Thesis (D. Min.)--Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2002. / Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 106-111, 158-166).

This study intends to investigate assimilation in Swedish ice hockey. The overall aim is to achieve a deeper understanding of how ice hockey associations are working to recruit young individuals with a different ethnic background. The specific aim is to find out the opinion of the association leaders in the subject. Furthermore, the study aim to explain the obstacles and opportunities association leaders sees with assimilation in ice hockey. To answer the purpose of the study and the issue, the study was conducted by semi-structured interviews with eight leaders in eight different associations. All but one respondent are active in associations within the county Västerbotten. Half of the associations where medium to large, in terms of members, the other half is small associations with less then 300 members. The results of the study showed that the respondents want a greater effort when it comes to assimilation within ice hockey, not only for ice hockey, for sports in general. A few of the sport associations had worked or works with assimilation. Furthermore leaders felt that communication was an obstacle for the associations to bring the interest of newly arrived citizens. They also mention the fact that ice hockey is an expensive sport as an obstacle. The results also show that the respondents believe there were a need to be greater cooperation between associations and the Swedish ice hockey federation.

The epigenetic post-translational modifications (PTMs) of histone proteins are numerous and have an important role in regulating cellular development. Molecular recognition elements that can bind directly to epigenetic PTMs have previously been developed. The most synthetically accessible of these are a family of molecules called monoaryl-trisulfonate calix[4]arenes. The initial goal of this thesis was to develop research tools consisting of these asymmetrically-derivatized calixarenes immobilized onto a solid resin for the purpose of enrichment of PTM-bearing species. Seven novel resin-immobilized calixarene reagents were created and employed in batch-wise pulldown experiments, as well as chromatographic separations. These experiments produced mixed results: poor efficacy was demonstrated in batch-binding experiments but total separation of certain PTM bearing peptides was achieved in a chromatographic approach. During these studies, a subset of these calixarenes were found to undergo self-association in water in a fashion not previously observed for calixarenes. Secondary goals of the thesis were to create new examples of this self-associating motif, and to characterize and develop structure-function relationships for their assemblies. Eight new self-associating calixarenes were developed and characterized extensively by 1H NMR, isothermal titration calorimetry (ITC), and X-ray crystallography. Self-association was shown to be enthalpically driven with Kd values ranging from 1-20 mM. The dimeric assembly behaviours were remarkably consistent across many different family members, and were shown to persist even in highly competitive media like mock blood and urine. This system represents a novel class of ordered calixarenes assemblies that operate in biological media. / Graduate / 2016-12-23

No description available.

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is a computer-based psychological test that measures implicit attitudes, stereotypes and beliefs. In an effort to better understand the applicability and limitations of the IAT researchers have investigated the effects of manipulating a variety of procedural variables that comprise the IAT, not least the IAT categories and the exemplars that are instances of those categories. This study investigated the effects of manipulating the IAT's target categories that define the attitudinal domain that the IAT measures. Experiments were devised to determine the IAT's sensitivity to minor and major semantic manipulations to its target categories while keeping exemplars and attribute categories constant. It was found that the IAT was sensitive to major semantic differences in its target categories, but was apparently insensitive to minor semantic category differences, implying that it is unable to discriminate between subtle distinctions in attitude. It was hypothesised that this latter finding could have been partly due to a temporary cognitive re-definition of the categories in accordance with the salient characteristics of the exemplars. / Thesis (M.Soc.Sc.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2008.

Five experiments with rats were conducted to determine the extent to which associative processes could be used to explain how rats seem able to learn complex CS-US contingencies during Pavlovian conditioning. Rats were exposed to positive, zero and negative CS-US contingencies and conditioned behaviour was compared with predictions derived from both associative models of conditioning and nonassociative normative theories of causal reasoning. A common measure of contingency, Deltap, when used to analyze Pavlovian conditioning requires defining the likelihood of the US in the presence and absence of the CS. Experiments 1 and 2 involved a novel preparation in which, in addition to standard CS presence trials, the absence of the CS was signalled by a second CS, called the trial marker (a lever). Rats were trained to learn relationships in which the CS was either a positive predictor of the US or in which it was unrelated to the US. More conditioned tray entries were observed when the CS signalled an increased likelihood of the US (positive contingency). Consistent with the associative explanations, the trial marker elicited conditioned lever pressing when the CS signalled no change in the likelihood of the US (zero contingency). Experiments 3, 4 and 5 extended the analysis with multiple CSs. These experiments examined whether learning about one CS was determined by its contingency relative to the contingency of other concurrently trained CSs. In experiments 3 and 4 conditioned responding to a moderately predictive CS was determined by its contingency relative to a perfectly predictive CS. Experiment 5 extended this effect to a case in which conditioning was influenced by the presence of a perfect predictor of the absence of the US. Together these results support the hypothesis that relative contingencies determine the strength of conditioned responding. The results are discussed from the perspective of both associative and nonassociative theory.

Spreading activation is a common method for searching semantic or neural networks, it iteratively propagates activation for one or more sources through a network { a process that is computationally intensive. Spectral association is a recent technique to approximate spreading activation in one go, and therefore provides very fast computation of activation levels. In this paper we evaluate the characteristics of spectral association as replacement for classic spreading activation in the domain of ontology learning. The evaluation focuses on run-time performance measures of our implementation of both methods for various network sizes. Furthermore, we investigate differences in output, i.e. the resulting ontologies, between spreading activation and spectral association. The experiments confirm an excessive speedup in the computation of activation levels, and also a fast calculation of the spectral association operator if using a variant we called brute force. The paper concludes with pros and cons and usage recommendations for the methods. (authors' abstract)

The present work examined subjects' performance on eight types of four word analogy problems. Two critical dimensions distinguish among these analogy types: specificity and inclusiveness. Whole-part analogies such as hand : palm as foot : sole (read hand is to palm as foot is to sole) are specific because the association appearing in the two word pairs consist of spatial/functional relationships which are highly similar to each other. In contrast, analogies such as car : wheel as boat : mast are nonspecific because they use whole-part associations which are less similar to each other. Analogies are inclusive if they use relatively direct associations, as in the whole-part association illustrated by car : wheel. In contrast, noninclusive analogies require additional inferences between words, as illustrated in the part-part association bumper: wheel, which requires the object car to be inferred. Responses from undergraduate university subjects show that both inclusive and specific analogy problems were solved more quickly than their noninclusive and nonspecific counterparts, respectively. Experiment 1 illustrated these specificity and inclusiveness effects both in a recognition (multiple choice) paradigm, and a recall paradigm where subjects spoke their own answer choices aloud. Subsequent experiments were performed to examine the role of the association types and the role of word attributes in subjects' processing of these analogy problems. Experiment 2 attempted to prime subjects with the association type used in each block of analogy problems, but showed a very modest effect on solution latencies. In Experiment 3 reordering the words within analogy problems unexpectedly increased the latencies for many problems, apparently because different words appeared in the third word positions within them. Experiments 4 and 5 focussed directly on the study of specificity. Experiment 4 showed that the processing benefit found for specific analogies is due to the close match of word attributes between word pairs, not due to the attributes of the particular words used. Experiment 5 manipulated the taxonomic similarity of the subject matter addressed by the two pairs of words, and found that the use of word pairs from more taxonomically distant subject areas increased solution latencies for some analogy types. Experiment 6 required subjects to group analogy problems into categories they defined. This procedure validated six of the eight analogy types used in this thesis; the specificity distinction was not evident among the groups of problems formed by subjects. The discussion of these results supports a theoretical model of problem solving four word analogies which incorporates a stage-like, componential processing for nonspecific types, and a faster, more automatic processing for specific types. The discussions of empirical and theoretical work in this thesis also focussed more widely on its relevance to more practical uses of analogies in problem solving.

In recent years quantum algorithms have become a popular area of mathematical research. Farhi and Gutmann introduced the concept of a quantum walk in 1998. In this thesis we investigate mixing properties of continuous-time quantum walks from a mathematical perspective. We focus on the connections between mixing properties and association schemes. There are three main goals of this thesis. Our primary goal is to develop the algebraic groundwork necessary to systematically study mixing properties of continuous-time quantum walks on regular graphs. Using these tools we achieve two additional goals: we construct new families of graphs that admit uniform mixing, and we prove that other families of graphs never admit uniform mixing. We begin by introducing association schemes and continuous-time quantum walks. Within this framework we develop specific algebraic machinery to tackle the uniform mixing problem. Our main algebraic result shows that if a graph has an irrational eigenvalue, then its transition matrix has at least one transcendental coordinate at all nonzero times. Next we study algebraic varieties related to uniform mixing to determine information about the coordinates of the corresponding transition matrices. Combining this with our main algebraic result we prove that uniform mixing does not occur on even cycles or prime cycles. However, we show that the probability distribution of a quantum walk on a prime cycle gets arbitrarily close to uniform. Finally we consider uniform mixing on Cayley graphs of elementary abelian groups. We utilize graph quotients to connect the mixing properties of these graphs to Hamming graphs. This enables us to find new results about uniform mixing on Cayley graphs of certain elementary abelian groups.

In biomolecules, the relationship among the sequence, molecular structure, and biological function are of very importance in the development of nanotechnology such as drug discovery. Previous studies involving multiple sequence alignment of biomolecules have demonstrated that interdependent or associated sites are indicative of the structural and functional characteristics of biomolecules, as an extension to methods such as consensus sequences analysis. In this thesis, a new method to detect associated sites in aligned sequence ensembles is proposed. It involves the use of multiple sub-tables (or levels) of two-dimensional contingency table analysis. The idea is to incorporate analysis by following an approach known as granular computing, which represents information at different levels of granularity or resolution. When associations of multiple sites in the sequence alignment converge, they reflect points of interrelatedness among the sites in the biomolecules. The study involves two different phases of analysis. The first phase includes labeling of the molecular sites in the p53 protein multiple sequence alignment according to the detected patterns. The sites are consequently labeled into three different types based on their site characteristics - conserved sites, associated sites, and hypervariate sites. To identify and label the associated sites, the proposed method is employed. In the second phase, the significance of the extracted site patterns is evaluated with respect to some of the structural and functional characteristics of the p53 protein. The results indicate that the extracted site patterns in combination with conserved sites are significantly associated with some of the known functionalities of p53 such as post translational modifications and the mutation frequency of the sites, hence establishing the link between these identified sites and the defined functionality. Furthermore, when these sites are aligned with p63 and p73, the homologs of p53, based on the common domains, the sites significantly discriminate between the human sequences of the p53 family. Therefore, the study confirms the importance of these detected sites that could indicate their differences in cancer suppressing property.