<p><font face="Times New Roman"> <p align="left">This study looks at the effect of a cross-cultural instructional approach on the learners&rsquo / conceptions of lightning and attitude towards science. It explored Basotho conceptions of lightning and thunder under the following themes: nature of lightning, protection against lightning, animalistic/humanistic behaviour of lighting and nature of wounds inflicted by lightning.</p> </font></p>

The first part of the thesis (Part I) is devoted to find methods to describe transient behaviour of traffic processes, where the main emphasis is put on the description and analysis of excess periods and excess volumes of quite general stochastic processes. By assuming that traffic changes on different time scales, the transient characteristics such as excess periods could be important measures to describe periods of congestion on a communication link and moreover, the corresponding excess volume will represent lost information during such periods. Although the results obtained are of rather general nature, they provide some rather fundamental insight into transient characteristics of traffic processes. The distributions of the length of excess periods may then be expressed it terms of some excess probabilities that are related to the minimum of the process in the time interval considered. Similar relationsfor the excess volumes are harder to obtain and require the joint probability of the arrived volume and the minimum of the process in the same time interval.

Road design with focus to safety has been extensively developed in last decades in Nordic and some other EU countries with the main aim to achieve a decrease in a number of accidents and fatalities on the roads. These countries gained many valuable experiences, but they had to sacrifice great effort, expenses, and time to reach the present art-of-state. The purpose of the Master’s Thesis is to review some design approaches with focus to safety and discuss the general way that they may be applied. The Master’s Thesis studies safety in three levels: (i) general - design standards, national safety policies and road hierarchy; (ii) local authority and road administrator; and (iii) three specific safety countermeasures - junctions, pedestrian crossings and traffic calming. The first part of Master’s Thesis describes the general road design standards background and their art of state. Furthermore, it discusses the new approaches in road design standard such as Dutch classification of road standards. Safety policies and programs are discussed and the concept of human imperfection is explained. Road safety policy and road hierarchy in Sweden and Denmark is described. The second part is devoted to the planning process on local authority and road administrator level. The phases of planning process are described. Special attention is paid to ranking process when choosing most effective countermeasures, next to black spot programs and also to public attitudes to safety countermeasures. The focus of the last part is in specific designs for safer road environment. There are discussed three groups of road facilities and countermeasures; unctions, pedestrian crossings and traffic calming. The cost, effectiveness, suitability, possible side effects and other properties of individual types of countermeasures are discussed.

Clarks Crossing, FbNo-24, is a farmstead site occupied during the late nineteenth century by John Fowler and Maggie Clark. It was during the excavation of this site during the Department of Archaeology Historical Archaeology Field School (2002-2005) at the University of Saskatchewan, under the direction of Dr. Margaret Kennedy, that interesting patterns in the ceramic assemblage were observed. There seemed to be a preference in the assemblage for moulded relief decorated white granite ware ceramics. This research was undertaken to explore that preference and possible meanings behind it. Three avenues of study are undertaken to accomplish the goal of learning more about the relationship between ceramics, consumer behaviour and the sociocultural landscape of the nineteenth century west. These avenues are as follows; a historical and archaeological study of the Clarks and the site of Clarks Crossing, a discussion of white granite ware ceramics and the issues regarding its classification, and an analysis of the ceramics at Clarks Crossing including an examination of the ware types, the makers marks, and the decorative technique and images found on the ceramics.<p> The behaviour of consumers can be influenced by several factors, including marketing and group membership or identity. Marketing can be a separate influence but it can also be seen as a factor in creating a perceived group identity. This thesis explores the influences on consumer behaviour in ceramics, specifically the ceramics of Clarks Crossing. It will discuss the implication that the ware type and decorative images on the ceramics act as the material manifestation of such influences.

The Qweak experiment at Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jefferson Lab) will measure the proton's weak charge by measuring the parity violating asymmetry in elastic electron-proton scattering at very low momentum transfer, with the aim of determining the proton's weak charge with 4% combined statistical and systematic errors. The experimental apparatus includes a longitudinally polarized electron beam, a liquid hydrogen target, a room temperature toroidal magnetic spectrometer, and a set of precision detectors for the scattered electrons. The toroidal magnetic spectrometer, which will deflect away the inelastic scattered electrons and focus the elastic scattered electrons onto the detectors, plays a crucially important role in the experiment. In this thesis, in order to meet the requirements for the installation and calibration of the toroidal magnetic spectrometer, the numerical simulation of the spectrometer's magnetic field based on a realistic magnet model is discussed, a precise 3D field mapping is introduced, and some simulation results are provided. The zero-crossing analysis technique, which can be used to precisely infer the individual coil locations of the toroidal magnet, is presented and explored in detail. / October 2007

Many traffic accidents are caused by driver unawareness. This includes fatigue, drowsiness and distraction. In this thesis two systems are described that could be used to decrease the number of accidents. In the first part of this thesis a system using long-term information to warn drivers suffering from fatigue is developed. Three different versions with different criteria are evaluated. The systems are shown to handle more then 60% of the cases correctly. The second part of this thesis examines the possibilities of developing a warning system based on the predicted time-to-lane crossing, TLC. A basic TLC model is implemented and evaluated. For short time periods before lane crossing this may offer adequate accuracy. However the accuracy is not good enough for the model to be used in a TLC based warning system to warn the driver of imminent lane departure.

Clarks Crossing, FbNo-24, is a farmstead site occupied during the late nineteenth century by John Fowler and Maggie Clark. It was during the excavation of this site during the Department of Archaeology Historical Archaeology Field School (2002-2005) at the University of Saskatchewan, under the direction of Dr. Margaret Kennedy, that interesting patterns in the ceramic assemblage were observed. There seemed to be a preference in the assemblage for moulded relief decorated white granite ware ceramics. This research was undertaken to explore that preference and possible meanings behind it. Three avenues of study are undertaken to accomplish the goal of learning more about the relationship between ceramics, consumer behaviour and the sociocultural landscape of the nineteenth century west. These avenues are as follows; a historical and archaeological study of the Clarks and the site of Clarks Crossing, a discussion of white granite ware ceramics and the issues regarding its classification, and an analysis of the ceramics at Clarks Crossing including an examination of the ware types, the makers marks, and the decorative technique and images found on the ceramics.<p> The behaviour of consumers can be influenced by several factors, including marketing and group membership or identity. Marketing can be a separate influence but it can also be seen as a factor in creating a perceived group identity. This thesis explores the influences on consumer behaviour in ceramics, specifically the ceramics of Clarks Crossing. It will discuss the implication that the ware type and decorative images on the ceramics act as the material manifestation of such influences.

The aim for this master thesis is to create an understanding of the intersubjective processes of how individuals are experimenting with their identities in social media and the consequences for the identity and embodiment. The thesis is completed with the help of discourse analysis and a starting point in four complementary theories. Central to the implementation of the analysis is the concept of diffraction. Therefore the thesis is, which is reflected in the choice of theoretical approaches and methods, critical to many aspects of classical philosophy of science and method. The empirical material is based on interviews. During the analysis the theory is applied to empirical data received from the interviews, but the empirical data will also be used as inspiration for examining my chosen theories. The analysis covers several topics. First I discuss how a web-identity is constructed and how this can be considered as a process of negotiation with other users on the same website. Furthermore I discuss how my informants negotiate about boundaries conserning sexuality and corporeality, but that the subjective boundaries shift in the encounter between different discursive claim to legitimate expression of body and sexuality. In the final section, before the final discussion, I discuss the body's impacts on communication on a website. During the final discussion several questions are being raised. Centrally, however, is how the essays selected theories help to demonstrate how the negotiation of boundaries in social media is complex, and that experimentation with the identity of a website partly dependent on society's other discourses on gender, body and desires. But it is also discussed how discourses of gender, body and desire is shifted inside the selected websites, and that these sites creates new opportunities for identification and self-knowledge.

As some companies in the paper industry struggle to shift from commodity grades to value added products, technical challenges and opportunities have grown tremendously. These new products require more stringent manufacturing specifications and improved performance relative to those of lignocellulosic fibers currently being produced. Hence, topochemical and mechanical modifications of pulp fibers have moved to the forefront of many corporate strategies. Researchers are beginning to develop new tools to help better understand the fundamental mechanisms of fiber modifications and how to most efficiently apply them. Two novel approaches are presented. First, a new method to observe single fiber crossings is developed. It was found that refining reduces the stepheight in the fiber crossing for both hardwood and softwood kraft pulps by increasing the tendency of the fibers to collapse, deform, and assume a lens like shape. The effect of pulp type, bleaching, drying, wet pressing, and fiber charge were also investigated. Graphs of stepheight versus freespan were linear through the origin suggesting that the freespan (flexibility) of the crossing fiber is largely unimportant to the formation of fiber crossings. Quite surprisingly, the ratio of stepheight to freespan remained relatively constant no matter the treatment. Only bleaching and the addition of surface charge via CMC had any independent impact on freespan. The data do not fit bending or shear mechanisms that have been developed in the literature suggesting that another mechanism may be responsible for the deformation behavior of single fiber crossings. Also, a method employing fluorescence microscopy and fluorescence resonance energy transfer is used to image the areas of a fiber-fiber interface while they were bonded. Analysis of the FRET signal from fiber crossings indicate that wet pressing increased the FRET occurring between the two dyed fiber surfaces. The results are consistent with the increased amount of interdiffusion expected with higher levels of wet pressing. Two novel techniques are used to investigate fundamental aspects of fiber deformation behavior and fiber-fiber bond formation. As these methods are further refined and utilized they will provide new avenues for researchers to explore and expand the property space of fibers and paper sheets.

The present study aims to redeem social indexical meanings of language choice and language alternation in the light of indexical order, a notion proposed by Silverstein (2003). Many researchers have agreed that language varieties are indexical of certain macro-social relations and that code-switching even within a speech event can also be socially meaningful. Nonetheless, some issues such as how the indexical associations have been formed and how the associations are dynamically transformed into indexical effects have been less extensively discussed. Based on the framework of indexical order, together with some code-switching approaches and concepts, this thesis examines two opening speeches made for two international sports events held in Taiwan. The two speeches were delivered by the mayors of the host cities. Each speech involved more than one language, including cases of both code-switching and crossing (Rampton, 1998). The notion of indexical order has helped unveil the dialectical nature of how the indexical meanings are produced in code-switching or language-choice practices. Besides, the analyses of this study will demonstrate how the framework of indexical order may enrich the code-switching approaches and general code-switching studies.