Conventional production of meat products from ruminant animals in the United States requires inputs including the cultivation and nitrogen fertilization of annual grains such as corn and barley, and transportation of cattle and grain to feedlots. Consumers have concerns about the impact of feedlot conditions on animal health, and about the implications of pharmaceutical inputs such as growth hormones and antibiotics on the environment and human health. These concerns have led to a growing interest in pasturefinished meat production by consumers. Such smaller-scale livestock production systems can be healthier and lower-stress for animals, are integrated into local food systems and are more transparent to consumers, and have higher potential profitability for producers than traditional ruminant production methods. There is a strong market for pasture-finished beef products, and prices for naturally or organically raised beef have remained well above feedlot-produced product prices. There is also concern about the impact of ruminant production on the environment, including air and water pollution from feedlot production and greenhouse gasses that are emitted from ruminant animals during feed digestion. This thesis project explored the potential of a beef production system based on perennial legumes, including the non-bloating legume birdsfoot trefoil (BFT; Lotus corniculatus L.) for producing meat products from cattle while reducing concentrate feeding and methane production. The condensed tannins that are produced by BFT bind proteins in the rumen but allow them to be digested in the abomasum and intestines, which in turn leads to better utilization of forage nutrients during the finishing period and higher gains or milk production. The higher digestibility of legumes compared with grasses reduces methane emissions in cattle both through higher digestibility of the forage and through direct impacts on methanogens operating in the rumen. As reported in this thesis, steers finished on BFT gained significantly more weight per day than steers fed another perennial forage legume, cicer milkvetch, but did not gain as rapidly as feedlot-fed steers. At the end of summer grazing, the blood plasma of pasture-fed steers was lower in saturated and omega-6 fatty acids and higher in transvaccenic and omega-3 fatty acids than the blood plasma of feedlot-fed steers. When beef cows grazed grass and legume pastures, enteric methane emissions were lower on the legume pastures than the grass pasture. These results demonstrate that, compared with other feed sources, perennial legume pastures used for cattle production can improve cattle gains and reduce environmental impacts.

Justice Thurgood Marshall proposed a three-pronged postulate in his dissent in1972 in the Furman v. Georgia (408 U.S. 238) Supreme Court case. The American public is generally uninformed when it comes to the death penalty, and given information a "great mass of citizens" would be against it, unless their underlying beliefs were rootedin retribution (Furman v. Georgia, p. 363). These statements subsequently came to be known as the Marshall Hypothesis, and were deemed testable by researchers. This study examines the influence on death penalty opinion as a consequence of participating in a college class on the death penalty. Students in the class, who were either criminology majors or minors, were asked to take part in a questionnaire regarding their attitudes toward capital punishment at the beginning and at the end of the semester.Over the course of the class, students took part in a pre and post-test designed to measure their knowledge of the death penalty. This study correlated the amount of knowledge gained by each student with their respective death penalty attitudes. Results indicated that many in the class had little knowledge of the practice, application, and corollary effects of capital punishment. Those students who made the greatest amount of knowledge gains also reported a reduction in support for capital punishment. The acceptance of death penalty truths was not found to be related to a reduction in death penalty support. Further analysis, however, showed that those students who accepted these death penalty “truths” were also able to disregard death penalty “myths.” The present study concludes that support for the death penalty is directly reduced through increased knowledge gain, and indirectly reduced through truth acceptance as a function of death penalty “myth” abandonment.

L'augmentation exponentiel des performances des lignes de télécommunication optique est en partie du au développement de deux technologie : l'amplificateur à fibre dopée erbium(EDFA) et l'utilisation du multiplexage en longueur d'onde (WDM). Or, combinée, ces des technologies font apparaitre sur les lignes de télécommunication le problème de saturation spectrale du gain (GSHB), un trou se perce dans la bande de gain lorsqu'un fort signal passe dans la fibre amplificatrice.<br />Ce travail de thèse étudie donc ce problème afin de le relier à des grandeurs et des phénomènes physiques connus. Nous avons donc du procédé à des expériences de spectrométrie directement sur fibre optique afin d'effectuer des comparaisons entre les grandeurs mesurée sur échantillons massifs, et en particulier la largeur homogène, celle mesurée sur fibre optique à la fois par des technique comparables (RFLN), et via le trou de GSHB. <br />Nous avons ensuite effectué la première modélisation de l'EDFA qui tient compte des aspects inhomogènes de la répartition de l'erbium dans la matrice hôte, celui-ci rend pour la première fois, compte qualitativement de phénomène lié à l'inhomogénéité tel que le GSHB.<br />Enfin nous avons étudié de nouveaux matériaux utilisables pour l'amplification optique fibré, des matériaux nanostructurés. En effet, contrôler l'environnement de l'erbium indépendamment de la matrice hôte, permettrait d'optimiser à la fois les propriétés de luminescence de l'erbium et les aspects fibrage et guide optique de l'EDFA. Nous avons donc mis en évidence les propriétés particulières de l'erbium dans ces nanoparticules.

L'objectif de ce travail est d'étudier la possibilité d'étendre les formats de modulation utilisés actuellement en télécommunications optiques par solitons. Face aux techniques classiques de modulation d'intensité, multiplexage temporel, et multiplexage en longueur d'onde, largement répandues dans de tels systèmes, nous avons réalisé un démonstrateur basé sur les retards optiques et la modulation de phase différentielle. Cette modulation s'apparente à un codage cohérent, c'est à dire que l'information est codée dans la phase optique des solitons transmis. De plus, l'utilisation de retards optiques nous fournit un moyen naturel de multiplexage / démultiplexage tout optique. Cette technique nous a permis d'explorer les effets propres à la phase dans la propagation de solitons sur une liaison amplifiée. Nous avons donc réalisé une source soliton basée sur la commutation de gain d'un laser semiconducteur et la compression linéaire au moyen d'un réseau de Bragg chirpé photoinscrit. Afin d'évaluer les performances du système proposé, nous avons ensuite étudié la stabilité de la phase d'un soliton face au bruit des amplificateurs optiques de manière théorique. L'expression analytique obtenue a été validée par des simulations numériques basées sur la méthode split-step Fourier. Cette étude nous a permis de mettre en évidence l'effet bénéfique du filtrage en ligne sur la stabilité de la phase. Enfin, nous avons réalisé un démonstrateur mettant en pratique le format de modulation proposé. Celui-ci comporte un unique dispositif pour simuler le codeur et le décodeur, et la propagation sur de longues distances est étudiée grâce à une boucle de recirculation. La gigue de phase mesurée correspond assez bien aux estimations théoriques.

Les réseaux de diffraction sont largement utilisés dans le traitement optique de l'information. Toutefois, les applications nécessitent des efficacités de diffraction importantes, d'excellentes résolutions dans le domaine des fréquences spatiales et des temps de réponses appropriés à la fonction recherchée (grande durée de vie pour les mémoires, temps de réponses rapide pour les opérations de traitements de l'information...). Ces qualités étant difficiles à obtenir à l'aide des matériaux existants, une solution consiste à placer le matériau non-linéaire à l'intérieur d'une cavité Fabry-Pérot, avec le double avantage d'obtenir une efficacité de diffraction fortement accrue et une résolution dans le domaine des fréquences spatiales améliorée. Le mémoire rapporte comment l'utilisation d'un milieu intracavité amplificateur permet d'accroître encore davantage la puissance du faisceau diffracté, avec des efficacités de diffraction largement supérieures à l'unité. Les propriétés diffractives des réseaux d'indice et/ou de gain insérés dans un résonateur de Fabry-Pérot amplificateur de longueur supérieure ou égale à l'épaisseur du réseau sont analysées théoriquement et expérimentalement. Un modèle analytique a été élaboré et a permis de montrer l'immense potentiel de tels dispositifs, en terme de sélectivité angulaire et d'efficacité de diffraction, cette dernière pouvant être très largement supérieure à l'unité. Un dispositif expérimental a ensuite été conçu afin de prouver la faisabilité du concept et de valider le modèle analytique. Le milieu non-linéaire intracavité est un cristal de Nd:YVO4. Le réseau est inscrit optiquement par absorption de la figure d'interférence de deux faisceaux d'écriture. La diffraction du signal de lecture est analysée autour de la double résonance de Bragg et de Fabry-Pérot, ainsi qu'à proximité de l'une ou de l'autre résonance séparément, afin de remonter aux propriétés diffractives du réseau. Les résultats expérimentaux sont en bon accord avec les calculs numériques issus du modèle analytique. La comparaison avec le réseau de Bragg hors cavité montre l'amélioration significative apportée par la cavité amplificatrice: l'efficacité de diffraction est augmentée d'un facteur 5000 et la sélectivité angulaire d'un facteur proche de 20. Ces résultats sont très encourageants pour une application de ce type de dispositif au traitement optique de l'information, surtout dans le cas où une très forte sortance est nécessaire.

<p>Three of the most important factors with regards to wireless multi-hop networks, namely reachability, energy consumption and network stability are considered in our transmitter macrodiversity supported broadcasting routing algorithms. Broadcasting applications are not only used to send routing table, queries, programming logic, any specific request etc. to all the nodes from access point but are also capable of playing a vital role in wireless TV distributions and visual sensor networks. All the algorithms are simulated in the MATLAB environment in which the nodes are random and are battery driven on a multi-hop randomized topology. Four new single frequency network (SFN) based algorithms (SFN-A, SFN-B, SFN-C and SFN-D) are formed in order to work over multi-hopping and where three of the algorithms SFN-A, SFN-B and SFN-D bear more or less the same amount of reachability. These three algorithms are able to reach more than 90% of reachability in only Tx power -8dBm whereas non-SFN requires -4dBm and SFN-C requires -2dBm and, in addition can achieve a maximum of 29 percentage points more reachability than the non-SFN algorithm. However, the best algorithm SFN-D consumes a maximum of 58.76% less energy than the SFN-A and a maximum of 14.28% less energy than the SFN-B. The SFN-D algorithm achieves a maximum 3.43 dB diversity gain together with the maximum 37.33% energy consumption gain in comparison to the non-SFN algorithm.</p>

<p>The goal of this Master thesis has on the one hand been to create a simulation environment for robots, where not only the simulations in this work can be performed, but also similar robot simulations, and on the other hand to study regulators that can increase the possibilities of rejecting disturbances on an industrial robot. The robot model used has three degrees of freedom, corresponding to the three main links on ABB:s IRB7600. </p><p>The simulation environment is created using Matlab, Simulink, and Robotics Toolbox. It is constructed in a general way and can be used for simulations of other robot objects created in Robotics Toolbox. </p><p>A gain scheduling is added to the LQ-regulator, where the feedback matrix is varied depending on the arm position in the workspace. The gain scheduling is implemented along a reference path in the workspace, around which the simulations and frequency analyses are performed. </p><p>The regulators that have been tested are a PID-regulator, a gain scheduled LQ-regulator, a gain scheduled LQ-regulator with reconstructed states, and finally a fix LQ-regulator with reconstructed states. Results from the tests show that the gain scheduling LQ-regulator is the one that yields the best rejection of disturbances, but the corresponding regulator with reconstructed states, which is more realistic, performs nearly as well. The model based regulators are, however, significantly better when it comes to rejecting disturbances than the PID-regulator.</p>

<p>The overall objective of the Wallenberg Laboratory for Information Technology and Autonomous Systems (WITAS) at Linköping University is the development of an intelligent command and control system, containing vision sensors, which supports the operation of a unmanned air vehicle (UAV) in both semi- and full-autonomy modes. One of the UAV platforms of choice is the APID-MK3 unmanned helicopter, by Scandicraft Systems AB. The intended operational environment is over widely varying geographical terrain with traffic networks and vehicle interaction of variable complexity, speed, and density.</p><p>The present version of APID-MK3 is capable of autonomous take-off, landing, and hovering as well as of autonomously executing pre-defined, point-to-point flight where the latter is executed at low-speed. This is enough for performing missions like site mapping and surveillance, and communications, but for the above mentioned operational environment higher speeds are desired. In this context, the goal of this thesis is to explore the possibilities for achieving stable ‘‘aggressive’’ manoeuvrability at high-speeds, and test a variety of control solutions in the APID-MK3 simulation environment.</p><p>The objective of achieving ‘‘aggressive’’ manoeuvrability concerns the design of attitude/velocity/position controllers which act on much larger ranges of the body attitude angles, by utilizing the full range of the rotor attitude angles. In this context, a flight controller should achieve tracking of curvilinear trajectories at relatively high speeds in a robust, w.r.t. external disturbances, manner. Take-off and landing are not considered here since APIDMK3 has already have dedicated control modules that realize these flight modes.</p><p>With this goal in mind, we present the design of two different types of flight controllers: a fuzzy controller and a gradient descent method based controller. Common to both are model based design, the use of nonlinear control approaches, and an inner- and outer-loop control scheme. The performance of these controllers is tested in simulation using the nonlinear model of APID-MK3.</p> / Report code: LiU-Tek-Lic-2002:11. The format of the electronic version of this thesis differs slightly from the printed one: this is due mainly to font compatibility. The figures and body of the thesis are remaining unchanged.

<p>Today’s diesel engines are complex with systems like VGT and EGR to be able to fulfil the stricter emission legislations and the demands on the fuel consumption. Controlling a system like this demands a sophisticated control system. Furthermore, the authorities demand on self diagnosis requires an equal sophisticated diagnosis system. These systems require good knowledge about the signals present in the system and how they affect each other.</p><p>One way to achieve this is to have a good model of the system and based on this calculate an observer. The observer is then used to estimate signals used for control and diagnosis. Advantages with an observer instead of using just sensors are that the sensor signals often are noisy and need to be filtered before they can be used. This causes time delay which further complicates the control and diagnosis systems. Other advantages are that sensors are expensive and that some engine quantities are hard to measure.</p><p>In this Master’s thesis a model of a Scania diesel engine is developed and an observer is calculated. Due to the non-linearities in the model the observer is based on a constant gain extended Kalman filter.</p>

<p>Bakgrund: Migration är ett vanligt förekommande fenomen idag vare sig den är ofrivillig eller frivillig. Mycket forskning har gjorts om den ofrivilliga flyktingmigrationen men ytterst lite forskning har fokuserat på den frivilliga migrationen, då i synnerhet gällande högutbildade individer med special kompetens. </p><p>Avgränsningar: Vi har begränsat oss till att studera de mer rationella orsakerna till inflödet av utländsk kompetens, vilka anses vara lättare för en stat att påverka. Vidare så har vi fokuserat oss mot de individer som anses vara högutbildade eller inneha en speciell eftertraktad kompetens. Studien är också begränsad till att studera migration av högutbildad arbetskraft mellan i-länder. </p><p>Syfte: Syftet med denna uppsats är att undersöka orsakerna till det nettoinflöde av utländsk kompetens till ett visst land vilka kan påverkas av statliga åtgärder. I vårt fall har vi använt oss av Nederländerna som ett studieobjekt i vår undersökning för att se vad den nederländska staten gjort för att attrahera utländsk kompetens. Genomförande: Uppsatsen baseras på empiriska resultat som insamlades under en veckas uppehåll i Nederländerna. Vi har också använt oss av litteratur och artiklar angående migration av högutbildade. Viss statistik data angående Nederländerna har också använts. </p><p>Resultat: Vi har funnit att orsakerna till migration av högutbildade individer styrs av både rationella och irrationella faktorer som mer eller mindre kan påverkas av statliga åtgärder. Vad gäller Nederländerna så har man inte tagit några åtgärder med det explicita syftet att attrahera utländsk kompetens. Detta har blivit en positiv konsekvens av den nederländska statens försök att attrahera utländska direktinvesteringar. Slutligen har vi funnit att"brain drain"inte nödvändigtvis är en negativ företeelse på lång sikt.</p> / <p>Background: It is a common phenomenon for people today to leave their country of origin to move to another country. Involuntary movements have been the focus of much research, however little has been done to explain why voluntary migration takes place specifically amongst highly skilled individuals.</p><p>Purpose: The purpose of this report is therefore to investigate the reasons for the net inflow of foreign skilled workforce to a country, which a government can influence. In doing so we have made use of the Netherlands as a case study. </p><p>Limitations: We have focused on the inflow of foreign competence for more rational reasons, which a country's government could have some influence upon. Furthermore, we will concentrate on those individuals who are considered to be highly educated or specialists. The study is limited to the migration of skilled labour from one industrialised country to another. </p><p>Manner of Proceedings: The report is based on empirical results collected during a weeks visit to the Netherlands. We have also made use of literature and articles treating the brain drain-brain gain phenomenon. Some use of statistics regarding the Netherlands has also been used. </p><p>Results: We have found that the reasons for the migration of highly skilled labour is dependent on both rational and irrational factors of influence. The possibility for a government to influence any of these issues varies. Regarding the Netherlands nothing has been done with the explicit intent of attracting foreign competence, this has been a positive side effect in the attempt to attract FDI. Finally we have found that brain drain is not necessarily a bad phenomenon in the long run.</p>