In the present work we develop a unified way of looking at normed spaces of analytic functions (NSAF's) and their embedding into the Frechet space of analytic functions on a general domain, by requiring only that the embedding map is bounded. This is a succinct definition of NSAF and derive from it a list of interesting properties. For example Proposition 4.4 describes the behavior of point evaluations and Proposition 4.6 part (i) gives a general sufficient condition for a NSAF to be a Banach space, which as far as we know, are new results. Also, Proposition 4.5, parts (ii) and (iii) of Proposition 4.6 and Proposition 4.7 are results, which are slight generalizations of fairly standard results, which show up elsewhere in a more specific setting. Some of the facts about NSAF's are stated and proven in a more general context. In particular, a significant part of the material is dedicated to the normed space of continuous functions on a metric space. On the other hand, we provide the necessary background on differential geometry and complex analysis, which further determine the peculiarities in the context of spaces of analytic functions. At the end we illustrate our results on two specific examples of NSAF's, namely the Bergman and the Bloch Spaces over a general domain in Cd. We give a new proof of the reflexivity of the Bergman Space Ap(G, μ) for the case p>1 and of the Schur property of A1(G, μ). We also give new proofs for the equivalences of some of the definitions of the Bloch functions.

The aim is to study a continuous chemical process, and then analyze the hold process of the reactor and build the models which could be trained to realize the fault diagnosis and localization in the process. An experimental system has been built to be the research base. That includes experiment part and record system. To the diagnosis and localization methods, the work presented the methods with the data-based approach, mainly the Bayesian network and RBF network based on GAAPA (Genetic Algorithm with Auto-adapted of Partial Adjustment). The data collected from the experimental system are used to train and test the models.

Today the ideas of long life learning are not theories anymore. The changing needs of a society force many of people acquire new competencies and professional qualifications. Education is not provided for once and ever but becomes the result of a permanent learning that lasts for the rest of one’s life. The issues of professional development are solved in the context of long life learning and continuous education. Research highlights that a big impact is made on the knowledge and value formation of a social pedagogue by the new university study programmes enabling to continue studies and update one’s knowledge, update qualification and master new technologies. The graduates of the social pedagogue’s non-university study programmes are provided with the possibility to continue their studies at Vilnius Pedagogical University. The results of the research carried out for the first time to identify the needs and possibilities of the development of professional competencies could be used for constant update and improvement of study programs, it creates the prerequisites to train social pedagogues as highly qualified professionals who would meet the needs of labour market and society by being of high professional competencies. The object of the final thesis is the development of social pedagogues’ professional competencies during continuous studies. The aim of the research is to discuss the peculiarities of professional competence development and to analyse the development of... [to full text]

An effective, viable design solution for the elevated viaduct guideway for Universal Freight Shuttle (UFS) system championed by Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) is presented. The proposed precast elevated UFS bridge system is analyzed for the operational vehicular loading as provided by TTI and a number of design alternatives for the various bridge components are provided. This includes: the design of the fully precast deck panels for long continuous spans, design of the shear connectors resisting interface shear at bridge deck-girder interface, design of structurally efficient and cost-effective trough girders and its design alternative with I-girders, and economic and long-term serviceable design of bridge piers. A literature review and study of the existing precast bridges is presented for the state-of-the-art and practice, design specifications and publications by AASHTO, State Department of Transportation and other agencies. These existing systems are refined to determine the most appropriate specification for the proposed bridge components by integrating the planning, design, fabrication and construction techniques to ensure high precision freight shuttle movement, construction feasibility, safety, life-cycle cost, durability and serviceability requirements. The design concept presented is a deviation from the conventional railways and highways design. The best practices and specifications of AASHTO and AREMA are combined suitably in this research to suit the major requirements of the project. A combination of the design philosophy with appropriate construction techniques has been blended to devise a system which is efficient for offsite manufacture of components for construction of the bridge and adaptable to the different bridge configurations. Based on the design results, it is found that precast concrete deck panels in combination with precast, prestressed concrete trough girders provides the most efficient superstructure solution for this project. The Damage Avoidance Design for the precast bridge piers along with the precast superstructure provides a system with comparable structural performance along with other benefits such as long term serviceability, economical sections, practically transportable units, modular simplicity for relocation as desired and ability to offer space for commercial usage. The steps for construction of the bridge is schematically presented and sequentially explained.

Recent developments in instrumentation, communication and software have enabled the integration of real-time data into the decision-making process of hydrocarbon production. Applications of real-time data integration in drilling operations and horizontal-well lateral placement are becoming industry common practice. In reservoir management, the use of real-time data has been shown to be advantageous in tasks such as improving smart-well performance and in pressure-maintenance programs. Such capabilities allow for a paradigm change in which reservoir management can be looked at as a strategy that enables a semi-continuous process of model updates and decision optimizations instead of being periodic or reactive. This is referred to as closed-loop reservoir management (CLRM). Due to the complexity of the dynamic physical processes, large sizes, and huge uncertainties associated with reservoir description, continuous model updating is a large-scale problem with a highly dimensional parameter space and high computational costs. The need for an algorithm that is both feasible for practical applications and capable of generating reliable estimates of reservoir uncertainty is a key element in CLRM. This thesis investigates the validity of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling used in a Bayesian framework as an uncertainty quantification and model-updating tool suitable for real-time applications. A 3-phase, dual-porosity, dual-permeability reservoir model is used in a synthetic experiment. Continuous probability density functions of cumulative oil production for two cases with different model updating frequencies and reservoir maturity levels are generated and compared to a case with a known geology, i.e., truth case. Results show continuously narrowing ranges for cumulative oil production, with mean values approaching the truth case as model updating advances and the reservoir becomes more mature. To deal with MCMC sampling sensitivity to increasing numbers of observed measurements, as in the case of real-time applications, a new formulation of the likelihood function is proposed. Changing the likelihood function significantly improved chain convergence, chain mixing and forecast uncertainty quantification. Further, methods to validate the sampling quality and to judge the prior model for the MCMC process in real applications are advised.

Carbon nanotubes have become one of the most important building blocks critical to nanotechnology. Carbon nanotubes have attracted the interests of many scientists since their discovery due to their remarkable properties and have been widely used for various applications. However, the bottle neck in nanotube research has been the lack of a cheap, continuous and fast nanotube production method. This study concerns a reactor where nanotubes are continuously deposited on a carbon substrate using arc discharge at atmospheric pressure. This process appears to be the first to employ an arc discharge as the method for continuous mass deposition of nanotubes on a substrate. This nanotube deposition method eliminates the generic multistep process of nanotube deposition on substrates for its use in many applications. The effect of various parameters influencing growth and morphology of nanotubes on the substrate in the arc reactor (inter-electrode gap, atmosphere composition, current density, flushing, substrate type and speed and catalyst) have been systematically explored to optimise nanotube growth. The field emission properties of the nanotube laden substrate are studied for use and applicability as electron emitters. The nanotube samples demonstrated superior emission properties, low turn-on field and excellent current stability when put into applications such as a luminescent tube and an ionisation sensor. Theoretical modelling of the behaviour of a single nanotube during field emission was performed using finite element analysis software (COMSOL 3.2) to understand the effect of nanotube length, diameter, and vacuum gap on an individual nanotube. The results reveal that resistive heating (temperature) limits the maximum current carried by an individual nanotube. Furthermore, a new growth model is introduced to explain the formation of nanotubes from graphene fragments and nanocrystallites, due to polarisation of carbon species near the electrode surface suggesting that carbon vapour is unlikely to be responsible for nanotube growth.

Weftless Bead design has long been in existence and still used in many passenger car, bus, truck and agriculture tractors. The ideal bead design is a high strength flexible cable with minimal cross section and covered by rubberized nylon, rayon or steel wire side wall. The basic tire bead designs are weftless bead with rubberized ribbon of parallel wires of multiple wound layers and a continuous wire wound in sufficient number of loops to give the required strength. Weftless bead failures generally occur within about 5cm from the end of the overlapping parallel wire ribbon. The cause for this failure is generally attributed to the mounting process in which the diameter of the tire bead is changed during the mounting process in the well of the rim. A finite element model of the tire bead was developed and under the known stresses of the mounting and final use conditions. The Weftless bead generally consists of five steel wires in parallel in a continuous rubber tape or ribbons, which loosely secures the wires in a soft insulating rubber. The ribbon is wound into a hoop with four courses resulting in a grommet composed of a stack of wires. This ribbon with ten cut ends forming a splice, with five at the inner cut edge and five at the outer cut edge. A continuous bead formed from a single wire does not have this failure prone splice region. Field data and the finite element calculations show the failure point of the weftless bead is almost always at the under lap or at the starting point of the weftless bead. Continuous wire bead have significant advantages in safety over the Weftless bead still used in tires.

Cardiac surgery incisional pain can decrease inspiratory effort, alter normal respiratory mechanics, and increase the potential for post-operative pulmonary complications. Post-surgical atelectasis is the most frequent complication after coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG), ranging from 54% to 92%. All types of therapy such as an incentive spirometry (IS), deep breathing exercises (DBE) or continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) have a valuable role to play in the prevention or the treatment of post-surgical atelectasis. However, the type of therapy that should be used is not completely clear yet. The present research aims to evaluate the benefit of early use of CPAP via mask therapy to treat or prevent post-surgical atelectasis after CABG, particularly in smokers and elderly patients, as compared to regular (IS) therapy. Also, it aims to evaluate the patients' and medical staff's experience about the use of the new method of CPAP via mask therapy. The present research was conducted at King Fahd Armed Forces Hospital in Saudi Arabia between March 2010 and December 2011. It used a mixed methods approach. The first two studies were intervention quantitative studies, which investigated the benefit of CPAP via mask therapy. The others were qualitative studies that evaluated the experience of patients and medical staff regarding CPAP therapy use.A total of 180 patients (male and female) (36 in each group) participated in the two quantitative studies. Ninety two participants (male and female) participated in the qualitative studies. The first quantitative study results showed an improvement in CPAP via mask therapy for half hours every two hours group measurements as compared to IS therapy groups. IC was increased significantly in the "CPAP every two hours group" as compared to control group (IS) (baseline mean for IS group 1.34L and "CPAP every two hours group" 1.42L, post- therapy mean 1.59L and 1.88L respectively, p= 0.037). In addition, when chest physiotherapy was added to the two regimens, the improvement of CPAP therapy measurements became more than IS therapy. Moreover, the patient’s acceptance rate for CPAP therapy every two hours was 93% and the medical staff acceptance rate was 86%. CPAP via mask therapy for half hour every two hours had better outcomes in treating or preventing post-surgical atelectasis after CABG, particularly in smokers and elderly patients. Adding chest physiotherapy led to even better outcomes. The use of the new method of CPAP therapy had high acceptance rate by the participants and medical staff.

Gaussian process regression (GPR) is a long-standing technique for statistical interpolation between observed data points. Having originally been applied to spatial analysis in the 1950s, GPR offers highly nonlinear predictions with uncertainty adjusting to the degree of extrapolation -- at the expense of very few model parameters to be fit. Thus GPR has gained considerable popularity in statistical applications such as machine learning and nonparametric density estimation. In this thesis, we explore the potential for GPR to improve the efficiency of parametric inference for continuous-time stochastic processes. For almost all such processes, the likelihood function based on discrete observations cannot be written in closed-form. However, it can be very well approximated if the inter-observation time is small. Therefore, a popular strategy for parametric inference is to introduce missing data between actual observations. In a Bayesian context, samples from the posterior distribution of the parameters and missing data are then typically obtained using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, which can be computationally very expensive. Here, we consider the possibility of using GPR to impute the marginal distribution of the missing data directly. These imputations could then be leveraged to produce independent draws from the joint posterior by Importance Sampling, for a significant gain in computational efficiency. In order to illustrate the methodology, three continuous processes are examined. The first one is based on a neural excitation model with a non-standard periodic component. The second and third are popular financial models often used for option pricing. While preliminary inferential results are quite promising, we point out several improvements to the methodology which remain to be explored.

In the present work we develop a unified way of looking at normed spaces of analytic functions (NSAF's) and their embedding into the Frechet space of analytic functions on a general domain, by requiring only that the embedding map is bounded. This is a succinct definition of NSAF and derive from it a list of interesting properties. For example Proposition 4.4 describes the behavior of point evaluations and Proposition 4.6 part (i) gives a general sufficient condition for a NSAF to be a Banach space, which as far as we know, are new results. Also, Proposition 4.5, parts (ii) and (iii) of Proposition 4.6 and Proposition 4.7 are results, which are slight generalizations of fairly standard results, which show up elsewhere in a more specific setting. Some of the facts about NSAF's are stated and proven in a more general context. In particular, a significant part of the material is dedicated to the normed space of continuous functions on a metric space. On the other hand, we provide the necessary background on differential geometry and complex analysis, which further determine the peculiarities in the context of spaces of analytic functions. At the end we illustrate our results on two specific examples of NSAF's, namely the Bergman and the Bloch Spaces over a general domain in Cd. We give a new proof of the reflexivity of the Bergman Space Ap(G, μ) for the case p>1 and of the Schur property of A1(G, μ). We also give new proofs for the equivalences of some of the definitions of the Bloch functions.