Santrauka Šiame darbe analizuojami arbitražo teisinės prigimties, arbitražinio susitarimo bei sprendimo esmė bei probleminiai klausimai, pateikiama užsienio arbitražų sprendimo pripažinimo procedūros ir užsienio arbitražų sprendimo nepripažinimo pagrindų problematika, tiriami užsienio arbitražų sprendimo pripažinimo ir apeliacijos (revizijos) panašumai, skirtumai bei tarpusavio santykis. Remiantis darbo eigoje atliktos analizės rezultatais, atskleidžiami Lietuvos bei pasirinktų užsienio valstybių užsienio arbitražų sprendimo pripažinimo teisinio reglamentavimo, teismų praktikos panašumai ir skirtumai, identifikuojamos problemos ir pateikiamas galimas jų sprendimas. Atskirų valstybių nacionalinių įstatymų užsienio arbitražų sprendimo pripažinimo klausimų reglamentavimo įvairovė bei nevieninga teismų praktika sąlygoja analizuojamų problemų gajumą. Daugiausia darbe analizuojamas 1958m Niujorko konvencijos ir Lietuvos komercinio arbitražo įstatymo nuostatų taikymas užsienio arbitražų sprendimo pripažinimo srityje. Vadovaujantis atlikta teisine analize, galima daryti išvadą, kad norint harmonizuoti užsienio arbitražų sprendimo pripažinimo reglamentavimą, reikalingas ne tik vieningas užsienio arbitražų sprendimo pripažinimo nuostatų aktas- Niujorko konvencija, bet ir ją įgyvendinantis, tarptautiniu lygiu priimtas, Niujorko konvencijos įgyvendinimo aktas, kuris leistų suvienodinti nacionalinius įstatymus ir sudarytų tinkamas sąlygas užsienio arbitražų sprendimo pripažinimo vieningai... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / Summary The Recognition of Foreign Arbitral Awards and Relation with Appeal (Revision) This article analyses the nature of arbitrage, the essence of arbitral agreement and decision. The main issues presented are problematic points of recognition procedure and grounds of disclaimer of foreign arbitral awards. Furthermore, while using comparative method the aim of this article was to disclose and investigate similarities, differences and relations between foreign arbitral award recognition and appeal (revision). According to the results of the analysis, there were discovered similarities and differences of Lithuanian and selected foreign countries court rulings adopted in the cases of recognition of arbitral awards. Therefore, the appropriate problems were identified and possible solutions of recent regulation were offered. In Addition, the vitality of these problems are influenced due to variety of national regulations and disunity of judicial practice of every single foreign country. Analysis of the rules of the New York convention and The Law of commercial arbitration of Republic of Lithuania as well as application of them is the central topic of this article. Following the legal analysis of this article, it is concluded that the harmonizing purpose of recognition of foreign arbitral award regulations determines the New York convention cannot secure appropriate legal practice as international implementation and enactment of this convention is necessary due to harmonize... [to full text]

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The Simple View of Reading (SVR; Gough & Tunmer, 1986) provides a conceptual framework for describing the processes involved when readers comprehend text and strong evidence for the SVR comes from factor analytic studies showing dissociation between decoding and comprehension skills. The aim of the present study was to investigate if pre-decoding and comprehension components exist in Canadian English-speaking pre-readers (n = 36) with the use of Principal Components Analysis and to create a parent literacy questionnaire that contains parent literacy practices that may predict children's pre-decoding and comprehension skills. All children were administered a battery of pre-reading measures and parents completed a literacy survey. Principal Components Analysis demonstrated that listening comprehension and pre-decoding measures loaded as distinct components. The findings provide support for the SVR framework. No clear patterns were identified between parent literacy practices and children's pre-reading skills. Further work is needed with a larger and more representative sample.

Image-based face recognition has attained wide applications during the past decades in commerce and law enforcement areas, such as mug shot database matching, identity authentication, and access control. Existing face recognition techniques (e.g., Eigenface, Fisherface, and Elastic Bunch Graph Matching, etc.), however, do not perform well when the following case inevitably exists. The case is that, due to some variations in imaging conditions, e.g., pose and illumination changes, face images of the same person often have different appearances. These variations make face recognition techniques much challenging. With this concern in mind, the objective of my research is to develop robust face recognition techniques against variations. This thesis addresses two main variation problems in face recognition, i.e., pose and illumination variations. To improve the performance of face recognition systems, the following methods are proposed: (1) a face feature extraction and representation method using non-uniformly selected Gabor convolution features, (2) an illumination normalization method using adaptive region-based image enhancement for face recognition under variable illumination conditions, (3) an eye detection method in gray-scale face images under various illumination conditions, and (4) a virtual pose generation method for pose-invariant face recognition. The details of these proposed methods are explained in this thesis. In addition, we conduct a comprehensive survey of the existing face recognition methods. Future research directions are pointed out.

Paradoxical results on object-recognition delayed nonmatching-to-sample (DNMS) tasks have been found in monkeys and rats that receive either partial, ischemia-induced hippocampal lesions or complete hippocampal ablation. Ischemia results in severe DNMS impairments, which have been attributed to circumscribed CA1 cell loss. However, ablation studies indicate that the hippocampus plays only a minimal role in the performance of the DNMS task. Two hypotheses have been proposed to account for these discrepant findings (Bachevalier & Mishkin, 1989). First, the "hippocampal interference" hypothesis posits that following ischemia, the partially damaged hippocampus may disrupt activity in extrahippocampal structures that are important for object-recognition memory. Second, previously undetected ischemia-induced extrahippocampal damage may be responsible for the DNMS impairments attributed to CA1 cell loss. To test the "hippocampal interference" hypothesis, the effect of partial NMDAinduced lesions of the dorsal hippocampus were investigated on DNMS performance in rats. These lesions damaged much of the same area, the CA1, as did ischemia; but did so without depriving the entire forebrain of oxygen, thereby reducing the possibility of extrahippocampal damage. In Experiment 1, rats were trained on the DNMS task prior to receiving an NMDA-lesion. Postoperatively, these rats reacquired the nonmatching rule at a rate equivalent to controls and were unimpaired in performance at delays up to 300 s. In Experiment 2, naive rats were given NMDA-lesions and then trained on DNMS. These rats acquired the DNMS rule at a rate equivalent to controls and performed normally at delays up to 300 s. These findings suggest that interference from a partially damaged hippocampus cannot account for the ischemia-induced DNMS impairments and that they are more likely produced by extrahippocampal neuropathology. In Experiment 3, rats from the previous study were tested on the Morris water-maze. Compared to sham-lesioned animals, rats with partial lesions of the dorsal hippocampus were impaired in the acquisition of the water-maze task. Thus, subtotal NMDA-lesions of the hippocampus impaired spatial memory while leaving nonspatial memory intact. Mumby et al. (1992b) suggested that the ischemia-induced extrahippocampal damage underlying the DNMS deficits is mediated or produced by the postischemic hippocampus. To test this idea, preoperatively trained rats in Experiment 4 were subject to cerebral ischemia followed within 1hr by hippocampal aspiration lesions. It was hypothesized that ablation soon after ischemia would block the damage putatively produced by the postischemic hippocampus and thereby prevent the development of postoperative DNMS deficits. Unlike "ischemia-only" rats, the rats with the combined lesion were able to reacquire the nonmatching rule at a normal rate and performed normally at delays up to 300 s. Thus, hippocampectomy soon after ischemia eliminated the pathogenic process that lead to ischemia-induced DNMS deficits. Experiment 5 investigated the role of ischemiainduced CA1 cell death as a factor in the production of extrahippocampal neuropathology. Naive rats were given NMDA-lesions of the dorsal hippocampus followed 3 weeks later by cerebral ischemia. If the ischemia-induced CA1 neurotoxicity is responsible for producing extrahippocampal damage then preischemic ablation should attenuate this process and prevent the development of DNMS impairments. This did not occur: Rats with the combined lesion were as impaired as the "ischemia-only" rats in the acquisition of the DNMS task. This suggests that the ischemia-induced pathogenic processes that result in extrahippocampal neuropathology comprise more than CA1 neurotoxicity. The findings presented in this thesis are consistent with the idea that ischemiainduced DNMS deficits in rats are the result of extrahippocampal damage mediated or produced by the postischemic hippocampus. The discussion focuses on three main points: 1) How might the post-ischemic hippocampus be involved in the production of extrahippocampal neuropathology? 2) In what brain region(s) might this damage be occurring? 3) What anatomical, molecular, or functional neuropathology might ischemia produce in extrahippocampal brain regions? The results are also discussed in terms of a specialized role for the hippocampus in mnemonic functions and the recently emphasized importance of the rhinal cortex in object-recognition memory.

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Emotion states greatly influence many areas in our daily lives, such as: learning, decision making and interaction with others. Therefore, the ability to detect and recognize one’s emotional states is essential in intelligence Human Machine Interaction (HMI). In this thesis, a pattern classification framework was developed to sense and communicate emo- tion changes expressed by the Central Nervous System (CNS) through the use of EEG signals. More specifically, an EEG-based subject-dependent affect recognition system was developed to quantitatively measure and categorize three affect states: Positively excited, neutral and negatively excited. Several existing feature extraction algorithms and classifiers were researched, analyzed and evaluated through a series of classification simulations using a publicly available emotion-based EEG database. Simulation results were presented followed by an interpretation discussion. The findings in this thesis can be useful for the design of affect sensitive applications such as augmented means of communication for severely disabled people that cannot directly express their emotions. Furthermore, we have shown that with significantly reduced number of channels, classification rates maintained a level that is feasible for emotion recognition. Thus current HMI paradigms to integrate consumer electronics such as smart hand-held device with commercially available EEG headsets is promising and will significantly broaden the application cases.

The objective of this thesis is to synthesize and examine the photophysical and structural properties of 3-(pyridin-2-yl)imidazo[1,5-a]pyridine (P) and 3-(pyridin-2-yl)imidazo [1,5-a]pyridine (IQ) based cations and their potential use as DNA binding agents. The P ligand was aimed to compare with the IQ ligand as they have similar structures. Two series of compounds were synthesized; one series comprising organic cations, including PC2, PC3, PC4, IQC2 and IQC3. The other one contains ruthenium complexes Ru(bpy)2P, Ru(bpy)2IQ and Ru(P)3). Compounds were prepared as Cl-, Br- and/or PF6- salts. All compounds were characterized by NMR, UV-vis, luminescescence and electrochemistry, when applicable. The results show that P and IQ based organic cations have similar electrochemical properties, and may be candidates for guanine photo-oxidation. However, [Ru(bpy)2P](PF6)2, [Ru(bpy)2IQ](PF6)2 and [Ru(P)3](PF6)2 do not seem to have reduction potentials in the excited states that are appropriate for nucleic base photo-oxidation. / Thesis (Master, Chemistry) -- Queen's University, 2009-09-01 11:58:42.728