<p>Chromatography is a powerful technique, essential in chemical analyses and preparative separation in industry and research. Many different kinds of chromatographic material are needed, due to the large variety of applications. Detailed methods of characterisation are needed to design new chromatographic materials and understand their properties. In this thesis, confocal Raman spectroscopy and surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) have been applied to micrometer-size chromatographic beads, for which these techniques have not been used earlier. New methodology, optimized for use with the chromatographic beads, has been developed and evaluated. </p><p>Confocal spectroscopy has been used to determine distributions of functional groups within single chromatographic beads. This distribution is of great importance in determining the chromatographic properties, since the material is porous and the solute molecules can diffuse inside the beads. Most of the confocal experiments have been performed with Raman spectroscopy; fluorescence spectroscopy, using Nd³⁺ ions or dye-labelled proteins as fluorescence probes, has been used for comparison. </p><p>The concentration of adsorbed analytes is very low within the beads. SERS was therefore used to enhance the Raman signal. SERS-active surfaces were prepared by incorporating gold nano-particles into the interior of the bead. TEM measurements showed that the gold nano-particles could be observed throughout, and it was possible to record analyte spectra from different positions within the bead. Enhanced spectra could be obtained both for small test molecules and for larger bio-molecules, although the spectra for the smaller analytes were much more intense.</p>

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Chromatography is a powerful technique, essential in chemical analyses and preparative separation in industry and research. Many different kinds of chromatographic material are needed, due to the large variety of applications. Detailed methods of characterisation are needed to design new chromatographic materials and understand their properties. In this thesis, confocal Raman spectroscopy and surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) have been applied to micrometer-size chromatographic beads, for which these techniques have not been used earlier. New methodology, optimized for use with the chromatographic beads, has been developed and evaluated. Confocal spectroscopy has been used to determine distributions of functional groups within single chromatographic beads. This distribution is of great importance in determining the chromatographic properties, since the material is porous and the solute molecules can diffuse inside the beads. Most of the confocal experiments have been performed with Raman spectroscopy; fluorescence spectroscopy, using Nd3+ ions or dye-labelled proteins as fluorescence probes, has been used for comparison. The concentration of adsorbed analytes is very low within the beads. SERS was therefore used to enhance the Raman signal. SERS-active surfaces were prepared by incorporating gold nano-particles into the interior of the bead. TEM measurements showed that the gold nano-particles could be observed throughout, and it was possible to record analyte spectra from different positions within the bead. Enhanced spectra could be obtained both for small test molecules and for larger bio-molecules, although the spectra for the smaller analytes were much more intense.

Software project managers usually use benchmarking repositories to estimate effort, cost, and duration of the software development which will be used to appropriately plan, monitor and control the project activities. In addition, precision of benchmarking repositories is a critical factor in software effort estimation process which plays subsequently a critical role in the success of the software development project. In order to construct such a precise benchmarking data repository, it is important to have defined benchmarking data attributes and data characteristics and to have collected project data accordingly. On the other hand, studies show that data characteristics of benchmark data sets have impact on generalizing the studies which are based on using these datasets. Quality of data repository is not only depended on quality of collected data, but also it is related to how these data are collected. In this thesis, a benchmarking methodology is proposed for organizations to collect benchmarking data for effort estimation purposes. This methodology consists of three main components: benchmarking measures, benchmarking data collection processes, and benchmarking data collection tool. In this approach results of previous studies from the literature were used too. In order to verify and validate the methodology project data were collected in two middle size software organizations and one small size organization by using automated benchmarking data collection tool. Also, effort estimation models were constructed and evaluated for these projects data and impact of different characteristics of the projects was inspected in effort estimation models.

Bakgrund: Globaliseringen leder till att länder i allt högre utsträckning konkurrerar med varandra om uppmärksamhet, respekt och tillit från investerare, turister, konsumenter, donatorer, invandrare och media. Ett kraftfullt och positivt varumärke utgör därför en viktig konkurrensfördel. Varumärkesprofilering och branding, är de sätt på vilka en organisation kommunicerar, särskiljer och symboliserar sig själva gentemot sina kunder/klienter. National Branding är samma sak, men för ett land. Argumentet för National Branding är, i dagens globaliserade värld, att det finns en acceptans för konkurrens mellan länder för att erhålla uppmärksamhet av världen och dess tillgångar. Detta leder till att det blir ännu viktigare för ett lands ledare att göra allt som står i deras makt att projicera en positiv och konsekvent bild av det landet de försöker styra. Forskningsfråga: Vad innebär det att "branda" Sverige? Syfte: Syftet med denna uppsats är att klargöra vad National Branding betyder och hur det fungerar för Sverige. Då begrepp inom kommunikation spelar en viktig roll för hur ett sådant komplext projekt ska utföras, kommer även dessa att beskrivas närmare och analyseras utifrån. Tillvägagångssätt: För att kartlägga vad National Branding är har Simon Anholts diskussioner och journaler studerats men också andra författares texter inom ämnet. För att fördjupa mig i hur National Branding fungerar rent praktiskt har jag intervjuat Thomas Carlhed som är Brand manager på Svenska Institutet och Anders Wollter, ambassadör och Koordinator för House of Sweden. Övriga personer som har intervjuats är Karin Serenander på UD:s info-enhet och samordnare för NSU-kretsen och Ylva Björnberg på Visit Sweden som också är expert i NSU:s arbetsgrupp för Nation Branding. Jag har under ett samtal med före detta riksdagsmannen Knut Billing diskuterat allmänt om National Branding. E-postintervju har genomförts med Jenny Lennung på UD, Henrik Uggla, forskare i Brand Management och Olle Wästberg, generaldirektör, SI. Resultat: Det moderna Sverige är dynamiskt och förändringsbenäget, multikulturellt, internationaliserat, samarbetsvilligt, socialt medvetet, kreativt, pålitligt och förknippat med kvalitet. Men kunskapen om Sverige varierar väldigt mycket. Det finns de som är ointresserade av Sverige och experter som vill skapa möten i de nätverk som de redan har. Det är viktigt att man får en bild av ett land och symboler är lätta att kommunicera med. Antalet associationer till landet Sverige är få och att använda sig av kungahuset är ett sätt att kommunicera ett lands kultur, värderingar och historia. Alla intervjupersoner menar att kungafamiljens symboliska värde och deras roll som ambassadörer för Sverige är ovärderligt. Även om den Sverigebild vi vill förmedla är sann och tagen ur verkligheten betyder det inte att det är tillräckligt. Även om Sverige ligger i framkant inom många områden betyder det inte att det kommer att vara så för all framtid. Därför måste den kontinuerligt uppdaterade Sverigebilden kommuniceras, på "rätt sätt" och till "rätt målgrupp", konstant. Det gäller att hitta passande kanaler och symboler för en sådan varumärkesuppbyggandeprocess. Landets befolkning som är en del av varumärket måste ha ökad kunskap om vad Sverige och Sverigebilden innebär och står för. Detta kommer leda till att befolkningen känner sig stolta över varumärket Sverige.

Early diagnosis represents an effective way to improve patient prognosis in cancer. New opportunities for cancer diagnosis and screening may arise from identification of cancer-specific epigenetic alterations in the cell-free circulating DNA (cirDNA). This study investigated biomarkers at the level of DNA methylation in the plasma cirDNA of individuals affected with prostate cancer or colorectal cancer. A methylation-sensitive restriction enzyme-based method was used to enrich methylated DNA fractions, which were interrogated on CpG island and human genome tiling microarrays. A number of genes and non-coding loci exhibited differential methylation between prostate cancer patients and controls. The candidate loci identified from these microarray experiments underwent verification by bisulfite modification coupled with pyrosequencing. Our results suggest that microarray-based studies of DNA methylation in the cirDNA can be a promising avenue for the identification of epigenetic biomarkers in cancer.

Early diagnosis represents an effective way to improve patient prognosis in cancer. New opportunities for cancer diagnosis and screening may arise from identification of cancer-specific epigenetic alterations in the cell-free circulating DNA (cirDNA). This study investigated biomarkers at the level of DNA methylation in the plasma cirDNA of individuals affected with prostate cancer or colorectal cancer. A methylation-sensitive restriction enzyme-based method was used to enrich methylated DNA fractions, which were interrogated on CpG island and human genome tiling microarrays. A number of genes and non-coding loci exhibited differential methylation between prostate cancer patients and controls. The candidate loci identified from these microarray experiments underwent verification by bisulfite modification coupled with pyrosequencing. Our results suggest that microarray-based studies of DNA methylation in the cirDNA can be a promising avenue for the identification of epigenetic biomarkers in cancer.

This Dissertation analyzes the conditions, problems and potential of rural women&rsquo / s empowerment through a sample of rural women&rsquo / s organizations (two women&rsquo / s cooperative, seven rural development cooperative and one village women associaton) with interpreting DAWN iniative and GAD approach with a socialist feminist perspective. In this study, it is stated that the agricultural sector policies and rural development policy were constructed in relation with the conditions of underdevelopment and thus, in relation with the agreements with IMF, WTO and IPARD Programme of EU which enforced the decreasing of agricultural sector subsidies. It is notable that these policies are formulated with an aim of increasing the influence and significance of capitalist relations in agricultural sector and rural areas without taking precautions for the survival of small sized farming households in rural areas. Despite these general influences of underdevelopment to Turkish Agricultural Sector and patriarchal gender assumptions, these women&rsquo / s organizations could be successful to some extent empowering their members with the recognized dimensions of empowerment such as / psychological, economical, social, organizational and political. All these dimensions are interrelated with each other. In this study, it was observed that while economic empowerment and psychological empowerment is the base of all other dimensions of empowerment, social empowerment and organizational empowerment are the most dynamic processes of empowerment and political empowerment is hardest dimension or outcome to achieve.

A well known birthday paradox is one the most important problems in cryptographic applications. Incremental hash functions or digital signatures in public key cryptography and low-weight parity check equations of LFSRs in stream ciphers are examples of such applications which benet from birthday problem theories to run their attacks. Wagner introduced and formulated the k-dimensional birthday problem and proposed an algorithm to solve the problem in O(k.m^ 1/log k ). The generalized birthday solutions used in some applications to break Knapsack based systems or collision nding in hash functions. The optimized birthday algorithms can solve Knapsack problems of dimension n which is believed to be NP-hard. Its equivalent problem is Subset Sum Problem nds the solution over Z/mZ. The main property for the classication of the problem is density. When density is small enough the problem reduces to shortest lattice vector problem and has a solution in polynomial time. Assigning a variable to each element of the lists, decoding them into a matrix and considering each row of the matrix as an equation lead us to have a multivariate polynomial system of equations and all solution of this type can be a solution for the k- list problem such as F4, F5, another strategy called eXtended Linearization (XL) and sl. We discuss the new approaches and methods proposed to reduce the complexity of the algorithms. For particular cases in over-determined systems, more equations than variables, regarding to have a single solutions Wolf and Thomea work to make a gradual decrease in the complexity of F5. Moreover, his group try to solve the problem by monomials of special degrees and linear equations for small lists. We observe and compare all suggested methods in this

This thesis focuses on the colonialist discourse in Japanese linguistics in the period from 1868 to 1945, the time when Japan changed from a semi-feudal isolated country to a modernized nation and a colonizer. To address the complexity caused by such rapid development, and namely, to show how modernization and colonialism shaped Japanese language studies during this period, I present my analysis in two parts: the first part explores multiple facets of Japanese language education in the colonial period, both on Japanese territory and in Japanese colonies, particularly on the Korean Peninsula; the second part is a study of language manuals for Japanese soldiers. Although I examine some multilingual manuals, my main focus is on Korean language manuals because their number far exceeds that of other languages and also because Korea is my primary research area. My claim is that a careful examination of language manuals as well as of Japanese language education both in Japan and its colonies reveals one of the characteristic features of Japanese colonial linguistics: a situation when a standard-in-the-making was simultaneously being exported to colonial sites with variable success rates. Before the Japanese language went abroad, and more importantly, after its export, the struggle over what kind of Japanese language to teach continued to be a matter of controversy and was never settled until the U.S. occupied Japan and implemented educational reforms. But superimposed on all the debates was always the conflicting concept of kokugo (national language), which was so over-politicized that it precluded the possibility of any academic reforms or structural refinements in tandem with its political expansion overseas. As my study shows, one of the reasons for this complexity was that not only nationalism but also pan-Asianist discourse played a significant role in the Japanese colonial enterprise in East Asia. The language manuals for Japanese soldiers that I examine were published between 1882 and 1935. As the publication years grow more recent, we can see, in the prefaces and the contents, shifts in the forms of nationalism and pan-Asianist rhetoric occurring simultaneously with the rise of colonialist discourse.