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<p>U disertaciji su prikazana istraživanja vezana za objektivnu i subjektivnu,<br />psihofizičku metodu koja u eksperimentu utvrđuje koliki uticaj imaju različiti<br />parametri rasterizacije kao i dimenzija posmatrane slike na percepciju<br />realističnog prikaza i zrnaste strukture uz poređenje sa objektivnim metodama<br />obuhvaćenim eksperimentalnim merenjima. U metodologiji istraživanja su<br />korišćeni uzorci rastrirani sa dva različita tipa rastera frekventno<br />modularni i amplitudno modularni. Poznatim i priznatim naučnim metodima<br />obrade podataka došlo se do relevantnih rezultata koji potvrđuju različitost<br />posmatranih reprodukcija i model kontrole parametara rasterizacije.</p> / <p>The research presented in this dissertation is related to the image reproduction quality<br />assessment. Dissertation was designed to determine the impact of halftone attributes<br />on image quality. Objective and subjective quality assessment results were designed<br />to complement recently published findings for quality assessment. These attributes are<br />directly dependent on the chosen halftoning method. In this research the samples were<br />halftoned using two different types of screening methods: frequency modulated and<br />amplitude modulated method. Experiment data samples, were analysed by adequate<br />statistical methods. Results indicate significant influence of halftoning method on the<br />quality assessment and defines control model.</p>

Work analysis we-to-print aplications run by company REP Tisk spol. s r. o. It contains theoretical background, analysis od the current version of the application and suggestions for new version. The emphasis was primarily on pricing variability. Key was also possibility to run the application on multiple web sites simultaneously.

Serving the good of the community is a professional value prized by those who work in the provincial press. It is also seen as a vital role for local newspapers by those outside the industry. A localised form of the Fourth Estate, the good of the community therefore justifies and underpins the routines and news values of those who work in regional and local news organisations. This thesis investigates the extent to which this notion serves as a functional value for the English provincial news industry; it positions it within an historical context to understand its relationship with the economic structure of the local newspaper. As such, after Foucault, it constitutes the good of the community as a discursive position which functions in different ways during different periods of development for the provincial press. The history of the provincial press is charted from its inception in the eighteenth century to the present day. This history conceptualises its development within six distinct stages; as such it seeks to demonstrate the fluidity of the notion of serving the good of the community which is presented as absolute by the industry. Interviews with current workers within the industry are used to expose the way in which the concept functions for the industry today and concomitant changes wrought by digital innovation. These demonstrate that the notion functions best at those titles which enjoy direct investment in their ability to act in a way which serves the good the community; conversely it is most under threat at those titles which are increasingly removed from their locale for reasons of profit. This thesis ends with the suggestion that preserving the ability of the provincial news industry to serve the good of the community necessitates a new approach to an assessment of its value; it suggests that alternative funding models are needed if the ability of the industry to meet this goal is to be retained.

ITC/USA 2015 Conference Proceedings / The Fifty-First Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 26-29, 2015 / Bally's Hotel & Convention Center, Las Vegas, NV / In this work, a 3D-printable multilayer phased array system is designed to demonstrate the applicability of additive manufacturing technique combining dielectric and conductor processes at room temperature for RF systems. Phased array systems normally include feeding networks, antennas, and active components such as switches, phase shifters and amplifiers. To make the integrated system compact, the array system here uses multilayer structure that can fully utilize the 3D space. The vertical interconnections between layers are carefully designed to reduce the loss between layers. Simulated results show good impedance matching and high-directive scanning beam. This multilayer phased array will finally be 3D printed by integrating thermal / ultrasound wire mesh embedding method (for metal) and fused-deposition-modeling technique (for dielectric).

Palmar flexion crease matching is a method for verifying or establishing identity. New methods of palmprint identification, that complement existing identification strategies, or reduce analysis and comparison times, will benefit palmprint identification communities worldwide. To this end, this thesis describes new methods of manual and automated palmar flexion crease identification, that can be used to identify palmar flexion creases in online palmprint images. In the first instance, a manual palmar flexion crease identification and matching method is described, which was used to compare palmar flexion creases from 100 palms, each modified 10 times to mimic some of the types of alterations that can be found in crime scene palmar marks. From these comparisons, using manual palmar flexion crease identification, results showed that when labelled within 10 pixels, or 3.5 mm, of the palmar flexion crease, a palmprint image can be identified with a 99.2% genuine acceptance rate and a 0% false acceptance rate. Furthermore, in the second instance, a new method of automated palmar flexion crease recognition, that can be used to identify palmar flexion creases in online palmprint images, is described. A modified internal image seams algorithm was used to extract the flexion creases, and a matching algorithm, based on kd-tree nearest neighbour searching, was used to calculate the similarity between them. Results showed that in 1000 palmprint images from 100 palms, when compared to manually identified palmar flexion creases, a 100% genuine acceptance rate was achieved with a 0.0045% false acceptance rate. Finally, to determine if automated palmar flexion crease recognition can be used as an effective method of palmprint identification, palmar flexion creases from two online palmprint image data sets, containing images from 100 palms and 386 palms respectively, were automatically extracted and compared. In the first data set, that is, for images from 100 palms, an equal error rate of 0.3% was achieved. In the second data set, that is, for images from 386 palms, an equal error rate of 0.415% was achieved.

The development of reading competency is one of the most significant pedagogical achievements during the first few years of schooling. Although most children learn to read successfully when exposed to reading instruction, up to 18% of children experience significant reading difficulty (Shaywitz, 1998). As a group, young children with speech impairment are at risk of reading impairment, with approximately 50% of these children demonstrating poor acquisition of early reading skills (Nathan, Stackhouse, Goulandris, & Snowling, 2004; Larivee & Catts, 1999). A number of variables contribute to reading outcomes for children with speech impairment including co-occurring language impairment, the nature and severity of their speech impairment as well as social and cultural influences. An area of research that has received increasing attention is understanding how access to the underlying sound structure or phonological representations of spoken words stored in long-term memory account for reading difficulties observed in children (Elbro, 1996; Fowler, 1991). Researchers have hypothesised that children with speech impairment may be at increased risk of reading disability due to deficits at the level of phonological representations (Bird, Bishop, & Freeman, 1995). Phonological representation deficits can manifest in poor performance on tasks that require children to think about the sound structure of words. Knowledge about the phonological components of words is commonly referred to as phonological awareness. Identifying and manipulating phonemes within words are examples of phonological awareness skills. Some children with speech impairment perform poorly on phonological awareness measures compared to children without speech difficulties (Bird et al., 1995; Carroll & Snowling, 2004; Rvachew, Ohberg, Grawburg, & Heyding, 2003). As performance on phonological awareness tasks is a strong predictor of early reading ability (Hogan, Catts, & Little, 2005), there is an important need to determine if children with speech impairment who demonstrate poor phonological awareness, have deficits at the level of phonological representations. This thesis reports a series of studies that investigated the relationship between phonological representations, phonological awareness, and word decoding ability in children with moderate to severe speech impairment. A child with complex communication needs (CCN) who used Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) was also examined to determine how the absence of effective articulation skills influences the development of phonological representations. The study employed a longitudinal design to compare the performance of nine children (aged 3:09-5:03 at initial assessment) with moderate to severe speech impairment and 17 children with typical speech development on novel assessment measures designed to determine characteristics of children's phonological representations. The tasks required children to judge the accuracy of spoken multisyllable words and newly learned nonwords. The relationships between performance on these tasks and measures of speech, phonological awareness and early print decoding were also examined. Four assessment trials were implemented at six-monthly intervals over an 18-month period. The first assessment trial was administered approximately 6 to12 months before children commenced school. The fourth trial was administered after children had completed 6 to 12 months of formal education. The child with CCN completed three assessment trials over a period of 16 months. Data analyses revealed that the children with speech impairment had significantly greater difficulty (p<0.01) judging mispronounced multisyllable words compared to their peers with typical speech development. As a group, children with speech impairment also demonstrated inferior performance on the judgment of mispronounced forms of newly learned nonwords (p<0.05). No group differences were observed on the judgment of correctly pronounced real and nonword stimuli. Significant group differences on speech production and phoneme segmentation tasks were identified at each assessment trial. Moderate to high correlations (i.e., r = 0.40 to 0.70) were also observed between performance on the phonological representation tasks and performance on phonological awareness and speech production measures at each trial across the study. Although no significant group differences were observed on the nonword decoding task, 4 of the 9 children with speech impairment could not decode any letters in nonwords (compared to only 1 child without speech impairment) at the final assessment trial when children were 6-years-old. Two children with speech impairment showed superior nonword decoding ability at trial 3 and 4. The within-group variability observed on the nonword decoding task highlighted the heterogeneity of children with speech impairment. The performances of four children with speech impairment with differing types of speech error patterns were analysed to investigate the role of phonological representations in their speech and phonological awareness development. The child with delayed speech development and excellent phonological awareness at trial 1, demonstrated superior phonological awareness and word decoding skills at age 6 years, although his performance on phonological representation tasks was inconsistent across trials. In contrast, a child with delayed development and poor early phonological awareness demonstrated weak performance on phonological representation, phonological awareness, and decoding at each successive assessment trial. The child with a high percentage of inconsistent speech error patterns generally demonstrated poor performance on phonological representation, phonological awareness and decoding measures at each of the 4 assessment trials. The child with consistent and unusual speech error patterns showed increasingly stronger performance on the phonological representation tasks and average performance on phonological awareness but limited word decoding ability at age 6. The 11-year-old girl with CCN, whose speech attempts were limited and unintelligible, demonstrated below average performance on phonological representation tasks, suggesting that an absence of articulatory feedback may negatively influence the development of well-specified phonological representations. This thesis provides evidence for the use of receptive tasks to identify differences in the phonological representations of children with and without speech impairment. The findings also provide support for the link between the representation of phonological information in long-term memory and children's speech production accuracy, phonological awareness and print decoding ability. The variable performance of some children with speech impairment and the child with cerebral palsy demonstrate the need to consider individual characteristics to develop an understanding of how children store and access speech sound information to assist their acquisition of early reading skills.

This collection is an observation of the relationship between celebrity culture, fashion and the female form. Exploring how the modern fashion image is communicated to a wider audience through mass media. At the same the work aims to explore new ways of developing clothing from a starting point in figurative prints. The work explores the body as the new context of the celebrity image in order to display different perspectives of both image and body. This has been found through an interaction between print and body, the visual perception within the relationship of these and from a social point of view. The work displays thoughts regarding perspectives on body ideals, female stereotypes, fashion, clothing, mass media and fame in today’s society. The bodies of celebrities are seen as walking billboards and advertisement for designers, the work questions this adopted culture by highlighting the phenomenon. While the work is a comment on the ridiculousness within the mass media and celebrity worship, it is also a homage to these women who have put a mark in fashion history. The final result could be seen as a series examples of possible outcomes from working with the image in relation to body. But also as a statement on how the current state of fashion, where new ideas seem less important as who is wearing what.

This thesis analyzes discourses of identity construction in the production and consumption of translated fiction in the contemporary British book culture. Drawing from ethnographic methods, it investigates what middle class, engaged readers make out of the translated novels they read, particularly in the ways that these books have been produced and marketed to them. The study concludes that translated fiction illustrates the multilayered meaning structures regarding taste and identity in reading communities and in the publishing industry in contemporary Britain. The theoretical framework of the thesis is based on sociological and anthropological studies on identity, intercultural communication and the consumption of art, alongside theories of reading and literary exchange from literary studies and translation studies. Data for the analysis on reading has been collected through participant observation/focus groups at over 30 book group meetings. Research methods also include interviews with individual readers and publishing industry professionals. Analysis of reading communities concentrates on responses to translated novels as texts that have undergone linguistic transference and as stories that portray other cultures. These responses are contextualized with the value orientations that arise from current trends of cultural consumption in the UK, such as monolingualism, cosmopolitanism and omnivorousness. The thesis also includes a case study on Turkish literature, exploring recent trends in literary production and the cultural role of literary translators. The study reveals the complex inflections of taste and identity in the practices of the agents of print culture. The textual-linguistic dimensions of translated texts are often the subject of negative evaluations when readers do not recognize the agency of the literary translator as an artist. Moreover, the opportunity of cultural encounter enabled by the reading experience activates varying discourses of intercultural communication, depending on readers’ cultural capital, their level of commitment to cosmopolitanism and the orientation of the book group’s discussion. In the production and consumption of translated fiction, the tension that arises between the pleasure and distinction dimensions of literary products translates into dilemmas between exoticism and cosmopolitan egalitarianism.

My art is about journeys, mapping, and layering. Two archetypal images in my work are the camel and the desert. Much of this imagery was inspired by my personal journey over the Sahara and into Western Africa. On another level, this journey connects to my metaphorical journey through life. As a printmaker, my art is very process oriented. Printmaking itself can be thought of as a kind of journey. My trip or the process is more important than the destination or the final result. Like the desert, my images are constantly shifting and transforming through the process of working. Printmaking with its alchemical overtones, layering, and unique surface qualities becomes a natural extension of my imagery.