The family of sets with the Baire property of a topological space X, i.e., sets which differ from open sets by meager sets, has different nice properties, like being closed under countable unions and differences. On the other hand, the family of sets without the Baire property of X is, in general, not closed under finite unions and intersections. This thesis focuses on the algebraic set-theoretic aspect of the families of sets without the Baire property which are not empty. It is composed of an introduction and five papers. In the first paper, we prove that the family of all subsets of ℝ of the form (C \ M) ∪ N, where C is a finite union of Vitali sets and M, N are meager, is closed under finite unions. It consists of sets without the Baire property and it is invariant under translations of ℝ. The results are extended to the space ℝn for n ≥ 2 and to products of ℝn with finite powers of the Sorgenfrey line. In the second paper, we suggest a way to build a countable decomposition <img src="http://www.diva-portal.org/cgi-bin/mimetex.cgi?%5Ctiny%5Clbrace%5Ctext%20X_i%5Crbrace%20_%7Bi=1%7D%5E%5Cinfty" /> of a topological space X which has an open subset homeomorphic to (ℝn, τ), n ≥ 1, where τ is some admissible extension of the Euclidean topology, such that the union of each non-empty proper subfamily of <img src="http://www.diva-portal.org/cgi-bin/mimetex.cgi?%5Ctiny%5Clbrace%5Ctext%20X_i%5Crbrace%20_%7Bi=1%7D%5E%5Cinfty" /> does not have the Baire property in X. In the case when X is a separable metrizable manifold of finite dimension, each element of <img src="http://www.diva-portal.org/cgi-bin/mimetex.cgi?%5Ctiny%5Clbrace%5Ctext%20X_i%5Crbrace%20_%7Bi=1%7D%5E%5Cinfty" /> can be chosen dense and zero-dimensional. In the third paper, we develop a theory of semigroups of sets with respect to the union of sets. The theory is applied to Vitali selectors of ℝ to construct diverse abelian semigroups of sets without the Baire property. It is shown that in the family of such semigroups there is no element which contains all others. This leads to a supersemigroup of sets without the Baire property which contains all these semigroups and which is invariant under translations of ℝ. All the considered semigroups are enlarged by the use of meager sets, and the construction is extended to Euclidean spaces ℝn for n ≥ 2. In the fourth paper, we consider the family V1(Q) of all finite unions of Vitali selectors of a topological group G having a countable dense subgroup Q. It is shown that the collection <img src="http://www.diva-portal.org/cgi-bin/mimetex.cgi?%5Ctiny%5Clbrace%5Ctext%20G%20%5Csetminus%20%5Ctext%20U%20:%20%5Ctext%20U%20%5Cin%20%5C%20%5Cmathcal%7BV%7D_1(%5Ctext%7BQ%7D)%5Crbrace" /> is a base for a topology τ(Q) on G. The space (G, τ (Q)) is T1, not Hausdorff and hyperconnected. It is proved that if Q1 and Q2 are countable dense subgroups of G such that Q1 ⊆ Q2 and the factor group Q2/Q1 is infinite (resp. finite) then τ(Q1) <img src="http://www.diva-portal.org/cgi-bin/mimetex.cgi?%5Ctiny%5Cnot%5Csubseteq" /> τ(Q2) (resp. τ (Q1) ⊆ τ (Q2)). Nevertheless, we prove that all spaces constructed in this manner are homeomorphic. In the fifth paper, we investigate the relationship (inclusion or equality) between the families of sets with the Baire property for different topologies on the same underlying set. We also present some applications of the local function defined by the Euclidean topology on R and the ideal of meager sets there.

Recent studies have identified the Class B g-protein coupled receptor (GPCR) pituitary adenylate cyclase activating polypeptide type 1 (PAC1R) as a key component in physiological stress management. Over-activity of neurological stress response systems due to prolonged or extreme exposure to traumatic events has led researchers to investigate PAC1R inhibition as a possible treatment for anxiety disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In 2008, Beebe and coworkers identified two such small molecule hydrazide antagonists and a general pharmacaphore for PAC1R inhibition. However, a relative dearth of information about Class B GPCRs in general, and PAC1R in specific, has significantly hindered progress toward the development of small molecule antagonists of PAC1R. The recent crystallization of the homologically similar glucagon receptor (GCGR) by Siu and coworkers in 2013, also a Class B receptor, has provided an experimentally resolved template from which to base computationally derived models of PAC1R. Initially, this research was focused towards synthesizing small molecule antagonists for PAC1R which were to be biologically screened via a qualitative western blot assay followed by a radioisotope binding assay for those hydrazides exhibiting down-stream signaling inhibitory capabilities. However, the resolution of the GCGR crystal structure shifted research objectives towards developing a homology model of PAC1R and evaluating that computationally created model with Beebe's known small molecule antagonists. Created using academic versions of on-line resources including UniProtKB, Swiss-Model and Maestro, a homology model for PAC1R is presented here. The model is validated and evaluated for the presence of conserved Class B GPCR residues and motifs, including expected disulfide bridges, a conserved tyrosine residue, a GWGxP motif, a conserved glutamic acid residue and the extension of the transmembrane helix 1 (TM1) into the extra-cellular domain. Having determined this virtual PAC1R an acceptable model, ligand docking studies of known antagonists to the receptor were undertaken using AutoDock Vina in conjunction with AutoDock Tools and PyMol. Computational docking results were evaluated via comparison of theoretical binding affinity results to Beebe's experimental data. Based on hydrogen bonding capabilities, several residues possibly key to the ligand-receptor binding complex are identified and include ASN 240, TYR 241 and HIST 365. Although the docking software does not identify non-bonding interactions other than hydrogen-bonding, the roles of additional proposed binding pocket residues are discussed in terms of hydrophobic interactions, π-π interactions and halogen bonding. These residues include TYR 161, PHE 196, VAL 203, PHE 204, ILE 209, LEU 210, VAL 237, TRP 297, PHE 362 and LEU 386. Although theoretical in nature, this reported homology modeling and docking exercise details a proposed binding site that may potentially further the development of drugs designed for the treatment of PTSD.

There is a common requirement in the process, oil and gas turbine industries for high performance axial flow compressors operating over a wide range of mass flow rate and rotational speed at high efficiency. The trends have been for higher blade loadings (greater pressure rise per stage) and higher efficiency which are increasingly achieved through sophisticated Computational Fluid Dynamics designs. These trends, however, tend to mitigate against stable operating flow range (reduced surge margin), which can often lead to performance compromises. The objective of this work is to investigate the possibility of using alternative means to gain ow range by better use of variable geometry, which may permit design objectives to be better achieved. Variable geometry of the type envisaged is already often employed to overcome part-speed operating problems, but it proposed here that there may be additional benefits from their more intelligent control. The operation of axial compressors with a wide operating range is limited by instabilities, which cause a full breakdown of the flow, which is surge. These instabilities, which are caused by high incidence and subsequent stalling of stages occur due to different phenomena at part and full speed operation. The problem at part-speed is that the front stages are often heavily stalled and rear stages choked, whereas at high speeds, the front stages are operating close to choke and the rear stages tend to be stalling. Optimisation of the design to full load conditions can often provide part-speed problems and to achieve the acceptable performance, variable geometry over the front region of the compressor is sometimes used to modify the flow angles and avoid stage stall and subsequent surge. To-date, such variable settings follow some schedule established by analysis and experiment whereas this work presents a methodology of setting blade rows using an optimisation procedure and investigates the likelihood of performance benefits being obtained by a control technique which reacts° to these changing conditions. The construction of the numerical method presented in this thesis was done with an emphasis upon its intended contribution towards a eventual online control application. Therefore, a practical approach has been employed in the development of the compressor modelling techniques used in the work. Specifically, a highly empirical one-dimensional performance prediction code was constructed, employing successful correlations taken from the literature. This was coupled to a surge prediction method that has been shown in the past to function more than satisfactorily in a multistage environment. Finally, the predicted stage and overall performance (including the surge point) characteristics were passed to a optimisation program, which allowed these simulated conditions to be investigated. It is hoped that the work presented has illustrated the potential (from a aerodynamic performance point of view) of such a control technique to offer additional freedom in the operation of a multistage axial flow compressor. Moreover, the numerical modelling techniques have been developed enough to envisage (at least in part) their simple integration within a practical system. Clearly, some further investigations are required to take this work forward and the next logical step would be to improve the empirical rules with which the blade performance is predicted. A experimental programme would also be of great advantage, for example in the study of how the deviation angle for a given blade row varies over time (operating hours) in a real machine due to ageing and fouling. This would allow better estimates of the stage work during long term operation so that the optimiser could adapt to the slowly degrading performance of the blades. Finally, it is important to verify the simulated results with measured data, taken at the same optimal stator vane settings as given by the program. This must be carried out before it can be applied to a real application, although a limited study of this nature is presented in chapter 6.

Master of Science in Engineering - Engineering / An option is the right to buy or sell an underlying asset at a future date by fixing the price now. The field of option pricing produces a challenge because of the complexity with pricing American styled options which cannot be done by the Black-Scholes equations. Neural Networks and Machine Learning techniques are predictors based on past data and it is intuitive to believe that they can model American options as they are non-linear instruments. Call option data on the South African All Share Index (ALSI) was used for testing of the techniques. These two different techniques were compared. What was also done was the comparison of Bayesian techniques applied to both the techniques. What this provided was confidence levels for the predictions. The investigations showed that Machine Learning techniques out-performed Neural Networks. The investigations also showed that there is scope for work to be done to improve the model.

This licentiate thesis is a part of an effort to run large electronic structure calculations in modern computational environments with distributed memory. The ultimate goal is to model materials consisting of millions of atoms at the level of quantum mechanics. In particular, the thesis focuses on different aspects of a computational problem of inverse factorization of Hermitian positive definite matrices. The considered aspects are numerical properties of the algorithms and parallelization. Not only is an efficient and scalable computation of inverse factors necessary in order to be able to run large scale electronic computations based on the Hartree–Fock or Kohn–Sham approaches with the self-consistent field procedure, but it can be applied more generally for preconditioner construction. Parallelization of algorithms with unknown load and data distributions requires a paradigm shift in programming. In this thesis we also discuss a few parallel programming models with focus on task-based models, and, more specifically, the Chunks and Tasks model. / eSSENCE

A Central Counterparty (CCP) handles clearing between its members and can mutualise and reduce the counterparty and credit risk in a network. In the case of a clearing member defaulting on its obligations, the defaulted portfolio will be taken over by the CCP, which will attempt to close out the positions as quickly as possible. It is vital that the CCP minimises the losses they may suffer during the period between default and close out, the so called holding period. This thesis investigates and tests several potential hedging strategies to minimise value fluctuations during the holding period. These include neutralising the exposure to different risk factors, as well as finding the ideal hedging position using principal component analysis. The defaulted portfolio can contain different instruments, such as options, interest rate swaps and bonds, which requires different approaches to neutralise exposure. To determine the performance of the different strategies, backtesting was performed on historical data from the years 2001 to 2013, and the results were analysed in order to determine the effectiveness and potential costs of the hedging. The results show that significant reduction in value fluctuations can be achieved by employing these strategies, while not exceeding an affordable level of cost. Based on the findings, a function was created in Java that can recommend optimal hedging positions given a defaulted portfolio of any composition.

Lo Sau-Han Silvia. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 137-143). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- Definition of a summary --- p.2 / Chapter 1.2 --- Definition of text summarization --- p.3 / Chapter 1.3 --- Previous work --- p.4 / Chapter 1.3.1 --- Extract-based text summarization --- p.5 / Chapter 1.3.2 --- Abstract-based text summarization --- p.8 / Chapter 1.3.3 --- Sophisticated text summarization --- p.9 / Chapter 1.4 --- Summarization evaluation methods --- p.10 / Chapter 1.4.1 --- Intrinsic evaluation --- p.10 / Chapter 1.4.2 --- Extrinsic evaluation --- p.11 / Chapter 1.4.3 --- The TIPSTER SUMMAC text summarization evaluation --- p.11 / Chapter 1.4.4 --- Text Summarization Challenge (TSC) --- p.13 / Chapter 1.5 --- Research contributions --- p.14 / Chapter 1.5.1 --- Text summarization based on thematic term approach --- p.14 / Chapter 1.5.2 --- Bilingual news summarization based on an event-driven approach --- p.15 / Chapter 1.6 --- Thesis organization --- p.16 / Chapter 2 --- Text Summarization based on a Thematic Term Approach --- p.17 / Chapter 2.1 --- System overview --- p.18 / Chapter 2.2 --- Document preprocessor --- p.20 / Chapter 2.2.1 --- English corpus --- p.20 / Chapter 2.2.2 --- English corpus preprocessor --- p.22 / Chapter 2.2.3 --- Chinese corpus --- p.23 / Chapter 2.2.4 --- Chinese corpus preprocessor --- p.24 / Chapter 2.3 --- Corpus thematic term extractor --- p.24 / Chapter 2.4 --- Article thematic term extractor --- p.26 / Chapter 2.5 --- Sentence score generator --- p.29 / Chapter 2.6 --- Chapter summary --- p.30 / Chapter 3 --- Evaluation for Summarization using the Thematic Term Ap- proach --- p.32 / Chapter 3.1 --- Content-based similarity measure --- p.33 / Chapter 3.2 --- Experiments using content-based similarity measure --- p.36 / Chapter 3.2.1 --- English corpus and parameter training --- p.36 / Chapter 3.2.2 --- Experimental results using content-based similarity mea- sure --- p.38 / Chapter 3.3 --- Average inverse rank (AIR) method --- p.59 / Chapter 3.4 --- Experiments using average inverse rank method --- p.60 / Chapter 3.4.1 --- Corpora and parameter training --- p.61 / Chapter 3.4.2 --- Experimental results using AIR method --- p.62 / Chapter 3.5 --- Comparison between the content-based similarity measure and the average inverse rank method --- p.69 / Chapter 3.6 --- Chapter summary --- p.73 / Chapter 4 --- Bilingual Event-Driven News Summarization --- p.74 / Chapter 4.1 --- Corpora --- p.75 / Chapter 4.2 --- Topic and event definitions --- p.76 / Chapter 4.3 --- Architecture of bilingual event-driven news summarization sys- tem --- p.77 / Chapter 4.4 --- Bilingual event-driven approach summarization --- p.80 / Chapter 4.4.1 --- Dictionary-based term translation applying on English news articles --- p.80 / Chapter 4.4.2 --- Preprocessing for Chinese news articles --- p.89 / Chapter 4.4.3 --- Event clusters generation --- p.89 / Chapter 4.4.4 --- Cluster selection and summary generation --- p.96 / Chapter 4.5 --- Evaluation for summarization based on event-driven approach --- p.101 / Chapter 4.6 --- Experimental results on event-driven summarization --- p.103 / Chapter 4.6.1 --- Experimental settings --- p.103 / Chapter 4.6.2 --- Results and analysis --- p.105 / Chapter 4.7 --- Chapter summary --- p.113 / Chapter 5 --- Applying Event-Driven Summarization to a Parallel Corpus --- p.114 / Chapter 5.1 --- Parallel corpus --- p.115 / Chapter 5.2 --- Parallel documents preparation --- p.116 / Chapter 5.3 --- Evaluation methods for the event-driven summaries generated from the parallel corpus --- p.118 / Chapter 5.4 --- Experimental results and analysis --- p.121 / Chapter 5.4.1 --- Experimental settings --- p.121 / Chapter 5.4.2 --- Results and analysis --- p.123 / Chapter 5.5 --- Chapter summary --- p.132 / Chapter 6 --- Conclusions and Future Work --- p.133 / Chapter 6.1 --- Conclusions --- p.133 / Chapter 6.2 --- Future work --- p.135 / Bibliography --- p.137 / Chapter A --- English Stop Word List --- p.144 / Chapter B --- Chinese Stop Word List --- p.149 / Chapter C --- Event List Items on the Corpora --- p.151 / Chapter C.1 --- "Event list items for the topic ""Upcoming Philippine election""" --- p.151 / Chapter C.2 --- "Event list items for the topic ""German train derail"" " --- p.153 / Chapter C.3 --- "Event list items for the topic ""Electronic service delivery (ESD) scheme"" " --- p.154 / Chapter D --- The sample of an English article (9505001.xml). --- p.156

Chow, Chi Wang. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2013. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves [81]-84). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web.

<p> Earthquakes and tsunamis represent two of the most devastating natural disasters faced by humankind. Earthquakes can occur in matters of seconds, with little to no warning. The governing variables of earthquakes, namely the stress profiles of vast regions of the earth's crust, cannot be measured in a comprehensive manner. Similarly, tsunami parameters are often accurately determined only minutes before waves make landfall. We are therefore left only with statistical analyses of past events to produce hazard forecasts for these disasters. Unfortunately, the events that cause the most damage also occur infrequently, and most regions have scientific records of earthquakes going back only a century, with modern instrumentation being widely distributed only in the past few decades. The 2011 <i>M=</i>9 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, which killed close to sixteen thousand people, is the perfect case study of a country heavily invested in earthquake and tsunami risk reduction, yet being unprepared for a once-in-a-millennium event. </p><p> Physics-based simulations are some of the most promising tools for learning more about these systems. These tools can be used to study many thousands of years worth of synthetic seismicity. Additionally, scaling laws present in such complex geophysical systems can provide insights into dynamics otherwise hidden from view. This dissertation represents a collection of studies using these two tools. First, the Virtual Quake earthquake simulator is introduced, along with some of my contributions to its functionality and maintenance. A method based on Omori aftershock scaling is presented for verifying the spatial distribution of synthetic earthquakes produced by long-term simulators. The use of aftershock ground motion records to improve constraints on those same aftershock models is then explored. Finally, progress in constructing a tsunami early warning system based on the coupling of Virtual Quake and the Tsunami Squares wave simulator is presented. Taken together, these studies demonstrate the versatility and strength of complexity science and computational methods in the context of hazard analysis.</p><p>

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Computational and Systems Biology Program, 2018. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references. / DNA sequencing and metabolomics technologies have accelerated the discovery of novel biomarkers in clinical samples. In this thesis, I explore the potential of fecal biomarkers to impact clinical and public health practice through non-invasive assessments. First, I highlight the potential of the gut microbiome to provide novel diagnostic and therapeutic targets. By analyzing the gut microbiome and metabolome of mice exposed to a high salt diet, we identified Lactobacillus as a potential probiotic to counteract salt-sensitive conditions such as high blood pressure. Next, I present preliminary validation of wipe samples as a patient-friendly alternative to standard stool collection methods, in particular for the clinical management of Inflammatory Bowel Disease patients. By comparing paired stool and wipe samples, I show that wipe samples capture the same gut microbiome profiles as standard stool samples, and can also be used to quantify fecal calprotectin. Finally, I present the first ever analysis of the microbiome and metabolome of wastewater collected from a residential neighborhood. By testing samples collected hourly over one day, we identified thousands of bacteria and metabolites derived from human activity. Glucuronide compounds that directly reflect consumption of pharmaceutical products and drugs were identified for the first time in a wastewater epidemiology study. Our results highlight the potential of testing wastewater in geo-localized residential areas to produce high-quality data to inform public health practice. Together, these results show the potential of leveraging high-throughput technologies to create seamless readouts of human and population health. / by Mariana Guadalupe Matus García. / Ph. D.