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In this paper two different models for forecasting the number of monthly departing passengers from Sweden to any international destination are developed and compared. The Swedish transport agency produces forecasts on a yearly basis, where net export is the only explanatory variable controlled for in the latest report. More profound studies have shown a relevance of controlling for variables such as unemployment rate, oil price and exchange rates. Due to the high seasonality within passenger flows, these forecasts are based on monthly or quarterly data. This paper shows that a seasonal autoregressive integrated moving average model with exogenous input outperforms the benchmark model forecast in seven out of nine months. Thus, controlling for oil price, the SEK/EUR exchange rate and the occurrence of Easter reduces the mean absolute percentage error of the forecasts from 3,27 to 2,83 % on Swedish data.

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The characteristics and applications of a novel design of a thin film photocontactor based on the principle of irradiating a 'water bell' with ultraviolet (UV) light a,e considered in this work. Measurements of UV doses received by the liquid films in single passes were made using both actinometric and bioassay-based methods. The chemical actinometer employed was potassium ferrioxalate (K,Fe(C,o.l,)) and the microorganisms used in the bioassay were Pseudomonas stutzeri (mRG) and a repair-deficient strain of Escherichia coli (NCIMB 11190). Good agreement was obtained between the doses measured using actinometry and the E. coli-based bioassay. At higher doses, good agreement was also obtained for the dose estimates made using actinometry and the Ps. stutzeri bioassay. In addition, a hydrodynamic water bell model, previously developed in the literature, was combined with a UV intensity model to predict UV doses with generally good results. Microbially contaminated metal working fluids were identified as a suitable medium for disinfection using the thin film contactor because they are not treatable using conventional UV contactors, and because the systems employed in industry vary widely in scale. Batches of contaminated emulsion ranging in volume from 200 to 1000 L were successfully disinfected. Representative members of the microbial population were isolated, and their changing status throughout treatment recorded. Against expectations, the population showed no capacity for the post-irradiation repair of UV-induced damage. A simplified disinfection model was established in order to model the treatment of batches of contaminated metal working fluids. Preliminary predictions made using a combination of experimental data for the population as a whole and that for individual species coupled with that generated using the hydrodynamic bell model, gave encouraging results.

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Vaccination against the Influenza A virus (IAV) is often an important and critical task for much of the population, as IAV causes yearly epidemics, and can cause even deadlier pandemics. Designing the vaccine requires an understanding of the current major circulating strains of Influenza, as well as an understanding of how those strains could change over time to become either less harmful or more deadly, or simply die out completely. An error in the prediction process can lead to a non-immunized population at risk of epidemics, or even a pandemic. Presented here is a posterior predictive approach to generate emerging influenza strains based on a realistic genomic model that incorporates natural features of viral evolution such as selection and recombination. Also introduced is a sequence sampling scheme to relieve the computational burden of the posterior predictive analysis by clustering sequences based on their pairwise similarity. Finally, the impact of “evolutionary accidents” that take the form of bursts of evolution and or of recombination on the predictive power of our procedure is tested. An analysis of the impact of these bursts is carried out in a retrospective study that focuses on the unexpected emergence of a new H3N2 strain in the 2007-08 influenza season. Measuring the R2 values of both pairwise and patristic distances, the model reaches a predictive power of ∼40%, but is not able to simulate the emergence of the target Brisbane/10/2007 sequence with a high probability. The inclusion of “evolutionary accidents” improved the algorithm’s ability to predict HA sequences, but the prediction power of the NA gene remained low.

This thesis examines the special case in which a newly developed dynamic measurement system must be characterized when an accepted standard qualification procedure does not yet exist. In order to characterize this type of system, both physical experimentation and computational simulation methods will be used to build trust in this measurement system. This process of establishing credibility will be presented in the form of a proposed methodology. This proposed methodology will utilize verification and validation methods that apply within the simulation community as the foundation for this multi-faceted approach. The methodology will establish the relationships between four key elements: physical experimentation, conceptual modeling, computational simulations, and data processing. The combination of these activities will provide a comprehensive characterization study of the system. In order to illustrate the methodology, a case study was performed on a dynamic force measurement system owned by Sandia National Laboratories. This system was designed to measure the force required to pull a specimen to failure in tension at a user-input velocity. The results of the case study found that there was a significant measurement error occurring as the pull event involved large break loads and high velocities. 100 pull events were recorded using an experimental test assembly. The highest load conditions discovered a force measurement error of over 100%. Using computational simulations, this measurement error was reduced to less than 10%. These simulations were designed to account for the inertial effects that skew the piezoelectric load cells. This thesis displays the raw data and the corrected data for five different pull settings. The simulations designed using the methodology significantly reduced the error in all five pull settings. In addition to the force analysis, the simulations provide insight into the complete system performance. This includes the analysis of the maximum system velocity as well as the analysis of several proposed design changes. The findings suggest that the dynamic measurement system has a maximum velocity of 28 fps, and that this maximum velocity is unaffected by the track length or the mass of the moving carriage.

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Environmental education is a relatively young area that can trace its roots back to the global environmental crises of the late 1960s and 1970s. Research in environmental education since this time has established the justification for its existence in the formal curriculum of schools. Less research has been conducted on the actual pedagogy of environmental education. This forms one part of the justification for this research study. The other justification for this research study is school students' objectification of the environment evidenced from the findings of a large survey of NSW school students. The objectification of the environment finding referred to students' responses that suggested that the environment was separate from them in contrast to a minority of students' responses that referred to a relational view (Loughland, Reid, Walker & Petocz, 2003). The two foci of pedagogy and students' understandings of the environment come together in the research question of this thesis, what is the relation between pedagogy and representations of the environment in environmental education? A Bernsteinian model of pedagogy, the pedagogical device, underpins the theoretical analysis of the pedagogy of environmental education in this study (Bernstein, 1990). A particular aspect of this device, the pedagogic recontextualising field, is used as a framework of analysis for the exposition of the major influences on the development of pedagogy of environmental education in NSW. Another theory of pedagogy, the NSW Quality Teaching Framework, is used to offer a performative angle on pedagogy to provide theoretical triangulation for the study. The pedagogy of environmental education was examined through a classroom ethnography with the researcher acting as a participant observer. The data were in the form of field notes, curriculum materials including children's literature, transcripts of classroom learning and products of students' learning. The analysis of the data was conducted using a variety of methods of analysis. The data were initially coded for themes that were the different representations of the environment in the pedagogy of this classroom. Further, the NSW Quality Teaching Framework (NSW DET 2003) was used as a theoretical framework of analysis in order to examine the data from the perspective of student performance in relation to current understandings of what constitutes good pedagogical practice. Next, Bernstein's model of the pedagogic device (1990) was used to analyse the data in the larger context of the social construction of knowledge in the school curriculum. This analysis incorporated Bernstein's original notions of pedagogical classification and framing (1971). This study has two main findings. First, the pedagogy of environmental education has strong classification and framing (after Bernstein 1971) that supports the objectification of the environment. Second, there is also some weak framing of the pedagogy of environmental education that generally does not support the objectification of the environment. The implications for these findings for practice are that environmental educators should be aware of deterministic curriculum that seeks to impose one view of the environment onto students. This curriculum positions the environment as an object that needs to be saved through human intervention. Further research into the pedagogy of environmental education that explores the relation of students' understandings of the environment and their relation to the epistemological and theoretical bases of pedagogy is warranted as a result of this study.