Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2000. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 89-99).

Mediated public diplomacy plays an important role in attaining foreign policy objectives by communicating with foreign audiences in order to establish a dialogue intending to inform and influence. The Russian state-funded global network RT serves as an important tool of Russian mediated public diplomacy. Its purpose is not only to cover major global events that are often missed by the Western mainstream media, but also to apprise an international audience of an alternative pro-Russian perspective. Interestingly, although there are a few researches analysing Moscow's efforts to rebrand its international image in the last decade, there has been very little work done giving a good insight into Russian media. This dissertation seeks to participate in the discussion about public diplomacy in general by applying the framing theory as a tool of mediated diplomacy. A qualitative analysis of 97 articles discussing the effects of international sanctions imposed on Russia in the aftermath of the escalation of the Ukrainian crisis, revealed a constructed pro-Russian narrative. Several strategies are pursued to convince its audience about the rightness of the Russian stance and gain support for the Kremlin's assertions. Finally, RT aims to wipe out the demonisation of Putin and its administration and counterbalance the penetration of the West in its sphere of influence.

There's been a lot of debate behind frames per seconds in gaming recently and many people come with all kinds of strange claims. For example, that the eye can only see 30 frames per second, its more “cinematic” and that it is the optimal framerate for games.This thesis studies about the importance of frames per second within games and the history behind frames per seconds, in games and all the way back when movie industry began. What is best for higher player performance and what should developers strive for? There was a personal preliminary test with an extended playthroughs of each game, to see if the playstesters would experience similar issues. Afterwards two quantitative tests with two different methods, a blind test and a performance test, are conducted to measure if any player notices the differences, how the framerate can affect the player’s performance and what they preferred. / Det har varit en hel del debatt om bilder per sekund inom spel under de senaste åren och det har kommit fram alla möjliga konstiga påståenden. Till exempel, att ögat kan bara se 30 bilder per sekund, det är mer ”filmiskt” och att det är den optimala bildhastigheten för spel. Denna studier handlar om hur viktigt bilder per sekund inom spel är och historien bakom bilder per sekund, allt ifrån spel till filmindustrins början. Vad är bäst för högre prestationer för spelarna och vad bör spelutvecklare sträva efter? Ett personligt förberedande test med utsträckt igenomspelning av båda spelen, för att se om speltestarna skulle få ett liknande problem. Därefter två kvantitativa tester med två olika metoder, ett blindtest och ett prestandatest, genomförs för att mäta om någon spelare märker skillnaderna, hur de olika nivåerna av bilder per sekund kan påverka spelarna prestanda och vad de föredrog.

This thesis presents results of research aimed at developing an improved understanding of the behavior of column panel zones reinforced with doubler plates in seismic resistant steel moment frames. A primary goal of the research was to develop data to support the development of improved design guidelines for welding doubler plates to columns, with and without the presence of continuity plates. The research addressed several issues and questions related to welding and detailing of doubler plates. This included evaluation of the effects of welding the top and bottom of the doubler plate in addition to the vertical edges, the effects of extending the doubler plate beyond the panel zone, and the impact of welding a continuity plate to a doubler plate. These issues were investigated through detailed finite element models of a simplified representation of the panel zone region, subjected to monotonic loading. The results of the research suggest that, in general, there is little benefit in welding the top and bottom edges of a doubler plate if the vertical edges are welded, particularly in terms of overall panel zone strength and stiffness. However, the top and bottom welds provide some benefit in reducing stresses on the vertical welds. The results also suggest that extending the doubler plate above and below the panel zone has little benefit for heavy columns of shallow depth, such as the W14x398 considered in this analysis. However, extending the doubler plate did result in approximately a 10-percent increase in panel zone strength for deeper columns, such as the W40x264 considered in this analysis. Finally, the results showed that welding a continuity plate directly to a doubler plate had no adverse effects on the doubler plate in terms of increased forces or stresses. Interestingly, welding the continuity plate to the doubler plate simply changed the load path for transfer of load from the beam flange to the column web and doubler plate, but did not change the stresses in the doubler plate. Further research is needed to validate these findings for more accurate representations of the panel zone region of the column and for cyclic loading. / text

Η εργασία αυτή ασχολείται με τον υπολογισμό της δυναμικής απόκρισης επίπεδων μεταλλικών πλαισίων που υποβάλλονται σε σεισμική διέγερση, λαμβάνοντας υπόψη την επίδραση του ρυθμού παραμόρφωσης στις ιδιότητες του υλικού κατασκευής.Από την έρευνα προέκυψαν πολύ χρήσιμα συμπεράσματα που αιτιολογούν, σε ικανοποιητικό βαθμό, την απρόβλεπτη συμπεριφορά μεταλλικών κατασκευών κατά τη διάρκεια ισχυρών σεισμικών γεγονότων στο παρελθόν. / This work elaborates with the calculation of the dynamic response of plane steel frames subjected to earthquake motions taking care of strain rate effect on material properties. The obtained results justify, in a satisfactory way, the unpredictable behavior of steel structures observed in the past due to severe earthquake ground motions.

Lexical categories like noun and verb are foundational to language acquisition, but these categories do not come neatly packaged for the infant language learner. Some have proposed that infants can begin to solve this problem by tracking the frequent nonadjacent word (or morpheme) contexts of these categories. However, nonadjacent relationships that frame categories contain reliable adjacent relationships making the type of context (adjacent or nonadjacent) used for category acquisition unclear. In addition, previous research suggests that infants show learning of adjacent dependencies earlier than learning of nonadjacent dependencies and that the learning of nonadjacent word relationships is affected by the intervening information (how informative it is and how familiar it is). Together these issues raise the question of whether the type of context used for category acquisition changes as a function of development. To address this question, infants ages 13, 15, and 18 months were exposed to an artificial language containing adjacent and nonadjacent information that predicted a category. Infants were then tested to determine whether they 1) detected the category using adjacent information 2) only detected the nonadjacent dependency, with no categorization, or 3) detected both the nonadjacent relationship and the category. The results showed high individual variability in the youngest age group with a gradual convergence towards detecting the category and the associated environments by 18 months. These findings suggest that both adjacent and nonadjacent information may be used at early stages in category acquisition. The results reveal a dynamic picture of how infants use distributional information for category acquisition and support a developmental shift consistent with previous infant studies examining dependencies between words.

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We present an alternative method of extracting production related differences from time-lapse seismic data sets. Our method is not based on the actual subtraction of the two data sets, risking the enhancement of noise and introduction of artifacts due to local phase rotation and slightly misaligned events. Rather, it mutes events of the monitor survey with respect to the baseline survey based on the magnitudes of coefficients in a sparse and local atomic decomposition. Our technique is demonstrated to be an effective tool for enhancing the time-lapse signal from surveys which have been cross-equalized

Frames sind parametrisierte Elemente zur Erzeugung von Programmen in einer beliebigen Zielprogrammiersprache. Ihre Handhabung ist einfach und schnell zu erlernen. Allerdings findet bei Verwendung von Frames eine “Verunreinigung” des Programmcodes, der als Basis für die Generatorentwicklung dient, mit Befehlen der Generatorsprache statt. Dies erschwert die Weiterverwendung der gewohnten Entwicklungsumgebung für die Zielprogrammiersprache. Eine eventuelle Weiterentwicklung der Programmbasis muss anschließend in Form von Frames erfolgen. Im Rahmen dieser Arbeit erfolgt die Beschreibung noninvasiver Frames, bei denen Informationen zur Position der Frames getrennt vom Programmcode aufbewahrt werden. Ihre Vermischung erfolgt in einem separaten Schritt zur Darstellung oder zur eigentlichen Codeerzeugung. Der Prozess der Generatorentwicklung auf der Basis noninvasiver Frames passt sich gut in die Prozesse von Merkmal-orientierter (FOSD) und Generativer Softwareentwicklung (GSE) ein, weil noninvasive Frames die automatisierte Prüfung aller mit dem Generator erzeugbaren Programme hinsichtlich Syntax und bestimmter semantischer Eigenschaften unterstützen und die Generierung durch Auswahl der gewünschten Programmeigenschaften ermöglichen. Die Machbarkeit der Entwicklung von Softwaregeneratoren mit noninvasiven Frames wird anhand zweier Fallstudien demonstriert.

A fundamental task in structural stability analysis is to ensure the safety of structures throughout their operational life so as to prevent catastrophic consequences either at ambient or elevated temperatures. This thesis concerns the stability of unbraced steel frames due to abnormal loadings or fire loads, and develops practical methods to evaluate the stability capacity of unbraced steel frames at ambient temperature or in fire. The problem of determining the elastic buckling strengths of unbraced steel frames subjected to variable loadings can be expressed as an optimization problem with stability constraints based on the concept of storey-based buckling. The optimization problem can be solved by the linear programming method, which is considerably simpler and more suitable for engineering practice than the nonlinear programming method. However, it was found that the frame buckling strength obtained from the linear programming method based on Taylor series approximation on column stiffness may be overestimated in some cases. Thus, a secant approximation of the column stiffness was introduced, and a modified linear programming method based on the secant approximation was proposed. Numerical examples show that the linear programming method in light of the secant approximation can yield conservative results and maintain simplicity. In spite of the convenience of the modified linear programming method, numerical examples show that the linear programming method cannot accurately detect the maximum and minimum frame buckling strengths in some cases. Therefore, an alternative method to assess the lateral stiffness of an axially loaded column derived by using two cubic Hermite elements to signify the column is proposed. Unlike the column stiffness obtained from the Euler-Bernoulli beam theory containing transcendental functions, the stiffness in the proposed method includes only polynomials. Thus, the column stiffness within the proposed method enables the minimization and maximization problems to be solved by efficient gradient-based nonlinear programming algorithms, which overcome the inability of linear programming algorithm to detect the minimum frame buckling strength in some cases. The accuracy of the column stiffness associated with the proposed method was compared with that of the Euler-Bernoulli beam theory. Four unbraced steel frames were investigated to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method. It is known that the evaluation of the lateral stability of steel frames subjected to elevated temperatures is different from that at ambient temperature due to the degradation of material strength. Thus, the storey-based buckling method at ambient temperature was extended to evaluating the stability of unbraced steel frames subjected to elevated temperature. To simulate a steel column exposed to the elevated temperature, an analytical model was proposed to examine the effects of axial loading, elevated temperature, and thermal boundary restraints on the lateral stiffness of steel columns in unbraced frames. The procedure of evaluating the stability capacity of unbraced steel frames at elevated temperature was then concluded. Numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the evaluation procedure of the proposed method. The column model was then refined to evaluate the lateral stiffness of steel column subjected to non-uniform elevated temperature distributions along the longitudinal direction. The lateral stiffness equation of the column model was derived based on the Euler-Bernoulli beam theory. The procedure to evaluate the stability capacity of unbraced steel frames subjected to non-uniform elevated temperature distributions was then concluded. The numerical examples were investigated with the proposed method for non-uniform elevated temperature distributions. Finally, initial attempts were made to evaluate the stability of unbraced steel frames with fire-protected columns at different fire scenarios. A degradation factor charactering the variation of the Young's Modulus of steel at elevated temperature was introduced. The objective and constraint functions were constructed, and optimal tools were used to determine the buckling strength of an unbraced steel frame at different fire scenarios.