The Fayúm Province of Egypt covers an almost continuous time span from the middle Eocene through the early Oligocene and has produced a number of vertebrate fossils important to evolutionary history. This area includes early crocodylids inaccurately assigned to crown-group Crocodylus, which has been shown through molecular and morphological phylogenetic analyses to have diverged during the Miocene. We reviewed two taxa from the early Oligocene Gebel Qatrani Formation, Crocodylus megarhinus Andrews 1905 and Crocodylus articeps Andrews 1905, which had previously been synonymized, with C. articeps thought to be based on a juvenile specimen of C. megarhinus. Crocodylus megarhinus outwardly resembles most living species of Crocodylus, however it is a basal crocodylid lacking diagnostic features for the crown genus. The holotype of C. articeps is now lost, but based on a cast and published images of the original material, it was a slender-snouted form that can be distinguished from smaller specimens of C. megarhinus. Although not synonymous with C. megarhinus, C. articeps cannot be diagnosed or scored for existing character matrices sufficiently to allow precise phylogenetic placement. Previous analyses of C. megarhinus included information from C. articeps; recoding C. megarhinus based only on material referable to that species does not change its phylogenetic position, but it forces a reconsideration of the polarity of character states in clades leading to the origin of crown-genus Crocodylus which, in turn, may inform efforts to resolve the relationships among living crocodylid lineages. Based on its confirmed phylogenetic position as a basal crocodylid, C. megarhinus provides insight into the ancestral conditions of all crocodylids and supports an African origin for Crocodylidae.

Cette these presente une contribution a la compilation de silicium. Elle traite de l'integration d'un outil de synthese architecturale dans<br />les environnements de CAO existants. Il s'agit de la personnalisation de l'architecture abstraite, resultat de la synthese de haut niveau, pour la<br />generation d'une description compatible avec les outils de simulation et de synthese au niveau transfert de registres. Le but etant d'offrir<br />plusieurs modeles architecturaux utilisant differents modeles de synchronisation afin de couvrir les besoins de differentes applications. Apres<br />une introduction de l'outil de synthese architecturale AMICAL et de plusieurs modeles architecturaux au niveau transfert de registres, cette these<br />presente une methode et un outil pour la personnalisation de l'architecture abstraite generee par AMICAL et la traduction des fichiers de sortie<br />donnes en SOLAR en leurs equivalents VHDL. Finalement, une etude comparative des differents modeles architecturaux sur plusieurs<br />exemples est detaillee. Cette etude montre qu'il faut plusieurs modeles architecturaux pour differentes applications. Ces modeles architecturaux<br />se differencient entre eux par leur structure, leur bibliotheque de macro-composants et leur modele de synchronisation utilise.

Cette thèse discute dans un premier temps des propriétés et des concepts des langages de description du matériel HDL. Ensuite, le langage FIDEL pour la description (fonctionnelle, structurelle) et la simulation de circuits intégrés VLSI est présenté, en insistant sur les différentes caractéristiques de ce langage qui sont adaptées à une simulation hiérarchique et multi-niveaux. Deux outils de simulation, logico-fonctionnelle et electrico-fonctionnelle, sont présentés. Ces deux outils présentent une avancée dans le domaine de la simulation dans le but de garder la précision tout en diminuant le cout de simulation des circuits VLSI. Une évaluation des différents langages de description selon leurs domaines d'application et propriétés est présentée. Au vu de cette évaluation, FIDEL s'insère en bonne place, tant au niveau des concepts que de l'utilisation pratique

Au fur et à mesure que la complexité s'accroit, il devient nécessaire de définir de nouvelles méthodes permettant de la gérer. Une des façons de maîtriser cette complexité est d'élever le niveau d'abstraction des spécifications en utilisant des langages de spécification systèmes. D'un autre côté, l'élévation du niveau d'abstraction augmente le fossé entre les concepts utilisés pour la spécification (processus communicants, communication abstraite) et ceux utilisés par les langages de description de matériel. Bien que ces langages soient bien adaptés à la spécification et la validation de systèmes complexes, les concepts qu'ils manipulent ne sont pas aisément transposables sur ceux des langages de description de matériels. Il est donc nécessaire de définir de nouvelles méthodes permettant une synthèse efficace à partir de spécifications systèmes. Le sujet de cette thèse est la présentation d'une approche de génération de code C et VHDL à partir de spécifications systèmes en SDL. Cette approche résout la principale difficulté rencontrée par les autres approches, à savoir la communication inter-processus. La communication SDL peut être traduite en VHDL en vue de la synthèse. Cela est rendu possible par l'utilisation d'une forme intermédiaire qui supporte un modèle de communication générale qui autorise la représentation pour la synthèse de la plupart des schémas de communication. Cette forme intermédiaire permet d'appliquer au système un ensemble d'étapes de raffinement pour obtenir la solution désirée. La principale étape de raffinement, appelée synthèse de la communication, détermine le protocole et les interfaces utilisés par les différents processus pour communiquer. la spécification raffinée peut être traduite en C et VHDL pour être utilisée par des outils du commerce. Nous illustrons la faisabilité de cette approche par une application à un système de télécommunication : le protocole TCP/IP sur ATM.

A partial description of the convex hull of solutions to the economic lot-sizing problem with start-up costs (ELSS) has been derived recently. Here a larger class of valid inequalities is given and it is shown that these inequalities describe the convex hull of ELSS. This in turn proves that a plant location formulation as a linear program solves ELSS. Finally a separation algorithm is given.

Omega is a description system for knowledge embedding which incorporates some of the attractive modes of expression in common sense reasoning such as descriptions, inheritance, quantification, negation, attributions and multiple viewpoints. A formalization of Omega is developed as a framework for investigations on the foundations of knowledge representation. As a logic, Omega achieves the goal of an intuitively sound and consistent theory of classes which permits unrestricted abstraction within a powerful logic system. Description abstraction is the construct provided in Omega corresponding to set abstraction. Attributions and inheritance are the basic mechanisms for knowledge structuring. To achieve flexibility and incrementality, the language allows descriptions with an arbitrary number of attributions, rather than predicates with a fixed number of arguments as in predicate logic. This requires a peculiar interpretation for instance descriptions, which in turn provides insights into the use and meaning of several kinds of attributions. The formal treatment consists in presenting semantic models for Omega, deriving an axiomatization and establishing the consistency and completeness of the logic.

This report describes a program which automatically characterizes the behavior of any driven, nonlinear, electrical circuit. To do this, the program autonomously selects interesting input parameters, drives the circuit, measures its response, performs a set of numeric computations on the measured data, interprets the results, and decomposes the circuit's parameter space into regions of qualitatively distinct behavior. The output is a two-dimensional portrait summarizing the high-level, qualitative behavior of the circuit for every point in the graph, an accompanying textual explanation describing any interesting patterns observed in the diagram, and a symbolic description of the circuit's behavior which can be passed on to other programs for further analysis.

This qualitative research is about how Swedish media constructs immigrants in articles. The focus of the study will lie on ten Swedish articles and how they stereotype immigrants, but the demarcation will be for young immigrant boys related to crimes. The purpose of this paper is to highlight how media achieves its goal to construct a group as inferior. This will be implemented with the help of articles from different newspapers that reported on immigrants who have committed crimes. We have chosen to look at different newspapers to see if there is a curtain pattern in the construction of immigrant boy. How do the media focus on offenders with immigrant backgrounds look like? How is the immigrant boy constructed in different media? By using the theory constructive discourse analysis we will try to see patterns and understand how the immigrant boy is presented in the media outlets. We will also be using the theory about established and outsiders by Norbert Elias to helps us understand peoples need of keeping a curtain group as outsiders in order to strengthening themselves. The results of our investigation were not quite what we expected. That for us was assumed about the immigrant boy was that he was portrayed in the media as something dark and dangerous, as was the case in the previous research. But it was shown in our study that in recent year the construction of immigrant boy in the media is ambivalent and not always directly negative.

The most dominant architecture in the contemporary business domain is Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The large number of the existing service description and discovery systems available today, including the ones proposed in research proposals, reveals an increasing need for adaptive, semantically enriched and context-aware, wide-area service discovery. This need will become more intense in the years to come as the number of available services increases rapidly. The main reason behind the existence of a plethora of such systems is that before these initiatives, the standard in service discovery was taking into account only the syntactic descriptions of the services, causing conflicts when services, with similar syntactic descriptions, needed to be evaluated. The research solutions available today offer efficient and accurate discovery at the syntactic, functional semantic and non-functional semantic level. However, the problem is that there is no general consensus yet regarding service discovery. Research by its very nature, leads to point solutions rather than complete systems. Based on these observations, we propose an adaptive service description and discovery framework for carrier applications, enabling the model-driven specification of services and client profiles, and also, for allowing the dynamic configuration of the services to meet specific quality requirements defined by the clients. The framework was implemented in the context of Model Driven Development, to ensure platform independence at the level of the specification of services. The framework takes the union of the point solutions offered by research proposals in the area of service description and discovery, creates an abstract model, and can compile that model to platform specific code. More specifically, services for carrier applications can be specified in a platform independent way both in terms of service signatures (syntactic properties) and in terms of the functionality and the QoS service characteristics (semantic properties). A model transformation framework allows for the creation of a platform specific model for the description of services in a specific technology platform (e.g., Web services). The framework is extensible to accommodate future extensions. In addition, as a proof of concept, we designed and developed an Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) prototype tool, implementing our proposal.

We consider the overlap between reasoning involved in <em>conjunctive query optimization</em> (CQO) and in tableaux-based approaches to reasoning about subsumption in <em>description logics</em> (DLs). In both cases, an underlying graph is created, searched and modified. This process is determined by a given <em>query</em> and <em>database schema</em> in the first case and by a given <em>description</em> and <em>terminology</em> in the second. The opportunities for overlap derive from an abundance of reductions of various schema languages to terminologies for common DL dialects, and from the fact that descriptions can in turn be viewed as queries that compute a single column. <br /><br /> Our main contributions are as follows. We present the design and implementation of a common graph utility that integrates the requirements for both CQO and DL reasoning. We then verify this model by also presenting the design and implementation for two drivers, one that implements a query optimizer for a conjunctive query language extended with descriptions, and one that implements a complete DL reasoner for a feature based DL dialect.