Uma manifestação da cultura popular Brasileira é a razão de interesse em nossa pesquisa: o Bumba Meu Boi da cidade de São Paulo. Tal folguedo existe no Brasil desde aproximadamente o século XVII, surgindo primeiramente nas regiões do nordeste brasileiro. Hoje é uma das manifestações culturais mais populares entre as existentes em nosso país. Dentre todas as regiões onde o Boi é tematizado, o foco de nosso estudo é o Boi do Grupo Cupuaçu, Boi do Morro do Querosene, localizado na cidade de São Paulo, bairro do Butantã. Região esta que apresenta e comemora o folguedo inspirado no Bumba Meu Boi do Maranhão. Os festejos acerca do Boi que acontecem no Morro do Querosene envolvem não só os brincantes que são integrantes do Boi, como toda a comunidade ali presente: moradores, comerciantes e também o público que participa prestigiando os eventos. Nossa pesquisa teve como objetivo geral compreender a encenação do folguedo do Bumba Meu Boi realizado pelo Grupo Cupuaçu na cidade de São Paulo, como forma de identidade dos brincantes com sua terra natal de onde tal manifestação é oriunda; e como objetivos específicos procuramos a- delimitar a compreensão sobre identidade cultural na ótica dos Estudos Culturais, entendendo que ela não é permanente, e é reconstruída a partir das vivências dos sujeitos em determinado contexto sócio-histórico; b- identificar o processo constituinte do Bumba Meu Boi enquanto manifestação presente no período festivo do ciclo junino no Brasil, atrelado à um conjunto de influencias da miscigenação do povo brasileiro (indígena, africana e portuguesa), e do catolicismo jesuítico. Enquanto metodologia, trata-se de uma pesquisa do tipo qualitativa, num caráter exploratório. Serão utilizados os enfoques bibliográfico e de campo. Para a pesquisa de campo optou-se pela aplicação do estudo de caso, utilizando como instrumento de pesquisa a observação em equipe. Conclui-se que os folguedos do Bumba Meu Boi encenados pelo Grupo Cupuaçu sofrem mudanças em sua concepção, devido ao contexto urbano da cidade de São Paulo, exercendo influência direta em sua produção / One manifestation of Brazilian popular culture is the reason for interest in our research: Bumba Meu Boi in São Paulo. Such merriment exists in Brazil since about the seventeenth century, first appearing in the regions of northeast Brazil. Today is one of the most popular cultural events between existing in our country. Among all regions where the Ox is thematized, the focus of our study is the Ox Cupuacu Group, Ox of Morro do Querosene, located in São Paulo, district of Butantã. This region that displays and celebrates the merriment inspired by the Bumba Meu Boi about Maranhão. The festival happening in the Morro do Querosene involving not only the revelers who are members of the Ox, as the entire community present there: residents, traders and also the public participating prestige events. Our research goal is to understand the general merriment of the staging of Bumba Meu Boi conducted by Cupuacu Group in São Paulo, as a form of identity of revelers with their homeland where such expression is derived; and specific: a- to delimit the understanding of cultural identity in the perspective of Cultural Studies, understanding that it is not permanent, and is reconstructed from the experiences of the subjects in a particular socio-historical context goals; b- to identify the constituent process of the Bumba Meu Boi while in this festive period junino cycle in Brazil manifestation linked to a set of influences from the miscegenation of the Brazilian people (indigenous, African and Portuguese), and Jesuit Catholicism. As a methodology, it is a qualitative study, an exploratory character. The bibliographic and field approaches will be used. For the field research was chosen application case study, using as a research tool in the observation. We conclude that the mirth of the Bumba Meu Boi staged by Cupuacu Group undergo changes in its design due to the urban context of the city of São Paulo, direct influence on their production

Using Alban Berg’s opera Lulu as a case study, this dissertation explores the fluid nature of cultural artifacts as they are reborn within new socio-cultural contexts. By examining several Lulu productions, this inquiry seeks to understand the changes of meaning that have occurred through the transformation of canonic works in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. Central to this project is the shifting nature of the character of Lulu, not only in Berg’s opera, but also in various artistic genres that preceded and affected his own conceptions, as well as her appearances in selected productions. This study contrasts modern Lulu productions with the composer’s intentions for the opera, using Berg’s operatic text as a basis for comparison. These assessments will be made through a semiotic analysis of various staging elements, musical and textual analysis of archival materials, and consideration of past Lulu scholarship. Relevant features of the political, cultural, and social climate of each production are also be investigated. Two Werktreue productions are examined: the Austrian première of Lulu at the Theatre an der Wien (1962) and the Metropolitan Opera staging by John Dexter (1977). Several Regietheater productions are also studied, including the three-act 1979 première at the Paris Opera—complete with Friedrich Cerha’s third act—as well as stagings at the Glyndebourne Festival, Opernhaus Zürich, the Royal Opera House, the Theater Basel, and the Gran Teatre del Liceu. Although much scholarship has been written on Lulu, directors have implemented some of the most radical changes to the opera. Building on Lydia Goehr’s definition of the work-concept in The Imaginary Museum of Historical Works, this project examines the role of these radically altered stagings as challenges to the work-concept of Lulu. In order to assess the portrayal of Lulu in the above-listed productions, this dissertation investigates the origins of her character, tracing the genesis of Lulu and the numerous artists who molded her, including Félicien Champsaur, Frank Wedekind, Leopold Jessner, and G. W. Pabst. Finally, this dissertation considers a work that goes beyond modifications of orchestration, setting, and staging in Regietheater productions. Olga Neuwirth’s opera, American Lulu, represents the ultimate authorial challenge, functioning as both an adaptation of Berg’s text and as a newly composed work. This inquiry explores the transformed mise en scène and re-imagined characters of American Lulu, investigating Neuwirth’s politicized changes and the effect that these alterations have on the story of Lulu. In addition to analyzing her score and libretto, this study examines the performance and depiction of race and sexuality in two American Lulu productions, at the Komische Oper Berlin and the Young Vic in London. Several Lulu performances discussed in this study explore an area which, even as recently as the publication of Roger Parker’s Remaking the Song, was called “untouched”: the alteration of the operatic text itself. Whether these updated works and radical stagings are considered a passing trend or true innovations, the effect of staging on operagoers is undeniable. Like the shifting interpretations of the iconic character herself, the complex history of Lulu reflects the development of canonic works over time, as they are altered, transformed, and reborn in new environments.

The study was concerned with the variable of staging which is a component of text structure. Staging is known to affect the comprehension process of proficient readers. Two passages developed and analysed for staging by Clements (1976) were used in this study to investigate the effects staging has on the readers' comprehension of the passages. The two passages were identical in content and different only in the staging level at which information occurred. Ten experimental texts were developed from Clements' two passages. The texts enabled (i) the comparison of the effects of supplying high, medium or low staged information to the readers on their ability to replace cloze deletions in the rest of the text: and (ii) the comparison of the effects of supplying intact the staging categories Old Topic, New Topic, Old Comment, or New Comment on the readers' ability to replace cloze deletions in the rest of the text. The cloze replacement scores were taken as measures of the readers' comprehension of the text. The subjects used in this study were a mixture of male and female, undergraduate and postgraduate students at Riverina College of Advanced Education. The height of staged information and the staging category of the information were found to have no significant affect upon the readers' comprehension of the texts. However, it is suggested 111 that this may be an artifact of the use of cloze procedure as the measure of comprehension. Suggestions are made for further research to clarify the usefulness of cloze as a research tool in this area and to support or reject the conclusion of this study.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 90-109).

One primary topic of sleep studies is the depth of sleep. According to definitions of R&K rules, human sleep can be roughly divided into three different stages: Awake, Non-rapid-eye-movement (NREM) Sleep, and Rapid-eye-movement (REM) Sleep. Moreover, sleep stages are scored mainly by EEG signals and complementally by EOG and EMG signals. Many researchers have indicated that diseases or disorders occur during sleep will affect life quality of patients. For example, REM sleep-related dyssomnia is highly correlated with neurodegenerative or mental disorders such as major depression. Furthermore, sleep apnea is one of the most common sleep disorders at present. Untreated sleep apnea can increase the risk of mental and cardiovascular diseases. This research proposes a detection method of REM sleep. Take into account the environment of homecare, we just extract and analyze EOG signals for the sake of convenience in comparison with EEG channels. By analyzing elementary waveforms of EOG signals based on VQ method, the proposed method performs a classification accuracy of 67.71% in a group application. The corresponding sensitivity and specificity are 73.38% and 68.95% respectively. In contrast, the average classification accuracy is 82.02% in personalized applications. And the corresponding average sensitivity and specificity are 83.05% and 81.62% respectively. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of detecting REM sleep via the proposed method, especially in personalized applications. This will be propitious to a long term tracing and research of personal sleep status.

Since studies have revealed sleeping quality is highly related to our health conditions, sleep-medicine has attracted more and more attention in recent years. Sleep staging is one of the most important elements of sleep-medicine. Traditionally, it¡¦s done by observing the information form of EEG, EOG and EMG signals. But this is almost not possible to achieve at home. Automatic detection of REM sleep is the main goal of this study. Via comparing the classification performances of different combinations of EEG, EOG and EMG signals, this study also tries to simplify the number of signal channels. By using features extracted from EEG, EOG and EMG signals, the back-propagation neural networks are used to distinguish REM and NREM sleep. By refining the outputs of the neural networks, this study extensively test the efficacy of the proposed approach by using databases from two different sleep centers. This work also investigates the influences of the number of signal channels, REM sleep ratio, AHI, and age on classification results. Data acquired from the sleep centers of China Medical University Hospital (CMUH) and Sheng-Mei Hospital are arranged in ten different groups. For our largest datasets, which consists of 1318 subjects from CMUH, the results show that the proposed method achieves 95.5% epoch-to-epoch agreement with Cohen's Kappa 0.833, sensitivity 85.9% and specificity 97.3%. The generalization accuracy is 94.1% with Cohen's Kappa 0.782, sensitivity 78.5% and specificity 97.3%.

Sleep staging can be used to assess whether sleep structure is abnormal. According to the R&K rule, human sleep can be divided into four different stages: Awake, Light Sleep, Deep Sleep and Rapid-Eye-Movement (REM) Sleep. Conventionally, sleep staging are scored mainly by EEG signals and complementally by EOG and EMG signals. The goal of this study is to detect slow wave sleep (SWS) automatically by using different combinations of EEG, EOG, and EMG signals. In particular, a total of 16 combinations of channels have been studied. Based on high amplitude slow wave characteristics of SWS, this study develops many of feature variables to characterize SWS. A subset of these features are employed to design neural network classifier to detect SWS. This study has noted interpersonal-differences in physiological signals between people and proposes solutions to this problem to improve the performance of SWS detection. The number of tested subjects from two different sleep centers is 1318 and 947 subjects, respectively. These subjects were divided into five groups for training and testing data in order to test performance of our proposed approach. By applying the proposed approach to 1318 subjects, the experimental results show that the proposed method achieves kappa of 0.63 by using a single EEG channel, kappa of 0.6 by using two channels EOG and kappa of 0.66 by using the best combination of multi-channel singals. The size of dataset used in this work is significantly large than those of previous studies and thus provide more reliable experimental results. The experimental results show that the proposed approach can provide satisfactory performance in dealing with dataset with more than 1000 subjects.

The rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep is one of the most important parts in overnight sleep. In this study, an automatic REM sleep staging rule is introduced. Compared with the traditional REM detection method, a distinct feature of this method is that it only requires two EOG signals and thus reduces the number of input signal channels significantly. We calculate the correlation coefficient series between two EOG signals. By representing such a series with a VQ coding method, several techniques are proposed to improve the classification rate. Experimental results are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

This dissertation provides a detailed description of the research work completed on fin staged heat exchangers. The effects of staging fin on the frosting performance of heat pump evaporators and the whole heat pump system have been studied experimentally and theoretically. Frost degrades the performance of fin-and-tube outdoor coils as well as the whole heat pump system. The objective of the experimental part of this study was to investigate the effects of the staging fin on the frost/defrost performance of heat pump outdoor coils under different operating conditions. To accomplish this objective, a series of frosting tests was conducted on an off-the-shelf heat pump system with five (three two-row and two three-row) evaporators over a range of outdoor temperatures and humidities and a range of airflow rates typical of those found in residential sized heat pumps. Performances of the heat pump unit with baseline or fin staged outdoor coils at either frosting or steady-state test conditions are compared and analyzed. Experimental data showed that for a given tworow heat pump outdoor coil operating at the standard ANSI/ASHRAE 35 °F (1.7 °C) frosting conditions, fin staging increased cycle time and COP. There was a small decrease in peak capacity at lower initial airflow rates. At a lower temperature of 28 °F (2.2 °C), cycle time continued to be enhanced with fin staging, and cyclic COP was within 5% of the base case when fin staging was used. In the second step of this work, an analytical model to simulate the performance of both the baseline and fin staged heat pump coils under frosting conditions was developed based on fundamental heat and mass transfer principles. The transient performance of the frosted evaporator was analyzed with the quasi-steady state approach. The section-by-section evaluation scheme was combined with the tubeby- tube approach to model the mass transfer process in the frost formation module. The two-dimensional fin surface was divided into a number of parallel non-overlapping sections. Each of the sections was the calculation unit for the mass transfer. Methods for calculating the airside heat transfer coefficient and friction factor were developed and applied to the simulation model of the fin staged coil. To verify the validity of the frosted evaporator model, the frosting performance of three two-row coils at the same test conditions was simulated and compared with experimental data. The frosted evaporator model appeared to provide satisfactory simulation of the fin-and-tube heat exchanger during the frost buildup process. Comparisons with the test data indicated that the model could capture the trends of the coil capacity, pressure drop, airflow and frost growth. The model also provided a variety of other simulation results including frost mass accumulation, air velocity inside coil, air and refrigerant outlet state, and so on. Overall, the numerical results were in reasonable agreement with the test data under different frosting operation conditions.

One of the important measures for sleep quailty is sleep structure. Normal sleep consists of awake, rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and nonrapid eye movement (NREM) sleep states. NREM sleep can be further classified into stage 1, stage 2 and slow wave sleep (SWS). These stages can be analyzed quantitatively from various electrical signals such as the electroencephalogram (EEG), electro-oculogram (EOG), and electromyogram (EMG). The goal of this research is to develop a simple four-stage process to classify sleep into wake, REM, stage 1, stage 2 and SWS by using a single EEG channel. By applying the proposed approach to 48727 distinct epochs which are acquired from 62 persons, the experimental results show that the proposed method is achieves 76.98% of accuracy. The sensitivity and PPV for wake are 85.96% and 68.35%. Furthermore, the sensitivity and PPV for REM are 82.13% and 74.11%, respectively. The sensitivity and PPV for the stage 1 are 9.02% and 39.00%. The sensitivity and PPV for the stage 2 are 84.19% and 79.36%. The sensitivity and PPV for SWS are 81.53% and 85.40%.