<p>The purpose of this qualitative study has been; how social bonds are interlaced between the social worlds contained within the analytical division of “outside Internet” and “within Internet”. What happens with the social bond as the individual oscillate between this analytic bisection? This purpose raises important questions of the use of Internet in everyday life.</p><p>A new stance is taken toward studying the Internets integration into everyday life. The focus is adjusted to the importance of emotions. Emotions of pride and shame will be treated as the signals of social bonds state and will indicate the resistance or openness of this integration. Goffmans theory on face-work will be used as a complement. A cognitive approach on social bonds will assist the emotional approach. This is interwoven with a perspective for understanding Internet as a medium in form rather than only to focus on the “content”.</p><p>The conclusion consists of a required consistency between the quality of the social bond on the Internet and outside the Internet. The fear of inconsistency had to do with a threat of loss of face, not to come in conflict with established norms from outside the Internet. Development of close and intimate social bonds on the Internet that didn’t have a counterpart or was in inconsistency with the social bond outside Internet, lead to shame that threatened the social bond. The integration of Internet in everyday life is therefore not accomplished. Still, a new generation with instant access to the Internet is to be primary socialized under new conditions.</p>

This thesis is concerned with multigraphs and their complexity which is defined and quantified by the distribution of edge multiplicities. Two random multigraph models are considered.  The first model is random stub matching (RSM) where the edges are formed by randomly coupling pairs of stubs according to a fixed stub multiplicity sequence. The second model is obtained by independent edge assignments (IEA) according to a common probability distribution over the edge sites. Two different methods for obtaining an approximate IEA model from an RSM model are also presented. In Paper I, multigraphs are analyzed with respect to structure and complexity by using entropy and joint information. The main results include formulae for numbers of graphs of different kinds and their complexity. The local and global structure of multigraphs under RSM are analyzed in Paper II. The distribution of multigraphs under RSM is shown to depend on a single complexity statistic. The distributions under RSM and IEA are used for calculations of moments and entropies, and for comparisons by information divergence. The main results include new formulae for local edge probabilities and probability approximation for simplicity of an RSM multigraph. In Paper III, statistical tests of a simple or composite IEA hypothesis are performed using goodness-of-fit measures. The results indicate that even for very small number of edges, the null distributions of the test statistics under IEA have distributions that are  well approximated by their asymptotic χ2-distributions. Paper IV contains the multigraph algorithms that are used for numerical calculations in Papers I-III.

The purpose of this qualitative study has been; how social bonds are interlaced between the social worlds contained within the analytical division of “outside Internet” and “within Internet”. What happens with the social bond as the individual oscillate between this analytic bisection? This purpose raises important questions of the use of Internet in everyday life. A new stance is taken toward studying the Internets integration into everyday life. The focus is adjusted to the importance of emotions. Emotions of pride and shame will be treated as the signals of social bonds state and will indicate the resistance or openness of this integration. Goffmans theory on face-work will be used as a complement. A cognitive approach on social bonds will assist the emotional approach. This is interwoven with a perspective for understanding Internet as a medium in form rather than only to focus on the “content”. The conclusion consists of a required consistency between the quality of the social bond on the Internet and outside the Internet. The fear of inconsistency had to do with a threat of loss of face, not to come in conflict with established norms from outside the Internet. Development of close and intimate social bonds on the Internet that didn’t have a counterpart or was in inconsistency with the social bond outside Internet, lead to shame that threatened the social bond. The integration of Internet in everyday life is therefore not accomplished. Still, a new generation with instant access to the Internet is to be primary socialized under new conditions.

The purpose of this qualitative study has been; how social bonds are interlaced between thesocial worlds contained within the analytical division of “outside Internet” and “withinInternet”. What happens with the social bond as the individual oscillate between this analyticbisection? This purpose raises important questions of the use of Internet in everyday life. A new stance is taken toward studying the Internets integration into everyday life. The focusis adjusted to the importance of emotions. Emotions of pride and shame will be treated as thesignals of social bonds state and will indicate the resistance or openness of this integration.Goffmans theory on face-work will be used as a complement. A cognitive approach on socialbonds will assist the emotional approach. This is interwoven with a perspective forunderstanding Internet as a medium in form rather than only to focus on the “content”. The conclusion consists of a required consistency between the quality of the social bond onthe Internet and outside the Internet. The fear of inconsistency had to do with a threat of lossof face, not to come in conflict with established norms from outside the Internet.Development of close and intimate social bonds on the Internet that didn’t have a counterpartor was in inconsistency with the social bond outside Internet, lead to shame that threatenedthe social bond. The integration of Internet in everyday life is therefore not accomplished.Still, a new generation with instant access to the Internet is to be primary socialized undernew conditions.

Production of mutant biological molecules for understanding biological principles or as therapeutic agents has gained considerable interest recently. Synthetic genes are today being widely used for production of such molecules due to the substantial decrease in the costs associated with gene synthesis technology. Along one such line, we have engineered tRNA genes in order to dissect the effects of G:U base-pairs on the accuracy of the protein translation machinery. Our results provide greater detail into the thermodynamic interactions between tRNA molecules and an Elongation Factor protein (termed EF-Tu in bacteria and eEF1A in eukaryotes) and how these interactions influence the delivery of aminoacylated tRNAs to the ribosome. We anticipate that our studies not only shed light on the basic mechanisms of molecular machines but may also help us to develop therapeutic or novel proteins that contain unnatural amino acids. Further, the manipulation of the translation machinery holds promise for the development of new methods to understand the origins of life. Along another line, we have used the power of synthetic biology to experimentally validate an evolutionary model. We exploited the functional diversity contained within the EF-Tu/eEF1A gene family to experimentally validate the model of evolution termed ‘heterotachy’. Heterotachy refers to a switch in a site’s mutational rate class. For instance, a site in a protein sequence may be invariant across all bacterial homologs while that same site may be highly variable across eukaryotic homologs. Such patterns imply that the selective constraints acting on this site differs between bacteria and eukaryotes. Despite intense efforts and large interest in understanding these patterns, no studies have experimentally validated these concepts until now. In the present study, we analyzed EF-Tu/eEF1A gene family members between bacteria and eukaryotes to identify heterotachous patterns (also called Type-I functional divergence). We applied statistical tests to identify sites possibly responsible for biomolecular functional divergence between EF-Tu and eEF1A. We then synthesized protein variants in the laboratory to validate our computational predictions. The results demonstrate for the first time that the identification of heterotachous sites can be specifically implicated in functional divergence among homologous proteins. In total, this work supports an evolutionary synthetic biology paradigm that in one direction uses synthetic molecules to better understand the mechanisms and constraints governing biomolecular behavior while in another direction uses principles of molecular sequence evolution to generate novel biomolecules that have utility for industry and/or biomedicine.

<p>In the modern sensing environment, large numbers of sensor tasking decisions must be made using an increasingly diverse and powerful suite of sensors in order to best fulfill mission objectives in the presence of situationally-varying resource constraints. Sensor management algorithms allow the automation of some or all of the sensor tasking process, meaning that sensor management approaches can either assist or replace a human operator as well as ensure the safety of the operator by removing that operator from a dangerous operational environment. Sensor managers also provide improved system performance over unmanaged sensing approaches through the intelligent control of the available sensors. In particular, information-theoretic sensor management approaches have shown promise for providing robust and effective sensor manager performance.</p><p>This work develops information-theoretic sensor managers for a general static target detection problem. Two types of sensor managers are developed. The first considers a set of discrete objects, such as anomalies identified by an anomaly detector or grid cells in a gridded region of interest. The second considers a continuous spatial region in which targets may be located at any point in continuous space. In both types of sensor managers, the sensor manager uses a Bayesian, probabilistic framework to model the environment and tasks the sensor suite to make new observations that maximize the expected information gain for the system. The sensor managers are compared to unmanaged sensing approaches using simulated data and using real data from landmine detection and unexploded ordnance (UXO) discrimination applications, and it is demonstrated that the sensor managers consistently outperform the unmanaged approaches, enabling targets to be detected more quickly using the sensor managers. The performance improvement represented by the rapid detection of targets is of crucial importance in many static target detection applications, resulting in higher rates of advance and reduced costs and resource consumption in both military and civilian applications.</p> / Dissertation

Labyrinth seals are often utilized in locations where contact seals cannot be utilized due to the large displacements of the rotating shaft. The performance evaluation of a labyrinth seal is very important to make sure that optimum performance of turbomachinery is attained. Performance parameters such as carryover coefficient, discharge coefficient were evaluated for a see through triangular tooth on stator labyrinth seal. This computational study investigates how flow conditions and seal parameter variations for see through tooth on stator triangular cavity labyrinth seals affect the value of the carryover coefficient and discharge coefficient. A Finite volume CFD commercial code was used to accomplish the above study. The influence of Reynolds number, rotational speed, seal radial clearance, pitch, tooth angle, tooth width are considered using the finite volume method of computational fluid dynamics. It was found that Reynolds number, high shaft speed and clearance have a significant effect on the carryover coefficient and the discharge coefficient. Clearance is the major influential parameter to be considered among all seal geometric parameters to optimize an ideal seal.

This thesis is an attempt to reassess the long debated issues of economic history from the perspective of institutional economics. Besides examining different approaches to technology and its impact on economic and social life, it analyzes the role of institutions in history. It discusses the institutional interpretations of the critical developments of economic history such as, the Industrial Revolution and the Great Divergence, with an emphasis on differences between the two scholarly traditions, namely, the Original Institutional Economics and the New Institutional Economics. Although the arguments of New Institutionalists concerning the role of technology in history have been effectively incorporated into the economic history research, the potential contributions of the Original Institutional Economics to the study of economic history have remained for the most part unexplored. The aim of this thesis is to demonstrate the relevance and importance of original institutional analysis with respect to technology and economic history.

À l'échelle macroscopique, le transport d'un composant d'un mélange fluide dans un milieu poreux est décrit par des flux advectif, diffusif et dispersif. Ces deux derniers peuvent être formulés en utilisant les tenseurs de diffusion et de dispersion homogénéisés. Nous nous intéressons d'abord au cas monophasique où le milieu est saturé par un liquide incompressible. En utilisant la technique de développement asymptotique à double échelle, le champ de vitesse est d'abord obtenu en résolvant le problème de Stokes à l'échelle microscopique, puis le champ de vitesse est utilisé pour résoudre un problème d'advection-diffusion vectoriel dont la solution permet d'évaluer les tenseurs de diffusion et de dispersion. Nous considérons une approximation par éléments finis des problèmes posés à l'échelle microscopique dont nous effectuons une analyse numérique complète. Dans le cas du problème de Stokes, nous comparons trois types d'éléments finis en fonction de la qualité de la divergence du champ de vitesse discret. A titre d'application, nous calculons les valeurs des tenseurs de diffusion et de dispersion pour des réseaux cubiques et cubiques centrés de sphères et nous étudions l'influence de l'intensité de l'advection et de la morphologie des pores sur les tenseurs. La méthodologie ci-dessus est étendue au cas diphasique où nous considérons le transport de vapeur en équilibre avec des ménisques liquides localisés dans les pores. Nous mettons en évidence l'influence de la concentration de vapeur et de la taille des pores dans l'équilibre liquide-vapeur. Des simulations sur des réseaux cubiques et cubiques centrés de sphères fournissent les coefficients des tenseurs de diffusion et de dispersion. Enfin, un problème de transport macroscopique est résolu afin d'étudier les effets non-linéaires dus au caractère multi-échelles du problème.

Change in gene expression is a powerful tool for evolution, because seemingly small expression changes can contribute important steps towards adaptation without necessarily affecting the whole organism. There is still much to learn about how gene expression evolves on genome- and population-wide levels, especially in non-model organisms. This thesis addresses some important questions in gene expression evolution via the quantitative measurement of RNA and protein levels in birds. First, I confirmed the state of incomplete dosage compensation in birds by sequencing the transcriptome of collared flycatchers (Ficedula albicollis). I showed that pleiotropy governs the evolution of expression male-bias from the Z chromosome. Sex-linked genes in females were more highly expressed than half the male expression level, indicative of a partial up-regulation. A comparison with data from ostrich (Struthio camelus), a bird with non-degenerated sex chromosomes, showed that sex-linked expression male-bias evolved following sex chromosome degradation. Second, using a combination of RNA sequencing and proteome mass spectrometry in chicken (Gallus gallus), I asked whether complete dosage compensation was achieved through regulation at translation. I showed that this was not the case and that incomplete dosage compensation extends to the protein level in birds. In addition, sex-linked genes showed more often an increased amount of regulation at translational level than autosomal genes. Third, I investigated gene expression divergence between collared and pied flycatchers (Ficedula hypoleuca) using RNA sequencing in multiple tissues and individuals. Tissues differed in the degree of expression variance and in the number of divergent genes, which I identified using expression QST. Variance within species was negatively correlated with expression breadth and protein interactivity, indicating that evolutionary constraints act predominantly within interbreeding populations. Among genes unique to one of the species, I identified one gene, DPP7, falling into a large genomic deletion fixed in pied flycatchers. Fourth, I investigated allele-specific expression (ASE) in the two flycatcher populations. ASE was identified from genetic variants within transcripts using RNA sequencing reads. We developed a Bayesian negative binomial approach that gained statistical power by estimating expression variance from combined SNPs within a transcript and overdispersion from the whole dataset.