<p>The aerodynamics of insect flight is not well understood despite it has been extensively investigated with various techniques and methods. Its complexities mainly have two folds: complex flow behavior and intricate wing morphology. The complex flow behavior in insect flight are resulted from flow unsteadiness and three-dimensional effects. However, most of the experimental studies on insect flight were performed with 2D flow measurement techniques whereas the 3D flow measurement techniques are still under developing. Even with the most advanced 3D flow measurement techniques, it is still impossible to measure the flow field closed to the wings and body. On the other hand, the intricate wing morphology complicates the experimental studies with mechanical flapping wings and make mechanical models difficult to mimic the flapping wing motion of insects. Therefore, to understand the authentic flow phenomena and associated aerodynamics of insect flight, it is inevitable to study the actual flying insects. </p> <p>In this thesis, a recently introduced technique of schlieren photography is first tested on free jet of match rockets with a physics based optical flow method to explore its potential of flow quantification of unsteady flow. Then the schlieren photography and optical flow method are adapted to tethered and feely flying houseflies to investigate the complex wake flow and structures. In the end, a particle tracking velocimetry system: Shake the Box system, is utilized to resolve the complex wake flow on a tethered house fly and to acquire some preliminary 3D flow field data</p>

This Ph.D. dissertation focuses on a comprehensive study of seismic waveform similarity aiming at two themes: (1) reliable identification of repeating earthquakes (repeaters) and (2) investigation of the detailed source process of induced seismicity through the three-dimensional spatiotemporal evolution of mainly neighbouring earthquakes. Theme 1: Reliable identification of repeaters. Repeaters, occurring repeatedly on the same fault patch with nearly identical waveforms, are usually identified with the match-filtering (MF) method which essentially measures the degree of waveform similarity between an earthquake pair through the corresponding cross-correlation coefficient (CC). However, the performance of the MF method can be severely affected by the length of the cross‐correlation window, the frequency band of the applied digital filter, and the presence of a large‐amplitude wave train. To optimize the performance of MF, I first examine the effects of different operational parameters and determine generic rules for selecting the window length and the optimal frequency passband. To minimize the impact of a large‐amplitude wave train, I then develop a new method, named the match-filtering with multisegment cross-correlation (MFMC) method. By equally incorporating the contributions from various segments of the waveforms, the new method is much more effective in capturing the minor waveform discrepancy between an event pair due to location difference and hence is more reliable in detecting potential repeaters and discriminating non-repeaters with large inter-event separation. With both synthetic and borehole array waveform data, I further reveal that waveform similarity is controlled by not only the inter-event separation but also many other factors, including station azimuth, epicentral distance, velocity structure, etc. Therefore, in contrast to the traditional view, the results indicate that waveform similarity alone is insufficient to unambiguously identify true repeaters. For reliable repeater identification, we should rely on a physics-based approach considering both the overlapped source area and magnitude difference. Specifically, I define an event pair to be true repeaters if their inter-event separation is smaller than the rupture radius of the larger event and their magnitude difference is no more than 1. For the precise estimation of inter-event distance in cases of limited data, I develop the differential traveltime double-difference (DTDD) method which relies on the relative S-P differential traveltime. The findings of this study imply that previously identified repeaters and their interpretations/hypotheses potentially can be biased and hence may need a systematic reexamination. Theme 2: Investigation of the detailed source process of induced seismicity. Earthquakes induced by hydraulic fracturing (HF), especially those with large magnitudes, are often observed to have occurred near/after well completion. The delayed triggering of induced seismicity with respect to injection commencement poses serious challenges for risk mitigation and hazard assessment. By performing waveform cross-correlation and hierarchical clustering analysis, I reveal a high-resolution three-dimensional source migration process with mainshock delayed triggering that is probably controlled by local hydrogeological conditions. The results suggest that poroelastic effects might contribute to induced seismicity but are likely insufficient to activate a non-critically stressed fault of sufficient size. My analysis shows that the rapid pore-pressure build-up from HF can be very localized and capable of producing large, felt earthquakes on non-critically stressed fault segments. I further infer that the number of critically stressed, large intraplate faults should be very limited, and that reactivation of such faults may require sufficient pore-pressure accumulation. The findings of this study may also explain why so few fluid injections are seismogenic. / Graduate

Syftet med studien var att undersöka hur förekomsten av sammanbrott kan minskas. Detta utifrån familjehemsföräldrars upplevelser av stöd och behov av stöd från Humana, samt familjehemsföräldrarnas upplevelser av relationen mellan familjehem och det placerade barnet. Kvalitativa semistrukturerade intervjuer genomfördes digitalt med fyra konsulentstödda familjehem. Respondenterna upplevde att stödet var tillfredsställande, men att de saknade fler grupphandledningar. Studien visade att familjehemsföräldrarna upplevde att Humanas stöd vid konflikter mellan familjehemmet och det placerade barnet minskade risken för sammanbrott, alternativt fördröjde ett sammanbrott i de fall det var oundvikligt. Vi hade fått en mer heltäckande bild om vi tog hänsyn till det placerade barnets eget perspektiv men av etiska skäl exkluderades barnens perspektiv från studien. En lämplig matchning mellan familjehem och barn innan placeringen visade sig kunna motverka sammanbrott då det ledde till en bättre relation mellan placerat barn och familjehemsföräldrar. / The aim of this study was to examine how the occurrence of placement breakdowns can be reduced. This through foster parents’ experiences of support and need of support from Humana, together with the foster parents’ experiences of the relationship between themselves and the foster child. Qualitative semi-structured interviews took place digitally with four consultancy-supported foster parents. The respondents found the support satisfying, but wanted more group tutoring. The study showed that the foster parents experienced that support from Humana in conflicts between them and the foster child reduced the risk of a breakdown, or delayed the breakdown in those cases it could not be avoided. Taking the foster childrens’ opinions into account would have given a bigger picture, but their point of view was excluded due to ethical reasons. A suitable match between the foster parents and the child led to a better relationship and therefore resulted in preventing breakdowns.

Being able to predict the outcome of a game is useful in many aspects. Such as,to aid designers in the process of understanding how the game is played by theplayers, as well as how to be able to balance the elements within the game aretwo of those aspects. If one could predict the outcome of games with certaintythe design process could possibly be evolved into more of an experiment basedapproach where one can observe cause and effect to some degree. It has previouslybeen shown that it is possible to predict outcomes of games to varying degrees ofsuccess. However, there is a lack of research which compares and evaluates severaldifferent models on the same domain with common aims. To narrow this identifiedgap an experiment is conducted to compare and analyze seven different classifierswithin the same domain. The classifiers are then ranked on accuracy against eachother with help of appropriate statistical methods. The classifiers compete onthe task of predicting which team will win or lose in a match of the game BloodBowl 2. For nuance three different datasets are made for the models to be trainedon. While the results vary between the models of the various datasets the general consensus has an identifiable pattern of rejections. The results also indicatea strong accuracy for Support Vector Machine and Logistic Regression across allthe datasets.

Helmut Lachenmann’s theory of perception highlights musical moments that step out of a coherent stream of self-contained musical logic and challenges established categories of musical experience. The penultimate scene (No. 23: Shō) of Lachenmann’s »opera« The Little Match Girl (1991-96/2001) and the airy chords in the final section of his large ensemble work Concertini (2004/2005) arguably represent such moments of fundamental musical alterity in the composer’s recent output that are characterised by a specific auratic emphasis. Closer examination, however, suggests that these sections are also multiply mediated by self-references with the larger musical structure of these extensive works. This article provides a loosely connected series of discussions on how a balance between alterity and self-referentiality is achieved in these two examples. The discussions acknowledge the distinction between »extra-opus« and »intra-opus« references derived from cognitive science and music theory and focus on pitch organisation, sectional time structure, narrativity and interculturality. The Japanese mouth organ shō that figures prominently in the opera scene and, according to the composer, provides the »scale« for the concluding sounds in Concertini, without doubt symbolizes a moment of fundamental alterity due to its unique timbre, its unalienated sound and a basic articulation derived from the Japanese court music repertoire tōgaku. A detailed analysis of fingerings and pitch organisation, however, reveals a »double-coding« of Lachenmann’s material: on the »extra-opus« realm it refers to or »deconstructs« both Japanese and European musical conventions, on the »intra-opus« realm it connects to the framing scenes of the opera and forms part of a large-scale »cadence sound« that reconsiders the complete spectrum between pitched and unpitched sounds within the three closing scenes. The »utopian« shō-chords played by wind instruments in the final section of Concertini, in contrast, create a more fragmentary type of »cadence sound« due to their short durations, but nevertheless exert a »magnetic« attraction that temporarily assembles the heterogeneous »sound families« of the piece into transient sonic entities. A detailed overview of the sectional time structures reveals that in both cases the music follows a rather rigid sequence of proportions derived from Fibonacci series and the golden section, and includes several quasi symmetrical time layers. In both examples this time structure supports pivotal formal processes: in the shō-scene from the Little Match Girl it suggests a shift from the predominance of shō-sounds to their increasingly independent orchestral »resonances«, in Concertini the symmetrical position of the »shō-chords« within the final section emphasizes their cadential function and »magnetic« effect. The concluding discussions on narrativity and interculturality suggest that – partly in contrast to the preceding arguments of this essay – the analysed sections tend to subvert the conventional closure concept of a »cadence« and rather create open endings. The self-referential elements in the Little Match Girl’s construction of the shō and its inclusion in a re-invented type of »celestial mechanics« discloses non-essentialist, polyvalent strata of musical meaning that match Lachenmann’s concept of nonconventional musical narrativity and non-exploitative musical interculturality (a concept that he has critically discussed at length in a recent article). This is especially cogent when his shō-music is compared to other recent works for the Japanese mouth organ that recontextualize its sounds by »demythologization« in a much more obvious, arguably didactic manner. Finally, Lachenmann’s key idea of »liberated perception« is associated with this discussion on interculturality and traced back to moments in Keiji Nishitani’s philosophy – leaving this article open to further research.

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Animals learn from past experience to guide future behavior and improve survival. This ability relies in part on specific episodic memories of past events encoded by neuronal activity and stored by updated connectivity between neurons. The unique architecture and activity of the hippocampus and related cortical regions are crucial for supporting these episodic memories. Hippocampal models propose the need for a pattern separation function to disambiguate similar memories and a pattern completion function to recall the full breadth of an experience from a partial cue. Past work suggests that neuronal activity in the dentate gyrus (DG) of hippocampus contributes to memory-guided navigation and plays a role in pattern separation. We tested the role of specific DG neuronal ensembles (i.e. engrams) in supporting the pattern separation function and altering downstream neural activity and, ultimately, behavior. To that end, we used an activity-dependent labeling paradigm to identify and manipulate engram ensembles during navigational and contextual fear conditioning (CFC) tasks. The results of our first experiment revealed that the DG partially disambiguates specific maze trajectories while still exhibiting greater overlap than chance levels. These findings suggest that the DG contributes to memory-guided navigation by both pattern separation and completion. Our second experiment manipulated nonspecific memory-related DG populations to assess the functional role of these cells in task generalization across contexts and ongoing spatial working memory. Optogenetic activation of these ensembles disrupted performance accuracy and exhibited a time-dependent impairment effect suggesting a role of the DG in task generalization between contexts. The final experiments investigated the physiological ramifications of artificial memory ensemble reactivation during ongoing navigation behavior. We recorded local field potential (LFP) and single unit responses in mouse DG and CA1 during artificial reactivation of a DG-mediated CFC memory engram. Stimulation of the DG entrained LFP and individual cell spiking in a subpopulation of CA1 pyramidal cells. Their spatial information was disrupted by stimulation despite stable navigational representation before and after the manipulation. Further, the presence of stimulation could be reliably decoded by the firing rate of the network, suggesting that engram reactivation forced the CA1 to adopt a repeatable state, perhaps to support behavioral expression of memories. In summary, my dissertation work presents empirical and theoretical evidence for the role of the dentate gyrus as a single node of an extended separation/completion circuit distributed anatomically and temporally as a neural mechanism supporting episodic memory.

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The aim of this study was to explore how match-related statistics contribute to winning association football matches. This is relevant for stakeholders in the football industry to facilitate the understanding of what factors contribute to winning matches and can thus be of use when formulating match tactics. A model was constructed through the use of binary logistic regression, where winning/not winning was used as the response variable and standardized match-related statistics were used as predictor variables. Using the acquired coefficients, it was concluded that, among other variables, the home advantage and the ability of a team to finish on target has a strong correlation with winninggames. Further, the study explores the impact of a team’s ability to win football games on the financial landscape of the modern football world. The results show that some of the examined statistics are well correlated to winning a match, but that the tactical useability of these insights is low. / Syftet med denna studie var att utforska hur matchrelaterad statistik bidrar till att vinna fotbollsmatcher. Detta är relevant för aktörer inom fotbollsbranchen för att underlätta försåelsen av vilka matchrelaterade faktorer som bidrar till vinst och kan således användas för att forma matchtaktik. En modell konstruerades genom binär logistisk regression, där att vinna/att inte vinna användes som responsvariabel och standardiserad matchrelaterad statistik användes som prediktorvariabel. Genom att använda koefficienterna tillhörande modellen,kan man fastslå att bland annat hemmalagsfördel samt ett lags förmåga att träffa mål korrelerar starkt med att vinna matcher. Dessutom utforskar studien påverkan av ett lags förmåga att vinna fotbollsmatcher på det finansiella landskapet tillhörande den moderna fotbollen. Resultaten visar att vissa av de studerade variablerna korrelerar starkt med att vinna fotbollsmatcher, men attmöjligheterna att använda dessa insikter till att forma taktik är begränsade.

<p>AMR as a cause of graft rejection has been long recognized and the presence of pre formed antibodies against donor HLA is a risk factor for increased graft rejection. FlowXM is the current clinical gold standard for detecting harmful DSA in the recipients and a positive FlowXM is considered a strong contraindication to transplantation. However, newer techniques such as SAB provide with a highly sensitive and specific method for DSA detection that is unattainable by FlowXM. But due to the intrinsic limitations associated with SAB assays, the clinical relevance of DSA detected on SAB has been highly disputable. Therefore, the overall aim of this study was to investigate the utility of SAB in predicting harmful DSA levels, by establishing a fluorescence range on SAB that correlated to positive FlowXM. This was done by retrospectively testing the highest serum dilutions on FlowPRA SAB that produced positive B or T cell FlowXM from 15 variably sensitized patients. Thus, a very narrow MFI range on SAB was established, for B and T cells separately, that correlated to positive FlowXM. On B cells this correlate ranged from 2780-7772 MFI (Mean MFI =5641), whereas T cell range was 1089-6731 (Mean MFI= 3226). In order to test these ranges for prediction of positive FlowXM, B and T cell FlowXM tests were carried out using various serum/cell combinations. DSA MFI of >3000 on SAB resulted in a significantly higher T cell positive FlowXM (p</p> / Master of Science (MSc)