Consumed by Faith: The development of Christian Fundamentalism and its applications in contemporary society

My research aims to understand how and why fundamentalists justify violence against people who do not fit their profile of "righteous" or "saved" persons, such as abortion doctors and clinic workers, gays and lesbians, and Jews. The first section of this paper travels through the history of fundamentalism since its origins in the British and American apocalipticism, or belief in the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. However, my history of Protestant Fundamentalism in the United States will focus on the ways in which Fundamentalism developed in response to many changes in American social structure. I interpret Fundamentalism as an anti-modern movement seeking to reassert "traditional" Christian values.

Development Of Climate Change Information Database And Its Use In Civic Consciousness Enlightenment

GCM outputs such as CMIP3 are available via network access to PCMDI web site. Meteorological researchers are familiar with the usage of the GCM data, but the most of researchers other than meteorology such as agriculture, civil engineering, etc., and general people are not familiar with the GCM. There are some difficulties to use GCM; 1) to download the enormous quantity of data, 2) to understand the GCM methodology, parameters and grids. In order to provide a quick access way to GCM, Climate Change Information Database has been developed. The purpose of the database is to bridge the users and meteorological specialists and to facilitate the understanding the climate changes. The resolution of the data is unified, and climate change amount or factors for each meteorological element are provided from the database. All data in the database are interpolated on the same 80km mesh. Available data are the present-future projections of 27 GCMs, 16 meteorological elements (precipitation, temperature, etc.), 3 emission scenarios (A1B, A2, B1). We showed the summary of this database to residents in Toyama prefecture and measured the effect of showing and grasped the image for the climate change by using the Internet questionary survey. The persons who feel a climate change at the present tend to feel the additional changes in the future. It is important to show the monitoring results of climate change for a citizen and promote the understanding for the climate change that had already occurred. It has been shown that general images for the climate change promote to understand the need of the mitigation, and that it is important to explain about the climate change that might occur in the future even if it did not occur at the present in order to have people recognize widely the need of the adaptation.

A study on time-varying quantile and its applications

This Thesis is the result of my Master Degree studies at the Graduate School of Economics, Getúlio Vargas Foundation, from January 2004 to August 2006. am indebted to my Thesis Advisor, Professor Luiz Renato Lima, who introduced me to the Econometrics' world. In this Thesis, we study time-varying quantile process and we develop two applications, which are presented here as Part and Part II. Each of these parts was transformed in paper. Both papers were submitted. Part shows that asymmetric persistence induces ARCH effects, but the LMARCH test has power against it. On the other hand, the test for asymmetric dynamics proposed by Koenker and Xiao (2004) has correct size under the presence of ARCH errors. These results suggest that the LM-ARCH and the Koenker-Xiao tests may be used in applied research as complementary tools. In the Part II, we compare four different Value-at-Risk (VaR) methodologies through Monte Cario experiments. Our results indicate that the method based on quantile regression with ARCH effect dominates other methods that require distributional assumption. In particular, we show that the non-robust method ologies have higher probability to predict VaRs with too many violations. We illustrate our findings with an empirical exercise in which we estimate VaR for returns of São Paulo stock exchange index, IBOVESPA, during periods of market turmoil. Our results indicate that the robust method based on quantile regression presents the least number of violations.

The Unruh effect and its applications

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)

Sintering of tin oxide and its applications in electronics and processing of high purity optical glasses

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP)

Boosting optimum-path forest clustering through harmony Search and its applications for intrusion detection in computer networks

In this paper we propose a nature-inspired approach that can boost the Optimum-Path Forest (OPF) clustering algorithm by optimizing its parameters in a discrete lattice. The experiments in two public datasets have shown that the proposed algorithm can achieve similar parameters' values compared to the exhaustive search. Although, the proposed technique is faster than the traditional one, being interesting for intrusion detection in large scale traffic networks. © 2012 IEEE.

Social-spider optimization-based artificial neural networks training and its applications for Parkinson's disease identification

Evolutionary algorithms have been widely used for Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) training, being the idea to update the neurons' weights using social dynamics of living organisms in order to decrease the classification error. In this paper, we have introduced Social-Spider Optimization to improve the training phase of ANN with Multilayer perceptrons, and we validated the proposed approach in the context of Parkinson's Disease recognition. The experimental section has been carried out against with five other well-known meta-heuristics techniques, and it has shown SSO can be a suitable approach for ANN-MLP training step.

An study on ear detection and its applications to face detection

[EN]OpenCV includes di erent object detectors based on the Viola-Jones framework. Most of them are specialized to deal with the frontal face pattern and its inner elements: eyes, nose, and mouth. In this paper, we focus on the ear pattern detection, particularly when a head pro le or almost pro le view is present in the image. We aim at creating real-time ear detectors based on the general object detection framework provided with OpenCV. After training classi ers to detect left ears, right ears, and ears in general, the performance achieved is valid to be used to feed not only a head pose estimation system but also other applications such as those based on ear biometrics.

Knot theory and its applications

Nella tesi verranno presi in considerazione tre aspetti: si descriverà come la teoria dei nodi si sia sviluppata nel corso degli anni in relazione alle diverse scoperte scientifiche avvenute. Si potrà quindi subito avere una idea di come questa teoria sia estremamente connessa a diverse altre. Nel secondo capitolo ci si occuperà degli aspetti più formali di questa teoria. Si introdurrà il concetto di nodi equivalenti e di invariante dei nodi. Si definiranno diversi invarianti, dai più elementari, le mosse di Reidemeister, il numero di incroci e la tricolorabilità, fino ai polinomi invarianti, tra cui il polinomio di Alexander, il polinomio di Jones e quello di Kaufman. Infine si spiegheranno alcune applicazioni della teoria dei nodi in chimica, fisica e biologia. Sulla chimica, si definirà la chiralità molecolare e si mostrerà come la chiralità dei nodi possa essere utile nel determinare quella molecolare. In campo fisico, si mostrerà la relazione che esiste tra l'equazione di Yang-Baxter e i nodi. E in conclusione si mostrerà come modellare un importante processo biologico, la recombinazione del DNA, grazie alla teoria dei nodi.

Efficient certification of feasibility and objective value of linear programs and its applications

The use of linear programming in various areas has increased with the significant improvement of specialized solvers. Linear programs are used as such to model practical problems, or as subroutines in algorithms such as formal proofs or branch-and-cut frameworks. In many situations a certified answer is needed, for example the guarantee that the linear program is feasible or infeasible, or a provably safe bound on its objective value. Most of the available solvers work with floating-point arithmetic and are thus subject to its shortcomings such as rounding errors or underflow, therefore they can deliver incorrect answers. While adequate for some applications, this is unacceptable for critical applications like flight controlling or nuclear plant management due to the potential catastrophic consequences. We propose a method that gives a certified answer whether a linear program is feasible or infeasible, or returns unknown'. The advantage of our method is that it is reasonably fast and rarely answers unknown'. It works by computing a safe solution that is in some way the best possible in the relative interior of the feasible set. To certify the relative interior, we employ exact arithmetic, whose use is nevertheless limited in general to critical places, allowing us to rnremain computationally efficient. Moreover, when certain conditions are fulfilled, our method is able to deliver a provable bound on the objective value of the linear program. We test our algorithm on typical benchmark sets and obtain higher rates of success compared to previous approaches for this problem, while keeping the running times acceptably small. The computed objective value bounds are in most of the cases very close to the known exact objective values. We prove the usability of the method we developed by additionally employing a variant of it in a different scenario, namely to improve the results of a Satisfiability Modulo Theories solver. Our method is used as a black box in the nodes of a branch-and-bound tree to implement conflict learning based on the certificate of infeasibility for linear programs consisting of subsets of linear constraints. The generated conflict clauses are in general small and give good rnprospects for reducing the search space. Compared to other methods we obtain significant improvements in the running time, especially on the large instances.

The discrete Pascal transform and its applications

We introduce a new discrete polynomial transform constructed from the rows of Pascal’s triangle. The forward and inverse transforms are computed the same way in both the oneand two-dimensional cases, and the transform matrix can be factored into binary matrices for efficient hardware implementation. We conclude by discussing applications of the transform in

ARISTOTLE AND THE IMPORTANCE OF VIRTUE IN THE CONTEXT OF THE POLITICS AND THE NICOMACHEAN ETHICS AND ITS RELATION TO TODAY

While much of Aristotle's works are preserved in various volumes, two of his famous works are the Nichmachean Ethics and the Politics, both of which contain a rich compilation of ethical and political thought. In the Ethics, Aristotle describes a thorough understanding of ethical and intellectual virtue. By pursuing these virtues, Aristotle argues that a person can achieve a life of fulfilling happiness. The ideal polis as described in the Politics serves as a place where the virtuous life is attained in the best manner.Citizens who pursue virtue make the polis better, and the rulers that guide the polis ensure that the citizens have every opportunity to pursue the virtuous life. In this thesis, I see how relevant Aristotle's theory is by laying out the basic principles of the Ethics and the Politics and the connections between the two works. Indoing so, I found that Aristotle's ideal theory points out a significant flaw in our political system: the fact that we do not share a common moral conception such as the one concerned with the virtuous life as Aristotle proposes. This does not suggest thatAristotle's view was actualized during his time period, but that Aristotle conceives of an ideal life and an ideal polis that could be realized. Certainly there are issues with Aristotle's thesis concerning the inferiority of slaves and women. But what is morepoignant is the impracticality of instituting a shared common conception when today's political system permits various ideas about ethics and morality.

NICKEL-COBALT SOLID SOLUTION AND ITS APPLICATIONS AS CATALYSTS FOR CARBON DIOXIDE REFORMING OF METHANE

Global warming issue becomes more significant to human beings and other organisms on the earth. Among many greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide (CO2) has the largest contribution to global warming. To find an effective way to utilize the greenhouse gas is urgent. It is the best way to convert CO2 to useful compounds. CO2 reforming of methane is an attractive process to convert CO2 and methane into synthesis gas (CO/H2), which can be used as a feedstock for gasoline, methanol, and other hydrocarbons. Nickel and cobalt were found to have good activity for CO2 reforming. However, they have a poor stability due to carbon deposition. This research developed efficient Ni-Co solid solution catalysts with excellent activities and high stability for CO2 reforming of methane. First, the structure of binary oxide solid solution of nickel and cobalt was investigated. It was found that while the calcination of Ni(NO3)2 and Co(NO3)2 mixture with 1:1 molar ratio at a high temperature above 800 oC generated NiO-CoO solid solution, only Ni3O4-Co3O4 solid solution was observed after the calcination at a low temperature of 500 oC. Furthermore, if the calcination was carried out at a medium temperature arranged from 600 to 700 oC, both NiO-CoO and Ni3O4-Co3O4 solid solutions can be formed. This occurred because Co3O4 can induce the formation of Ni3O4, whereas NiO can stabilize CoO. In addition, the lattice parameter of Ni3O4, which was predicted by using Vegard’s Law, is 8.2054 Å. As a very important part of this dissertation, Ni-Co solid solution was evaluated as catalysts for CO2 reforming of methane. It was revealed that nickel-cobalt solid solution showed excellent catalytic performance and high stability for CO2 reforming of methane. However, the stability of Ni-Co solid solution catalysts is strongly dependent on their composition and preparation condition. The optimum composition is 50%Ni-50%Co. Furthermore, the structure of Ni-Co catalysts was characterized by XRD, Vvis, TPR, TPD, BET, AES, TEM, XANES and EXAFS. The relationship between the structure and the catalytic performance was established: (1) The reduced NiO-CoO solid solution possesses better catalytic performance and stability than the reduced Ni3O4-Co3O4 solid solution. (2) Ni is richer on surface in Ni-Co catalysts. And (3) the reduction of Ni-Co-O solid solution generated two types of particles, small and large particles. The small ones are dispersed on large ones as catalytic component.

SYNTHESIS OF GRAPHENE AND ITS APPLICATIONS FOR DYE-SENSITIZED SOLAR CELLS

Graphene, which is a two-dimensional carbon material, exhibits unique properties that promise its potential applications in photovoltaic devices. Dye-sensitized solar cell (DSSC) is a representative of the third generation photovoltaic devices. Therefore, it is important to synthesize graphene with special structures, which possess excellent properties for dye-sensitized solar cells. This dissertation research was focused on (1) the effect of oxygen content on the structure of graphite oxide, (2) the stability of graphene oxide solution, (3) the application of graphene precipitate from graphene oxide solution as counter electrode for DSSCs, (4) the development of a novel synthesis method for the three-dimensional graphene with honeycomb-like structure, and (5) the exploration of honeycomb structured graphene (HSG) as counter electrodes for DSSCs. Graphite oxide is a crucial precursor to synthesize graphene sheets via chemical exfoliation method. The relationship between the oxygen content and the structures of graphite oxides was still not explored. In this research, the oxygen content of graphite oxide is tuned by changing the oxidation time and the effect of oxygen content on the structure of graphite oxide was evaluated. It has been found that the saturated ratio of oxygen to carbon is 0.47. The types of functional groups in graphite oxides, which are epoxy, hydroxyl, and carboxylgroups, are independent of oxygen content. However, the interplanar space and BET surface area of graphite oxide linearly increases with increasing O/C ratio. Graphene oxide (GO) can easily dissolve in water to form a stable homogeneous solution, which can be used to fabricate graphene films and graphene based composites. This work is the first research to evaluate the stability of graphene oxide solution. It has been found that the introduction of strong electrolytes (HCl, LiOH, LiCl) into GO solution can cause GO precipitation. This indicates that the electrostatic repulsion plays a critical role in stabilizing aqueous GO solution. Furthermore, the HCl-induced GO precipitation is a feasible approach to deposit GO sheets on a substrate as a Pt-free counter electrode for a dye-sensitized solar cell (DSSC), which exhibited 1.65% of power conversion efficiency. To explore broad and practical applications, large-scale synthesis with controllable integration of individual graphene sheets is essential. A novel strategy for the synthesis of graphene sheets with three-dimensional (3D) Honeycomb-like structure has been invented in this project based on a simple and novel chemical reaction (Li2O and CO to graphene and Li2CO3). The simultaneous formation of Li2CO3 with graphene not only can isolate graphene sheets from each other to prevent graphite formation during the process, but also determine the locally curved shape of graphene sheets. After removing Li2CO3, 3D graphene sheets with a honeycomb-like structure were obtained. This would be the first approach to synthesize 3D graphene sheets with a controllable shape. Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that the 3D Honeycomb-Structured Graphene (HSG) possesses excellent electrical conductivity and high catalytic activity. As a result, DSSCs with HSG counter electrodes exhibit energy conversion efficiency as high as 7.8%, which is comparable to that of an expensive noble Pt electrode.