<p><font face="Times New Roman"><font face="Times New Roman"> <p align="left">As a case study, the paper analyzes the Bank&rsquo / s role in the Chad-Cameroon Petroleum Development and Oil Pipeline project (the project) in which the Bank has been involved since the year 2000. The paper presents the lessons, challenges and implications from this protection of human rights.</p> </font></font></p>

This study has successfully identified transcripts differentially expressed in the salivary gland and midgut and provides candidate genes that are critical to response to parasite invasion. Furthermore, an open-source Glossina resource (G-ESTMAP) was developed that provides interactive features and browsing of functional genomics data for researchers working in the field of Trypanosomiasis on the African continent.

High-performance embedded networks are found in computer systems that perform applications such as radar signal processing and multimedia rendering. The system can be composed of multiple computer nodes that are interconnected with the network. Properties of the network such as latency and speed affect the performance of the entire system. A node´s access to the network is controlled by a medium access protocol. This protocol decides e.g. real-time properties and services that the network will offer its users, i.e. the nodes. Two such network protocols with heterogeneous real-time services are presented. The protocols offer different communication services and services for parallel and distributed real-time processing. The latter services include barrier synchronisation, global reduction and short message service. A network topology of a unidirectional pipelined optical fibre-ribbon ring is assumed for both presented protocols. In such a network several simultaneous transmissions in non-overlapping segments are possible. Both protocols are aimed for applications that require a high-performance embedded network such as radar signal processing and multimedia. In these applications the system can be organised as multiple interconnected computation nodes that co-operate in parallel to achieve higher performance. The computing performance of the whole system is greatly affected by the choice of network. Computing nodes in a system for radar signal processing should be tightly coupled, i.e., communications cost, such as latency, between nodes should be small. This is possible if a suitable network with an efficient protocol is used. The target applications have heterogeneous real-time requirements for communication in that different classes of data-traffic exist. The traffic can be classified according to its requirements. The proposed protocols partition data-traffic into three classes with distinctly different qualities. These classes are: traffic with hard real-time demands, such as mission critical commands; traffic with soft real-time demands, such as application data (a deadline miss here only leads to decreased performance); and traffic with no real-time constraints at all. The protocols are analysed and performance is tested through simulation with different data-traffic patterns.

The purpose of this thesis is to construct a"Program Address Generator"(PAG) to a 24-bit Harvard type, RISC DSP processor using the VHDL language. The PAG is a part of the program control unit, and should consist of the following units: A system stack for storing jump and loop information. A program counter, a status register, a stack pointer, an operating mode register and two registers called loop address and loop counter register, to support hardware loops. The PAG handles the fetch stage of the processor pipeline, and should handle instructions such as the jump, subroutine jump, return from subroutine/interrupt and loop instructions, among others. The PAG was successfully designed, and its function verified through extensive tests, where common combinations of ASM instructions were tested. Files for automated testing was created, to support easy testing if only small changes are applied to the PAG.

Exclusionary discipline policies (Casella, 2003; Christle, Jolivette & Nelson, 2005; Tuzzolo & Hewitt, 2007), academic failure and school dropout are some of the most salient factors in the school to prison pipeline (Christle, Jolivette & Nelson, 2005). While previous research has explored the variability in existing exclusionary discipline policies and identified numerous factors associated with expulsion or criminal justice outcomes among youth, there has been little effort to bring these individual and school level factors together into a single predictive model that is informed by existing criminological theories. In this context, the proposed study will use multiple waves of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to consider how school discipline policies, demographics, and competing criminological explanations affect the risk of expulsion and then future contact with the criminal justice system. Findings reveal that school-level factors such as severe disciplinary policies, school size, and school type are weak predictors of expulsion and adult arrest. Conversely, measures of social bonding, low self-control, learning, and strain theories show promise in predicting expulsion and arrest outcomes. A history of school disciplinary actions and self-reported delinquency present themselves as the strongest predictors of expulsion and subsequent arrest. Theoretical and policy implications are considered.

Gene-fusions are a prevalent class of genetic variants that are often employed as cancer biomarkers and therapeutic targets. In recent years, high-throughput sequencing of the cellular genome and transcriptome have emerged as a promising approach for the investigation of gene-fusions at the DNA and RNA level. Although, large volumes of sequencing data and complexity of gene-fusion structures presents unique computational challenges. This dissertation describes research that first addresses the bioinformatics challenges associated with the analysis of the massive volumes of sequencing data by developing bioinformatics pipeline and more applied integrated computational workflows. Application of high-throughput sequencing and the proposed bioinformatics approaches for the breast and ovarian cancer study reveals unexpected complex structures of gene-fusions and their functional significance in the onset and progression of cancer. Integrative analysis of gene-fusions at DNA and RNA level shows the key importance of the regulation of gene-fusion at the transcription level in cancer.

The mechanisms by which hydrates deposit in a petroleum production-line are likely to be related to pipeline surface properties, e.g. pipeline material, surface energy and roughness. In this work, the wettability alteration of pipeline surfaces from contact with oil, as well as the adhesion energy between water and solid in the presence of oil is investigated. Contact angles are determined as a function of solid material and oil composition, for both model oils and crude oils. Although contact angles in oil/brine/solid systems have been extensively reported in the literature, the variety of solids that may mimic a pipeline is limited. In this study, we include various metal surfaces in addition to glass and a coating. Initial results from using near infrared imaging for collecting contact angle data in non-translucent systems are also presented.

The pipeline industry has conducted a vast amount of research on the subject of mechanical damage. Mechanical damage makes up a large portion of the total amount of pipeline failures that occur each year. The current methods rely on engineering judgment and experience rather than scientific theory. The method for the assessment of mechanical damage introduced in this study uses a material property called critical strain to predict the onset of cracking within the pipe wall. The critical strain is compared to the strain within a dent using a ductile failure damage indicator (DFDI). To investigate the use of the DFDI to indicate the onset of cracking within a dent, the study attempted to accomplish three tasks. The first was to investigate the use of various techniques to locate the critical strain from the stress-strain curve. Five samples taken from the pipe material was used to generate both engineering and true stress-strain curves. A sensitivity analysis was conducted to show the effects of different variables on the critical strain value. The DFDI compares the critical strain value to the calculated strain at the deepest depth location within a dent. The strain calculations use the curvature of the dent and thus require a dent profile. A high resolution laser scanner was used to extract dent profiles from a pipe. The second task of the study was to investigate the reliability of the laser scanner equipment used for this study. The results from the investigation showed that the laser scanner could be used to scan the inside of the pipe despite its design for external scanning. The results also showed that the scans should be 1 mm in length along the axis of the pipe at a resolution of 0.5 mm and 360 degrees around the pipe. The final task was to conduct the denting test. The test used a spherical indenter to dent the pipe at increments of 3% of the outside diameter. The results from the test showed that a visible crack did not form on the inside pipe surface as expected from the DFDI method. This does not mean a crack did not form. During the denting test distinct popping sounds were observed possibly indicating cracks forming within the pipe wall.

<p><font face="Times New Roman"><font face="Times New Roman"> <p align="left">As a case study, the paper analyzes the Bank&rsquo / s role in the Chad-Cameroon Petroleum Development and Oil Pipeline project (the project) in which the Bank has been involved since the year 2000. The paper presents the lessons, challenges and implications from this protection of human rights.</p> </font></font></p>

This study has successfully identified transcripts differentially expressed in the salivary gland and midgut and provides candidate genes that are critical to response to parasite invasion. Furthermore, an open-source Glossina resource (G-ESTMAP) was developed that provides interactive features and browsing of functional genomics data for researchers working in the field of Trypanosomiasis on the African continent.