The research aims to provide an alternative working methodology from the perspective of a contemporary Chinese artist, not a calligrapher, to answer the research question: how does one create new works of calligraphy an art so burdened with historical tradition? This is practice based research; the designed pattern of study aims to test and to exemplify the relationship, and also most importantly based on the nature of the investigation and practical necessity, the strategy of the research project is implemented in a dialectical construction as the title of the thesis suggests.

Nowadays, it is of crucial importance for the manufacturing industry to be prepared for the application and understanding of autonomous mobile robots. Given this fact, educational institutions have to provide knowledge and experience to students. These autonomous mobile robots are made and controlled using different platforms and programming languages. Currently, the University of Skövde wishes to expand the range of tools to be available for building and experimenting with autonomous robots. For this purpose, this thesis project has two main goals. The first goal is finding the best available robotic platform for small scale, self-built, programmable robots. Such a platform has to include all the hardware necessary for later implementation with the software. The platform is evaluated in this thesis following different criteria. The second goal is to build a robot using the chosen platform. The robot has to perform a certain task taking advantage of its specific hardware. The development of the task has been achieved using the Robot Operative System (ROS). This thesis provides step by step instructions of how to build the platform and perform the task.

Orientador: Antônio Carlos Tavares / Banca: Roseane Corrêa Grilo / Banca: Thiago Salomão de Azevedo / Banca: Diego Correa Maia / Banca: Sandra Elisa Contri Pitton / Resumo: A falta de planejamento urbano, o aumento populacional nas áreas urbanas culminando com a ocupação de áreas inadequadas para a construção de moradias, podem ser consideradas como fatores que têm contribuído para o aumento do número de pessoas afetadas pelos chamados desastres naturais ao longo dos anos. No Brasil, inexiste uma tendência natural para fenômenos de origem tectônica, como os terremotos e vulcões, no entanto, são frequentes os registros de desastres resultantes de variabilidades climáticas e instabilidades atmosféricas, como secas, inundações e deslizamentos de terra. Dentre esses desastres, as inundações são as mais recorrentes e quando ocorrem em centros urbanos adensados, os transtornos se tornam mais graves. Em Teresina, capital do estado do Piauí, assim como em muitos municípios brasileiros, as inundações são frequentes em determinados pontos da cidade durante o período chuvoso, que vai de janeiro a maio. Diante disso, pretende-se com essa pesquisa, analisar a vulnerabilidade às inundações em Teresina, à luz das características do seu sítio urbano, das funções da cidade e seu meio ambiente, apontando as áreas com maior recorrência de episódios e o perfil da população afetada. Estudos acerca da vulnerabilidade em áreas urbanas vêm sendo, nos últimos anos, valioso instrumento utilizado por diversos estudiosos no sentido de apontar as áreas das cidades em que a população é suscetível a qualquer desastre que comprometa a sua qualidade de vida e a importância desses estudos perpassa o fato de que podem subsidiar políticas públicas que minimizem os problemas de parcelas significativas dos citadinos que estão suscetíveis aos diversos desastres. Para tanto, foram utilizados como procedimento metodológico, a construção de um referencial teórico abordando os conceitos de desastres naturais, seus tipos e ocorrências no mundo e no Brasil, bem como a aplicação de questionários... / Abstract: The lack of urban planning, the increase of the population in the urban areas culminating in the occupation of areas inadequate to build houses, can be considered as factors that have contributed to the increase in the number of people affected by the natural disasters throughout the years. In Brazil, there is no natural tendency for tectonic origin phenomenon, such as earthquakes and volcanoes, however, the records of disasters resulting from climate variability and atmospheric instability, such as droughts, floods and landslides are frequent. Among these disasters, the floods are the most recurring and when they happen in the dense urban centers, the troubles become more aggravated. In Teresina, capital of the state of Piauí, just like many other Brazilian counties, the floods are frequent in specific parts of the city during the rainy season, which goes from January to May. In view of the above, it's intended with this research, to analyze the vulnerability to floods in Teresina, by the light of the characteristics of its urban site, the functions of the city and its environment, pointing out the areas with the most recurring episodes and the profile of the affected population. Studies about the vulnerability in urban areas are becoming, in the recent years, a valuable instrument used by many scholars in order to point out the areas of the city in which the population is susceptible to any disaster that can compromise their quality of life and the importance of these studies goes through the fact that they can subsidize public policies that minimize the problems of less fortunate segments of the townspeople that are susceptible to many disasters. In order to achieve this, we used as methodological procedures the making of a theoretical referential approaching the concepts of natural disasters, their types and occurrences in the world and in Brazil, as well as the application of questionnaires in segments considered vulnerable to... / Doutor

More and more devices around us are connected to the internet and communicate to each other. This includes devices such as radon sensors. Radon is a radio active gas and is the cause of several hundred cases of lung cancer. Smart connected radon sensors can be helpful to reduce the levels of radon as they provide remote access to the user. This study examines the opportunity to connect an already existing radon sensor to the “Internet of Things”. The aim of this study has been to answer the problem “find a better solution for the IoT system and develop it”. The study was performed with a literature study of three Internet of Things platforms. This resulted in one Internet of Thing platform being used throughout the study. A database system and a system with the chosen platform was implemented and a time measurement of the different systems was performed. The study has shown that a less secured system is faster and it is also shown that the Amazon Web Service IoT Core is fast with respect to the many features offered. The study concludes that the choice of system depends on where and how the system is supposed to be implement. If the system just needs to send and store data, a regular MySQL database is enough. If the system in the future is supposed to be able to communicate with other devices, a IoT platform should be used.

Today at various locations and factories we have a lot of sensors and actuators that interact with each other and a control-unit. The control-unit is in most cases a cloud-based solution. This is in most cases a good solution. However, there is a rise in expected devices and sensors which will most likely be too much data for the existing network to handle. This paper researches if a fog-unit might be the solution to this problem. The setup of the fog-unit in the network is a unit between the cloud and the sensors and actuators. In this paper the fog-unit and sensors/actuators have been emulated on Raspberry Pi’s. The sensors are emulated using python-threads and communicate with the fog-unit using the UDP-based protocol CoAP and the fog communicates to the cloud using the TCP- based protocol MQTT. After a prototype was built it using said Raspberry Pi’s it was sent through a few measurements in the fields of bandwidth, cloud-utilization and response times. This was later compared to another setup without the fog-unit as the control setup. The result with this kind of setup was that a fog-unit lowers the cloud-utilization and use of bandwidth, however it increases the round trip time of a request from the cloud by a large amount. Which leads to the conclusion that a fog-unit in this kind of setup might be a good network solution if the response time to the cloud isn’t important.

The trait approach to personality is one of the most influential epistemological frameworks in personality psychology and underlies the development of most objective personality inventories. The Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) is amongst the most widely used operationalisations of the FFM within personality assessment (Costa and McCrae, 1992). However, recent research (Franklin, 2009; Laher, 2010) suggests that the NEO-PI-R is not wholly applicable within the South African context; as there may be inappropriate items contained within the inventory, both linguistically and culturally. Within the United States, McCrae, Costa and Martin (2004) identified the NEO-PI-R as having specific problematic items, and developed the NEO-PI-3 as a revised “more readable” version of the NEO-PI-R. Thirty-seven items were changed from the original 240 items in the NEO-PI-R to create the NEO-PI-3. However, the modifications made to the NEO-PI-3 did not address all the issues pertinent within the NEO-PI-R from a South African perspective as evidenced in Laher’s (2010) and Franklin’s (2009) studies. This study adapted the NEO-PI-3 by changing specific items informed through Franklin (2009) and Laher’s (2010) research, as well as research conducted within this study on two samples of university lectures at the University of the Witwatersrand. Forty-nine items were changed from the original 240 NEO-PI-R items, retaining 30 items changed from the NEO-PI-3, and preferring 3 of the original NEO-PI-R items to the NEO-PI-3 items. These changes were aimed at making the NEO-PI-3 a more appropriate and applicable instrument both culturally and linguistically within the South African context. This modified inventory was then administered to 175 students at the University of the Witwatersrand to test the inventory’s validity and reliability. The reliability of this modified inventory was assessed through conducting an internal consistency analysis generating alpha coefficients indicating that the inventory was indeed reliable. The construct validity of this modified inventory was assessed through an exploratory factor analysis where five factors did emerge from the analysis; concomitant with the theoretical basis of the FFM. Based on feedback from the participants, both quantitatively and qualitatively, recommendations for future research and further problematic items are identified and discussed. In terms of the reliability of the modified version of the NEO-PI-3, internal consistency coefficients produced within the study suggested that the instrument is reliable, producing moderate to good alpha values, as well as producing evidence of good construct validity. Only 17 items emerged as still being potentially problematic within the modified version of the NEO-PI-3.

Orientador: Silvia Aparecida Guarnieri Ortigoza / Banca: Antonio Cardoso Façanha / Banca: Claudete de Castro Silva Vitte / Banca: José Gilberto de Souza / Banca: Eduardo Alberto Manfredini / Resumo: As características da sociedade se refletem diretamente no arranjo espacial da cidade, na forma como as pessoas habitam, trabalham e se deslocam em seu cotidiano. Na cidade moderna, produto da economia de mercado, é comum a tentativa de aglutinação da população segundo estratos econômicos, com as pessoas buscando a proximidade com seus assemelhados. Especialmente, assemelhados econômicos, em um processo de autossegregação, que apenas se consolida, mas nunca finda, pois em função da constante necessidade de multiplicação do capital, novas necessidades são criadas e essa elite segregada se desloca em busca de novos bairros, novos serviços, novos vizinhos, em uma constante busca pelo novo, o diferenciado, o exclusivo. O entendimento dos processos de segregação socioespacial é importante para a compreensão da própria cidade e da sociedade que a molda. Este trabalho busca explicar o processo de segregação socioespacial existente em bairros da zona Leste de Teresina, em especial o Jóquei, Fátima, Horto e São Cristóvão, identificando as contribuições dos agentes do mercado imobiliário e do Poder Público, este último enquanto poder legitimador do processo. A pesquisa é feita segundo o arcabouço metodológico estabelecido por Henri Lefèbvre, estruturado em três momentos de análise. São estudados diversos marcos temporais que de alguma forma possam ter contribuído com a evolução da autossegregação, desde a fundação do Jockey Club e dos primeiros loteamentos de seu entorno, no início da década de 1950, até os dias atuais / Abstract: The characteristics of society are directly reflected in the spatial arrangement of the city, in the way people live, work and move within it in their everyday life. In the modern city, a product of the market economy, attempts to agglutinating the population based on the socio-economic group they belong to are common, with people seeking proximity to their counterparts. Especially their economic counterparts, in a process of self-segregation that only consolidates itself, but never ends, for because of the constant need of self-replication that capital has, new needs are created and this self-segregated economic elite moves away, seeking new neighborhoods, new services, new neighbors, in a constant search for the new, the unique, the exclusive. The understanding of the processes of socio-spatial segregation is important to understand the city itself and the society that shapes it. This thesis aims to explain the process of socio-spatial segregation that takes place on the East Side of Teresina, especially in the neighborhoods of Jóquei, Fátima, Horto and São Cristóvão, indentifying the contributions of the agents of the real estate market and of the government institutions, the latter as the legitimating power of this process. The research is carried out according to the theoretical framework established by Henri Lefèbvre, structured in three moments of analysis. Many temporal marks that may have contributed in any way to the evolution of selfsegregation were analyzed, from the foundation of the Jockey Club and the first subdivisions of land in its surroundings, in the beginning of the decade of 1950, to the present / Doutor

The goal of this thesis was to develop, deploy and evaluate a lightweight portable intrusion detection system (LPIDS) over wireless networks. The LPIDS was developed by adopting two different string matching algorithms: Aho-Corasick algorithm and Knuth–Morris–Pratt algorithm (KMP). The LPIDS was implemented and tested on the hardware platforms Wi-Fi Pineapple and Raspberry Pi. To evaluate and test the LPIDS as well as the algorithms, performance metrics such as throughput, response time and power consumption are considered. The experimental results reveal that Aho-Corasick performed better than KMP throughout the majority of the process, but KMP was typically faster in the beginning with fewer rules. Similarly, Raspberry Pi shows remarkably higher performance than Wi-Fi Pineapple in all of the measurements. Moreover, we compared the throughput between LPIDS and Snort. It was concluded that the throughput was significantly higher for LPIDS when most of the rules do not include content parameters. This thesis concludes that due to computational complexity and slow hardware processing capabilities of Wi-Fi Pineapple, it could not become suitable IDS in the presence of different pattern matching strategies. Finally, we propose a modification of Snort to increase the throughput of the system.

Nowadays, a growing number of startups, who used to produce non- intelligent devices, are seeking transformation and hope to achieve their Internet of Things (IoT) deployment. In other words, they begin to focus on producing smarter devices to meet user’s needs. At present, various IoT cloud platforms are emerging one after another, but using these resources can be costly for small companies. Since the entire IoT system is complex, it involves many links, the purpose of this project is to create a suitable IoT platform for small companies. The system applies JavaWeb technology with the framework of Spring MVC + Spring + Hibernate (SSH), uses open source User Interface (UI) solution and MySQL database management system (DBMS). At the same time, the system adopts Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) as the communication protocol to complete the data transmission between devices and the platform. Finally, the system is deployed in the server built on the Raspberry Pi. The system is measured from multiple aspects on the established scenario. The results show that companies and users can use the platform as expected, and companies can expand the system to further realize their IoT deployment in the future.

Thesis advisor: Mary F. Roberts / Secreted phosphatidylinositol-specific phospholipase Cs (PI-PLCs) are often virulence factors in pathogenic bacteria. Understanding how these enzymes interact with target membranes may provide novel methods to control bacterial infections. In this work, two typical PI-PLC enzymes, from Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) and Staphylococcus aureus (Sa), were studied and their membrane binding properties were examined and correlated with enzymatic activity. BtPI-PLC is kinetically activated by allosteric binding of a phosphatidylcholine (PC) molecule. MD simulations of the protein in solution suggested correlated loop and helix motions around the active site could regulate BtPI-PLC activity. Vesicle binding and enzymatic studies of variants of two proline residues, Pro245 and Pro254, that were associated with these motions showed that loss of the correlated motions between the two halves of PI-PLC were more critical for enzymatic activity than for vesicle binding. Furthermore, loss of enzyme activity could be rescued to a large extent with PC present in a vesicle. This suggests that binding to PC changes the enzyme conformation to keep the active site accessible. SaPI-PLC shows 41.3% sequence similarity with BtPI-PLC but has very different ways its activity is regulated. While it is kinetically activated by PC it does not in fact bind to that phospholipid. Enzymatic and membrane interaction assays showed that SaPI-PLC has evolved a complex, apparently unique way to control its access to PI or GPI-anchored substrate. (i) An intramolecular cation-pi latch facilitates soluble product release under acidic conditions without dissociation from the membrane. (ii) There is a cationic pocket on the surface of enzyme that likely modulates the location of the protein. (iii) Dimerization of protein is enhanced in membranes containing phosphatidylcholine (PC), which acts not by specifically binding to the protein, but by reducing anionic lipid interactions with the cationic pocket that stabilizes monomeric protein. SaPI-PLC activity is modulated by competition between binding of soluble anions or anionic lipids to the cationic sensor and transient dimerization on the membrane depleted in anionic phospholipids. This protein also served as a way to test the hypothesis that a cation-pi box provides for PC recognition site. This structural motif was engineered into SaPI-PLC by forming N254Y/H258Y. This variant selectively binds PC-enriched vesicles and the enzyme binding behavior mimics that of BtPI-PLC. Itaconic acid (ITA) is a metabolite synthesized in macrophages and related cell lines by a cis-aconitate decarboxylase (cADC). cADC activity is dramatically increased upon macrophage stimulation. In this work, the cell line RAW264.7 was used to show that cADC activity upon stimulation requires de novo protein synthesis. MS analyses of partially purified RAW264.7 protein extracts from stimulated cells show a large increase for immunoresponsive gene 1 protein (IRG1) and siRNA knockdown of the IRG1 reduces cADC activity upon stimulation. Suspected active site residues of IRG1 were identified by mutagenesis studies of the recombinant protein based on a homology structure model of fungal cADC. The cloning and overexpression of this enzyme should help clarify the cofactor-independent decarboxylation mechanism of this mammalian enzyme as well as open up future studies into the specific role of ITA in the mammalian immune system and cancers. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2013. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Chemistry.