In Sweden today, there are 3.7 thousand registered Swedish churches with the oldest being just over 900 years old. During the last thousand years the church has existed side by side with the Swedish society which has formed alongside of it. During a long period, the national registration was managed by the church with the parish being the most important community for the individual. As modern Swedish society developed, its relationship to religion changed. The percentage of formal members in the Swedish church has dropped to 56%. Forecasts suggest that the number will drop to 30% by 2050. In the year 2000, the church and the state separated. Since then the churches are formally owned by the Swedish church. However, the possibility of freely disposing of them is severely limited by legal protection (cultural heritage law). In compensation for the increased responsibility and additional costs for the individual parishes, a cultural heritage compensation (KAE) was introduced. This is a compensation that currently amounts to SEK 460 million per year. Despite this number, it doesn’t fill the economic gap that the maintenance of these buildings creates. As a result of this 104 churches have been taken out of use since. The trinity of Sweden, the state and religion is a complex matter and the fate of Swedens churches is still to be decieded. But the fact that cultural heritage is being torn down due to lack of interest, money and ignorance is something worth pointing out. At the same time, the discussion of reuse has never been more relevant. So what if we could reprogram the function of these churches? Making the premises active once again. This thesis work will start in the context of rethinking a Swedish church - How could a church be reprogrammed? In this project, I wish to develop an understanding of how to manage a modern solution within a cultural and historic built environment. And by this creating a new experience of the church building in correlation to how our society functions today.

In multimedia learning environments, research suggests that simultaneous presentation of redundant text (i.e. identical narration and on-screen text) may inhibit learning when presented with animation at the same time. However, related studies are limited to testing with cause-and-effects content information (e.g., Moreno & Mayer, 1999, 2002). This study examined the effects of redundant text on learners' memory achievement and problem solving ability. The study replicated and extended prior research by using descriptive, rather than cause-and-effect content information. The primary research questions were (a) does redundant text improve learning performance if learners are presented with instructional material that addresses subject matter other than cause-and-effect relationship? and (b) does sequential presentation of animation followed by redundant text help learning? To answer the research questions, five hypotheses were tested with a sample of 224 Taiwanese students enrolled in a college level Management Information System (MIS) courses at a management college in southern Taiwan. Statistically significant differences were found in memory achievement and problem solving test scores between simultaneous and sequential groups; while no statistically significant differences were found in memory achievement and problem solving test scores between verbal redundant and non-redundant groups. These results were supported by interviewees expressing difficulty in connecting animation and verbal explanation in the two sequential presentation groups. The interview responses also helped to explain why insignificant results were obtained when redundant and non-redundant verbal explanations with animation were presented simultaneously. In general, the results support previous research on the contiguity principle, suggesting that sequential presentations may lead to lower learning performance when animation and verbal explanation are closely related. The separation of the two types of information may increase cognitive load. In addition, the study found that impairment of redundant text was also affected by various learning characteristics, such as the structure of the instructional content and learners previous learning experiences. Recommendations for future study include: (a) research on various situations such as characteristics of the content, characteristics of learners, and difficulty of the instructional material that influences the effects of redundant text, and (b) research on prior learning experience that influences the effects of simultaneous redundant text presentations.

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Control allocation is examined for linear time-invariant problems that have more controls than degrees of freedom. The controls are part of a physical system and are subject to limits on their maximum positions. A control allocation scheme commands control deflections in response to some desired output. The ability of a control allocation scheme to produce the desired output without violating the physical position constraints is used to compare allocation schemes. Methods are developed for computing the range of output for which a given scheme will allocate admissible controls. This range of output is expressed as a volume in the n-dimensional output space. The allocation schemes which are detailed include traditional allocation methods such as Generalized Inverse solutions as well as more recently developed methods such as Daisy Chaining, Cascading Generalized Inverses, Null-Space Intersection methods, and Direct Allocation. Non-linear time-varying problems are analyzed and a method of control allocation is developed that uses Direct Allocation applied to locally linear problems to allocate the controls. This method allocates controls that do not violate the position limits or the rate limits for all the desired outputs that the controls are capable of producing. The errors produced by the non-linearities are examined and compared with the errors produced by globally linear methods. The ability to use the redundancy of the controls to optimize some function of the controls is explored and detailed. Additionally, a method to reconfigure the controls in the event of a control failure is described and examined. Detailed examples are included throughout, primarily applying the control allocation methods to an F-18 fighter with seven independent moment generators controlling three independent moments and the F-18 High Angle of Attack Research Vehicle (HARV) with ten independent moment generators. / Ph. D.

The effects of intraserial repetition were tested using a probeless memory search task. Reaction time was facilitated in Experiments II and III only if the task involved alphabetical comparisons suggesting that repetition affects a comparison stage. The results of Experiment III revealed that the location of an item and its repeat in the set is an important variable since repetition effects were found only if the item and repeat were adjacent in the set. The results were supportive of an information reduction model in which stimulus sets containing repetition are reduced. Set reduction occurs more readily for the adjacent repetition condition due to the identical items being perceptually distinct. Support for a trace strength model prediction that only repeated target letters would facilitate RT was not found. / Master of Science

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Redundantly actuated manipulators have only recently aroused significant scientific interest. Their advantages in terms of enlarged workspace, higher payload ratio and better manipulability with respect to non-redundantly actuated systems explain the appearance of numerous applications in various fields: high-precision machining, fault-tolerant manipulators, transport and outer-space applications, surgical operation assistance, etc. The present Ph.D. research proposes a unified approach for modeling and actuation of redundantly actuated parallel manipulators. The approach takes advantage of the actuator redundancy principles and thus allows for following trajectories that contain parallel (force) singularities, and for eliminating the negative effect of the latter. As a first step of the approach, parallel manipulator kinematic and dynamic models are generated and treated in such a way that they do not suffer from kinematic loop closure numeric problems. Using symbolic models based on the multibody formalism and a Newton-Euler recursive computation scheme, faster-than-real-time computer simulations can thus be achieved. Further, an original piecewise actuation strategy is applied to the manipulators in order to eliminate singularity effects during their motion. Depending on the manipulator and the trajectories to be followed, this strategy results in non-redundant or redundant actuation solutions that satisfy actuator performance limits and additional optimality criteria. Finally, a validation of the theoretical results and the redundant actuation benefits is performed on the basis of well-known control algorithms applied on two parallel manipulators of different complexity. This is done both by means of computer simulations and experimental runs on a prototype designed at the Center for Research in Mechatronics of the UCL. The advantages of the actuator redundancy of parallel manipulators with respect to the elimination of singularity effects during motion and the actuator load optimization are thus confirmed (virtually and experimentally) and highlighted thanks to the proposed approach for modeling, simulation and control.

This paper reports a series of experiments designed to compare memory for multiple kinds of source information in young and older adults. The older adults in these studies were classified as having well or poorly functioning frontal lobes. In EXPERIMENTS 1-3, three different sources that provided independent cues to item information were examined using a repeated-measures design. In particular, participants' memory for voice source information, spatial source information, and temporal source information was tested in separate blocks. The results indicated that the performance of both young and older adults depended upon the type of source tested: Voice source memory was superior to spatial source and temporal source memory, which did not differ. There was also an age effect that was mediated by frontal functioning. Only the low frontal older adults showed impairments in source memory. High frontal older adults were equivalent to young. In EXPERIMENT 4, sources that provided redundant cues to item information were investigated. Voice sources and spatial sources were perfectly matched during encoding such that Voice A always came from Location 1 and Voice B always came from Location 2. When sources provided redundant information in this manner, young and high frontal older adults improved their spatial source memory by making use of redundant voice information, whereas the low frontal older adults not only performed more poorly than both young and high frontal older adults, but were unable to benefit from the redundancy. No differences in item memory were found. The findings were interpreted in terms of the executive and working memory functions involved in the integration of various contextual elements of an experience with its content.