Fire Safety Engineering is required at every stage in the life cycle of modern-day buildings. Fire safety design, detection and suppression, and emergency response are all vital components of Structural Fire Safety but are usually perceived as independent issues. Sensor deployment and exploitation is now common place in modern buildings for means such as temperature, air quality and security management. Despite the potential wealth of information these sensors could afford fire fighters, the design of sensor networks within buildings is entirely detached from procedures associated to emergency management. The experiences of Dalmarnock Fire Test Two showed that streams of raw data emerging from sensors lead to a rapid information overload and do little to improve the understanding of the complex phenomenon and likely future events during a real fire. Despite current sensor technology in other fields being far more advanced than that of fire, there is no justification for more complex and expensive sensors in this context. In isolation therefore, sensors are not sufficient to aid emergency response. Fire modelling follows a similar path. Two studies of Dalmarnock Fire Test One demonstrate clearly the current state of the art of fire modelling. A Priori studies by Rein et al. 2009 showed that blind prediction of the evolution of a compartment fire is currently beyond the state of the art of fire modelling practice. A Posteriori studies by Jahn et al. 2007 demonstrated that even with the provision of large quantities of sensor data, video footage, and prior knowledge of the fire; producing a CFD reconstruction was an incredibly difficult, laborious, intuitive and repetitive task. Fire fighting is therefore left as an isolated activity that does not benefit from sensor data or the potential of modelling the event. In isolation sensors and fire modelling are found lacking. Together though they appear to form the perfect compliment. Sensors provide a plethora of information which lacks interpretation. Models provide a method of interpretation but lack the necessary information to make this output robust. Thus a mechanism to achieve accurate, timely predictions by means of theoretical models steered by continuous calibration against sensor measurements is proposed. Issues of accuracy aside, these models demand heavy resources and computational time periods that are far greater than the time associated with the processes being simulated. To be of use to emergency responders, the output would need to be produced faster than the event itself with lead time to enable planning of an intervention strategy. Therefore in isolation, model output is not robust or fast enough to be implemented in an emergency response scenario. The concept of super-real time predictions steered by measurements is studied in the simple yet meaningful scenario of concurrent flow flame spread. Experiments have been conducted with PMMA slabs to feed sensor data into a simple analytical model. Numerous sensing techniques have been adapted to feed a simple algebraic expression from the literature linking flame spread, flame characteristics and pyrolysis evolution in order to model upward flame spread. The measurements are continuously fed to the computations so that projections of the flame spread velocity and flame characteristics can be established at each instant in time, ahead of the real flame. It was observed that as the input parameters in the analytical models were optimised to the scenario, rapid convergence between the evolving experiment and the predictions was attained.

ABSTRACT This thesis offers a feminist cultural analysis of the popular Indonesian television serial (sinetron) Misteri Gunung Merapi (Mysteries of Mount Merapi). It investigates the television text in relation to its various contexts within the social and cultural transformations of contemporary Indonesia. Misteri Gunung Merapi has been produced since 1998, shortly after the financial crisis and the fall of the New Order regime. Since it was first broadcast by the Indosiar television station, it has ranked among the top-rating television programs in Indonesia, and I am interested in its success in this era of social transformation. The purpose of my study is to examine the significance of this success, including exploring the possibility that it is due to the serial’s engagement with recent issues in contemporary Indonesian culture, in particular the changing roles of women. The discussion falls into three main parts: a consideration of the contexts of socio-cultural change and the globalisation of the television industry within which the sinetron is produced; an examination of the way the sinetron draws on traditional theatrical performance, popular memory and supernatural belief; and a study of its representation of women and gender issues within the action-adventure genre to which it belongs. In the context of the television industry, this sinetron’s production signals the changing character of the industry, from state control to free market. In the socio-cultural context, as state control grew weaker and civil society flourished, the flow of globalization became more visible, foregrounding conflicts between Islamic and secular groups, often over the roles and representations of women. As a sinetron kolosal-laga or epic, the series tells historical and legendary stories in such a way that they speak to contemporary Indonesia as it is in the process of reinventing itself. Misteri Gunung Merapi draws on the narrative and dramatic conventions of both traditional theatrical performance and internationally popular genres of action cinema; it constructs popular memory to raise issues about the present; and it employs popular fascination with the supernatural to invoke the mixture of spiritual traditions that has always characterised Javanese culture, in particular. Focussing on the emergence of warrior women in film and television in both the Hollywood action-adventure and Kung Fu/wuxia genres, the thesis investigates the construction of female fighters on screen. I suggest that the sinetron does not share the same problems of gender representation that feminist criticism has identified in either of these genres. Four areas of analysis - heroism, body, power, and the camera - demonstrate that there is a different concept of gender in Indonesia which is illuminated in this sinetron’s representations of women and gender issues.

Denna uppsats beskriver det praktiska arbetet bakom balanseringen av skadevärden gentemot de två fighting-stilarna Mace och Dual-Wield i spelet Project Colosseum. Uppsatsen inleds med en beskrivning av bakgrunden till spelet, varefter de verktyg som använts i processen beskrivs i detalj. Vidare presenteras praktiska exempel på uträkningar innan ett antal teorier rörande balansering, hämtade från facklitteratur presenteras. Avslutningsvis förs en diskussion kring arbetets validitet, dess förhållande till de teorier som presenterats samt den egna kunskapsprocessen.

Fighting has been a centerpiece of the National Hockey League since it was formed in 1917. Although rules have been introduced regulating the physicality of play in the NHL, fighting is demanded—and encouraged—by fans and players alike. Fans have long been attracted to the violence of professional hockey; previous studies have documented that professional hockey is a “blood sport” that generates revenues with violence. This research investigates the effect of fighting on player salaries in the NHL, examining the way in which fighting has become a strategic element of the game, describing the way players enforce their own “Code” of hockey rules and police the ice in ways referees cannot, and comparing the salaries of fighters and skilled players to determine how players in different roles are valued.

Spelutveckling är något som ständigt förändras, möjligheterna vi har idag är väldigt olika de möjligheter vi hade för tio år sedan och de möjligheter som vi kommer att ha om tio år. I denna rapport vill vi utforska några av dessa nya möjligheter och vi vill därför ta reda på hur väl lämpat C# och WPF är för implementationen av ett timingbaserat fightingspel till rörelsesensorn Microsoft Kinect genom att genomföra sagda implementation. Resultatet av detta examensarbete är en tidig version av spelet och en analys av de svårigheter som har uppstått och de begräsningar som vi har upptäckt med C#, WPF och Kinect.

Decision makers often present military researchers with a most daunting challenge: to pursue, with some level of prophetic certainty, innovative concepts that will yield increased capabilities during future wars against forecasted threats in not-yet- determined locations. This conundrum is complicated further with the requirement that the proposed technology yield benefit throughout the various strata of military operations. In the maturation of an advanced capability enabled by a technological advancement, a groundbreaking design should simultaneously demonstrate performance overmatch against an envisioned foe while showing that the costs associated with development, procurement, and operation outweigh reverting to an incremental advancement in the conventional means of delivering combat power. This manuscript focuses on the construction and utilization of decision support tools for use by scientists and engineers charged with providing a quantitative evaluation of an advanced ground combat system. The concepts presented focus on the effects and synergy regarding the combat vehicle principal attributes of survivability, lethality, and mobility. Additionally, this study provides a framework for analysis of these attributes when screened at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels of war. These concepts are presented and demonstrated from both the candidate selection (or choice) perspective, and the concept development (or design) perspective. As an example of this approach, this study includes a comparison of conventional powder gun cannonry versus a specific type of electromagnetic launch device known as the railgun. The decision support tools formulated in this dissertation allow the user to distill, at a coarse level of fidelity, the parametric relationships between system survivability, lethality, and mobility for advanced weapon system concepts. The proposed methods are suited for evaluation at the nascent stages of development, when the information normally applied in standard methods is sparse. This general approach may also be valuable in contemporary acquisition strategies employed in urgent fielding efforts, where the immediacy of the problem can benefit from an expedient and efficient method of analyzing the coupled and synergistic effects of implementing a proposed technology. While advantage is typically measured in terms of performance overmatch at the platform level, the broadening of this consideration vertically to higher levels of military command can aid in identifying the competing issues and complementary relationships related to a technical approach. Finally, given the backdrop demonstration for the framework, this manuscript may serve as a brief summary of system fundamentals and design theory for direct fire powder gun cannonry and electromagnetic railguns. / text

Firefighters often arrive at structures in which the state of fire progression can be described as ventilation-controlled or under-ventilated. This means that inside the enclosure the pyrolyzed fuel has consumed most, if not all of the available oxygen, resulting in incomplete combustion. Under-ventilated (fuel rich) combustion is particularly dangerous to occupants because of the high yield of toxins such as carbon monoxide and to firefighters because once firefighters enter the structure and introduce oxidizer, the environment can rapidly change into a very dangerous, fast burning condition. The fuel load in many compartment fires would support a several megawatt fire if the fire were not ventilation controlled. In the process of making entrance to the fire compartment, firefighters will likely provide additional ventilation paths for the fire and may initiate firefighting tactics like positive pressure ventilation to push the hot flammable combustion products out of the attack pathway. Forced ventilation creates a strongly mixed flow within the fire compartment. Ventilation creates a complex fluid mechanics and combustion environment that is generally not analyzed on the scale of compartment fires. To better understand the complex coupling of these phenomena, compartment scale non-reacting and reacting experiments were conducted. The experiments, which were conducted at The University of Texas at Austin’s fire research facility, were designed to gain insight into the effects of ventilation on compartment thermal characteristics. Computational models (low and high order) were used to augment the non-reacting and reacting experimental results. Though computationally expensive, computational fluid dynamics models provided significant detail into the coupling of buoyantly driven fire products with externally applied wind or fan flow. A partially stirred reactor model was used to describe strongly driven fire compartment combustion processes because previously there was not an appropriate low dimensional computational tool applicable to this type of problem. This dissertation will focus on the experimental and computational characterization of strong vent flows on single room enclosure fires. / text

Playing is a common behavior among juveniles of many mammalian species, including rats (Rattus norvegicus). The mechanisms underlying the change that occurs in the play fighting of male rats at puberty were the focus of this thesis. It was found that castration at weaning disrupted the formation of male-typical dominance relationships, but did not alter the pubertal changes in play fighting, whereas neonatal castration prevented the shift from juvenile- to adult-typical behaviour at puberty. This transistion is male specific and cannot be induced in females by exposing htme to more extreme social contexts, involving interactions with unfamiliar males. The change in play by males at puberty is not, then, a byproduct of other sex differences, but results from a highly specific mechanism in early infancy. The significance of this sex difference is explored with respect to the functions of play fighting in rats and other species. / xii, 137 leaves : ill. ; 28 cm.

Play fighting in kindling-prone (FAST) and kindling-resistant (SLOW) rats: Potential genetic controls over the components of play. Even though the behavioral components of play fighting have been well characterized in the rat, little is known about the underlying neurobehavioral mechanisms that control them. FAST and SLOW lines of selectively-bred rats were used to determine whether the components of play fighting were dissociable. Differences in their respective play profiles suggest tht there are genetic differences in the expression of differnt components of play. The effects of gene-environment interactions on the components of play suggest that playful attack and playful defense may be differentially labile, and that socially-relevant envionmental manipulations may have a greater impact on social interactions in adulthood than in the juvenile phase. Furthermore, these findings suggest that the genetic constraints on each of the components of play fighting give each component a unique pattern of context-dependent change. Future experiments using FAST and SLOW, as well as other selectively-bred lines of rats may provide insight into the proximate mechanisms regulating play fighting. / viii, 125 leaves ; 28 cm.

Protective helmets used by fire-fighters must be designed to minimize the amount of heat transferred to the users head while providing durability, comfort, and affordable costs. This thesis highlights the evaluation of new helmet technology specifically tailored to high radiant heat environments to advance the state-of-the-art in head protection for this application. The research focused on the assessment of the outer shells of helmets and the properties of the surfaces. The development included the evaluation of radiation heat transfer, in a laboratory environment, to various helmet shell surface constructions. Industry standards were considered, and critiqued. Experiments were designed to isolate critical design variables for measurement and evaluation. Custom, purpose-built laboratory apparatus for testing helmets were designed, explained and utilized in the testing of specimens. Additionally, market demands for firefighting helmets were explored. Helmet durability was specifically addressed with abrasion criteria established and the reflectivity effects of the abraded surfaces evaluated. Resulting from this study, new surface technologies were identified for possible development in future helmet designs. Various surface materials, finishes, and coatings were compared and contrasted to current industry state-of-the-art equipment. The knowledge discovered further advanced modern head protection science in aim of increased safety and performance of fire-fighting personnel.