L’intérêt que porte la communauté scientifique ainsi que politique aux les services écosystémiques et à leur résilience face aux changements globaux (environnementaux ou sociétaux) en cours est grandissant, ce qui se reflète par le nombre d’études à ce sujet, le rapport d’évaluation des écosystèmes pour le millénaire et la mise en place d’un groupe de travail sur la résilience (« Resilience Alliance »). Les définitions de la résilience sont elles aussi très variées, avec des concepts tels que la résistance, la résilience spécifique (« de quoi à quoi ? »), la résilience générale, l’adaptabilité et la transformabilité, que nous nous sommes appropriés dans le but de développer un cadre conceptuel et méthodologique pour étudier la résilience de la fourniture de services écosystémiques, en particulier dans le but de comparer les potentiels de résilience des différents types de prairies subalpines du col du Lautaret (Hautes-Alpes, France) pour un ensemble de services sélectionnés. Nous avons proposé deux approches pour évaluer les potentiels de résilience des différents états dans lequel peut se trouver un socio-écosystème, en considérant la résilience comme la capacité d’un système à maintenir une fourniture stable de services écosystémiques (composante résistance) mais aussi sa capacité à l’adapter (différentes composantes selon le degré d’adaptation : résilience, transition, transformation). Une première étape d’évaluation d’un ensemble de services d’intérêt sur la zone d’étude est suivie d’une première analyse de la résilience de chacun de ces services spécifiquement, basée sur l’évaluation de « gammes opérationnelles » pour chaque service, définies comme les gammes de valeurs que peut prendre le dit service dans un état donné du socio-écosystème. L’échelle organisationnelle à laquelle ces gammes sont évaluées les relie aux différentes composantes de la résilience. Les résultats confirment l’intérêt de s’intéresser à la résilience spécifique de chaque service, car leur profil de résilience sont différents, c’est-à-dire que les prairies aux plus forts potentiels ne sont pas les même d’un site à l’autre, bien que dans tous les cas les potentiels de résilience soient plutôt forts, au contraire des autres potentiels.La deuxième analyse part de l’hypothèse théorique que la diversité des traits de réponse (hétérogénéité et redondance) améliore la résilience. Nous avons fait l’hypothèse que, lorsque les traits de réponse sont ceux utilisés pour modéliser les services écosystémiques, la diversité fonctionnelle d’une communauté végétale peut-être reliée à sa résilience générale en termes de services écosystémiques. Nous avons relié plusieurs mesures de la diversité fonctionnelle aux potentiels de résilience (entropie et diversité fonctionnelle dans leur dimension α et β, redondance et complémentarité des groupes fonctionnels). Cependant, les résultats obtenus par l’analyse des prairies du Lautaret nous amènent à réfuter l’hypothèse proposant que la diversité fonctionnelle des communautés végétales permet d’expliquer le profil de résilience des services écosystémiques analysés, car ils ne concordent pas avec les profils de résilience trouvés par l’approche des gammes opérationnelles. Au final, nous préconisons d’utiliser l’approche des gammes opérationnelles, qui permet de connaître le profil de résilience de chaque service, dans le cadre d’étude portant sur la capacité d’un socio-écosystème à maintenir la fourniture de ses services écosystémiques. Cette approche peut de plus être enrichie d’une approche de scénarisation qui permettrait de déterminer « à quoi » la fourniture de chaque service est résiliente. / As evidenced by the number of studies on the subject, the recent millennium ecosystem assessment and the establishment of a working group on resilience (« Resilience Alliance »), the interest of the scientific community in ecosystem services and their resilience in the face of global change (environmental or social) is steadily increasing. Definitions of resilience are highly varied, and we used concepts such as resistance, specific resilience (« of what to what ? »), generalised resilience, adaptability and transformability to develop a conceptual and methodological framework to study the resilience of ecosystem service provision. This conceptual framework was applied to compare the potential resilience of differing sub-alpine grasslands types in three local government areas in the area of the Col du Lautaret (Hautes-Alpes, France) for a number of locally and regionally important ecosystem services. We proposed two approaches for evaluating the potential resilience of the different states in which a socio-ecosystem can exist, by considering resilience as the capacity of a system to maintain a stable provision of an ecosystem service (resistance component), as well as its capacity to adapt this provision if needed (components of resilience, transition, transformation depending on the degree of adaptation). A first stage of the quantification of ecosystem services was followed by an initial analysis of each of these services via the evaluation of their « operating ranges », defined as the range of values that a service can take given a particular state of the socio-ecosystem. The organizational scale at which these ranges are evaluated links them to other components of resilience. Our results confirm the utility of considering the specific resilience of each service, as the profiles of their resistance are different. In particular, the types of grasslands with the highest resilience component potential are not the same from one site to another, even though in all cases these resilience component potentials are rather high as compared to other components potentials. The second analysis is based on the theoretical hypothesis that it is the increasing diversity of response traits (heterogeneity and redundancy) which increases resistance. We hypothesised that, when it is response traits that have been used to model ecosystem services, the functional diversity of a plant community can be linked to its overall resistance in terms of ecosystem services. We linked a number of measures of functional diversity to resilience potential, including the α and β dimensions of entropy and functional diversity, and the redundancy and complementarity of functional groups. The obtained results for the grasslands at Lautaret lead us to reject the hypothesis which proposes that the functional diversity of plant communities can be used to predict the patterns of resilience of the analysed ecosystem services, as these do not correspond to the patterns of resistance obtained from the approach using operating ranges. Finally, we suggest that to assess the capacity of a socio-ecosystem to maintain the provision of ecosystem services, our approach using operating ranges is preferable as it allows for the quantification of the resistance profile of each service. This approach could be further developed using scenario building so as to determine « to what » the provision of each service is resistant.

Was bringt intensive Computernutzer dazu, ihre Freizeit am Rechner zu verbringen, und gibt es hierbei Unterschiede zwischen verschiedenen Nutzertypen? N = 271 Personen nahmen an einer online Befragung zu Anreizen freizeitlicher Computernutzung teil. Durch ausgewählte Internetverteiler waren gezielt besonders engagierte Computernutzer angesprochen worden (M = 3,9 Freizeitstunden am Rechner pro Tag). Für diese Nutzer fanden sich (in der Reihenfolge ihres Gewichtes) folgende Anreizfaktoren: Zugehörigkeit/Gemeinschaft; Kompetenzerleben; Vielseitigkeit/Nutzen; Langeweilevermeidung; rebellische Illegalitätstendenz. Gruppiert nach ihren bevorzugten Nutzungsweisen fanden sich drei Nutzertypen: Zweckorientierte Nutzer (58%), Hacker (= Eindringen in fremde Systeme ohne Schädigungsabsicht, 22%) und Cracker (Eindringen mit Schädigungsabsicht, 20%). Diese Nutzertypen unterschieden sich deutlich in ihrem Anreizprofil. Hacking und Cracking, nicht aber zweckorientierte Nutzungsweisen waren korreliert mit Flow-Erleben und positiver Aktivierung am Rechner. Die Ergebnisse sind nicht repräsentativ für alle Freizeitnutzer. Sie beziehen sich auf eine gezielt rekrutierte Stichprobe besonders engagierter Computernutzer, die über spezifische Netzwerke (z. B. relevante Fachschaften, Chaos Computer Club) erreichbar sind.

Cloud computing is emerging as a promising platform for compute and data intensive scientific applications. Thanks to the on-demand elastic provisioning capabilities, cloud computing has instigated curiosity among researchers from a wide range of disciplines. However, even though many vendors have rolled out their commercial cloud infrastructures, the service offerings are usually only best-effort based without any performance guarantees. Utilization of these resources will be questionable if it can not meet the performance expectations of deployed applications. Additionally, the lack of the familiar development tools hamper the productivity of eScience developers to write robust scientific high performance computing (HPC) applications. There are no standard frameworks that are currently supported by any large set of vendors offering cloud computing services. Consequently, the application portability among different cloud platforms for scientific applications is hard. Among all clouds, the emerging Azure cloud from Microsoft in particular remains a challenge for HPC program development both due to lack of its support for traditional parallel programming support such as Message Passing Interface (MPI) and map-reduce and due to its evolving application programming interfaces (APIs). We have designed newer frameworks and runtime environments to help HPC application developers by providing them with easy to use tools similar to those known from traditional parallel and distributed computing environment set- ting, such as MPI, for scientific application development on the Azure cloud platform. It is challenging to create an efficient framework for any cloud platform, including the Windows Azure platform, as they are mostly offered to users as a black-box with a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) to access various service components. The primary contributions of this Ph.D. thesis are (i) creating a generic framework for bag-of-tasks HPC applications to serve as the basic building block for application development on the Azure cloud platform, (ii) creating a set of APIs for HPC application development over the Azure cloud platform, which is similar to message passing interface (MPI) from traditional parallel and distributed setting, and (iii) implementing Crayons using the proposed APIs as the first end-to-end parallel scientific application to parallelize the fundamental GIS operations.

A power transformer is one of the most important and expensive components in any power system. Power transformers can be exposed to a wide variety of abnormal conditions and faults. Internal turn-to-turn faults are the most difficult types of faults to detect within the power transformer. The IEEE Standards documents have revealed that there is no one standard way to protect all power transformers against minor internal faults such as turn-to-turn faults and at the same time to satisfy basic protection requirements: sensitivity, selectivity, and speed.<p> This thesis presents a new, simple and efficient protection technique which is based on negative sequence currents. Using this protection technique, it is possible to detect minor internal turn-to-turn faults in power transformers. Also, it can differentiate between internal and external faults. The discrimination is achieved by comparing the phase shift between two phasors of total negative sequence current. The new protection technique is being studied via an extensive simulation study using PSCAD®/EMTDC 1 software in a three-phase power system and is also being compared with a traditional differential algorithm.<p> Relay performance under different numbers of shorted turns of the power transformer, different connections of the transformer, different values of the fault resistances, and different values of the system parameters was investigated. The results indicate that the new technique can provide a fast and sensitive approach for identifying minor internal turn-to-turn faults in power transformers.

A power transformer is one of the most important and expensive components in any power system. Power transformers can be exposed to a wide variety of abnormal conditions and faults. Internal turn-to-turn faults are the most difficult types of faults to detect within the power transformer. The IEEE Standards documents have revealed that there is no one standard way to protect all power transformers against minor internal faults such as turn-to-turn faults and at the same time to satisfy basic protection requirements: sensitivity, selectivity, and speed.<p> This thesis presents a new, simple and efficient protection technique which is based on negative sequence currents. Using this protection technique, it is possible to detect minor internal turn-to-turn faults in power transformers. Also, it can differentiate between internal and external faults. The discrimination is achieved by comparing the phase shift between two phasors of total negative sequence current. The new protection technique is being studied via an extensive simulation study using PSCAD®/EMTDC 1 software in a three-phase power system and is also being compared with a traditional differential algorithm.<p> Relay performance under different numbers of shorted turns of the power transformer, different connections of the transformer, different values of the fault resistances, and different values of the system parameters was investigated. The results indicate that the new technique can provide a fast and sensitive approach for identifying minor internal turn-to-turn faults in power transformers.

Scientists and engineers measure dielectric constant because it gives them better understanding of materials and helps them to know how to integrate these materials into their design processes;it also helps them to shorten design life cycle,and aside these two functions,it has numerous uses all of which cannot be enumerated in this section.Owing to its usefulness,various measurement methods of dielectric constant of materials have been developed over the years.Each method has its limitations which affect the accuracy of the measurement;these limitations range from frequency,temperature,and  mearsurement environment to material under test.   In this thesis,four most common methods of measuring dielectric constant were discussed and the most accurate one,the resonant method,was chosen and worked on .The project was executed by making a mathematical analysis of the ring resonator which was later simulated in HFSS to get results which would be comparable to ones obtained in  laboratory measurements.   The ring was fabricated and taken to the laboratory for measurement.Two monopole antennas were connected to the two ports of a VNA with one antenna serving as the transmitter and the other serving as the receiver.   The resonant frequencies obtained were combined with the geometric parameters of the ring resonator and that of the MUT in equations written into MATLAB scripts;this equations were used to extract the dielectric constant of the MUT.

The application of second generation sequencing technology to the characterization of complex microbial communities has profoundly affected our appreciation of microbial diversity. The explosive growth of microbial sequence data has also necessitated advances in bioinformatic methods for profiling microbial communities. Data aggregation strategies should allow the relation of metagenomic sequence data to our understanding of microbial taxonomy, while also facilitating the discovery of novel taxa. For eukaryotes, a method has been established that links DNA sequences to the identification of organisms: DNA Barcoding. A similar approach has been developed for prokaryotes using target genic regions as markers for species identification and to profile communities. A key difference in these efforts is that within DNA barcoding there is a formalized framework for the evaluation of barcoding targets, whereas for prokaryotes the 16S rRNA gene target has become the de facto barcode without formal evaluation. Using the framework developed for evaluating DNA barcodes in eukaryotes, a study was undertaken to formally evaluate 16S rRNA and cpn60 as DNA barcodes for Bacteria. Both 16S rRNA and cpn60 were found to meet the criteria for DNA barcodes, with cpn60 a preferred barcode based on its superior resolution of closely related taxa. The high resolution of cpn60 enabled a method of sequence data aggregation through sequence assembly: microbial profiling using metagenomic assembly (mPUMA). The scoring of metagenomic assemblies in terms of sensitivity and specificity of the operational taxonomic units formed was used to evaluate and optimize the assembly of cpn60 barcodes. Using optimized parameters, mPUMA was demonstrated to faithfully reconstruct a synthetic community in terms of richness and abundance. To facilitate the use of mPUMA, a software package was developed and released under an open source license. The utility of mPUMA was further examined through the characterization of the epiphytic seed microbiomes of Triticum and Brassica species. A microbiome shared across both crop genera including fungi and bacteria was detected: a particularly important observation as it implies that seeds may serve as a vector for microbes that could include both pathogenic and beneficial organisms. The relative abundances of taxa identified by mPUMA were confirmed by qPCR for multiple cases of both fungal and bacterial taxa. By culturing isolates of both bacteria and fungi from the seed surfaces it was demonstrated that mPUMA faithfully assembled consensus sequences for OTUs that were 100% identical to isolated fungi and bacteria. Patterns observed in the relative abundances of the shared microbiome OTUs were used to generate the hypothesis that an Pantoea-like bacterium and an Alternaria-like fungus had an antagonistic relationship, since sequences corresponding to these organisms showed reciprocal abundance patterns on Triticum and Brassica seeds. Studies of the interactions of cultured isolates revealed fungistatic interactions that could account for their reciprocal abundances. These interactions could be directly relevant to plant health, given that Alternaria-like fungi are linked to grain spoilage in wheat, and diseases in canola. Taken together, results of this thesis demonstrate the superiority of the cpn60 universal target as a barcode for Bacteria, forming the basis for an assembly-based strategy for microbial profiling of bacterial and eukaryotic microbial communities that can lead to the discovery of novel taxa and microbial interactions.

With the ongoing innovation of production technology, the quality and properties of NoteBook (NB) are more advanced, and the price is getting lower. Due to the low price and the rising of Chinese consumption level, the demand of NB is progressively increasing. On the other hand, compared with other items, NB is a high unit price item. Therefore, the brand name of products becomes a factor for consideration in consumer purchases. It also leads to the consequence of NB industrial concentration. According to MIC¡¦s report, the global market share of top 5 NB brand (Acer, Hewlett Packard, Dell, Lenevo, and Toshiba) is up to 74% in 2010. Due to the circulation in information technology, NB functions and services provided by brand companies become similar. Under this condition, the discrepancy between different brand NBs is shortened. In the consumer-oriented market, only consumer satisfaction cannot create the consumer loyalty. Despite the consumer satisfaction, brand companies should consider other factors that affect the brand loyalty. The research is to discuss the factors affecting brand loyalty from the aspects of involvement, using habits, and demographic variables. In addition, statistic analysis is based on collecting questionnaires, in which the analysis includes factor analysis, regression analysis, and ANOVA analysis. The research found that: 1. Consumer satisfaction still affects brand value ,and be a essential factor of brand loyalty. 2. Regarding to involvement, product pleasure will be factor between consumer satisfaction and brand loyalty; others will be not. 3. Using habit and Demographic Statistic will be factors between consumer satisfaction and brand loyalty.

This thesis improved the structure of traditional envelope elimination and restoration transmitter by replacing the analog components of envelope detector and limiter using digital processing technique of polar transformation. Envelope signal was modulated by delta-sigma modulation, which could suppress the quantization noise and would be good for integrated circuit design. The front end analog circuits of transmitter used high efficiency class-S and class-E power amplifiers to amplify envelope and phase signal separately and finally combined them at the output of class-E power amplifier. The RF transmitters using polar modulation had advantages of high efficiency and linearity when transmitting high PAPR-valued digital modulation signals. For example, when transmitting the QPSK-modulated signal with 900MHz carrier and 1Msps data rate, the transmitter was measured with efficiency as high as 60%, ACPR above 34dB, and EVM less than 6.5%.

Obesity has been described as a global health crisis due to the rapid increases seen worldwide (Whitlock et al., 2005; Harris et al., 2009; Yetter, 2009). The consequences of obesity are far-reaching and include the physiological and psychological implications for obese individuals, as well as the financial impact it has on both the individual and national health care. Children, especially those of minority ethnic background and lower socioeconomic status, are at increased risk for developing obesity (Yetter, 2009; Veldhuis et al., 2009). Intervention programs targeting underlying causes of childhood obesity have been developed, but little consistent success has been achieved (Summerbell et al., 2005; Sherry, 2005). One factor that could be influencing the lack of success is the stigmatization that can be felt by children taking part in intervention programs. Furthermore, many programs have targeted behavior change without determining underlying attitudes about behaviors. It is critical that effective obesity intervention programs be developed for children at high risk of developing obesity. This study used indirect messaging to address health issues related to overweight and obesity in children. An education program about animal health was presented to two groups of eight and nine year old children. The program included a combination of classroom instruction and practical application both in the classroom and at the Palm Beach Zoo with real animals. The children's attitude, knowledge, and practice of healthy behavior was measured before and after exposure to the program to evaluate its effect. It was hypothesized that learning about what being healthy entails for animals will have positive implications for the children's own health. It was found that children who participated in this study were already knowledgeable about healthy behaviors and also had overall positive attitudes towards health. However, they did not have high levels of health behavior practices. Participation in the program did not significantly improve the knowledge, attitudes, or practice of health behavior in the children. Zoos should consider designing program that specifically target increasing the practice of health behaviors in children.