This collection examines the continuities and changes that have set the Dominican political system apart from its Latin American counterparts over the last couple of decades. Whereas traditional political parties have lost support throughout Latin America, and electoral systems have devolved into illiberal democracies, Dominican democracy remains flawed but vibrant with a popular embrace of party politics. Across eight chapters a collection of subject experts argue that the Dominican case offers valuable lessons to understand that even though traditional political parties are endangered throughout the region, they are not going anywhere. The book analyzes topics including electoral politics, the quality of Dominican democracy, political parties, corruption, relations with Haiti and the United States, migration, the Dominican diaspora, gender and politics, social movements, and civil participation and citizenship, to reveal how the Dominican case proves that traditional political parties can adapt in order to survive, turning themselves into major sources of patronage, appealing to personalistic politics, and tinkering with the constitution in order to stay relevant. Dominican Politics in the Twenty First Century will be a vital resource for understanding contemporary Dominican politics. It will appeal to political scientists, Latin Americanists, and students of democracy, comparative politics, and electoral politics in general.

This thesis sheds valuable new light on the second-order cosmological perturbation theory, extensively discussing it in the context of cosmic microwave background (CMB) fluctuations. It explores the observational consequences of the second-order vector mode, and addresses magnetic field generation and the weak lensing signatures, which are key phenomena of the vector mode. The author demonstrates that the second-order vector mode, which never appears at the linear-order level, naturally arises from the non-linear coupling of the first-order scalar modes. This leads to the remarkable statement that the vector-order mode clearly contributes to the generation of cosmological magnetic fields. Moreover, the weak lensing observations are shown to be accessible to the vector mode. On the basis of ongoing and forthcoming observations, the thesis concludes that the second-order vector mode is detectable.

This thesis sheds valuable new light on the second-order cosmological perturbation theory, extensively discussing it in the context of cosmic microwave background (CMB) fluctuations. It explores the observational consequences of the second-order vector mode, and addresses magnetic field generation and the weak lensing signatures, which are key phenomena of the vector mode. The author demonstrates that the second-order vector mode, which never appears at the linear-order level, naturally arises from the non-linear coupling of the first-order scalar modes. This leads to the remarkable statement that the vector-order mode clearly contributes to the generation of cosmological magnetic fields. Moreover, the weak lensing observations are shown to be accessible to the vector mode. On the basis of ongoing and forthcoming observations, the thesis concludes that the second-order vector mode is detectable.

Vision-based control of wheeled mobile robots is an interesting field of research from a scientific and even social point of view due to its potential applicability. This book presents a formal treatment of some aspects of control theory applied to the problem of vision-based pose regulation of wheeled mobile robots. In this problem, the robot has to reach a desired position and orientation, which are specified by a target image. It is faced in such a way that vision and control are unified to achieve stability of the closed loop, a large region of convergence, without local minima and good robustness against parametric uncertainty. Three different control schemes that rely on monocular vision as unique sensor are presented and evaluated experimentally. A common benefit of these approaches is that they are valid for imaging systems obeying approximately a central projection model, e.g., conventional cameras, catadioptric systems and some fisheye cameras. Thus, the presented control schemes are generic approaches. A minimum set of visual measurements, integrated in adequate task functions, are taken from a geometric constraint imposed between corresponding image features. Particularly, the epipolar geometry and the trifocal tensor are exploited since they can be used for generic scenes. A detailed experimental evaluation is presented for each control scheme.