Bioelectronic medicine is an emerging discipline being a intersection of neu- roscience, immunology and electrical engineering. Chronic inflammation is linked to disorders such as diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, asthma, atheroscle- rosis, obesity and inflammatory bowel disease. Chronic inflammatory diseases have been recognized as the most significant cause of death in the world today, with more than 50% of all deaths being attributable to inflammation-related diseases. To find specific parameters for the stimulation of the vagus nerve would be a major advancement in the field, since it will help restore the vagal tone optimally. A systematic review has been made to understand and explore the tissue damage, stimulation sites, FDA approved parameters and the safety and efficacy in vagus nerve stimulation (VNS). A control closed- loop system was developed based on the needs of the field and a human clinical trial protocol was proposed.    The control close-loop system is able to receive feedback from a continuous real-time measurement of the pressure of the peripheral blood flow and send a VNS based on a heart rate (HR) settled threshold. The stimulation is delivered with previously settled parameters such as, pulse width, output current, duty cycle and frequency and helps observe if the nerve has been correctly targeted or not. From the results, it becomes clear that the connection of the devices has been correctly accomplished and that the HR reduction is being measured by the control close-loop which would stimulate again when the HR threshold is surpassed. Based on the concept of this control close-loop a human protocol has been proposed to test if the hypothesis that patients have their best inflammatory response with different output current rather than all having one best performing one and that non-healthy patients will lower their HR baseline after VNS treatment showing the increase of vagus nerve activity. This report adds value on the creation of a new control close-loop device between the MouseOx and Intan devices. Controlling the stimulation parameters in VNS can be a powerful technique that will increase patient specificity and will help non respondents to different drug treatments to have a more effective alternative. The HR is a simple biomarker to detect VNS bioactivity but lots of further research on non-invasive devices and software limitations are still needed to be overcome to have clear guidance in the field. The proposal of a new human clinical trial that might give a clear and feasible solution to either find an efficient stimulation setting or the assurance of the real need for an interactive control close-loop system that would tailor the stimulation parameters for each specific patient is presented. / Bioelektronisk medicin är en framväxande disciplin som är en skärningspunkt mellan neurovetenskap, immunologi och elektroteknik. Kronisk inflamma- tion är kopplad till sjukdomar som diabetes, reumatoid artrit, astma, åder- förkalkning, fetma och inflammatoriska tarmsjukdomar som är den vanligaste dödsorsaken i världen idag. Att hitta specifika parametrar för stimulering av vagusnerven skulle vara ett stort framsteg på området, eftersom det hjälper till att återställa vagustonen optimalt. En systematisk översyn har gjorts för att förstå och utforska vävnadsskadan, stimuleringsställena, FDA-godkända parametrar och säkerheten och effekten i VNS. Ett kontrollsystem med slutet kretslopp utvecklades baserat på fältets behov och ett protokoll för kliniska prövningar för människor föreslogs. Kontrollsystemet kan ta emot feedback från en kontinuerlig realtidsmätning av trycket i det perifera blodflödet och skicka en VNS baserat på en HR-bestämd tröskel. Stimuleringen levereras med tidigare inställda parametrar såsom pulsbredd, utström, arbetscykel och frekvens. Av resultaten blir det tydligt att anslutningen av enheterna har åstadkommits korrekt och att HR-reduktionen mäts av kontrollens slutslinga som skulle stimulera igen när HR-tröskeln överskrids. Baserat på konceptet med denna kontroll close-loop har ett mänskligt protokoll föreslagits för att testa om hypotesen att patienter har sitt bästa inflammatoriska svar med olika utström snarare än att alla har en bäst presterande och att icke-friska patienter kommer att sänka sin HR baslinje efter VNS-behandling som visar ökningen av vagusnervens aktivitet. Den här rapporten ger ett mervärde när det gäller skapandet av en ny kontrollenhet mellan MouseOx- och Intan-enheterna. Att kontrollera stimuleringsparametrarna i VNS kan vara en kraftfull teknik som kommer att öka patientspecificiteten och som hjälper icke-respondenter till olika läkemedelsbehandlingar att få ett mer effektivt alternativ. HR är en enkel biomarkör för att upptäcka VNS-bioaktivitet, men massor av ytterli- gare forskning om icke-invasiva enheter och mjukvarubegränsningar behövs fortfarande för att få en tydlig vägledning på området. Förslaget om en ny klinisk prövning på människa som kan ge en tydlig och genomförbar lösning för att antingen hitta effektiva stimuleringsmiljöer eller försäkran om det verkliga behovet av ett interaktivt kontrollsystem med nära slinga som skulle skräddarsy stimuleringsparametrarna för varje specifik patient presenteras.

Traditionally, humanities scholars carrying out research on a specific or on multiple literary work(s) are interested in the analysis of related texts or text passages. But the digital age has opened possibilities for scholars to enhance their traditional workflows. Enabled by digitization projects, humanities scholars can nowadays reach a large number of digitized texts through web portals such as Google Books or Internet Archive. Digital editions exist also for ancient texts; notable examples are PHI Latin Texts and the Perseus Digital Library. This shift from reading a single book “on paper” to the possibility of browsing many digital texts is one of the origins and principal pillars of the digital humanities domain, which helps developing solutions to handle vast amounts of cultural heritage data – text being the main data type. In contrast to the traditional methods, the digital humanities allow to pose new research questions on cultural heritage datasets. Some of these questions can be answered with existent algorithms and tools provided by the computer science domain, but for other humanities questions scholars need to formulate new methods in collaboration with computer scientists. Developed in the late 1980s, the digital humanities primarily focused on designing standards to represent cultural heritage data such as the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) for texts, and to aggregate, digitize and deliver data. In the last years, visualization techniques have gained more and more importance when it comes to analyzing data. For example, Saito introduced her 2010 digital humanities conference paper with: “In recent years, people have tended to be overwhelmed by a vast amount of information in various contexts. Therefore, arguments about ’Information Visualization’ as a method to make information easy to comprehend are more than understandable.” A major impulse for this trend was given by Franco Moretti. In 2005, he published the book “Graphs, Maps, Trees”, in which he proposes so-called distant reading approaches for textual data that steer the traditional way of approaching literature towards a completely new direction. Instead of reading texts in the traditional way – so-called close reading –, he invites to count, to graph and to map them. In other words, to visualize them. This dissertation presents novel close and distant reading visualization techniques for hitherto unsolved problems. Appropriate visualization techniques have been applied to support basic tasks, e.g., visualizing geospatial metadata to analyze the geographical distribution of cultural heritage data items or using tag clouds to illustrate textual statistics of a historical corpus. In contrast, this dissertation focuses on developing information visualization and visual analytics methods that support investigating research questions that require the comparative analysis of various digital humanities datasets. We first take a look at the state-of-the-art of existing close and distant reading visualizations that have been developed to support humanities scholars working with literary texts. We thereby provide a taxonomy of visualization methods applied to show various aspects of the underlying digital humanities data. We point out open challenges and we present our visualizations designed to support humanities scholars in comparatively analyzing historical datasets. In short, we present (1) GeoTemCo for the comparative visualization of geospatial-temporal data, (2) the two tag cloud designs TagPies and TagSpheres that comparatively visualize faceted textual summaries, (3) TextReuseGrid and TextReuseBrowser to explore re-used text passages among the texts of a corpus, (4) TRAViz for the visualization of textual variation between multiple text editions, and (5) the visual analytics system MusikerProfiling to detect similar musicians to a given musician of interest. Finally, we summarize our and the collaboration experiences of other visualization researchers to emphasize the ingredients required for a successful project in the digital humanities, and we take a look at future challenges in that research field.

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<p>Denna uppsats syftar till att undersöka behovet av indirekt eld och Close Air Support i militäraoperationer i bergsterräng och belysa vilka aspekter som påverkar nyttjandet av försvarsmaktensenheter och verkanssystem vid insatser i bergsmiljö. För att svara på syftet med uppsatsen har följande studiefråga ställts: Hur använde USA den grundläggande förmågan verkan för att påverka motståndaren under Operation Anaconda? Fallstudie och textanalys har använts som vetenskaplig metod och teknik för denna uppsats. Inledningsvis studerades texter om operation Anaconda och hur operationen genomfördes. Därefter studerades svenska doktriner och reglementen avseende teorier om grundläggande förmågor och hur verkan uppnås i striden. Slutligen analyserades hur USA använde den grundläggande förmåganverkan under operation Anaconda med tyngdpunkt på indirekt eld och close air support. De viktigaste slutsatserna är att striden genomförs i tre dimensioner med indirekt eld, direktriktadeld och minor. Alla är väsentliga för att effekt med verkan skall uppnås i striden. Försvinner en dimension bör de andra dimensionerna öka med fler element.</p> / <p>This paper aims to examine the need for indirect fire and Close Air Support of military operations in mountainous terrain, highlighting the aspects that affect the use of Swedish armed forces units and their technical systems in the mountain environment. To answer the purpose of this paper the following question was asked: How did U.S. forces use the basic capacity of effect to the opponent during Operation Anaconda? A case study and text analysis has been used as a scientific method and technique for this thesis. Initially texts about Operation Anaconda were studied on how the operation was carried out. Then Swedish doctrines and regulations relating to theories of basic abilities and the effect achieved in the battle were studied. Finally, the writer analyzed how the U.S. used the basic capacity of effect during Operation Anaconda, with an emphasis on indirect fire and close air support. The main conclusions are that the battle is carried out in three dimensions with indirect fire, direct fire and mines. All are essential to achieved effect in the battle. If one dimension diminishes the other dimensions should increase by more elements.</p>

Denna uppsats syftar till att undersöka behovet av indirekt eld och Close Air Support i militäraoperationer i bergsterräng och belysa vilka aspekter som påverkar nyttjandet av försvarsmaktensenheter och verkanssystem vid insatser i bergsmiljö. För att svara på syftet med uppsatsen har följande studiefråga ställts: Hur använde USA den grundläggande förmågan verkan för att påverka motståndaren under Operation Anaconda? Fallstudie och textanalys har använts som vetenskaplig metod och teknik för denna uppsats. Inledningsvis studerades texter om operation Anaconda och hur operationen genomfördes. Därefter studerades svenska doktriner och reglementen avseende teorier om grundläggande förmågor och hur verkan uppnås i striden. Slutligen analyserades hur USA använde den grundläggande förmåganverkan under operation Anaconda med tyngdpunkt på indirekt eld och close air support. De viktigaste slutsatserna är att striden genomförs i tre dimensioner med indirekt eld, direktriktadeld och minor. Alla är väsentliga för att effekt med verkan skall uppnås i striden. Försvinner en dimension bör de andra dimensionerna öka med fler element. / This paper aims to examine the need for indirect fire and Close Air Support of military operations in mountainous terrain, highlighting the aspects that affect the use of Swedish armed forces units and their technical systems in the mountain environment. To answer the purpose of this paper the following question was asked: How did U.S. forces use the basic capacity of effect to the opponent during Operation Anaconda? A case study and text analysis has been used as a scientific method and technique for this thesis. Initially texts about Operation Anaconda were studied on how the operation was carried out. Then Swedish doctrines and regulations relating to theories of basic abilities and the effect achieved in the battle were studied. Finally, the writer analyzed how the U.S. used the basic capacity of effect during Operation Anaconda, with an emphasis on indirect fire and close air support. The main conclusions are that the battle is carried out in three dimensions with indirect fire, direct fire and mines. All are essential to achieved effect in the battle. If one dimension diminishes the other dimensions should increase by more elements.

Thesis--School of Advanced Airpower Studies, 1996. / Shipping list no.: 1998-0921-M. "August 1997." Includes bibliographical references. Also available via Internet from the Air University Press web site. Address as of 10/28/03: http://aupress.au.af.mil/SAAS%5FTheses/Lewis/lewis.pdf; current access is available via PURL.

The Internal Revenue Code invokes the concept of reasonableness as the major qualification for the stockholder executive compensation deduction for federal income tax purposes. However, neither the Code nor Regulations contain general guidelines for determining reasonable compensation. Consequently, disputes with the IRS are frequent, resulting in substantial litigation. The primary hypothesis of the study was that the IRS guideline variables were incapable of discriminating taxpayers who have won litigated reasonable compensation cases from those who have lost. The secondary hypothesis was that the IRS guideline variable group, the court case variable group, or the two groups combined were equally powerful in discriminating taxpayers who have won litigated reasonable compensation cases from taxpayers who have lost. The study included all unreasonable compensation cases litigated in the Tax Court from 195^ to September, 1980. Only cases related to the reasonableness of officer-shareholder compensation of closely-held corporations were included.

Denna uppsats är en textanalytisk studie som studerar artisten Håkan Hellströms låttexter. Texterna i fokus är från två olika album från olika delar av hans karriär. Detta i syftet att utifrån tematiken, influenserna och den klingande texten visa vad texterna representerar i olika delar av Hellströms liv. Metoderna som har använts vid analys av texterna har utgått från begreppen närläsning, fonotext och intertextualitet där närlyssning och närläsning har varit den huvudsakliga metoden för att få fram material ur texterna. Konklusionerna av denna studie är att Hellström skildrar ämnen i respektive album som är relevanta för den aktuella plats i livet han är i samt att metoderna i låtskrivandet har visat sig sammanfattningsvis vara att använda liknande metaforer för att beskriva olika ämnen, intertextualitet används som en konstnärlig metod och att Hellströms karaktäristiska bräckliga röst är den huvudsakliga kärnan i förmedlandet av texterna.

Traditionally, humanities scholars carrying out research on a specific or on multiple literary work(s) are interested in the analysis of related texts or text passages. But the digital age has opened possibilities for scholars to enhance their traditional workflows. Enabled by digitization projects, humanities scholars can nowadays reach a large number of digitized texts through web portals such as Google Books or Internet Archive. Digital editions exist also for ancient texts; notable examples are PHI Latin Texts and the Perseus Digital Library. This shift from reading a single book “on paper” to the possibility of browsing many digital texts is one of the origins and principal pillars of the digital humanities domain, which helps developing solutions to handle vast amounts of cultural heritage data – text being the main data type. In contrast to the traditional methods, the digital humanities allow to pose new research questions on cultural heritage datasets. Some of these questions can be answered with existent algorithms and tools provided by the computer science domain, but for other humanities questions scholars need to formulate new methods in collaboration with computer scientists. Developed in the late 1980s, the digital humanities primarily focused on designing standards to represent cultural heritage data such as the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) for texts, and to aggregate, digitize and deliver data. In the last years, visualization techniques have gained more and more importance when it comes to analyzing data. For example, Saito introduced her 2010 digital humanities conference paper with: “In recent years, people have tended to be overwhelmed by a vast amount of information in various contexts. Therefore, arguments about ’Information Visualization’ as a method to make information easy to comprehend are more than understandable.” A major impulse for this trend was given by Franco Moretti. In 2005, he published the book “Graphs, Maps, Trees”, in which he proposes so-called distant reading approaches for textual data that steer the traditional way of approaching literature towards a completely new direction. Instead of reading texts in the traditional way – so-called close reading –, he invites to count, to graph and to map them. In other words, to visualize them. This dissertation presents novel close and distant reading visualization techniques for hitherto unsolved problems. Appropriate visualization techniques have been applied to support basic tasks, e.g., visualizing geospatial metadata to analyze the geographical distribution of cultural heritage data items or using tag clouds to illustrate textual statistics of a historical corpus. In contrast, this dissertation focuses on developing information visualization and visual analytics methods that support investigating research questions that require the comparative analysis of various digital humanities datasets. We first take a look at the state-of-the-art of existing close and distant reading visualizations that have been developed to support humanities scholars working with literary texts. We thereby provide a taxonomy of visualization methods applied to show various aspects of the underlying digital humanities data. We point out open challenges and we present our visualizations designed to support humanities scholars in comparatively analyzing historical datasets. In short, we present (1) GeoTemCo for the comparative visualization of geospatial-temporal data, (2) the two tag cloud designs TagPies and TagSpheres that comparatively visualize faceted textual summaries, (3) TextReuseGrid and TextReuseBrowser to explore re-used text passages among the texts of a corpus, (4) TRAViz for the visualization of textual variation between multiple text editions, and (5) the visual analytics system MusikerProfiling to detect similar musicians to a given musician of interest. Finally, we summarize our and the collaboration experiences of other visualization researchers to emphasize the ingredients required for a successful project in the digital humanities, and we take a look at future challenges in that research field.

This study explores the manifestation of piety and sensuality in the operas Manon and Thaïs by Jules Massenet. These two themes are prevalent in Massenet’s operas as well as his oratorios, although it is not clear why this is so. His admiration and love for the human voice and his ability to compose beautiful melodies are reflected in the fact that he composed primarily for the lyric theatre. Piety and sensuality in Manon and Thaïs are articulated predominantly by the eponymous female characters. In order to understand the characters and the motivations that steer their lives, it was necessary to gain an understanding of the socio-historical context of piety and sensuality. This understanding was reached through means of a traditional literature review, which also shed light on the nineteenth-century Zeitgeist and its influence on Massenet and his work. This is a hermeneutic study conducted in light of an interpretive paradigm. The libretti of Manon and Thaïs were explored by means of a close reading to identify sections dominated by piety and sensuality. Following the example of Lawrence Kramer, a combination of close reading and analysis was used to look at the ways in which piety and sensuality are articulated in the music. It became clear that Massenet used various compositional techniques to differentiate between piety and sensuality in his music scores. These techniques were applied with such skill that a listener can identify these two themes through close listening. / DMus (Performance), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015