Worldwide, there is a well-documented crisis for bees and other pollinators which represent a fundamental biotic capital for wild life conservation, ecosystem function, and crop production. Among all pollinators of the world, bees (Hymenoptera: Apoidea) constitute the major group in…

My dissertation centers on the meaning of dreams as interpreted by literati in the late Ming (1368-1644), viewed through the lens of the 1636 encyclopedia Forest of Dreams. This thirty-four-juan tome is the largest extant Chinese dream encyclopedia and includes…

The genetic algorithms have seen applied in knowledge discovery and specially for discovering association rules. In this paper, we explore the use of di erent rule quality measures in the tness function in a genetic algorithm for discovering association rules.…

Ce mémoire propose une analyse critique du discours de l’enregistrement sonore à domicile (home recording). Dans la foulée des propos mettant de l’avant l’ «accessibilité» et la «démocratisation» de l’enregistrement sonore, ce mémoire analyse les relations de savoir/pouvoir produites et…

A fuzzy controller is usually designed by formulating the knowledge of a human expert into a set of linguistic variables and fuzzy rules. As it is well known, the use of prior knowledge can dramatically improve the performance and quality…

We present a new algorithm to process captured images of reflected Placido rings. Up to our knowledge, conventional topographers transform from Cartesian to polar coordinates and vice-versa, thus extrapolating corneal data and introducing noise and image artefacts. Moreover, captured data…

This dissertation is the first comprehensive and interdisciplinary study of Ottoman economic thought within the context of modernization during the reign of Abdülhamid II (1876-1909). Drawing on a broad array of primary sources ranging from textbooks and manuals of economics…

There is no enough evidence about the effects of the new information and communication technologies (ICT) in Spain and how these ICT cause differences between regions. So, the aim of this work is to analyze the regional disparities relative to…

Purpose: Citations received by papers published within a journal serve to increase its bibliometric impact. The objective of this paper was to assess the influence of publication language, article type, number of authors, and year of publication on the citations…

Michel Foucault, Thomas Mann, and more recently, Sven-Olov Wallenstein have argued that the modern European hospital of the early twentieth century acted as a research laboratory for a new way of governing human populations. This dissertation studies a subsequent phase…