Sport providers should be concerned with the participant experience, and in particular extraordinary experiences, as they have the potential to shift participant behaviors and attitudes to those desired by sport organizations. Extraordinary experiences are characterized by interpersonal interactions, separation from the usual, and feelings of self-transformation or personal growth (Arnould & Price, 1993). Due to the power, intensity, and transformative effects of these experiences, they can generate lasting shifts in beliefs and attitudes (Schouten, McAlexander & Koenig, 2007). This research project examined the relationship between the extraordinary experience and the personal transformation by examining the characteristics of the experience and impacts on participants. Texas 4000 is a community of cancer fighters who “train, fundraise, educate, and bring hope to those with cancer” for one year before their experience culminates with a 4,000 mile bike ride. University students apply to participate, and once accepted they begin planning, fundraising, volunteering and training for their ride to Alaska. Along the ride, they interact with members of the communities they pass through to spread “hope, knowledge, and charity.” Over 400 individuals have completed the ride within the last ten years. For this study, alumni participated in in-depth interviews about their experience and how it impacted their life. Participant impacts included feelings of empowerment, new perspectives and appreciations, a sense of meaning and purpose, and strong relationships that resulted in a sense of community with other riders, the organization, and the larger cancer community. Importantly, participants’ history and backgrounds influenced how participants interacted with the community and the impacts that they felt. Additionally, the extraordinary experience of the ride created enduring change in participants; the preparation for the extraordinary experience was not as impactful and merely allowed participants to develop the necessary skills to participate in the summer ride. / text

Programmers make systematic edits—similar, but not identical changes to multiple places during software development and maintenance in order to add features and fix bugs. Finding all the correct locations and making the ed- its correctly is a tedious and error-prone process. Existing tools for automating systematic edits are limited because they do not create general purpose edit scripts or suggest edit locations, except for specialized or trivial edits. Since many similar changes occur in similar contexts (in code with similar surrounding dependent relations and syntactic structures), there is an opportunity to automate program transformations based on examples of systematic edits. By inferring systematic edits and relevant context from one or more exemplar changes, automated approaches can (1) apply similar changes to other loca- tions, (2) locate code that requires similar changes, and (3) refactor code which undergoes systematic edits. This thesis seeks to improve programmer produc- tivity and software correctness by automating parts of systematic editing and refactoring. Applying similar, but not identical code changes, to multiple locations with similar contexts requires (1) understanding and relating common program context—a program’s syntactic structure, control, and data flow—relevant to the edits in order to propagate code changes from one location to oth- ers, and (2) recognizing differences between locations in order to customize code changes for each location. Prior approaches for propagating nontrivial, general-purpose code changes from one location to another either do not ob- serve the program context when placing edits, or do not handle the differences between locations when customizing edits, producing syntactic invalid or in- correctly modified programs. We design a novel technique and implement it in a tool called Sydit. Our approach first creates an abstract, context-aware edit script which contains a syntax subtree enclosing the exemplar edit with all concrete identifiers abstracted and a sequence of edit operations. It then applies the edit script to user-selected locations by establishing both context matching and identifier matching to correctly place and customize the edit. Although SYDIT is effective in helping developers correctly apply edits to multiple locations, programmers are still on their own to identify all the appropriate locations. When developers omit some of the locations, the edit script inferred from a single code location is not always well suited to help them find the locations. One approach to infer the edit script is encoding the concrete context. However, the resulting edit script is too specific to the source location, and therefore can only identify locations which contain syntax trees identical to the source location (false negatives). Another approach is to encode context with all identifiers abstracted, but the resulting edit script may match too many locations (false positives). To suggest edit locations, we use multiple examples to create a partially abstract, context-aware edit script, and use this edit script to both find edit locations and transform the code. Our experiments show that edit scripts from multiple examples have high precision and recall in finding edit locations and high accuracy when applying systematic edits because the extracted common context together with identified common concrete identifiers from multiple examples improves the location search without sacrificing edit application accuracy. For systematic edits which insert or update duplicated code, our systematic editing approaches may encourage developers in the bad practice of creating or evolving duplicated code. We investigate and evaluate an approach that automatically refactors cloned code based on the extent of systematic edits by factoring out common code and parameterizing any differences between them. Our investigation finds that refactoring systematically edited code is not always feasible or desirable. When refactoring is desirable, systematic ed- its offer a better way to scope the refactoring as compared to whole method refactoring. Automatic clone removal refactoring cannot obviate the need for systematic editing. Developers need tool support for both automatic refactoring and systematic editing. Based on the systematic changes already made by developers for a subset of change locations, our automated approaches facilitate propagating general purpose systematic changes across large programs, identifying locations requiring systematic changes missed by developers, and refactoring code undergoing systematic edits to reduce code duplication and future repetitive code changes. The combination of these techniques opens a new way of helping developers automate tedious and error-prone tasks, when they add features, fix bugs, and maintain software. These techniques also have the potential to guide automated software development and maintenance activities based on existing code changes mined from version histories for bug fixes, feature additions, refactoring, and software migration. / text

Deciphering genetic determinants of tumorigenesis is the greatest challenge and promise of the present-day era of biomedical research. As extensive tumor genome characterization efforts of the past decade had revealed, tumor genomes harbor multiple point mutations and gene copy number alterations. This exquisite complexity brings forth the challenge of distinguishing numerous incidental alterations from those that are functionally relevant to tumorigenesis. During the past decade, functional genetic screens have shown their utility in identifying genetic changes that functionally contribute to tumor-specific hallmarks and thus hold a great potential for identifying promising new targets for the rational design of successful anticancer therapies. A key hallmark of cancer cells is their ability to escape signals that govern homeostasis of normal tissue. In normal epithelia, growth and survival of cells is dictated by their physical anchorage to the extracellular matrix, and disruption of proper cell-matrix anchorage triggers cell death. Tumors of epithelial origin develop ways to subvert anoikis signals, which enables both their uncontrollable expansion at the primary site as well as metastatic colonization of distant organs. Understanding the genetic determinants of matrix-independent growth of cancer cells is a promising approach to identify potent and selective anticancer targets. In the work presented in this dissertation, we use an unbiased functional genetic screening approach to test a large set of eight thousand human genes to identify those that are involved in inducing and maintaining resistance of mammary epithelial cells to matrix detachment-induced cell death. We show that a cell adhesion molecule PVRL4 promotes cell survival in the absence of matrix anchorage in normal epithelial cells and in cancer cells. Our work reveals that PVRL4 promotes anchorage-independent growth by promoting cell-to-cell attachment and matrix-independent c-Src activation. PVRL4 is focally and frequently amplified in several types of solid tumors. Growth of orthotopically implanted tumors in vivo is inhibited by blocking PVRL4-driven cell-to-cell attachment with monoclonal antibodies, demonstrating a novel strategy for targeted therapy of cancer.

published_or_final_version / Medical Sciences / Master / Master of Medical Sciences

published_or_final_version / Medical Sciences / Master / Master of Medical Sciences

Flexible electronics using III-V materials for nano-electronics with high electron mobility and optoelectronics with direct band gap are attractive for many applications. This thesis describes a complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) compatible process for transforming traditional III-V materials based electronics into flexible one. The thesis reports releasing 200 nm of Gallium Arsenide (GaAs) from 200 nm GaAs / 300 nm Aluminum Arsenide (AlAs) stack on GaAs substrate using diluted hydrofluoric acid (HF). This process enables releasing a single top layer compared to peeling off all layers with small sizes at the same time. This is done utilizing a network of release holes that contributes to the better transparency (45 % at 724 nm wavelengths) observed. Fabrication of metal oxide semiconductor capacitor (MOSCAPs) on GaAs is followed by releasing it to have devices on flexible 200 nm GaAs. Similarly, flexible GaSb and InP fabrication process is also reported to transform traditional electronics into large-area flexible electronics.

This essay focuses on a postmodern reading of An Imaginary Life by David Malouf. It argues that language is a central theme in the novel and that Ovid’s transformation corresponds to his changing attitude towards different languages. According to Karin Hansson, Ovid’s transformation is divided into three stages. First, he longs for Latin, then he acquires Getic and in the end he seeks the languages of nature. The essay shows that stage two, Ovid’s acquisition of Getic, induces the deconstruction of the traditional high culture-low culture dichotomy in the novel. Language is understood as a representative of culture, and when Ovid considers Getic equal to Latin, the distinction between high culture and low culture collapses. Stage three, Ovid’s relationship with the wild child and his acquisition of the instinctive languages of nature, leads to the deconstruction of the animal-human dichotomy. The facts that the wild child transcends animality by gaining language and that Ovid wants to overcome human languages and immerse himself in nature promote a non-binary and multifaceted understanding of the human-animal relationship. To confirm its argument, the essay draws on Jacques Derrida’s ideas of language as well as his notions of the animal-human relationship.

Decisions regarding the mapping of system-on-chip (SoC) components onto a NoC become more difficult with increasing complexity of system design. These complex systems capable of providing multiple functionalities tend to operate in multiple modes of operation. Modeling the system communication in these multimodes aids in efficient system design. This research provides a heuristic that gives a flexible mapping solution of the multimode system communications onto the NoC topology of choice. The solution specifies the immediate neighbors of the SoC components and the routes taken by all communications in the system. We validate the mapping results with a network-on-chip simulator (NoCSim). This thesis also investigates the cost associated with the interfacing of the components to the NoC. With the goal of reducing communication latency, we examine the packetization strategies in the NoC communication. Three schemes of implementations were analyzed, and the costs in terms of latency, and area were projected through actual synthesis.

In this project I have tried to obtain stable transformants of Drosophila melanogaster flies using electroporation. I have completed approximately 200 tests using different DNA concentrations, voltages and cuvettes, including a novel Petri dish cuvette which I developed and manufactured myself. I also developed new and more efficient procedures of egg collection and egg dechorionation. Although I was not  successful in obtaining true stable transformants, control experiments indicate that electroporation of DNA into embryos could be accomplished under the conditions used. The lack of stable transformants was probably due to failure of the electroporated DNA to integrate into the host genome. The reasons for why the DNA did not integrate was not further investigated in this study.

Work purpose: to create a porgramme which could transform existent view to specialised squares of small scale, attributing a characteristic colour, according to the needs of a consumer. Conclusions: 1. In order to creat a specilaized transformation system of raster views the best way suggested is to apply a „Reduction/Expansion method“, which helps to lose the least amount of graphical information. 2. Specialized transformation system of raster views (in terms of C++) is created, which transforms existent view to specialised squares of small scale, attributing a characteristic colour, according to the needs of a consumer.