Proteins are the fundamental unit of computation and signal processing in biological systems. A quantitative understanding of protein biophysics is of paramount importance, since even slight malfunction of proteins can lead to diverse and severe disease states. However, developing accurate and useful mechanistic models of protein function can be strikingly elusive. I demonstrate that the adoption of Bayesian statistical methods can greatly aid in modeling protein systems. I first discuss the pitfall of parameter non-identifiability and how a Bayesian approach to modeling can yield reliable and meaningful models of molecular systems. I then delve into a particular case of non-identifiability within the context of an emerging experimental technique called single molecule photobleaching. I show that the interpretation of this data is non-trivial and provide a rigorous inference model for the analysis of this pervasive experimental tool. Finally, I introduce the use of nonparametric Bayesian inference for the analysis of single molecule time series. These methods aim to circumvent problems of model selection and parameter identifiability and are demonstrated with diverse applications in single molecule biophysics. The adoption of sophisticated inference methods will lead to a more detailed understanding of biophysical systems. / text

Better understanding of urban travelers is necessary, as sustainable development is becoming an integral part of transportation policy and practice. A volume of research shows people’s expressed willingness to adopt more sustainable urban travel behaviours, but a general sense of resistance to change is often encountered. Current methods in transportation research are not able to fully grasp on individual motivations such as discontent with public transport. This gap of knowledge in qualitative transportation research calls for the development of new methods. James Scott’s concept of the hidden transcript allows for the assumption that there are expressions of dissatisfaction towards public transportation at grassroots level. In order to access hidden transcripts on public transportation in Stockholm there is a need for a new method, which is developed in this thesis. The proposed visual mixed method draws from principles of visual ethnography, virtual ethnography, nethnography and social media research. The methodology is then tested and assessed as a platform to give voice to hidden transcripts on public transportation. The choice of method for developing the method is meta-methodology. The discussion sheds light on the potential of the framework (1) to grant access to hidden transcripts; (2) to fill a knowledge gap in transportation qualitative research; (3) to assist planners towards sustainable development of urban transportation.

本文共包含三大部分，第一部份為《隱藏層》，其次為《隱藏層》原創小說，最末為《隱藏層》創作的論述。 本創作與論述係由《隱藏層》小說為開端，之後改編為劇本，最後以論述方式來檢視之前的創作。 劇本共計有八十八場戲，小說有三十二章，論述共有五章，分別為創作動機、科幻潮流、劇本編輯、劇本內容討論、以及結論、討論與問題提出等五章。 因本創作作品應該歸類在科學幻想作品當中，論述中討論科學幻想作品的歷史與演進，並提及西洋、日本與本國的科學幻想作品演進歷史，並從中尋求本文所處定位。 台灣科學幻想作品一向都有持續發展，但鮮少為文壇主流，甚至純文學者流，往往視之為旁門左道，非文學之類，因此造成書寫者往往沒有充足的發表空間與被欣賞、討論的論域。至於改換成劇本或者拍攝成電視、電影的作品，則更是寥寥可數。一來資金方面不若美國好萊塢雄厚，往往無法製作精緻的畫面，二來既然此一論域一向不被重視，沒有前途/錢途，自然難以吸引優秀人才投入，製作出可看性高的作品。 本文則嘗試從此一科學幻想角度切入，雖沒能耐也沒野心將科學幻想作品一下提升至重要地位，但也希望能夠使用這一題材創作出具有本土拍攝可能性的、好看的作品。 此外，內文中由創作改編為劇本，因此，不僅只是單純的創作，也藉由自我反省式的思考，從形式上對劇本編輯的方式加以論述，內容上也針對改編成劇本所使用的表現手法，象徵意義等方面，進行討論，最後達成結論，並提出討論問題。

Nous présentons une approche de reconnaissance d'écriture manuscrite à partir de champs de Markov cachés et fondée sur une analyse entièrement bidimensionnelle de l'écriture. Son originalité réside dans la combinaison d'une analyse fenêtrée de l'image, d'une modélisation markovienne et dans la mise en oeuvre de la programmation dynamique 2D qui permet un décodage rapide et optimal des champs de Markov. Un aspect important de ces travaux est la méthodologie de développement employée qui est centrée sur l'évaluation systématique des apports algorithmiques et des paramètres utilisés. Ces algorithmes sont en partie empruntés aux techniques utilisées dans le domaine de la reconnaissance de la parole et sont très génériques.<br /><br />L'approche proposée est validée sur deux applications correspondant à des bases de données standard et librement disponibles. L'application de cette méthode extrêmement générique à une tâche de reconnaissance de chiffres manuscrits a permis d'obtenir des résultats comparables à ceux de l'état de l'art. L'application à une tâche de reconnaissance de mots manuscrits a permis de confirmer que l'extension de cette approche à des tâches plus complexes était naturelle.<br /><br />L'ensemble de cette recherche a démontré la validité de l'approche développée qui apparaît comme candidate au statut d'approche standard pour plusieurs problèmes de vision. En outre, elle ouvre la voie à de très nombreux développements concernant la tâche de traitement de l'écriture manuscrite et des améliorations significatives pourraient encore être apportées en recourant à d'autres principes issus du traitement de la parole et du langage. D'autres tâches comme la segmentation d'image devraient tirer avantage de la robustesse et de la faculté d'apprentissage de la modélisation que nous proposons.

The purpose of this essay is to understand meeting between hidden refugees and health professionals through interviews with refugee in hiding and health professionals. The implantation of the essay has been made by social science research methods which I have used as a qualitative survey. The material that I have used in this paper is to interview with hidden refugee and health care workers. I have used the different sources such as literature, internet and different laws which relates to the topic of this easy. I am using the power of theories to analyze the work. The work highlights relation between healthcare professionals and hidden refugees. The work is based on a new law that called SFS and that is health care for some foreigners who reside in Sweden without the necessary of permeation which according to the Social Board (2010) gives the hidden and undocumented person entitled to care that cannot be deferred. The result of my investigation was that hidden refugee’s right to emergency cares is not always met in practice although they are legally entitled to it. Another result was that the hidden meeting with health care professionals is not problem in itself but being refused to care is problematic . Controlled documents from health professionals page allows hidden may feel at a disadvantage. In this case crated anxiety and fear among the hidden people seeking care .This means that they seek care at nonprofit organizations instead. Conclusions about my essay is that a more clear legislation should be enacted and that healthcare professionals should be payable after care needs and not by legal status and ability to pay.

In Ireland, formal mentoring as a mechanism for supporting student learning in the Teaching Practice (TP) phase of Initial Teacher Education (ITE) is at a developmental stage. The Irish Government appears to support mentoring initiatives in ITE, however, there is little evidence of a clear policy on student teacher learning, and the role of mentoring within it. This study investigates physical education teacher education (PETE) student learning on TP within a community of practice framework. Currently, the process of informal mentoring of PETE students during TP is undertaken by untrained cooperating teachers (CTs) as an unacknowledged gesture of goodwill. This has implications for the quality of PETE student learning during TP and became the subject of this research. Employing a range of qualitative data collection methods, this study focused on one umbrella case study (Greendale University, schools and PETE students) and five individual case studies: tetrads of PETE student, CT, university tutor (UT) and school principal (SP) during one academic year. PETE student learning was investigated from the perspectives of each member of the tetrad and data collected were analysed using grounded theory. Findings from this research concluded that (a) untrained CTs were unsuitable mentors and (b) untrained UTs were inappropriate tutors for PETE students as they both needed teaching expertise, a positive disposition and adequate training to embrace their respective roles. The study also found that within TP, there was a perceived lack of parity between the schools and university, with SPs feeling excluded and taken for granted by the university. This often led to open hostility between CTs and UTs, who were unclear about their respective TP roles. The combination of these factors resulted in PETE students learning the powerful hidden curriculum of TP which encouraged them to learn pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) in an unsupported and often isolated manner.

The main objective of this thesis was the synthesis of speech synchronised motion, in particular head motion. The hypothesis that head motion can be estimated from the speech signal was confirmed. In order to achieve satisfactory results, a motion capture data base was recorded, a definition of head motion in terms of articulation was discovered, a continuous stream mapping procedure was developed, and finally the synthesis was evaluated. Based on previous research into non-verbal behaviour basic types of head motion were invented that could function as modelling units. The stream mapping method investigated in this thesis is based on Hidden Markov Models (HMMs), which employ modelling units to map between continuous signals. The objective evaluation of the modelling parameters confirmed that head motion types could be predicted from the speech signal with an accuracy above chance, close to 70%. Furthermore, a special type ofHMMcalled trajectoryHMMwas used because it enables synthesis of continuous output. However head motion is a stochastic process therefore the trajectory HMM was further extended to allow for non-deterministic output. Finally the resulting head motion synthesis was perceptually evaluated. The effects of the “uncanny valley” were also considered in the evaluation, confirming that rendering quality has an influence on our judgement of movement of virtual characters. In conclusion a general method for synthesising speech-synchronised behaviour was invented that can applied to a whole range of behaviours.

The majority of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems rely on hidden Markov models (HMM), in which the output distribution associated with each state is modelled by a mixture of diagonal covariance Gaussians. Dynamic information is typically included by appending time-derivatives to feature vectors. This approach, whilst successful, makes the false assumption of framewise independence of the augmented feature vectors and ignores the spatial correlations in the parametrised speech signal. This dissertation seeks to address these shortcomings by exploring acoustic modelling for ASR with an application of a form of state-space model, the linear dynamic model (LDM). Rather than modelling individual frames of data, LDMs characterize entire segments of speech. An auto-regressive state evolution through a continuous space gives a Markovian model of the underlying dynamics, and spatial correlations between feature dimensions are absorbed into the structure of the observation process. LDMs have been applied to speech recognition before, however a smoothed Gauss-Markov form was used which ignored the potential for subspace modelling. The continuous dynamical state means that information is passed along the length of each segment. Furthermore, if the state is allowed to be continuous across segment boundaries, long range dependencies are built into the system and the assumption of independence of successive segments is loosened. The state provides an explicit model of temporal correlation which sets this approach apart from frame-based and some segment-based models where the ordering of the data is unimportant. The benefits of such a model are examined both within and between segments. LDMs are well suited to modelling smoothly varying, continuous, yet noisy trajectories such as found in measured articulatory data. Using speaker-dependent data from the MOCHA corpus, the performance of systems which model acoustic, articulatory, and combined acoustic-articulatory features are compared. As well as measured articulatory parameters, experiments use the output of neural networks trained to perform an articulatory inversion mapping. The speaker-independent TIMIT corpus provides the basis for larger scale acoustic-only experiments. Classification tasks provide an ideal means to compare modelling choices without the confounding influence of recognition search errors, and are used to explore issues such as choice of state dimension, front-end acoustic parametrization and parameter initialization. Recognition for segment models is typically more computationally expensive than for frame-based models. Unlike frame-level models, it is not always possible to share likelihood calculations for observation sequences which occur within hypothesized segments that have different start and end times. Furthermore, the Viterbi criterion is not necessarily applicable at the frame level. This work introduces a novel approach to decoding for segment models in the form of a stack decoder with A* search. Such a scheme allows flexibility in the choice of acoustic and language models since the Viterbi criterion is not integral to the search, and hypothesis generation is independent of the particular language model. Furthermore, the time-asynchronous ordering of the search means that only likely paths are extended, and so a minimum number of models are evaluated. The decoder is used to give full recognition results for feature-sets derived from the MOCHA and TIMIT corpora. Conventional train/test divisions and choice of language model are used so that results can be directly compared to those in other studies. The decoder is also used to implement Viterbi training, in which model parameters are alternately updated and then used to re-align the training data.

The current study set out to explore the affect and significance of differing parental conditions on the experiences commonly reported by young carers. Previous studies on young caring have reflected on the impacts of caring for parents with particular `types' of conditions (normally physical disability or mental health problems) or a specific diagnosis. However, these have not contrasted or discriminated young carers' experiences according to different parental conditions. To address this gap in knowledge, the current study considered the experiences of young carers supporting parents with different `types' of conditions, namely physical disability, mental health problems and substance misuse. The participants discussed the impact of caring on a range of areas such as their education, social life, health, spatial transitions, relationships and role reversals. Additionally, definitional issues were considered. This included young carers own understanding and subscription to the term `young carer' and the significance of this to their identification. In terms of methodology, the study was firmly grounded within the qualitative domain and influenced by a constructive-interpretive paradigm, specifically symbolic interactionism. Within this, the grounded theory approach was used insofar as it provided a method to conduct the study. A range of data-collection techniques were employed. Semi-structured interviewing was the principal method used, with additional data gathered through a self-esteem tool, observations and diaries. The sample consisted of 30 young carers. The results showed firstly that the participants did not necessarily comprehend the term `young carer' or apply it to their own caring roles at home. Arguably, this contributed to their `hidden-ness' (i. e. invisibility) and as a result their needs were overlooked. The need for a new definition which embraces their understandings, together with appropriate awareness-raising programmes within schools and for key social care and health professionals was evidenced and called for. Secondly, whilst the participants shared common experiences regardless of the nature of the parental condition, other issues reported were specific to particular situations. Those most adversely affected were caring in the contexts of parental substance misuse or parental mental health problems. Such young carers were dually disadvantaged, as they experienced the most extreme difficulties, yet their caring roles and needs were least likely to be addressed. The experiential differences reported by young carers in different caring contexts have important practice implications. Nevertheless, the extent to which the experiences reported could be wholly attributed to the caring role, rather than other structural and socio-economic factors was questionable.

Children with autism often exhibit deficits in question-asking. This study replicated and extended Williams, Donley, and Keller.s (2000) training package: a modeling and reinforcement procedure to teach the use of 3 different questions about hidden objects. Two boys, aged 13 and 12, with primary diagnoses of autism, participated. A multiple baseline design across questions was used. Both children learned to ask all three questions: .What.s that?. .Can I see (item name)?. and .Can I have (item name)?. Question-asking generalized to novel locations, people, and stimulus materials with minimal additional training. These results support the efficacy of this training package as an efficient way to teach children with autism to ask questions about objects in their environment.