Product placement has been intensely studied in almost every mass communications medium. One notable exception is in children's picture books where scholarship on the placement of products and brands has been severely underserved despite a steady presence in a medium integral to socialization and society. The present study recognizes the unique characteristics of the shared reading that takes place in this medium and explores its effects on memory for and attitudes toward product placements within children's picture books. Using a laboratory experiment, quantitative statistical analysis of resulting data, and qualitative exploration of themes resulting from subjects' responses, the present study demonstrates that the practice of shared reading positively affects both recollection and attitudes toward product placement in children's picture books. It also discusses the results in the context of their ethical and practical applications and implications.

<p>This thesis explores content design – an area which encompasses the practices and the conceptions of the description, organisation and manipulation of digital content. The overall aim was to identify and examine principles, methods and tools appropriate for content design within the humanities and the social sciences. Another purpose was to investigate the limitations and opportunities of the identified methods and tools by means of modelling and applications of prosopographical materials, designed for research and teaching in history of education.</p><p>The prosopographical collection consists of three different kinds of sources: transcriptions from biographical reference books, written biographical accounts and digitalised archival sources, such as enrolment registers. These resources were encoded according to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) guidelines with the purpose to denote specific structures and semantic features of the content. The thesis demonstrates how the prosopographical collection, stored in a master file in TEI/XML format, was encoded and organised and then further transformed, migrated and manipulated by other tools and to other platforms. This resulted in several examples of applications demonstrating a broad range of uses for research and teaching in history of education and alike.</p><p>One conclusion is that the TEI guidelines serve well as a valuable tool for the markup of rather complex historical materials designed for multiple purposes: for qualitative analyses, and as input to multivariate statistical analyses, and for migration into relational databases. Another conclusion is that such digital collections, provided with markup, could be treated as research tools themselves, because they lend themselves much more than simply access, retrieval or reading. In this prosopographical collection, the markup contributes to make explicit the underlying theories and thus provides scholars, teachers and students with tools to reuse and rearrange the content for other kinds of uses in other areas. </p>

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This thesis explores content design – an area which encompasses the practices and the conceptions of the description, organisation and manipulation of digital content. The overall aim was to identify and examine principles, methods and tools appropriate for content design within the humanities and the social sciences. Another purpose was to investigate the limitations and opportunities of the identified methods and tools by means of modelling and applications of prosopographical materials, designed for research and teaching in history of education. The prosopographical collection consists of three different kinds of sources: transcriptions from biographical reference books, written biographical accounts and digitalised archival sources, such as enrolment registers. These resources were encoded according to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) guidelines with the purpose to denote specific structures and semantic features of the content. The thesis demonstrates how the prosopographical collection, stored in a master file in TEI/XML format, was encoded and organised and then further transformed, migrated and manipulated by other tools and to other platforms. This resulted in several examples of applications demonstrating a broad range of uses for research and teaching in history of education and alike. One conclusion is that the TEI guidelines serve well as a valuable tool for the markup of rather complex historical materials designed for multiple purposes: for qualitative analyses, and as input to multivariate statistical analyses, and for migration into relational databases. Another conclusion is that such digital collections, provided with markup, could be treated as research tools themselves, because they lend themselves much more than simply access, retrieval or reading. In this prosopographical collection, the markup contributes to make explicit the underlying theories and thus provides scholars, teachers and students with tools to reuse and rearrange the content for other kinds of uses in other areas.

Discrete and Continuous spatial encoding methods are described with details of understanding principles and practical implications. Step by step experimental op- timization procedure of these methods to achieve slice selection are also discussed. In the subsequent chapters we use these methods for different applications. Spin-lattice relaxation parameters of NMR active nuclei provide valuable infor- mation on molecular dynamics. Single scan selective excitation methods of mea- surement of T1 result in significant reduction of time compared to the standard inversion recovery method and are attractive tools of applications in `Real time' NMR investigations of biological and chemical processes. It is shown here that the addition of the gradient echo following the selective excitation not only significantly improves the S/N ratio, but also makes GESSIR a versatile pulse sequence. Using this sequence, T1 values ranging from 2 s to 56 s have been measured with accuracy comparable to the standard IR experiment. This indicates that it is possible to utilize GESSIR for a wide range of molecules containing protons and hetero nuclei with medium to long T1 relaxation times as a routine NMR technique. The utility of the technique for studying other relaxation parameters has also been demonstrated. It may be mentioned that for measurement of relaxation parameters routinely, a few well-chosen points are enough. A fine selection of large number of experimental points could be useful when high accuracy is required or Chapter 3. GESSIR 91 for applications where certain property of the system investigated is changing in a continuous manner spatially and requires large number of slices to be selected as discussed in the next chapter. The long duration of time-honored two dimensional experiments is reduced to fraction of seconds by employing the ultrafast encoding experiments. Main com- plications in making the UF experiments available for routine use were the limited spectral widths and resolution in both UF and conventional dimensions. Various developments have been made in the path of improvements in increasing the spectral width in UF dimension. Of these, two experimental methods that are already proposed, namely the folding of peaks into the observable spectral window and the interleaved acquisition which doubles the spectral widths in both dimensions. The integration of covariance processing with ultrafast technique yields better correlated spectrum with considerable improvement in resolution. The effectiveness of the new processing is demonstrated for UF COSY experiments which can be easily extended to other ultrafast homonuclear experiments like TOCSY, NOESY as well as multi dimensions. The proposed processing method is an initial step to work on improving resolutions of UF data and making the ease of applicability of ultrafast spectroscopy as a routine multidimensional NMR. At the same time of this work W. Qui et.al [268] proposed a processing method based on covariance and pattern recognition for improving resolutions of spatially encoded data. They used pattern recognition algorithm also for avoiding the artifacts due to very low resolution data available with the UF experiment. They implemented the method UF TOCSY spectra and shown resolution improvement with the covariance pro- cessing for relatively more number of detection gradients which is many times hardware limited. Our method of covariance data processing is essentially same as that of Qui, less number of acquisition gradients were used in our processing, linear prediction and apodization concepts were utilized and the artifacts arise due mismatch of datas with positive and negative acquisition gradients are minimized by shifting one the data. In conclusion new methods of processing/the combination of various processing methods of the ultrafast data have the scope of improving the quality of ultrafast NMR spectra.

This thesis focuses on problem-solution analysis of synchronous digital circuits; the results of which are autosynchronous circuit design methodology, timing parameter definitions based on simulation models and constraint settings. The RTL transformation of the synchronous state machine in VHDL language to an autosynchronous state machine was created with minimal modifications for the simple design of these circuits. Following this, a comparison of the transformed state machines with their synchronous originals in parameters such as chip area, current consumption and timing specification domain is introduced. The summation of this thesis displays a theoretical comparison of several types of synchronization (synchronous, autosynchronous, fundamental asynchronous, EAIC, Bundled-data, Dual-rail) which are presented on the single state machine example with the same technology parameters.

Diverse ägyptologische Großprojekte (TLA: http://aaew.bbaw.de/tla; Ramses: http://ramses.ulg.ac.be/; Rubensohn: http://elephantine.smb.museum/; Karnak: http://www.cfeetk.cnrs.fr/karnak/) erstellen annotierte Korpora. Für einen Datenaustausch ist ein standardisiertes Austauschformat, das auf TEI beruht, dringend erforderlich. Dazu haben sich diese Großprojekte zusammengeschlossen, um einen gemeinsamen Vorschlag zu erarbeiten. In unserem Vortrag möchten wir den aktuellen Stand der Diskussion präsentieren: Was ist der Basistext in der Auszeichnung: hieroglyphische Annotation oder die Umschrift des Textes? Wie geht man mit den verschiedenen Schriftformaten um? Können die Metadatenangaben im Header mithilfe gemeinsamer Thesauri standardisiert werden? Was wird inline, was wird stand-off annotiert?

Ausgehend von einer Darstellung der (an TEI angelehnten) Entwicklung von MEI werden die Forschungsperspektiven des Einsatzes dieses für wissenschaftliche Zwecke geschaffenen Formats und speziell das Potential seines umfangreichen Header-Bereichs beschrieben. Am Beispiel der Rolle von Faksimiles in Editionen wird deutlich, wie dieses Format zu einer neuen Zusammenarbeit von Wissenschaft und Bibliotheken beitragen kann. / Starting from the description of the development of MEI (which has to be seen in parallel with TEI) the paper deals with the perspectives of the usage of this format, which was designed for scholarly purposes and, in the library context, has high potentials especially in the header-section. The role of facsimiles in editions illustrates how this format might contribute to a new way of collaboration between the scholarly and the library world.

My thesis will demonstrate that Rate Adaptive Runlength Limited encoding (RA-RLL) achieves high data rates with acceptable error rate over a wide range of signal distortion/attenuation, and background noise. RA-RLL has performance superior to other infrared modulation schemes in terms of bandwidth efficiency, duty cycle control, and synchronization frequency. Rate adaptive techniques allow for quick convergence of RA-RLL parameters to acceptable values. RA-RLL may be feasibly implemented on systems with non-ideal timing and digital synchronization.

Existing methods in Reinforcement Learning (RL) that rely on gradient estimates suffer from the slow rate of convergence, poor sample efficiency, and computationally expensive training, especially when dealing with complex real-world problems with a sizable dimensionality of the state and action space. In this work, we attempt to leverage the benefits of evolutionary computation as a competitive, scalable, and gradient-free alternative to training deep neural networks for RL-specific problems. In this context, we present a novel distributed algorithm based on an efficient model encoding that allows the intuitive application of genetic operators. Our results demonstrate improved exploration and considerable reduction of trainable parameters while maintaining comparable performance with algorithms like Deep Q-Network (DQN), Asynchronous Advantage Actor Critic (A3C), and Evolution Strategy (ES) when evaluated on Atari 2600 games. A scalability assessment of the algorithm revealed a significant parallel speedup and over 10,000 fold improvement in memory requirement. Sample efficiency improved in some experiments, but not significantly. Finally, the algorithm was applied on a Remote Electrical Tilt (RET) optimization task, the improvements in Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) show that the algorithm is also effective in other domains. / gradientskattningar är begränsade av långsam konvergenshastighet, låg samplingeffektivitet och beräkningsmässigt dyra träningsprocedurer. Detta är särskilt fallet när dessa hanterar komplexa och verkliga problem med högdimensionella tillstånds- och handlingsrum. I detta arbete försöker vi utnyttja fördelarna med evolutionär beräkning som ett konkurrenskraftigt, skalbart och gradientfritt alternativ till att träna djupa neurala nätverk för RL-specifika problem. I detta sammanhang presenterar vi en ny distribuerad algoritm baserad på en effektiv modellkodning som möjliggör intuitiv tillämpning av genetiska operatorer. Våra resultat visar ett förbättrat utforskande och en avsevärd minskning av träningsbara.