This PhD thesis investigates power relationships within a corporate Finance Department employing a Foucauldian approach to explaining corporate hierarchies and resistance and the implications.Research was conducted in the form of a case study and observation of a corporate finance department, referred to as the 'Finance Department', at the 'Company', referred to as such for confidentiality purposes. The Company is a large Dutch based mail and logistics entity that operates internationally across over 200 countries and has its corporate head office just outside of Amsterdam. The Company's Finance Department was in the throws of change, particularly around hierarchies as a result of the reengineering process with the purpose of creating efficiencies. The aim of the research was to evaluate the power relationships that existed within the hierarchies between management and workers who worked either for the Finance Department or closely with it, and to analyse the outcomes of these power relationships in terms of resistance.The case study is a Foucauldian insight into the different individuals who worked either within the Finance Department or closely with it, with an evaluation of their roles and how their differing power structures impacted upon the workflow within the Finance Department.The outcome of this research is an evaluation of those individuals and their relationships at a particular point in time, which was impacted by so many different factors. The research could give readers an understanding of power relationships and framework for contextual Foucauldian evaluation.The significance of the contribution arising from this particular piece of research is that it involves the combination of a case study method with a Foucauldian perspective. The combination of these two elements allows the research to be done both from the top down and also from the bottom up. Increasing in use as a research tool (Hamel, 1992), the case study contributes uniquely to our body of knowledge of individual, organisational, social and political phenomena (Yin, 1994). The Foucauldian perspective plays an important part in terms of an understanding of power, despite the fact that it is often difficult to fully comprehend the meanings behind Foucault's work (McHoul & Grace, 1993).

The phrase “middle schooling” refers to the school setting for adolescent students generally between the ages of 11 and 15 years of age (Lawton, 1999). This period of time has been recognized on a national level as being particularly significant in education. A call for reform in upper primary and lower secondary to address the understanding of adolescents in a complex and changing society has been recognized publicly at a federal and state level (Lawton, 1999). This research evaluates the redesign of one middle school’s structure through the implementation of a vertical curriculum in a catholic secondary college in a country town. The program has been in place for three years in the college and the need to evaluate it takes on significance for the college itself, and the wider educational community who have been discussing and researching middle school curriculum design for a number of years. Research methodology takes the form of attitudinal questionnaires administered to parents, students and staff in the college. Quantitative analysis using descriptive statistics is used for closed questions to look for significant differences between the parent, student and teacher attitude towards the philosophy and delivery of the vertical structure. One-way ANOVA and MANOVA analysis revealed that parents, students and staff were all supportive of the new structure and its driving philosophies, although parents scored significantly higher on the scales examined than staff or students. Correlations and Chi Square analysis were applied to selected scales, revealing overall that the outcomes of the vertical curriculum are being met. A number of areas were also identified as needing improvement, with areas of emphasis differing for the parent, staff and student groups in the community.

This thesis is concerned with the problem of learning comprehensible theories from structured data and covers primarily classification and regression learning. The basic knowledge representation language is set around a polymorphically-typed, higher-order logic. The general setup is closely related to the learning from propositionalized knowledge and learning from interpretations settings in Inductive Logic Programming. Individuals (also called instances) are represented as terms in the logic. A grammar-like construct called a predicate rewrite system is used to define features in the form of predicates that individuals may or may not satisfy. For learning, decision-tree algorithms of various kinds are adopted.¶ The scope of the thesis spans both theory and practice. On the theoretical side, I study in this thesis¶ 1. the representational power of different function classes and relationships between them;¶ 2. the sample complexity of some commonly-used predicate classes, particularly those involving sets and multisets;¶ 3. the computational complexity of various optimization problems associated with learning and algorithms for solving them; and¶ 4. the (efficient) learnability of different function classes in the PAC and agnostic PAC models.¶ On the practical side, the usefulness of the learning system developed is demontrated with applications in two important domains: bioinformatics and intelligent agents. Specifically, the following are covered in this thesis:¶ 1. a solution to a benchmark multiple-instance learning problem and some useful lessons that can be drawn from it;¶ 2. a successful attempt on a knowledge discovery problem in predictive toxicology, one that can serve as another proof-of-concept that real chemical knowledge can be obtained using symbolic learning;¶ 3. a reworking of an exercise in relational reinforcement learning and some new insights and techniques we learned for this interesting problem; and¶ 4. a general approach for personalizing user agents that takes full advantage of symbolic learning.

There is an every increasing need to develop more durable and higher performing coatings for use in a range of products including tools, devices and bio-implants. Nano-structured coatings either in the form of a nanocomposite or a multilayer is of considerable interest since they often exhibit outstanding properties. The objective of this thesis was to use advanced plasma synthesis methods to produce novel nano-structured coatings with enhanced properties. Coatings consisting of combinations of aluminum (Al), aluminum nitride (AlN) and amorphous carbon (a-C) were investigated. Cathodic vacuum arc deposition and unbalanced magnetron sputtering were used to prepare the coatings. By varying the deposition conditions such as substrate bias and temperature, coatings with a variety of microstructures were formed. A comprehensive range of analytical methods have been employed to investigate the stoichiometry and microstructure of the coatings. These include Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM), Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy (STEM), Electron Energy Loss Spectroscopy, Auger Electron Spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction and Raman spectroscopy. In addition to the investigation of microstructure, the physical properties of the coatings were measured. Residual stress has been recognized as an important property in the study of thin film coatings since it can greatly affect the quality of the coatings. For this reason, residual stress has been extensively studied here. Hardness measurements were performed using a nano indentation system, which is sensitive to the mechanical properties of thin films. This thesis undertook the most comprehensive investigation of the Al/AlN multilayer system. A major finding was the identification of the conditions under which layers or nanocomposite form in this system. A model was developed based on energetics and diffusion limited aggregation that is consistent with the experimental data. Multilayers of a-C and Al were also found to form nanocomposites. No hardness enhancement as a function of layer thickness or feature size was observed in either the Al/AlN or a-C/a-C systems. It was found that the most important factor which determines hardness is the intrinsic stress, with films of high compressive stress exhibiting the highest hardness. Nano-structured multilayers of alternating high and low density a-C were investigated. For a-C multilayers prepared using two levels of DC bias, evidence of ion beam induced damage was observed at the interfaces of both the low and high density layers. In addition, the structure of the high density (ta-C, known as tetrahedral amorphous carbon) layers was found to be largely unchanged by annealing. These results extend our understanding of how a-C form from energetic ion beams and confirms the thermal stability of ta-C in a multilayer. This thesis also presented the first attempt to synthesis a-C multilayered films with a continuously varying DC bias in sinusoidal pattern. The resulting films were shown to have a structurally graded interface between layers and verified that ion energy and stress are the most important factors which determine the structure of a-C films.

<p>The use of out-door pedagogy in the school has been frequently high-lighted during recent years. To which extent out-door education was practised in the school depends on the opinions among the active teachers. The aim of this study was to examine the opinions on out-door pedagogy among teachers in classes 4-6 of the elementary school and to find out to which extent the teacher used out-door teaching. The study was based on qualitatively structured interviews with 4 teachers having different lenght of teaching experience. The results of the interviews showed that the teachers had different opinions on the definition of out-door pedagogy. They claimed that out-door pedagogy was a way to explore nature, to link the out-door environment to theoretical subjects and to give the children an increased understanding on nature. In daily teaching, out-door pedagogy was practiced to a varying extent depending on weather, season, schedule and the teacher´s own experience of out-door teaching. The teachers stressed that out-door pedagogy was an interdisciplinary teaching method that offered a possibility to integrate different subjects.</p>

Dimensional metrology is of prime importance in the industrial and scientific domains, particularly in the field of quality control of manufactured products. In robotics too: without dimensional sensors, robots would be nothing else more than automatons, going through the same repetitive tasks again and again in a carefully controlled environment. This thesis deals with a noncontact measurement technique involving active vision, called triangulation under laser plane lighting. This optomechatronic method consists in projecting a laser sheet on an object or a surface under test, and analyzing the intersecting curve on an image taken by a camera. It allows making a wide variety of dimensional, noncontact and nondestructive, measurements (length, area, volume, diameter, curvature, reverse engineering,...). The original approach of the work is that the focus is brought on the determination of specific, restricted dimensional information on objects of diverse, but a priori known, shapes with the objective of achieving metrological performances in agreement with the industrial requirements. Furthermore, ambulatory instruments­i.e. devices that are at least portable, or even handheld­are exclusively aimed, using low-cost components. Another objective is to obtain systems for which an industrial transposition to innovative instrumental products is feasible. The text is divided in two distinct parts, both strongly correlated. The first one deals with all the theoretical aspects of the method: camera model, passage from 2-D image to 3-D scene, image processing, calibration, accuracy analysis... The performances of the developed models are also studied, in terms of robustness and repeatability. The second part describes four innovative applications of our own: the diameter measurement of cylindrical and of spherical objects, dimensional measurements in the building sector and the determination of the road surface microtexture. The achieved accuracies are globally of about 1%.

Turbulent flows present structures with a wide range of scales. The computation of the complete physics of a turbulent flow (termed DNS) is very expensive and is, for the time being, limited to low and medium Reynolds number flows. As a way to capture high Reynolds number flows, a part of the physics complexity has to be modeled. Large eddy simulation (LES) is a simulation strategy where the large turbulent eddies present on a given mesh are captured and the influence of the non-resolved scales onto the resolved ones is modeled. The present thesis reports on the development and validation of a methodology in order to apply LES for complex wall-bounded flows. Discretization methods and LES models, termed subgrid scale models (SGS), compatible with such a geometrical complexity are discussed. It is proved that discrete a kinetic energy conserving discretization of the convective term is an attractive solution to perform stable simulations without the use of an artificial dissipation, as upwinding. The dissipative effect of the SGS model is thus unaffected by any additional dissipation process. The methodology is first applied to a developed parallel fourth-order incompressible flow solver for cartesian non-uniform meshes. In order to solve the resulting Poisson equation, an efficient multigrid solver is also developed. The code is first validated using DNS (Taylor-Green vortex, channel flow, four-vortex system) and LES (channel flow), and finally applied to the investigation of an aircraft two-vortex system in ground effect. The methodology is then applied to improve a RANS-based industrial unstructured compressible flow solver, developed at CENAERO, to perform well for LES applications. The proposed modifications are tested successfully on the unsteady flow past a sphere at Reynolds of 300 and 10000, corresponding to the subcritical regime.

Dimensional metrology is of prime importance in the industrial and scientific domains, particularly in the field of quality control of manufactured products. In robotics too: without dimensional sensors, robots would be nothing else more than automatons, going through the same repetitive tasks again and again in a carefully controlled environment. This thesis deals with a noncontact measurement technique involving active vision, called triangulation under laser plane lighting. This optomechatronic method consists in projecting a laser sheet on an object or a surface under test, and analyzing the intersecting curve on an image taken by a camera. It allows making a wide variety of dimensional, noncontact and nondestructive, measurements (length, area, volume, diameter, curvature, reverse engineering,...). The original approach of the work is that the focus is brought on the determination of specific, restricted dimensional information on objects of diverse, but a priori known, shapes with the objective of achieving metrological performances in agreement with the industrial requirements. Furthermore, ambulatory instruments­i.e. devices that are at least portable, or even handheld­are exclusively aimed, using low-cost components. Another objective is to obtain systems for which an industrial transposition to innovative instrumental products is feasible. The text is divided in two distinct parts, both strongly correlated. The first one deals with all the theoretical aspects of the method: camera model, passage from 2-D image to 3-D scene, image processing, calibration, accuracy analysis... The performances of the developed models are also studied, in terms of robustness and repeatability. The second part describes four innovative applications of our own: the diameter measurement of cylindrical and of spherical objects, dimensional measurements in the building sector and the determination of the road surface microtexture. The achieved accuracies are globally of about 1%.

Turbulent flows present structures with a wide range of scales. The computation of the complete physics of a turbulent flow (termed DNS) is very expensive and is, for the time being, limited to low and medium Reynolds number flows. As a way to capture high Reynolds number flows, a part of the physics complexity has to be modeled. Large eddy simulation (LES) is a simulation strategy where the large turbulent eddies present on a given mesh are captured and the influence of the non-resolved scales onto the resolved ones is modeled. The present thesis reports on the development and validation of a methodology in order to apply LES for complex wall-bounded flows. Discretization methods and LES models, termed subgrid scale models (SGS), compatible with such a geometrical complexity are discussed. It is proved that discrete a kinetic energy conserving discretization of the convective term is an attractive solution to perform stable simulations without the use of an artificial dissipation, as upwinding. The dissipative effect of the SGS model is thus unaffected by any additional dissipation process. The methodology is first applied to a developed parallel fourth-order incompressible flow solver for cartesian non-uniform meshes. In order to solve the resulting Poisson equation, an efficient multigrid solver is also developed. The code is first validated using DNS (Taylor-Green vortex, channel flow, four-vortex system) and LES (channel flow), and finally applied to the investigation of an aircraft two-vortex system in ground effect. The methodology is then applied to improve a RANS-based industrial unstructured compressible flow solver, developed at CENAERO, to perform well for LES applications. The proposed modifications are tested successfully on the unsteady flow past a sphere at Reynolds of 300 and 10000, corresponding to the subcritical regime.

The use of out-door pedagogy in the school has been frequently high-lighted during recent years. To which extent out-door education was practised in the school depends on the opinions among the active teachers. The aim of this study was to examine the opinions on out-door pedagogy among teachers in classes 4-6 of the elementary school and to find out to which extent the teacher used out-door teaching. The study was based on qualitatively structured interviews with 4 teachers having different lenght of teaching experience. The results of the interviews showed that the teachers had different opinions on the definition of out-door pedagogy. They claimed that out-door pedagogy was a way to explore nature, to link the out-door environment to theoretical subjects and to give the children an increased understanding on nature. In daily teaching, out-door pedagogy was practiced to a varying extent depending on weather, season, schedule and the teacher´s own experience of out-door teaching. The teachers stressed that out-door pedagogy was an interdisciplinary teaching method that offered a possibility to integrate different subjects.