Thesis (M.Tech.: Chiropractic)- Dept. of Chiropractic, Durban Institute of Technology, 2006. 88 leaves. / Myofascial pain syndrome is the second most common reason patients seek the help of health care workers. It costs billions of dollars each year in lost revenue due to loss of productivity and other costs. The treatment of myofascial pain syndrome has been extensively researched and it appears that dry needling and medicinal injections of trigger points are some of the most effective modalities. However, an unwanted side effect common to both these therapies is post-needling soreness. Despite being mentioned in passing by many authors, very little detail is available regarding post-needling soreness. It is unclear whether post-needling soreness arises from the trigger point itself, or whether the tissue damage caused by the needle insertion is responsible. Therefore, this study was aimed at investigating whether dry needling muscle tissue in asymptomatic subjects (i.e. subjects not suffering from myofascial pain syndrome) resulted in post-needling soreness. Two different dry needling techniques were also compared with a placebo group in order to determine which technique resulted in the least post-needling soreness. This study was designed as a prospective, randomised, placebo controlled experimental investigation. Sixty subjects were randomly allocated into three equal groups. Group one received the single needle insertion technique and the second group received the fanning dry needling technique. The last group formed the control group and the subjects were treated using the Park Sham Device (placebo needles). All the subjects were between the ages of 18 and 50 and were required to be asymptomatic in the low back region.

This thesis examines how early warning signals perform when tested on climate systems thought to exhibit future tipping point behaviour. A tipping point in a dynamical system is a large and sudden change to the state of the system, usually caused by changes in external forcing. This is due to the state the system occupies becoming unstable, causing the system to settle to a new stable state. In many cases, there is a degree of irreversibility once the tipping point has been passed, preventing the system from reverting back to its original state without a large reversal in forcing. Passing tipping points in climate systems, such as the Amazon rainforest or the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, is particularly dangerous as the effects of this will be globally felt. Fortunately there is potential for early warning signals, designed to warn that the system is approaching a tipping point. Generally, these early warning signals are based on analysis of the time series of the system, such as searching for ‘critical slowing down’, usually estimated by an increasing lag-1 autocorrelation (AR(1)). The idea here is that as a system’s state becomes less stable, it will start to react more sluggishly to short term perturbations. While early warning signals have been tested extensively in simple models and on palaeoclimate data, there has been very little research into how these behave in complex models and observed data. Here, early warning signals are tested on climate systems that show tipping point behaviour in general circulation models. Furthermore, it examines why early warning signals might fail in certain cases and provides prospect for more ‘system specific indicators’ based on properties of individual tipping elements. The thesis also examines how slowing down in a system might affect ecosystems that are being driven by it.

Previous research has identified strength as a key factor for performance in cross-country skiing. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the relationship between upper body strength and performance in swedish junior cross-country skiers. 33 swedish young men and 23 young women age 17,3 ± 1,0 years volunteered to participate in specific tests during a summer training camp were they completed a test battery consisting of bench press and bench pull. The strength variables obtained were correlated with FIS-points (International Ski Federation´s ranking points for distance and sprint performance) used as the performance indicator. Correlations were performed by Spearman´s rank correlation coefficient for all variables. The results showed that FIS-points for sprint correlated significantly with both bench press and bench pull. No significant correlation was found between FIS-points for distance and bench pull. These results may predict performance for cross-country skiers and indicate a justification for increased proportion of strength training.

Much of our current understanding of how consumers shop for goods and services is based on cross-sectional analyses of end-of-trip variables (e.g., basket composition, total spending) that has largely assumed purchase behavior is constant over the course of a shopping trip, however research has begun to demonstrate how an initial purchase can influence a subsequent purchase decision. This suggests shopping behavior may not only vary throughout a shopping trip, but rather is specifically influenced by when a purchase decision occurs within a shopping trip. I build on this foundation through two essays that show how and why a consumer’s in-store purchasing behavior is influenced by both the decisions they have made and the decisions they anticipate to make later. The first essay demonstrates that a consumer’s relative spending— the price of an item, relative to the prices of the other items in the same product category—evolves nonlinearly over a single shopping trip, and this pattern is distinct for budget and nonbudget shoppers. The second essay examines whether and how encountering promotions in-store, but temporally in advance of the promoted product influences a consumer’s redemption decision. These findings suggest that shoppers’ decisions evolve of a single shopping trip as a function of the decisions and evaluations the have made earlier in the shopping trip, as well the decisions they still have left to make. In each essay, implications for researchers and practitioners are presented and opportunities for future research are discussed.

Syftet med studien är att studera subjektiva upplevelser av vilka faktorer som varit bidragande till ett upphörande med brottsligt beteende, samt de faktorer som enligt egna upplevelser leder till ett upprätthållande av en mer konventionell livsstil. För att studera detta har en kvalitativ metod tillämpats och semistrukturerade intervjuer med fyra före detta kriminella individer genomförts. Studiens resultat visade att kärleksrelationer och föräldraskap, att sluta med alkohol- och narkotika missbruk, bryta upp från tidigare omgivning samt egen vilja är faktorer som i samspel med varandra påverkat de intervjuade att upphöra med brottsligt beteende. Rutiner, nytt socialt nätverk och stöd är faktorer som enligt intervjupersonerna möjliggjort ett upprätthållande av en mer konventionell livsstil. Studiens viktigaste slutsats är att samspel mellan yttre och inre faktorer även kallade vändpunkter, är av största vikt för att en upphörandeprocess skall vara framgångsrik. / ”It´s never too late.” - Four stories about the path out of crime. The purpose of this paper was to study the subjective experiences of factors that have contributed to desistance from criminal behavior, and the factors which, according to the interviewees own experiences lead to the maintenance of a more conventional lifestyle. The study was performed using qualitative semi-structured interviews with four ex-offenders. The results have shown that factors, such as love relationships and parenting, as well as desistance from alcohol and drug abuse and changing their environment are factors that in interaction with each other have affected the interviewed individuals desistance from criminal behavior. Routines, new social network and support are factors which, according to the interviewees made it possible to maintain a more conventional lifestyle. The study's main conclusion is that the interaction between external and internal factors so called ”turning points”, is crucial to a desistance process to be successful.

This thesis is comprised of three problems in number theory. The introduction is Chapter 1. The first problem is to partially generalize the main theorem of Gross, Kohnen and Zagier to higher weight modular forms. In Chapter 2, we present two conjectures which do this and some partial results towards their proofs as well as numerical examples. This work provides a new method to compute coefficients of weight k+1/2 modular forms for k>1 and to compute the square roots of central values of L-functions of weight 2k>2 modular forms. Chapter 3 presents four different interpretations of the main construction in Chapter 2. In particular we prove our conjectures are consistent with those of Beilinson and Bloch. The second problem in this thesis is to find an arithmetic formula for the central value of a certain Hecke L-series in the spirit of Waldspurger's results. This is done in Chapter 4 by using a correspondence between special points in Siegel space and maximal orders in quaternion algebras. The third problem is to find a lower bound for the cardinality of the principal genus group of binary quadratic forms of a fixed discriminant. Chapter 5 is joint work with Jeffrey Stopple and gives two such bounds. / text

Les technologies récentes d'acquisition de données en trois dimensions fournissent un grand nombre de points non-structurés en trois dimension. Il est important de reconstruire une surface continue à partir de ces points non-structurés et de la visualiser. Dans ce document, nous présentons de nouvelles méthodes pour reconstruire des surfaces implicites à partir de grands ensembles de points non-structurés. Ces méthodes mettent en oeuvre des surfaces variationnelles reconstruites localement à partir de fonctions de base radiales, surfaces qui sont combinées entre elles par un mécanisme de partition de l'unité. Afin d'obtenir une visualisation interactive des surfaces générées, nous présentons également des techniques de rendu qui utilisent non seulement la surface implicite reconstruite, mais également l'ensemble de points initial. Une première technique de rendu à base de points s'adapte automatiquement en fonction de la position de l'observateur et de la taille de la fenêtre de visualisation, grâce à une structure hiérarchique à multirésolution, et une deuxième technique de rendu à base de points utilise la géométrie différentielle locale dans chaque point. Enfin, un grand nombre d'applications effectives ou d'applications potentielles des techniques précédentes sont présentées, telles que la construction interactive de textures solides à partir de points non-structurés, la reconstruction altimétrique de terrain en fonction des lignes de niveaux, ou encore la réparation de photographies abîmées.

Le but initial de cette thèse était d'étudier les espaces de superlacets, version géométrique des espaces de supercordes en Physique. Le point de départ était alors d'étendre les résultats de classifications de l'article de Oleg Mokhov : Symplectic and Poisson structures on loop spaces of smooth manifolds, and integrable systems au cadre de la supergéométrie. Dans cet article l'auteur établit une classification des formes symplectiques locales homogènes d'ordre 0, 1 et 2 sur l'espace des lacets LM = C1(S1;M) à partir d'objets géométriques sur la variété différentiable M. Dans cette thèse, on remplace la variété M par une supervariété Mpjq et le cercle S1 par un supercercle S1jn et l'on étudie l'espace des morphismes de supervariétésMor(S1jn;Mpjq). Dans les deux premières parties, l'on définit les structures géométriques classiques et super des espaces de superlacets. Pour ce faire, l'on se restreint aux deux supercercles S1j1 et en s'inspirant des travaux sur LM, l'on détermine une structure de variété de Fréchet des espaces de superlacets SLM = Mor(S1j1;M). Puis l'on introduit la structure super qui nous a semblé la plus naturelle sur SLM en terme de faisceaux. Afin de pouvoir travailler en coordonnées, l'on introduit la structure super par un autre point de vue en considérant l'espace de superlacets SLM comme le foncteur de points SLM. De plus, en interprétant les calculs de Mokhov en terme de jets, ceci nous permet d'une part d'apporter une justification rigoureuse aux-dits calculs et d'autre part, d'obtenir une généralisation directe des méthodes de calculs en coordonnées ("à la physicienne"). Le troisième chapitre expose les résultats de classification obtenus. Comme dans le cas classique, on obtient un théorème de dépendance limitée de l'ordre des jets qui interviennent dans les formes d'ordre 0 et 1. Puis, on obtient une classification des formes d'ordre 0 au moyen de formes différentielles sur la supervariété Mpjq. Une classification des formes homogènes d'ordre 1 et 2 au moyen de métriques Riemaniennes et de connexions sur Mpjq. Enfin le quatrième chapitre est consacré à la généralisation des résultats d'un autre article de O. Mokhov : Complex homogeneous forms on loop spaces of smooth manifolds and their cohomology groups. De par la présence de la variable impaire, on précise tout d'abord la définition des formes homogènes locales sur SLM, puis on démontre que muni de la différentielle extérieure, l'espace des formes homogènes sur SLM d'ordre m 2 N donné définit un complexe. On calcule alors complètement les espaces de cohomologie pour les ordres m = 0 et 1, partiellement pour les ordres 2 et 3 et on explicite ainsi les formes symplectiques exactes obtenues au troisième chapitre.

L'irrégularité des pluies, l'évaporation considérable de l'eau de surface et des points d'eau traditionnels, entrainent une insuffisance de l'eau au Burkina Faso notamment en milieu rural. Cela contraint l'État et les partenaires à la mise en place des points d'eau modernes. Elle ne tient pas compte des positions, des valeurs culturelles qui légitiment la gestion traditionnelle de l'eau. La nouvelle gestion de l'eau renvoie à une problématique du rapport à l'eau et relève d'une modification sociale. Cette modification provient des pratiques, de leur évolution par rapport au système social mais aussi des processus intervenant sur les pratiques elles-mêmes. Les individus font l'apprentissage de la nouvelle gestion de l'eau, se positionnent selon le contexte en fonction de leurs appartenances dans le rapport à l'eau, des modes de solidarités comme moyen d'action communautaire par rapport aux oppositions sociales. C'est dans cette perspective que la thèse analyse à partir de la gestion de l'eau, les tensions et les recompositions sociales dans cinq villages autour du bassin versant du Nakambé.

在這篇論文中，我們希望用不同角度來重新探討一個古典的數學問題；點、線、面切割最多區域問題，雖然這個問題已經經由許多方法得到公式，例如：遞迴關係、差分方程式、歐拉公式、標準n維空間切割系統等等，並延伸出其他方面的問題，可以運用在很多地方，所以我們希望可以再找到更簡單易懂的論證方式，可以讓國中學生也能理解。 思考學生現有的數學觀念，我們發現利用不等式的數學觀念，藉由定義出一套有規則的系統以及數學歸納法，可以以更直接，簡單的理論驗證出此數學公式，最後我們更希望能將這理論推廣至n維度空間。 / In this research, we will discuss a classical mathematical question from different aspects. The question of maximizing the number of regions made up by points, lines and planes has been proved and developed many formulas, using Recurrence Relations, Difference Equations, and Euler's Formula etc., which can extend to other questions and apply to many areas. Therefore, we hope to find an easier way to prove it which may help middle school students to understand better. We find that we can use the concept of inequality from what the students learn so far. By defining a logical system and using Induction, we can prove this mathematical formula in an easier and more direct way. Finally we hope it can be generalized to n-dimensional space.