Doctor of Philosophy / Collective actions of large animal groups result in elaborate behaviour, whose nature can be breathtaking in their complexity. Social organisation is the key to the origin of this behaviour and the mechanisms by which this organisation occurs are of particular interest. In this thesis, these mechanisms of social interactions and their consequences for group-level behaviour are explored. Social interactions amongst individuals are based on simple rules of attraction, alignment and orientation amongst neighbouring individuals. As part of this study, we will be interested in data that takes the form of a set of directions in space. In Chapter 2, we discuss relevant statistical measure and theory which will allow us to analyse directional data. These statistical tools will be employed on the results of the simulations of the mathematical models formulated in the course of the thesis. The first mathematical model for collective group behaviour is a Lagrangian self-organising model, which is formulated in Chapter 3. This model is based on basic social interactions between group members. Resulting collective behaviours and other related issues are examined during this chapter. Once we have an understanding of the model in Chapter 3, we use this model in Chapter 4 to investigate the idea of guidance of large groups by a select number of individuals. These individuals are privy to information regarding the location of a specific goal. This is used to explore a mechanism proposed for honeybee (Apis mellifera) swarm migrations. The spherical theory introduced in Chapter 2 will prove to be particularly useful in analysing the results of the modelling. In Chapter 5, we introduce a second mathematical model for aggregative behaviour. The model uses ideas from electromagnetic forces and particle physics, reinterpreting them in the context of social forces. While attraction and repulsion terms have been included in similar models in past literature, we introduce an orientation force to our model and show the requirement of a dissipative force to prevent individuals from escaping from the confines of the group.

Of the 20 standard amino acids, cysteines are the only amino acids that have a reactive sulphur atom, thus enabling two cysteines to form strong covalent bonds known as disulfide bonds. Even though almost all proteins have cysteines, not all of them have disulfide bonds. Disulfide bonds provide structural stability to proteins and hence are an important constraint in determining the structure of a protein. As a result, disulfide bonds are used to study various protein properties, one of them being protein folding. Protein structure prediction is the problem of predicting the three-dimensional structure of a protein from its one-dimensional amino acid sequence. Ab initio methods are a group of methods that attempt to solve this problem from first principles, using only basic physico-chemical properties of proteins. These methods use structure libraries of short amino acid fragments in the process of predicting the structure of a protein. The protein structures from which these structure libraries are created are not classified in any other way apart from being non-redundant. In this thesis, we investigate the structural dissimilarities of short amino acid fragments when occurring in proteins with disulfide bonds and when occurring in those proteins without disulfide bonds. We are interested in this because, as mentioned earlier, the protein structures from which the structure libraries of ab initio methods are created, are not classified in any form. This means that any significant structural difference in amino acids and short fragments when occurring in proteins with and without disulfide bonds would remain unnoticed as these structure libraries have both fragments from proteins with disulfide bonds and without disulfide bonds together. Our investigation of structural dissimilarities of amino acids and short fragments is done in four phases. In phase one, by statistically analysing the phi and psi backbone dihedral angle distributions we show that these fragments have significantly different structures in terms of dihedral angles when occurring in proteins with and without disulfide bonds. In phase two, using directional statistics we investigate how structurally different are the 20 different amino acids and the short fragments when occurring in proteins with and without disulfide bonds. In phase three of our work, we investigate the differences in secondary structure preference of the 20 amino acids in proteins with and without disulfide bonds. In phase four, we further investigate and show that there are significant differences within the same secondary structure region of amino acids when they occur in proteins with and without disulfide bonds. Finally, we present the design and implementation details of a dihedral angle and secondary structure database of short amino acid fragments (DASSD) that is publicly available. Thus, in this thesis we show previously unknown significant structure differences in terms of backbone dihedral angles and secondary structures in amino acids and short fragments when they occur in proteins with and without disulfide bonds.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2006. / The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file viewed on (March 1, 2007) Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

<p>High-spin states in the oblate deformed odd-odd thallium nucleus ( ) 109 190 81 Tl have been investigated through the reaction 175Lu(20Ne, 5n)190Tl at a beam energy of 115 MeV. The gamma rays emitted from 190Tl nucleus were detected with Ge detectors using the AFRODITE array at iThemba LABS, South Africa. Gamma-gamma coincidence data were obtained and used to construct the level scheme. In this work, Directional Correlations from Oriented (DCO) state ratios and linear polarization anisotropies were measured in order to deduce spin and parity of energy levels in the decay scheme. It was possible to determine the spin and parity of two additional signature-partner bands which decay to the ground-state band.</p>

From the viewpoint of applications, conventional cameras are usually limited in their fields of view. The omni-directional camera has a full range in all directions, which gains the complete field of view. In the past, a moving object can be detected, only when the camera is static or moving with a known speed. If those methods are employed to mobile robots or vehicles, it will be difficult to determine the motion of moving objects observed by the camera. In this paper, we assume the omni-directional camera is mounted on a moving platform, which travels with a planar motion. The region of floor in the omni-directional image and the brightness constraint equation are applied to estimate the ego-motion. The depth information is acquired from the floor image to solve the problem that cannot be obtained by single camera systems. Using the estimated ego-motion, the optical flow caused by the floor motion can be computed. Therefore, comparing its direction with the direction of the optical flow on the image leads to detection of a moving object. Due to the depth information, even if the camera is in the condition that combining translational and rotational motions, a moving object can still be accurately identified.

This dissertation is divided into two main topics. In the first topic, we study the joint source-channel coding problem of transmitting an analog source over a Gaussian channel in two cases - (i) the presence of interference known only to the transmitter and (ii) in the presence of side information about the source known only to the receiver. We introduce hybrid digital analog forms of the Costa and Wyner-Ziv coding schemes. We present random coding based schemes in contrast to lattice based schemes proposed by Kochman and Zamir. We also discuss superimposed digital and analog schemes for the above problems which show that there are infinitely many schemes for achieving the optimal distortion for these problems. This provides an extension of the schemes proposed by Bross and others to the interference/source side information case. The result of this study shows that the proposed hybrid digital analog schemes are more robust to a mismatch in channel signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), than pure separate source coding followed by channel coding solutions. We then discuss applications of the hybrid digital analog schemes for transmitting under a channel SNR mismatch and for broadcasting a Gaussian source with bandwidth compression. We also study applications of joint source-channel coding schemes for a cognitive setup and also for the setup of transmitting an analog Gaussian source over a Gaussian channel, in the presence of an eavesdropper. In the next topic, we consider joint physical layer coding and network coding solutions for bi-directional relaying. We consider a communication system where two transmitters wish to exchange information through a central relay. The transmitter and relay nodes exchange data over synchronized, average power constrained additive white Gaussian noise channels. We propose structured coding schemes using lattices for this problem. We study two decoding approaches, namely lattice decoding and minimum angle decoding. Both the decoding schemes can be shown to achieve the upper bound at high SNRs. The proposed scheme can be thought of as a joint physical layer, network layer code which outperforms other recently proposed analog network coding schemes. We also study extensions of the bi-directional relay for the case with asymmetric channel links and also for the multi-hop case. The result of this study shows that structured coding schemes using lattices perform close to the upper bound for the above communication system models.

Typically, MAC protocols for mobile ad hoc networks assume omnidirectional antennas, and use of directional antennas offers many advantages, such as range extension, reduced co-channel interference, increased the degree of spatial reuse, improved the throughput of networks, and reduced the transmission power. There are many wireless ad hoc MAC protocol have been proposed. However, these protocols do not provide significant improvement of network performance because they can¡¦t let nodes to support multiple simultaneous transmissions or receptions ability. In this paper, we proposed a newly designed MAC protocols, we used adaptive beam-forming system to reduce the co-channel interference problem, and our proposed MAC protocol will enable nodes with multiple simultaneous transmissions and receptions ability. The handshake mechanism of proposed MAC protocol is that used receiver initialize handshake mechanism such as MACA/BI. We changed the Ready-to-Receive (RTR) control packet, which was used to poll neighbor nodes to be a dual-used control packet, Ready-to-Receive-Transmission (RTRT). Our simulation results will show that our proposed MAC protocol do exploit the advantage of space division multiple access that significantly reduced the problem of poor networks throughput which caused by bottleneck nodes in wireless ad hoc networks.

¡@¡@In recent years, the trends in network communication towards mobile network .Traditional network cannot meet the need of new communication challenge. The 802.11 outperforms other new wireless network technique ¡@¡@In this paper, we assume user have wireless NIC devices with Mobile IPv6 protocol module. We use this model to build an environment and use this environment to design our Mobile IPv6 multicast simulation. We do these for two reasons, (1)To analyze how to use multicast over Mobile IPv6 wireless network. (2)To design an experimentation for multicast over wireless LAN. After we get results of the experimentation, we could know why wireless network does not have better quality than wired LAN. ¡@¡@During our implementation, we have a high latency problem and try to solve it by our program. After our improvement, average latency reduces to 27.77% and miss rate reduces to 33.07%. ¡@¡@Our implementation not only provide some useful information when some one need to build Mobile IPv6 environment but also give a solution for solving handover latency problem.

The aim of this study is to combine the basic concepts of mechanics on drill string which are related to directional drilling, thus finding a less complicated and more economical way for drilling directional wells. Slick BHA, which has no stabilizers attached and single stabilizer BHA are analyzed through previously derived formulas gathered from the literature that are rearranged for this study. An actual directional well is redrilled theoretically with a slick BHA and a computer program is assembled for calculating the side force and direction of the well for single stabilizer BHA. Influence of controllable variables on drilling tendency is investigated and reported. The study will be useful for well trajectory and drill string design in accordance with the drilling phase. Also, by using available data from offset wells, drilling engineer can back-calculate the formation anisotropy index (FAI) that is often used for optimizing well trajectories and predicting drilling tendency on new wells in similar drilling conditions. After analysing the directional well data used in this study, it has been concluded that the well could be drilled without a steerable tool if the kick of point (KOP) is not a shallower depth. If the KOP is kept similar, the same curvature could not be achieved without a steerable tool.

On the subject of what affect voters¡¦ vote choice, political scientists for a long time emphasize three answers: party identification, candidate orientation, and issue orientation. About issue orientation, Rational Choice Theory assumes that human are rational pursuing maximizing self- interests. When voters are making their vote decisions, they would observe the issues positions of competing parties or candidates, comparing with their own positions, and then vote the party or the candidate who can represent their own positions best. Spatial Theory, from Rational Choice Theory, takes those abstract issue positions into some issue space. Both the issue positions of voters and parties could be presented by some points in the space, and the length and direction between the points can represent the differences between issue positions. There are several different models in Spatial Theory, and different models advocate different ways about how voters use the points in issue space to form their evaluations to competing parties or candidates. In this paper, we take the viewpoints of Spatial Theory to research the issue voting behavior of Taiwanese voters. First, we try to know the spatial distribution of voters¡¦ issue positions. Then we inspect the association between voters¡¦ social back- ground elements and issue position. Finally, we test three models of Spatial Theory, proximity model, directional model, and RM mixed model, to know how Taiwanese voters use issue positions to form their party-evaluation.