This study is focus on the integration and miniaturess of the active circuit and antennas. Recently, the monolithic microwave integrated circuits have been mature in communication markets and the associated handsets are interesting in the quality and profile. The antenna plays a role as a radiator in wireless system. Therefore, the performance dominates the quality of communication. The aspect of the antenna usually occupies the majority communication hardware¡¦s area. Comparing many front end circuit elements, the challenges in the antennas will be more crucial. Therefore, it has well merits in designing high integration and bandwidth antennas. Based on the integration of the active circuits stage and antennas, this work presents the aperture coupled active antenna with harmonic suppression and broadband dual feeds circularly polarized patch antenna. Utilizing the bented aperture and insertion of narrow rectangular slots on excitation edge for shifting the high order harmonic components from the active stage, the harmonic suppression characterization is implemented by the above approach. The other active antenna, braodband dual feeds circularly polarized antenna, is achieved with spatial power combining. The subject aims the different excitated patch structures and replacing the periodic feeding lines as active circuits in the discussion. Relative to the conventional 50 Ohm feeds, the mechanics of the feeds are modified with stepped impedance resonators and stubs at the same physical wave length condition for achieving the integration of the antenna and the circuit. Besides, this antenna can exhibit excellent behavior and compact the size in the effective frequency range.

Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) hazards include LNG flammable vapor dispersion and LNG pool fire thermal radiation. A large LNG pool fire emits high thermal radiation thus preventing fire fighters from approaching and extinguishing the fire. One of the strategies used in the LNG industry and recommended by federal regulation National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) 59A is to use expansion foam to suppress LNG vapors and to control LNG fire by reducing the fire size. In its application, expansion foam effectiveness heavily depends on application rate, generator location, and LNG containment pit design. Complicated phenomena involved and previous studies have not completely filled the gaps increases the needs for LNG field experiments involving expansion foam. In addition, alternative LNG vapor dispersion and pool fire suppression methodology, Foamglas® pool fire suppression (PFS), is investigated as well. This dissertation details the research and experiment development. Results regarding important phenomena are presented and discussed. Foamglas® PFS effectiveness is described. Recommendations for advancing current guidelines in LNG vapor dispersion and pool fire suppression methods are developed. The gaps are presented as the future work and recommendation on how to do the experiment better in the future. This will benefit LNG industries to enhance its safety system and to make LNG facilities safer.

Many radars suffer from masking of weaker targets by stronger ones due to range sidelobes of pulse compression codes. We propose a method to prevent this by successively detecting targets and canceling their effects. Performance of the proposed method will be investigated in various scenarios with regard to existence of noise, targets, and the Doppler effect.

Yellow rust disease is one of the most important problems in wheat production. It causes substantial yield losses throughout the world. There are resistant and susceptible wheat varieties to various yellow rust pathotypes. In this thesis genes that are induced in wheat, in virulence and avirulence conditions upon yellow rust inoculations were investigated. Consequently, it was aimed to identify genes that may be playing critical roles in the disease resistance mechanism. The strategy was to construct subtracted cDNA libraries from resistant and susceptible plants and analyse the sequences obtained from these libraries. The subtraction approach in this study differs from the common subtraction designs implicated in plant-pathogen interactions / instead of comparing a compatible or an incompatible interaction with a control, one of the subtractions in this study is done taking a compatible interaction as the tester and an incompatible one as the driver, and the second subtraction, vice versa. Therefore, it was intended to compare the transcriptomes from compatible and incompatible plant-pathogen interactions directly. Suppression Subtractive Hybridization method was used to construct subtracted cDNA libraries. Two subtractions were performed / SSH1 (D-R), taking a compatible interaction as the tester sample and an incompatible one as the driver sample, and SSH2 (R-D), taking an incompatible interaction as the tester sample and a compatible one as the driver. In the end, two subtracted cDNA libraries, SSH1 (D-R) library (1536 clones) and SSH2 (R-D) library (1152 clones) were obtained and the libraries were sequenced. Sequence results were subjected to BlastN and BlastX analysis. We looked for a group of genes that were frequently emphasized in plant disease related studies when we searched within the Blast N homology results of the two libraries. We found out that 19 such genes are present in our libraries. We discussed supposed induction of these genes in the interactions investigated in our study. The fact that these genes were found to be present in our libraries enhances the reliability of our results suggesting that the gene sequences we found indeed belong to genes differentially expressed in the respective comparisons investigated in our study. As such, it also implies that other sequences that were found similar to genes of known functions may represent candidate genes as subjects of further studies investigating wheat-yellow rust interactions.

A complex exponential waveform embedded in white noise can be optimally detected by matched filtering which is equivalent to Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT). However, if the input includes multiple complex exponentials, the DFT processing is not optimal. The frequency spectrum of the complex exponential signal with finite observation interval is not impulse. The spectrum includes side-lobes called spectral leakage.Because of the strong side-lobes, weak components can be masked, or side-lobes can be interpreted as independent complex exponentials causing false alarms. The conventional approach is to suppress side-lobes by using an amplitude weighting function, called a window function. However, windows reduce the signal to noise ratio at the output and also widens the main lobe in the spectrum resulting in a loss of frequency resolution. In this thesis, the problem of detection of a complex exponential signal under a secondary complex exponential interference is investigated. Alternative windowing techniques such as spatially variant apodization (SVA), dual apodization (DA) are studied in the context of detection of weak sinusoids under strong sinusoidal interference. The detection performance of SVA and DA is compared with the conventional methods and the optimal detector.

The present study investigates the effects of cognitive inhibitory mechanisms and tendency to suppress thoughts on the frequency and intensity of traumatic intrusions within the trauma film paradigm. Non clinical participants&rsquo / response inhibition and proactive inhibition levels and tendency to suppress thoughts were measured prior to exposure to a trauma film. One week after seeing the trauma film, participants reported the frequency and intensity of trauma film related intrusions with an intrusion diary and Impact of Events Scale. No significant effect of response inhibition, proactive inhibition and thought suppression tendency was found on the frequency and intensity of trauma film related intrusions. Findings of the study are discussed.

In this thesis, the multi-carrier (MC) code division multiple access (CDMA) system is considered in Rayleigh fading channel. The main concern of this thesis is to devise a new direct linearly constrained constant modulus (LCCM) inverse QRD-RLS algorithm for multiple access interference (MAI) cancellation and the problem due to the mismatch of the channel estimator. In the conventional approach, two significant detectors are applied to the system for multiuser interference suppression, one is the blind adaptation algorithm and the other is adaptive linearly constrained PLIC approach. However, the mirror effect may occur when the blind adaptation algorithm is employed. It might affect the performance in terms of bit error rate (BER), although the desired signal to interference (due to other users) improvement is still acceptable. Moreover, in case that the channel coefficients could not be estimated perfectly, the mismatch problem may occur to degrade the performance of the adaptive linearly constrained PLIC approach with the LMS or RLS algorithm. To overcome the mismatch problem, the conventional approach is to use the LCCM criterion with gradient algorithm. However, the convergence rate of the gradient algorithm is too slow to be implemented in real-time wireless communication system. In this thesis, to have fast convergence rate and to circumvent the mismatch problem, the robust LCCM-IQRD algorithm is devised and applied to the MC-CDMA system in Rayleigh fading channel. The proposed robust LCCM-IQRD algorithm has shown to be more effective in terms of MAI cancellation and the mismatch due to imperfect channel estimator. The performance, in terms of BER, of the proposed algorithm is superior to that of the conventional PLIC based algorithms, the blind adaptation algorithm, and the conventional LCCM gradient algorithm.

This study was designed to remedy the current lack of information on the causes of depression among Chinese women in the United States. It is based on an integrated understanding of depression, anger, female gender socialization, acculturation processes, and Chinese cultural values. More specifically, this study aims to investigate the depressive symptoms in this population using a psychoanalytic conceptualization of depression as anger "turn-inward." The researcher hypothesized that after controlling for the effects of female gender role identification and acculturation level, anger suppression has a direct positive effect on depressive symptoms. It was also hypothesized that female gender role identification has a direct positive effect on depressive symptoms. Statistically significant strong positive relationships were found for both relationships. Results also suggested that acculturation level has a direct negative effect on depressive symptoms. However, neither the Chinese culture orientation nor the European American culture orientation was found to have a statistically significant effect on depressive symptoms. It is worth noting that the results of this study revealed that 90% of the variance in depressive symptoms was explained by variables included the path model in this study. Recommendations for future research and clinical practice are also discussed.

This is the first research by using suppression subtractive hybridization (SSH) to analysis the gene expression in marine macroalga Ulva fasciata Delile against excess copper toxicity, and it gives us a comprehensive understanding of the tolerant mechanism while macroalgae face to the excess copper. Suppression subtractive hybridization was used to identify genes differentially expressed following exposure to 50 £gM CuSO4 for 6- 12h in a marine macroalga Ulva fasciata Delile. In this work, 69 genes were identified, of which 55 were up-regulated and 14 were down-regulated. According to the database of Gene Ontology (GO), these genes were classified into 10 categories as follows: 1. Transcription; 2. Translation, ribosomal structure and biogenesis; 3. Posttranslational modification, protein turnover, chaperones; 4. Photosynthesis; 5. Cell redox homeostasis; 6. Stress; 7. Metabolism; 8. Energy production and conversion; 9. Transport; 10. Function unknown. According to the results, we suggest that the responses of U. fasciata against excess copper toxicity are mainly through increase of the energy production for providing sufficient energy to many metabolic pathways, and control of the Fe homeostasis and redox form of thiol groups for maintaining the cellular redox homeostasis, moreover, expression of photosynthetic genes for letting the photosynthesis work. In addition, to scavenge the ROS is by expression of stress-related genes, meanwhile, the proteins, DNA and lipids damaged by ROS (reactive oxygen species) and copper are repaired by expression of the other categorical genes. Over and above, the genes expressing in the metabolism category might maintain the amino acids homeostasis and increase the purine content, and subsequently increase the tolerant capacity of U. fasciata against excess copper toxicity. In addition, the concentrations of antioxidants and the activities and gene expression of antioxidant enzymes were determined in Ulva fasciata Delile by a 4-day exposure to 0, 5, 10, 20 and 50 £gM CuSO4. These results demonstrate that the maintenance of antioxidant homeostasis and the induction of activities of antioxidant enzymes via enhanced gene expression are used by U. fasciata to cope with the Cu-induced oxidative stress, but the defense capacity cannot sufficiently alleviate oxidative damage occurring under the condition of higher Cu concentrations. Moreover, according to the results from the expression of genes involved in the control of redox homeostasis and antioxidant defense was studied in macroalga Ulva fasciata Delile in response to CuSO4 (5 and 50 £gM) and ROS (H2O2 and O2£»-), we suggest that ROS involved in up-regulation of antioxidant defense-related genes and the expression of genes of antioxidant defense enzymes and UfMsrA (methionine sulfoxide reductase A) are associated with long-term adaptation of U. fasciata to Cu excess and transcription of redox- related genes and UfGr (glutathione reductase) is up-regulated for short-term acclimation. Promoters play a key role in regulating gene expression. Based on the analysis of cis-acting elements on UfMsr promoters, we suggested that the signal transduction pathway of copper stress in U. fasciata is related to that of other stresses and of defense-related plant hormones, however, Ca2+ and calmodulin might participate in it. To sum up, U. fasciata could resist oxidative damage caused by excessive copper through the regulation on the molecular level.

Notre travail a consisté à étudier 2 gènes impliqués dans la réversion tumorale et régulés par P53.<br />Nous avons identifié dans le promoteur du gène siah-1b une séquence sur laquelle P53 se lie in vitro et in vivo. De plus, nous avons montré la fonctionnalité de cet élément de réponse suite à l'induction de P53.<br />La particularité de ce site, dont la structure diffère fortement du consensus de liaison de P53 à l'ADN, ouvre de nouvelles perspectives dans l'analyse des mécanismes régulés par P53.<br />L'étude de la protéine TSAP6 murine a permis de caractériser son expression au niveau tissulaire et intracellulaire. La fonction de TSAP6 n'étant pas bien connue, nous avons entrepris de l'analyser dans des modèles animaux portant un gène tsap6 muté ou invalidé.<br />La mutation du gène tsap6 Gln-395-Lys induit l'apparition d'une microcytose et d'un emphysème pulmonaire chez la souris. La caractérisation des mécanismes conduisant à ces phénotypes est en cours et nous permettra de mieux comprendre la fonction de TSAP6.