Läsning anses vara en grundläggande färdighet med avgörande betydelse för en individs skolgång. Den svenska grundskolan har tagit emot en stor andel nyanlända elever. Den nya elevgruppen satte fokus på ett behov att ändra undervisningsmetoder och anpassa läs- och skrivundervisningen för att möta denna elevgrupp. Studiens övergripande syfte är att undersöka huruvida intensiva interventioner enligt en RTI-modell påverkar nyanlända elevers progression med avseende på avkodning och läsförståelse. Studien är av kvasiexperimentell karaktär, deltagarna (n=44) utvalda utefter kriterier så som tid i Sverige, ålder, kön, modersmål och avkodning på andraspråket. Resultatet visade att interventioner i avkodning påverkade försöksgruppen resultat positivt, jämfört med jämförelsegruppen som inte fick intensiva interventioner. Läsförståelsens resultat för försöksgruppen påvisade en svagare progression framför allt för de äldre eleverna i studien. Jämförelsegruppens läsförståelseresultat visade ingen progression.

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The load forecasting has become an important role in the operation of power system, and several models by using different techniques have been applied to solve these problems. In the literature, the linear regression models are considered as a traditional approach to predict power consumption, and more recently, the artificial neural network (ANN) models have received more attention for a great number of successful and practical applications. This report introduces both linear regression and ANN models to predict the power consumption for Fortum in Ekerö. The characteristics of power consumption of different kinds of consumers are analyzed, together with the effects of weather parameters to power consumption. Further, based on the gained information, the numerical models of load forecasting are built and tested by the historical data. The predictions of power consumption are focus on three cases separately: total power consumption in one year, daily peak power consumption during winter and hourly power consumption. The processes of development of the models will be described, such as the choice of the variables, the transformations of the variables, the structure of the models and the training cases of ANN model. In addition, two linear regression models will be built according to the number of input variables. They are simple linear regression with one input variable and multiple linear regression with several input variables. Comparison between the linear regression and ANN models will be carried out. In the end, it finds out that the linear regression obtains better results for all the cases in Ekerö. Especially, the simple linear regression outperforms in prediction of total power consumption in one year, and the multiple linear regression is better in prediction of daily peak load during the winter.

In adults, sex and steroid hormone differences have been observed in several cognitive domains, most notably in the domains of spatial processing, language, and manual dexterity. Age-related cognitive differences have also been observed throughout the lifespan, with many improvements occurring during childhood. While cognition improves with age, other factors (i.e., sex, pubertal status, and steroid hormone levels) may also influence development. The present study compared performance on a visuo-spatial working memory (VSWM) task and three simple articulation (ART) tasks. Pubertal status and hormone levels, at time of testing, were measured. Sex, pubertal status, and hormone differences were observed. This study is one of the first to provide evidence of such differences in typically developing adolescents.

Les nanoparticules d’argent (Ag NPs) sont considérablement utilisées dans l’industrie alimentaire. Elles sont fortement appliquées comme enrobages d’emballages alimentaires afin d’assurer une meilleure qualité des aliments et une plus longue durée de conservation sur les étagères des supermarchés. En revanche, les risques associés aux Ag NPs sont inquiétants. Leurs effets potentiels sur les humains et sur l’environnement suscitent un grand intérêt scientifique. C’est pourquoi il est important de valider des méthodes analytiques pour détecter, caractériser et quantifier les Ag NPs dans la nourriture mise en contact avec ce type de contenant. Les méthodes permettront de mieux comprendre la migration de l'argent vers les aliments directement ingérés par l’humain. La spectrométrie de masse à plasma à couplage inductif en mode particule unique (SP-ICP-MS) est une technique prometteuse pour caractériser et quantifier de petites particules (de quelques nanomètres) à de faibles concentrations (dans l'ordre du ng L-1). Contrairement aux techniques analytiques conventionnelles, telles que les techniques de microscopie et de diffusion de la lumière, le SP-ICP-MS distingue la forme ionique de la forme particulaire de l'analyte. Cette présente étude valide une méthode pour la caractérisation et la quantification des Ag NPs et de l’argent ionique dans deux boissons et trois simulants: jus d'orange, préparation en poudre pour nourrissons, eau Milli-Q, acide acétique à 3% et éthanol à 10%. De plus, une meilleure compréhension du devenir et de la migration de l’argent provenant d'emballages alimentaires nano-activés a pu être obtenue. En effet, les milieux acides et les traitements thermiques ont engendré de plus grands relargages d’argent, sous forme ionique, contrairement aux milieux dits « lipophiles » tels que la préparation pour nourrissons et l’éthanol. En conclusion, ce mémoire nous démontre que les voies de libération des NPs des contenants nano-activés ne sont pas encore très bien comprises. De plus amples études doivent être entreprises afin de pouvoir établir des modèles de migration clairs et afin de mieux comprendre les risques associés à leurs utilisations. / Silver nanoparticles (Ag NPs) are increasingly used in the food industry. They are integrated into coatings of various food packaging to help ensure longer product shelf life. However, the risks associated with Ag NPs are currently not well known and their potential effects on humans are causing growing concern. Furthermore, it is not clear whether NPs have greater or lesser risk than dissolved silver ions or bulk phase Ag. Consequently, it is necessary to detect and to characterize the release of silver from silver-enhanced containers into real food matrices using sensitive analytical techniques that allow one to distinguish between silver ions and nanoparticles. Single particle ICP-MS is a promising technique to count and size small particles at low concentrations. Compared to other conventional instrumentation, it can distinguish between ionic and particulate forms of the analyte. This thesis focused firstly on the validation of an analytical method for the analysis of Ag NPs and ionic silver in three different food simulants (Milli-Q water, 10% ethanol and 3% acetic acid) and in two drinks (orange juice and infant milk formula). A better understanding of the aging and of the migration of silver has been reached in these matrices. Essentially, acidic media caused significant NP oxidation whereas organic macromolecules like lipids, proteins and polysaccharides appeared to increase the stability of the NPs. Subsequently, a migration study from silver-enhanced containers showed significant release of dissolved Ag in 3% acetic acid and a lower release in milk formula. Also, heating led to a considerable release of silver from the container. To conclude, further studies are needed to obtain clear release models to better understand the risk on humans and on the environment.

Aus der Einleitung: 'Conceptual graphs (CGs) are an expressive formalism for representing knowledge about an application domain in a graphical way. Since CGs can express all of first-order predicate logic (FO), they can also be seen as a graphical notation for FO formulae. In knowledge representation, one is usually not only interested in representing knowledge, one also wants to reason about the represented knowledge. For CGs, one is, for example, interested in validity of a given graph, and in the question whether one graph subsumes another one. Because of the expressiveness of the CG formalism, these reasoning problems are undecidable for general CGs. In the literature [Sow84, Wer95, KS97] one can find complete calculi for validity of CGs, but implementations of these calculi have the same problems as theorem provers for FO: they may not terminate for formulae that are not valid, and they are very ineficient. To overcome this problem, one can either employ incomplete reasoners, or try to find decidable (or even tractable) fragments of the formalism. This paper investigates the second alternative. The most prominent decidable fragment of CGs is the class of simple conceptual graphs (SGs), which corresponds to the conjunctive, positive, and existential fragment of FO (i.e., existentially quantified conjunctions of atoms). Even for this simple fragment, however, subsumption is still an NP-complete problem [CM92]. SGs that are trees provide for a tractable fragment of SGs, i.e., a class of simple conceptual graphs for which subsumption can be decided in polynomial time [MC93]. In this report, we will identify a tractable fragment of SGs that is larger than the class of trees. Instead of trying to prove new decidability or tractability results for CGs from scratch, our idea was to transfer decidability results from description logics [DLNN97, DLNS96] to CGs. The goal was to obtain a \natural' sub-class of the class of all CGs in the sense that, on the one hand, this sub-class is defined directly by syntactic restrictions on the graphs, and not by conditions on the first-order formulae obtained by translating CGs into FO, and, on the other hand, is in some sense equivalent to a more or less expressive description logic. Although description logics (DLs) and CGs are employed in very similar applications (e.g., for representing the semantics of natural language sentences), it turned out that these two formalisms are quite different for several reasons: (1) conceptual graphs are interpreted as closed FO formulae, whereas DL concept descriptions are interpreted by formulae with one free variable; (2) DLs do not allow for relations of arity > 2 ; (3) SGs are interpreted by existential sentences, whereas almost all DLs considered in the literature allow for universal quantification; (4) because DLs use a variable-free syntax, certain identifications of variables expressed by cycles in SGs and by co-reference links in CGs cannot be expressed in DLs. As a consequence of these differences, we could not identify a natural fragment of CGs corresponding to an expressive DL whose decidability was already shown in the literature. We could, however, obtain a new tractability result for a DL corresponding to SGs that are trees. This correspondence result strictly extends the one in [CF98]. In addition, we have extended the tractability result from SGs that are trees to SGs that can be transformed into trees using a certain \cycle-cutting' operation. The report is structured as follows. We first introduce the description logic for which we will identify a subclass of equivalent SGs. In Section 3, we recall basic definitions and results on SGs. Thereafter, we introduce a syntactical variant of SGs which allows for directly encoding the support into the graphs (Section 4.1). In order to formalize the equivalence between DLs and SGs, we have to consider SGs with one distinguished node called root (Section 4.2). In Section 5, we finally identify a class of SGs corresponding to a DL that is a strict extension of the DL considered in [CF98].

Språket är den viktigaste faktorn för integration och nyligen har kraven på kunskaper i svenska skärpts. För att fungera fullt ut i det svenska samhället krävs en läsförmåga i nivå med årskurs 6, men en tidigare undersökning visar att majoriteten av vuxna invandrare efter avslutad SFI-utbildning endast har en läsförmåga i nivå med årskurs 3-5. En läsintervention med single-subject design har därför genomförts med tre elever på kurs C på SFI. Läsinterventionen har genomförts med Wendick-modellens läslistor tre gånger i veckan under sju veckor, totalt 20 lektioner. Resultaten visade en ökning på Avkodning Ord för en av eleverna och en ökning på Avkodning Nonord för alla tre eleverna. Dessa resultat visar att Wendick-modellens läslistor är en fungerande metod i en-till-en-situationer då elevernas avkodning på nonord har förbättrats av interventionen. Studiens resultat visar även vikten av tidiga insatser för att ge elever med bristande läs- och skrivfärdigheter rätt hjälp och stöd från studiestart för att de snabbare ska kunna integreras i samhället.

[pt] Esta pesquisa teve como objetivo investigar o comportamento tensão-deformação-resistência da areia da Praia de Ipanema, RJ, em ensaios de cisalhamento simples (DSS) realizados em corpos de prova secos, cisalhados a volume constante sob carregamento monótono de deformação controlada. Foi desenvolvido um procedimento para moldagem de corpos de prova de areia na condição seca para ensaios de DSS. Os corpos de prova foram moldados nos domínios de compacidade relativa (CR) fofo, médio, compacto e muito compacto. Para cada um desses domínios de CR, foram realizados ensaios de DSS sob os seguintes valores de tensão vertical inicial: 25, 50, 100, 150, 300, 500 e 750 kPa. Os resultados permitiram avaliar a influência da tensão vertical inicial e do índice de vazios pré-cisalhamento (epc) na variação da tensão vertical (variação da tensão vertical no cisalhamento) necessária para manter a altura (e o volume) do corpo de prova constante durante o cisalhamento, na taxa de mobilização de ângulo de atrito no plano horizontal em relação à distorção, no valor do ângulo de atrito máximo mobilizado no plano horizontal, no valor da tensão cisalhante na ruptura, no valor da distorção na ruptura, bem como nos valores dos módulos de cisalhamento secantes G25 e G50. / [en] This research aimed to investigate the stress-strain-strength behavior of the Ipanema Beach (RJ) sand in direct simple shear tests (DSS) carried out on dry specimens, sheared at constant volume under strain-controlled static loading. A procedure for preparing dry sand specimens was developed for DSS tests. The specimens were prepared in loose, medium, dense and very dense domains of relative density (Dr). For each of these Dr domains, DSS tests were carried out under the following initial vertical stress values: 25, 50, 100, 150, 300, 500 and 750 kPa. The results allowed to evaluate the influence of the initial vertical stressand the pre-shear void ratio (epc) on the vertical stress change (variation of vertical stress in shear) necessary to keep the specimen height (and volume) constant during shear, on the rate ofmobilization of the friction angle in the horizontal plane in relation to distortion, on the value of the maximum friction angle mobilized in the horizontal plane, on the value of the shear stress at failure, on the value of the distortion at failure, as well as on the values of the secant shear modulus G25and G50.

Potential parameters that can handle multi-component oxide glass systems especially boron oxide are very limited in literature. One of the main goals of my dissertation is to develop empirical potentials to simulate multi-component oxide glass systems with boron oxide. Two approaches, both by introducing the composition dependent parameter feature, were taken and both led to successful potentials for boron containing glass systems after extensive testing and fitting. Both potential sets can produce reasonable glass structures of the multi-component oxide glass systems, with structure and properties in good agreement with experimental data. Furthermore, we have tested the simulation settings such as system size and cooling rate effects on the results of structures and properties of MD simulated borosilicate glasses. It was found that increase four-coordinated boron with decreasing cooling rate and system size above 1000 atoms is necessary to produce converged structure. Another application of the potentials is to simulate a six-component nuclear waste glass, international simple glass (ISG), which was for first time simulated using the newly developed parameters. Structural features obtained from simulations agree well with the experimental results. In addition, two series of sodium borosilicate and boroaluminosilicate glasses were simulated with the two sets of potentials to compare and evaluate their applicability and deficiency. Various analyses on the structures and properties such as pair distribution function, total correlation function, coordination number analysis, Qn distribution function, ring size distribution function, vibrational density of states and mechanical properties were performed. This work highlights the challenge of MD simulations of boron containing glasses and the capability of the new potential parameters that enable simulations of wide range of mixed former glasses to investigate new structure features and design of new glass compositions for various applications.

Approximate query processing is an adequate technique to reduce response times and system load in cases where approximate results suffice. In database literature, sampling has been proposed to evaluate queries approximately by using only a subset of the original data. Unfortunately, most of these methods consider either only certain problems arising due to the use of samples in databases (e.g. data skew) or only join operations involving multiple relations. We describe how well-known sampling techniques dealing with group-by operations can be combined with foreign-key joins such that the join is computed after the generation of the sample. In detail, we show how senate sampling and small group sampling can be combined efficiently with the idea of join synopses. Additionally, we introduce different algorithms which maintain the sample if the underlying data changes. Finally, we prove the superiority of our method to the naive approach in an extensive set of experiments.