This project revolves around the measurement of T1 and T2 relaxation times in the ratbrain, in a multi-center way. That is to say, elaborate an efficient protocol to calculate highresolution 3D map of the brain. This protocol should be applied in different centers andreturn similar results. Finally, procedures should be defined to ease the collaborationbetween the different centers. The first step consisted in in vitro experiments, in whichdifferent sequences were tested. It resulted that the MDEFT sequence with inversionpreparation (MPRAGE) gives the best results in the shortest time for T1. For T2, theMSME sequence was chosen. The next step moved on in vivo experiments on three rats inorder to get used to manipulating living animals and make new adjustments. As thephysiology is not the same on in vitro and in vivo experiments, some parameters had to beslightly adapted. Once the final 2h-protocol was established, it was tested on a populationof ten rats. Experiments were made at the GIN and CRMBM. Different fitting pipelineswere tried (GIN, CRMBM, MIRCEN). The brain was segmented into different regions. Itresulted that the GIN and CRMBM pipelines return the same T1 values using the differentdatasets. The MIRCEN pipeline under-estimates by 200 ms. The three pipelines return similar T2 values. The GIN and CRMBM datasets provide comparable T1 values, but theGIN center presents slightly higher T2 values. Regarding the multi-center collaboration,the different pipelines were ported to the VIP platform so that the scientific community caneasily reuse them.

On April 21, 2001, the United States and China faced their first major incident of the 21st century when a U.S. spy plane accidentally collided with a Chinese fighter plane. The dialogue that followed between the two countries, as well as the tenor of the incident as reported in the international press, provide some interesting and insightful glimpses into how these major powers handled the incident in the days and weeks that followed. Although the mainstream media in both China and the United States reported the key facts and elements of the incident in a similar fashion, the spin that was ultimately placed on the event by the Chinese press was clearly indicative of the Asian state's desire to portray the United States as being at fault; however, because both countries have an enormous stake in ensuring continued friendly relations for trade purposes, the Chinese press eventually adopted an official position that would allow the United States to "save face" while ensuring that the killed Chinese pilot involved was lauded as a fearless hero of the state and a martyr to its cause. To determine how these events played out in the respective mainstream media of China and the United States, as well as the international media, this research provides a review of the relevant literature to identify how the spy plane collision was portrayed, what elements are regarded as important for analysis. This study compares the two accounts from China and the U.S., and to a lesser extent, the international media, by grouping the media accounts into three separate dimensions: 1) visual framing, 2) contextual framing and 3) operational framing, to determine how these factors played out in the spy plane incident. The analysis of the media accounts is followed by a summary of the research in the concluding paragraph.

Lethality of aggravated assaults has long been discussed in terms of weapons used, location of assault, demographics of victims, and regions of the US in which the assault occurred. However, dating back to the 1950s, medical response times have been discussed as a mediating factor, but minimally explored in analyses. The current study assesses the lethality of shootings with a primary focus on emergency medical and police response times in New Orleans, LA. Along with routine activities and social disorganization indicators, 102 shootings that occurred in 3 months are analyzed to establish response time patterns of lethality. Results indicate that neither medical nor police response times impact the odds of a victim surviving a shooting, but instead, it is the days on which the violent encounters occur and the socioeconomic characteristics of the neighborhood that have a stronger influence on life or death, although not statistically significant. Limitations and future research directions are discussed.

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Systems controlled by embedded computers become indispensable in our lives and can be found in avionics, automotive industry, home appliances, medicine, telecommunication industry, mecatronics, space industry, etc. Fast, accurate and flexible performance estimation tools giving feedback to the designer in every design phase are a vital part of a design process capable to produce high quality designs of such embedded systems. In the past decade, the limitations of models considering fixed task execution times have been acknowledged for large application classes within soft real-time systems. A more realistic model considers the tasks having varying execution times with given probability distributions. No restriction has been imposed in this thesis on the particular type of these functions. Considering such a model, with specified task execution time probability distribution functions, an important performance indicator of the system is the expected deadline miss ratio of tasks or task graphs. This thesis proposes two approaches for obtaining this indicator in an analytic way. The first is an exact one while the second approach provides an approximate solution trading accuracy for analysis speed. While the first approach can efficiently be applied to monoprocessor systems, it can handle only very small multi-processor applications because of complexity reasons. The second approach, however, can successfully handle realistic multiprocessor applications. Experiments show the efficiency of the proposed techniques. / <p>Report code: LiU-Tek-Lic-2002:58.</p>

This essay will analyze a selection of characters from Charles Dickens’ novel Hard Times. Characterizations will be analyzed by using a Marxist theoretical framework, e.g., characters’ relations to Marxist concepts such as class struggle, alienation, and stratification will be studied. The purpose of this essay is to use Marxist concepts in order to understand Dickens’ satire and critique of capitalism. This is done by applying a theory criticizing capitalism, namely Marxist theory, to some of the novel’s characters and analyzing these characters according to their relations to the main features of Marxist theory. A few characters are selected for analysis, to distinguish characteristics or traits that satirize society. Moreover, the essay will investigate whether the author alludes to Marxist concepts when satirizing contemporary society. The characters portrayed in the novel are all exposed to a society characterized by hardship, inequality, and class struggle. These concepts are all features of a society that Marxism critiques. Accordingly, the thesis is that Marxist concepts are implicit in the text and do play a role in Dickens’ satirizing of his contemporary, capitalist, industrialized society, despitenot being mentioned explicitly.

The central objective of this work is to present an analysis of the asymptotic conformal Killing vectors in asymptotically-flat space-times of general relativity. This problem has been examined by two different methods; in Chapter 5 the asymptotic expansion technique originated by Newman and Unti [31] leads to a solution for asymptotically-flat spacetimes which admit an asymptotically shear-free congruence of null geodesics, and in Chapter 6 the conformal rescaling technique of Penrose [54] is used both to support the findings of the previous chapter and to set out a procedure for solution in the general case. It is pointed out that Penrose's conformal technique is preferable to the use of asymptotic expansion methods, since it can be established in a rigorous manner without leading to the possible convergence difficulties associated with asymptotic expansions. Since the asymptotic conformal symmetry groups of asymptotically flat space-times Are generalisations of the conformal group of Minkowski space-time we devote Chapters 3 and 4 to a study of the flat space case so that the results of later chapters may receive an interpretation in terms of familiar concepts. These chapters fulfil a second, equally important, role in establishing local isomorphisms between the Minkowski-space conformal group, 90(2,4) and SU(2,2). The SO(2,4) representation has been used by Kastrup [61] to give a physical interpretation using space-time gauge transformations. This appears as part of the survey of interpretative work in Chapter 7. The SU(2,2) representation of the conformal group has assumed a theoretical prominence in recent years. through the work of Penrose [9-11] on twistors. In Chapter 4 we establish contact with twistor ideas by showing that points in Minkowski space-time correspond to certain complex skew-symmetric rank two tensors on the SU(2,2) carrier space. These objects are, in Penrose's terminology [91, simple skew-symmetric twistors of valence [J. A particularly interesting aspect of conformal objects in space-time is explored in Chapter 8, where we extend the work of Geroch [16] on multipole moments of the Laplace equation in 3-space to the consideration. of Q tý =0 in Minkowski space-time. This development hinges upon the fact that multipole moment fields are also conformal Killing tensors. In the final chapter some elementary applications of the results of Chapters 3 and 5 are made to cosmological models which have conformal flatness or asymptotic conformal flatness. In the first class here we have 'models of the Robertson-Walker type and in the second class we have the asymptotically-Friedmann universes considered by Hawking [73]. / University of Bradford Research Studenship

Aim: To examine how the New York Times portrays Melania Trump in her role as First Lady. Methodology: A qualitative discourse analysis of newspaper articles from the New York Time’s online publication. The main theoretical and methodological foundation is Fairclough’s concept of critical discourse analysis (CDA) and Yvonne Hirdman’s theories about gender system and gender contract. Main results: The main results of the analysis is that Melania Trump is depicted as absent, non-traditional, irresponsible, unhappy, greedy, non-supportive, illiterate, that she is mimicking other First Ladies, responsible for her husband’s actions, that she prioritizes motherhood over the First Lady role, and that she is compared to other women in a negative light.