No description available.

Recent advances in wireless and sensing technologies have enabled the deployment of large scale Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) which have a wide range of scientific and commercial applications. However, due to the limited energy supply of sensor nodes, extending the network lifetime has become crucial for WSNs to deliver their promised benefits. Several proposals have aimed at this objective by designing energy efficient protocols at the physical, medium access, and network layers. While the proposed protocols achieve significant energy savings for individual sensor nodes, they fail to solve topology-related problems. An example of such problems is the bottlenecks around the sink, which is a direct result of multi-hop relaying: sensor nodes around the sink relay data generated all over the network which makes them deplete their energy much faster than other nodes. A natural solution to this problem is to have multiple mobile data collectors so that the load is distributed evenly among all nodes. We investigate this promising direction for balancing the load and, hence, prolonging the lifetime of the network. We design optimization schemes for routing and placement of mobile data collectors in WSNs. We show, by theoretical analysis and simulations, that our approach has the potential to prolong the lifetime of the network significantly. / Thesis (Ph.D, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2009-04-26 21:58:55.152

No description available.

No abstract available. / Thesis (M.Ed.)-University of Durban-Westville, 1979.

Au cours des 15 dernières années, une attention particulière fut accordée à l'intégrité des gestionnaires de fonds communs de placement et au respect des intérêts des porteurs de parts de ces fonds. La présente recherche tente de caractériser l'incidence de la performance sur la prise de risque des gestionnaires. Plus précisément, de répondre à l'interrogation suivante : Est-ce que les gestionnaires moins performants augmentent de façon plus importante le risque de leur portefeuille que les plus performants avec comme objectif d'améliorer leur classement? Les conclusions des études empiriques précédentes semblent mitigées selon les mesures de risques employées. Au moyen d'un échantillon de 13 901 fonds sur une période de 1996 à 2008, nos résultats indiquent que selon la mesure de risque utilisée pour répondre à cette question, qu'elle soit réalisée ou anticipée, les conclusions diffèrent. La proportion des gestionnaires moins performants qui diminuent le risque réalisé, soit l'écart-type ou le bêta, en deuxième période semble plus élevée que celle qui l'augmente. Cependant, la conclusion inverse est observable avec les mesures de risque anticipé, étant la variance conditionnelle de type GARCH et le bêta conditionnel à la Ferson et Schadt (1996). Enfin, un aspect dynamique du comportement des gestionnaires est observable au cours de la deuxième partie de l'année. C'est-à-dire que le comportement de ceux-ci se modifie pendant le reste de l'année.

Background: Advertising channels in today's marketplace are becoming more limited with the development of ad-free sources of entertainment. The phenomenon of product placements is therefore becoming one of the most important sources for advertising in media. Especially film productions have turned into a canvas for companies to display their brands upon. Purpose: The purpose of this thesis was to investigate the case of product placements in Hollywood blockbuster movies. In particular, brand recognition and audience's ac-ceptance of a brand’s presence in movies were examined. Method: A mixed method approach was applied in order to fulfill the purpose of this thesis and answer research questions. A questionnaire in the form of a handout and focus group discussions were used to collect quantitative and qualitative data from audiences consisting of international students. The questionnaires were handed out after the movies had been shown in a setting resembling that of a movie theater, meaning that respondents were not aware of the study beforehand and were therefore not biased. The focus group discussions gave us information needed in answering the second research question and getting more insights of the practice. Conclusions: Our research showed that product placements in movies lead to brand recognition, and audience’s acceptance of a brand’s presence is influenced by congru-ency of product placement in movies. This outcome resulted from the combination of four determining factors: movie genre, execution factors, appropriateness in the movie setting and brand characteristics.

<p>SAMMANFATTNING</p><p>Bakgrund:På en Utvecklande och Lärande VårdEnhet (ULVE) ges studenterna möjlighet att sammanfoga vårdvetenskaplig teori med vårdpraxis genom att bashandledare, huvudhandledare och lärare intar en reflekterande hållning gentemot studenten som har ett livsvärldsperspektiv som grund. Detta ställer krav på handledarna att utifrån studenternas livsvärld försöka överbrygga klyftan mellan teori och praktik. Bashandledarna behöver då stöd för att känna motivation och lust till handledning.</p><p>Syfte:Syftet med föreliggande studie är att inom ULVE-avdelningarna synliggöra de motiverande faktorerna för bashandledarna i deras handledande arbete.</p><p>Metod:Studien är en intervjustudie. Med en induktiv ansats gjordes en kvalitativ innehållsanalys.</p><p>Resultat:Efter innehållsanalysen från intervjuerna framkom 3 kategorier och 8 underkategorier som beskriver det handledande arbetet och de faktorer som påverkar detta. De tre kategorierna var Möjligheter och hinder i ULVE utifrån bashandledarnas perspektiv, Organisatoriska faktorer med påverkan på bashandledarnas handledning och vårdvetenskap i den handledande rollen.</p><p>Slutsats:Av resultatet kan ses att verksamheten behöver en lyhördhet för att bibehålla de motiverade bashandledarna som finns på ULVE. Ytterligare forskning behövs för att belysa de motiverande faktorerna till handledning samt hur detta kan utveckla en konstruktiv och fördjupad läroprocess för bashandledare och studenter.</p>

The present study was an attempt to look at the empirical classification of children's learning disabilities based on neuropsychological variables at differing IQ levels. Subjects were divided into four groups based upon Full Scale IQ (i.e., 70-79, 8089, 90-99, 100-110). Subsequent clustering of the test data within each group suggested that while the students in the 70-79 IQ range were represented by a single impaired cluster, each of the other IQ groups had both a moderately impaired cluster and a non-impaired cluster. The study attempted to respond to criticisms of previous research by using a large sample of subjects (N = 928), utilizing a broad range of subjects with a representative sample of abilities, and applying an interpretable structure to the cluster analysis (i.e., neuropsychological variables within IQ levels). The present research further offered a perspective on programming by way of neuropsychological functioning. As such, the results argued for placement procedures for learning disabled children that are apart from those formulas relative to achievement and intelligence. / Department of Educational Psychology

This study investigates variable positioning of adverbs in compound verb tenses in vernacular Quebec French using the sociolinguistic framework of Variation Theory (Weinreich et al. 1968; Labov 1969). While variable adverb placement is addressed in both the prescriptive and linguistic literature, whether their explanations for it hold in practice remains to be determined; quantitative research of this phenomenon in usage-based corpora is limited, and rare in French. The research objectives are therefore to determine the productivity of variable adverb placement in French in these verbal contexts, to uncover the linguistic and/or social factors which constrain it, and to evaluate the extent to which current treatments of this variable in the literature accurately reflect what occurs in speech. Data is thus extracted from a corpus of spontaneous discourse, is coded for several linguistic and social factors, and is quantitatively analysed using standard variationist methodology (Poplack & Tagliamonte 2001). Overall rates of variant use suggest that variable adverb placement is robust, with adverbs occurring just slightly more frequently after the past participle than between the auxiliary and the participle; placement at the beginning of the sentence is rare. The results of the distributional and multivariate analyses largely confirm the purported conditioning effects of the tested linguistic factors, suggesting that prescriptive and theoretical linguistic approaches are generally correct in their accounts of this phenomenon. However, closer investigation reveals these effects to be sensitive to the lexical identity of the adverb, namely, their particular placement preferences; once these positioning predilections are taken into consideration, the conditioning effects of the linguistic factors essentially disappear. Sociodemographic factors are also found to be mildly implicated in variable adverb placement, and these too are sensitive to the influence of the lexical identity of the adverb. Ultimately, it is argued that this variable is primarily lexically-constrained, a finding which can be only minimally and indirectly inferred from the relevant literature. Taken together, the results of this study provide new and vital insight into the mechanisms underlying variable adverb placement in French, and also highlight the importance of quantitatively investigating such variable language phenomena in corpora of vernacular speech.

Piezoelectric actuators have proven to be useful in suppressing disturbances and shape control of flexible structures. Large space structures such as solar arrays are susceptible to large amplitude vibrations while in orbit. Moreover, Shape control of many high precision structures such as large membrane mirrors and space antenna is of great importance. Since most of these structures need to be ultra-light-weight, only a limited number of actuators can be used. Consequently, in order to obtain the most effcient control system, the locations of the piezoelectric elements as well as the feedback gain should be optimized. These optimization problems are generally non-convex. In addition, the models for these systems typically have a large number of degrees of freedom. Researchers have used numerous optimization criteria and optimization techniques to find the optimal actuator locations in structural shape and vibration control. Due to the non-convex nature of the problem, evolutionary optimization techniques are extensively used. However, One drawback of these methods is that they do not use the gradient information and so convergence can be very slow. Classical gradient-based techniques, on the other hand, have the advantage of accurate computation; however, they may be computationally expensive, particularly since multiple initial conditions are typically needed to ensure that a global optimum is found. Consequently, a fast, yet global optimization method applicable to systems with a large number of degrees of freedom is needed. In this study, the feedback control is chosen to be an optimal linear quadratic regulator. The optimal actuator location problem is reformulated as a convex optimization problem. A subgradient-based optimization scheme which leads to the global solution of the problem is introduced to optimize the actuator locations. The optimization algorithm is applied to optimize the placement of piezoelectric actuators in vibration control of flexible structures. This method is compared with a genetic algorithm, and is observed to be faster in finding the global optimum. Moreover, by expanding the desired shape into the structure’s modes of vibration, a methodology for shape control of structures is presented. Applying this method, locations of piezoelectric actuators on flexible structures are optimized. Very few experimental studies exist on shape and vibration control of structures. To the best knowledge of the author, optimal actuator placement in shape control has not been experimentally studied in the past. In this work, vibration control of a cantilever beam is investigated for various actuator locations and the effect of optimal actuator placement is studied on suppressing disturbances to the beam. Also using the proposed shape control method, the effect of optimal actuator placement is studied on the same beam. The final shape of the beam and input voltages of actuators are compared for various actuator placements.