Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:25:32Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2006-06-08Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T19:53:22Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 schinaider_sj_me_rcla.pdf: 576104 bytes, checksum: 41c3c4e7eec02c3dd98738011e8c7b76 (MD5) / Educação e aprendizado são assuntos de grande importância para a sociedade em vista do desenvolvimento tecnológico e do progresso social. No presente trabalho analisamos a distribuição estatística das notas dos candidatos ao vestibular (Exame de Admissão) da Academia da Força Aérea, situada em Pirassununga, Estado de São Paulo Brasil, onde se formam os Oficiais da Aeronáutica (Força Aérea Brasileira), entre os anos de 1999 a 2004, em busca de algumas características que indiquem o processo de aprendizagem em cada disciplina do vestibular. O exame de admissão consta de 4 disciplinas: Física, Matemática, Inglês e Português, todos com questões objetivas. Os candidatos melhor classificados são selecionados de acordo com o número de vagas determinado pelo Comando da Aeronáutica. Notou-se, claramente, que, nas disciplinas Física, Matemática e Inglês, as notas obedecem a uma distribuição do tipo Lei de Potência Gradualmente Truncada, como também foi observado anteriormente nas disciplinas, em conjunto, de Ciências Exatas e Biológicas. Na disciplina Português as notas obedecem a uma distribuição normal, resultado que se explica, considerando-se a dependência dos assuntos dados na área de Física, Matemática e Inglês (língua estrangeira) aos assuntos ministrados anteriormente, enquanto em Português, (língua materna) cada capítulo é relativamente independente. Também apresentamos sugestão para melhorar o ensino de ciências e matemáticas. / Science and Mathematic Education is a subject of great importance for the society in sight of recent technological and social program. In the present work, we study the statistical distribution of the marks obtained by the candidates in entrance examination of Air Force Academy, which prepare officers for Brazilian Air Force and is situated at Pirassununga São Paulo, in the period of 1999-2004. Our object is to find some characteristics of the process of learning in various disciplines. The admission examination consist of four disciplines; Physics, Mathematics, English and Portuguese. The candidates are selected in accordance with the merit list in the examination and number of seats available as determined by the Air Force Command. We showed that in the discipline of Physics, Mathematics and English, the distribution of marks obtained is in accordance with Gradually Truncated Power Law as also have been reported earlier in Exact and Biological Sciences in University entrance examination. In Portuguese the Distribution is Normal. We explained these results considering importance of the understanding of material given previously to understand a new chapter in area of Physics, Mathematics and English as our foreign language. In the case of Portuguese (Native Language), each chapter is relatively independent and thus not require knowledge of previous chapters. We also presented some suggestions to improve the science and Mathematics Education at High School level.

Submitted by Fabio Sobreira Campos da Costa (fabio.sobreira@ufpe.br) on 2015-05-08T14:05:16Z No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) 1 Dissertação - João Vitor Nogueir.pdf: 7740367 bytes, checksum: e311056ecafb8741fc3538682907dcc1 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2015-05-08T14:05:16Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) 1 Dissertação - João Vitor Nogueir.pdf: 7740367 bytes, checksum: e311056ecafb8741fc3538682907dcc1 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-01-30 / A instabilidade de Saffman-Taylor se dá na interface entre dois fluidos viscosos no interior de uma célula de Hele-Shaw (CHS). A CHS é um aparato experimental que consiste em duas placas, usualmente planas e paralelas, separadas por uma distância muito pequena. Sabe-se que quando um fluido viscoso desloca outro mais viscoso, em uma CHS, a interface entre eles se torna instável e estruturas chamadas de “dedos viscosos” surgem. Em função da geometria da CHS e da força motriz do fluxo, tais dedos podem bifurcar, afinar, competir em tamanho e interferirem uns com os outros, formando as mais diversas estruturas morfológicas. Estudos com fluidos newtonianos em CHS vêm sendo feitos desde o final do século XIX. No entanto, apenas recentemente, a cerca de trinta anos, estudos com fluidos não newtonianos em CHS vêm sendo conduzidos, e em sua maioria estudos analíticos lineares ou não lineares puramente numéricos. Este trabalho tenta preencher essa lacuna com um estudo analítico não linear de fluidos não newtonianos em CHS. Estudamos a CHS de geometria radial com levantamento da placa superior e injeção como forças motrizes do fluxo. Nestes casos estudamos o fluido yield stress, um tipo especial de fluido não newtoniano que se comporta como um “semissólido”. Estudamos também o fluido power-law que introduz, na viscosidade, uma dependência do fluxo. Em cada caso fomos capazes de estabelecer conexões entre as nossas previsões teóricas e os experimentos e simulações encontrados na literatura. Tais previsões são acerca da estabilidade e morfologia da interface como: bifurcação de dedos, a estrutura conhecida como side branching e a competição entre dedos.

No description available.

Abstract This thesis is a study of the odour responses of insect olfactory (or odorant) receptor neurons (ORN) of blowfly (Calliphora vicina), mosquito (Aedes communis), fruitflies (Drosophila melanogaster and D. virilis) and large pine weevil (Hylobius abietis). A power-law dependence (similar to Stevens' law in psychophysics) was obtained for the action potential rate of ORN responses vs. odour concentration in measurements with metal microelectrodes from blowfly ORNs and an analysis system was developed for the extracellularily recorded action potentials (or nerve pulses). Odour exposure sequences were used to study action potential rates quantitatively as a function of odour concentration in air exposure. For an odour exposure sequence, a known initial amount of the odour compound in a filter paper inside a Pasteur pipette at the beginning of repeated exposures caused a gradual dilution of the odour concentration in the exposure sequence. The concentration at each exposure was calculated according to the discrete multiple headspace extraction and dilution (DMHED) method. The estimated odour concentration was assumed to obey in the method an exponential law with respect to the exposure number in the sequence. Despite that many uncontrollable parameters remain for measuring quantitatively the characteristics of the ORNs, the results obtained, e.g., sensitivity, specificity, adaptability, and the power-law realation are both biologically and technically very interesting. A time-to-voltage converter (TVC) was utilized for the response analysis in determining action potential intervals originating from a single ORN. A precision analysis of TVC was also performed. With the mosquito (Aedes communis), fruitflies (Drosophila melanogaster and D. virilis) and large pine weevil (Hylobius abietis) antennae were tested for inhibitory and excitatory effects to find out repellents and attractants. Human sweat was found to cause strong stimulus exposure in the responses of the mosquito ORNs and Neutroil® caused inhibitory responses in pine weevil ORNs, respectively. The power-law exponents for blowfly ORNs were about 0.19 in the case of 1-hexanol (HX), 0.065 in the case of 1,4-diaminobutane (14DAB) and 0.32 in the case of butyric acid (BA). The corresponding Stevens' law exponent values 0.39 and 0.33 have been reported for HX and BA, respectively, by Patte et al. (1975).

It is known that when water is a product in reactions catalysed by cation exchange resins, it inhibits the reaction rate much more than predicted by the reverse reaction or dilution effects. In this work the inhibiting effect is ascribed to the preferential association of the catalytically active sites with water. In the derivation of the kinetic model, a Freundlich type adsorption isotherm was used to quantify the number of sites occupied by water. This is combined with a power law expression for the reaction rate. The resultant expression can accurately predict the reaction rate for various initial concentrations of water and mesityl oxide. Even when water was initially added to the reaction mixture, this model still gave an absolute average error of 6.5% compared to a 54.6% error when the same approach was followed but with the more popular Langmuir isotherm to describe site deactivation. The kinetic expression previously proposed for this reaction system by Klein and Banchero also failed when water was added to the reaction mixture and gave an average error of 71.1%. The procedure used to derive the model is therefore suggested for all cation exchange catalysed reactions where water is one of the products. / Dissertation (MSc)--University of Pretoria, 2005. / Chemical Engineering / unrestricted

No description available.

The research performed in this thesis aims to improve our understanding about one of the most malignant tumors of the human brain – glioma. From the early stages of my career I was confronted with the cruel reality of losing patients due to this devastating disease. The studies performed over the last four years involve extensive data analysis in different clinical and laboratory settings. The direct application of different analysis methods and tools in order to investigate the glioma infiltration delineation has potentially lead to direct applications of our results in the clinical setting. The overall approach of the study is based on three primary outcome measures, i.e., neuronal, electrophysiological and genetic/molecular features for distinguishing infiltrated and non-infiltrated zones within specifically peritumoral tissue (PT) and, more extensively, across the radiologically-defined boundaries of healthy, peritumoral and tumoral tissues. As such, we propose for the first time an objective demarcation and characterization of the PT and we detail how the genetic and epigenetic alterations within the tumoral and peritumoral area are linked with macroscopic functional MRI results. We also describe scale-free features (power law exponent) as well as distinct spectral features and reactivity to external stimulus in the tumoral and adjacent tissue of patients and provide novel insights in terms of glioma’s electrophysiology. The insights gained from these empirical studies further improve our understanding about the pathophysiology of this disease at micro- and macroscopic scales allowing us to envisage novel management methods for patients affected by glioma.

We consider a general preferential attachment model, where the probability that a newly arriving vertex connects to an older vertex is proportional to a (sub-)linear function of the indegree of the older vertex at that time. We provide a limit theorem with rates of convergence for the distribution of a vertex, chosen uniformly at random, as the number of vertices tends to infinity. To do so, we develop Stein's method for a new class of limting distributions including power-laws. Similar, but slightly weaker results are shown to be deducible using coupling techniques. Concentrating on a specific preferential attachment model we also show that the outdegree distribution asymptotically follows a Poisson law. In addition, we deduce a central limit theorem for the number of isolated vertices. We thereto construct a size-bias coupling which in combination with Stein’s method also yields bounds on the distributional distance.

No description available.

Measuring the research performance of a university is important to the universities themselves, governments, and students alike. Among other metrics, the number of publications is easy to obtain, and due to the large number of publications each university produces during one year, it suggests to be one accurate metric. However, the number of publications depends largely on the size of the institution, suggesting, if not addressed, that larger universities are better. Thus, one might intuitively try to normalize by size and use publications per researcher instead. A better institution would allow individual researchers to have more publications each year. However, publications, like many other things, might follow a power-law distribution, where most researchers have few, and only a few researchers have very many publications. These power-law distributions violate the assumptions the central limit the orem makes, for example, having a well-defined mean or variance. Specifically, one can not normalize or use averages from power-law distributed data, making the comparison of university publications impossible if they indeed follow a power-law distribution. While it has been shown that some scientific domains or universities show this power-law distribution, it is not known if Swedish universities also show this phenomenon. Thus, here we collect publication data for Swedish universities and determine whether or not, they are power-law distributed. Interestingly, if they are, one might use the slope of the power-law distribution as a proxy to determine research output. If the slope is steep, it suggests that the ratio between highly published authors and those with few publications is small. Where as a flatter slope suggests that a university has more highly published authors than a university with a steeper slope. Thus, the second objective here is to assess if the slope of the distribution can be determined or to which extent this is possible. This study will show that eight of the fifteen Swedish universities considered follow a power-law distribution (Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistic<0.05), while the remaining seven do not. The key determinant is the total number of publications. The difficulty here is that often the total number of publications is so small that one can not reject a power-law distribution, and it is also impossible to determine the slope of the distribution with any accuracy in those cases. While this study suggests that in principle, the slopes of the power-law distributions can be used as a comparative metric, it also showed that for half of Sweden’s universities, the data is insufficient for this type of analysis.