Os biomateriais podem ser definidos como substâncias de origem natural ou sintética que são tolerados de forma transitória ou permanente pelos diversos tecidos que constituem os órgãos dos seres vivos. Dentre esses biomateriais podemos citar o Agregado de Trióxido Mineral (ATM), que foi desenvolvido na Universidade de Loma Linda na década de 90. Desde então, não cessaram trabalhos de pesquisa envolvendo esse material e o Cimento Portland (CP); que embora não seja um material de uso odontológico direto, pode-se afirmar que possui basicamente os mesmos componentes químicos do ATM. O objetivo da presente pesquisa foi avaliar a biocompatibilidade do cimento Portland comum (CP-I) e do cimento Portland branco (CPB) não estrutural, incluídos na calvária de ratos. Foram selecionados vinte ratos, dois foram previamente utilizados como grupo piloto; os dezoito restantes foram distribuídos em três grupos de seis ratos que avaliados nos tempos experimentais de 30, 60, 90 dias foram mortos para análise histopatológica. Cada animal recebeu um implante, sendo três de Cimento Portland Comum (CP-I) e três de Cimento Portland Branco (CPB). Os resultados mostraram que não houve conseqüências de uma proliferação microbiológica em nenhum dos cimentos e tempos pesquisados. Observou-se tecido conjuntivo denso, celular e ricamente vascularizado. Também foi visualizado uma matriz óssea recém formada, adjacente aos osteoblastos ativos e que não estava ainda calcificada; apresentava-se menos mineralizada e com ausência de lamelas. Durantes os tempos histológicos de 30, 60 e 90 dias, o infiltrado inflamatório disperso no tecido apresentou-se: intenso, moderado e discreto. Sugerindo a mudança do processo inflamatório de agudo a crônico respectivamente / The biomaterials can be defined as substances of natural or synthetic origin that are tolerated on a temporary or permanent by the various tissues that make up the organs of living beings. Among these biomaterials can quote the mineral trioxide aggregate (MTA), which was developed at the University of Loma Linda, in the 90s. Since then, it stopped work on research involving this material and Portland cement (PC), which although not a dental material to use direct, one can say that basically has the same chemical components of the ATM. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the biocompatibility of common Portland cement (PC-I) and the white Portland cement (CPB) no structural, included in the skull of rats. Twenty rats were selected, two were previously used as a pilot group and the eighteen others were divided into three groups of six rats that were killed and evaluated in experimental stroke, 30, 60, and 90 days. Each animal received an implant, three of Common Portland Cement (PC-I) and three of White Portland Cement (CPB). The results show that there were no consequences of a microbial proliferation in any of cement and times searched. There was also the formation of bone tissue with characteristics of immaturity, showing gaps in some areas without osteocytes; presence of moderate and cell tissue, richly vascularized, showing characteristics of biocompatibility, and the potential for bone and cell differentiation.

Two measurements of the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa angle &gamma; using B &rarr; DK and B⁰ &rarr; DK^&ast;0 decays are presented in this thesis. The subsequent D meson decays to the K_S⁰&pi;⁺&pi;^− and K_S⁰K⁺K^− final states are studied using a binned Dalitz plot analysis. The D strong-phase variation over the Dalitz plot is taken from measurements performed at the CLEO-c experiment, making the analysis independent of a model to describe the D decay amplitude. Both measurements are performed using proton-proton collision data collected by the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment in 2011 and 2012, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 3 fb^−1 at centre-of-mass energies &radic;s = 7 TeV and 8 TeV. The value &gamma;= (62 ⁺¹⁵<sub style='position: relative; left: -1.7em;'>−14</sub>)° is measured using B⁰ &rarr; DK^&ast;0 decays and &gamma; = (71 ± 20)° is measured using B⁰ &rarr; DK^&ast;0 decays, with a second solution for each value corresponding to &gamma; + 180°. The measurements are consistent with the world average value of &gamma;.

Orientador: Alex Gomes Dias / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal do ABC. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Física, 2013

Adolescent cannabis use has grown because of increased availability and higher societal acceptance. This increase in cannabis use is problematic as adolescents who experiment with cannabis are more likely to abuse cannabis and experiment with other illicit drugs such as cocaine. The reason for the greater susceptibility to drugs use is unclear and may be the result of altered drug sensitivity after cannabis exposure. Thus, the present investigation used the behavioral sensitization paradigm to examine the behavioral response of early adolescent rats to the cannabinoid agonist CP 55,940 (CP) or cocaine after repeated cannabinoid administration. It was hypothesized that: (1) CP would cause a sensitized response in both male and female adolescent rats, (2) female rats would have a greater behavioral response than male rats, (3) pretreatment with CP would induce cross-sensitization to cocaine, (4) pretreatment with cocaine would cause behavioral sensitization and conditioned activity in male and female adolescent rats. In the first experiment, 137 male and female Sprague-Dawley rats were given CP (4, 13.2, or 40 µg/kg, IP) or vehicle (50% DMSO/H2O) once daily for 5 consecutive days on postnatal day (PD) 30- PD 34. Distance traveled and stereotyped movement was assessed for 1 h after each drug injection. After a 48 h abstinence period (i.e., on PD 36), rats were given CP (4 or 13.2 µg/kg, IP) and distance traveled and stereotyped movement was monitored for 2 h. In the second experiment, 146 male and female rats were tested with the same protocol as in Experiment 1 except that rats were given CP (13.2 or 4 µg/kg), cocaine (20 mg/kg), or vehicle (saline or 50% DMSO/H2O) for five days and then tested with saline or cocaine (10 mg/kg) after 48 h. In the first experiment, no dose of CP altered distance traveled scores or stereotyped movement over the five pre-exposure days nor did CP cause behavioral sensitization on the test day. In the second experiment, pretreatment with cocaine led to enhanced distance traveled scores and stereotyped movement when challenged with cocaine (behavioral sensitization) or saline (conditioned activity) on test day. In contrast, CP-pretreated rats did not show greater activity when injected with cocaine or saline on test day. These data show that cannabinoids do not act like psychostimulant drugs, since CP did not cause the same changes in drug sensitivity as cocaine. The cocaine sensitization observed in adolescent rats indicates that this age group is particularly vulnerable to the rewarding effects of cocaine, and suggests that early cocaine exposure can augment drug seeking behavior. The failure to detect cannabinoid-induced sensitization, conditioned activity, or cocaine cross-sensitization during adolescence suggests that CP, when given at a consistent dose, does not increase the addictive properties of cannabinoids or cocaine. The results also indicate that cannabinoid use does not alter drug responsivity or lead to greater drug seeking and abuse in the adolescent population.

Disability is a state which questions one’s social standing. Individuals with disability are often seen shunned and sheltered from the society. It is understood that one cannot expect the world to revolve around us, rather we make adjustments to make life smoother. This thesis looks at non-verbal communication strategies within one case study who suffers from Cerebral Palsy and multiple communication needs. The major share of the thesis looks at the multimodal communication where the communication and bodily gestures gain prominence.   Cerebral Palsy, in an overview, (CP) is a group of permanent neurological disorder that affects one’s body movement and muscle coordination, commonly seen in an infant stage or early childhood caused by the damage to the brain that hinders the brain’s ability to control movement and posture of the body. CP affects the outer layer of the brain that directs the muscle movements. Alongside a stationary characteristic, a lot of motor, sensory and intellectual impairments accompany the disorder. These characteristics mark the beginning of life for the CP injured and is seen affecting their physical, mental and social existence, limiting their abilities of motor and oral skills impairing the ability of speech. Physique alterations include changes in jaw structure, lips and tongue making it nearly impossible in articulating words (Geytenbeek, 2011). Communication is an integral part of any relation. Feelings and emotions are often conveyed through communicating it in two different ways- verbal (psycholinguistics) - that involves a lot of ideas, messages conveyed through words and speech for communication and non-verbal (psychobiological) - involves facial and bodily expressions. My prime target is the latter’s way of communication, how these non- verbal communication can be interpreted, how do the family members and personal assistants decipher the expressions and understand subtle nuances. The complexity of communication within this group is further intensified by the power structures and decision makers in the society. It also tries to look at different models of communication and the strategies to make communication effective among the disabled group. Communication is very mutable and through this dissertation I try to analyze techniques that gives visibility to varied experiences and turning them into representations of certain ideas. Also it tries to unravel the emerging problems within the communication arena, misinterpretations thus reaching a conclusive hypothesis that communication is constantly irregular and fluctuating according to distinctive time, person and space.

The main goal of this thesis will be the design and implementation of a 2048-point FFT on an FPGA through the use of VHDL code.The FFT will use a butterfly Radix-2 architecture with focus on the comparison of the parameters between the system with different Worlengths, Coefficient Wordlengths and Symbol Error rates as well as different modulation types, comparing 64QAM and 256QAM for the 5Gsystem.This implementation will replace an FFT function block in a Matlab based open source 5G NR simulator based on the 3GPP 15 standard and simulate spectrum, MSE payload,and SER performance.

Master of Engineering (Research) / Educational standards are having a significant impact on e-Learning. They allow for better exchange of information among different organizations and institutions. They simplify reusing and repurposing learning materials. They give teachers the possibility of personalizing them according to the student’s background and learning speed. Thanks to these standards, off-the-shelf content can be adapted to a particular student cohort’s context and learning needs. The same course content can be presented in different languages. Overall, all the parties involved in the learning-teaching process (students, teachers and institutions) can benefit from these standards and so online education can be improved. To materialize the benefits of standards, learning resources should be structured according to these standards. Unfortunately, there is the problem that a large number of existing e-Learning materials lack the intrinsic logical structure required, and further, when they have the structure, they are not encoded as required. These problems make it virtually impossible to share these materials. This thesis addresses the following research question: How to make the best use of existing open learning resources available on the Internet by taking advantage of educational standards and specifications and thus improving content reusability?In order to answer this question, I combine different technologies, techniques and standards that make the sharing of publicly available learning resources possible in innovative ways. I developed and implemented a three-stage tool to tackle the above problem. By applying information extraction techniques and open e-Learning standards to legacy learning resources the tool has proven to improve content reusability. In so doing, it contributes to the understanding of how these technologies can be used in real scenarios and shows how online education can benefit from them. In particular, three main components were created which enable the conversion process from unstructured educational content into a standard compliant form in a systematic and automatic way. An increasing number of repositories with educational resources are available, including Wikiversity and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology OpenCourseware. Wikivesity is an open repository containing over 6,000 learning resources in several disciplines and for all age groups [1]. I used the OpenCourseWare repository to evaluate the effectiveness of my software components and ideas. The results show that it is possible to create standard compliant learning objects from the publicly available web pages, improving their searchability, interoperability and reusability.

La mesure des paramètres de violation de CP dans les désintégrations du type b->uubard permet en principe d'avoir accès à sin(2alpha), où alpha est l'un des angles du triangle d'unitarité. Cependant, la présence de diagrammes à boucle, appelées diagrammes pingouins, complique l'interprétation de la mesure expérimentale, qui ne donne en fait accès qu'à une valeur effective de \alpha : æff. Les mesures dans le canal B0->rho0rho0 permettent de réaliser pour la première fois une analyse d'isospin complète dans les modes B->rhorho, et donc en principe de déterminer le décalage \alpha-æff induit par les diagrammes pingouins. La désintégration B0->rho0rho0 a été étudiée en utilisant l'échantillon final de BABAR, soit $465 10^6$ désintégrations $\Y4S\to\BB$, collectées auprès du collisionneur \epem asymétrique PEP-II. Le rapport d'embranchement du mode B0->rho0rho0 a été mesuré BR=0.92±0.32±0.14 10^{-6} ainsi que la fraction de polarisation longitudinale fL= 0.75+0.11-0.14±0.03. La signifiance du signal B0->rho0rho0 est de 3.1 \sigma en prenant en compte les erreurs systématiques. La dépendance temporelle de la composante longitudinale a été étudiée et les paramètres de violation CP ont également été mesurés: S^{00}_L = 0.3±0.7±0.2, C^{00}_L = 0.2±0.8±0.2. L'implication de ces résultats sur l'angle $\alpha$ du triangle d'unitarité a été étudiée en effectuant une analyse d'isospin. En utilisant les mesures de BABAR pour les modes B->rho+rho- et B±->rho±rho0, la limite supérieure à 68% (90%) sur le décalage induit par la présence de diagrammes pingouins est donnée par: |\alpha-æff|<15.6° (<17.6°)

Une analyse en amplitudes dépendantes du temps des désintégrations $B^0 \to K^0_S\pi^+\pi^-$ est effectuée afin de mesurer les paramètres de violation de CP des modes $f_0(980)K_S^0$ et $\rho^0(770)K_S^0$, ainsi que l'asymétrie directe de CP pour $K^*(892)^\pm\pi^\mp$. Les résultats sont obtenus à partid d'un échantillon de $(383\pm 3)\times10^{6}$ paires $B\bar{B}$, enregistrées par le détecteur \babar\ auprès du collisionneur asymétrique PEPII au SLAC. Deux solutions sont trouvées, avec des figures de mérite équivalentes sur la qualité de l'ajustement. En incluant les incertitudes systématiques et provenant du modèle de Dalitz utilisé, l'intervalle de confiance combiné sur $\beta_{\rm eff}$ dans le mode $f_0(980)K_S^0$ est $18^\circ< \beta_{\rm eff}<76^\circ$ (à $95\%$ C.L.) ; la conservation de CP dans ce mode est exclue à $3.5$ écarts standard. Pour le mode $\rho^0(770)K_S^0$, l'intervalle de confiance combiné est est $-9^\circ< \beta_{\rm eff}<57^\circ$ (à $95\%$ C.L.). Pour le mode $K^*(892)^\pm\pi^\mp$, le paramètre d'asymétrie directe de CP est $A_{\rm CP}=-0.20 \pm 0.10\pm 0.01\pm 0.02$. La mesure de la phase relative entre les amplitudes de désintégration $B^0\to K^*(892)^+\pi^-$ et $\bar{B}^0\to K^*(892)^-\pi^+$ exclut l'intervalle $[-132^\circ : +25^\circ]$ (à $95\%$ C.L.). Les rapports d'embranchement et les asymétries directes de CP sont mesurées pour tous les modes résonants intermédiaires significatifs. Les mesures obtenues dans les modes $\rho^0(770) K^0_S$ et $K^{*\pm}(892)\pi^{\mp}$ sont utilisées comme paramètres d'entrée dans une analyse phénoménologique des désintégrations $B \to K^*\pi$ et $B \to \rho K$, basée uniquement sur la symétrie d'isospin $SU(2)$. L'ajout d'informations extérieures sur la matrice CKM permet de poser des contraintes sur l'espace des paramètres hadroniques. Pour $B \to K^*\pi$, les intervalles obtenus sur les pingouins électrofaibles ne sont que marginalement en accord avec les attentes théoriques. Les contraintes sur la matrice CKM sont dominées par des incertitudes d'origine théorique. Une étude de prospective, utilisant les améliorations attendues sur les mesures de ces modes à LHCb, ou dans les programmes futurs tels que Super-B ou Belle-upgrade, permet d'illustrer le potentiel de physique de cette approche.

Cette these presente le resultat obtenu a l'aide des premieres donnees collectees par NA48 en 1997 pour la mesure du parametre $Re(\varepsilon'/\varepsilon)$ de violation directe de CP. Une attention particuliere est portee a l'etude des performances des systemes de declenchement.