In this essay I analyze the way my collection of poetry relates to the concept cyclic. What is cyclic and what different interpretations are there concerning the concept? Which other related concepts are there regarding things that seem to reoccur regularly? How does the cyclical, the circular, relate to the linear in regard, for example, to the perception of time? Life often creates the sense that different phenomena and experiences repeat themselves. Different processes are conducted according to regular or irregular cyclical phases, situations seem familiar and events can be relived.          Starting from my writing project Sinnligt kviller, a collection of poems, I discuss these questions in themselves and the impact they have had on my collection. I describe the phenomenon cyclic as a result of the emotions and moods this term creates in a more or less decisive way.          The intention with this paper is to show how Sinnligt kviller offers different perspectives of and reflections upon the various feelings provoked by the cyclic in our lives, feelings that are given my own voice in the literary text under study.

Ziel der vorliegenden Arbeit ist die retrospektive Beurteilung der Sicherheit und Effektivität der Leberteilresektion bei der Behandlung von Lebermetastasen des kolorektalen Karzinoms sowie der Re-Resektion bei Patienten mit Rezidivlebermetastasen. Weiterhin soll das operative Vorgehen bei synchronen Lebermetastasen hinsichtlich simultaner Resektionsverfahren und zweizeitigen Vorgehens untersucht werden. Insgesamt wurden die Ergebnisse von 660 Patienten ausgewertet, die zwischen 1988 und 2004 mit 685 Leberteilresektionen behandelt wurden. Unter diesen waren 75 Patienten, die eine Re-Resektion erhielten sowie 202 Patienten, bei denen die Lebermetastasen synchron auftraten. Neben der Analyse der postoperativen Letalität und postoperativen Komplikationen sollen prognostische Faktoren für das Langzeitüberleben und das Auftreten von Tumorrezidiven nach Leberteilresektion identifiziert werden. Da sich die Studienpopulation aus einem Zeitraum von über 15 Jahren rekrutiert, sollen außerdem verschiedene Zeitabschnitte vergleichend analysiert werden. Die Leberteilresektion ist derzeit die einzige potentiell kurative Therapie bei kolorektalen Lebermetastasen. Als prognostisch günstige Parameter in der multivariaten Analyse zeigten sich die Radikalität des Eingriffes, die Anzahl der Metastasen, vorhandene ligamentäre Lymph-knotenmetastasen sowie das Jahr der Resektion. Auch bei Rezidiven kolorektaler Lebermetastasen ist das chirurgische Vorgehen derzeit die einzige kurative Intervention. Re-Resektionen weisen ein vergleichbares operatives Risiko und vergleichbare Langzeitüberlebensraten auf wie Erstresektionen. Als einziger prognostischer Parameter für das Langzeitüberleben erwies sich in der multivariaten Analyse die Radikalität des Eingriffes. Bei synchronen Lebermetastasen sind die wichtigsten Kriterien, um eine simultane Resektion durchzuführen, die Berücksichtigung des Alters sowie des Resektionsausmaßes. Simultane Resektionen sind bei synchronen kolorektalen Lebermetastasen dann so sicher und effizient durchführbar wie Resektionen im zweizeitigen Vorgehen.

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Prostatos vėžys yra dažniausia vyrų onkologinė liga JAV, Vakarų Europoje bei Lietuvoje. Dėl senstančios visuomenės ateityje bus nustatoma dar daugiau naujų prostatos vėžio atvejų. Lietuvos vėžio registro duomenimis 1995 – 2005 metais vidutinis metinis prostatos vėžio sergamumo didėjimas - 14,5 proc. per metus. Vyrų sergamumas prostatos vėžiu Lietuvoje 2005 metais siekė 125,9/100000 atvejų, o mirtingumas nuo šios ligos siekė 31/100000 atvejų. Vyrų mirtingumas nuo prostatos vėžio antras pagal dažnį po plaučių vėžio su vėžiu susijusio mirtingumo grupėje. Todėl daugelis tyrėjų pabrėžia, kad norint mažinti mirtingumą, reikia ankstinti prostatos vėžio nustatymo laiką. Pradėta Lietuvos vyrų ankstyvosios prostatos vėžio diagnostikos programa ir dažnas prostatos specifinio antigeno nustatymas lėmė padidėjusį apsilankymų pas urologus skaičių ir padidino prostatos biopsijų kiekį. Norint efektyviai ir optimaliai ištirti šiuos pacientus, reikia daug materialinių išteklių ir laiko.Šio darbo tikslas buvo optimizuoti pacientų su padidėjusia prostatos vėžio rizika ištyrimą ir stebėjimą bei nustatyti ryšį tarp prostatos vėžio rizikos veiksnių ir prostatos vėžio diagnozavimo padidėjusios rizikos grupėje. Darbo uždaviniai: 1. Išanalizuoti prostatos vėžio nustatymo dažnį pirmąja ir kartotinėmis lateralinėmis sekstantinėmis prostatos biopsijomis ir įvertinti jų efektyvumą. 2. Nustatyti amžiaus, rūkymo, alkoholio vartojimo, prostatos vėžio šeiminės anamnezės, viršsvorio ir padidėjusio cholesterolio... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / Prostate cancer is the most frequent malignant disease in men in United States, Western Europe and in Lithuania. Due to ageing population incidence of prostate cancer will rise even more in the future. Since the year 2003 prostate cancer became the most common form of cancer diagnosed in men in Lithuania (more than 1500 new prostate cancer cases a year). There were 2005 of new prostate cancer cases diagnosed in the year 2005. According to Lithuanian Cancer Registry data during the years 1995-2005 the prevalence of prostate cancer was increasing 14.5 percent annually. Prostate cancer was detected in 24.3 percent of all cancer cases in men in the year 2005 in Lithuania and in 48.3 percent of them disease was detected in the stages I and II. In the year 2005 the prevalence of prostate cancer in Lithuanian men was 125.9 per 100000 population and mortality was 31 per 100000 population. Prostate cancer is a second common form of death after lung cancer in cancer-associated mortality group in Lithuania. Prostate cancer mortality ranged between 19 and 55 per 100000 in Europe and it was 23.2 per 100000 populations in the year 2006 in European Union. Many authors stress that it is important to diagnose prostate cancer in the early stages in order to reduce prostate cancer mortality rate. The aim of the study was to optimize investigation and follow-up of the high prostate cancer risk patients, and to define the relation between prostate cancer risk factors and prostate cancer... [to full text]

<p>In many forensic cases, such as mass disasters reconstruction cases, the recovered DNA is highly degraded. In such incidences, typing of STR loci has become one of the most powerful tools for retrieving information from the degraded DNA. However, as DNA degradation proceeds, three phenomena occur consecutively: loci imbalance, allele dropout and no amplification. To solve the problem of degraded DNA, redesigned primer sets have been developed in which the primers were positioned as close as possible to the STR repeat region. These reduced primer sets were called Miniplexes. Unfortunately, a few of the CODIS STR loci cannot be made into smaller amplicons. For this reason non-CODIS miniSTRs have been developed. The present study was undertaken for the population genetic analysis of microsatellite variation in four South African populations / Afrikaner, Xhosa, Mixed Ancestry and Asian Indian using eight non-CODIS miniSTR loci. These miniSTRs loci were characterized within the populations by estimating the levels of diversity of the markers, estimating the population genetic parameters, and studying the inter-population relationships. All of the miniSTRs were amplified successfully and the genetic variability parameters across all loci in Afrikaner, Mixed Ancestry, Asian Indian and Xhosa were estimated to be in the range of 3 (D4S2364) to 12 (D9S2157) alleles, the total number of alleles over all loci ranged from 100 to 204, the allelic richness ranged from 3.612 to 10.307 and the heterozygosity ranged from 0.4360 to 0.8073. Genetic distance was least between Afrikaner and Asian Indian and highest between Xhosa and Mixed Ancestry. Deviations from Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium were not observed for most of the loci. The low mean FIS (-0.027) and FIT (-0.010) and FST (0.017) values across the populations indicated low level of inbreeding within (FIS) and among (FST) the populations. The Asian Indian population showed higher levels of the inbreeding coefficient, indicating less gene exchange between it and other populations. These 8 markers can be used for genetic investigations and assessing population structure. The study contributed to the knowledge and genetic characterization of four South African populations. In addition, these MiniSTRs prove to be useful in cases where more genetic information is needed.</p>

In South Africa various financial institutions and independent vendors have developed residential property valuation models to estimate the current value of historically traded properties. A natural extension to these models has been to develop historical property price indices. In this dissertation, three of the four approaches to developing property price indices will be examined. Through back–testing and other statistical methods, the most accurate and robust approach will be determined. The four major approaches available are the mean valuation per suburb, the median valuation per suburb, the repeat sales approach and hedonic regression. The mean valuation per suburb approach can be biased because of outliers in property prices. However, outliers in property prices will not influence the median valuation per suburb approach, but in cases where property values in a suburb have a skewed distribution, the valuation amount could be distorted. Neither of the above mentioned shortcomings influences the repeat sales or the hedonic regression approach. To follow the hedonic regression approach, the characteristics of the property need to be known. In South Africa, however, the available property data lacks detailed characteristics of traded properties. This dissertation will therefore focus on the first three methods. The repeat sales approach measures the growth in property prices by applying a generalized linear model to properties that have traded more than once. This approach is only possible if there is a representative amount of repeat sales able to fit a model. The focus of this project will be on the repeat sales approach, but all three the approaches discussed will be analysed to prove that the repeat sales approach is the most accurate in developing a property price index for properties in South Africa. / Thesis (M.Sc. (Risk Analysis))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2011.

In South Africa various financial institutions and independent vendors have developed residential property valuation models to estimate the current value of historically traded properties. A natural extension to these models has been to develop historical property price indices. In this dissertation, three of the four approaches to developing property price indices will be examined. Through back–testing and other statistical methods, the most accurate and robust approach will be determined. The four major approaches available are the mean valuation per suburb, the median valuation per suburb, the repeat sales approach and hedonic regression. The mean valuation per suburb approach can be biased because of outliers in property prices. However, outliers in property prices will not influence the median valuation per suburb approach, but in cases where property values in a suburb have a skewed distribution, the valuation amount could be distorted. Neither of the above mentioned shortcomings influences the repeat sales or the hedonic regression approach. To follow the hedonic regression approach, the characteristics of the property need to be known. In South Africa, however, the available property data lacks detailed characteristics of traded properties. This dissertation will therefore focus on the first three methods. The repeat sales approach measures the growth in property prices by applying a generalized linear model to properties that have traded more than once. This approach is only possible if there is a representative amount of repeat sales able to fit a model. The focus of this project will be on the repeat sales approach, but all three the approaches discussed will be analysed to prove that the repeat sales approach is the most accurate in developing a property price index for properties in South Africa. / Thesis (M.Sc. (Risk Analysis))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2011.

This thesis examines landscape change from 1889 to the present within the foothills-parkland ecoregion of Waterton Lakes National Park (WLNP) in southwestern Alberta, Canada. Land cover dynamics are explored qualitatively and quantitatively using Geographical Information Systems and a combination of historical and contemporary data sources including: (1) Dominion Land Survey (DLS) transect records (1889), (2) repeat oblique photographs (1914 and 2004) and repeat aerial photography (1939 and 1999). Results indicate a consistent increase in woody vegetation cover, particularly aspen forest cover, within the foothills-parkland since 1889, largely at the expense of native grasslands. The primary drivers of these changes likely include: climatic influences, changes to the historical grazing regime, the suppression of natural fire cycles and the cessation of First Nations’ land management practices. This research illustrates the value of integrating multiple historical data sources for studying landscape change in the Canadian Rockies, and explores the implications of this change for ecological restoration in the foothills-parkland of WLNP.

Multipath propagation and mobility in wireless communication systems give rise to variations in the amplitude and phase of the transmitted signal, commonly referred to as fading. Many wireless applications are affected by slowly varying fading, where the channel is non-ergodic, leading to non-reliable transmission during bad channel realizations. These communication scenarios are well modeled by the block-fading channel, where the reliability is quantatively characterized by the outage probability. This thesis focuses on the analysis and design of adaptive transmission schemes to improve the outage performance of both single- and multiple-antenna transmission over the block-fading channel, especially for the cases where discrete input constellations are used. Firstly, a new lower bound on the outage probability of non-adaptive transmission is proposed, providing an efficient tool for evaluating the performance of non-adaptive transmission. The lower bound, together with its asymptotic analysis, is essential for efficiently designing the adaptive transmission schemes considered in the thesis. Secondly, new power allocation rules are derived to minimize the outage probability of fixed-rate transmission over block-fading channels. Asymptotic outage analysis for the resulting schemes is performed, revealing important system design criteria. Furthermore, the thesis proposes novel suboptimal power allocation rules, which enjoy low-complexity while suffering minimal losses as compared to the optimal solution. Thus, these schemes facilitate power adaptation in low-cost devices. Thirdly, the thesis considers incremental-redundancy automatic-repeat-request (INR-ARQ) strategies, which perform adaptive transmission based on receiver feedback. In particular, the thesis concentrates on multi-bit feedback, which has been shown to yield significant gains in performance compared to conventional single-bit ARQ schemes. The thesis proposes a new information-theoretic framework for multi-bit feedback INR-ARQ, whereby the receiver feeds back a quantized version of the accumulated mutual information. Within this framework, the thesis presents an asymptotic analysis which yields the large gains in outage performance offered by multi-bit feedback. Furthermore, the thesis proposes practical design rules, which further illustrates the benefits of multi-bit feedback in INR-ARQ systems. In short, the thesis studies the outage performance of transmission over block-fading channels. Outage analysis is performed for non-adaptive and adaptive transmission. Improvements for the existing adaptive schemes are also proposed, leading to either lower complexity requirements or better outage performance. Still, further research is needed to bring the benefits offered by adaptive transmission into practical systems. / Thesis (PhD)--University of South Australia, 2010

Multipath propagation and mobility in wireless communication systems give rise to variations in the amplitude and phase of the transmitted signal, commonly referred to as fading. Many wireless applications are affected by slowly varying fading, where the channel is non-ergodic, leading to non-reliable transmission during bad channel realizations. These communication scenarios are well modeled by the block-fading channel, where the reliability is quantatively characterized by the outage probability. This thesis focuses on the analysis and design of adaptive transmission schemes to improve the outage performance of both single- and multiple-antenna transmission over the block-fading channel, especially for the cases where discrete input constellations are used. Firstly, a new lower bound on the outage probability of non-adaptive transmission is proposed, providing an efficient tool for evaluating the performance of non-adaptive transmission. The lower bound, together with its asymptotic analysis, is essential for efficiently designing the adaptive transmission schemes considered in the thesis. Secondly, new power allocation rules are derived to minimize the outage probability of fixed-rate transmission over block-fading channels. Asymptotic outage analysis for the resulting schemes is performed, revealing important system design criteria. Furthermore, the thesis proposes novel suboptimal power allocation rules, which enjoy low-complexity while suffering minimal losses as compared to the optimal solution. Thus, these schemes facilitate power adaptation in low-cost devices. Thirdly, the thesis considers incremental-redundancy automatic-repeat-request (INR-ARQ) strategies, which perform adaptive transmission based on receiver feedback. In particular, the thesis concentrates on multi-bit feedback, which has been shown to yield significant gains in performance compared to conventional single-bit ARQ schemes. The thesis proposes a new information-theoretic framework for multi-bit feedback INR-ARQ, whereby the receiver feeds back a quantized version of the accumulated mutual information. Within this framework, the thesis presents an asymptotic analysis which yields the large gains in outage performance offered by multi-bit feedback. Furthermore, the thesis proposes practical design rules, which further illustrates the benefits of multi-bit feedback in INR-ARQ systems. In short, the thesis studies the outage performance of transmission over block-fading channels. Outage analysis is performed for non-adaptive and adaptive transmission. Improvements for the existing adaptive schemes are also proposed, leading to either lower complexity requirements or better outage performance. Still, further research is needed to bring the benefits offered by adaptive transmission into practical systems. / Thesis (PhD)--University of South Australia, 2010