The economic impact of legalized marijuana has been massive, but does legal marijuana have the impact to create new types of urban spaces? The legalization of formerly illicit vices has created urban spaces thematically constructed around vice, such as The Strip in Las Vegas (gambling) or The Wallen in Amsterdam (prostitution). This paper suggests that legalized marijuana similarly has the potential to construct vice-themed urban spaces in a post-industrial economic paradigm defined by consumption. Using Denver’s South Broadway (an urban area that has been rebranded as “The Green Mile” due to the outgrowth of marijuana businesses in the area) as the foundation for the analysis, this paper uses qualitative methodologies including historical and content analysis and interviews to examine how marijuana becomes normalized through legalization and resituated for mass consumption, in turn creating the possibility for the construction of thematic urban spaces.

The development of chromatin conformation capture technology has opened new avenues of study into the 3D structure and function of the genome. Chromatin structure is known to influence gene regulation, and differences in structure are now emerging as a mechanism of regulation between, e.g., cell differentiation and disease vs. normal states. Hi-C sequencing technology now provides a way to study the 3D interactions of the chromatin over the whole genome. However, like all sequencing technologies, Hi-C suffers from several forms of bias stemming from both the technology and the DNA sequence itself. Several normalization methods have been developed for normalizing individual Hi-C datasets, but little work has been done on developing joint normalization methods for comparing two or more Hi-C datasets. To make full use of Hi-C data, joint normalization and statistical comparison techniques are needed to carry out experiments to identify regions where chromatin structure differs between conditions. We develop methods for the joint normalization and comparison of two Hi-C datasets, which we then extended to more complex experimental designs. Our normalization method is novel in that it makes use of the distance-dependent nature of chromatin interactions. Our modification of the Minus vs. Average (MA) plot to the Minus vs. Distance (MD) plot allows for a nonparametric data-driven normalization technique using loess smoothing. Additionally, we present a simple statistical method using Z-scores for detecting differentially interacting regions between two datasets. Our initial method was published as the Bioconductor R package HiCcompare [http://bioconductor.org/packages/HiCcompare/](http://bioconductor.org/packages/HiCcompare/). We then further extended our normalization and comparison method for use in complex Hi-C experiments with more than two datasets and optional covariates. We extended the normalization method to jointly normalize any number of Hi-C datasets by using a cyclic loess procedure on the MD plot. The cyclic loess normalization technique can remove between dataset biases efficiently and effectively even when several datasets are analyzed at one time. Our comparison method implements a generalized linear model-based approach for comparing complex Hi-C experiments, which may have more than two groups and additional covariates. The extended methods are also available as a Bioconductor R package [http://bioconductor.org/packages/multiHiCcompare/](http://bioconductor.org/packages/multiHiCcompare/). Finally, we demonstrate the use of HiCcompare and multiHiCcompare in several test cases on real data in addition to comparing them to other similar methods (https://doi.org/10.1002/cpbi.76).

<p>Researchers tend to use their own or favourite gene names in scientific literature, even though there are official names. Some names may even be used for more than one gene. This leads to problems with ambiguity when automatically mining biological literature. To disambiguate the gene names, gene normalization is used. In this thesis, we look into an existing gene normalization system, and develop a new method to find gene candidates for the ambiguous genes. For the new method a lexicon is created, using information about the gene names, symbols and synonyms from three different databases. The gene mention found in the scientific literature is used as input for a search in this lexicon, and all genes in the lexicon that match the mention are returned as gene candidates for that mention. These candidates are then used in the system's disambiguation step. Results show that the new method gives a better over all result from the system, with an increase in precision and a small decrease in recall.</p>

<p>The aim with this study was to illustrate communicative meetings between people that are visiting and working in two different associations for people with intellectual disabilities. The method we used was interviews. To find out the meaning of the associations for the members creating of identity, participation and self esteem we asked them if they felt stigmatized and if they thought that the associations reduced that feeling and how the pedagogy cooperation between them selves and the coaches were working. The results of the study showed that the members of the association experienced that it had a positive influence according to their creating of identity, participation and self esteem. The members felt that coaching and the pedagogy cooperation had both positive and negative aspects but mostly it worked well.</p>

<p>The study is focused on the interactional strategies used by interviewees in radio discourse, which are face-saving, relationship-securing and cooperative strategies. The interviewees’ speech is analysed according to their use of the selected discourse operators, which are the hedge <em>you know</em>, the personal pronoun <em>you</em>, personal address as well as greeting questions, information-seeking, reassuring and tag-questions. The results turned out to be almost similar to previous research. The face-saving strategy is shown to be male-dominant, while the relationship-securing and the cooperative strategies proved to have female dominance. The results are contrasted and reviewed by using two different kinds of normalization. The normalization is done both according to the percentage of the selected items and the percentage of the space used for every selected item and strategy.</p>

The aim with this study was to illustrate communicative meetings between people that are visiting and working in two different associations for people with intellectual disabilities. The method we used was interviews. To find out the meaning of the associations for the members creating of identity, participation and self esteem we asked them if they felt stigmatized and if they thought that the associations reduced that feeling and how the pedagogy cooperation between them selves and the coaches were working. The results of the study showed that the members of the association experienced that it had a positive influence according to their creating of identity, participation and self esteem. The members felt that coaching and the pedagogy cooperation had both positive and negative aspects but mostly it worked well.

This thesis examined the evidence, policy decision-making, and implementation of HPV vaccination in Canada as a case study to explore normalization versus individualized decision making in public health programs. Mixed methods were used: a systematic review, content analyses and policy document analysis. Overall, the scientific evidence supported an effect of vaccination against HPV infection and precancerous cervical lesions, but evidence regarding cervical cancer incidence or mortality is lacking. Scientific and medical communities appeared optimistic about the vaccine, but cautious about its readiness for routine implementation. Policy decision-making was initially cautious, but shifted towards active program implementation, possibly related to the availability of federal funding. The educational materials and media coverage both sent clearly normalizing messages about HPV vaccination. The discussion suggests that HPV vaccination might be more suited to an individualized than population approach, but many factors coincided to promote its implementation, in Canada, within a traditional public health model.

In this dissertation, we propose new design guidelines to reduce the amount of redundancy that databases carry. We use techniques from information theory to define a measure that evaluates a database design based on the worst possible redundancy carried in the instances. We then continue by revisiting the design problem of relational data with functional dependencies, and measure the lowest price, in terms of redundancy, that has to be paid to guarantee a dependency-preserving normalization for all schemas. We provide a formal justification for the Third Normal Form (3NF) by showing that we can achieve this lowest price by doing a good 3NF normalization. We then study the design problem for XML documents that are views of relational data. We show that we can design a redundancy-free XML representation for some relational schemas while preserving all data dependencies. We present an algorithm for converting a relational schema to such an XML design. We finally study the design problem for XML documents that are stored in relational databases. We look for XML design criteria that ensure a relational storage with low redundancy. First, we characterize XML designs that have a redundancy-free relational storage. Then we propose a restrictive condition for XML functional dependencies that guarantees a low redundancy for data values in the relational storage.

Age-model derived sediment mass accumulation rates (MARs) are consistently higher than 230Th-normalized MARs in the Equatorial Pacific Ocean during the past 25 ka. The offset, being highest in the Panama Basin, suggests sediment redistribution in this region is prominent. I test the hypothesis that downslope transport of sediments from topographically highs that surround the Panama Basin is the cause of higher-than-expected xs230Th inventories in the deeper parts of the basin. There is little difference in xs230Th inventories between the highest and lowest reaches of the basin suggesting that the topographic highs did not serve as a source of xs230Th. A spatial analysis suggests that there may be an enhanced scavenging of xs230Th closest to the equator in productive waters. To examine whether lateral mixing of productive equatorial waters with adjacent waters delivers xs230Th to the Panama Basin, I measured dissolved 230Th in eight deep-water casts within the Guatemala, Panama, and Peru Basins along a meridional transect at ~86°W. Below 1000 m, the Panama Basin shows the highest deficit (~50%) of 230Th in deep waters assuming a reversible exchange of 230Th between dissolved and sinking particulate matter. Peru Basin waters have a larger range of dissolved 230Th concentrations (7.9-16.5 fg/kg) than that within Panama Basin waters (5.7-7.1 fg/kg). There is a progressive decrease, suggesting advection, in average dissolved deep-water (>1000 m) 230Th concentrations from the southernmost sites in the Peru Basin toward the Panama Basin. My calculations suggest that advected 230Th is between 15-30% of the total 230Th being produced within waters of the Panama Basin itself. In the Panama Basin, the averaged biogenic barium and opal MARs suggest that productivity was greater during the Holocene (0-13000 years) than that during the last glacial (13000-25000 years) suggesting higher productivity during the Holocene. Uauth, however, is higher in sediments deposited during the last glacial than in those deposited during the Holocene, suggesting that low bottom water oxygen contents rather than respiration of organic matter drives Uauth enrichment. This oxygen depletion during the last glacial suggests that bottom waters were enriched in respired carbon, which, in turn, could be a driver of lower glacial atmosphere pCO2 values.

In this dissertation, we propose new design guidelines to reduce the amount of redundancy that databases carry. We use techniques from information theory to define a measure that evaluates a database design based on the worst possible redundancy carried in the instances. We then continue by revisiting the design problem of relational data with functional dependencies, and measure the lowest price, in terms of redundancy, that has to be paid to guarantee a dependency-preserving normalization for all schemas. We provide a formal justification for the Third Normal Form (3NF) by showing that we can achieve this lowest price by doing a good 3NF normalization. We then study the design problem for XML documents that are views of relational data. We show that we can design a redundancy-free XML representation for some relational schemas while preserving all data dependencies. We present an algorithm for converting a relational schema to such an XML design. We finally study the design problem for XML documents that are stored in relational databases. We look for XML design criteria that ensure a relational storage with low redundancy. First, we characterize XML designs that have a redundancy-free relational storage. Then we propose a restrictive condition for XML functional dependencies that guarantees a low redundancy for data values in the relational storage.