This project investigates various ways in which resistance is explored by Kamala Das, Adoor Gopalakrishnan and Arundhati Roy in My Story, Vidheyan, and The God of Small Things respec-tively. “Liminal Resistances: Local Subjections in My Story, Vidheyan, and The God of Small Things” aims to examine the workings and creative subversions of hegemonic discourses of caste, class, gender and color within the local milieu of Kerala, India. By exploring the theoreti-cal apparatuses employed in three diverse texts set in Kerala, this project identifies: firstly, Das’s subversion of Nair Kerala’s sense of gendered and casted normativity in My Story; secondly, Adoor’s depiction of the notion of home that enables self-recognition between the exploited and tyrant ensuring both suppression and libratory self-formation for classed subjects in Vidheyan; and finally, Roy’s portrayal of the conceptual category of whiteness within Kerala as being nei-ther uniformly subservient nor stable as depicted in The God of Small Things. It is hoped that by identifying and exploring the theoretical nuances of resistances in these generically diverse texts—autobiography, film, and fiction-- all set within the local realms of Kerala, this project will contribute a new scholarship in postcolonial studies that will recognize and problematize local instances of subversions and their representations within the Indian subcontinent.

This paper aims to study the possibilities and challenges the car industry has to face with applying information technology in cars. The goal is to describe and analyse all the existing technology in the cars out on the market today as well as future possible technologies in cars. By interviewing people who has been working or are working with information technology in cars, we aim to clarify the obstacles and opportunities in the process of implementing informatics in cars. With this knowledge we want to learn more about Ubiquitous computing and how humans interact with Ubiquitous computers today and will be interacting in the future. Technology has a rapid development pace and we find it interesting to examine how the car industry can keep up with the rapid development pace of technology.

John Milton begins his Second Defence of the English People by stressing the universal importance of gratitude: "In the whole life and estate of man the first duty is to be grateful to God." Peter Medine has shown the prominence of gratitude in Paradise Lost, but scholars have not fully appreciated the role of this virtue elsewhere in Milton's writing. This thesis is an attempt to redress that oversight with reference to A Mask and Paradise Regained, while also answering a question that Medine raises but does not satisfactorily resolve: Why gratitude? Both texts have been read as responses to the early modern debate about the doctrine of things indifferent, or adiaphora, and I argue that this context helps explain Milton's interest in gratitude. The first section of this thesis accordingly reviews the historical and theological context of the adiaphora controversy, while the second examines Milton's more direct treatment of things indifferent and gratitude, primarily in De Doctrina Christiana. In the remaining sections, historical and literary analysis of A Mask and Paradise Regained illuminates how Milton addresses tensions in the doctrine of things indifferent by emphasizing gratitude. Of the commonly recognized criteria for directing the use of adiaphora—the rule of faith, the rule of charity, and the glorification of God, often through gratitude—gratitude toward God frequently receives less thorough attention, yet Milton gives it a prominent role in A Mask and allows it to overshadow the other guidelines in Paradise Regained. Although gratitude is itself sometimes subject to manipulation in these texts, both A Mask and Paradise Regained suggest that the requirement of God-ward gratitude can serve as a check against subtle distortions of the other guidelines. The effectiveness of this strategy stems from the fact that the vices gratitude guards against—self-indulgent ingratitude, stoical ingratitude, and idolatry—are the vices that underlie licentiousness and superstition, the primary abuses of the doctrine of things indifferent. Milton's privileging of gratitude thus provides a way of cross-checking appeals to the more contested criteria of faith and love, protecting the doctrine of things indifferent from perversions that would undermine Christian liberty.

The main objectives of this thesis are to examine the relations between people and things in American novelist Henry James's 1897 novel The Spoils of Poynton, and thus to deepen our understanding of James's engagement with material culture. Critics have tended to frame James's works in general in terms of his detachment from economic and material reality; and criticisms on the novel in particular have seen it as exemplifying the alleged detachment, interpreting the things accumulated by a female collector at Poynton, as something illusory and unsubstantial, such as a form of commodity fetishism, a Freudian fetish, or a Lacanian signifier. Contrary to the conventional view, however, this thesis argues that James, in this novel about a struggle between a mother and her son over a house and its furnishings, represents and explores physical and affective relationships between the characters and things. James, focusing on the characters' sense experience, attempts to criticize the phallocentric power of his own culture that not only excludes women from the legal right of possession but also undervalues female domestic work in spite of its support for the culture. Drawing our attention to the senses that have traditionally been thought "lower" and "feminine," and thus refusing the taxonomization and hierarchization of the senses, James expands the category of aesthetic experience. This thesis argues that in the novel, by adopting as his primary mode of writing immediate sense experience prior to philosophical abstraction, James makes clear the latent implication between cultural repudiation of the feminine and the material, on the one hand, and the political and institutionalized exclusion of women by patriarchal property law, on the other. Criticism that ignores the material urgency and presence in the novel will further replicate that patriarchal power structure.

In conjunction with the possibility of inexpensive wireless communication, many products of tomorrow are developed with the support for wireless communication. The technology enables the possibilty of wireless communication to small plattforms at a realistic price. The cheap connectivity allows for great creativity and gives the developers imagination a wide discretion in the development of new products. This thesis aims to evaluate how the serial communication protocol Modbus RTU - RS232, performs and behaves when transported through meshed networks (Atmel lightweight mesh will be used in this thesis). The work was commissioned by M2M Solutions in J¨onk¨oping. The report will answer the following questions1. How does Modbus RTU behaves when transported through a meshed network. 2. How does Modbus RTU preform when transported through Atmel Lightweight Mesh.The authors have chosen to conduct action research to answer established questions. A test system consisting of both hardware and software was designed and created. With this system, several different tests were conducted and the results were observed and subjected to reflection. The different tests varied the distance, the network’s composition and location of the network infrastructure. Through observation of the test system and evaluation of the recorded data conclusions concering Modbus RTU’s performance and behavior during transport in Atmel lightweigh mesh has been drawn. The test system has been designed with the help of clients and previously made research. Modbus behaves nominally during transportation through Atmel lightweight mesh. Before the network is fully established, an inability to transport data has beend observed. The performance is evaluated by the time it takes to send data, the time is greatly affected by the following factors; Network composition and changes in signal strength (that creates changes in transport routes). For each additional node that traffic is transported through an increase of 5-10ms in the responstime was noted. The network’s ability to change the transport route is also expected to increase performance. The wireless communication provides a longer range than during transportation by standard conventional cable.Considering the results, the authors believe that Modbus RTU has the potential for use in transportation through wireless, meshed networks. One possible scenario is when several Modbus RTU masters are beeing used and data needs to be transported over large distances.

Detta arbete undersöker hur man kan bearbeta och formulera upplevelser av en film med hjälp av figural analys. Denna analys har jag hittat i filmvetenskapens fält. Syftet är att med hjälp av denna vidga filmens möjligheter som verktyg i skolan. Tillsammans med en fenomenologisk ansats och gestaltande metod söker jag en didak-tisk metod/upplägg för elever att formulera upplevelser, som ett komplement till tra-ditionell filmanalys.Med utgångspunkt i Svenska filminstitutets filmhandledningar konstaterar jag vad som inte behandlas när man i skolan ser en film. I filmhandledningarna uppmanas eleverna till en diskussion från frågor som rör värdegrunden, och upplevelsen av filmens bilder lämnas därhän. Jag har undersökt det figurala som ett sätt att komma åt möjligheten att formulera upplevelsen av en spelfilm man har sett i skolan, med hjälp av rörliga bilder. Det figurala är ett begrepp som syftar till vårt omedvetna begär och primära fantasi och vår upplevelse. Med en figural analys kan man fokusera på bildmaterialet utan att söka tecken och betydelse för de bildelement man finner. Teknikens möjligeter, såsom dubbelexponeringar, animeringar, hastighetsvariationer och så vidare utgör nya visuella uttryck.I filmen ”Where wild things are” har jag undersökt vad jag kan komma åt i en spelfilm med hjälp av en figural analys. Detta har jag sedan arbetat med i min gestaltande metod som utgår från en filmad skogspromenad. I gestaltningen har jag återberättat scener ur filmen från mitt eget liv, där jag har liknande upplevelser, då upplevelser kan sägas bottna i tidigare erfarenheter. Vidare har jag förstärkt min upplevelse, med teknikens hjälp, i filmredigeringen. Jag har, bland annat, arbetat utifrån Deleuzes tankar om montage som det effektfullaste sättet att med hjälp av teknikens möjligheter bana väg för en upplevelse hos betraktaren. Till min hjälp har jag Karl Hanssons avhandling, ”det figurala och den rörliga bilden” i Filmvetenskap vid Stockholms universitet .Min slutsats är att man i skolsammanhang, utan att nämna ett svårt begrepp som det figurala, kan använda sig av denna analys och metod för att ge elever möjlighet att också få fokusera på sin egen upplevelse, och resonera kring sin egen vardag som något större. På detta sätt kan man lägga fokus på en större del av människan, då hela människan ska få plats i skolan, så som värdegrunden är formulerad.

Evolving smart infrastructures requires both content distribution as well as event notification and processing support. Content Centric Networking (CCN), built around named data, is a clean slate network architecture for supporting future applications. Due to its focus on content distribution, CCN does not inherently support Publish-Subscribe event notification, a fundamental building block in computer mediated systems and a critical requirement for smart infrastructure applications. While semantics of content distribution and event notification require different support systems from the underlying network infrastructure, content distribution and event notification can still be united by leveraging similarities in the routing infrastructure. Our Extended-CCN architecture(X-CCN) realizes this to provide lightweight content based pub-sub service at the network layer, which is used to provide advanced publish/subscribe services at higher layers. Light weight content based pub-sub and CCN communication at network layer along with advanced publish/subscribe together are presented as data fabric for the smart infrastructures applications.

Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) is growing prominence as an automated identification technology able to turn everyday objects into an ad-hoc network of mobile nodes; which can track, trigger events and perform actions. Energy scavenging and backscattering techniques are the foundation of low-cost identification solutions for RFIDs. The performance of these two techniques, being wireless, significantly depends on the underlying communication architecture and affect the overall operation of RFID systems. Current RFID systems are based on a centralized master-slave architecture hindering the overall performance, scalability and usability. Several proposals have aimed at improving performance at the physical, medium access, and application layers. Although such proposals achieve significant performance gains in terms of reading range and reading rates, they require significant changes in both software and hardware architectures while bounded by inherited performance bottlenecks, i.e., master-slave architecture. Performance constraints need to be addressed in order to further facilitate RFID adoption; especially for ultra large scale applications such as Internet of Things. A natural approach is re-thinking the distributed communication architecture of RFID systems; wherein control and data tasks are decoupled from a central authority and dispersed amongst spatially distributed low-power wireless devices. The distributed architecture, by adjusting the tag's reflectivity coefficient creates micro interrogation zones which are interrogated in parallel. We investigate this promising direction in order to significantly increase the reading rates and reading range of RFID tags, and also to enhance overall system scalability. We address the problems of energy-efficient tag singulations, optimal power control schemes and load aware reader placement algorithms for RFID systems. We modify the conventional set cover approximation algorithm to determine the minimal number of RFID readers with minimal overlapping and balanced number of tags amongst them. We show, via extensive simulation analysis, that our approach has the potential to increase the performance of RFID technology and hence, to enable RFID systems for ultra large scale applications. / Thesis (Ph.D, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2011-08-30 23:41:02.937

Evolving smart infrastructures requires both content distribution as well as event notification and processing support. Content Centric Networking (CCN), built around named data, is a clean slate network architecture for supporting future applications. Due to its focus on content distribution, CCN does not inherently support Publish-Subscribe event notification, a fundamental building block in computer mediated systems and a critical requirement for smart infrastructure applications. While semantics of content distribution and event notification require different support systems from the underlying network infrastructure, content distribution and event notification can still be united by leveraging similarities in the routing infrastructure. Our Extended-CCN architecture(X-CCN) realizes this to provide lightweight content based pub-sub service at the network layer, which is used to provide advanced publish/subscribe services at higher layers. Light weight content based pub-sub and CCN communication at network layer along with advanced publish/subscribe together are presented as data fabric for the smart infrastructures applications.

The future Internet will be an IPv6 network interconnecting traditional computers and a large number of smart object or networks such as Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). This Internet of Things (IoT) will be the foundation of many services and our daily life will depend on its availability and reliable operations. Therefore, among many other issues, the challenge of implementing secure communication in the IoT must be addressed. The traditional Internet has established and tested ways of securing networks. The IoT is a hybrid network of the Internet and resource-constrained networks, and it is therefore reasonable to explore the options of using security mechanisms standardized for the Internet in the IoT. The IoT requires multi-facet security solutions where the communication is secured with confidentiality, integrity, and authentication services; the network is protected against intrusions and disruptions; and the data inside a sensor node is stored in an encrypted form. Using standardized mechanisms, communication in the IoT can be secured at different layers: at the link layer with IEEE 802.15.4 security, at the network layer with IP security (IPsec), and at the transport layer with Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS). Even when the IoT is secured with encryption and authentication, sensor nodes are exposed to wireless attacks both from inside the WSN and from the Internet. Hence an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) and firewalls are needed. Since the nodes inside WSNs can be captured and cloned, protection of stored data is also important. This thesis has three main contributions. (i) It enables secure communication in the IoT using lightweight compressed yet standard compliant IPsec, DTLS, and IEEE 802.15.4 link layer security; and it discusses the pros and cons of each of these solutions. The proposed security solutions are implemented and evaluated in an IoT setup on real hardware. (ii) This thesis also presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of a novel IDS for the IoT. (iii) Last but not least, it also provides mechanisms to protect data inside constrained nodes. The experimental evaluation of the different solutions shows that the resource-constrained devices in the IoT can be secured with IPsec, DTLS, and 802.15.4 security; can be efficiently protected against intrusions; and the proposed combined secure storage and communication mechanisms can significantly reduce the security-related operations and energy consumption.