The subject of this diploma thesis is the study of the production of polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA) employing Cupriavidus malaysiensis. The aim of this thesis is to obtain and characterize the polymer with the most advantageous properties. The theoretical part deals with polyhydroxyalkanoates and their biotechnological production. Then selected microorganisms producing 3-hydroxybutyrate and 4 hydroxybutyrate, P(3HB co 4HB), are described. After that, the theoretical part deals with the production of PHA employing Cupriavidus malaysiensis. The bacterial strains of Cupriavidus malaysiensis DSM 19416, 19379 and 25816 were used in the experimental part. The strain Cupriavidus necator H16 was used as a control strain. First, the ability to utilize various carbon sources by the given bacterial strains was determined. Then, the aim was to select the optimal carbon source, a precursor for the synthesis of a polymer with high content of 4-hydroxybutyrate, and to determine the ideal culturing conditions for the growth of the microorganisms, which have been studied, and the production of P(3HB co-4HB). A two-stage culture and bioreactor culture was also performed to produce the desired copolymer. Furthermore, the production of terpolymer of 3-hydroxybutyrate, 4 hydroxybutyrate and 3-hydroxyvalerate, P(3HB co 4HB co 3HV), was studied by single stage and two-stage cultivation. In the last part, the produced polymers were characterized by gas chromatography with flame ionization detector (GC-FID), size exclusion chromatography with multi-angle static light scattering (SEC-MALS), differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) and thermogravimetry.

This project seeks new forms of housing production that answer to the disappearance of the welfare state and provides structures for self-organization. It stretches the limits of the housing policies and explores new flexible design solutions. It addresses social and economical adaptability where both the city and the dwellers have responsibility for the process and development of new housing. The adaptable city is a city where dwellers co-create their housing environment.

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La classification de données (ou apprentissage non-supervisé) vise à regrouper un ensemble d'observations sous la forme de classes homogènes et contrastées. Lorsque les données sont caractérisées par un grand nombre de variables, il devient nécessaire d'adapter les méthodes classiques, notamment au niveau des métriques, afin de maintenir des classes pertinentes ; ce phénomène est connu sous le nom de "malédiction de la dimension". Dans cette thèse, nous proposons une mesure de co-similarité basée sur la notion de co-occurrences d'ordre supérieur, directement extraites à partir des données. Dans le cas de l'analyse de texte, par exemple, les similarités entre documents sont calculées en prenant en compte les similarités entre mots, qui simultanément prennent en compte les similarités entre documents. Par cette approche " circulaire ", nous parvenons à mettre en correspondance des documents sans mots communs mais ayant juste des mots similaires. Cette approche s'effectue de manière purement numérique sans nécessiter de thesaurus externe. En outre, notre méthode peut également être étendue pour tirer parti de connaissances "a priori" afin de réaliser des tâches de catégorisation de textes : l'étiquette des documents est utilisée pour influencer les mesures de similarité entre les mots afin de classer de nouvelles données. Ainsi, le même cadre conceptuel, exprimable en terme de théorie des graphes, peut être utilisé à la fois pour les tâches de classification et de catégorisation en fonction de la quantité d'information initiale. Nos résultats montrent une amélioration significative de la précision, par rapport à l'état de l'art, à la fois pour le co-clustering et la catégorisation sur les jeux de données qui ont été testés.

Aujourd’hui, l'entrepreneuriat et l’innovation sont promus par les gouvernements et les organisations mondiales et nationales. Les Libanais perçoivent de bonnes opportunités pour créer de nouvelles entreprises, mais une grande partie des entreprises nouvelles vivent un échec. Le manque d’analyse des compétiteurs, de connaissances d’opportunités externes et de capacités à développer et à gérer leurs entreprises sont les raisons principales qui expliquent cette situation. L’acquisition de nouvelles compétences et la mise en place d’activités entrepreneuriales sont influencées par l’absence d’un écosystème national d’entrepreneuriat et d’innovation. Dans notre recherche, nous présentons l’approche co-innopreneuriat qui propose une méthode de co-innovation et de co-création de valeurs par convergence et par collaboration basée sur des théories en SIC et des concepts en TIC. Notre but est d’améliorer la performance de l’innovation et les avantages compétitifs des entreprises nouvelles, les facteurs d’innovation et les avantages compétitifs, qui sont tous des facteurs clés de succès de l’entrepreneuriat et du développement des compétitivités des nations. L’expérimentation et l’évaluation de notre approche a été réalisée auprès de participants réels appartenant à différentes communautés du savoir externes et correspondant aux activités principales du processus d’innovation et à travers un outil open source. Cette évaluation nous a permis de valider deux hypothèses d’étude concernant l’efficacité et l’efficience de l’innovation pour améliorer la performance de l’innovation et les avantages compétitifs des entreprises nouvelles. / Today, entrepreneurship and innovation are promoted by governments and global and national organizations. Lebanese foreseen good opportunities for starting a business, but a lot of startups face a failure. The lack of competitors’ analysis, knowledge of external opportunities and abilities to develop and manage their companies are the main reasons for this situation. The acquisition of new skills and the development of entrepreneurial activities are influenced by the absence of a national entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystem. In this research, we present co-innopreneuriat which provides a method for co-innovation and co-creation of values by a convergence and collaboration approach based on Information and communication sciences’ theories and Information and communication technologies’ concepts. Our objective is to improve innovation performance and competitive advantages of the startups. Innovation and competitive advantages are key success factors of the entrepreneurship and the development of economic competitiveness factors. The experimentation and the evaluation of our approach were conducted with participants from different knowledge communities related to the main activities of the innovation process. This evaluation allowed us to validate two research hypotheses concerning the effectiveness and efficiency of innovation in order to improve the innovation performance and competitive advantages of startups.

No description available.

Co-terapi innebär att två terapeuter arbetar tillsammans i terapi med en eller flera patienter och uppstod inom ramen för familjeterapi. Syftet med denna uppsats var att belysa om det finns forskningsstöd för att co-terapi fungerar, såväl för familjer och par i behandling, som för nya terapeuter som ska skolas in i yrket, samt vilken inverkan co-terapiskapet kan ha på terapeuternas utveckling. Vår frågeställning var om det är möjligt att utfärda rekommendationer om när co-terapi är att föredra i behandlingen utifrån den forskning som finns om co-terapi. Metoden i denna litteraturstudie blev en systematisk litteraturgenomgång av vetenskapliga artiklar som avhandlade dessa ämnen. Tio relevanta artiklar valdes och analyserades och presenteras utifrån olika teman. Resultaten var mångfasetterade och gav inga entydiga svar angående om och när co-terapi bör användas. Det betonades att ett gott behandlingsresultat vid co-terapi förutsatte en hög grad av samarbete mellan terapeuterna. Det fanns fördelar med co-terapi: det var värdefullt vid byte av terapeut då utgående och ingående terapeut kunde samverka; en stark allians mellan terapeuterna kunde utgöra en förebild av en relation med fungerande kommunikation; i en utbildningssituation fann oerfarna terapeuter det utvecklande med co-terapi med erfaren terapeut. Slutsatsen är att av de artiklar som analyserades går det inte att rekommendera co-terapi inom några specifika sammanhang men heller inte att avfärda i något sammanhang. Co-terapi är vad co-terapeuterna gör det till och för att göra bra co-terapi krävs kännedom om varandra, en allians och en vilja och tro på att arbeta co-terapeutiskt.

Over the past few years information technology (IT) and business alignment has become a great concern to organizations. To achieve alignment has become a daunting task for organizations due to rapid changes in business environment and lack of IT support. In business organizations business processes and IT are interrelated and interact with each other where one entity influences to another entity i.e. evolution in business processes requires evolution in IT and vice versa. When this co-evolution is not well aligned, a gap is created due to wrong configuration between business requirements and IT deployment. Organizations usually strive to bridge the gap by implementing business and IT strategies (i.e. top-down planning) and tend to ignore other aspects of the co-evolution. Alignment is a continuous co-evolutionary process in which all components of business and IT are interrelated and enhance organization performance. The co-evolution between business and IT is not restricted to a level but it occurs at all levels and therefore, it is necessary to understand and study co-evolution at all levels within organizations. This thesis presents a co-evolutionary framework that helps to study and understand the co-evolution at three levels i.e. strategic level, operational level and individual level in an integrated fashion. The three levels need to co-evolve so that all components at each level co-evolve. This framework will speed up the alignment in organizations. We argue that the lack of knowledge of business among IT people and IT knowledge among business executives may cause the gap; therefore, a need arises to have a knowledgeable mediator between the domains that could help in the co-evolution. A K-mediator (i.e. knowledge mediator) has been used in the proposed co-evolutionary framework that facilitates the co-evolution at each level. Finally the thesis presents a case study in financial domain in order to evaluate and validate the framework.

Milling and co-milling are well known techniques that have potential to enhance the solubility and/or dissolution rate of poorly soluble drugs. There are broadly two aims for this project. The first was to develop an understanding of how individual and combination of techniques may be used to explore the impact of milling on particle characteristics (including phase changes, fractures and change in particle size) as a function of milling time/speed, for a range of single powder materials. Anhydrous (lactose, sucrose), monohydrate (lactose) and dihydrate (trehalose) excipients and a poorly soluble drug (ibuprofen), were chosen as model substrates. Each material was micronized by ball-milling (for various time durations and milling speeds) and then characterized by a range of techniques, specifically, SEM, DSC, TGA, THz and dielectric spectroscopy. The second aim of the project was to investigate the impact of milling and co-milling on the solubility and dissolution rate of ibuprofen after co-milling with a variety of excipients (polymer and surfactants). The principle findings of this programme of work can be summarized as follows: i) ball milling of lactose monohydrate produces nano-structured systems with a mixture of damaged crystals and amorphous phase, that can be characterised by dielectric relaxation spectroscopy (DRS), ii) THz spectroscopy provides estimates for residual crystallinity in lactose monohydrate that were much lower than the estimates from the thermal techniques. Such estimates of residual crystallinity are considered to be more reliable given the fact that the spectroscopic measurement characterizes the material in its native state, whereas thermal techniques require a heating process, which tend to induce de-vitrification and mutarotation of lactose. In case of anhydrous materials, while there was agreement between thermal and THz techniques at long milling times, it was shown that the THz technique was susceptible to moisture absorption and crystallization at short milling times, iii) In the molecular dynamics of milled sugars studied by DRS, the structural relaxation is not visible in the vicinity of glass transition, however the secondary relaxation (β) process is equally capable and provided molecular dynamics in term of activation energy changes. The activation energies of beta process of both lactose and sucrose are least affected by milling time, but the higher activation energies for sucrose as compared with lactose show that sucrose has lower propensity to re-crystallize than lactose during post milling storage, iv) Ibuprofen can be assayed by UV-method in the presence of interfering (in absorption) substance by applying multivariate method involving the calculation of concentration factors and v) Co-milling with soluplus has increased the in the solubility of ibuprofen by ~20% and dissolution rate ~50% in 30 min, while these values are ~5% and 30%, respectively in case of co-milling with HPMC.

The North Sea Regional Advisory Council serves as a case study. Established during the 2002 Common Fisheries Policy, the North Sea Regional Advisory Council (NSRAC) offers stakeholder participation in the decision-making process. Its establishment was to some extent an experiment based on a leap of faith that better governance could help the ailing fisheries policy. A short analysis reveals the shortcomings of the previous fisheries policy, all of which root in the discrepancy between political motivation and legal objectives. The 'Tragedy of the Commons' suggests that democracy might indeed not be perfect for fisheries management. Past decision-making procedures in the European Community lent themselves to state competition and 'tragic' decision-making in the Council. In this situation, Regional Advisory Councils were hoped by some to provide self-regulation fora. EC/ EU constitutional law prevents this. The Common Fisheries Policy requires balancing of highly diverse interests. The NSRAC is not suited for such balancing, due to its (enshrined) industry majority. Nevertheless the NSRAC has already made valuable contributions and offers some potential for more. The double-bind between decision-makers and grass roots fishermen incentivises industry representatives in the NSRAC to propose conservation measures. They are less inclined to be hard-handed on the industry, though. NSRAC members stepped beyond 'stalling tactics' with regard to scientific assessments and proactively support them. In return, the decision-making system needs to acknowledge NSRAC commitment and provide sufficient funds.