Abstract In this thesis, we will study very small full trios and full AFLs inside the family of context-free languages. Especially, we are interested in the existence of the smallest nontrivial full trios and full AFLs. This is an old research subject, and it has not been studied much since the 1970s. A conjecture by Autebert et al. states that there does not exist a nontrivial minimal full trio inside the family of context-free languages (2) (see also (1)). First, we will show that there does not exist a nontrivial minimal full trio or a nontrivial minimal full AFL with respect to the bounded context-free languages. This result solves another old conjecture stated by Autebert et al. (1). Then we will try to generalize our result to also concern unbounded context-free languages. We will make some progress, but the problem still remains open.

During the Cold War the foreign policy of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), was heavily criticized by scholars and activists for following the lead of the U.S. state in its overseas operations. In a wide range of states, the AFL-CIO worked to destabilize governments selected by the U.S. state for regime change, while in others the Federation helped stabilize client regimes of the U.S. state. In 1997 the four regional organizations that previously carried out AFL-CIO foreign policy were consolidated into the American Center for International Labor Solidarity (Solidarity Center). My dissertation is an attempt to analyze whether the foreign policy of the AFL-CIO in the Solidarity Center era is marked by continuity or change with past practices. At the same time, this study will attempt to add to the debate over the role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the post-Cold War era, and its implications for future study. Using the qualitative “process-tracing” detailed by of Alexander George and Andrew Bennett (2005) my study examines a wide array of primary and secondary sources, including documents from the NED and AFL-CIO, in order to analyze the relationship between the Solidarity Center and the U.S. state from 2002-2009. Furthermore, after analyzing broad trends of NED grants to the Solidarity Center, this study examines three dissimilar case studies including Venezuela, Haiti, and Iraq and the Middle East and North African (MENA) region to further explore the connections between U.S. foreign policy goals and the Solidarity Center operations. The study concludes that the evidence indicates continuity with past AFL-CIO foreign policy practices whereby the Solidarity Center follows the lead of the U.S. state. It has been found that the patterns of NED funding indicate that the Solidarity Center closely tailors its operations abroad in areas of importance to the U.S. state, that it is heavily reliant on state funding via the NED for its operations, and that the Solidarity Center works closely with U.S. allies and coalitions in these regions. Finally, this study argues for the relevance of “top-down” NGO creation and direction in the post-Cold War era.

Sports injury prevention has been the focus of a number of recent public health initiatives due to the acknowledgement that sports injuries are a significant public health problem in Australia Whilst Australian football is one of the most popular participation sports in the country, only very limited data is available about football injuries The majority of sports injury data available for this sport is from hospital emergency departments and elite-level injury surveillance Overall there is a paucity of data from treatment settings other than hospitals In particular, there is a lack of information about the injuries sustained by community-level, junior and recreational Australian football participants. One good potential source of football injury data is sports medicine clinics. Analysis of injury presentations to sports medicine clinics was undertaken to provide a detailed description of the epidemiology of Australian football injuries that present to this treatment setting and to determine the implications for injury prevention in this sport. In addition, the data from sports medicine clinics was compared with existing sources of Australian football injury data to determine how representative sports medicine clinic data is of other football injury data sources and to provide recommendations for future injury surveillance n Australian football. The results contained in this thesis show that Australian football is the sport most associated with injury presentation at sports medicine clinics. The majority of injured Australian football players presenting to sports medicine clinics are community-level or junior participants which suggests that sports medicine clinics are a good source of information on the injuries sustained by sub-elite football participants. Competition is the most common context in which Australian football players presenting to sports medicine clinics are injured. The major causes of injuries to Australian football players are being struck by another player, collisions and overuse. Injuries to Australian football players predominantly involve the lower limb. Adult players, players who stopped participating immediately after noticing their injury and players with overuse injuries are the most likely to sustain a more severe injury (i.e. more than four weeks before a full return to football participation and a moderate/significant amount of treatment expected). The least experienced players (five or less years of participation) are more likely to require a significant amount of treatment than the more experienced players. The prevention of lower limb injuries, injuries caused by body contact and injuries caused by overuse should be a priority for injury prevention research in Australian football due to the predominance of these injury types in the pattern of Australian football injuries Additionally, adult players, as a group, should be a focus of injury prevention activities in Australian football due to the association between age and injury severity. Overall, the pattern of Australian football injuries presenting to sports medicine clinics appears to be different than reported by club-based and hospital emergency department injury surveillance activities. However, detailed comparison of sports medicine clinic Australian football data with other sources of Australian football injury data is difficult due to the variable methods of collecting and reporting injury information used by hospital emergency department and club-based injury surveillance activities. The development of a standardised method for collecting and reporting injury data in Australian football is strongly recommended to overcome the existing limitations of data collection in this sport. In summary, sports medicine clinics provide a rich source of Australian football injury data, especially from the community and junior levels of participation. The inclusion of sports medicine clinic data provides a broader epidemiological picture of Australian football injuries. This broader understanding of the pattern of Australian football injuries provides a better basis for the development of injury prevention measures in this sport.

The AFL-CIO established and maintained a foreign affairs organization, independent of the U.S. State Department, between the years 1954 and 1962. It engaged in foreign affairs activities as a means to protect itself and its ideology from domestic and foreign interference, to maintain or enhance domestic power and to satisfy its leaders' interests. What were the union's foreign policy commitments? Why were these chosen and by whom? How were these policies implemented? How effective was the union in fulfilling its commitments?The purpose of this paper is to answer these questions using the AFLCIO's activities in support of the Algerian independence movement, 19541962, as the primary example. Algeria was chosen because American labor actions on behalf of Algerian independence clearly demonstrated labor's principal foreign policy, commitment, viz. anti-Communism, and illustrated two of the main components of this basic policy: ending colonialism and gaining allies for the West.The Algerian example demonstrated the lengths to which labor would go in its struggle against Communism. Algeria was not a colony but an integral part of France, much like Alaska is of the United States. However, because the AFL-CIO leaders feared Communist infiltration of Algeria, they refused to recognize Algeria's legal status and supported its secession from France.In support of independence, American labor used the full range of its foreign policy options, including direct assistance to Algerian trade States to urge France to surrender Algeria. Labor's pursuit of its policies in and for Algeria did not go smoothly. The U.S. continued to supportunionists and indirect assistance to the revolution by pressuring the United France. The French were unrelenting in their opposition to labor's activities. The Algerian nationalists refused to compromise their conditions for accepting direct aid from American labor. Even after Algeria achieved independence, American labor could not be sure it had accomplished its goals. Algeria outlawed the Communist Party but it also refused alignment with the West and muzzled its trade union. American labor had difficulty implementing its policies in Algeria because most American labor leaders held unrealistic expectations regarding the role of labor in independent Algeria.Since it is necessary to document the existence of a separate labor foreign policy organization, an historical sketch is included in this paper. Further, to understand the circumstances surrounding the Algerian independence movement which affect labor's and the U.S. State Department's attitudes and activities, it is useful to know the nature of the relationships among Algeria, France and the U.S. Another historical sketch accomplishes this.The paper demonstratesthat the AFL-CIO (between 1954 and 1962) maintained an independent foreign affairs organization which established and pursued foreign policies. These policies were determined by the AFLCIO leadership and were primarily directed toward combatting Communism by developing free democratic trade union(s). The Algerian example will show that the implementation of union policies yielded inconclusive results due to circumstances largely beyond the union's control, viz. Algeria's determination to become an unaligned nation and its unwillingness to permit its trade union to become a source of potential political and economic opposition.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 206-218).

Fuzz testing is a random testing technique that is effective at finding bugs in large software programs and protocols. We investigate if the technology can be used to find bugs in multi-threaded applications by fuzzing a real-time embedded avionics platform together with a tool specialized at finding data races between multiple threads. We choose to fuzz an API (available to applications executing on top) of the platform. This thesis evaluates aspects of integrating a fuzzing program, AFL and a sanitizer, ThreadSanitizer with an embedded system. We investigate the modifications needed to create a correct run-time environment for the system, including supplying test data in a safe manner and we discuss hardware dependencies. We present a setup where we show that the tools can be used to find planted data races, however slowdown introduced by the tools is significant and the fuzzer only managed to find very simple planted data races during the test runs. Our findings also indicate what appear to be conflicts in instrumentation between the fuzzer and the sanitizer.

With safety critical software, it is important that the application is safe and stable. While this software can be quality tested with manual testing, automated testing has the potential to catch errors that manual testing will not. In addition there is also the possibility to save time and cost by automating the testing process. This matters when it comes to avionics components, as much time and cost is spent testing and ensuring the software does not crash or behave faulty. This research paper will focus on exploring the usefulness of automated testing when combining it with fuzz testing. It will also focus on how to fuzzy test applications classified into DAL-classifications.

Fuzzing is a test method used to automatically generate test case inputs and to executea system under test (SUT) with those inputs. The method is traditionally used to discovercrash-inducing bugs in software. Fuzzing can generate thousands of inputs per secondand many implementations use smart techniques to reach deeply into the code. Fewfuzz testing implementations, however, have the ability to explore and retain informationof state in stateful applications. We develop an extension of the fuzzer American Fuzzy Lop (AFL), building on the workof the Ijon project, and utilize its fuzzing capabilities to discover states in SUT; inparticular, applications built as finite state machines. The extension successfullyharnesses AFL’s input generation to explore the SUT’s state space. We then implement functionality that allows for the SUT to return state information tothe fuzzer, including the state path and path length. Furthermore, functionality is addedthat allows the test operator to specify the expected number of states in the SUT, andGUI extensions that provide real-time information of state discovery during fuzzing. The state information retained after a completed fuzzing session is automaticallysummarized in a structured format. We further demonstrate that the summarizedinformation can be used to generate test cases for a test operator to verify the SUT.

This dissertation deals with the didactic consequences of assessment for learning (AfL) in the subject of physical education and health (PEH) at three upper secondary schools in Sweden. The purpose of the study is to investigate how assessment for learning is realised in PEH and what triadic relations between the teacher, student and subject content are established in the formative assessment practice. The empirical material consists of group reflections within a Teacher Learning Community (TLC) as well as field studies, including lesson observations and semi structured interviews with both students and teachers. In the first step of the analysis the material is categorized by means of the five key strategies (Wiliam, 2010a), in order to identify different ways of working with AfL in upper secondary PEH. The second step is a combination of a governmentality (Foucault, 1978/1991b), a performativity (Ball, 2003) and a didactic (Hudson, 2002) analysis, which illuminates what triadic relations are established under different conditions of governance. The findings highlight five fabrications of AfL in PEH, named after their most prominent features or functions, AfL as: i) Empowerment, ii) Physical Activation, iii) Grade Generation, iv) Constructive Alignment, v) Negotiation. ”Among the products of discursive practices are the very persons who engage in them” (Davies & Harré, 2001, p. 263). Accordingly, different teacher and student subjects as well as characteristics of the subject content are constituted in each of these fabrications. Moreover, the so called ‘backwash effect’ (Torrance, 2012) implies that the contrasting versions of AfL promote different kinds of learning, such as: i) increased autonomy, ii) participation in a community of practice, iii) criteria compliance, iv) acquisition of prescribed abilities, v) group development. However, the big idea of AfL is to adapt the teaching to the students and not the students to the knowledge requirements. Hence, this dissertation could serve as a basis for discussion on possible didactic implications of AfL in PEH.

Ba(Zr0.1Ce0.7Y0.2)O3-£_ (BZCY) shows high proton conductivity as well as high chemical stability over a wide range of solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) operating conditions. Sm0.5Sr0.5CoO3-£_ (SSC) cathode deposited by electrostatic spray deposition (ESD) on SOFC half cell obtained via tape-casting shows porous and reticular microstructure, and the SOFC single cell consists of substrate/ BZCY+NiO/ BZCY/ SSC. The electrolyte thickness decrease from 22 £gm, 20 £gm, 17.6 £gm to 15.1 £gm after sintering as the content of carbon pore former in the corresponding anode functional layer increased from 0.0 wt.%, 5.0 wt.%, 10.0 wt.% to 15.0 wt.%, and the maximum power density of corresponding cells at 700¢J varies from 476.89 mW/cm2, 713.34 mW/cm2, 862.50 mW/cm2 to 706.89 mW/cm2, respectively.