This thesis is about the resources that speakers can draw on when producing actions, both verbal and non-vocal. It considers how identity categories, gaze and touch can contribute to action in everyday interactions. The study stemmed from an interest in how lesbian identity is made relevant by lesbian speakers in everyday co-present interaction. A corpus of approximately 23.5 hours of video-recordings was gathered: households self-designated as lesbian (including couples, families, and housemates) video recorded some of their everyday interactions (including mealtimes, watching television, and playing board games). Using the tools of Conversation Analysis and working with the video recordings and transcripts of the interactions, several ways of making a lesbian identity relevant through talk were identified. As the analysis progressed, it was found that many references to sexual identity were produced fleetingly; they were not part of or integral to the ongoing talk, and were not taken up as a topic by participants. Rather, this invoking of a participant s sexual identity appears to contribute to a particular action that is being produced. It was found that invokings of other identities, for example relating to occupation, nationality, and race, worked in a similar way, and this is explored in relation to explanations and accounts. Where the first half of the thesis focuses on verbal invokings of identity in relation to action, the second half of the thesis considers some of the non-vocal resources that participants incorporate into their actions. It was found that when launching a topic related to something in the immediate environment, speakers can use gaze to ensure recipiency. Also, when producing potentially face-threatening actions such as teases, reprimands or insults, speakers can use interpersonal touch to mitigate the threat. In addition to showing how identities can be made relevant in everyday interaction, the findings of this thesis highlight the complexity of action design, and that in co-present interaction the physical resources available to participants also need to be taken into account.

Failure of slopes adjacent to the UK transport infrastructure causes delays and these are expensive assets to repair and maintain. Understanding the processes that lead to failure will assist asset managers both now and in the future in the context of a changing climate. The EPSRC-funded multidisciplinary FUTURENET project investigated the effect of climate change on the resilience of the UK transport network and this thesis is a part of that project considering the weather patterns leading to slope failures along transport infrastructure slopes within the UK. To that end a series of slope failure case studies were investigated to understand the processes leading to failure. These were compiled using nationally held datasets as well as news reports. This research used data from the FUTURENET partners that hold national data sets and asset management information. This shows the wide reaching remit of a multidisciplinary collaborative project such as FUTURENET, but also highlights the limitations of datasets collected and used for very specific purposes and not necessarily suited to wider research. From these case studies a suite of slope failure weather thresholds were developed. These thresholds consider the antecedent period, water content within the slope through the soil moisture deficit and triggering rainfall through comparison to the long term average rainfall. Consideration was given to possible future weather using weather event sequences (WESQs), possible weather patterns for 2050 derived from the UKCP09 climate projection data. By considering these possible weather patterns with the slope failure thresholds a picture of a possible future was evaluated.

Acinetobacter baumannii is an emerging multiresistant pathogen increasingly known to cause infections in the immuno-compromised patients. Carbapenems and colistin are considered to be the last resorts in treatment of infections involving multidrug resistant strains of A. baumannii. Resistance to carbapenems is well known due to the presence of intrinsic carbapenemase gene blaOXA-51-like, which may be governed by insertion elements, or by acquired carbapenemases like blaOXA-23-like, blaOXA-58-like or blaOXA-40-like genes, most of which are frequently associated with insertion elements. The acquired carbapenemases can be integrated with the host chromosome making the bacterium strongly resistant to a range of antibiotics. Recent reports also suggest that the ubiquitous and intrinsic enzymes encoded by the blaOXA-51-like gene can be mobilized on a plasmid. In this thesis, the prevalence of antibiotic resistance was examined for 96 strains isolated from various parts of the world. The resistances to aminoglycosides, fluoroquinolones and cephalosporins were studied with a major focus on resistance to carbapenems. Section 1 shows the transposition of ISAba1 and its varied influence in controlling the blaOXA-51-like gene and the blaADC gene. It explains how ISAba1 being a strong factor in influencing antibiotic resistance genes contributes to the plasticity of the organism Section 2 is related with a novel insertion element ISAba125 controlling the blaADC gene and as an element providing high resistance to ceftazidime in comparison to ISAba1. Section 3 analyses the multi-drug resistant profile of strains isolated from Cochabamba, Bolivia. Besides the classification of carbapenem resistance for the clinical strains, the aminoglycoside resistance and ciprofloxacin mechanisms are examined in this project Section 4 relates with the pattern of resistance in strains isolated from the Aberdeen Royal Infirmary. It describes two novel variants of the blaOXA-51-like gene, namely blaOXA-216 and blaOXA-217 and also the acquisition of the blaOXA-23-like gene in two isolates from different years and deemed identical by their PFGE pattern. Section 5 describes the influence of ISAba825 in controlling the blaOXA-51-like gene and the blaOXA-58-like from clinical isolates Section 6 is related with the insertional inactivation of the blaOXA-132 gene and the carbapenem resistance caused by the activation of the blaOXA-58 gene in isolate Ab244 Section 7 describes the influence of insertion elements in strains having high ciprofloxacin resistance. This project is concerned with the role of efflux pump control system adeRS and how they influence the adeABC operon causing increased and decreased expression of the genes. Section 8 describes the multi drug resistant pattern of 36 strains each isolated from Europe and the United States In conclusion, there are various factors that influence the resistance profile of multidrug resistant A. baumannii isolates with insertion sequences such as ISAba1, ISAba2, ISAba3, ISAba825, IS1008, ISAba125, ISAba16 governing the expression or providing alternate mechanisms of resistance for the better fitness of the bacterium. Mutations in the genes identified in this study also have a crucial role in imparting resistance to this bacterium.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 29-November 02, 1990 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / Various PN codes for use in TTC spread-spectrum systems are considered. The evaluation is based on peak magnitudes and amplitude distributions of both the even and the odd autocorrelation and crosscorrelation functions. Furthermore the influence of the phase of a sequence on the correlation parameters is studied, multiple-access characteristics in terms of the total interference parameter are evaluated and synchronous as well as asynchronous code generation is considered.1

Random numbers (in one sense or another) have applications in computer simulation, Monte Carlo integration, cryptography, randomized computation, radar ranging, and other areas. It is impractical to generate random numbers in real life, instead sequences of numbers (or of bits) that appear to be ``random" yet repeatable are used in real life applications. These sequences are called pseudorandom sequences. To determine the suitability of pseudorandom sequences for applications, we need to study their properties, in particular, their statistical properties. The simplest property is the minimal period of the sequence. That is, the shortest number of steps until the sequence repeats. One important type of pseudorandom sequences is the sequences generated by feedback with carry shift registers (FCSRs). In this dissertation, we study statistical properties of N-ary FCSR sequences with odd prime connection integer q and least period (q-1)/2. These are called half-ℓ-sequences. More precisely, our work includes: The number of occurrences of one symbol within one period of a half-ℓ-sequence; The number of pairs of symbols with a fixed distance between them within one period of a half-ℓ-sequence; The number of triples of consecutive symbols within one period of a half-ℓ-sequence. In particular we give a bound on the number of occurrences of one symbol within one period of a binary half-ℓ-sequence and also the autocorrelation value in binary case. The results show that the distributions of half-ℓ-sequences are fairly flat. However, these sequences in the binary case also have some undesirable features as high autocorrelation values. We give bounds on the number of occurrences of two symbols with a fixed distance between them in an ℓ-sequence, whose period reaches the maximum and obtain conditions on the connection integer that guarantee the distribution is highly uniform. In another study of a cryptographically important statistical property, we study a generalization of correlation immunity (CI). CI is a measure of resistance to Siegenthaler's divide and conquer attack on nonlinear combiners. In this dissertation, we present results on correlation immune functions with regard to the q-transform, a generalization of the Walsh-Hadamard transform, to measure the proximity of two functions. We give two definitions of q-correlation immune functions and the relationship between them. Certain properties and constructions for q-correlation immune functions are discussed. We examine the connection between correlation immune functions and q-correlation immune functions.

Pseudo-random sequences are ubiquitous in modern electronics and information technology. High speed generators of such sequences play essential roles in various engineering applications, such as stream ciphers, radar systems, multiple access systems, and quasi-Monte-Carlo simulation. Given a short prefix of a sequence, it is undesirable to have an efficient algorithm that can synthesize a generator which can predict the whole sequence. Otherwise, a cryptanalytic attack can be launched against the system based on that given sequence. Linear feedback shift registers (LFSRs) are the most widely studied pseudorandom sequence generators. The LFSR synthesis problem can be solved by the Berlekamp-Massey algorithm, by constructing a system of linear equations, by the extended Euclidean algorithm, or by the continued fraction algorithm. It is shown that the linear complexity is an important security measure for pseudorandom sequences design. So we investigate lower bounds of the linear complexity of different kinds of pseudorandom sequences. Feedback with carry shift registers (FCSRs) were first described by Goresky and Klapper. They have many good algebraic properties similar to those of LFSRs. FCSRs are good candidates as building blocks of stream ciphers. The FCSR synthesis problem has been studied in many literatures but there are no FCSR synthesis algorithms for multi-sequences. Thus one of the main contributions of this dissertation is to adapt an interleaving technique to develop two algorithms to solve the FCSR synthesis problem for multi-sequences. Algebraic feedback shift registers (AFSRs) are generalizations of LFSRs and FCSRs. Based on a choice of an integral domain R and π ∈ R, an AFSR can produce sequences whose elements can be thought of elements of the quotient ring R/(π). A modification of the Berlekamp-Massey algorithm, Xu's algorithm solves the synthesis problem for AFSRs over a pair (R, π) with certain algebraic properties. We propose two register synthesis algorithms for AFSR synthesis problem. One is an extension of lattice approximation approach but based on lattice basis reduction and the other one is based on the extended Euclidean algorithm.

Structure is one of the fundamentals of music, yet the complexity arising from the vast number of possible variations of musical elements such as rhythm, melody, harmony, key, texture and form, along with their combinations, makes music modelling a particularly challenging task for machine learning. The research presented in this thesis focuses on the problem of learning a generative model for melody directly from musical sequences belonging to the same genre. Our goal is to develop probabilistic models that can automatically capture the complex statistical dependencies evident in music without the need to incorporate significant domain-specifc knowledge. At all stages we avoid making assumptions explicit to music and consider models that can can be readily applied in different music genres and can easily be adapted for other sequential data domains. We develop the Dirichlet Variable-Length Markov Model (Dirichlet-VMM), a Bayesian formulation of the Variable-Length Markov Model (VMM), where smoothing is performed in a systematic probabilistic manner. The model is a general-purpose, dictionary-based predictor with a formal smoothing technique and is shown to perform significantly better than the standard VMM in melody modelling. Motivated by the ability of the Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) to extract high quality latent features in an unsupervised manner, we next develop the Time-Convolutional Restricted Boltzmann Machine (TC-RBM), a novel adaptation of the Convolutional RBM for modelling sequential data. We show that the TC-RBM learns descriptive musical features such as chords, octaves and typical melody movement patterns. To deal with the non-stationarity of music, we develop the Variable-gram Topic model, which employs the Dirichlet-VMM for the parametrisation of the topic distributions. The Dirichlet-VMM models the local temporal structure, while the latent topics represent di erent music regimes. The model does not make any assumptions explicit to music, but it is particularly suitable in this context, as it couples the latent topic formalism with an expressive model of contextual information.

The gap between abstract, mathematics-oriented research in cryptography and the engineering approach of designing practical, network security protocols is widening. Network researchers experiment with well-known cryptographic protocols suitable for different network models. On the other hand, researchers inclined toward theory often design cryptographic schemes without considering the practical network constraints. The goal of this dissertation is to address problems in these two challenging areas: building bridges between practical network security protocols and theoretical cryptography. This dissertation presents techniques for building performance sensitive security protocols, using primitives from linear feedback register sequences (LFSR) sequences, for a variety of challenging networking applications. The significant contributions of this thesis are: 1. A common problem faced by large-scale multicast applications, like real-time news feeds, is collecting authenticated feedback from the intended recipients. We design an efficient, scalable, and fault-tolerant technique for combining multiple signed acknowledgments into a single compact one and observe that most signatures (based on the discrete logarithm problem) used in previous protocols do not result in a scalable solution to the problem. 2. We propose a technique to authenticate on-demand source routing protocols in resource-constrained wireless mobile ad-hoc networks. We develop a single-round multisignature that requires no prior cooperation among nodes to construct the multisignature and supports authentication of cached routes. 3. We propose an efficient and scalable aggregate signature, tailored for applications like building efficient certificate chains, authenticating distributed and adaptive content management systems and securing path-vector routing protocols. 4. We observe that blind signatures could form critical building blocks of privacypreserving accountability systems, where an authority needs to vouch for the legitimacy of a message but the ownership of the message should be kept secret from the authority. We propose an efficient blind signature that can serve as a protocol building block for performance sensitive, accountability systems. All special forms digital signatures—aggregate, multi-, and blind signatures—proposed in this dissertation are the first to be constructed using LFSR sequences. Our detailed cost analysis shows that for a desired level of security, the proposed signatures outperformed existing protocols in computation cost, number of communication rounds and storage overhead.

This study contributes to the growing body of formulaic language research that indicates that formulaic sequences (e.g., idioms, collocations, metaphors, and other conventionalized multi-word items) facilitate comprehension by reducing processing load (Wray, 2002). Expanding on Underwood et. al. (2004), this study combines corpus analysis and eye-movement data to assess the contribution of formulaicity to the comprehension of a whole, authentic text.Information regarding grammatical, lexical, and contextual conventions for each formulaic item in the text was obtained via the Collins COBUILD Online Corpus and the British National Corpus. Additionally, using an Applied Science Laboratories Eye Tracker, the eye movements of two native speakers and one non-native speaker of English were recorded and the fixations for formulaic sequences were compared. All eye movement data was interpreted in light of Goodman's Transactional model of reading (2003). Specifically, eye movements for each participant were compared across two conditions: 1) a condition comprised of the formulaic sequences in the text and 2) a baseline segment from the text which was free of formulaic items. Paired t-tests were performed for each participant to determine whether or not the eye movement behavior differed significantly in the two conditions. Data analysis indicates that both native and non-native readers of English showed significant differences in the eye movement patterns for the two conditions. However, these significant differences were reversed for the two participant groups. In the case of the native readers, the predictable nature of formulaic sequences facilitated the processing of written text, as evidenced by a significantly lower percentage of words fixated in the formulaic sequences in comparison with the percent of words fixated in the baseline condition. However, for the non-native readers, 1) lack of experience with the formulaic items and 2) their opaque nature appeared to hinder comprehension, resulting in a significantly higher percentage of words fixated in the formulaic condition than in the baseline, non-formulaic condition. This dissertation has implications for the fields of first and second language acquisition, particularly literacy theory and instruction.

Here I describe the construction and characterization of a new generation of human artificial chromosome that contains an array of DNA sequences that can be used to manipulate the chromosome in vivo and possibly in vitro. This HAC was originated in human fibrosarcoma HT1080 cells from a synthetic alphoid DNA containing an array of TetOperator sequences, cloned in a BAC-based vector. This synthetic ά-satellite DNA formed HACs that were stably maintained throughtout replication and segregation in HT1080 cells. However, I succeeded to also transfer and manipulate the alphoidtetO HAC into a HeLa-based hybrid cell line. The synthetic alphoidtetO HAC chromatin was similar to the chromatin at endogenous centromeric alphoid DNA. Importantly, the DNA sequences embedded in the synthetic HAC were accessible to targeting TetR-fused constructs in vivo. The alphoidtetO HAC could be successfully targeted with a number of TetR:fusion proteins without affecting its chromatin structure, kinetochore assembly and mitotic behaviour. However, the targeting of a transcriptional activator (tTA) inactivated the HAC synthetic alphoidtetO DNA in a fraction of transfected cells. Surprisingly, the targeting of the transcriptional repressor tTS, co-repressor KAP1 or the heterochromatin-associated protein HPIά severely inactivated the synthetic alphoidtetO kinetochore . In fact, upon targeting several inner and outer kinetochore proteins were delocalized from the alphoidtetO sequences. The dissociation of kinetochore proteins CENP-H and CENP-C appeared to precede that of CENP-A. The alphoidtetO HAC lacking inner kinetochore protein complexes showed mitotic defects including misalignment at the metaphase plate and defective anaphase segregation, ultimately being included in tiny DAPI-positive nano-nuclei in the cytoplasm. The transcriptional repressor tTS repressed the low levels of transcription from the alphoidtetO sequences. In addition, targeting of transcriptional repressors altered the HAC chromatin towards a more “closed”, heterochromatic conformation, as seen from the changes in histone tail modifications. Interestingly, the targeting of the histone methyltransferase EZH2 to the alphoidteto HAC showed a much milder inactivating activity compared to KAP1. Based on these results, I propose that the formation of HPI-type of heterochromatin or accumulation of HPIά to the centromeric regions could disrupt the association of constitutive kinetochore proteins to the underlying sequences. Centromeric alphoid sequences lacking a functional kinetochore structure then also loose the centromere-specific histone H3 variant CENP-A becoming definitively inactive. Alternatively, a basal transcriptional activity from centromeric sequences might be required for centromere functionality.