<p>You could say that the Swedish artist Felix Gmelin in his art uses media to get closer or further away from what we consider to be the reality and also truth. The purpose of this study is to discuss what this means for the intention of his art works. The starting point is my own aesthetic experience of his painting and the installations <em>A Gentleman’s agreement (1996), Farbtest, Die Rothe Fahne II (2003) and Tools and Grammar 2.5 (2007).</em> Each of these works of art consists of different kinds of prefabricated material such as articles, films and documents. These kinds of material are often considered to stand in the way of the aesthetic experience, maybe because they are supposed to be closer to reality and therefore to truth. The thesis of this study is that the truth in art is inscribed in the aesthetic framework of each art piece and also in the technical support it uses. If for example the support consists of an investigative journalist’s documentary research, in Rosalind Krauss’ description, the truth might be found in the authenticity of the documentary material. If the technical support has to do with sampling instead, as in the re-use of existing materials to create new works of art, the truth can probably not be found in the different pieces of material but in the work ofart in itself. It does not matter then if the different pieces of material it consists of is traditionally considered unaesthetic. The conclusion of this study is that Gmelin’s <em>Gentleman’s agreement</em>, <em>Farbtest, Die Rothe Fahne II</em> and <em>Tools and Grammar 2.5</em> actually discuss what truth is and if there is an aesthetic truth.</p> / Examensarbetet består dels av en vetenskaplig rapport (se Huvudtitel och Abstract), dels av en vetenskaplig artikel (se Alternativ titel).

You could say that the Swedish artist Felix Gmelin in his art uses media to get closer or further away from what we consider to be the reality and also truth. The purpose of this study is to discuss what this means for the intention of his art works. The starting point is my own aesthetic experience of his painting and the installations A Gentleman’s agreement (1996), Farbtest, Die Rothe Fahne II (2003) and Tools and Grammar 2.5 (2007). Each of these works of art consists of different kinds of prefabricated material such as articles, films and documents. These kinds of material are often considered to stand in the way of the aesthetic experience, maybe because they are supposed to be closer to reality and therefore to truth. The thesis of this study is that the truth in art is inscribed in the aesthetic framework of each art piece and also in the technical support it uses. If for example the support consists of an investigative journalist’s documentary research, in Rosalind Krauss’ description, the truth might be found in the authenticity of the documentary material. If the technical support has to do with sampling instead, as in the re-use of existing materials to create new works of art, the truth can probably not be found in the different pieces of material but in the work ofart in itself. It does not matter then if the different pieces of material it consists of is traditionally considered unaesthetic. The conclusion of this study is that Gmelin’s Gentleman’s agreement, Farbtest, Die Rothe Fahne II and Tools and Grammar 2.5 actually discuss what truth is and if there is an aesthetic truth. / Examensarbetet består dels av en vetenskaplig rapport (se Huvudtitel och Abstract), dels av en vetenskaplig artikel (se Alternativ titel).

Distributed systems are everywhere. From large datacenters to mobile devices, an ever richer assortment of applications and services relies on distributed systems, infrastructure, and protocols. Despite their ubiquity, testing and debugging distributed systems remains notoriously hard. Moreover, aside from inherent design challenges posed by partial failure, concurrency, or asynchrony, there remain significant challenges in the implementation of distributed systems. These programming challenges stem from the increasing complexity of the concurrent activities and reactive behaviors in a distributed system on the one hand, and the need to effectively leverage the parallelism offered by modern multi-core hardware, on the other hand. This thesis contributes Kompics, a programming model designed to alleviate some of these challenges. Kompics is a component model and programming framework for building distributed systems by composing message-passing concurrent components. Systems built with Kompics leverage multi-core machines out of the box, and they can be dynamically reconfigured to support hot software upgrades. A simulation framework enables deterministic execution replay for debugging, testing, and reproducible behavior evaluation for largescale Kompics distributed systems. The same system code is used for both simulation and production deployment, greatly simplifying the system development, testing, and debugging cycle. We highlight the architectural patterns and abstractions facilitated by Kompics through a case study of a non-trivial distributed key-value storage system. CATS is a scalable, fault-tolerant, elastic, and self-managing key-value store which trades off service availability for guarantees of atomic data consistency and tolerance to network partitions. We present the composition architecture for the numerous protocols employed by the CATS system, as well as our methodology for testing the correctness of key CATS algorithms using the Kompics simulation framework. Results from a comprehensive performance evaluation attest that CATS achieves its claimed properties and delivers a level of performance competitive with similar systems which provide only weaker consistency guarantees. More importantly, this testifies that Kompics admits efficient system implementations. Its use as a teaching framework as well as its use for rapid prototyping, development, and evaluation of a myriad of scalable distributed systems, both within and outside our research group, confirm the practicality of Kompics. / <p>QC 20130520</p>

This thesis explores constructions of gendered and gender political positions and practices of men identifying as ‘feminist’. The analysis is based on qualitative interviews with 28 men aged 20-34. At issue is how seemingly contradictory positions for men as feminists are made comprehensible in theory and practice. An introduction showcase theoretical discussions on gendered experiences and the possibilities of men being feminist, mainly from standpoint, radical feminist and poststructuralist radical constructionist perspectives. Men doing feminism emerge as an unresolved complex matter. This is followed by a critical discussion of state feminism, double emancipation and research on men and masculinities in the welfare state. The support for men’s participation, predominantly as white heterosexual fathers, in the Swedish gender equality project has consequences for the construction of men as potentially ‘new’, ‘good’ gender equal feminist subjects. In the construction of profeminist positions in interview performances, interviewees are located in-between the radical feminist, poststructuralist and gender equality perspectives on men, masculinity and feminism. Two themes involve an implementation of the concept of passing and introduce the analytical concept of co-fielding. Passing consists of the microsociological process of making radical and deconstructive profeminist positions authentic and yet being able to manage masculinity in homosocial contexts. Co-fielding refers to the conjoint interlacing of experiences, knowledge and meaning-making in interview interaction where relations of researcher-researched are characterized by discursive closeness and overlapping positions. Co-fielding practices affect the outcomes of co-construction of interview performances, the negotiation of gender and power relations and the reflexive use of (in this case feminist) knowledge in qualitative interviews. In analyzing the presentations of self, ambiguous meanings of profeminist positions emerge and the doing, undoing and redoing of feminism and masculinity appear multi-faceted. Radical feminism and radical constructionism seem intersected in making men’s feminist positions comprehensible. Such rebellious positions emerge as oxymoronic and, when critically brought into the gender equality context, located in a no man’s land out of place. In all, the thesis seeks to bring together theoretical, national and empirical locations of profeminist men, and in a concluding chapter also explore issues of ethics in feminist research and cross-gender interviewing.

Multi-antenna wireless communication systems that employ a large number of antennas have recently stirred a lot of research interest. This is mainly due to the possibility of achieving very high spectral efficiency, power efficiency, and link reliability in such large-scale multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. An emerging architecture for large-scale multiuser MIMO communications is one where each base station (BS) is equipped with a large number of antennas (tens to hundreds of antennas) and the user terminals are equipped with fewer antennas (one to four antennas) each. The backhaul communication between base stations is also carried out using large number of antennas. Because of the high dimensionality of large-scale MIMO signals, the computational complexity of various transceiver operations can be prohibitively large. Therefore, low complexity techniques that scale well for transceiver signal processing in such large-scale MIMO systems are crucial. The transceiver operations of interest include signal encoding at the transmitter, and channel estimation, detection and decoding at the receiver. This thesis focuses on the design and analysis of novel low-complexity transceiver signal processing schemes for large-scale MIMO systems. In this thesis, we consider two types of large-scale MIMO systems, namely, massive MIMO systems and generalized spatial modulation MIMO (GSM-MIMO) systems. In massive MIMO, the mapping of information bits to modulation symbols is done using conventional modulation alphabets (e.g., QAM, PSK). In GSM-MIMO, few of the avail-able transmit antennas are activated in a given channel use, and information bits are conveyed through the indices of these active antennas, in addition to the bits conveyed through conventional modulation symbols. We also propose a novel modulation scheme named as precoder index modulation, where information bits are conveyed through the index of the chosen precoder matrix as well as the modulation symbols transmitted. Massive MIMO: In this part of the thesis, we propose a novel MIMO receiver which exploits channel hardening that occurs in large-scale MIMO channels. Channel hardening refers to the phenomenon where the off-diagonal terms of HH H become much weaker compared to the diagonal terms as the size of the channel gain matrix H increases. We exploit this phenomenon to devise a low-complexity channel estimation scheme and a message passing algorithm for signal detection at the BS receiver in massive MIMO systems. We refer to the proposed receiver as the channel hardening-exploiting message passing (CHEMP) receiver. The key novelties in the proposed CHEMP receiver are: (i) operation on the matched filtered system model, (ii) Gaussian approximation on the off-diagonal terms of the HH H matrix, and (iii) direct estimation of HH H instead of H and use of this estimate of HH H for detection The performance and complexity results show that the proposed CHEMP receiver achieves near-optimal performance in large-scale MIMO systems at complexities less than those of linear receivers like minimum mean squared error (MMSE) receiver. We also present a log-likelihood ratio (LLR) analysis that provides an analytical reasoning for this better performance of the CHEMP receiver. Further, the proposed message passing based detection algorithm enables us to combine it with low density parity check (LDPC) decoder to formulate a joint message passing based detector-decoder. For this joint detector-decoder, we design optimized irregular binary LDPC codes specific to the massive MIMO channel and the proposed receiver through EXIT chart matching. The LDPC codes thus obtained are shown to achieve improved coded bit error rate (BER) performance compared to off-the-shelf irregular LDPC codes. The performance of the CHEMP receiver degrades when the system loading factor (ratio of the number of users to the number of BS antennas) and the modulation alpha-bet size are large. It is of interest to devise receiver algorithms that work well for high system loading factors and modulation alphabet sizes. For this purpose, we propose a low-complexity factor-graph based vector message passing algorithm for signal detection. This algorithm uses a scalar Gaussian approximation of interference on the basic sys-tem model. The performance results show that this algorithm performs well for large modulation alphabets and high loading factors. We combine this detection algorithm with a non-binary LDPC decoder to obtain a joint detector-decoder, where the field size of the non-binary LDPC code is same as the size of the modulation alphabet. For this joint message passing based detector-decoder, we design optimized non-binary irregular LDPC codes tailored to the massive MIMO channel and the proposed detector. GSM-MIMO: In this part of the thesis, we consider GSM-MIMO systems in point-to-point as well as multiuser communication settings. GSM-MIMO has the advantage of requiring only fewer transmit radio frequency (RF) chains than the number of transmit antennas. We analyze the capacity of point-to-point GSM-MIMO, and obtain lower and upper bounds on the GSM-MIMO system capacity. We also derive an upper bound on the BER performance of maximum likelihood detection in GSM-MIMO systems. This bound is shown to be tight at moderate to high signal-to-noise ratios. When the number of transmit and receive antennas are large, the complexity of en-coding and decoding of GSM-MIMO signals can be prohibitively high. To alleviate this problem, we propose a low complexity GSM-MIMO encoding technique that utilizes com-binatorial number system for bits-to-symbol mapping. We also propose a novel layered message passing (LaMP) algorithm for decoding GSM-MIMO signals. Low computational complexity is achieved in the LaMP algorithm by detecting the modulation bits and the antenna index bits in two deferent layers. We then consider large-scale multiuser GSM-MIMO systems, where multiple users employ GSM at their transmitters to communicate with a BS having a large number of receive antennas. For this system, we develop computationally efficient message passing algorithms for signal detection using vector Gaussian approximation of interference. The performance results of these algorithms show that the GSM-MIMO system outperforms the massive MIMO system by several dBs for the same spectral efficiency. Precoder index modulation: It is known that the performance of a communication link can be enhanced by exploiting time diversity without reducing the rate of transmission using pseudo random phase preceding (PRPP). In order to further improve the performance of GSM-MIMO, we apply PRPP technique to GSM-MIMO systems. PRPP provides additional diversity advantage at the receiver and further improves the performance of GSM-MIMO systems. For PRPP-GSM systems, we propose methods to simultaneously precode both the antenna index bits and the modulation symbols using rectangular precoder matrices. Finally, we extend the idea of index modulation to pre-coding and propose a new modulation scheme referred to as precoder index modulation (PIM). In PIM, information bits are conveyed through the index of a prehared PRPP matrix, in addition to the information bits conveyed through the modulation symbols. PIM is shown to increase the achieved spectral efficiency, in addition to providing diver-sity advantages.

Para la presente investigación de tesis desarrollada entre los distritos de Imperial y Pampas, provincia de Tayacaja, en el departamento de Huancavelica, se tiene como unidad de análisis a 60 muros de contención, donde se aplicó criterios muestréales de 23 muros f´c 210 kg/cm2. Como resultados alcanzados se logró elaborar concreto hidráulico de calidad usando agregado fino marginal con el cual se pudo satisfacer los parámetros de resistencia y durabilidad. Para demostrar la durabilidad se realizaron distintos ensayos; los que no cumplieron con las especificaciones de la norma EG-2000 fueron el de Equivalente de arena MTC E 114, Material que pasa el Tamiz N°200 MTC E 202 y Análisis granulométrico por tamizado ASTM C 136, por lo cual se efectuaron análisis más rigurosos como: el ensayo de Valor de azul de metileno y el ensayo de Análisis petrográfico macroscópico y microscópico en agregados para concreto ASTM C 295, donde se obtuvo como resultado que la arena no presenta elementos activos en su composición, lo que quiere decir que ante las condiciones ambientales de la zona estos elementos no se expanden ni se contraen y adicionalmente como medida de control se diseñó la mezcla de concreto hidráulico con aditivo incorporador de aire AirMix-200. Del mismo informe petrográfico se concluyó que la composición principal del agregado es la caliza, la cual es materia prima para la elaboración del cemento, que de alguna manera adicional ayuda a cumplir satisfactoriamente el parámetro de resistencia. Así mismo quedó demostrado que a través de ensayos a compresión no confinada de testigos de concreto, se alcanzó resistencias superiores a lo requerido en la norma EG-2000. Research for this thesis developed between the districts of Imperial and Pampas, Tayacaja province, in the department of Huancavelica, it has the analysis unit 60 retaining walls, where 23 sample criteria applied walls f´c 210 kg/cm2. Results obtained are as elaborate hydraulic concrete achievement of marginal quality using fine aggregate with which it was able to satisfy the parameters of strength and durability. To demonstrate the durability various tests were performed; those who do not comply with the specifications of the EG-2000 were rule the sand equivalent MTC E 114, passes what material the sieve No. 200 MTC E 202 and sieve analysis ASTM C 136, here by which they were made Analysis More rigorous like: The test value of methylene blue and testing of macroscopic and microscopic petrographic analysis in paragraph aggregate concrete ASTM C 295, where it resulted the sand without presents elements active in their composition, which means they say to the area Environmental Conditions These elements do not expand or contract and additionally as a control measure of self-design hydraulic concrete mix with entraining admixture AirMix-200 air. Same petrographic report concluded that the composition of the director of aggregate is limestone, which is a raw material for the production of cement, which in some additionally helps one perform satisfactorily resistance parameter. Also it demonstrated that one through essays of unconfined compressive concrete witness, higher strengths than required was reached in the EG-2000 standard.

Face au déluge actuel de données principalement non structurées, les graphes ont démontré, dans une variété de domaines scientifiques, leur importance croissante comme language abstrait pour décrire des interactions complexes entre des objets complexes. L’un des principaux défis posés par l’étude de ces réseaux est l’inférence de propriétés macroscopiques à grande échelle, affectant un grand nombre d’objets ou d’agents, sur la seule base des interactions microscopiquesqu’entretiennent leurs constituants élémentaires. La physique statistique, créée précisément dans le but d’obtenir les lois macroscopiques de la thermodynamique à partir d’un modèle idéal de particules en interaction, fournit une intuition décisive dans l’étude des réseaux complexes.Dans cette thèse, nous utilisons des méthodes issues de la physique statistique des systèmes désordonnés pour mettre au point et analyser de nouveaux algorithmes d’inférence sur les graphes. Nous nous concentrons sur les méthodes spectrales, utilisant certains vecteurs propres de matrices bien choisies, et sur les graphes parcimonieux, qui contiennent une faible quantité d’information. Nous développons une théorie originale de l’inférence spectrale, fondée sur une relaxation de l’optimisation de certaines énergies libres en champ moyen. Notre approche est donc entièrement probabiliste, et diffère considérablement des motivations plus classiques fondées sur l’optimisation d’une fonction de coût. Nous illustrons l’efficacité de notre approchesur différents problèmes, dont la détection de communautés, la classification non supervisée à partir de similarités mesurées aléatoirement, et la complétion de matrices. / In an era of unprecedented deluge of (mostly unstructured) data, graphs are proving more and more useful, across the sciences, as a flexible abstraction to capture complex relationships between complex objects. One of the main challenges arising in the study of such networks is the inference of macroscopic, large-scale properties affecting a large number of objects, based solely on he microscopic interactions between their elementary constituents. Statistical physics, precisely created to recover the macroscopic laws of thermodynamics from an idealized model of interacting particles, provides significant insight to tackle such complex networks.In this dissertation, we use methods derived from the statistical physics of disordered systems to design and study new algorithms for inference on graphs. Our focus is on spectral methods, based on certain eigenvectors of carefully chosen matrices, and sparse graphs, containing only a small amount of information. We develop an original theory of spectral inference based on a relaxation of various meanfield free energy optimizations. Our approach is therefore fully probabilistic, and contrasts with more traditional motivations based on the optimization of a cost function. We illustrate the efficiency of our approach on various problems, including community detection, randomized similarity-based clustering, and matrix completion.

Cette recherche menée au sein du pôle de recherche et développement de la société Perfect Memory s'intéresse à l'accompagnement de la mémoire familiale via un dispositif technique, interrogé par le prisme des sciences de l'information et de la communication. Elle propose la construction d'une approche d'éditorialisation du document numérique permettant à chacun de s'approprier son patrimoine culturel au travers de l'utilisation du dispositif technique co-construit, l'application Web Famille TM. L'interrogation du milieu socio-économique de la préservation et la valorisation du patrimoine culturel du particulier, auquel Perfect Memory appartient, nous amène à nous interroger sur les enjeux d'un rapprochement entre les notions de « numérique » et de « mémoire ». Un cadre théorique est ainsi construit, le document numérique est appréhendé comme support d'un exercice de la mémoire, permis par la médiation du dispositif technique. L'éditorialisation, en tant qu'ensemble d'opérations réalisées sur le document numérique par l'intermédiaire du dispositif technique, est placée au cœur de notre problématique axée sur les modalités d'accompagnement des pratiques mémorielles via le service Famille TM. La construction de notre approche d'éditorialisation est séparée en deux moments. Dans un premier temps, un corpus de documents numériques - productions familiales préservées par différentes institutions patrimoniales - est interrogé par une méthodologie sémiotique afin d'extraire les éléments saillants invariants à leur interprétation, que nous rassemblons sous l'appellation de marqueurs de mémoire. Dans un second temps, les catégories de marqueurs construits sont transcrites en recommandations éditoriales et ergonomiques destinées au dispositif technique Famille TM. Articulé jusqu'ici autour d'un axe unique - la documentarisation de l'archive -, le dispositif est enrichi de deux nouveaux modes - cinématographique et privé -, constituant autant de points d'entrée supplémentaires dans le document versé par l'utilisateur sur le service. L'approche d'éditorialisation du document est ainsi décomposée en trois modes, comportant chacun différents scénarii, articulation de fonctionnalités et d'une expérience utilisateur spécifiques, construits pour le service Famille TM. / This research project was made at the R&D department at Perfect Memory and focus on how to support family memory via a technological artifact. We question the artifact through the prism of information and communication sciences. The project offers to build a new approach, that of the editorialization of digital documents, enabling each user to rediscover their cultural heritage. This can be done by means of Famille TM, a co-built Web app. Following a study of the cultural heritage market as applied to private individuals, to whom Perfect Memory belongs, we proceed to a cross analysis of two concepts : "Digital" and "Memory". Starting from these, we built a theoretical framework in which we consider digital documents as a base for memory training. The technological artifact allows such training through a mediation process. Editorialization, as a set of processes made on the digital document through a technological artifact, appears as central to our concern: to design ways to support memory habits through Famille TM. We divide the construction of an editorialization approach into two steps. First, we build a corpus of digital documents - home movies - from various cultural heritage organizations. Then we interrogate the corpus through a semiotic methodology in order to gather salient and invariant elements in each interpretation. We name them memory markers. In a second step, we transcribe the markers categorization into editorial and ergonomic recommendations for Famille TM. Until today, the technological artifact consisted in one single mode: the documentation of archives. We introduce two extra modes: the cinematographic experience and the private experience. Each mode provides the user with an original entry point into documents uploaded on the app. To summarize our editorialization approach, we implement three modes into Famille TM and for each of them we design several scenarios made up of specific features and user experiences.

Design for modernization of the railway station Brandys nad Orlici. The reconstruction of both the gridiron. The main rails increase the speed to the maximum, in passing tracks increase the speed to 60 km / h The station will eliminate level crossings on the platform. Width arrangement of the platforms will be designed to accommodate persons with reduced mobility options.

This master's thesis deals with demonstration of various approaches to probabilistic inference in Bayesian networks. Basics of probability theory, introduction to Bayesian networks, methods for Bayesian inference and applications of Bayesian networks are described in theoretical part. Inference techniques are explained and complemented by their algorithm. Techniques are also illustrated on example. Practical part contains implementation description, experiments with demonstration applications and conclusion of the results.