In this study spectral and photometric data of the SAX J2103.5+4545 Be/X-ray system are given. The spectral data were taken from June 2007 to September 2008 with the 1.5 m Russian-Turkish telescope, whereas the photometric data were obtained using ROTSE-IIId archive from June 2004 to November 2008. The photometric data up to April 2007 shows that the system was in quiescence in the optical region. But, in the 23rd of April 2007, the system&#039 / s luminosity underwent a large increase, which is in agreement with X-ray data. This increase was approximately 1 mag. Also, the Halpha line was displaying an emission with increased equivalent width proportional to the outburst. Afterwards, the Halpha line profile changed from a double peaked emission into a single peaked absorption, which is in agreement with the system&#039 / s structure. This means that the Be star threw away its disc and its light curve fell back to its old luminosity.

China inspired and fascinated the Western early-20th-century author. Some, like Pearl S. Buck, writing about a China where she grew up and lived for many years, offered careful, portraits of the Chinese people she loved. Others, such as Fu Manchu creator Sax Rohmer, depicted China as an evil empire and the Chinese as cruel and dangerous criminal masterminds. French author Victor Segalen saw China as the last crumbling frontier of an elusive exotic world that existed in stark contrast to the suffocating modernity and alienation of Europe. This thesis project examines three specific examples of Western literature about China from the early twentieth century: British author Sax Rohmer, whose depictions of exaggeratedly evil Oriental vilains reinforced Western fears of the Chinese Other; French writer Victor Segalen whose mystical portraits of a magnificent Chinese Empire served as the basis for his artistic manifesto on exoticism, and Pearl S. Buck, whose portrayals of sympathetic Chinese peasants helped shift American popular opinion and foreign policy. These three authors, though their styles, approaches and motives varied greatly, all feature the intersecting themes of exoticism, modernity and imperialism. The tensions between these three elements play out in different ways in each chapter of this thesis, and yet all three are examples of exotic writing about China at a time when exoticism was a lost cause, or as Chris Bongie describes it, “an idea with no future” (15). In these examples, imperialism still coloured perceptions of a racially distinct other, and modernity’s inevitability made imagining the exotic a depressing, frightening or naïvely hopeful exercise. In all three examples, this results in an exoticism that seeks to extend the boundaries of what had become a shrinking frontier. Some of the authors succeed in balancing the tensions between exoticism, imperialism and modernity, but in general most do not, and the texts remain deeply conflicted. / Graduate / 0295 / 0332

In this thesis,red noise analysis techniques are presented. The necessity of the use of the window functions and the Deeter polynomial method in order to determine red noise is discussed. The method was applied to the source SAX J2103.5+4545 which showed a white torque noise with a relatively low noise strength due to its being a transient system.

Konstanz, FH, Diplomarb., 2004.

In the overall academic study of the saxophone and its history there is a considerable lack of integration in how the technological advances of the saxophone enabled the eminent virtuosi of the repertory to accomplish the challenges of saxophone technique and style. This dissertation explores the technological development of the saxophone from when the instrument was first invented in the 1850s to the 1950s. Concurrent with this investigation, the trajectory of the major repertory of the saxophone is also plotted with the technological developments of each era. This dissertation aims to synthesise and study these two aspects contemporaneously to achieve viable theories to explain the effect that saxophone manufacturers of their particular eras had on the expansion of the classical saxophone repertory. As saxophone manufacturers expanded and diversified their approach in instrument construction, the players started to gain more facility with aspects like altissimo and intonation to aid them to play the repertoire proficiently. As a result, standards in the course of the first century of the saxophone’s existence gradually become higher. This dissertation is grounded in an assortment of secondary historical sources and the concepts that surround them. This work aims to aid saxophone players to not only understand the development of their instrument and repertory, but also the concepts and utilisation of vintage saxophones of previous eras. / Dissertation (MMus)--University of Pretoria, 2014. / lk2014 / Music / MMus / Unrestricted

The purpose of this thesis was to investigate whether some successful ideas in NLP, such as word2vec, are applicable to time series prob- lems or not. More specifically, we are interested to assess a combina- tion of previously proven methods such as SAX and Word2vec. Based on a rolling window approach, we applied SAX to create words for each window. These words formed a corpus on which we performed Word2vec, which served as inputs in a time series forecasting setting. We found that for forecasting horizons of longer length, our proposed method showed an improvement over statistical models under certain conditions. The findings suggest that bringing tools from the natural language processing domain into the time series domain may be an ef- fective idea. Further research is necessary to broaden the knowledge of these types of methods by testing alternative options for the cre- ation of words. Hopefully, this work will motivate other researchers to investigate this type of solution further.

No description available.

L’alumine est un support important en catalyse hétérogène. Le contrôle de ses propriétés physiques et texturales permet d’en améliorer les performances comme support pour des applications en catalyse. Les catalyseurs à base de cobalt sont connus pour présenter d’excellentes performances pour la réaction de reformage de l’éthanol (RRE) du fait de leur grande affinité à cliver les liaisons C-H et C-C.De nombreuses études ont visé à corréler les propriétés de l’alumine avec celles des catalyseurs. L’alumine présente une chimie de surface plutôt complexe qui peut être contrôlée par le mode de préparation. Dans ce travail,des alumines possédant des méso- et macropores ont été obtenues par voie sol-gel dans un mode de préparation « one-pot » accompagnée par une séparation de phases. Dans cette stratégie intégrative, les deux procédés,gélification et séparation de phases, surviennent spontanément dans les systèmes contenant un inducteur de séparation de phase.Les différentes alumines ont été synthétisées à partir d’isopropoxyde oude chlorure d’aluminium et de polyethylène oxyde ou polypropylène oxydeutilisés comme inducteur de séparation de phases. Le choix approprié des compositions des réactifs permet le contrôle de la taille et volume des pores. La formation des macropores résulte du processus de séparation de phase après décomposition par calcination de l’inducteur alors que l’espace entre particules formant le squelette du xerogel constitue la structure mésoporeuse.Les différentes alumines poreuses ainsi préparées et une alumine commerciale ont été utilisées comme supports de catalyseurs de cobalt par imprégnation par voie humide. Les précurseurs oxydes du catalyseur obtenu après calcination sont composés de phases de type Co ₃ O ₄ et CoAl₂O ₄ , cette dernière étant en quantité plus importante dans les alumines synthétiques.Comme les alumines sol-gel sont caractérisées par une plus grande proportion d’aluminium en site octaédrique et de groupement hydroxyles de surface que l’alumine commerciale, nous avons proposé que ces caractéristiques facilitent la migration du Cobalt dans le réseau alumine et explique la formation plus importante de phase de type CoAl₂O ₄ .Les catalyseurs ont été caractérisés pendant l’activation et en conditions réelles de fonctionnement RRE par EXAFS rapide pour suivre l’évolution de l’ordre local du cobalt et par spectroscopie Raman et spectrométrie de masse résolues dans le temps pour l’analyse des produits de réaction. Si l’espèce active est indiscutablement Co0, nous avons montré que les performances catalytiques dépendent aussi du rapport Co ² ⁺ /Co ⁰ obtenu après activation, dans le sens où de faibles rapports Co ² ⁺ /Co ⁰ ne permettront pas de nettoyer la surface du catalyseur par oxydation du coke formé lorsque la réaction de reformage de l’éthanol opère. Une conclusion importante de ce travail est la mise en évidence du rôle joué par l’oxyde cobalt (CoO) dans la stabilité du catalyseur à travers la promotion de l’oxydation des espèces carbonées déposées en surface. Ainsi le contrôle du rapport Co ² ⁺ /Co ⁰ apparaît comme un élément capital pour la conception de catalyseurs performants à base de cobalt pour la réaction de reformage de l’éthanol, le choix du support étant essentiel / Alumina is an important support for heterogeneous catalysts. Thematching of appropriate alumina physical properties and controlled texturalproperties can improve its performance as support in catalysis applications.Cobalt based catalysts have been reported to have a good ethanol steamreforming (ESR) performance due to their high activity for the cleavage of C-Hand C-C bonds.Many studies have been conducted about the effects of aluminaproperties on the cobalt catalysts properties. Alumina exhibits a rather complexsurface chemistry which can be controlled by the preparation procedure. In thiswork alumina samples with macro and mesoporous structure were obtainedusing the one-pot sol-gel synthesis accompanied by phase separation. In thisintegrative strategy both processes, gelation and phase separation,spontaneously occur in system containing the presence of the phase separationinducer.The different aluminas were produced by using as aluminum reactants,aluminum isopropoxide and chloride and PolyEthylene Oxide or PolyPropyleneOXide as phase separation inducer. Appropriate choice of the startingcomposition allows the control the pore size and volume. Macroporous areformed as a result of phase separation after burning the phase separationinducer, while voids between particles of the xerogel skeletons form amesoporous structures.The different alumina porous alumina and commercial alumina wereused as supports for preparing by wetness impregnation cobalt-based catalyst.The oxidic catalyst precursors obtained after calcination are composed of Co ₃ O ₄ and CoAl₂O ₄ -like phases, the latter being in higher proportions in the sol-gelalumina than in the commercial one. As the sol-gel alumina presents a largeramount of octahedral AlVI sites and surface hydroxyl groups than thecommercial alumina, it was assumed that these features can facilitate themigration of Co ions into the alumina network leading to formation of thegreatest amount of CoAl₂O ₄ .The catalysts were characterized under realistic activation and reactionconditions by the combination of Quick-XAS (X-ray Absorption Spectroscopy)for monitoring the change of the local order around Co with time-resolvedRaman and Mass spectroscopy for monitoring reaction products. If the Co(0)species is undoubtedly the active species for ESR, the catalytic performancehas been clearly shown to be affected by the Co ² ⁺ /Co ⁰ ratio obtained afteractivation, getting lower Co ² ⁺ /Co ⁰ ratios will not allow to clean the surface of thecatalyst by oxidation of C* as ESR is running. As an important conclusion of thework reported herein, we have evidenced that the cobalt oxide (CoO) plays akey role in the stability over time of the catalyst through oxidation of adsorbedand reactive carbon atoms. Then the control of the Co ²⁺ /Co ⁰ ratio appears to beone of the key issues in the design of efficient cobalt alumina-supported ethanolsteam reforming catalysts and the choice of the support is essential forcontrolling this ratio of active cobalt species.

I present RAACD, a software suite that detects misbehaving computers in large computing systems and presents information about those machines to the system administrator. I build this system using preexisting anomaly detection techniques. I evaluate my methods using simple synthesized data, real data containing coerced abnormal behavior, and real data containing naturally occurring abnormal behavior. I find that the system adequately detects abnormal behavior and significantly reduces the amount of uninteresting computer health data presented to a system administrator.

Syftet med detta utvecklingsarbete var att utveckla en lärarahandledning som stöd i teknik riktat till pedagoger i förskolan. Den skullle ge barnen en möjlighet till att skapa ett intresse för teknik. Lärarhandledningen riktar sig till pedagoger som arbetar med barn i åldrarna 3-6 och innehåller frågor om tekniken i vardagen som kan ställas av två mjukbjörnar, Nelli och Nalle. Utifrån dessa frågor så framställdes konkreta bygg- och konstruktionsuppdrag till varje enskild fråga. I handledningen så beskrivs det på vilket sätt pedagogerna kan arbeta med frågorna. Handledningen har utvärderats av fyra förskollärare och fick mycket positiv respons. / The aim of this development work was to develop a teacher´s guide to assist in technology aimed at educators in preschool. It would give the kids an opportunity to create an interest in the technology. Teacher´s Guide is aimed at educators that works with children ages 3-6 and includes questions about the technology of every day life that can be aked of two softbears, Nelli and Nalle. From these questions then prepared an constuction and constuction tasks to each individual question. The Guide describes the way in which teahers can work with technology in every day life. The tutorial has been evalueted in four preschool theacher´s and got a very positive respons.