Kriminalvården är en statlig myndighet som i dagsläget befinner sig i startgroparna för att ta fram en tillgänglighetspolicy. De diskuterar även eventuella åtgärder för att hantera användandet av informations- och kommunikationsteknik (IKT) kopplat till arbete. Studien syftar till att beskriva och analysera fenomenet tillgänglighet och uppkoppling utifrån chefers uppfattningar inom Kriminalvården samt hur de hanterar detta. Vidare syftar studien till att undersöka chefers uppfattade möjligheter och utmaningar kopplat till ämnet. Insamlingen av datamaterialet skedde via tio semistrukturerade intervjuer som bearbetades utifrån en fenomenografisk analysmetod. Studiens resultat pekade på såväl likheter som skillnader mellan chefernas uppfattningar. Majoriteten av cheferna uttryckte att de satte en tydlig gräns mellan arbete och fritid vilket analysen dock inte tydde på. Cheferna uppfattade i stor utsträckning att tillgänglighet och uppkoppling inte var ett problem. Några chefer hade strategier för att hantera uppkopplingen och andra inte. En skillnad var i hur cheferna hanterade mejl utanför kontorstid. Detta kunde ske genom att några chefer skickade mejl,vissa inte alls och en del chefer skickade mejl även om de var av uppfattningen att det sände dåliga signaler.

Progress in the fields of wearable computing, soft robotics and bio hybrid engineering depend on new classes of soft multifunctional materials that match the mechanical properties of soft biological tissue and possess high toughness, while having metal-like electrical and thermal properties.

This thesis aims to describe a phenomenon of judicial law-making in 21st century. The thesis is concerned with two main issues, specifically the binding effect of prior judicial decisions and the boundaries of judicial authority in law-making. The thesis begins with a description of essential terms and it focuses especially on a type of judicial decisions-making, which results in not following plain and clear language of the applicable statute. A judge is not free in his choice when to avoid the language of the statute. He is limited by values embedded in law by legislator, which he cannot exceed and extend. Therefore this activity is deemed to be a method of selecting an applicable legal norm, not creation of new law. The thesis further explains when not following plain and clear language of the applicable statute can be in reasonable cases justifiable. This part is followed by specific parts dealing with the particular forms of the judicial law-making within the bounds of two legal systems - common law and civil law. In the conclusion the paper draws a comparison between the judicial law- making in mentioned legal systems. The thesis concludes that there is a difference between the systems in the concept of bindingness of prior judicial decisions. Yet, both systems reach the stability of court...

Depuis plusieurs années, l’émergence de la Chine sur la scène économique mondiale préoccupe les opinions publiques. Le spectre du péril jaune, né à la fin du XIXe siècle, réapparait. Le péril jaune prend d’abord la forme d’un péril militaire. Les Européens craignent l’instabilité politique qui caractérise l’Extrême-Orient. Les conflits s’y succèdent en exposant les Occidentaux établis en Asie : la guerre des Boxers en 1900 et la guerre russo-japonaise en 1905. Le péril jaune apparaît aussi comme un péril démographique. La présence croissante des Chinois de par le monde est avérée. Les communautés asiatiques se caractérisent par l’absence de volonté de s’intégrer dans les pays où elles s’implantent. En Europe, les tensions entre les communautés d’origines européennes et asiatiques dans l’aire pacifique sont perçues comme de mauvais présages. C’est bien le péril jaune économique qui est le plus souvent dénoncé. Le rapide décollage de l’industrie et du commerce du Japon inquiète. Les Asiatiques semblent capables de concurrencer les Occidentaux. Nombreux sont ceux qui considèrent alors que la Chine peut évoluer comme le Japon. L’argument des bas salaires asiatiques, fondement d’une concurrence déloyale, est l’argument premier sur lequel repose la crainte du déclin économique de l’Occident. Cette crainte n’est pas partagée par tous. En France, le député Paul d’Estournelles de Constant considère cette concurrence nouvelle comme une évolution normale. Il pense que l’Occident doit relever ses manches pour œuvrer à son redressement plutôt que de dénoncer, de façon stérile, l’essor de l’Asie. Il défend l’idée que le salut des Européens repose sur l’union économique et politique. / For several years the emergence of China on the global economic scene has been worrying. The spectre of the Yellow Peril is reappearing. In fact this fear began a century ago. At the end of the XIXth century China and the Far East were already worrying. The Yellow Peril seemed to be first a military instability which characterized the Far East. Clashes followed each other imperilling Westerners living in Asia : The Boxer war in 1900 and the Russian/Japanese war in 1905. The Yellow Peril appearred as a demographic danger. The growing presence of the Chinese throughout the world was worrying. Asian communities were characterized by unwillingness to integrate into the countries where they were becoming established. In Europe tension between the communities of European and Asian extractions in the Pacific area was worrying. It was in the economic field that the Far East worried most. The spectacular growth of Japan showed clearly that Asiatics could expand very quickly. China seemed then to be going in the same direction. So in Europe we were worrying about the competition that Chinese and Japanese workers could offer to the Western Workers. Some observers did not believe in this threat. In France deputy Paul d’Estournelles de Constant was fascinated by this subject. He thought that China and Japan were going to compete with some Western industries. He thought that safety of European countries lay in economic and political union. The threat of Yellow Peril appeared to be a highly stimulating challenge to the Western World.

The human body has a unique mechanism for perceiving surrounding temperatures. When an object is in contact with the skin, we do not feel its temperature. Instead, we feel the temperature change that is caused on our skin by that object. The faster the heat is transferred, the more intense the thermal sensation is. In this dissertation, a new dynamic thermal display method, where different rates of warm and cold are applied on the skin to generate a unique sensation, is presented. The new method can be related in a wide range of applications including thermal haptics and virtual reality. To understand the perception of temperature and the general thermal state of the human body, the first aspect of this dissertation focuses on investigating the interaction between temperature change and perception on a large scale. Three field surveys were conducted inside airconditioned buildings to investigate the change in the thermal state and temperature perception of occupants when the room temperature changes. The results showed that the participants’ prediction of constant operating temperature was poor, however, their prediction was significantly improved when temperature changes were presented. In order to more accurately investigate the perception of temperature on the skin, a new thermal display method using multiple-channel thermal actuators was developed. The principle of this method is to apply slow and fast rates of temperature change simultaneously on the skin. The slowly changing temperatures are below the perceptual threshold of the thermal receptors, therefore will not be detected whereas the quickly changing temperatures are above the perceptual threshold, hence, will be detected. The idea here is to keep the average surface temperature of the skin constant, however a person will perceive a sensation of continuous cooling. This method was tested through a series of experiments, and the results showed that it is capable of generating a continuous cooling sensation without changing the average temperature of the stimulation area. Multiple variations of this method were tested including different heating and cooling rates of change, different skin locations and patterns of stimuli. Also, a continuous warming was generated using similar concept. To further investigate the temperature distribution that is caused by this method and its effect on the skin, a computational simulation was conducted. An approximate model of the skin was used to monitor its surface temperature and record the temperatures in the stimulation area when the continuous cooling method is applied. The results of the simulation showed that the temperature under the surface of the stimulation area was affected by the continuous cooling method that was applied on the skin model, however this method did not affect the average surface temperature of the skin. These findings may later determine the efficiency and intensity of the method of continuous cooling, and allow us to investigate different technically challenging variations of this method.

Reaction rate data at 50oC was generated in a batch reactor over a wide range of initial concentrations in the reaction mixture. In each case the reaction was allowed to reach equilibrium. Equilibrium conversion data clearly indicated that it is important to consider the non-ideality of the system. The NRTL activity model proved to be the most suitable model to calculate the activity based equilibrium constant, as the percentage standard deviation of the equilibrium constant calculated in this manner was only 7.6% for all the different experiments as opposed to 17.8% when the equilibrium constant was based on concentration. The NRTL parameters used were obtained from Gmehling&Onken (1977) who determined the parameters from vapour liquid equilibrium. The Langmuir-Hinshelwood kinetics proposed by Song et al. (1998) and Pöpken et al. (2000) provided an excellent representation of the reaction rate over a wide concentration range with an AARE of 6% and 5% respectively. It was shown that when the NRTL activities were used in the rate expression that a power law model provided a similarly accurate prediction of the reaction rate (AARE = 4.1%). When the Eley-Rideal reaction expression (in terms of the adsorption of methanol and water) was used, a slight improvement was achieved (AARE = 2.4%). As both the Langmuir-Hinshelwood and Eley-Rideal models require separate experiments for the measurement of adsorption constants, it seems that the activity based power law model should be the kinetic expression of choice. It can be concluded that a two parameter activity based rate expression predicts the reaction rate with similar accuracy as the multi-parameter adsorption models. This indicates that it is not necessary to know the concentration on the resin surface (adsorption models) or in the resin gel (absorption models) when describing the reaction rate as long as the bulk liquid phase activities can be adequately described. / Dissertation (MEng (Chemical Engineering))--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Chemical Engineering / unrestricted

Grothendieck published an extraordinary paper entitled ”Resume de la theorie metrique des pro¬duits tensoriels topologiques” in 1953. The main result of this paper is the inequality which is commonly known as Grothendieck Inequality. Following Kirivine, in this article, we give the proof of Grothendieck Inequality. We refor¬mulate it in different forms. We also investigate the famous Grothendieck constant KG. The Grothendieck constant was achieved by taking supremum over a special class of matrices. But our attempt will be to investigate it, considering a smaller class of matrices, namely only the positive definite matrices in this class. Actually we want to use it to get a counterexample of Matsaev’s conjecture, which was proved to be right by Von Neumann in some specific cases. In chapter 1, we shall state and prove the Grothendieck Inequality. In chapter 2, we shall introduce tensor product of vector spaces and different tensor norms. In chapter 3, we shall formulate Grothendieck Inequality in different forms and use the notion of tensor norms for its equivalent formation .In the last chapteri.ein chapter4we shall investigate on the Grothendieck constant.

Characterization of semi-permeable films promotes the systematic selection of membranes and process design. When acquiring the diffusive and sorption properties of gas transport in non-porous membranes, the time lag method is considered the conventional method of characterization. The time lag method involves monitoring the transient accumulation of species due to permeation on a fixed volume present in a downstream reservoir. In the thesis at hand, an alternative approach to the time lag technique is proposed, termed as the short cut method. The short cut method appoints the use of a two reservoir system, where the species decay in the upstream face of the membrane is monitored, in combination with the accumulation on the downstream end. The early and short time determination of membrane properties is done by monitoring the inflow and outflow flux profiles, including their respective analytical formulas. The newly proposed method was revealed to have estimated the properties at 1/10 the required time it takes for the classical time lag method, which also includes a better abidance to the required boundary conditions. A novel design of the upstream reservoir, consisting of a reference and working volume, is revealed, which includes instructional use, and the mechanics involved with its operation. Transient pressure decay profiles are successfully obtained when the reference and working volumes consisted of only tubing. However when tanks were included in the volumes, large errors in the decay were observed, in particular due to a non-instantaneous equilibration of the pressure during the start up. This hypothesis was further re-enforced by examining different upstream tank-based configurations. iii In the end, a validated numerical model was constructed for the purpose of simulating the two reservoir gas permeation system. A modified form of the finite differences scheme is utilized, in order to account for a concentration-dependent diffusivity of penetrants within the membrane. Permeation behavior in a composite membrane system was disclosed, which provided a new perspective in analyzing the errors associated with the practical aspect of the system.

In aeronautical telemetry, the multipath interference usually causes significant performance degradation. As the bit rate of telemetry systems increases, the impairments of multipath interference are more serious. The constant modulus algorithm (CMA) blind equalizer is effective to mitigate the impairments of multipath interference. The CMA adapts the equalizer coefficients to minimize the deviation of the signal envelope from a constant level. This paper presents the performances of the CMA blind equalizer applied for PCM-FM, PCM-BPSK, SOQPSK-TG and ARTM CPM in aeronautical telemetry.

L’objectif de cette thèse était d’étudier suivant deux approches la dégradation des polydiméthylsiloxanes. L’approche expérimentale a permis d’étudier les mécanismes de rupture de chaîne et les phénomènes de réticulation du polymère lorsque ce dernier est soumis à des conditions de thermo-oxydation ou de photo-oxydation comparables à celles du vieillissement naturel. La seconde partie propose de modéliser les résultats expérimentaux par un modèle cinétique issu des calculs ab initio. L’exploitation in vitro de la dégradation du polymère a permis de mettre en évidence la formation de monoxyde de carbone et de dioxyde de carbone, ceux-ci jouant le rôle de révélateurs de rupture de liaison Si-CH3. Toutefois le comportement des PDMS sur des temps de dégradation plus importants montre clairement la formation d’oligomères cycliques par dépolymérisation de la chaîne macromoléculaire. Parallèlement la photo-oxydation de ces polymères entraîne la formation de réseaux multidimensionnels qui traduisent des phénomènes de réticulation avec formation d’acide formique. Cette étude a permis de montrer que la dégradation des PDMS, dans des conditions de vieillissement naturel, procède de deux mécanismes antagonistes, l’un favorisant la réticulation du polymère et le second sa dépolymérisation. La seconde partie de ce travail s’intéresse aux mécanismes de formation des oligomères cycliques observés expérimentalement lors de la dégradation des PDMS. Des réponses précises ont pu être amenées grâce à une analyse théorique détaillée de la constante de cyclisation de ces polymères. Cette étude nous a permis de montrer le rôle essentiel du couplage des rotateurs internes dans le calcul de la constante de cyclisation en fonction de la taille des cycles obtenus. Nos résultats théoriques reproduisent avec exactitude l’évolution de la courbe de la constante de cyclisation observée expérimentalement pour des cycles de taille inférieure à 20 motifs, à savoir un maximum global pour des cycles constitués de quatre motifs et un minimum local pour des cycles à dix motifs. Nous avons démontré que l’origine de l’évolution oscillatoire de la constante de cyclisation traduisait le changement de caractère de certains degrés de liberté entre des vibrations pures (petits cycles) et des rotations empêchées (cycles de plus grande taille). / This work aimed at investigating the degradation pathways of polydimethylsiloxanes through two perspectives. The experimental approach studied bond scission and cross-linking degradation mechanisms when the polymer is exposed to thermo- or photo-oxidation conditions that are similar to that of the natural ageing. In the second part, the experimental results are modeled with a theoretical kinetic model, based on ab initio calculations.The in-vitro study of the polymer degradation showed that formation of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide were by-products of Si-CH3 bond scissions. However, the degradation of PDMS for longer time periods showed clearly the formation of cyclic oligomers obtained through depolymerization of the macromolecule. In parallel, the photo-oxidation conditions yielded the formation of multidimensional cross-linked networks and formation of formic acid. This study showed that in the natural conditions, the degradation of PDMS proceeded through two opposite mechanisms, one that produced cross-linked networks while in the other, depolymerization was favored. In the second part, we investigated the mechanisms of the formation of cyclic oligomers that were observed experimentally during the degradation of the polymer. A detailed theoretical model was built in order to reproduce the dependence of the experimental cyclization constant with cycle size. This study showed the key role of the coupling in the treatment of hindered rotors. Our theoretical results reproduced accurately the oscillatory behavior of the cyclization constant for cycle sizes less than 20-mers, namely the global maximum for the 4-unit cyclic oligomers, and the local minimum for cycle sizes of 10 units. We have also shown that the origin of the oscillatory behavior of the cyclization constant revealed that some degrees of freedom underwent specific character transformation between a pure vibration for small cycles and hindered rotation for larger ring sizes.