Fundamental studies on thermodynamic properties of vanadium-containing oxides systems are essential to understand practical vanadium metallurgical process. The CALPHAD technique is here applied to the thermodynamic modelling of the V-O, Ca-V-O and Ti-V-O systems. The compound energy formalism is used for all the solution phases. All optimization processes and calculations are performed using the Thermo-Calc software package. The present work attempts to develop a self-consistent thermodynamic database of all phases in the studied systems. The obtained datasets can be used to calculate thermodynamic properties, stable as well as metastable phase equilibria and driving forces for oxidation etc. Steelmaking slag is an important secondary source for vanadium extraction. The phase relationships and vanadium distribution in the CaO-SiO2-MgO-V2O3-Al2O3 synthetic slags, whose compositions were chosen based on the relevance to the steel producers, are also studied. Phase equilibria in the temperature range of 1773 to 1823 K at oxygen partial pressure of 10-10 bar and 0.21 bar were characterized. An investigation of the volatilization of vanadium oxide was also carried out in the present work. Isothermal evaporation of vanadium pentoxide in the temperature range between 1723 and 1873 K was investigated by Thermogravimetric Analysis under different oxygen partial pressures, viz. oxygen, air or CO2. The Arrhenius activation energy for the evaporation reaction in various atmospheres was calculated from the experimental results. A mathematical model was developed to describe the kinetics of the evaporation process. Evaporation coefficients and enthalpies in various atmospheres were also estimated. The present results may have some implications in recovering vanadium from different vanadium-bearing sources. / <p>QC 20161202</p>

This thesis presents a development of classical canonical formalism and the usual transition schema to quantum dynamics. The question of transition from relativistic mechanics to relativistic quantum dynamics is answered by developing a homogeneous formalism which is relativistically invariant. Using this formalism the Klein-Gordon equation is derived as the relativistic analog of the Schroedinger equation. Using this formalism further, a method of generating other relativistic equations (with spin) is presented.

Cylindrically symmetric shell sources are studied and a general form of induced energy-momentum tensor of a collapsing shell is presented. The actual movement of the shell is numerically solved for a case when dynamics of the system is determined by energy conservation per unit length. It is then shown that additional assumptions can prevent the collapse, e. g. induced energy-momentum tensor as perfect fluid or null dust of counter-rotating particles. Collapse can be prevented also by introducing Thorne's C-energy into the system.

Au cours des dernières décennies, les approches expérimentales nous ont permis d'obtenir des informations importantes en biologie du développement et nous ont conduit à la définition de réseaux complexes de régulation contrôlant les processus développementaux. Actuellement, notre compréhension de ces réseaux est entravée par leur complexité même. La modélisation mathématique est de plus en plus utilisée pour intégrer les voies de régulation et prévoir les effets de perturbations génétiques. Durant ma thèse, je me suis intéressée à la différentiation du mésoderme chez Drosophila melanogaster. Elle commence par la spécification du mésoderme en 4 différents tissus: le muscle viscéral, le coeur, le muscle somatique et le corps gras. La formation de ces tissus se traduit par une organisation segmentale répétitive le long du mésoderme. Mon premier but était de construire un modèle qui récapitule la spécification de ces quatre tissus entre les stades 8 et 10. Par la suite, je me suis concentrée sur le développement du coeur dans le but de proposer un modèle de régulation de la diversification des cellules cardiaques contractiles (cardioblastes) entre les stade 10 et 12. Afin de comprendre ces processus complémentaires, j'ai été amené à modéliser les voies de signalisation qui jouent un rôle important dans le développement du mésoderme et des cardioblastes. Je me suis appuyée sur des données génétiques et des analyses haut-débit publiées (HhIP-chip, ChIP-seq et transcriptome) pour déterminer et annoter des graphes de régulation complet pour chacun de ces réseaux ou voies. / During the past decades, experimental approaches have allowed us to gain important insights in developmental biology, and led to the delineation of complex regulatory networks controlling developmental processes. Currently, our understanding of these networks is hindered by their sheer complexity. Mathematical modelling is increasingly used to integrate regulatory pathways and predict the effects of genetic perturbations. My thesis focuses on the development of the specification of the mesoderm in Drosophila melanogaster. Its development results in the formation of different tissues segmentally iterated: the visceral muscle, the heart, the somatic muscle, and the fat body. My first goal was to build a network model recapitulating the specification of these 4 mesodermal tissues during stages 8 to 10. Then, focusing on heart development, my second aim was to build a network model recapitulating contractile cardiac cell (cardioblast) diversification during stages 10 to 12. To understand these complementary processes, I was further led to model the signalling pathways that play important roles in mesoderm and cardioblast development. I rely on a combination of published genetic data and high- throughput analyses (ChIP-chip, ChiP-seq, transcriptome) to delineate and annotate comprehensive regulatory graphs for each of these networks or pathways. Using a logical formalism and the GINsim software, I have further defined logical rules enabling the simulation of wild type and mutant behaviours for each of this networks or pathways. By and large, my model simulations recapitulate all relevant published data.

D.Litt. et Phil. / Please refer to full text to view abstract

Le titre anglais de cette thèse, Soyinka’s Language – calqué sur celui de l’ouvrage de Frank Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language – est traduit librement en français par Les mots de Soyinka en mouvement pour évoquer la richesse poétique de ‘language’ dans ce contexte littéraire. Cette étude adopte l’approche de Kermode pour analyser un corpus d’oeuvres de Wole Soyinka (neuf pièces de théâtre et deux essais), dans la tradition critique anglaise de ‘close reading’. Les mots nous pénètrent malgré nos efforts pour nous tenir à l’écart de l’expérience (The Lion and the Jewel; le diptyque Jero). Ils peuvent également rendre concret le passage d’un monde à un autre – par exemple, à travers un vocabulaire pédagogique qui tombe rapidement en désuétude (The Road; Madmen and Specialists). Comment exprimer, comment articuler sur scène la notion ambivalente de la distance – d’un côté, la distance de la théorie, de l’objectivité; de l’autre, l’absence d’empathie, de compréhension humaine – (The Strong Breed, A Dance of the Forests, The Bacchae of Euripides, et The Burden of Memory)? Il s’agit d’un problème rhétorique qui s’apparente à un risque d’autarcie ou de solipsisme. Désamorcé dans la prose de The Man Died, ce risque sert de repoussoir, pour Soyinka dans Myth, Literature and the African World, à l’articulation d’une conception (yoruba) de l’existence, dont les tensions constitutives s’expriment à travers les ressources rhétoriques de la poésie orale. Cette étude se termine par une lecture de Death and the King’s Horseman, expression exemplaire de la tension entre l’affirmation de soi et le retour à la communauté, entre l’être et le non-être. / The title of this thesis is an allusion to Frank Kermode’s Shakespeare’s Language. There, Kermode directed his attentions to Shakespeare’s dramatic verse, its poetry, demonstrating how the demands which words make on the ear might attune us to the insinuating possibilities of language, if attended to by a patient reader. This thesis adopts the same methodological principle, in approaching a number of Wole Soyinka’s dramatic and prose works in English. Throughout, it is concerned with his intelligence as expressed through literature. To this end, it does not hesitate to speculate, in the manner of Shklovsky, as to schemata which Soyinka might have used in order to ‘make’ his works. At the same time, it sees in formalism, for writer and would-be critic alike, the danger of words’ being cut off from the common human constituency and experience which assure their meaning. Words penetrate us, undermine our attempts to stand apart, draw us into a realm of consequence (The Lion and the Jewel; the Jero plays). Consequence, in turn, implies passage between two distinct moments, inviting us to reflect on how language can become strange (The Road; Madmen and Specialists). What happens to words in one who is content to look on from a distance, instead of participating? This is the starting point for a discussion of Soyinka’s interrogations of justice in The Strong Breed, A Dance of the Forests, The Bacchae of Euripides and The Burden of Memory. Implicit in onlooking is the risk of self-sufficiency. Warded off in the prose of The Man Died, self-sufficiency provides a foil to a Yoruba conception of being and tragedy, as articulated in Myth, Literature and the African World. The study culminates in Death and the King’s Horseman, which best enacts the tension between self-assertion and commonality, departure and return, being and non-being, in and through poetic language.

The work is centered on the study of dimensionally reduced vector effective field theories from the point of view of soft scalar limits using the spinor-helicity formalism. The Dirac-Born-Infeld model is singled out by its enhanced soft limit at the level of four and six-point amplitudes. In the process, the spinor-helicity formalism is outlined and its use illustrated on explicit examples. The remainder of the work is focused on the corresponding questions in six dimensions. The rel- evant version of spinor-helicity formalism is presented, followed by a discussion of little group invariants and of the (im)possibility of their use on characteriza- tion of theories. Lastly, attempts at formalizing the process of taking the soft limit are made, with inspiration from the four-dimensional case. 1

The reemergence of artificial intelligence during the last 30 years has introduced severalforms of weak AI to our everyday lives, be it in our smartphones or how the weather ispredicted. Modern approaches to AI, using methods like neural networks and machinelearning, also feel confident about creating strong AI, intelligence that is human-like orsuperior to humans. In this thesis, I discover the philosophical premises of artificialintelligence, how the research program views the mind and what implications this has for theform of intelligence that is being constructed. Furthermore, I derive at several criteria thatneed to be met to qualify a system as intelligent. To cover this rather wide field, the works ofHubert Dreyfus, an early commentator on AI, and David Chalmers, one of the most widelyread philosophers of mind, are interrogated about their views on human intelligence and howsuch a theory relates to the possibility of intelligent machines.Key

[pt] A modernidade surge no Brasil, na cidade do Rio de Janeiro, pelas mãos de um pequeno grupo de arquitetos e transforma a cidade em alvo de reportagens nas mais importantes revistas de arquitetura do mundo. A Europa e os Estados unidos acompanham, entre perplexos e estupefatos, a adesão de um país com um governo autoritário e de tradição conservadora, na longínqua América do Sul, a propostas tão inovadoras. Dentre esses pioneiros estão os Roberto, três irmãos arquitetos, que, a partir de um entendimento de que a arquitetura moderna teria de ter os processos industriais incorporados aos seus métodos projetivos e construtivos, desenvolvem uma obra bastante diversificada com foco, principalmente, no mercado privado da construção civil. Na fase inicial da arquitetura moderna brasileira, da década de trinta à década de cinqüenta, apoiados na crença do poder transformador da forma moderna, articulam, com ampla liberdade formal e apurado controle sobre todos os componentes de suas edificações, uma poética que contrapõe a padronização, exigida pelos procedimentos industriais, à singularidade, numa operação que parece acusar o descompasso entre a realidade social do Brasil e a modernidade pretendida pela elite intelectual, política e financeira da época. / [en] Modernity appears in Brazil, in Rio de Janeiro, through the hands of a small group of architects and transforms the city into the target of the most important Architecture Magazines worldwide. Europe and The US watch, both perplexed and surprised, a country commanded by an authoritarian government and marked by a conservative tradition adhere to such innovative proposals. Among those pioneers are The Roberto Brothers, three architects and brothers who, believing that modern architecture must have its projective and constructive methods within industrial process, they develop a diversified work structured, mainly, in the civil construction private market. From the 30´s to the 50´s, during the initial phase of the Modern Brazilian Architecture, The Robertos, based on the belief of the transforming power of the modern shape and using the freedom of shape and wise control upon all the components of their constructions, articulate a measure which opposes standardization, demanded by industrial procedures, to singularity - in an operation that seems to show the abyss between the social reality of the country and the modernity sought by the intellectual, political and economic elite at the

O projeto tem por objetivo o estudo da composição fílmica a partir da polarização entre realismo e formalismo. Em um primeiro momento, compreende os principais pontos definidos por André Bazin e Hollis Frampton, apresentando algumas de suas observações e críticas do que consideravam as características fundamentais do cinema. Em seguida, é proposta uma ampliação dessa comparação, num diálogo com obras e autores que de alguma maneira orbitaram em torno de Bazin e Frampton. Investigando as maneiras pelas quais as duas tendências se opõem, e quais aspectos relativos à composição são evidenciados por elas, o trabalho busca ainda uma possível complementaridade, uma abordagem que as considere igualmente como partes de um mesmo espectro. / The purpose of this project is the study of film composition by means of the polarity between realism and formalism. At first, it covers the main points defined by André Bazin and Hollis Frampton, presenting some of their insights and criticisms, and what they considered to be the fundamental qualities of cinema. From this follows an attempt to amplify the comparative outlook, in a dialogue between authors and films that were closely related to Bazin and Frampton. As the work investigate the ways by which both tendencies oppose each other, and what aspects of film composition are revealed by this opposition, it looks for an approach which considers them equally as parts of the same spectrum