Thesis (Ph. D.)--Florida State University, 2004. / Advisor: Dr. John G. Dorsey, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed June 16, 2004). Includes bibliographical references.

Thèse--Paris.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 243-262).

Standard techniques used to analyze a system's response with uncertain system parameters or inputs, are generally Importance sampling methods. Sampling methods require a large number of simulation runs before the system output statistics can be analyzed. As model fidelity increases, sampling techniques become computationally infeasible, and Reliability methods have gained popularity as an analysis method that requires significantly fewer simulation runs. Reliability analysis is an analytic technique which finds a particular point in the design space that can accurately be related to the probability of system failure. However, application to dynamic systems have remained limited. In the following thesis a First Order Reliability Method (FORM) is used to determine the failure probability of a dynamic system due to system/input uncertainties. A pendulum cart system is used as a case study to demonstrate the FORM on a dynamic system. Three failure modes are discussed which correspond to the maximum pendulum angle, the maximum system velocity, and a combined requirement that neither the maximum pendulum angle or system velocity are exceeded. An explicit formulation is generated from the implicit formulation using a Response Surface Methodology, and the FORM is performed using the explicit estimate. Although the analysis converges with minimal simulation computations, attempts to verify FORM results illuminate current limitations of the methodology. The results of this initial study conclude that, currently, sampling techniques are necessary to verify the FORM results, which restricts the potential applications of the FORM methodology. Suggested future work focuses on result verification without the use of Importance sampling which would allow Reliability methods to have widespread applicability. / text

The experience of psychosis (e.g. threatening symptoms such as persecutory delusion and terrifying hallucinations) and its treatment (e.g. coercive measures such as involuntary admission and seclusion) are distressing. In view of the potential severity of the distress associated with psychosis, previous research has applied the trauma model to understand the experience of psychosis and its treatment and found that 11-67% of psychotic patients presented with clinically significant PTSD reactions in response to their psychosis and treatment experience. This phenomenon is termed as post-psychotic PTSD (PP-PTSD). However, previous research generally failed to find consistent relationship between PP-PTSD reactions and objective psychotic and treatment experiences (except for positive psychotic symptoms). Cognitive conceptualization of PTSD opines that it is the cognitive appraisal of the traumatic event, rather than the trauma per se, that is related to the development of PTSD. The present study aims to contribute to a better understand of PP-PTSD through a cognitive perspective. The present study applies Ehlers and Clark’s cognitive model of PTSD in understanding PP-PTSD. It explores the roles of fear of relapse and perceived risk of relapse, attribution of the causes of psychosis, perceived stigma and rejection and perceived consequence of the psychotic illness in PP-PTSD. The present study was a cross-sectional study and recruited 38 patients with schizophrenia-spectrum disorders. Semi-structured interview was used to determine whether the patients met the PP-PTSD diagnosis. The patient’s positive psychotic symptoms and social and occupational functioning were assessed by semi-structured interview while their PP-PTSD symptoms, trauma history and cognitive appraisals were measured using self-report questionnaires. Results showed that 15.8% of patients meet the full criteria of PP-PTSD and more than 50% of patients demonstrated some PP-PTSD reactions, which provides support for the application of the PP-PTSD construct in the local context. Treatment experiences were found to induce more severe PP-PTSD reactions than psychotic experience. Cognitive appraisals were found to be associated with PP-PTSD and there was some support for the application of Ehlers and Clark’s model in PP-PTSD. Specially, the present study found that fear of relapse, higher perceived risk of relapse, perceived helplessness and self-blame of causing the onset of psychosis, stable attribution of the cause of psychosis onset, perceived stigma, perceived large and chronic consequence of psychosis were all associated with more severe PP-PTSD reactions. Fear of relapse was also found to predict PP-PTSD severity. Clinical implications on the prevention, assessment and treatment with reference to the present results are discussed. / published_or_final_version / Clinical Psychology / Master / Master of Social Sciences

Evans' (e.g., 2006) heuristic-analytic theory of the selection task proposes that card selections are triggered by relevance-determining heuristics, with analytic processing serving merely to rationalise heuristically-cued decisions. Evans (1996) provided evidence for the theory by setting up an inspection-time paradigm. He used computerpresented selection tasks and instructions for participants to indicate (with a mousepointer) cards under consideration. The theory predicts that longer inspection times should be associated with selected cards (which are subjected to rationalisation) than with rejected cards. Evans found support for this idea. Roberts (1998b) however, argued that mouse-pointing gives rise to artefactual support for Evans' predictions because of biases associated with the task format and the use of mouse pointing. In the present thesis all sources of artefact were eradicated by combining careful task constructions with eye-movement tracking to measure directly on-line attentional processing. Across a series of experiments good evidence was produced for the robustness of the inspection-time effect, supporting the predictions of the heuristicanalytic account. It was notable, however, that the magnitude of the inspection-time effect was always small. A further experiment separated the presentation of rules from associated cards to avoid possible dilution of the inspection-time effect arising from parallel rule and card presentation. However, the observed inspection time effect remained small. A series of experiments utilising think-aloud methods were then employed to test further the predictions concerning relevance effects and rationalisation processes in the selection task. Predictions in relation to these experiments were that selected cards should be associated with more references to both their facing and their hidden sides than rejected cards, which are not subjected to analytic rationalisation. Support was found for all heuristic-analytic predictions, even .,' . where 'select/don't select' decisions were enforced for all cards. These experiments also clarify the role played by secondary heuristics in cueing the consideration of hidden card values during rationalisation. It is suggested that whilst Oaksford and Chater's (e.g., 2003) information gain theory can provide a compelling account of our protocol findings, Evans' heuristic-analytic theory provides the best account of the full findings of the thesis. The mental models theory (e.g., Johnson-Laird & Byrne, 2002) fares less well as an explanation of the full dataset.

No description available.

In the present work we develop a unified way of looking at normed spaces of analytic functions (NSAF's) and their embedding into the Frechet space of analytic functions on a general domain, by requiring only that the embedding map is bounded. This is a succinct definition of NSAF and derive from it a list of interesting properties. For example Proposition 4.4 describes the behavior of point evaluations and Proposition 4.6 part (i) gives a general sufficient condition for a NSAF to be a Banach space, which as far as we know, are new results. Also, Proposition 4.5, parts (ii) and (iii) of Proposition 4.6 and Proposition 4.7 are results, which are slight generalizations of fairly standard results, which show up elsewhere in a more specific setting. Some of the facts about NSAF's are stated and proven in a more general context. In particular, a significant part of the material is dedicated to the normed space of continuous functions on a metric space. On the other hand, we provide the necessary background on differential geometry and complex analysis, which further determine the peculiarities in the context of spaces of analytic functions. At the end we illustrate our results on two specific examples of NSAF's, namely the Bergman and the Bloch Spaces over a general domain in Cd. We give a new proof of the reflexivity of the Bergman Space Ap(G, μ) for the case p>1 and of the Schur property of A1(G, μ). We also give new proofs for the equivalences of some of the definitions of the Bloch functions.

In this thesis, we will study a class of divisor functions: the prime symmetric functions. These are polynomials over Q in the so-called elementary prime symmetric functions, whose values lie in Z. The latter are defined on the nonnegative integers and take the values of the elementary symmetric functions applied to the multi-set of prime factors (with repetition) of an integer n. Initially we look at basic properties of prime symmetric functions, and consider analogues of questions posed for the usual sum of proper divisors function, such as those concerning perfect numbers or Aliquot sequences. We consider the inverse question of when, and in how many ways a number $n$ can be expressed as f(m) for certain prime symmetric functions f. Then we look at asymptotic formulae for the average orders of certain fundamental prime symmetric functions, such as the arithmetic function whose value at n is the sum of k-th powers of the prime divisors (with repetition) of n. For these last functions in particular, we also look at statistical results by comparing their distribution of values with the distribution of the largest prime factor dividing n. In addition to average orders, we look at the modular distribution of prime symmetric functions, and show that for a fundamental class, they are uniformly distributed over any fixed modulus. Then our focus shifts to the related area of partitions into prime powers. We compute the appropriate asymptotic formulae, and demonstrate important monotonicity properties. We conclude by looking at iteration problems for some of the simpler prime symmetric functions. In doing so, we consider the empirical basis for certain conjectures, and are left with many open problems.

No description available.