Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'CROMs'

Bien prendre en charge le bon patient au bon moment au bon endroit selon les dernières recommandations des sociétés savantes est aujourd’hui la préoccupation de chaque professionnel de santé dans le but d’améliorer l’état de santé des populations. A travers la mise en place du parcours de soins innovant accéléré «Diagnostic en un jour» pour les pathologies hépato-biliopancréatiques aux Hôpitaux Universitaires de Strasbourg et la réalisation d’une étude comparative au parcours classique avec respectivement 330 vs 152 patients, l’efficacité́ et la soutenabilité́ financière de celui-ci sont prouvées. Nous montrons la possible diffusion de ce modèle à plus grande échelle pour d’autres pathologies et régions. Par ailleurs, la démarche VBHC appliquée à travers les questionnaires standardisés établis pour les cancers du foie et du pancréas permettra le recueil des résultats qui impotent aux patients PROMs et cliniques CROMs ayant pour objectif de tendre vers la pertinence et l’excellence des soins
Nowadays, taking good care of the right patient at the right time in the right place according to the latest guidelines established by professional societies is the main concern of each health care provider, aiming to improve populations’ state of health. From the example of the innovative and accelerated care pathway “Oneday diagnosis” for hepatobiliary and pancreatic diseases taking place in Strasbourg university hospital and the comparative study to ordinary pathway with respectively 330 vs 152 patients, we demonstrated its efficiency and sustainability. We confirmed the possible replication elsewhere and for other pathologies. Furthermore, the application of the VBHC concept through standardized questionnaires for liver and pancreatic cancers would allow to collect outcomes that matter to patients PROMs and clinical outcomes CROMs with the objective of reaching relevant and excellent care

El virus de la peste porcina africana (VPPA) representa, hoy en día, una gran amenaza para la industria porcina. La presencia descontrolada de la PPA en África ha favorecido su exportación a otros países, tal y como demuestra la última entrada del VPPA en el Cáucaso, en el año 2007, a través de la República de Georgia. Desde entonces, el VPPA se ha extendido a países vecinos, alcanzando la Unión Europea en 2014, y más recientemente llegando a China en verano de 2018, desde donde ya ha comenzado a extenderse por el resto de Asia. La falta de vacunas disponibles contra la PPA hace su control difícil y, hasta ahora, solamente la utilización de virus atenuados vivos como vacunas experimentales, había demostrado una sólida protección homóloga, contra la infección letal utilizando los virus virulentos parentales. Más recientemente, resultados obtenidos en nuestro laboratorio (Monteagudo et al., 2017) , han permitido describir un nuevo candidato vacunal con capacidades únicas de protección cruzada: BA71ΔCD2. Así, la inoculación de cerdos con BA71ΔCD2 fue capaz de proteger no sólo contra el desafío experimental con BA71, la cepa virulenta parental, sino también contra virus heterólogos, incluyendo Georgia2007/1, la cepa del genotipo II del VPPA que circula actualmente en la Europa continental y en Asia. A pesar de su demostrada eficacia y capacidad cros-protectora, BA71ΔCD2 presenta una serie de limitaciones de bioseguridad para su uso comercial, al menos en zonas libres de la enfermedad. Así pues, dos son los objetivos principales de esta tesis: primero, desarrollar una vacuna basada en BA71ΔCD2 más segura, reduciendo, en lo posible, la presencia de virulencia residual detectable sin disminuir su eficacia. Segundo, caracterizar en la medida de lo posible, su potencial protector pensando en escenarios muy distintos; como el de la Europa que nos rodea, así como en zonas endémicas donde la enfermedad está causando grandes estragos sin poder aplicar ninguna medida de control; como en el caso del África subsahariana y más recientemente de Asia. Para el primer objetivo se abordaron diferentes estrategias de vacunación que implicaban desde la inactivación del virus, cambiar las pautas de administración, buscar rutas de inoculación alternativas, usar adyuvantes de última generación e incluso llegar a manipular el genoma del virus, creando virus dobles mutantes e incluso inducibles. Los datos recopilados durante esta tesis nos demuestran que existe un fino equilibrio entre atenuación, virulencia y apatogenicidad para el caso del VPPA, pudiendo pasar con facilidad del éxito al fracaso en términos de protección. Si bien no podemos garantizar una formulación óptima para la administración de BA71ΔCD2 que conjugue su máxima eficacia y bioseguridad, estamos hoy más cerca de ello, exigiendo en el futuro más esfuerzos en investigación. Como sucede con casi todas las vacunas vivas en el mercado, incluyendo las que se administran en niños, su éxito depende precisamente de su capacidad de replicar in vivo. La dificultad añadida en el caso de una vacuna frente a la PPA en cerdo es que, como sucedería con el caso del Ébola para humanos, su administración en Europa, zona libre de ambas enfermedades, exige tolerancia cero en lo que se refiere al riesgo. El segundo objetivo de nuestra tesis se realizó pensando en zonas más desfavorecidas, endémicas para el VPPA, como podría ser el África subsahariana. Zonas en las que, en ocasiones circulan concomitantemente diversos genotipos del virus y multitud de subvariantes del mismo, y en los que habría que generar vacunas individuales para cada uno de ellos. De forma muy resumida, a lo largo de esta tesis hemos podido demostrar, por un lado, la capacidad de BA71ΔCD2 de proteger no sólo frente a una infección con Georgia2007/1, administrada intramuscularmente, sino además frente a la inoculación intranasal o por contacto con el mismo virus, extendiendo la protección incluso a la infección con garrapatas infectadas naturalmente con el genotipo XIX del VPPA; virus que se encuentra circulando actualmente en África. Finalmente, hemos podido demostrar que aquel animal vacunado frente a BA71ΔCD2 que sobrevive a una infección con un virus virulento, queda a su vez protegido frente a posteriores infecciones incluso con aislados muy alejados filogenéticamente de BA71ΔCD2. Virus contra los que por sí solo su eficacia había demostrado ser muy baja. Así pues, la vacunación con BA71ΔCD2 podrá no sólo tener efectos beneficiosos directos, sino también, indirectos, sobre todo para aquellos animales que han de vivir en zonas con una presión epidemiológica muy fuerte. De nuevo, futuras investigaciones habrán de desentrañar los mecanismos intrínsecos implicados en esta protección dual. La demostración, en esta tesis, de que BA71ΔCD2 podía inducir una respuesta de anticuerpos diferenciales respecto a la cepa circulante, basadas en un ensayo de inhibición de la hemadsorción, junto con el hecho de que BA71ΔCD2 sea el único prototipo vacunal existente, hoy en día, capaz de crecer en una línea celular estable añade muchas posibilidades a su utilización como vacuna de emergencia en zonas endémicas y muy castigadas por el virus. Mientras esperamos la vacuna ideal, estamos orgullosos de poder estar en el punto de mira, de aquellos que necesitan herramientas para controlar una más que inminente epidemia global.
African swine fever virus (ASFV) represents today a major threat to the swine industry. The uncontrolled presence of ASF in Africa has favoured its exportation to other countries, as evidenced by the last entry of ASFV in the Caucasus in 2007 through the Republic of Georgia. Since then, ASFV has spread to neighbouring countries, reaching the European Union in 2014, and more recently China in the summer of 2018, where it has already begun to spread throughout the rest of Asia. The lack of available vaccines against ASF makes its control even more difficult, and to date, only the use of live attenuated viruses as experimental vaccines, had demonstrated a strong but homologous protection against lethal infection with parental virulent viruses only. Recent results obtained in our laboratory (Monteagudo et al., 2017), allowed us to describe a new candidate with cross-protective capabilities: BA71ΔCD2. Thus, the inoculation of pigs with BA71ΔCD2 was able to protect not only against the experimental challenge with BA71, its virulent counterpart strain, but also against heterologous viruses, including Georgia2007/1, the strain of genotype II, currently circulating in Europe and Asia. Despite its demonstrated efficacy and cross-protective capacity, BA71ΔCD2 presents a series of biosecurity limitations for commercial use, at least in disease-free areas. So, two are the main objectives of this thesis: first, the development of a safer vaccine based on BA71ΔCD2, reducing as much as possible its residual virulence without decreasing its effectiveness. Second, the characterization of its protective potential in different scenarios, as it could be the Continental Europe, as well as endemic areas where the disease is causing great damage, without being able to apply any control measure, like Sub-Saharan African countries, or, more recently, Asia. For the first objective, different vaccination strategies were approached, involving the inactivation of the virus, changing the administration guidelines, searching for alternative inoculation routes, using next-generation adjuvants and even manipulating the genome of the virus for the generation of double mutants and inducible viruses. Although we cannot guarantee an optimal formulation for the administration of BA71ΔCD2 that combines its maximum efficacy and biosecurity, we can state that today we are closer than ever to reach such goal. Nevertheless, more efforts in research are needed to obtain the aforementioned objective. As it happens for almost all live vaccines in the market, including those that are currently administered in children, its success depends on its ability to replicate in vivo. A vaccine against ASF in pigs presents an additional difficulty. Similarly, to the case of Ebola for humans, its administration in Europe, a free area of both pathogens, requires zero tolerance in terms of risk. The second objective of our thesis was carried out thinking in the most disadvantaged areas such as Sub-Saharan Africa, which is endemic for ASFV. In these regions, diverse genotypes of the virus and a multitude virus subvariants circulate concomitantly at the same time, and individual vaccines would have to be generated for each one. Briefly, throughout this thesis we have been able to demonstrate the capacity of BA71ΔCD2 to protect not only against an infection with Georgia2007/1, administered intramuscularly, but also against intranasal, contact inoculation with the same virus, even expanding its protection to infection with ticks naturally infected with a genotype XIX of ASFV; currently circulating in Africa. Finally, we have been able to demonstrate that animals vaccinated with BA71ΔCD2 that survive an infection with its virulent counterpart, are protected against subsequent ASFV-infections even with phylogenetically very distant isolates from the BA71ΔCD2, against which its effectiveness is limited. These experiments demonstrate that vaccination with BA71ΔCD2 has direct and indirect effects that might be extremely beneficial, especially for those animals living in areas with a very high epidemiological pressure. Again, future investigations will have to unravel the intrinsic mechanisms involved in this dual protection. This thesis demonstrates that BA71ΔCD2 could induce a differential antibody response to the circulating strain, based on a hemadsorption inhibition assay. Moreover, BA71ΔCD2 is the only prototype vaccine capable of growing in a stable cell line, which represents a high benefit for its use as an emergency vaccine in endemic areas. While waiting for the ideal vaccine, we are proud to be in the spotlight of those who need tools to control a more than imminent global epidemic

Evolution of Helicoverpa armigera resistance to Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) cotton producing Cry1Ac is progressing in northern China, and replacement of Cry1Ac cotton by pyramided Bt cotton has been considered to counter such resistance. Here, we investigated four of the eight conditions underlying success of the refuge strategy for delaying resistance to Cry1Ac+Cry2Ab cotton, a pyramid that has been used extensively against H.armigera outside China. Laboratory bioassays of a Cry2Ab-selected strain (An2Ab) and a related unselected strain (An) reveal that resistance to Cry2Ab (130-fold) was nearly dominant, autosomally inherited, and controlled by more than one locus. Strong cross-resistance occurred between Cry2Ab and Cry2Aa (81-fold). Weaker cross-resistance (18- to 22-fold) between Cry2Ab and Cry1A toxins was also present and significantly increased survival of An2Ab relative to An on cotton cultivars producing the fusion protein Cry1Ac/Cry1Ab or Cry1Ac. Survival on Cry1Ac+Cry2Ab cotton was also significantly higher in An2Ab than in An, showing that redundant killing on this pyramid was incomplete. Survival on non-Bt cotton did not differ significantly between An2Ab and An, indicating an absence of fitness costs affecting this trait. These results indicate that a switch to three-toxin pyramided cotton could be valuable for increasing durability of Bt cotton in China.

As distrofias musculares em crianças e adolescentes acometem 1 em cada 3000 nascimentos. A distrofia de Duchenne é de origem genética e herança recessiva ligada ao cromossomo X, sendo determinada pela ausência da proteína distrofina, apresenta caráter invariavelmente progressivo, natureza mórbida e fim letal. Até o momento não se conhece tratamento efetivo, mesmo com todo o conhecimento que se tem da etiopatogenia. O objetivo deste estudo foi avaliar, no modelo animal, utilizando cães golden retrievers normais portadores e afetados pela distrofia muscular progressiva, a existência de alterações na função glomerular, através da comparação entre os clearances de creatinina, clearance do radionuclídeo EDTA-cromo e da concentração sérica de uréia e creatinina. Os animais foram divididos em 3 grupos de 9 animais sendo grupo 1 controle, grupo 2 portador e grupo 3 afetados. Todos os animais foram submetidos ao mesmos protocolos de exames. Não foram identificadas alterações significativas entre os grupos ou individualmente, sendo que todos os resultados encontraram-se dentro dos limites de normalidade. Sendo assim lesões renais primárias, obscuras aos testes convencionais, descartando-se uma correlação entre a distrofia muscular e lesão na musculatura dos vasos renais que pudessem levar a alterações da função do órgão.
The muscular dystrophys in children and teenagers is taken in 1 each 3000 births. The Duchenne`s dystrophy is from genetics origin and recessive heritage linked to X cromossome, and also determined by the lacre of dystrophyne protein; it shows progressive characteristics, morbid nature and a letal end. So far there is no known effective treatment, even with all the ethiopatogein knowledge. The goal of use of normal golden retrievers dogs, bling then carriers and affected by the progressive muscular dystrophy, the changing existence in the glomerular function through the comparison between the creatinine clearance, EDTA-crome clearance and seric urea and creatinine. Aiming the early diagnostic of the renal pathology. The animals were divided in 3 groups of 9 animals, bling group 1 control animals, group 2 carriers animals and group 3 affected animals. All of then were submitted to the some examinations protocols Their was no relevant identification between the groups or either individually, as all the results were within the expected and natural limits. Likewise, renal primary wounds are not clear in traditional tests made in dystrophyc animals, mainly caused by the muscular wounds in reanal vases harming this way the organ function.

В статті ми намагаємось визначити важливість роботи з інтернаціональними студентами. Кроскультурна компетенція та кроскультурна емпатія є важливими факторами для подолання кроскультурних проблем якісно та ефективно. Ефективність зростає, коли присутня компетенція та міжкультурна емпатія розвивається, коли ви намагаєтесь відчути себе на місті іншої людини.
В статье мы пробуем определить важность работи с интернациональными студентами. Кросскультурная компетенция и кросскультурная эмпатия являются важными факторами для преодоления кросскультурных проблем качественно и эффективно. Эффективность возрастает, когда присутствует компетенция и межкультурная эмпатия развивается, когда ви пробуете представить себя на мете другого человека.
In the article, we try to define some notions important for dealing with international students. Cross-cultural competence and empathy are important capacities for coping with cross-cultural problems adequately and effectively. Effective communication can be enhanced when competence is conveyed and the ability in intercultural empathy can be developed by consistently trying to put your feet in another’s shoes.

Emotions can be defined as a natural, instinctive state of mind arising from one’s circumstances, mood, and relationships with others. It has long been a question to be answered by psychology that how and what is it that humans feel. Enabling computers to recognize human emotions has been an of interest to researchers since 1990s (Picard et al., 1995). Ever since, this area of research has grown significantly and emotion detection is becoming an important component in many natural language processing tasks. Several theories exist for defining emotions and are chosen by researchers according to their needs. For instance, according to appraisal theory, a psychology theory, emotions are produced by our evaluations (appraisals or estimates) of events that cause a specific reaction in different people. Some emotions are easy and universal, while others are complex and nuanced. Emotion classification is generally the process of labeling a piece of text with one or more corresponding emotion labels. Psychologists have developed numerous models and taxonomies of emotions. The model or taxonomy depends on the problem, and thorough study is often required to select the best model. Early studies of emotion classification focused on building computational models to classify basic emotion categories. In recent years, increasing volumes of social media and the digitization of data have opened a new horizon in this area of study, where emotion classification is a key component of applications, including mood and behavioral studies, as well as disaster relief, amongst many other applications. Sophisticated models have been built to detect and classify emotion in text, but few analyze how well a model is able to learn emotion cues. The ability to learn emotion cues properly and be able to generalize this learning is very important. This work investigates the robustness of emotion classification approaches across genres and languages, with a focus on quantifying how well state-of-the-art models are able to learn emotion cues. First, we use multi-task learning and hierarchical models to build emotion models that were trained on data combined from multiple genres. Our hypothesis is that a multi-genre, noisy training environment will help the classifier learn emotion cues that are prevalent across genres. Second, we explore splitting text (i.e. sentence) into its clauses and testing whether the model’s performance improves. Emotion analysis needs fine-grained annotation and clause-level annotation can be beneficial to design features to improve emotion detection performance. Intuitively, clause-level annotations may help the model focus on emotion cues, while ignoring irrelevant portions of the text. Third, we adopted a transfer learning approach for cross-lingual/genre emotion classification to focus the classifier’s attention on emotion cues which are consistent across languages. Fourth, we empirically show how to combine different genres to be able to build robust models that can be used as source models for emotion transfer to low-resource target languages. Finally, this study involved curating and re-annotating popular emotional data sets in different genres, and annotating a multi-genre corpus of Persian tweets and news, and generating a collection of emotional sentences for a low-resource language, Azerbaijani, a language spoken in the north west of Iran.

English was the main focus of attention of the Natural Language Processing (NLP) community for years. As a result, there are significantly more annotated linguistic resources in English than in any other language. Consequently, data-driven tools for automatic text or speech processing are developed mainly for English. Developing similar corpora and tools for other languages is an important issue. However, this requires significant amount of effort. Recently, Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) techniques and parallel corpora were used to transfer annotations from a linguistic resource rich languages to a resource-poor languages for a variety of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, including Part-of-Speech tagging, Noun Phrase chunking, dependency parsing, textual entailment, etc. This cross-language NLP paradigm relies on the solution of the following sub-problems: - Data-driven NLP techniques are very sensitive to the differences in training and testing conditions. Different domains, such as financial news-wire and biomedical publications, have different distributions of NLP task-specific properties; thus, the domain adaptation of the source language tools -- either the development of models with good cross-domain performance or tuned to the target domain -- is critical. - Another difference in training and testing conditions arises with cross-genre applications such as written text (monologues) and spontaneous dialog data. Properties of written text such as punctuation and the notion of sentence are not present in spoken conversation transcriptions. Thus, style-adaptation techniques to cover a wider range of genres is critical as well. - The basis of cross-language porting is parallel corpora. Unfortunately, parallel corpora are scarce. Thus, generation or retrieval of parallel corpora between the languages of interest is important. Additionally, these parallel corpora most often are not in the domains of interest; consequently, the cross-language porting should be augmented with SMT domain adaptation techniques. - The language distance play an important role within the paradigm, since for close family language pairs (e.g. Romance languages Italian and Spanish) the range of linguistic phenomena to consider is significantly less compared to the distant family language pairs (e.g. Italian and Turkish). The developed cross-language techniques should be applicable to both conditions. In this thesis we address these sub-problems on complex Natural Language Processing tasks of Discourse Parsing and Spoken Language Understanding. Both tasks are cast as token-level shallow parsing. Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB) style discourse parsing is applied cross-domain and we contribute feature-level domain adaptation techniques for the task. Additionally, we explore PDTB-style discourse parsing on dialog data in Italian are report on challenges. The problems of parallel corpora creation, language style adaptation, SMT domain-adaptation and language distance are addressed on the task of cross-language porting of Spoken Language Understanding. This thesis contributes to the task with the language-style and domain adaptation techniques for machine translation of spoken conversations using off-the-shelf systems like Google Translate, SMT systems trained on both out-of-domain and in-domain parallel data. We demonstrate that the techniques are beneficial for both close and distant language pairs. We propose the methodologies for the creation of parallel spoken conversation corpora via professional translation services that considers speech phenomena such as disfluencies. Additionally, we explore the semantic annotation transfer using automatic SMT methods and crowdsourcing. For the later, we propose the computational methodology to obtain acceptable quality corpus without the target language references and the low worker agreement.

English was the main focus of attention of the Natural Language Processing (NLP) community for years. As a result, there are significantly more annotated linguistic resources in English than in any other language. Consequently, data-driven tools for automatic text or speech processing are developed mainly for English. Developing similar corpora and tools for other languages is an important issue. However, this requires significant amount of effort. Recently, Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) techniques and parallel corpora were used to transfer annotations from a linguistic resource rich languages to a resource-poor languages for a variety of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, including Part-of-Speech tagging, Noun Phrase chunking, dependency parsing, textual entailment, etc. This cross-language NLP paradigm relies on the solution of the following sub-problems: - Data-driven NLP techniques are very sensitive to the differences in training and testing conditions. Different domains, such as financial news-wire and biomedical publications, have different distributions of NLP task-specific properties; thus, the domain adaptation of the source language tools -- either the development of models with good cross-domain performance or tuned to the target domain -- is critical. - Another difference in training and testing conditions arises with cross-genre applications such as written text (monologues) and spontaneous dialog data. Properties of written text such as punctuation and the notion of sentence are not present in spoken conversation transcriptions. Thus, style-adaptation techniques to cover a wider range of genres is critical as well. - The basis of cross-language porting is parallel corpora. Unfortunately, parallel corpora are scarce. Thus, generation or retrieval of parallel corpora between the languages of interest is important. Additionally, these parallel corpora most often are not in the domains of interest; consequently, the cross-language porting should be augmented with SMT domain adaptation techniques. - The language distance play an important role within the paradigm, since for close family language pairs (e.g. Romance languages Italian and Spanish) the range of linguistic phenomena to consider is significantly less compared to the distant family language pairs (e.g. Italian and Turkish). The developed cross-language techniques should be applicable to both conditions. In this thesis we address these sub-problems on complex Natural Language Processing tasks of Discourse Parsing and Spoken Language Understanding. Both tasks are cast as token-level shallow parsing. Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB) style discourse parsing is applied cross-domain and we contribute feature-level domain adaptation techniques for the task. Additionally, we explore PDTB-style discourse parsing on dialog data in Italian are report on challenges. The problems of parallel corpora creation, language style adaptation, SMT domain-adaptation and language distance are addressed on the task of cross-language porting of Spoken Language Understanding. This thesis contributes to the task with the language-style and domain adaptation techniques for machine translation of spoken conversations using off-the-shelf systems like Google Translate, SMT systems trained on both out-of-domain and in-domain parallel data. We demonstrate that the techniques are beneficial for both close and distant language pairs. We propose the methodologies for the creation of parallel spoken conversation corpora via professional translation services that considers speech phenomena such as disfluencies. Additionally, we explore the semantic annotation transfer using automatic SMT methods and crowdsourcing. For the later, we propose the computational methodology to obtain acceptable quality corpus without the target language references and the low worker agreement.

Five different crops were evaluated in exploratory and observational field studies for potential use as a summer cover crop in a rotation with commonly grown vegetable and field crops. Sesbania ( Sesbania exaltata), cowpea (ViRna unguiculata), sunnhemp (Crotalaria iuncea var. Tropic Sun), sudangrass (Sorghum sudanense cv. Piper), and kenaf (Hibiscus cannabinus) were drill seeded and grown with 2-3 irrigations during the summer months in two field tests. In one test, fresh weight yields were: 7,794 lb/A for sesbania; 10,551 lb/A for sunnhemp; 5,184 lb/A for cowpea; 19,816 lb/A for sudangrass; and 2,390 lb/A for kenaf General observations indicated that adult whiteflies were attracted to sunnhemp at one test site but not at the other. Broccoli, cabbage, and barley were planted in the fall following the cover crops and general observations indicated that sudangrass significantly reduced all of the crops' stand and measurable responses were not evident where the other cover crops were planted.

Lo scopo di questo lavoro è quello di teorizzare un metodo per poter generare in modo automatico applicazioni web basate su operazioni standard su basi di dati, utilizzando un documento di livello comprensibile ad un calcolatore, e contemporaneamente abbastanza astratto da poter essere facilmente interpretabile dall'uomo. Dopo un primo capitolo introduttivo, nel secondo capitolo vengono analizzati dei generatori di interfacce utente andando ad analizzare i rapporti tra le interfacce e l'usabilità del prodotto. Il terzo capitolo invece indaga il processo orientato agli obiettivi (goal-oriented) CROSS per la creazione di software user-centered. Si osservano qui le differenze con un modello goal-oriented tradizionale. Vengono analizzate le cause di inusabilità che CROSS vuole contrastare, per poi, dopo una panoramica andare a vedere nel dettaglio quelle che sono le componenti CROSS: Concetti, Ruoli, Operazioni e Strutture e Schemi.Il quarto capitolo presenta CROSPEN API, il formalismo di rappresentazione e documentazione di Applicazioni Web che rispetta il processo di creazione CROSS. Viene dunque analizzato OpenApi, e successivamente viene spiegata la sua estensione CROSPEN API. Il quinto capitolo presenta lo strumento in se, raccontando le varie idee di sviluppo, l'implementazione dei concetti e le tecnologie impiegate nella sua realizzazione. Vengono analizzate le quattro componenti dell'applicazione: Crosser ( strumento di parsing del file CROSPEN API), Crossback (strumento di generazione del server), DBG (strumento di generazione della base di dati e delle funzioni per la sua gestione ) e CrossVue (il generatore di interfacce utente).Il sesto e ultimo capitolo ha il compito di trarre le conclusioni sul lavoro svolto e di raccontare i propositi di implementazione futuri.

Ingeniero Civil en Computación
El trabajo desarrollado en esta memoria nace dentro del rubro de la industria agrónoma, en particular, con la empresa Semillas SZ, que es una empresa chilena dedicada al cultivo y venta de semillas certificadas de papas a lo largo del país. Actualmente tanto Semillas SZ como el mercado de la papa se encuentran en crecimiento, por lo cual un manejo eficaz de la información se torna un punto clave para mantenerse competitivo y escalar dentro de la industria. Los alcances del proyecto desarrollado en esta memoria involucran dos desafíos cruciales de gestión de información dentro de la industria agrónoma, los cuales se denominaron Crops y Markets, dando origen al título de esta memoria. Crops ataca el problema de que para cultivar semillas de papas, por motivos de la rotación de cultivos, es necesario plantar en predios diferentes todos los años. Esto trae consigo la necesidad de encontrar de manera rápida predios los cuales cumplan con una serie de características que permitan el cultivo de semillas de papas en esa zona, junto con posteriormente poder llevar un registro y mantener un seguimiento de las diferentes plantaciones realizadas. Por otro lado, Markets refiere a la gestión comercial de la empresa, en el aspecto de la identificación y clasificación ágil de los actuales y potenciales clientes, y a su vez el registro de las diferentes transacciones tanto físicas como valorizadas realizadas a cada uno de ellos. A partir de lo anterior, se creó una aplicación web la cual permite al usuario visualizar espacialmente y clasificar dinámicamente la información de tanto Crops como de Markets, junto con habilitar diversas entradas de datos, por medio de interfaces amigables y usando las últimas tecnologías en lo que a desarrollo web se refiere, con la finalidad de poder mejorar el manejo de información y la toma de decisiones de la empresa. El resultado final fue una aplicación operativa y extensible que cumplió con los objetivos planteados inicialmente en la memoria.

Global markets are increasingly taking advantage of the strength and economic advantages of a diverse global workforce. It is common on international projects to find multi-cultural teams located in multiple countries. It is also common to find such projects led by Project Managers who come from many different countries. So having a person raised in India managing a project in China, with a design team in the USA, procurement procurement teams in Japan and Mexico, and a drafting team in Albania is not unusual. Even in historically monolithic markets like the USA, it is far more common to have mulit-cultural teams and foreign competition. In addition, the pressure on the industry to increase productivity and reduce costs is unrelenting. This leads to flatter project structures, and the need for leadership at multiple levels. My experience in such markets, and the glaring need for a Cross-Cultural Leadership model that could be used to improve leadership skills in international markets were the reasons for undertaking this thesis. The hypothesis of this thesis is that there are of cross-cultural leadership dimensions that are effective and essential, regardless of culture. Those dimensions are Trust, Empathy, Transformation, Power, and Communication. The thesis first explores the cultural and leadership aspects of Cross-Cultural Leadership through a review of the published literature. The literature research was then subjected to an exegetical review of the themes that emerged, and used to construct the Descriptors, and Sub-Descriptors for each of the leadership dimensions. The thesis also explored the transfer of cultural knowledge with metaphors and storytelling. In a fast paced business environment, developing a richer understanding and sensitivity to other coulters, in general and specific, is a skill that Leaders must possess. Lastly, the thesis explored the connections between conflict management and Cross-Cultural Leadership. Conflict management skills are becoming ever more important due to the rapid changes that are common in the current business environment. Change, cultural mis-information, scarce resources, poor communication skills, contractual ambiguity and complexity are but a few of the reasons that managing conflict is a critical skill for leaders. IV The design of the testing protocols was bifurcated. One track evaluated the hypothesis, the other track evaluated the connection between the Leadership Dimensions hypothesized, and the GLOBE survey. The GLOBE survey was utilized to investigate if a viable connection existed between the Leadership Dimensions and a broad based international survey of cultural dimensions. The testing of the hypothesis was performed using a Delphi panel of experts in international cross-cultural leadership, through two sessions of questions with feedback after the end of the first session. Subsequently, the results were analyzed, studied, and evaluated with an eye toward my practical experience in the field - sense making. The results were that the hypothesis was confirmed, and the connection to the GLOBE Survey cultural dimensions was also confirmed. A model is presented to summarize the findings of the thesis, called the Cross-Cultural Leadership Intelligence (XLQ) Model. As discussed in the thesis, Project Management has not emphasized leadership in the current body of knowledge (PMBOK), and it only makes general reference to cultural considerations. Recognizing this, The Project Management Institute (PMI) has funded a study that recommends more research in the area of cross-cultural leadership, and a new grant to study the question of how global the PMBOK really is. Both of these issues are addressed by this thesis. The XLQ model provides a framework for assessing and training Project Managers in cross-cultural leadership skills. The model is a global one that can be used across cultures, business models, and markets. The model also points towards the need for further research into metrics, education, training techniques, and of course, further empirical testing of the model itself.

This thesis is concerned with cross-cultural consulting. The research examines how a multinational consulting team worked with a multinational client. The consultants were from Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, Indonesia, USA and Australia and the client was a multinational oil company located on the island of Sumatra in Indonesia. The study employs the narrative theory of Ricoeur together with the research findings on culture of Hofstede, Trompenaars, Hall, Kluckhorn and Strodtbeck. The study relies on a comparison of national cultural characteristics as they were enacted duringthe conduct of a consulting project. The research emphasises the roles of the consultants, the consulting process and the consulting outcomes.

Key to achieving more efficient machine intelligence is the capability to analysing and understanding data across different views - which can be camera views or modality views (such as visual and textual). One generic learning paradigm for automated understanding data from different views called cross-view learning which includes cross-view matching, cross-view fusion and cross-view generation. Specifically, this thesis investigates two of them, cross-view matching and cross-view generation, by developing new methods for addressing the following specific computer vision problems. The first problem is cross-view matching for person re-identification which a person is captured by multiple non-overlapping camera views, the objective is to match him/her across views among a large number of imposters. Typically a person's appearance is represented using features of thousands of dimensions, whilst only hundreds of training samples are available due to the difficulties in collecting matched training samples. With the number of training samples much smaller than the feature dimension, the existing methods thus face the classic small sample size (SSS) problem and have to resort to dimensionality reduction techniques and/or matrix regularisation, which lead to loss of discriminative power for cross-view matching. To that end, this thesis proposes to overcome the SSS problem in subspace learning by matching cross-view data in a discriminative null space of the training data. The second problem is cross-view matching for zero-shot learning where data are drawn from different modalities each for a different view (e.g. visual or textual), versus single-modal data considered in the first problem. This is inherently more challenging as the gap between different views becomes larger. Specifically, the zero-shot learning problem can be solved if the visual representation/view of the data (object) and its textual view are matched. Moreover, it requires learning a joint embedding space where different view data can be projected to for nearest neighbour search. This thesis argues that the key to make zero-shot learning models succeed is to choose the right embedding space. Different from most existing zero-shot learning models utilising a textual or an intermediate space as the embedding space for achieving crossview matching, the proposed method uniquely explores the visual space as the embedding space. This thesis finds that in the visual space, the subsequent nearest neighbour search would suffer much less from the hubness problem and thus become more effective. Moreover, a natural mechanism for multiple textual modalities optimised jointly in an end-to-end manner in this model demonstrates significant advantages over existing methods. The last problem is cross-view generation for image captioning which aims to automatically generate textual sentences from visual images. Most existing image captioning studies are limited to investigate variants of deep learning-based image encoders, improving the inputs for the subsequent deep sentence decoders. Existing methods have two limitations: (i) They are trained to maximise the likelihood of each ground-truth word given the previous ground-truth words and the image, termed Teacher-Forcing. This strategy may cause a mismatch between training and testing since at test-time the model uses the previously generated words from the model distribution to predict the next word. This exposure bias can result in error accumulation in sentence generation during test time, since the model has never been exposed to its own predictions. (ii) The training supervision metric, such as the widely used cross entropy loss, is different from the evaluation metrics at test time. In other words, the model is not directly optimised towards the task expectation. This learned model is therefore suboptimal. One main underlying reason responsible is that the evaluation metrics are non-differentiable and therefore much harder to be optimised against. This thesis overcomes the problems as above by exploring the reinforcement learning idea. Specifically, a novel actor-critic based learning approach is formulated to directly maximise the reward - the actual Natural Language Processing quality metrics of interest. As compared to existing reinforcement learning based captioning models, the new method has the unique advantage of a per-token advantage and value computation is enabled leading to better model training.

Some administrative border areas are recently defined as cross-border areas, and have become a key phenomenon that is challenged by disparities between urban and rural areas. In this setting, the cross-sector collaboration is presented as a type of organization to respond challenges generating from these disparities. Despite its complexity, the cross-sector collaboration is becoming a significant strategy in cross-border areas to instigate sustainable development issues through bringing new dynamics into the traditional settings. From a realist perspective, the researchers in this study explore the cross-sector collaboration and approaches to organizing cross-sector collaboration in cross-border areas. Each side ofan administrative border in cross-border areas, there exists three main societal sectors - public, private and third sector having representation as collaboration stakeholders. In order to deal with sustainable development of cross-border areas through cross-sector collaboration, resource management and stakeholder management approaches are problematized as not adequate to address various dimensions of complexities regarded in cross-sector collaboration in cross-border areas. Moreover, the village of Röstånga has been studied in order to examine the practice of these approaches to cross-sector collaboration along the administrative border between Svalöv and Klippan municipalities in Skåne region.Fundamental factors in organizing cross-sector collaboration in cross-border areas have been identified throughout the case study. In order to organize cross-sector collaboration in such setting, the researchers also find out that there are 'other issues', commonly known by public and third sector as meeting points, local logic and social capital, that are not approached within neither resource management nor stakeholder management approach. These other issues need to be instantly addressed in cross-sector collaboration in cross-border rural areas in addition to the identified fundamental factors. At the end, the researchersdevelop 'Social Issue Management Approach' that integrates management-with-stakeholders approach, as having no focal organization but a common focal issue, and social issue approach as an ideal strategy suggested to organize cross-sector collaboration in cross-border areas.

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The thesis uses return data on equities, bonds, commodities and real estate for the U.S., Europe, Asia and Latin America to examine diversification potentials. The analysis focuses on benefits of cross-asset and cross-region diversification as well as the impact of financial distress on those strategies and portfolio performances. It concludes that diversification benefits vary over time and decrease in bear markets due to higher correlation. Investmentgrade bonds and gold have shown the highest diversification benefits for equity investors during financial distress. Assets from emerging markets seem to be less sensitive to global market drops and show more constant performances.
A tese utiliza dados de retorno sobre ações, títulos, commodities e imóveis para os EUA, Europa, Ásia e América Latina para examinar os potenciais de diversificação. A análise centra-se nos benefícios da diversificação entre ativos e entre regiões, bem como o impacto do sofrimento financeiro nessas estratégias e desempenhos da carteira. Conclui que os benefícios da diversificação variam ao longo do tempo e diminuem nos mercados ostentosos devido à maior correlação. Os títulos de grau de investimento e o ouro mostraram os maiores benefícios de diversificação para os investidores de capital durante o sofrimento financeiro. Os ativos dos mercados emergentes parecem ser menos sensíveis às quedas do mercado global e mostram performances mais constantes.

DigiExam är ett Edtech företag med huvudfokus kring digital kunskapskontroll och som utvecklar en plattform för digitala prov. Fördelen med digital kunskapskontroll är att lärare kan minimera den tid det tar att skapa och administrera prov samt att elever får tillgång till verktyg som både kan underlätta och effektivisera deras skrivande. Digitala prov kräver någon form av mjukvara för att vara möjligt. I DigiExams fall så tillhandahölls till en början fyra klienter för fyra möjliga operativsystem för att göra prov. Två utav klienterna var säregna medan de resterande två baserades på samma kodbas. För att minimera utvecklingstiden men även utvecklingskostnaden så valde man att ta fram en så kallad cross platform-klient. Denna klient skulle göra det möjligt att ha stöd för fyra olika operativsystem men basera applikationen på samma kodbas. Arbetet visar att det är fullt möjligt att skapa cross platform-klienter som baseras på webbteknologi och som kan använda operativsystemets fulla potential.  Resultatet blev en applikation som implementerade samma funktionalitet som de tidigare Mac OSX och Windows-klienterna, men som baserades på samma källkod som iPad- och Chromebook-klienterna.
DigiExam is an Edtech company with main focus on digital assessment. The company develops a platform that enables schools to minimize administrative overhead for teachers and enables students to use tools to help and improve their writing during an exam. In order to be able to take a test on a computer or tablet, the student needs to have some kind of software installed for digital exams. DigiExam used to have four clients for four operative systems. Two of the clients were based on the same source code while the other two were unique which made implementation and maintenance of features unnecessarily costly and time consuming. To deal with these issues the company decided to develop a cross platform-client which enables the developers to use one base source code for all clients and operative systems. The cross platform client developed in this dissertation proves that it is possible to create an application based on web technology and that uses the operative systems full potential. This dissertation gives an example how a cross platform client can be developed and resulted in client for Mac OSX and Windows that shares the same base source code as the Chromebook and iOS clients.

The object of this dissertation is hedging in Lithuanian and English research articles in the field of humanities and biomedical sciences. The aim of the research is to identify hedging devices and functions in linguistic and medical research articles in Lithuanian and English and to explore to what extent hedging is language-specific and discipline-specific. As there is a great variety of linguistic resources which convey the pragmatic function of hedging, this research is limited to certain lexical hedges: modal verbs, lexical verbs and adverbials, which are analysed within the conceptual categories of epistemic modality, evidentiality and vagueness. The results of the research suggest that the variety of hedging devices is determined by the discipline, whereas the type of the most frequent lexical hedges depends on the language (English vs. Lithuanian). The frequency of hedges used in the analyzed research articles depends both on the language and discipline. The results of the cross-disciplinary research show that both Lithuanian and English authors of medical texts tend to use fewer hedges than linguists. The variety of hedges employed in the analyzed articles of both disciplines is also different. In both Lithuanian and English linguistic articles a greater variety of hedges has been observed. The results of the cross-linguistic research indicate that according to the main parameters of the analysis, the English authors of the analyzed research articles employ hedges... [to full text]
Disertacijoje tiriamas autoriaus pozicijos švelninimas (angl. hedging) humanitarinių mokslų srities (kalbotyros krypties) ir biomedicinos mokslų srities (medicinos krypties) moksliniuose straipsniuose anglų ir lietuvių kalbomis. Disertacijos tikslas – nustatyti sąšvelnių (angl. hedges) vartosenos tendencijas ir raiškos ypatumus kalbotyros ir medicinos straipsniuose lietuvių ir anglų kalbomis bei išsiaiškinti, kokie veiksniai lemia autoriaus pozicijos raišką tyrinėtuose moksliniuose straipsniuose: konkreti mokslo sritis ar labiau kalbos, kultūros ypatumai. Dėl didelės kalbinių vienetų, galinčių atlikti sąšvelnių funkciją, įvairovės šiame darbe apsiribota tik tam tikromis raiškos priemonėmis: modaliniais veiksmažodžiais, leksiniais veiksmažodžiais ir prieveiksmiais bei aplinkybiniais žodžiais, tirtais iš episteminio modalumo, evidencialumo ir neapibrėžtumo kategorijų perspektyvos. Išanalizavus medžiagą, prieita prie tokių išvadų: sąšvelnių vartosenos įvairovė priklauso nuo disciplinos, o dažniausiai pasirenkamos leksinių vienetų grupės – nuo konkrečios kalbos (anglų vs. lietuvių). Sąšvelnių vartosenos dažnį lemia tiek kalba, tiek disciplina. Tarpdalykinio tyrimo rezultatų palyginimas rodo, kad ir lietuviai, ir anglakalbiai medikai vartoja mažiau tirtų kategorijų sąšvelnių nei kalbininkai. Skiriasi ir vartotų sąšvelnių įvairovė: tirtuose kalbotyros straipsniuose abiejomis kalbomis nustatyta įvairesnių sąšvelnių nei medicinos straipsniuose. Tarpkalbinio tyrimo rezultatai parodė... [toliau žr. visą tekstą]

This thesis investigates mathematics teacher professional development in a cross-school and cross-phase (elementary and high school) collaboration. The work is motivated by the fact that, currently, most teacher collaboration in England takes place within one school or department. Of the small number of collaborations that do extend beyond a single school, few involve teachers from different phases, and even fewer involve planning lessons together, observing and jointly reflecting on teaching practice. The cross-phase, cross-school setting additionally gives the potential for technology to play a major part in connecting teachers through technologies such as videoconferencing, video recordings of lessons, and on-line workspaces and communication. The research, which used qualitative methods, is a longitudinal case study of two cross-phase and cross-school teacher pairs collaboratively learning a new mathematics software for use in their teaching. One pair of teachers had previously worked with each other and one pair was created for the research project. The findings show that, while participating teachers were motivated to learn about new technologies to use for teaching, they were less interested in using technology for the purpose of collaboration. This is explained by a teaching culture in which experienced teachers expect to plan lessons individually and lesson observation is seen as a means of performance management. At the same time, there is evidence that the type of collaboration that did occur provides valuable opportunities for professional development. This development is not only in terms of the expected outcomes of the teacher collaboration in learning new technology for use in the teaching and learning of mathematics, but development which occurred through unanticipated opportunities which the collaboration gave rise to

Absolute total electron impact ionization cross-sections have been measured and calculations performed for C1 to C4 perfluorocarbons, C1 to C5 chlorocarbons and a number of mixed halo carbons and nitriles. Measured and calculated cross-sections using several different models have been analyzed using empirically and theoretically determined functions in terms of fundamental molecular parameters. A series of bond contributions to the total electron impact ionization cross-section have been determined and shown to reproduce total cross-sections for all of the molecules investigated with a high degree of confidence. An instrument has been constructed for the measurement of pseudo-absolute partial electron impact ionization cross-sections using the NIST standard mass spectrum database as a reference. Measurements were carried out for CF4, C2F6, C3F8, C3F6, F2C=CF-CF=CF2 and F3C-C=C-CF3 Theoretical models of electron impact ionization cross-sections have been critically assessed and a correction factor has been devised and applied to the binary encounter Bethe model of electron impact ionization resulting in a significant improvement in the performance of that model such that it can now be used for molecules comprising of atoms in rows 1 to 4 of the periodic table with a high degree of confidence. Ion imaging has been applied for the first time to crossed-beam electron impact ionization in an attempt to measure angular scattering patterns and energy disposal in a one step process. The instrument and the ion imaging process are described in detail and preliminary results reported in this thesis. A feasibility study has been carried out on the use of a capacitance manometer to measure neutral molecular beam fluxes directly and recommendations made for the future development of a usable device.

Crosses made in metal, paint, or stone stand at a singular intersection of past, present and future in the early medieval period. The historical cross of Golgotha is the source of such manufactured crosses’ form and power. Most also represent the theology of the Cross through their form and decoration, describing the soteriology of the crucifixion and anticipating its consummation at the end of time. As manufactured crosses recount the past and look forward to the eschaton, they concurrently function in the age of the Church, offering specific, contemporary points of access to all the larger cross-sign represents. In its multivalent identity, the cross’ status as the Church’s central sign reflects the Church’s own temporal position, simultaneously commemorating sacred history, functioning in the present day, and preparing for the Second Coming. Although rarely recognized, the Church-time form of the cross—which I term the “instrumental” cross—is often a discernable component of early medieval cross-objects and images. I argue that we can recognize the instrumental cross among the commemorative and proleptic aspects of the sign because a formal and conceptual language developed to articulate it. In its instrumental form, the cross becomes the sign of the Church in its role as mediator between Christians, Christ and the eschaton, affirming the indispensable place of man-made artwork in that project. The instrumental cross, in turn, signals the instrumentality of the many artworks into which it is incorporated. It plays a particularly important role in manuscripts. In the first half of the dissertation I define a class of visual strategies that communicate the instrumental identity of the cross. I treat works in many media in Chapter 1 and focus on manuscripts in Chapters 2–3. The second half of the dissertation concentrates upon the case studies of four complex, hitherto neglected gospel codices from ninth–tenth century western France. In each, the deep relationship between Church-time cross and gospel book drives a pictorial program that is crafted to define a specific codex as an manufactured instrument, made to integrate its community with the larger project of the Church for which the cross-sign stands.
History of Art and Architecture

Ligas metálicas não nobres são amplamente utilizadas em odontologia desde a segunda metade do século XX. Várias ligas metálicas para utilização em próteses sobre o implante dentário têm sido propostas nos últimos anos, visando uma melhor interação metal-cerâmica e maior resistência eletroquímica ao ambiente bucal. O objetivo deste trabalho é avaliar e comparar o comportamento eletroquímico in vitro de ligas à base de cobalto-cromo e níquel-cromo, utilizadas em supra estruturas de implantes dentários. Estas ligas foram estudadas em meios de solução aquosa de NaCl 0,15 mol L-1, saliva artificial e NaCl 0,15 mol L-1 com adição de caseína, fluoreto de sódio ou ácido acético, a partir de técnicas eletroquímicas e não eletroquímicas. Como técnicas eletroquímicas foram empregadas: medidas de potencial de circuito aberto, curvas de polarização anódica, cronoamperometria, voltametria cíclica e espectroscopia de impedância eletroquímica. As técnicas não eletroquímicas utilizadas foram: espectroscopia de absorção atômica com atomização eletrotérmica (EAA-FG), espectroscopia de fotoelétrons excitados por raios-X (XPS), microscopia eletrônica de varredura (MEV) e espectroscopia de energia dispersiva (EDS). Foram realizados testes de citotoxicidade utilizando a metodologia de incorporação do vermelho neutro. Uma boa correlação foi estabelecida entre os resultados obtidos pelas diferentes técnicas. Em solução de NaCl e saliva artificial as ligas apresentaram a seguinte ordem de resistência à oxidação: CoCrW < NiCrMo < CoCrMo. O filme formado em meio de saliva artificial se mostrou mais protetor do que o formado em meio de NaCl para todas as ligas, indicando que componentes presentes na saliva ao se adsorverem na superfície conferem uma maior proteção à mesma. As análises por XPS confirmaram a existência de um filme rico em Cr(III) com pequena concentração de cobalto e de níquel no filme passivo. As análises por EAA-FG a potenciais mais positivos mostraram que nesta região há oxidação generalizada, com a total dissolução do filme passivo e formação de Cr(VI), Ni(IV) e Co(II). As análises por MEV-EDS, para a superfície das ligas CoCrW e NiCrMo, apresentaram uma superfície quase homogênea e composições semelhantes antes e após 8h de imersão em meio de NaCl e em saliva artificial. A caseína atuou inibindo os processos de oxidação sobre a liga CoCrW e NiCrMo e sua atuação se tornou mais intensa com o aumento do potencial. A liga NiCrMo apresentou maior resistência à corrosão em meio de caseína quando comparada com a liga CoCrW. Os íons fluoreto atuam melhorando as características passivantes do filme, mas este efeito decresce com o aumento do potencial; a presença de ácido acético causa um aumento do efeito passivante do filme, à medida que cresce o potencial. As ligas CoCrW e NiCrMo não apresentaram efeito citotóxico, de acordo com a metodologia utilizada.
No noble metallic alloys are largely employed in odontology since the second part of the XX centrury. Different alloys have been proposed in order to be used in prosthesis on dental implants at last years, with the objective to obtain electrochemical resistance to oral environment. The aim of this work is to evaluate and to compare the electrochemical behavior \"in vitro\" of Co-Cr and Ni-Cr based alloys, used on dental implants structures. These alloys were studied in 0.15 mol L-1 NaCl aqueous in the absence and presence of casein, artificial saliva, sodium fluoride and acetic acid, using electrochemical and non-electrochemical techniques. Open circuit potencial measurements, anodic polarization curves, cronoamperometry, cyclic voltametry and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy were used as electrochemical techniques. Atomic absorption spectroscopy with graphite furnace (EAA-GF), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), scaning electron microscopy (SEM) and energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) were used as non electrochemical techniques. Cytotoxicity tests using the neutral red incorporation methodology were performed. A good correlation between the different techniques it was obtained. The alloys presented the following corrosion resistance order: CoCrW < NiCrMo < CoCrMo. The film formed in artificial saliva has been showed a better protective action than the observed in NaCl medium for the three studied materials as an indicative of the adsorption of substances present on saliva and the consequent inhibitive effect. XPS analysis have confirmed the presence of a Cr2O3 film with low Co(II) and Ni(II) concentrations. EAA-GF analysis at more positive potentials have shown the presence of generalized oxidation with total dissolution of the passive film resulting in Cr(VI), Ni(IV) and Co(II) ions as soluble products. MEV and EDS analysis have shown a quasi homogeneous and similar surface before and after 8h immersion in NaCl and artificial saliva. Casein has acted as inhibitor for oxidation process of CoCrW and NiCrMo in NaCl medium and its effects increases as the potential becomes more positive. The alloy NiCrMo presented a higher corrosion resistance in NaCl solution containing casein when compared to the CoCrW alloy. Ions fluoride has promoted a better performance of the film at Ecorr but its effects decreases at more positive potentials.The presence of acetic acid increases the passivating effect as potencial becomes more positive. Cytotoxicity was not observed for the alloys studied, using the described methodology

Forage crops have gained interest as potential source of lignocellulosic feedstock to produce ethanol. More focus is needed on developing cropping systems to improve productivity. This study was conducted to identify the agronomic potential of six different cover crops on five different annual biomass crops. Results indicated that forage pea (Pisum sativum L. cv. Arvika) N uptake was 126 kg N ha-1 and was able to fix approximately 60 kg of N ha-1 in only 60 days in the fall. Results across locations indicated that forage sorghum (Sorghum bicolor L. Moench cv. FS-5), and sweet sorghum (Sorghum bicolor L. Moench cv. Theis) had the highest biomass yields among the forage crops with 17.8 Mg ha-1 followed by sweet sorghum with 15.3 Mg ha-1, respectively. Therefore forage sorghum and sweet sorghum can be considered as the most productive biomass sources, specially combined with a legume cover crop seeded the previous fall.

Transport safety has a direct impact on people’s lives despite considerable improvements in recent decades. By treating transport modes independently and not taking full account of modal options available, policymakers have overlooked potentially important and low cost contributions to overall passenger safety. This thesis investigates the extent to which Cross Modal Switching (CMS), encouraging users to transfer to safer modes of transport, can be deployed as an instrument of transport safety policy. Research was conducted to establish the safety differences between modes on specific journeys, taking account of composite risks including all transport modes used. Primary research used surveys and qualitative interviews to target three different groups to understand their views on transport safety, willingness to switch modes, reasons that would cause them to switch and modal perceptions on risk and travel behaviour. The feasibility of promoting CMS was assessed by measuring substitutability between modes and calculating cross-elasticities using data from the empirical surveys conducted and previously published work. Cost benefit calculations were made using monetised risk and the cost of fares subsidies to assess the net safety benefits for three selected journeys. This analysis shows that there is a marginal justification for CMS as a tool within an overall integrated transport policy that considers safety in all modes simultaneously. This must recognise that the absolute safety benefits are not very large relative to other benefits, although the relative size depends on the manner in which changes of consumer surplus are treated in the CBA. CMS can be demonstrated to be cost effective in low risk modes, relative to larger infrastructure investments only yielding marginal safety improvements. Further research, using a larger sample of journey net benefit calculations, is thus required to validate the case robustly for CMS, identifying beneficial opportunities for modal switching on specific routes and target modes.

This thesis was made for Cybercom in Ostersund. They wanted an evaluation of HTML5 cross platform applications which studied HTML5 features as well as JavaScript libraries and frameworks. The resources put into mobile application development can be reduced bymaking applications that can work on all platforms instead of only natively. These types ofapplications are called cross platform applications and can be developed with specic tools.One way to develop cross platform applications is by using HTML5, which can either beused as a web application or packed into native applications using plug-ins. The purpose ofthis thesis was to create a mobile web app that can save maps to be used oine. The workwas done by evaluating frameworks for web applications. Frameworks that provide userinterface elements and features similar to those in native applications, and libraries that render maps served by map servers. Development environments for web development were also tested and evaluated. The results of the research and development were documented experience, and a HTML5 application that shows a map, has GPS functionality and can beused oine.

In Automotive Industries, to be confident regarding the success of a planned operation, performing accurate methods in order to detect abnormal operating conditions, known as faults, is crucial. An effective method for diagnosis and fault recognition ensures the safety of the operation, reduces manufacturing cost and any other potential impacts. In addition, mobile solutions have been widely adopted among automotive manufactures during recent years and they have taken full advantage of mobile strategies. Accordingly, it is necessary for there to be a future-proof plan to control the diagnostic operations in advance. In this thesis, the immediate objective has been to offer a future-proof and user-friendly solution to assist engineers and service technicians in the monitoring, detecting, and diagnosing of faults on Toyota/BT/CESAB branded trucks. A mobile cross-platform framework is used to develop the diagnostic mobile solution which is not only able to be deployed on Android and iOS mobile platforms, but also provides wireless communication between truck machines and mobile devices through Bluetooth and Wi-Fi ad hoc technologies. The diagnostic mobile tool is capable of processing real-time controller area network messages and visualizing the condition of different sensors in a more user-friendly way through rich hybrid and client-side web user interfaces. The experience of evaluating a cross-platform diagnostic tool on different mobile operating systems proved that cross-platform mobile development methodology can be a reliable technique for developing projects that essentially require real-time data processing. In addition, it indicates that Apple iOS offers a better runtime performance than Google Android for the current tool.

This thesis contains four chapters. Each chapter constitutes an empirical exercise in which I apply econometric ideas on studying the dynamics of large cross sections of data (Random Fields). Three of them concern the empirics of convergence and the fourth analyses business cycle fluctuations. The first, "Notes on Convergence Empirics: Some Calculations for Spanish Regions," describes the econometric methods for studying the dynamics of the distributions and how to characterise convergence in this framework, explains why the standard cross-section regression analysis is misleading when testing for convergence and then performs some calculations for regions in Spain. The second chapter, "Dynamics of the Income Distribution Across OECD Countries", considers its baseline hypotheses to be those generated by the Solow growth model. Using sequential conditioning, it studies whether the convergence hypothesis implications can be shown to hold for the OECD economies. It finds that neither absolute nor conditional convergence, in the sense of economies approaching the OECD average, has taken place. The third chapter, "Cross Sectional Firm Dynamics: Theory and Empirical Results", extends ideas of distribution dynamics to a discrete choice setting, and extends the reasoning of Galton's Fallacy to the logit model. It provides evidence of the tendency of firm sizes to converge for the US chemicals sector by analysing dynamically evolving cross-section distributions. Finally, the fourth chapter, "Unemployment in Europe and Regional Labour Fluctuations" applies distribution dynamics ideas to a business cycle setting. It analyses the dynamics of employment for 51 European regions from 1960 to 1990, addressing the issue of whether regional shocks have aggregate effects on unemployment or the opposite. It uses a model for non-stationary evolving distributions to identify idiosyncratic and aggregate disturbances.