The left-right concept is considered to facilitate communication and orientation in the political world. It has a long tradition in European politics due to its capacity to absorb different associations over time. However, this dynamic nature of the concept requires periodical reassessments in order to assure that a common conceptualisation endures. This dissertation focuses on reassign what individual left-right orientation means. Usually, this is measured by asking people to place themselves on a scale labelled ‘left’ and ‘right’ at its endpoints. The first empirical analysis of this dissertation shows that this measure is comparable across groups and countries. Thereafter, the relationship between an individual’s issue preference and left-right orientation is considered. The second empirical analysis shows that this relationship is conditioned by the importance people assign to the respective issues. The final analysis demonstrates that what explains left-right orientation is contingent on individual and contextual factors. This implies that in order to understand left-right orientation, it is not enough to identify what has an impact on a person’s position but also account for all those factors that predict variation between individuals. Given this complexity, my conclusion is that the left-right concept runs the risk of becoming too complicated to serve as an analytical tool to shed light on political attitudes and behaviour. / El concepte esquerra-dreta és considerat com un factor facilitador de la comunicació en el món polític. Té una llarga tradició’ en la política europea degut a la seva capacitat d’absorbir diferents associacions a través del temps. Tanmateix, aquesta natura dinàmica del concepte requereix revisions periòdiques per assegurar que persisteix una conceptualització comuna. La present tesi es centra en resignar el que significa l’orientació esquerra-dreta. Normalment, es mesura tot demanant als enquestats posicionar-se a ells mateixos en una escala que va de l’esquerra a la dreta. El primer anàlisi empíric de la present tesi mostra que aquesta mesura és comparable entre grups i països. Seguidament, es considera la relació entre les preferències temàtiques dels individus i llur orientació esquerra-dreta. El segon anàlisi empíric mostra que aquesta relació està condicionada per la importància que les persones assignen als temes respectius. L’anàlisi final demostra que el que explica l’orientació esquerra-dreta depèn de factors contextuals i individuals. Això implica que per entendre l’orientació esquerra-dreta no és suficient identificar què té un impacte en la posició d’una persona sinó també una explicació per a tots aquells factors que preveuen la variació entre individus. Donada aquesta complexitat, la meva conclusió és que el concepte esquerra-dreta corre el risc de convertir-se en massa complicat per a servir com a eina analítica per a l’estudi de les actituds i el comportament politics.

Working memory (WM) capacity – the capacity to maintain and manipulate information in mind – plays an essential role in high-level cognitive functions. An important determinant of WM capacity is the ability to resolve interference of previously encoded but no longer relevant information (proactive interference: PI). Four different mechanisms of PI resolution involving binding and inhibition have been proposed in the literature, although debate continues regarding their role. Braver et al. (2007) introduced an important distinction in the PI resolution literature, proposing two general types of PI control mechanisms that occur at different time points: proactive control (involves preparation in advance of the interference) and reactive control (occurs after interference occurs). This thesis proposed that among these four functions involving binding and inhibition, item inhibition and binding could be involved in proactive control, while familiarity inhibition and episodic inhibition could be involved in reactive control. The question is which mechanism in each pair is indeed involved in proactive control and reactive control respectively, and how these proactive control and reactive control mechanisms work together to resolve PI. In addition, do these mechanisms play a role in the relationship between PI resolution and WM? In an individual differences study, individuals’ ability to resolve PI was assessed in memory tasks, with two versions of each that encouraged the use of either proactive or reactive control. In addition, measures were obtained of individuals’ ability of binding and inhibition in tasks that had minimal memory demands. Regression analyses showed contributions of binding and inhibition to PI resolution and WM. Moreover, these functions are responsible for the correlation between PI resolution and WM. In a neuroimaging study, the neural basis of proactive control was examined by comparing two memory tasks that differed in their demand on binding and inhibition. In addition, the brain regions engaged in reactive control was examined by contrasting trials involving interference or not. The thesis showed that item inhibition carried out by the left inferior frontal cortex (IFC) is involved in proactive control while episodic inhibition carried out by the left IFC and the posterior parietal cortex is involved in reactive control.

Heart failure is the clinical syndrome accompanying the inability of the heart to maintain a cardiac output required to meet the metabolic requirements and accommodate venous return, and is one of the leading causes of mortality in United States. Accurate imaging of the heart and its failure is important for successful patient management and treatment. Multiple cardiac imaging modalities provide complementary information about the heart – LV function and wall motion, anatomy, myocardial viability and ischemia. In many instances, it is necessary for a patient to undergo multiple imaging sessions to obtain diagnostic clinical information with confidence. It would be beneficial to the individual and the health care system if a single imaging modality could yield reliable clinical information about the heart, leading to a reduced cost, anxiety and an increased diagnostic confidence. This thesis proposes methods that would make cardiac MRI perform an improved assessment of LV function, wall motion, and viability, such that cardiac MRI is taken one step closer to being a single stop solution for imaging of heart. Conventional cardiac MR imaging is performed at a temporal resolution of around 40 ms per cardiac phase. While the global left ventricular (LV) function can be reliably established at this temporal resolution, functional metrics characterizing transient function like peak filling and ejection rates are not accurately assessed. A high temporal resolution is necessary to characterize such transient LV function and wall motion mechanics. This thesis proposes methods to acquire cine-images of the heart at a higher temporal resolution (~ 6 ms) and algorithms to acquire the LV volume across all cardiac phases that would yield functional metrics characterizing LV function and wall motion mechanics. The validation of these algorithms was performed on human subjects. Cardiac MR imaging is the current gold standard of myocardial viability imaging, in which scarred regions of the heart following myocardial infarction are visualized. However viability imaging faces image quality challenges in patients with severe arrhythmias and in cases where a higher spatial resolution, and hence a longer acquisition time, is desired. This thesis also proposes an arrhythmia insensitive inversion recovery (AIIR) algorithm that would significantly reduce artifacts that degrade image quality, thereby extending viability imaging to higher spatial resolution and in patients with severe arrhythmia. Simulations, experimental validation on phantoms and clinical verification on patients are performed. Results from high temporal resolution imaging reveal that obtaining cine cardiac MR images at a temporal resolution of 6 ms per cardiac phase is feasible. Appropriate validated algorithms yield LV time-volume curve from which LV functional metrics are reliably extracted. A dependence on temporal resolution is revealed, and a temporal resolution cut-off of 12 ms is proposed to reliably capture the temporal dynamics of the LV. Also, results from cardiac viability imaging show that the AIIR algorithm performs significantly better than conventional imaging methods in both phantoms and human subjects, as shown by the blinded expert scores, leading to a better image quality. In conclusion, this thesis proposes and implements methods that help cardiac MRI yield 1) a better function and wall motion assessment of the heart through high temporal resolution imaging and 2) a better assessment of myocardial viability through the AIIR algorithm.

The left hemisphere interpreter refers to a function in the left hemisphere of the brain that search for and produce causal explanations for events, behaviours and feelings, even though no such apparent pattern exists between them. Confabulation is said to occur when a person presents or acts on obviously false information, despite being aware that they are false. People who confabulate also tend to defend their confabulations even when they are presented with counterevidence. Research related to these two areas seems to deal with the same phenomenon, namely the human tendency to infer explanations for events, even if the explanations have no actual bearing in reality. Despite this, research on the left hemisphere interpreter has progressed relatively independently from research related to the concept of confabulation. This thesis has therefore aimed at reviewing each area and comparing them in a search for common relations. What has been found as a common theme is the emphasis they both place on the potentially underlying function of the interpreter and confabulation. Many researchers across the two fields stress the adaptive and vital function of keeping the brain free from both contradiction and unpredictability, and propose that this function is served by confabulations and the left hemisphere interpreter. This finding may provide a possible opening for collaboration across the fields, and for the continued understanding of these exciting and perplexing phenomena.

From the middle of the eighteenth century, the use of left-hand pizzicato and harmonics began to become more common in violin playing. Over time, these techniques underwent substantial developments thanks to several different violinists, among others Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst. These developments, however, have not been adequately investigated or documented, and in general, ignorance and misconceptions prevail regarding who contributed what, as well as to the significance of these individual contributions.This thesis attempts to present Ernst's contributions in this area, and also advance that his lack of adequate recognition is unfair. In order to do this, a more complete and chronologically accurate review of the development of left-hand pizzicato and harmonics from the beginning of their development has been drawn up. This has been done through critical reviews and comparisons of different contemporary sources such as musical journals, violin methods and musical scores.The conclusion has been drawn that Ernst contributed to the development of left-hand pizzicato and harmonics to a greater extent than has been adequately recognised. The importance of his role in this development is partially due to the number of his individual contributions, but primarily because he enabled the violin to play the role of several independent instruments played simultaneously in a more advanced fashion, which has arguably changed the outlook of the instrument.

Every positive integer has a unique radix 2 representation which uses the digits {0,1}. However, if we allow digits other than 0 and 1, say {0,1,-1}, then a positive integer has many representations. Of these <i>redundant</i> representations, it is possible to choose one that has few nonzero digits. It is well known that using representations of integers with few nonzero digits allows certain algebraic operations to be done more quickly. This thesis is concerned with various representations of integers that are related to efficient implementations of algebraic operations in cryptographic algorithms. The topics covered here include: <ul> <li> <i>The width-w nonadjacent form (w-NAF)</i>. We prove that the <i>w</i>-NAF of an integer has a minimal number of nonzero digits; that is, no other representation of an integer, which uses the <i>w</i>-NAF digits, can have fewer nonzero digits than its <i>w</i>-NAF. </li> <li><i>A left-to-right analogue of the w-NAF</i>. We introduce a new family of radix 2 representations which use the same digits as the <i>w</i>-NAF, but have the property that they can be computed by sliding a window from left to right across the binary representation of an integer. We show these new representations have a minimal number of nonzero digits. </li> <li><i>Joint representations</i>. Solinas introduced a {0,1,-1}-radix 2 representation for pairs of integers called the joint sparse form. We consider generalizations of the joint sparse form which represent <i>r</i>&ge;2 integers and use digits other than {0,1,-1}. We show how to construct a {0,1,2,3}-joint representation that has a minimal number of nonzero columns. </li> <li><i>Nonadjacent digit sets</i>. It is well known that if <i>x</i> equals 3 or -1 then every nonnegative integer has a unique {0,1,<i>x</i>}-nonadjacent form; that is, a {0,1,<i>x</i>}-radix 2 representation with the property that, of any two consecutive digits, at most one is nonzero. We investigate what other values of <i>x</i> have this property. </li> </ul>

In this paper we propose two simple algorithms to estimate parameters £] and baseline survival function in Cox proportional hazard model with application to Massachusetts Health Care Panel Study (MHCPS) (Chappell, 1991) data which is a left truncated and interval censored data. We find that, in the estimation of £] and baseline survival function, Kaplan and Meier algorithm is uniformly better than the Empirical algorithm. Also, Kaplan and Meier algorithm is uniformly more powerful than the Empirical algorithm in testing whether two groups of survival functions are the same. We also define a distance measure D and compare the performance of these two algorithms through £] and D.

In this study, the Turkish left in the 1960s is discussed in the light of the term peculiarism. This is done on the basis of three groups of the Turkish left in the period, namely the Y&ouml / n journal, the MDD group and the TiP with specific reference to Mehmet Ali Aybar. The main premises of the term peculiarism are considered to be nationalism, Kemalism, developmentalism or non-capitalist path of development, the idea of a &ldquo / popular national front&rdquo / and anti-imperialism. Accordingly, each group is discussed on the basis of the above told concepts.

This thesis aims to examine the experiences of the resistance committees organized by a revolutionary Movement, Devrimci Yol (Revolutionary Way), in Turkey in the late 1970s. More specifically it focuses on Devrimci Yol&rsquo / s formulations concerning the issue of revolutionary organization, how it and the resistance committee experiences &ndash / within their contexts- embodied the tension between being organized in accordance with initiating change within the social relations of everyday life and being organized in accordance with a strategy of state takeover. The study argues that Devrimci Yol&rsquo / s attempt towards the reconciliation of these two understandings gave the Movement its peculiarity within the left in Turkey. With all their constraints the resistance committees and accompanying experiences of people&rsquo / s and workplace committees pointed out a logic of revolutionary organization different from the predominant one in which any kind of revolutionary transformation was postponed until the forthcoming revolution. When examining Devrimci Yol and the resistance committees, the study refers to different approaches to the question of revolutionary organization in Marxist theory and practice.

<p>Många studier om föräldraskap är mest fokuserade på mammors upplevelser av graviditet och förlossning. Även om mammorna föder barnen och är i behov av mer vård än papporna, är det två personer som blir föräldrar. Pappor behöver också uppmärksamhet och kunskap för att bli bra föräldrar. Svenska barnmorskor och sjuksköterskor saknar ibland kunskap om mäns upplevelser av graviditet och förlossning. Syftet med denna studie är att belysa blivande/nyblivna pappors upplevelser av barnmorskors/sjuksköterskors bemötande. En litteraturstudie valdes för denna studie. 14 artiklar analyserades och de svarade på studiens syfte. I resultatet framkommer två teman, att bli bekräftad och att få ett stöd och att vara ett stöd, med tillhörande sex underteman. Pappor verkar vara de bortglömda föräldrarna. Många pappor känner att de är utelämnade och känner sig ofta oförberedda på själva förlossningen. Det framkommer även att de pappor som får extra förberedelser känner sig mer säkra under förlossningen och nyföddhetsperioden.</p>