterIE algorithm is shown to devise very efficient strategies, which minimize as far as possible the number of node visits in the explored search space. Finally, we have carried out experiments on benchmark datasets to back the effectiveness claim of the proposed algorithm versus its competitors

Mastering the Spatio-Temporal Knowledge Discovery Process

The thesis addresses a topic of great importance: a framework for data mining positioning data collected by personal mobile devices. The main contribution of this thesis is the creation of a theoretical and practical framework in order to manage the complex Knowledge discovery process on mobility data. Hence the creation of such framework leads to the integration of very different aspects of the process with their assumptions and requirements. The result is a homogeneous system which gives the possibility to exploit the power of all the components with the same flexibilities of a database such as a new way to use the ontology for an automatic reasoning on trajectory data. Furthermore two extensions are invented and developed and then integrated in the system to confirm the extensibility of it: a innovative way to reconstruct the trajectories considering the uncertainty of the path followed and a Location prediction algorithm called WhereNext. Another important contribution of the thesis is the experimentation on a real case of study on analysis of mobility data. It has been shown the usefulness of the system for a mobility manager who is provided with a knowledge discovery framework

From plague and fire : votive churches of Royal free city of Varaždin.

U razdoblju od 1665. do 1715. godine u gradu Varaždinu podignute su tri zavjetne kapele; protupožarna kapela sv. Florijana, protukužna kapela svetih Fabijana i Sebastijana i također protukužna kapela sv. Roka. Sve tri kapele izgrađene su u trenucima kolektivnih nepogoda (požar i epidemije kuge) koje su pogađale čitav grad te u mnogo čemu utjecale na život ljudi. U radu se pokušava interpretirati navedena zavjetovanja prvenstveno stavljajući naglasak na izniman utjecaj religijske sfere na svakodnevni, politički, socijalni pa i ekonomski život gradske zajednice. Osim toga, daje se i pregled do sad poznatih zavjetnih crkava na području Hrvatske na temelju kojeg se zaključuje o jedinstvenosti i speficičnosti primjera grada Varaždina kao grada s višestrukim brojem zavjetnih crkava sagrađenih u iznimno kratkom razdoblju od samo šezdeset godina. Osim toga, daje se pokušaj prve sveobuhvatne umjetničke valorizacije baštine zavjetnih crkava grada Varaždina. Naposljetku, ovaj rad je pokušaj stvaranja modela za interdisciplinarno istraživanje fenomena zavjetovanja i umjetničke baštine.In the period between 1665. and 1715., there were erected three votive churches in a town of Varaždin; fire chapel of St. Florian, plague chapel of Saints Fabian and Sebastian, and chapel of St. Roch, also a plague chapel. All three chapels were built during times of great catastrophes (fire and epidemics of plague) that had an impact on the whole city and in many ways affected the lives of people. This thesis attempts to interpret these vocations, primarily by emphasizing the extraordinary influence of the religious sphere on everyday, political, social and economic life of the city community. In addition, thesis provides an overview of all known votive churches on the territory of Croatia, which leads to conclusion of the uniqueness of the city of Varaždin as a city with multiple votive churches constructed in an exceptionally short period of only sixty years. Also, this thesis gives a first comprehensive evaluation of the heritage of votive churches of Varaždin. Finally, this paper is an attempt to create a model for interdisciplinary research of the phenomena of vocation and artistic heritage

COMEÇAR de Almada Negreiros arte e o poder formatador da matemática

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Ensino da MatemáticaEste trabalho desenvolve-se tendo como base vários pressupostos: a importância da obra de arte na vida do Homem, a relação existente entre a matemática e arte e o poder formatador da matemática na arte. Optou-se por considerar como ponto de partida a análise de uma obra de arte: COMEÇAR de Almada Negreiros, utilizando o método de Panofsky. O poder formatador da matemática é evidenciado nesta obra de arte em particular, confirmando a tese de que a matemática manifesta esse poder na arte, condicionando os trabalhos realizados por alguns artistas. Esta investigação centrada numa leitura matemática dos aspetos artísticos da obra de arte, demonstrou que a matemática exerce o seu poder formatador na obra, ao “obrigar” o artista a seguir regras de natureza matemática e geométrica na elaboração dos seus trabalhos

Abduction and Anonymity in Data Mining

This thesis investigates two new research problems that arise in modern data mining: reasoning on data mining results, and privacy implication of data mining results. Most of the data mining algorithms rely on inductive techniques, trying to infer information that is generalized from the input data. But very often this inductive step on raw data is not enough to answer the user questions, and there is the need to process data again using other inference methods. In order to answer high level user needs such as explanation of results, we describe an environment able to perform abductive (hypothetical) reasoning, since often the solutions of such queries can be seen as the set of hypothesis that satisfy some requirements. By using cost-based abduction, we show how classification algorithms can be boosted by performing abductive reasoning over the data mining results, improving the quality of the output. Another growing research area in data mining is the one of privacy-preserving data mining. Due to the availability of large amounts of data, easily collected and stored via computer systems, new applications are emerging, but unfortunately privacy concerns make data mining unsuitable. We study the privacy implications of data mining in a mathematical and logical context, focusing on the anonymity of people whose data are analyzed. A formal theory on anonymity preserving data mining is given, together with a number of anonymity-preserving algorithms for pattern mining. The post-processing improvement on data mining results (w.r.t. utility and privacy) is the central focus of the problems we investigated in this thesis