The objectives of the Maritime Labour Convention 2006 (hereafter: MLC 2006) have long been familiar to many states, but for some it has brought with it increased expectations in improving working conditions for seafarers. This study aims to analyse the early figures provided by Paris Memorandum of Understanding’s (hereafter: Paris MoU) on the number of deficiencies and detentions in before and after the implementation of the MLC 2006, as well as the ILO Committee of Experts 2014 Report, which marks the first full year of MLC 2006 compliance in the first ratifying states. The purpose was to provide an early report on the progress of the MLC 2006 to date as well as how it has adapted to concerns expressed by experts in maritime law prior to its implementation. Even if it has not been long enough since the entry into force to properly identify a trend, it is interesting to see a positive start to the MLC 2006, which has received rapidly increasing attention, and that awareness of labour rights has increased in the maritime industry. Figures also revealed that the early result is at least not a decrease in the number of reported deficiencies. In addition, the fact that a number of detentions have been issued is worthy of note, as they were very rare in the labour context before the MLC 2006.

A Madeira Laminada Colada (MLC) é um produto engenheirado que requer precisão de fabricação em todos os seus estágios. O produto acabado pode somente ser testado em condições laboratoriais, entretanto é necessário o controle de qualidade na sua produção para assegurar que suas propriedades sejam conformes aos requisitos especificados para o produto de acordo com as normas vigentes. Considerando que no Brasil ainda não existe uma norma específica de qualificação para a MLC e o potencial que esse material tem de ocupar espaço no mercado futuro, este trabalho tem por finalidade propor recomendações metodológicas para os ensaios de controle de qualidade de elementos estruturais de MLC, tendo como pontos de partida as Normas Canadenses CSA 0177-2006, Estadunidenses AITC A190.1-2007, Européia EM 386-2001 e Chilena NCh2148.cR2010, com ênfase principal no sistema de controle de qualidade dos materiais empregados na produção de MLC. Para a avaliação do método proposto foram realizados ensaios com três combinações de espécie-adesivo-tratamento, os mesmos utilizados no projeto de Pesquisa e Desenvolvimento da ANEEL/EESC: \"PD220-07 - CABEÇA DE SÉRIE DA CRUZETA VERDE DE MLC\". Os resultados mostram que o método proposto é adequado e de suma importância no estudo de MLC estrutural em função da sensibilidade de combinação espécie-adesivo-tratamento. / The Glued Laminated Wood is an engineered product that requires precision manufacturing in all its stages. The finished product can only be tested in laboratory conditions, however it is necessary to quality control in their production to ensure that the properties of the MLC are appropriate to the requirements specified for the product in accordance with the standards. Considering that in Brazil there is still no specific standard of qualification for the manufacturers of Glulam and the promising future market, this paper aims to propose some methodological recommendations for quality control testing of structural elements of Glulam-based Canadian Standards CSA 0177 - 2006, AITC A190.1-2007 American, European and Chilean NCh2148.cR2010 AT 386-2001, with primary emphasis on the control system of quality of materials used in the production of Glulam. For the evaluation of the proposed trials were conducted with combinations of three species - adhesive - treatment that were used in the design of Research and Development ANEEL/EESC \"PD220-07 - HEAD OF SERIES CROSSHEAD MLC\". The results show that the proposed method is suitable and of paramount importance in the study of structural MLC according to the sensitivity of species combination - adhesive - treatment.

We study the characteristics of the dual frequency liquid-crystal (LC) optoelectronic devices in this literary. We fabricate the LC lens with the dual frequency liquid crystal in our experiment. In this study, we first prepare a parabolic polymer structure on the glass substrate to form a polymeric lens glass, then, fill the dual-frequency LC into the empty cell which consists of one ITO glass and the polymeric lens glass to fabricate a frequency modulation LC lens. Additionally, a hybrid surface alignment is also used for our LC lens. For the dual-frequency LC, a hybrid surface alignment is necessary to obtain a frequency modulation LC lens. Because of the polymeric lens, the electric fields are inhomogeneous distributions in the LC lens when a voltage is applied to the electrodes. In this situation, an inhomogeneous electric field is applied to the cell to create GRIN lens-like distribution of the gradient refractive index. Thus, the focusing effects occur when the light passes through the LC lens. Moreover, by changing the amplitude and frequency of the applied voltage, the focal length of the LC lens can be changed. We mainly discuss the optical property and the response time of the LC lens based on the voltage modulation and the frequency modulation. The experimental results reveal that the frequency modulation has more advantages, such as widen range of controlled focal length and faster response time, comparing with the voltage modulation.

Η συμπεριφορά των NAND Flash μνημών, της πιο επιτυχημένης τε- χνολογίας Non-Volatile μνημών σήμερα, αλλοιώνεται με την αύξηση των εγγραφών. Αυτή η διαδικασία, που ονομάζεται γήρανση, πέρα από μη ανα- στρέψιμη είναι και πολύ σημαντική για τον σχεδιασμό συστημάτων που χρησιμοποιούν NAND Flash μνήμες (π.χ. SSD), επειδή επηρεάζει την ΙΟ απόδοση και την αξιοπιστία του συστήματος. Τα πειράματα πάνω σε πραγ- ματικές NAND Flash μνήμες είναι χρονοβόρες και μη αναστρέψιμες δια- δικασίες, καθώς νέες εγγραφές στην μνήμη αυξάνουν την γήρανση και η συμπεριφορά του συστήματος αλλάζει. Σκοπός της παρούσας διπλωματικής εργασίας, είναι η ανάπτυξη ενός συστήματος που θα μπορεί να εξομοιώσει σε πραγματικό χρόνο και με με- γάλη ακρίβεια την συμπεριφορά NAND Flash μνημών με συνθήκες γή- ρανσης παραμετροποιημένες από τον χρήστη. Τα βασικά πλεονεκτήματα αυτής της προσέγγισης είναι τα ακόλουθα: η τεχνολογία που εξομοιώνεται μπορεί να χρησιμοποιηθεί υπό ίδιες συνθήκες γήρανσης για επαναληπτικά πειράματα και το ίδιο σύστημα μπορεί να χρησιμοποιηθεί για να συγκρίνει διαφορετικές τεχνολογίες μνημών υπό διαφορετικές συνθήκες γήρανσης χρησιμοποιώντας τις ίδιες ρυθμίσεις hardware. / The behavior of NAND Flash, the most successful non-volatile memory technology today, deteriorates as the number of write accesses increases. This process, known as aging, is not only irreversible but also critical for the design of systemsthat use NAND Flash (ie. Solid-State Drives), since it affects the system’s IO performance and the required overhead for achieving a specific level of reliability. Experimental characterization of NAND Flash-based systems during their whole lifetime is a time-consuming and non-repetitive process, since further programming cycles increase aging, and the system's behavior changes. In this work, we present the architecture and experimental resultsof a system that can be used to emulate in real-time and with high precision the behavior of NAND Flash memories underuser-defined aging conditions. The main advantages of this approach are the following: the emulated technology can be used under the same aging conditions for repetitive experiments and under different aging conditions using the same hardware setup.

Σκοπός της παρούσας εργασίας είναι η μελέτη με την βοήθεια της τεχνικής Monte Carlo των φασμάτων εκτός πεδίου του γραμμικού επιταχυντή SL- 18 της ELEKTA. Η μελέτη έδειξε συσχέτιση μεταξύ δόσης και απόστασης από των άξονα της δέσμης. / The aim of this study was to investigate the energy spectrum outside the field limits of therapeutic high energy photon beams. Monte Carlo simulations were used in order to determine the dose and to confirm or to try to re-estimate the Energy correction factors used in off-field in-vivo dosimetry. The ELEKTA-SL18 medical accelerator was simulated for 6MV and 15MV, using the EGSnrc code. The simulation includes the regular jaws and the MLC. The output of each simulation was a square scoring plane at SSD 100cm. The energy spectrum, the mean energy, the energy fluence and other parameters were studied for annular areas centred on the Z axis, and for 1cm2 rectangular areas centred on both X and Y axis. These regions were selected every 1cm inside and outside the reference (10x10) cm2 field of the primary beam. The spectra and all the aforementioned parameters were found to be in relation to the position, and their comparison revealed differences, that exceeded the statistical error, between areas that had the same distance from the center but were located on different axes. These differences were more important for the lower energy (6MV), as the contribution from leakage radiation is relatively higher. Their comparison served to study the influence of the spectral differences on the measurements of this energy-dependent dosimetric system outside the treatment field. The ELEKTA SL-18 LINAC was simulated for photon beams of 6MV and 15MV with and without MLCs. The photon energies and the dose to the out-field areas close to treatment field are considerable and this should be taken into account when radiosensitive organs are close to the field limits. This could be more important to complicated IMRT treatments where the treatment time is altered.

No description available.

As well as the many benefits associated with the evolution of multispectral sensors into hyperspectral sensors there is also a considerable increase in storage space and the computational load to process the data. Consequently the remote sensing ommunity is investigating and developing statistical methods to alleviate these problems. / The research presented here investigates several approaches to reducing the dimensionality of hyperspectral remotely sensed data while maintaining the levels of accuracy achieved using the full dimensionality of the data. It was conducted with an emphasis on applications in maximum likelihood classification (MLC) of hyperspectral image data. An inherent characteristic of hyperspectral data is that adjacent bands are typically highly correlated and this results in a high level of redundancy in the data. The high correlations between adjacent bands can be exploited to realise significant reductions in the dimensionality of the data, for a negligible reduction in classification accuracy. / The high correlations between neighbouring bands is related to their response functions overlapping with each other by a large amount. The spectral band filter functions were modelled for the HyMap instrument that acquires hyperspectral data used in this study. The results were compared with measured filter function data from a similar, more recent HyMap instrument. The results indicated that on average HyMap spectral band filter functions exhibit overlaps with their neighbouring bands of approximately 60%. This is considerable and partly accounts for the high correlation between neighbouring spectral bands on hyperspectral instruments. / A hyperspectral HyMap image acquired over an agricultural region in the south west of Western Australia has been used for this research. The image is composed of 512 × 512 pixels, with each pixel having a spatial resolution of 3.5 m. The data was initially reduced from 128 spectral bands to 82 spectral bands by removing the highly overlapping spectral bands, those which exhibit high levels of noise and those bands located at strong atmospheric absorption wavelengths. The image was examined and found to contain 15 distinct spectral classes. Training data was selected for each of these classes and class spectral mean and covariance matrices were generated. / The discriminant function for MLC makes use of not only the measured pixel spectra but also the sample class covariance matrices. This thesis first examines reducing the parameterization of these covariance matrices for use by the MLC algorithm. The full dimensional spectra are still used for the classification but the number of parameters needed to describe the covariance information is significantly reduced. When a threshold of 0.04 was used in conjunction with the partial correlation matrices to identify low values in the inverse covariance matrices, the resulting classification accuracy was 96.42%. This was achieved using only 68% of the elements in the original covariance matrices. / Both wavelet techniques and cubic splines were investigated as a means of representing the measured pixel spectra with considerably fewer bands. Of the different mother wavelets used, it was found that the Daubechies-4 wavelet performed slightly better than the Haar and Daubechies-6 wavelets at generating accurate spectra with the least number of parameters. The wavelet techniques investigated produced more accurately modelled spectra compared with cubic splines with various knot selection approaches. A backward stepwise knot selection technique was identified to be more effective at approximating the spectra than using regularly spaced knots. A forward stepwise selection technique was investigated but was determined to be unsuited to this process. / All approaches were adapted to process an entire hyperspectral image and the subsequent images were classified using MLC. Wavelet approximation coefficients gave slightly better classification results than wavelet detail coefficients and the Haar wavelet proved to be a more superior wavelet for classification purposes. With 6 approximation coefficients, the Haar wavelet could be used to classify the data with an accuracy of 95.6%. For 11 approximation coefficients this figure increased to 96.1%. / First and second derivative spectra were also used in the classification of the image. The first and second derivatives were determined for each of the class spectral means and for each band the standard deviations were calculated of both the first and second derivatives. Bands were then ranked in order of decreasing standard deviation. Bands showing the highest standard deviations were identified and the derivatives were generated for the entire image at these wavelengths. The resulting first and second derivative images were then classified using MLC. Using 25 spectral bands classification accuracies of approximately 96% and 95% were achieved using the first and second derivative images respectively. These results are comparable with those from using wavelets although wavelets produced higher classification accuracies when fewer coefficients were used.

A Madeira Laminada Colada (MLC) é um produto engenheirado que requer precisão de fabricação em todos os seus estágios. O produto acabado pode somente ser testado em condições laboratoriais, entretanto é necessário o controle de qualidade na sua produção para assegurar que suas propriedades sejam conformes aos requisitos especificados para o produto de acordo com as normas vigentes. Considerando que no Brasil ainda não existe uma norma específica de qualificação para a MLC e o potencial que esse material tem de ocupar espaço no mercado futuro, este trabalho tem por finalidade propor recomendações metodológicas para os ensaios de controle de qualidade de elementos estruturais de MLC, tendo como pontos de partida as Normas Canadenses CSA 0177-2006, Estadunidenses AITC A190.1-2007, Européia EM 386-2001 e Chilena NCh2148.cR2010, com ênfase principal no sistema de controle de qualidade dos materiais empregados na produção de MLC. Para a avaliação do método proposto foram realizados ensaios com três combinações de espécie-adesivo-tratamento, os mesmos utilizados no projeto de Pesquisa e Desenvolvimento da ANEEL/EESC: \"PD220-07 - CABEÇA DE SÉRIE DA CRUZETA VERDE DE MLC\". Os resultados mostram que o método proposto é adequado e de suma importância no estudo de MLC estrutural em função da sensibilidade de combinação espécie-adesivo-tratamento. / The Glued Laminated Wood is an engineered product that requires precision manufacturing in all its stages. The finished product can only be tested in laboratory conditions, however it is necessary to quality control in their production to ensure that the properties of the MLC are appropriate to the requirements specified for the product in accordance with the standards. Considering that in Brazil there is still no specific standard of qualification for the manufacturers of Glulam and the promising future market, this paper aims to propose some methodological recommendations for quality control testing of structural elements of Glulam-based Canadian Standards CSA 0177 - 2006, AITC A190.1-2007 American, European and Chilean NCh2148.cR2010 AT 386-2001, with primary emphasis on the control system of quality of materials used in the production of Glulam. For the evaluation of the proposed trials were conducted with combinations of three species - adhesive - treatment that were used in the design of Research and Development ANEEL/EESC \"PD220-07 - HEAD OF SERIES CROSSHEAD MLC\". The results show that the proposed method is suitable and of paramount importance in the study of structural MLC according to the sensitivity of species combination - adhesive - treatment.

Im Rahmen der Arbeit Molekularbiologische Charakterisierung des Glukose Phosphotransferase System Regulators MtfA aus Escherichia coli wurde das als Mlc titration factor A charakterisierte Protein MtfA auf genetischer, biochemischer und physiologischer Ebene näher charakterisiert. Mit Hilfe von gezielten Austauschen konservierter Aminosäuren konnte im aminoterminalen Bereich eine leuzinreiche Dimerisierungsdomäne und im carboxyterminalen Bereich eine Mlc Wechselwirkungsdomäne identifiziert werden. Letzteres konnte mit Hilfe von Di-Hybrid Studien unabhängig bestätigt werden. Die EIIBGlc Domäne des Glukosetransporters vermag Mlc zu binden. Durch die Membranassoziation des Transporters kann Mlc von seiner Operatorsequenz durch Titration entfernt werden. Lösliches EIIBGlc bindet ebenfalls an Mlc. Es löst aber keine Inaktivierung des Repressors aus. MtfA dagegen liegt cytoplasmatisch vor und inaktiviert Mlc vermutlich über die Inhibierung seiner Tetramerisierung. Eine parallele Expression von MtfA und EIIBGlc zeigte einen inhibitorischen Einfluss von EIIBGlc auf die Wechselwirkung von MtfA und Mlc. Physiologische Untersuchungen von MtfA weisen auf einen Einfluss des Proteins auf das Chemotaxisverhalten von E.coli hin. Darüber hinaus konnte ein relativ schwacher mtfA-Promotor nachgewiesen werden. Im Rahmen von Wachstumskompetitionsversuchen wurde ein Wachstumsvorteil des MtfA Wildtyps im Vergleich zur Mutante beim Wachstum auf Glukose und bei 42°C beobachtet. Außerdem stellte sich bei diesen Versuchen ein Unterschied in der Regulation von MtfA in den Stämmen K-12 und LJ110 heraus. Dieser konnte im Rahmen von RT-RT PCR Studien sowie mittels Western-Blot Analysen bestätigt werden. Die erfolgreiche Reinigung des Proteins ermöglichte den Nachweis der Dimerisierung in verschiedenen biochemischen Analysen, sowie die Herstellung spezifischer Antikörper.

No description available.