A visão de processo adaptativo aplicada à aprendizagem pressupõe quebra da estabilidade, necessária para o aprendiz alcançar níveis superiores de complexidade. Dessa forma, instabilidade, incerteza, desordem e erro podem se constituir características positivas do processo. Considerando o CR como fonte de ordem/desordem, o presente trabalho teve o propósito de investigar quais regimes de freqüência (33%, 66% e 100%) e precisão (geral e específico) de CR favorecem o processo adaptativo na aquisição de uma habilidade motora conjugada de preensão manual com posicionamento linear. Cento e vinte adultos universitários de 18 a 39 anos (média de 25 e desvio padrão de 4,5 anos) foram alocados a seis grupos de 20 sujeitos (dez do sexo masculino e dez do sexo feminino). Na primeira fase do estudo (estabilização), os sujeitos executaram a tarefa com CR verbal, que versou apenas sobre a tentativa recém finalizada de modo a informar sobre o alcance de 20% da força máxima e 35 cm de deslocamento. O critério para encerramento dessa fase foi a execução de duas tentativas dentro de uma faixa de tolerância de erro. Na fase de adaptação, os sujeitos foram testados em 15 tentativas sem CR na mesma tarefa, porém com a perturbação ambiental de uma força de translação de aproximadamente 2 kgf, no sentido contrário do movimento. O equipamento desenvolvido e utilizado foi o Aparelho Eletromagnético de Posicionamento Linear com Dinamometria. As tentativas foram executadas com o membro superior não dominante e com oclusão visual. Da força aplicada no dinamômetro e do deslocamento do cursor originaram-se as medidas de erro: absoluto (EA), constante (EC) e variável (EV). Os resultados da fase de estabilização mostraram indicações de que CR freqüente e específico proporcionou melhor desempenho. Além disso, os grupos, em ambas as demandas (força e distância), reduziram o nível de erros de um ponto inicial a um ponto posterior no tempo com tendência exponencial, o que evidencia a ocorrência de aprendizagem da tarefa. Com base nos resultados da segunda fase, a adaptação à perturbação introduzida não se condicionou às manipulações de freqüência e precisão de CR da fase de estabilização. Os dados de ambas as demandas se ajustaram a um modelo caracterizado pela presença de variância substancial no momento inicial. Não obstante, houve heterogeneidade de resposta ao longo das tentativas na demanda de distância. Os resultados de ambas as demandas da tarefa evidenciaram tracking de baixo a moderado, ou seja, não houve estabilidade de desempenho dos sujeitos, o que implica em possibilidade muito reduzida para prever o desempenho de cada grupo e para cada sujeito. Uma quantidade muito reduzida de sujeitos apresentou não aleatoriedade de erros, reveladora de alguma tendência ou estratégia de desempenho consistente ao longo das tentativas. Pode-se concluir que não se faz necessário reduzir excessivamente a incerteza por intermédio de regimes de CR com muita freqüência e precisão. / Motor learning is a ciclic, dynamic and adaptive process, in which motor skills are stabilised and used in more complex situations. To understand motor skill acquisition as an adaptive process, it is necessary to break down the achieved stability in order to reach higher levels of complexity. Thus, instability, uncertainty, disorder, and error might act as positive features in this process. Considering KR as a source of order/disorder, this study aimed to investigate which frequency (33%, 66% e 100%) and precision (general and specific) KR schedules benefit the adaptive process in the acquisition of a linear positioning and manual force control combination motor task. A hundred and twenty undergraduate students ranging from 18 to 39 years (mean age = 25 yr., standard deviation = 4.5 yr.) were randomly assigned to six groups of 20 subjects each (ten male and ten female). In the first phase of the experiment (stabilisation), the subjects performed the motor task receiving verbal KR about the immediately finished trial that provided information about accomplishing the goal of 20% of the maximum force and 35 cm of displacement. The criterion to complete this phase was to perform two consecutive trials inside the error bandwidth. In the adaptation phase, 15 non-KR trials were performed on the same task, but with an environmental perturbation involving a traction force of about 2 kgf in the opposite direction of the movement. It was developed and used an apparatus enabling a linear positioning combined with a manual force control task. The subjects performed blindfolded and with the non-dominant hand. Absolute, constant, and variable errors measures were used to analyse the learning process. According to the stabilisation phase results, there were evidences that frequent and specific KR produced improvement of performance. The groups, on both task requirements (force and distance), reduced the level of errors from an initial to a posterior point in time with exponential trend, which is an evidence of learning occurrence. Results from the second phase indicated that the adaptation to the introduced perturbation was not related to KR frequency and precision provided in the stabilization phase. Data from both requirements fitted in a model with significant variance at the beginning. However, there was response heterogeneity throughout the trials in the distance requirement. Moreover, results revealed from low to moderate tracking, that is, subjects did not perform with stability, what reduces the probability to preview the performance of each group and each subject. A few amount of subjects exhibited absence of error randomness, which could express some performance trend, that is, a consistent strategy along trials. It can be concluded that it is not necessary to excessively diminish uncertainty by means of KR schedules with high frequency and precision.

<p>The progesterone receptor (PR) is a member of the nuclear receptor superfamily of ligand-regulated transcription factors. The steroid hormone progesterone binds to PR and induces a conformational change that enables the receptor to bind DNA, recruit cofactors, and directly regulate the transcription of target genes. In addition, extra-nuclear PR can indirectly regulate gene expression by rapidly activating other signaling pathways such as Src/MAPK. Although the direct and indirect functions of PR have been well studied in isolation, it is important to understand the molecular mechanisms by which these pathways can cross talk and integrate to ultimately impact gene expression.</p><p>Towards this end, we initiated studies to assess the overall impact of MAPK inhibition on PR transcriptional activity in T47D breast cancer cells treated with the synthetic progestin R5020. During the course of microarray and biochemical analyses that were undertaken to address this issue, we discovered a subset of PR target genes that are enriched for E2F binding sites. Subsequently, we determined that PR-B is a component of several distinct pathways that function both directly and indirectly to positively up-regulate E2F1 expression in T47D breast cancer cells. Firstly, PR directly regulates E2F1 transcription by binding to proximal and distal enhancer sites located near E2F1. Secondly, progestin induces the hyperphosphorylation of Rb, which results in increased recruitment of E2F1 to its own promoter, thereby activating a positive feedback loop that further amplifies its transcription. Finally, PR induces expression of Krüppel-like factor 15 (KLF15) and potentially other Sp/KLF family members, which can bind to GC-rich DNA within the E2F1 promoter and further activate transcription. Together, these results suggest a paradigm for multimodal PR gene regulation that entails cooperation between direct and indirect pathways of PR signaling to achieve the desired downstream transcriptional cascade.</p><p>In the breast and other tissues of the female reproductive system, progesterone plays an important role in normal development and function. Therefore, synthetic PR modulators (PRMs) are widely used to manipulate the downstream biology of PR for purposes including contraception and hormone replacement therapy (HRT). However, progestins and PR have also been implicated in disease pathologies such as breast cancer. While the molecular mechanisms by which PR regulates breast tumor growth have not been fully elucidated, recent studies highlight the fact that progestins may have a dose-dependent role in breast cancer progression. Consequently, we undertook studies to identify and characterize any differential effects of low-dose versus high-dose progestins on the downstream activities of PR. Specifically, we found that treatment of breast cancer cells with low-dose progestins can induce maximal transcriptional activation of a subset of PR target genes, including the cell cycle regulators cyclin D1 and E2F1. Furthermore, low-dose and high-dose progestins have differential effects on the phosphorylation of PR and subsequent receptor turnover. Cumulatively, these findings underscore the importance of establishing the effects of a wide range of progestin concentrations on target gene expression and other PR actions, so that we are able to accurately predict the potential consequences of PRMs on downstream PR signaling pathways and biology.</p> / Dissertation

This is a study of some of the major aspects of the development of post-colonial labour policy in Zambia. It examines the Zambian Government's attempts to 'incorporate' trade unions into its strategy of national development. Except for such later references as it was possible to include, it covers the period from 1971 to 1986. The purpose of the study is to examine the role played by law in the Zambian Government's attempts to incorporate trade unions and the rank and file sufficiently in the plans for national development. Zambian trade unions at independence were quite autonomous. Given the power and autonomy of trade unions, their attitude and approach have been viewed by the Government as crucial elements of national development. The Government has, therefore, progressively adopted measures aimed at the closer control and regulation of the trade union movement and its membership. In spite of such attempts, however, the approach in Zambia has been less coercive than in some other African countries. The Government has tended to rely on "pressure rather than force". In this context government reforms are examined in four key areas: the regulation of trade union activity, the restructuring of collective bargaining (including incomes policy), industrial conflict and dispute settlement procedures, and workers' participation. It is concluded that the Government has not achieved its stated major objectives. Although trade unions and their members have generally accepted the Government's overall authority to set the agenda of national development, they have resisted attempts to curtail their autonomy. It is on account of this failure that the Government now intends to integrate trade unions into the State completely.

Within the past decade, there has been considerable debate amongst lawyers in most European and North American jurisdictions on standardized contracts. The realisation that these contracts did not fit into the framework of the law of contract elaborated by nineteenth-centry theorists, induced judges and academic alike to fashion concepts and mechanisms in order to tackle the undoubted injustices which were concomitant with the use of standardized contracts. These well meaning attemtps, while affording some protection to weaker contracting parties, were nevertheless productive of uncertainty and inconsistency. Hence, there has been in recent years a spate of legislation designed to deal with standardized contracts directly or indirectly. The adoption of modern economic institutions and also of Western legal systems in Cameroon has brought about significant problems in the realm of contract. The widespread illiteracy in Cameroon, the lack of commercial sophistication of the bulk of the populace, and the use of standardized contracts, have created problems of a much wider dimension than those to be found in the developed countries. This thesis involves a study in comparative law. It charts the ways in which the English and French courts have addressed the problems of standardized contracts. It also delves into how the Cameroonian courts have dealt with them, revealing the incongruities inherent in the application of concepts which have been evolved in a different country with distinct motives, in another country with entirely different social realities. Finally, this thesis looks at the legislative innovation; brought to this area of the law by four European countries and discerns what lessons can be learned from them by Cameroonian legislators in dealing with the problems of standardized contracts in Cameroon. All this is achieved by pulling together legal analysis and comments by Anglo-Americans and European scholars, and by weaving into the text nearly all important English, French, Cameroonian and indeed American cases on this subject.

This is the first time I choose the play for my project of stage design and costumes and with this thesis there is a qustion I would like to answer to: which is my personal stagn ´s language? That´s why I need a play which helps me to solve this knot.

The separation of industrially important gases into pure supplies that can be used for many practical applications is based mainly on energy intensive methods such as the cryogenic distillation which is costly and energy intensive. Therefore other routes have been introduced to industrial separation of gases such as the selective adsorption using porous solid materials. Zeolites and activated carbon are the most widely used recyclable energy-efficient porous solid materials for industrial gas separations, however the low uptake and selectivity hurdles their commercialization in some separation applications. Metal organic frameworks (MOFs) have been extensively studied as solid porous materials in term of gas separations nevertheless the future of MOFs for practical gas separations is considered to be vague and stringent due to their low stability, low capacity and selectivity especially at low partial pressures of the adsorbed gas, the competitive adsorption of the contaminants such as H2O, NOX and SOX, high cost of the organic ligands, besides the challenges of the formulation of MOFs which is very important in the MOFs marketing. In this context we present new porous materials based on inorganic linkers as well as the organic molecules, Organic-Inorganic Hybrid Materials, which were found to conquer the current challenges for the exploitation of MOFs in practical gas separation such as separation of trace and low CO2 concentrations and Xe separation from Xe/Kr mixtures. The work presented herein encompasses the development of novel 48.67 topology metal organic material (MOM) platform of formula [M(bp)2(M'O4)] (M= Co or Ni; bpe= bipyridine-type linkers; M'= W, Mo or Cr) that have been assigned RCSR code mmo based upon pillaring of [M(bp)2] square grids by angular WO42-, MoO42- or CrO42- pillars. Such pillars are unexplored in MOMs. They represent ideal platforms to test the effect of pore size and chemistry upon gas sorption behavior since they are readily fine-tuned and can be varied at their 3-positions (metal, organic linker and the inorganic pillar) without changing the overall structure. Such an approach allows for systematic control of pore size to optimize interactions between the framework and the adsorbent in order to enhance selectivity and/or gas uptake. Interestingly, these nets showed a high chemical stability in air, water, boiling water and in a wide range of pH which is certainly a desirable property in industry and commercialization of MOMs. [Ni(bpe)2(MoO4)] (bpe= 1,2-bis(4-pyridyl) ethane), MOOFOUR-1-Ni, and its chromate analog, CROFOUR-1-Ni, exhibit remarkable CO2 affinity and selectivity, especially at low loading. This behavior can be attributed to exceptionally high isosteric heats of adsorption (Qst) of CO2 in MOOFOUR-1-Ni and CROFOUR-1-Ni of ~56 and ~50 kJ/mol, respectively, at zero loading. These results were validated by modeling which indicate that the electrostatics of such inorganic anions towards CO2 affords favourable attractions to CO2 that are comparable to the effect of unsaturated metal centres. The use of WO42- instead of CrO42- or MoO42- as an angular pillar in mmo topology nets has afforded two isostructural porous nets of formula [M(bpe)2WO4] (M = Co or Ni, bpe=1,2-(4-pyridyl)ethene). The Ni variant, WOFOUR-1-Ni, is highly selective towards CO2 thanks to its exceptionally high isosteric heat of adsorption (Qst) of -65.5 kJ/mol at zero loading. The fine-tunability and the inherent modularity of this platform allow us exquisite design and control over the pore chemistry through the incorporation of different functionalities inside the channels of the networks which was then demonstrated as valuable strategy in terms of carbon dioxide capture at condition relevant to the direct CO2 capture from air. The exploitation of 4,4'-azopyridine in the design and synthesis of CROFOUR-2-Ni, an isostructure of CROFOUR-1-Ni, affords a paradigm shift in the CO2 adsorption properties as exemplified by the enhanced CO2 isosteric heat of adsorption at moderate and high loading in CROFOUR-2-Ni and the superior CO2 selectivity even for trace and low CO2 concentration. The two isostructures, CROFOUR-1-Ni and CROFOUR-2-Ni have been also investigated in term of Xe adsorption and separation from Xe/Kr mixtures. The two structures were found to exhibit the remarkable Xe affinity and selectivity which, together with high stability, good recyclability, low regeneration energy and low cost of the two materials could not only diminish the cost of the Xe and Kr production but also can potentially afford a high purity of the separated gases.

A visão de processo adaptativo aplicada à aprendizagem pressupõe quebra da estabilidade, necessária para o aprendiz alcançar níveis superiores de complexidade. Dessa forma, instabilidade, incerteza, desordem e erro podem se constituir características positivas do processo. Considerando o CR como fonte de ordem/desordem, o presente trabalho teve o propósito de investigar quais regimes de freqüência (33%, 66% e 100%) e precisão (geral e específico) de CR favorecem o processo adaptativo na aquisição de uma habilidade motora conjugada de preensão manual com posicionamento linear. Cento e vinte adultos universitários de 18 a 39 anos (média de 25 e desvio padrão de 4,5 anos) foram alocados a seis grupos de 20 sujeitos (dez do sexo masculino e dez do sexo feminino). Na primeira fase do estudo (estabilização), os sujeitos executaram a tarefa com CR verbal, que versou apenas sobre a tentativa recém finalizada de modo a informar sobre o alcance de 20% da força máxima e 35 cm de deslocamento. O critério para encerramento dessa fase foi a execução de duas tentativas dentro de uma faixa de tolerância de erro. Na fase de adaptação, os sujeitos foram testados em 15 tentativas sem CR na mesma tarefa, porém com a perturbação ambiental de uma força de translação de aproximadamente 2 kgf, no sentido contrário do movimento. O equipamento desenvolvido e utilizado foi o Aparelho Eletromagnético de Posicionamento Linear com Dinamometria. As tentativas foram executadas com o membro superior não dominante e com oclusão visual. Da força aplicada no dinamômetro e do deslocamento do cursor originaram-se as medidas de erro: absoluto (EA), constante (EC) e variável (EV). Os resultados da fase de estabilização mostraram indicações de que CR freqüente e específico proporcionou melhor desempenho. Além disso, os grupos, em ambas as demandas (força e distância), reduziram o nível de erros de um ponto inicial a um ponto posterior no tempo com tendência exponencial, o que evidencia a ocorrência de aprendizagem da tarefa. Com base nos resultados da segunda fase, a adaptação à perturbação introduzida não se condicionou às manipulações de freqüência e precisão de CR da fase de estabilização. Os dados de ambas as demandas se ajustaram a um modelo caracterizado pela presença de variância substancial no momento inicial. Não obstante, houve heterogeneidade de resposta ao longo das tentativas na demanda de distância. Os resultados de ambas as demandas da tarefa evidenciaram tracking de baixo a moderado, ou seja, não houve estabilidade de desempenho dos sujeitos, o que implica em possibilidade muito reduzida para prever o desempenho de cada grupo e para cada sujeito. Uma quantidade muito reduzida de sujeitos apresentou não aleatoriedade de erros, reveladora de alguma tendência ou estratégia de desempenho consistente ao longo das tentativas. Pode-se concluir que não se faz necessário reduzir excessivamente a incerteza por intermédio de regimes de CR com muita freqüência e precisão. / Motor learning is a ciclic, dynamic and adaptive process, in which motor skills are stabilised and used in more complex situations. To understand motor skill acquisition as an adaptive process, it is necessary to break down the achieved stability in order to reach higher levels of complexity. Thus, instability, uncertainty, disorder, and error might act as positive features in this process. Considering KR as a source of order/disorder, this study aimed to investigate which frequency (33%, 66% e 100%) and precision (general and specific) KR schedules benefit the adaptive process in the acquisition of a linear positioning and manual force control combination motor task. A hundred and twenty undergraduate students ranging from 18 to 39 years (mean age = 25 yr., standard deviation = 4.5 yr.) were randomly assigned to six groups of 20 subjects each (ten male and ten female). In the first phase of the experiment (stabilisation), the subjects performed the motor task receiving verbal KR about the immediately finished trial that provided information about accomplishing the goal of 20% of the maximum force and 35 cm of displacement. The criterion to complete this phase was to perform two consecutive trials inside the error bandwidth. In the adaptation phase, 15 non-KR trials were performed on the same task, but with an environmental perturbation involving a traction force of about 2 kgf in the opposite direction of the movement. It was developed and used an apparatus enabling a linear positioning combined with a manual force control task. The subjects performed blindfolded and with the non-dominant hand. Absolute, constant, and variable errors measures were used to analyse the learning process. According to the stabilisation phase results, there were evidences that frequent and specific KR produced improvement of performance. The groups, on both task requirements (force and distance), reduced the level of errors from an initial to a posterior point in time with exponential trend, which is an evidence of learning occurrence. Results from the second phase indicated that the adaptation to the introduced perturbation was not related to KR frequency and precision provided in the stabilization phase. Data from both requirements fitted in a model with significant variance at the beginning. However, there was response heterogeneity throughout the trials in the distance requirement. Moreover, results revealed from low to moderate tracking, that is, subjects did not perform with stability, what reduces the probability to preview the performance of each group and each subject. A few amount of subjects exhibited absence of error randomness, which could express some performance trend, that is, a consistent strategy along trials. It can be concluded that it is not necessary to excessively diminish uncertainty by means of KR schedules with high frequency and precision.

No / This chapter discusses a linguistically orientated model of a conversational software agent (CSA) (Panesar 2017) framework sensitive to natural language processing (NLP) concepts and the levels of adequacy of a functional linguistic theory (LT). We discuss the relationship between NLP and knowledge representation (KR), and connect this with the goals of a linguistic theory (Van Valin and LaPolla 1997), in particular Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) (Van Valin Jr 2005). We debate the advantages of RRG and consider its fitness and computational adequacy. We present a design of a computational model of the linking algorithm that utilises a speech act construction as a grammatical object (Nolan 2014a, Nolan 2014b) and the sub-model of belief, desire and intentions (BDI) (Rao and Georgeff 1995). This model has been successfully implemented in software, using the resource description framework (RDF), and we highlight some implementation issues that arose at the interface between language and knowledge representation (Panesar 2017). / The full-text of this article will be released for public view at the end of the publisher embargo on 27 Sep 2024.

The ways people express their opinions and sentiments have radically changed in the past few years thanks to the advent of social networks, web communities, blogs, wikis and other online collaborative media. The distillation of knowledge from this huge amount of unstructured information can be a key factor for marketers who want to create an image or identity in the minds of their customers for their product, brand, or organisation. These online social data, however, remain hardly accessible to computers, as they are specifically meant for human consumption. The automatic analysis of online opinions, in fact, involves a deep understanding of natural language text by machines, from which we are still very far. Hitherto, online information retrieval has been mainly based on algorithms relying on the textual representation of web-pages. Such algorithms are very good at retrieving texts, splitting them into parts, checking the spelling and counting their words. But when it comes to interpreting sentences and extracting meaningful information, their capabilities are known to be very limited. Existing approaches to opinion mining and sentiment analysis, in particular, can be grouped into three main categories: keyword spotting, in which text is classified into categories based on the presence of fairly unambiguous affect words; lexical affinity, which assigns arbitrary words a probabilistic affinity for a particular emotion; statistical methods, which calculate the valence of affective keywords and word co-occurrence frequencies on the base of a large training corpus. Early works aimed to classify entire documents as containing overall positive or negative polarity, or rating scores of reviews. Such systems were mainly based on supervised approaches relying on manually labelled samples, such as movie or product reviews where the opinionist’s overall positive or negative attitude was explicitly indicated. However, opinions and sentiments do not occur only at document level, nor they are limited to a single valence or target. Contrary or complementary attitudes toward the same topic or multiple topics can be present across the span of a document. In more recent works, text analysis granularity has been taken down to segment and sentence level, e.g., by using presence of opinion-bearing lexical items (single words or n-grams) to detect subjective sentences, or by exploiting association rule mining for a feature-based analysis of product reviews. These approaches, however, are still far from being able to infer the cognitive and affective information associated with natural language as they mainly rely on knowledge bases that are still too limited to efficiently process text at sentence level. In this thesis, common sense computing techniques are further developed and applied to bridge the semantic gap between word-level natural language data and the concept-level opinions conveyed by these. In particular, the ensemble application of graph mining and multi-dimensionality reduction techniques on two common sense knowledge bases was exploited to develop a novel intelligent engine for open-domain opinion mining and sentiment analysis. The proposed approach, termed sentic computing, performs a clause-level semantic analysis of text, which allows the inference of both the conceptual and emotional information associated with natural language opinions and, hence, a more efficient passage from (unstructured) textual information to (structured) machine-processable data. The engine was tested on three different resources, namely a Twitter hashtag repository, a LiveJournal database and a PatientOpinion dataset, and its performance compared both with results obtained using standard sentiment analysis techniques and using different state-of-the-art knowledge bases such as Princeton’s WordNet, MIT’s ConceptNet and Microsoft’s Probase. Differently from most currently available opinion mining services, the developed engine does not base its analysis on a limited set of affect words and their co-occurrence frequencies, but rather on common sense concepts and the cognitive and affective valence conveyed by these. This allows the engine to be domain-independent and, hence, to be embedded in any opinion mining system for the development of intelligent applications in multiple fields such as Social Web, HCI and e-health. Looking ahead, the combined novel use of different knowledge bases and of common sense reasoning techniques for opinion mining proposed in this work, will, eventually, pave the way for development of more bio-inspired approaches to the design of natural language processing systems capable of handling knowledge, retrieving it when necessary, making analogies and learning from experience.

The purpose of this study was to examine whether the feedback schedule controlled by the learner created an optimal environment for retention of motor skills. Two experiments were conducted and participants were randomly assigned to a Control (100% KR), 20% RF KR, Self-controlled and Yoked conditions. In experiment one an anticipation timing task and in experiment two a ball throwing task was used. The second experiment also included a transfer test in order to measure the persistence of the acquired capability for performance. Absolute constant error (&amp / #9474 / CE&amp / #9474 / ) and variable error (VE) were calculated for four blocks of ten trials in acquisition phase and two blocks of ten trials in retention and transfer phases to analyze the subject&rsquo / s performances by repeated measures ANOVA. Experiment one analysis indicated significant main effects for groups in &amp / #9474 / CE&amp / #9474 / and VE. Participants in the self-controlled condition performed significantly better on retention test than the control group. Contrary to the expectations, experiment two analysis showed no significant differences between the groups in acquisition and retention tests. Group differences were only observed in transfer test between the 20% RF KR and Yoked conditions. There was an improvement in the performance by groups as they progressed through the acquisition trials. The results of the experiment were not consistent with regard to effects of KR on learning. The reasons might be attributed to several factors such as the age and the motivation of the subjects, and the nature of the task.