Thesis (doctoral)--Universität Zürich, 1906. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 90-93).

The thesis addresses a mode of visual art criticism that it characterizes as “antipodal”. Antipodality is a false image of the world, a phantasm. An antipodal simulacrum could be described by what Jurgis Baltrusaitus has called a “depraved perspective”, which is a procedure of investigation dominated by the passion to objectify the empirical sign in a conceit of perverse logic. A perspective rendering taken to literalist excess (comparable to the literalising of figurative language) causes anomalies in and corruptions of what is depicted. The invention of the antipodes by cartographers of early modern Europe—a “logical” necessity of mapping that then required discovery of the antipodal land as a lost object—might be such an instance of a depraved perspective. In Baltrusaitus’s terms, we could say such depravity produces an “aberration” in the manner of the optical phenomenon in which a celestial body is apparently displaced and viewed as if it were elsewhere. Such an aberration forms the thematic content of this thesis; content which is the proposition of an aberrant critical conceit of “antipodality” as a simulacrum. This was a formative concept for my own activity of art criticism, in that it allowed a defining moment for an Australian postmodernism (notably in the 1980s) as an evacuated sign-system of art, a styling of art as pseudo-art. But it has acquired a trajectory for art criticism beyond the definition of Australian postmodern style. An antipodal art criticism is likewise a pseudo-criticism, that’s to say, it is a performative enunciation of falseness: it addresses a pseudo-object. Like the antipodes, art is a necessary fiction for criticism, a lost object that needs to be discovered. The most potent pseudo-art for Australian postmodernism was kitsch, and its style was camp. For contemporary art criticism, however, in a digital era, the most potent pseudo-art is pornography, notably digital pornography. Kitsch is the simulacrum of aesthetic form. Pornography is the simulacrum of eroticism. The thesis develops a critical discussion of works of art through the perverse logic of pornography as a depraved perspective. In this respect, “antipodality” provides the conceptual structure of this thesis, which polemically reflects on art criticism and the simulacrum through the media of visual art, film and literature. In a specific Australian context, the thesis discusses the work of Imants Tillers and Lindy Lee as oeuvres that have dealt with the false identity of the artist as originator of their performative but empty signature styles. The pornographic impulse of antipodality is dealt with through other modes of self-portraiture and performativity, notably in three generations of photographic technique and genre: Diane Arbus, Merry Alpern and Natacha Merritt. The performative nature of a pseudo-art is correlative to the performativity of pornography as pseudo-eroticism: both render dubious any authenticity of the desire motivating the performances. The thesis examines in detail three instances of falsely performative identities in film: the alluring and haunted figure of Madeleine in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo; the ingenue, picaresque protagonist of Roger Vadim’s sci-fi fantasy Barbarella; and Gough Lewis’s humanistic documentary on a porn star whose notoriety derived from subjecting herself to “the world’s largest gang bang”, Sex: The Annabel Chong Story. Each of these cinematic portraits operates, with varying degrees and moments of artifice, a metafictional transgression of figural borders. This strategy as a type of erotic theatricality is considered in detail with, among other passing examples, two celebrated short works of libertine literature (by Vivant Denon and Jean-François de Bastide); two paintings—one by nineteenth-century French academic artist Jules-Joseph Lefebvre, the other by the quite un-academic painter Pierre Bonnard; and with an erotic, theatrical innovation called the “Attitude”, introduced by Emma Hamilton as an amateur drawing room entertainment in the late eighteenth century. Hamilton’s captivating tableaux are discussed in terms of the phantasm, and the thesis is inspired by two literary exemplars of phantasmic portraiture: Edgar Allan Poe’s figure of “the man of the crowd” and Guy de Maupassant’s “Horla”. The latter, in particular, is presented as an analogy for the performative effect of antipodal simulacrum of art criticism.

Due to high demand for planar structures with low loss, a considerable amount of research has been done to the design of substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) components in the mm-wave and microwave range. SIW has many advantages in comparison to conventional waveguides and microstrip lines, such as compact and planar structure, ease of fabrication, low radiation loss, high power handling ability and low cost which makes it a very promising technology for current and future systems operating in K-band and above. Therefore, all the work presented in this dissertation focuses on SIW technology. Five di erent antenna systems are proposed to verify the advantages of using SIW technology. First, a novel K-band end- re SIW circularly polarized (CP) antenna system on a single layer printed-circuit board is proposed. A high gain SIW H-plane horn and a Vivaldi antenna are developed to produce two orthogonal polarizations in the plane of the substrate. CP antennas have become very popular because of their unique characteristics and their applications in satellites, radars and wireless communications. Second, a K-band front-end system for tracking applications is presented. The circuit comprises an antenna array of two Vivaldi antennas, a frequency-selective power combiner, and two frequency-selective SIW crossovers, which eliminate the need for subsequent ltering. The integration of monopulse systems in planar, printed circuit SIW technology combined with the added bene ts of ltering functions is of great importance to the antennas and propagation community. Third, a phased array antenna system consisting of 24 radiating element is designed as feed system for reflector antennas in radio astronomy applications. A Ku-band antipodal dipole antenna with wide bandwidth, low cross-polarization and wide beamwidth is suggested as the radiating element. Forth, four di erent right-angled power dividers including in-phase and out-of-phase dividers as feed systems for antenna arrays are introduced. TE10 - to - TEq0 mode transducers are used for obtaining two, three, and four output dividers with phase control ability at K- and Ka-band. This feature is practical, for instance, when designing tracking systems since they are employed to obtain controllable phase distributions over the output ports. Fifth, a Ku-band beam steering antenna system which is applicable to use for wireless communications, radar systems, and also 5G applications is proposed. This antenna system uses variable reflection-type phase shifters which electrically steer the beam over a 50-degree scan range. Therefore, the SIW technology's reliability and also promising behavior in the microwave frequency range is proven for di erent applications. / Graduate

It is well known that direct surface waves of large earthquakes are capable of triggering shallow earthquakes and deep tremor at long-range distances. Recent studies have shown that multiple surface waves circling the earth could also remotely trigger microearthquakes. However, it is still not clear whether multiple surface waves returning back to the main shock epicenters could also trigger/modulate aftershock behavior. Here we conduct a study to search for evidence of such triggering by systematically examining aftershock patterns of earthquakes with magnitude ≥ 8 since 1990 that produce observable surface waves circling the globe repeatedly. We specifically examine the 2011 M9 Tohoku-Oki event using a composite catalog of JMA, HiNet and newly detected events obtained by waveform cross correlation. We compute the magnitude of completeness for each sequence, and stack all the sequences together to compute the seismicity and moment rates by sliding data windows. The sequences are also shuffled randomly and these rates are compared to the actual data as well as synthetic aftershock sequences to estimate the statistical significance of the results. Our results suggest that there is some moderate increase of early aftershock activity after a few hours when the surface waves return to the epicentral region. However, we could not completely rule out the possibility that such an increase is purely due to random fluctuations of aftershocks or caused by missing aftershocks in the first few hours after the mainshock.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

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A new N-dimensional digital modulation technique is proposed as a bandwidth efficient method for the transmission of digital data. The technique uses an antipodal scheme in which parallel binary data signs baseband orthogonal waveforms derived from Hermite polynomials. Orthogonality guarantees recoverability of the data from N simultaneously transmitted Hermite waveforms. The signed Hermite waveform is transmitted over a radio link using either amplitude or frequency modulation. The bandwidth efficiency of the amplitude Hermite method is found to be as good as filtered BPSK in practice, while the bit error rates for both modulations are identical. Hermite Keying (HK), the FM modulation version of the N-dimensional Hermite transmission, outperforms constant envelope FSK in terms of spectrum efficiency. With a simple FM detector, the bit error rate of HK is as good as that of non-coherent FSK. In a frequency selective fading channel, the simulation results suggest that specific data bits of HK are relatively secure from errors, which is beneficial in some applications. Symbol synchronization is critical to the system. An optimal synchronization method for the N-dimensional antipodal scheme in additive white Gaussian noise channel is derived. Simulation results confirm that the synchronizer can operate successfully at E/No of 3 dB. / Ph. D.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD (Mathematics) / The main theme of this thesis is the construction of linear codes from adjacency matrices or sub-matrices of adjacency matrices of regular graphs. We first examine the binary codes from the row span of biadjacency matrices and their transposes for some classes of bipartite graphs. In this case we consider a sub-matrix of an adjacency matrix of a graph as the generator of the code. We then shift our attention to uniform subset graphs by exploring the automorphism groups of graph covers and some classes of uniform subset graphs. In the sequel, we explore equal codes from adjacency matrices of non-isomorphic uniform subset graphs and finally consider codes generated by an adjacency matrix formed by adding adjacency matrices of two classes of uniform subset graphs.

No / A compact-size asymmetrical linearly tapered slot antenna required for portable ultra-wideband (UWB) imaging systems is presented. The total antenna size is reduced compared with the conventional linearly tapered slot antenna by using a triangular slot on the left-hand side of the tapered-shaped radiator, whereas introducing a corrugated pattern of cuts on the right side. The antenna operates over a wide bandwidth extending from 3.1 to 10.6 GHz with a maximum gain of 8.5 dBi. Stable radiation patterns are observed across the operational bandwidth, with cross-polarization levels below 20 dB. The realized antenna structure occupies a volume of 35 x 36 x 0.8 mm3, and possesses the essential time domain fidelity needed for UWB imaging applications. (c) 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J RF and Microwave CAE, 2013.

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