Social Welfare to Assess the Global Legibility of a Generalized Map

International audienceCartographic generalization seeks to summarize geographical information from a geo-database to produce a less detailed and readable map. The specifications of a legible map are translated into a set of constraints to guide the generalization process and evaluate it. The global evaluation of the map, or of a part of it, consisting in aggregating all the single constraints satisfactions, is still to tackle for the generalization community. This paper deals with the use of the social welfare theory to handle the aggregation of the single satisfactions on the map level. The social welfare theory deals with the evaluation of the economical global welfare of a society, based on the individual welfare. Different social welfare orderings are adapted to generalization, compared and some are chosen for several generalization use cases. Experiments with topographic maps are carried out to validate the choices

Social Multi-Criteria Evaluation (SMCE)

The main argument developed here is the proposal of the concept of “Social Multi-Criteria Evaluation” (SMCE) as a possible useful framework for the application of social choice to the difficult policy problems of our Millennium, where, as stated by Funtowicz and Ravetz, “facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent”. This paper starts from the following main questions: 1. Why “Social” Multi-criteria Evaluation? 2. How such an approach should be developed? The foundations of SMCE are set up by referring to concepts coming from complex system theory and philosophy, such as reflexive complexity, post-normal science and incommensurability. To give some operational guidelines on the application of SMCE basic questions to be answered are: 1. How is it possible to deal with technical incommensurability? 2. How can we deal with the issue of social incommensurability? To answer these questions, by using theoretical considerations and lessons learned from realworld case studies, is the main objective of the present article.Multi-Criteria Analysis, Economics, Complexity Theory, Environment, Social Choice, Post-Normal Science, Incommensurability, Ethics

Plasticity and Population Structure: Exploring Secular Trends in the Three- Dimensional Cranial Morphology of the Modern Portuguese

Significant secular changes have been documented in several worldwide populations over the past 200 years; these changes include increased stature and weight, increased cranial vault height, and a narrowing of the cranial vault width (Angel 1976; Boas 1912; Jantz 2001; Jonke et al. 2007; Little et al. 2006). A variety of hypotheses have been proposed as to the origins of the observed changes. This dissertation uses a documented collection of skeletons from the 19th and 20th centuries to describe the precise nature of the changes using three-dimensional methods and explores possible causes underlying the changes including individual environmental effects, demographic parameters, and spatial effects. Three-dimensional cranial landmarks from 500 identified individuals from the New Lisbon Skeletal collection in Lisbon, Portugal were collected along with available demographic data. The birth years represented in the sample range from 1805-1960. The Portuguese sample provides the opportunity for understanding the genetic and environmental components of the observed changes. The highly circumscribed nature of the skeletal collection, which contains only individuals from the relatively homogenous Portuguese population, enables a comparison of the observed changes with information about individual environmental effects, such as socioeconomic status and health status. The impact of the demographic transition that characterizes modern populations is also examined; the modern demographic transition is characterized by a decrease in mortality followed by a decrease in fertility. Also, information regarding the place of birth and place of death for individuals in the sample is used to model the spatial effects on cranial morphology and to demonstrate the maintenance of genetic structure in spite of significant secular changes. In addition to providing a unique sample for testing theories related to the causes of secular trends, this research also provides a new way of documenting secular trends. In previous research, secular changes have primarily used traditional linear craniometric data, anthropometric data, or conscript records to document change. The use of three-dimensional data enables a more exact description of changes in the cranial form and provides the opportunity for a more precise understanding of the basis for change

Culture and Urban Revitalization: A Harvest Document

Advocates have long argued that the economic benefits of the arts and culture provide a firm rationale for public support. Recent scholarship on the "creative class" and "creative economy" is simply the latest effort to link cultural expression to community prosperity. In contrast, the social benefits of cultural engagement have received relatively little attention, even though -- as we shall see -- they provide a stronger case.We need to avoid a simplistic either-or choice between the economic and social impacts of the arts. People who live in our cities, suburbs, and countryside are simultaneously consumers, workers, residents, citizens, and participants. Culture's role in promoting community capacity and civic engagement is central to its potential for generating vital cultural districts. To separate the economic and the social impacts of the arts makes each more difficult to understand.This document provides an overview of the state-of-the-art literature on culture and urban revitalization. In Part 2, we place the creative sector in contemporary context with a discussion of three social dynamics. The "new urban reality" has restructured our cities by increasing social diversity -- fueled by new residential patterns, the emergence of young adult districts, and immigration; expanding economic inequality; and changing urban form. Shifts in the economic and political environment have changed the structure of the creative sector. Finally, the changing balance of government, nonprofit, and for-profit institutions in social policy development -- the shift to transactional policymaking -- has profound implications for cultural policy and the creative sector broadly defined. These three forces -- the new urban reality, the changing structure of the creative sector, and the emergence of transactional policy-making -- define the context within which culture-based revitalization takes place

Taxation and State Building Under Diversity

The ethnic and religious diversity of the population is often associated with worse state building outcomes, including lower levels of taxation. In this dissertation I investigate how diversity hinders state building and how it shapes the patterns of taxation. The dissertation is structured around two main questions. The first question is: What are the mechanisms through which diversity constrains state building? Building on the fact that periods of state building include increases in the amount of taxes levied on the populations follows the second question that concerns the distributional consequences of the increases in the amount of taxes: Which groups bear the increasing fiscal burdens of an expanding state during periods of state building? I argue that diversity impedes state building by increasing the costs of the state’s investment in fiscal capacity. This is because in more diverse places the different ethnic and religious identities of the population make them more illegible to the state’s agents, making it more difficult for the state to acquire knowledge about the population and its economic activities. This illegibility also increases the bargaining power of local intermediaries vis-à-vis the state, which makes investment in fiscal capacity even costlier as these groups often oppose state building. Because it is cheaper to invest in the fiscal capacity of less diverse places, I also argue that the tax burdens of the core/dominant groups in the society, even though they are in power, increase more than the tax burdens of the minorities during periods of state building. I test these arguments in the context of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Ottoman Empire. The main empirical evidence relies on statistical analyses of an original dataset based on my archival work in the Ottoman archives in Istanbul. In addition to this, I use other original and secondary datasets, as well as a close reading and qualitative analysis of correspondences among Ottoman bureaucrats in the Ottoman archives. Using the local-level fiscal revenue data, I demonstrate that the increases in fiscal revenues during wartime were lower in more diverse areas in the empire, indicating diversity hinders state building. Using another dataset on the local-level expenses of the state, I find that the state had to invest more in more diverse provinces to be able to extract a unit revenue. This suggests that the costs of investment in fiscal capacity were higher under diversity. In order to provide evidence for the mechanisms I suggest in the argument, I show that the Ottoman State was less successful in successfully completing censuses in more diverse areas, which is consistent with the argument that diverse populations are more illegible to the state. I also utilize a dataset on governor assignments to provide evidence that diversity constrained possible government assignments, potentially decreasing bureaucratic capacity. I complement these quantitative analyses with qualitative analyses of archival documents and evidence from secondary sources. With these findings, I make three main contributions to the literatures on state building, the politics of taxation, and identity politics. First, I demonstrate that diversity impedes state building, and it does so by rendering populations illegible and making investment in fiscal capacity more costly. Hence, I propose and test a new theory that explains why diversity constrains state building, by bringing together insights from the state building and identity politics literatures. Second, I show that because the members of the core/dominant groups are more legible to the state and investment in fiscal capacity is cheaper where they live, they undergo higher tax burdens of the state building processes compared to the minorities. This indicates a distributive outcome that goes contrary to conventional wisdom where the ruling identity group taxes itself rather than other groups. Finally, finding that war can result in stronger states only under sufficient homogeneity of the population, I underline ethnic and religious diversity as factors that might condition the relationship where war leads to stronger states. This offers one possible explanation why the argument in the wider literature that warfare leads to stronger states is often challenged outside Early Modern Europe, where the populations were less diverse

Experimenting on the Poor: The Politics of Social Policy Evaluations in Brazil and Mexico

In the 1990s, Brazil and Mexico were pioneers in the implementation of conditional cash transfer programs (CCTs), which since have benefitted an estimated one billion poor families around the world. However, the initial evaluation strategies pursued by each state were different: Mexican officials partnered with US economists to implement an RCT evaluation, while Brazilians used a combination of statistical simulations and qualitative studies and aimed to secure the generation of policy knowledge to domestic experts. Based on eighteen months of participant observation in Mexico City and Brasília, 100 interviews with political and academic elites, content analysis of 400 policy documents, and historical-process tracing methods, this dissertation explains why these two similar countries, implementing the same policy, took different routes to assess the merits of CCTs, and what unintended consequences followed from these choices. I demonstrate that a key factor to achieve the legitimacy and political viability of CCTs is the knowledge regimes that states create to implement and evaluate these programs. The dissertation shows that while knowledge regimes tend to be understood as technical or apolitical machineries, they are inherently shaped by the politics of legitimation of CCTs and they produce unanticipated consequences for the ways that states combat poverty in the long-run. Only by taking into consideration the role that knowledge production plays in securing the political viability of CCTs, I argue, we can assess the politics and consequences of these programs, and how they relate to poor families on the ground

Maastikumeetrika ja ökosüsteemi kultuuriteenused – ressursipõhine integreeriv lähenemine maastikuharmoonia kaardistamisele

A Thesis for applying for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Environmental Protection.The overall idea of PhD thesis was to explain with objective evidence and using mapping techniques, why and how people value particular visual landscapes. Mainstream mapping research usually refers to uniqueness, diversity and naturalness of landscapes as the main factors for landscape values and preferences. These variables can be easily measured using satellite imagery and cartographic materials: for example, the diversity of landscape elements can be assessed with a function of Shannon information entropy, and naturalness – as the share of relatively natural land cover within the region of interest. However, psychological background suggests other important attributes of landscape experience – harmony, unity or coherence of the scene. Mentioned aspects are usually measured subjectively with questionnaires and surveys. Measuring landscape preferences is also quite a challenging task, requiring many people involved in assessment of photographs or even having a nature trip (with obvious drawbacks in spatial coverage and replicability with other evaluators). Therefore, the PhD research was designed to make all assessments as objective, as possible. Overall landscape coherence, for the first time, was measured as the extent to which total diversity of digital landscape model (composed of landforms and land cover) exceeds the added diversity of landforms and land cover alone. In this way, coherence was directly related to system properties of landscape, making it legible and understandable. Also, for the first time colour harmony of land cover was evaluated with remotely sensed data (satellite imagery). Retrieved map-based indices were examined with geo-located photographs of landscapes and outdoor recreation, uploaded to social media, such as Flickr, VK.com and former Panoramio. The study contributes to the operationalisation of landscape beauty and, therefore, more advanced landscape management, nature protection and sustainability of land use practises.Doktoritöö eesmärk on kaardistustehnoloogiad kasutades tõenduspõhiselt selgitada, miks ja kuidas inimesed väärtustavad teatud maastikke visuaalsest seisukohast. Peavoolu kaardistusuuringud tavaliselt keskenduvad maastiku väärtuste ja eelistuste hindamisel unikaalsusele, mitmekesisusele ja looduslikkusele. Neid muutujaid saab satelliitpiltide ja kartograafilise materjali põhjal lihtsalt mõõta, näiteks maastikuelementide mitmekesisust saab hinnata Shannoni entroopiavalemiga ning looduslikkust vastava iseloomuga maakatte osakaaluga uuritaval alal. Psühholoogilisest vaatepunktist lähtudes on maastikukogemusel veel teisi olulisi omadusi, nagu vaate harmoonia, ühtsus või kooskõla sidusus. Uuringute puhul mõõdetakse neid muutujaid tavaliselt subjektiivselt. Maastikueelistuste teaduslik hindamine on tõsine metoodiline väljakutse, mis nõuab paljude hindajate osalemist näiteks maastikufotode hindamisel või vahetult looduses, kus tuleb arvestada piirangutega ruumilisel esindatusel või hinnangute replikatiivsusel. Arvestades eelnimetatud asjaolusid, on dissertatsiooni eesmärgiks seatud leida võimalikult objektiivseid teid tavaliselt subjektiivsetena käsitletavate maastikumuutujate hindamisel. Uudne on üldise maastiku kooskõla mõõdetmine digitaalse pinnavorme ja maakatet hõlmava maastikumudeliga, võrreldes nende komponentide eraldi mõõtmisega. Selliselt menetledes on koherentsus otseselt seostatav maastiku struktuursete parameetritega ja seega muudab hinnangud loetavamaks ja arusaadavamaks. Esmakordselt on kaugseire andmete (satelliitpildid) alusel hinnatud ka maakatte värviharmooniat. Määratletud kaardipõhiseid indekseid kontrolliti kohtseotud fotodega maastikuvaadetest ning välirekreatsiooni tegevustest sotsiaalmeedias (nt Flickr, VK.com ja varasem Panoramio). Uuring aitab paremini mõista ja rakendada maastiku ilu hindamise käiku ja seeläbi kasutada esteetilist kvaliteeti maastiku planeerimisel ja korraldamisel, looduskaitses ja teistes säästva maakasutuse praktilistes valdkondades.Publication of this dissertation has been supported by the Estonian University of Life Science

Process Modelling, Web Services and Geoprocessing

Process modelling has always been an important part of research in generalisation. In the early days this would take the form of a static sequence of generalisation actions, but currently the focus is on modelling much more complex processes, capable of generalising geographic data into various maps according to specific user requirements. To channel the growing complexity of the processes required, better process models had to be developed. This chapter discusses several aspects of the problem of building such systems. As the system gets more complex, it becomes important to be able to reuse components which already exist. Web services have been used to encapsulate generalisation processes in a way that maximises their interoperability and therefore reusability. However, for a system to discover and trigger such a service, it needs to be formalised and described in a machine understandable way, and the system needs to have the knowledge about where and when to use such tools. This chapter therefore explores the requirements and potential approaches to the design and building of such systems

Human-like arm motion generation: a review

In the last decade, the objectives outlined by the needs of personal robotics have led to the rise of new biologically-inspired techniques for arm motion planning. This paper presents a literature review of the most recent research on the generation of human-like arm movements in humanoid and manipulation robotic systems. Search methods and inclusion criteria are described. The studies are analyzed taking into consideration the sources of publication, the experimental settings, the type of movements, the technical approach, and the human motor principles that have been used to inspire and assess human-likeness. Results show that there is a strong focus on the generation of single-arm reaching movements and biomimetic-based methods. However, there has been poor attention to manipulation, obstacle-avoidance mechanisms, and dual-arm motion generation. For these reasons, human-like arm motion generation may not fully respect human behavioral and neurological key features and may result restricted to specific tasks of human-robot interaction. Limitations and challenges are discussed to provide meaningful directions for future investigations.FCT Project UID/MAT/00013/2013FCT–Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the R&D Units Project Scope: UIDB/00319/2020