Interest in the delta operator as a tool in the development of robust approaches to modelling and control has been revived in the last decade, principally following the work of Goodwin (1985). The use of this discrete differential operator provides improved numerical properties particularly when modelling or implementing control at high sampling frequencies or under finite wordlength restraints. The delta operator also provides for the alliance of continuous time designs and discrete time application, linking traditional control theory with modern implementation through digital computing. In this thesis, a delta operator Simplified Refined Instrumental Variable (SRIV) approach to model estimation is employed, together with model order identification tools, to provide delta operator models for use in control and forecasting. The True Digital Control (TDC) design theory is adopted to develop a delta operator Proportional-Integral-Plus (PIP) controller. The construction of realisable control filters enables implementation of the PIP controller, the structure of which can prove operationally significant. A number of refinements to the standard PIP controller are developed and applications are presented for engineering and environmental examples. The development of a recursive delta operator Kalman filter is presented and incorporated within a forecasting framework. The resulting algorithm is applied to historical data to generate real time stochastic forecasts of river flows from an effective rainfall-flow model.

Dietary adherence is the degree to which participants follow prescribed dietary protocol. Without measuring adherence, it is not possible to validly measure the effect of the intervention. Assessing adherence allows the investigator to better determine whether the results are due to the diet itself. The overall goal of the analyses presented in this thesis was to assess if dietary adherence was higher on a whole grain versus refined grain provided food protocol with specific prescription for calorie consumption. Eighty-two men and women between the ages of 40-65 were assigned to either a refined or whole grain feeding protocol, using a 3-day rotating menu for 6 weeks. Daily food logs were used to assess adherence to the prescribed diets and calculate total energy consumed and macronutrient content. The first objective was to determine the caloric and macronutrient content of the assigned diets, and to compare whether the reported nutrient content was the same as the provided nutrient content. Overall, the median whole grain group consumption was 45.0 kcal per day more than they were assigned to, and the median refined grain group consumption was 10.5 kcal per day less than assignment. The refined grain diet's macronutrient composition was 52.1% carbohydrate, 19.9% protein, and 28.1% fat, whereas the whole grain group's macronutrient composition was 54.4% carbohydrate, 18.0% protein, and 27.6% fat. Both diets were within the average daily macronutrient recommendations of 50-55% carbohydrate, 15-20% protein, and 25-30% fat. There was a statistically significant difference in the percentage of carbohydrate and protein between groups. The second objective was to determine if two different diets had any effect on deviation from the protocol. Overall, there was an 8.9 kcal/day difference in deviation between the two groups throughout the study. When stratifying by diet level, there was no consistent pattern of deviations from the assigned protocol. On the 2000 kcal diet, those in the refined grain group consumed 184.5 kcals/day more than those in the whole grain group. In contrast on the 2500 kcal diet, the whole grain group consumed 105.0 kcal/day more than the refined grain group, while on the 3000 kcal/day diet, those in the refined grain group consumed slightly more kcals/day on average (12.5kcal/day) than the whole grain group. The study found no consistent difference in caloric consumption between the whole and refined grain groups, as well as no consistent difference in deviations from the assigned diet protocol. These results imply that dietary adherence can be achieved in a provided food whole grains study.

The notion of good living when related to habitation is, particularly in the United States, often associated with houses or apartments of large square footage. This demand for large spaces leads to compromises in architectural integrity and construction quality. In an architectural sense, good living is not directly related to the quantity of space. In this thesis, I argue that spatial quantity does not necessarily improve people's lives. Additionally, an excess of space often leads to investments in superficial conventions and products which can be associated with a consumer driven iconic representation of good living. At closer examination, most of these goods and products are disconnected from the most essential qualities of life and contribute little to the quality of our human relations. From an environmental standpoint, large under-used spaces require a larger footprint, i.e. larger parcels of land, with a greater consumption of construction materials and increased maintenance and energy demands over the extended "life" of a house. In this thesis work I will attempt to search for unique and substantial qualities within a house that is designed to be of a very small square footage. The design philosophy for A Very Small House has, at its core, only the most essential qualities of domestic space. For the personal life of the inhabitant: a refined place to cook, a refined place to bathe, a refined place to sleep. For the life of the inhabitant as a member of a family or a community: a refined place to gather and a refined place to extend. I use the word refined in this context to mean: very subtle, precise, or exact. A means of ennobling an act or a space / Master of Architecture

A sign pattern is a matrix whose entries are from the set $\{+, -, 0\}$. This thesis contains problems about refined inertias and minimum ranks of sign patterns. The refined inertia of a square real matrix $B$, denoted $\ri(B)$, is the ordered $4$-tuple $(n_+(B), \ n_-(B), \ n_z(B), \ 2n_p(B))$, where $n_+(B)$ (resp., $n_-(B)$) is the number of eigenvalues of $B$ with positive (resp., negative) real part, $n_z(B)$ is the number of zero eigenvalues of $B$, and $2n_p(B)$ is the number of pure imaginary eigenvalues of $B$. The minimum rank (resp., rational minimum rank) of a sign pattern matrix $\cal A$ is the minimum of the ranks of the real (resp., rational) matrices whose entries have signs equal to the corresponding entries of $\cal A$. First, we identify all minimal critical sets of inertias and refined inertias for full sign patterns of order 3. Then we characterize the star sign patterns of order $n\ge 5$ that require the set of refined inertias $\mathbb{H}_n=\{(0, n, 0, 0), (0, n-2, 0, 2), (2, n-2, 0, 0)\}$, which is an important set for the onset of Hopf bifurcation in dynamical systems. Finally, we establish a direct connection between condensed $m \times n $ sign patterns and zero-nonzero patterns with minimum rank $r$ and $m$ point-$n$ hyperplane configurations in ${\mathbb R}^{r-1}$. Some results about the rational realizability of the minimum ranks of sign patterns or zero-nonzero patterns are obtained.

Does the lead industry have a future, in the face of the developing environmental challenge? This thesis addresses this question and concludes, it should have for the foreseeable future, providing it adopts the changes detailed. These changes are posited within a framework, which consists of a strategy, approaches and tools. The changes are both technical and philosophical. They are technical, in the sense that the tools and approaches provide practical means whereby the environmental `risks' may be identified, assessed and managed. They are philosophical, because they set out and identify the features of a new conceptual paradigm, whose basis is in the concept of the `risk society'. The paradigm is significantly more holistic, multi-dimensional, inherently flexible, and is intended to be reflexive. Adoption of the elements of the framework, will facilitate a more effective establishment, and management of environmental `risk' credentials, which will help encourage better environmental decision making. Hence, it will facilitate, the balancing of resource consumption and environmental impact costs, versus social and economic benefits, in an improved manner. The modelling approaches, and selected inventory and environmental impact assessment tools, enclosed within this thesis, have been designed to facilitate the development of, and to function within, the new paradigm. These have been developed for BRM and MIM case studies, and function at the site-specific and the cradle-to-gate scales. The former consider the company site of Britannia Refined Metals (BRM) Ltd., where refining to produce primary and secondary refined lead products takes place, whilst the latter consider the life-cycle of the refined primary lead products of MIM Ltd. The modelling approaches have also been designed so, that they may be re-aggregated into models able to operate at many different scales, as required. The framework, and its elements, are applicable for all industries facing similar challenges.

Shear walls are the primary lateral load resisting elements in bearing wall systems used in masonry construction. Horizontal loads due to wind or earthquake are transferred to vertical walls by diaphragms that are rigid such as concrete floor slabs or flexible such as wood floors. With rigid diaphragms, loads are apportioned to the supporting walls based on their relative rigidity. Walls with openings accommodating doors and windows (“perforated walls”) have reduced rigidity that can be determined using available hand calculation methods. These methods primarily focus on analysis procedures, not on the visualization of the load path that is critically important in structural engineering practice. The analogy of springs in series or parallel is used to determine the equivalent stiffness of elastic systems in structural dynamics. This thesis uses this analogy to develop a method that can help visualize load flow in perforated shear walls connected to rigid diaphragms. Rigidities are calculated using existing methods and combined as springs in series or parallel to represent a perforated wall. Loads taken by the wall segments correspond to the electrical current flowing through this imaginary “circuit”. To help visualize the load path, the line drawing representation of springs in series or parallel and the applied lateral load are deliberately oriented in the vertical direction. The application of the analogy is illustrated by several numerical examples of varying complexity taken from text books. Finite element solutions are included in the comparisons to provide a measure of the relative accuracy of hand calculation methods. The analogy can be extended to refine existing hand calculation methods though this increases computational effort. It improves accuracy but only for cases where the aspect ratio of the wall segments is such that shear effects are dominant.

Foggy and hazy weather conditions considerably effect visibility distance which impacts speed, flow of traffic, travel time delay and increases the risk accidents. Bad weather condition is considered a cause of road accidents, since it the poor conditions can effect drivers field of vision. In addition, fog, haze and mist can have negative influences on visual applications in the open air since they decrease visibility by lowering the contrast and whitening the visible color palette. The poor visibility in these images leads to some failures in recognition and detection of the outdoor object systems and also in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). In this thesis, we propose an image visibility restoration algorithm under foggy weather in intelligent transportation systems. Various camera based Advanced Driver Assistant Systems (ADAS), which can be improved by applying the visibility restoration algorithm, have been applied in this field of study to enhance vehicle safety by displaying the image from a frontal camera to driver after visibility enhancement. To remove fog, automatic methods have been proposed which are categorized into two approaches based on the number of input images: 1) methods which are using polarizing filters, 2) methods which are using captured images from different fog densities. In both of these approaches multiple images are required which have to be taken from exactly the same point of view. While these applications can generate good results, their requirements make them impractical, particularly in real time applications, such as intelligent transportation systems. Therefore, in this thesis we introduce a high-performance visibility restoration algorithm only using a single foggy image which applies a recursive filtering to preserve the edge of images and videos in real time and also compute depth map of the scene to restore image. The applied edge preserving filtering is based on a domain transform in which 1-Dimensional edge-preserving filtering is performed by preserving the geodesic distance between points on the curves that is adaptable with wrapping the input signal. The proposed algorithm can be applied in intelligent transportation system applications, such as Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). The main features of the proposed algorithm are its speed, which plays a main role in real time applications, since 1-Dimensional operations are used in the applied filtering leads to remarkable speedups in comparison with classical median filters and robust bilateral lfilters. Potential of memory saving is considered as another one advantage of the proposed model and also the parameters of applied edge-preserving filtering do not effect on its computational cost. It is the first edge-preserving filter for color images with arbitrary scales in real time. The proposed algorithm is also able to handle both color and gray-level images and achieves the restored image without the presence of artifacts in comparison with other state-of-the-art algorithms.

Many models in the physical and life sciences formulated as dynamical systems have a positive steady state, with the local behavior of this steady state determined by the eigenvalues of its Jacobian matrix. The first part of this thesis is concerned with analyzing the linear stability of the steady state by using sign patterns, which are matrices with entries from the set {+,-,0}. The linear stability is related to the allowed refined inertias of the sign pattern of the Jacobian matrix of the system, where the refined inertia of a matrix is a 4-tuple (n+, n_-, ; nz; 2np) with n+ (n_) equal to the number of eigenvalues with positive (negative) real part, nz equal to the number of zero eigenvalues, and 2np equal to the number of nonzero pure imaginary eigenvalues. This type of analysis is useful when the parameters of the model are of known sign but unknown magnitude. The usefulness of sign pattern analysis is illustrated with several biological examples, including biochemical reaction networks, predator{prey models, and an infectious disease model. The refined inertias allowed by sign patterns with specific digraph structures have been studied, for example, for tree sign patterns. In the second part of this thesis, such results on refined inertias are extended by considering sign and zero-nonzero patterns with digraphs isomorphic to strongly connected orientations of the Petersen graph. / Graduate

Leaves and fruit of nine apple (Malus x domestica Borkh.) genotypes were evaluated for insect injury in 1998 and 1999. Foliar and fruit injury from 12 insect species was inconsistently affected by genotype. Spraying trees with oil affected neither fruit insect injury nor fruit phytotoxicity. In choice feeding assays, incidence of Japanese beetle (JB) feeding and leaf area consumed was greater for 'Liberty' than for 'York.' Genotypes did not differ in no-choice feeding assays. Choice and no-choice feeding assays between apple and oak indicated that JB could distinguish host plants in an artificial environment. Trichome density appeared different among three genotypes. 'York', the non-preferred genotype, had highest specific leaf weight and concentration of phloridzin, a feeding repellent. 'Liberty' the preferred genotype, had the lowest specific leaf weight, and had the highest concentration of quercitrin, a feeding stimulant. Olfactory stimuli of JB was evaluated with a Y-tube olfactometer. Beetles preferred the side of the Y-tube containing leaf tissue of apple or Virginia creeper over the side with no leaf. Beetles did not choose one plant species over the other. Bias test of beetle orientation in the Y-tube olfactometer indicated that in the morning, but not the afternoon, beetles preferentially moved into the left side of the Y-tube. Humidity did not affect beetle orientation. In darkness JB preferred a leaf disc over a paper disc and beetles tended to remain on the leaf. / Ph. D.

In this thesis we are dealing with basic methods of theoretical physics focusing on quantum theory of gravity, that are: Hamilton-Dirac formalism for singular systems, Dirac`s method of quantizing systems with constraints and its mathematical formulation - refined algebraic quantization, representation of compact groups and representation of Lorentz group. We apply these methods to find eigenstates of Lorentz group and General linear group generators. We construct a physical Hilbert space on temporal part of 3+1 decomposition of Einstein-Cartan theory. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)