Une lecture comparative de la « Poudre d’intelligence » de Kateb Yacine, de Pélagie-La-Charrette d’Antonine Maillet, de Midnight’s Children de Salman Rushdie et de Texaco de Patrick Chamoiseau, révèle le rôle fondamental des contingences qui produisent l’humour à travers un contexte déclencheur commun. En tant que processus, l’humour voile et dévoile, tout comme le procédé optique de l’anamorphose. Or un même bouleversement épistémologique affecte l’humour et l’anamorphose, chacun partageant le même principe de recréation des formes, du monde distendu ; un observateur ou un lecteur est alors indispensable à leur réalisation. Ces deux phénomènes convergent ainsi vers un humour anamorphique rendu sensible par les oeuvres du corpus. Rêve poétique et lucidité politique, l’humour marque une quête de communion porteuse de toutes les espérances. Son pouvoir évocateur émerveille et invite à entrer en contact avec la totalité du monde. La phénoménologie de l’humour anamorphique est sonapparition/disparition. Nous nous intéressons à son déploiement en suivant le mode de lecture du processus anamorphique. Suivre des yeux l’humour anamorphique revient à s’attacher à l’expression d’un bouleversement dans la vision du monde et dans le rapport aux signes. C’est en ce sens que l’humour se placerait sous le signe d’Hermès, originellement évoqué par des petits tas de pierres déposés au seuil des maisons et des temples.Symbole de seuil, de transition, de circulation, de mouvement, Hermès transparaît en agitateur del’humour anamorphique. / A comparative reading of '' La Poudre d'intelligence'' by Kateb Yacine, Pélagie-La-Charette by Antonine Maillet, Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie and Texaco by Patrick Chamoiseau brings to light the crucial role of the contingencies that make humour trigger from a common context. As a process, humour veils and unveils reality, just as the optical process of anamorphosis does. Now, identical epistemological disruption affects humour and anamorphosis, both sharing principle of re-Creating forms and a distorted world. An observer or reader proves therefore necessary to their realization. These two phenomena converge towards an anamorphic humour that stands out from the corpus' works. A poetical dream and a political clear-Headedness, humour initiates a quest for a communion filled with every possible hope. One marvels at its suggestive power and is invited to get into close acquaintance with the whole world. The phenomenology of anamorphic humour lies into its appearance/disappearance.Through the lens of the process of anamorphosis the focus will be set on how humour unfolds. Observing anamorphic humour amounts to studying the expression of a disruption in how the world is viewed as well as in the relationship to signs. It is in this sense that anamorphic humour could be associated with Hermes, who was originally evoked through small piles of stones on houses' and temples' thresholds. A symbol of threshold, transition, flow and movement, Hermes appears as an agitator of anamorphic humour, which is the hallmark of a passage, a change in direction, of a place where different meanings intertwine.

While recognizing some kinds of human motion patterns requires detailed feature representation and tracking, many of them can be recognized using global features. The global configuration or structure of an object in a frame can be expressed as a probability density function constructed using relational attributes between low-level features, e.g. edge pixels that are extracted from the regions of interest. The probability density changes with motion, tracing a trajectory in the latent space of distributions, which we call the configuration space. These trajectories can then be used for recognition using standard techniques such as dynamic time warping. Can these frame-wise probability functions, which usually have high dimensionality, be embedded into a low-dimensional space so that we can still estimate various meaningful probabilistic distances in the new space? Given these trajectory-based representations, can one learn models of signs in an unsupervised manner? We address these two fundamental questions in this dissertation. Existing embedding approaches do not extend easily to preserve meaningful probabilistic distances between the samples. We present an embedding framework to preserve the probabilistic distances like Chernoff, Bhattacharya, Matusita, KL or symmetric-KL based on dot-products between points in this space. It results in computational savings. We experiment with the five different probabilistic distance measures and show the usefulness of the representation in three different contexts - sign recognition of 147 different signs (with large number of possible classes), gesture recognition with 7 different gestures performed by 7 different persons (with person variations) and classification of 8 different kinds of human-human interaction sequences (with segmentation problems). Currently, researchers in continuous sign language recognition assume that the training signs are already available and often those are manually selected from continuous sentences. It consumes a lot of human time and is tedious. We present an approach for automatically learning signs from multiple sentences by using a probabilistic framework to extract the parts of signs that are present in most of its occurrences, and are robust to variations produced by adjacent signs. We show results by learning 10 signs and 10 spoken words from 136 sign language sentences and 136 spoken sequences respectively.

Dynamic programming has been widely used to solve various kinds of optimization problems.In this work, we show that two crucial problems in video-based sign language and gesture recognition systems can be attacked by dynamic programming with additional multiple observations. The first problem occurs at the higher (sentence) level. Movement epenthesis [1] (me), i.e., the necessary but meaningless movement between signs, can result in difficulties in modeling and scalability as the number of signs increases. The second problem occurs at the lower (feature) level. Ambiguity of hand detection and occlusion will propagate errors to the higher level. We construct a novel framework that can handle both of these problems based on a dynamic programming approach. The me has only be modeled explicitly in the past. Our proposed method tries to handle me in a dynamic programming framework where we model the me implicitly. We call this enhanced Level Building (eLB) algorithm. This formulation also allows the incorporation of statistical grammar models such as bigrams and trigrams. Another dynamic programming process that handles the problem of selecting among multiple hand candidates is also included in the feature level. This is different from most of the previous approaches, where a single observation is used. We also propose a grouping process that can generate multiple, overlapping hand candidates. We demonstrate our ideas on three continuous American Sign Language data sets and one hand gesture data set. The ASL data sets include one with a simple background, one with a simple background but with the signer wearing short sleeved clothes, and the last with a complex and changing background. The gesture data set contains color gloved gestures with a complex background. We achieve within 5% performance loss from the automatically chosen me score compared with the manually chosen me score. At the low level, we first over segment each frame to get a list of segments. Then we use a greedy method to group the segments based on different grouping cues. We also show that the performance loss is within 5% when we compare this method with manually selected feature vectors.

This study was a program evaluation of an American Sign Language internship program that was established in 2006 at a 4-year private college in the Midwestern United States but had never been evaluated. The purpose of the study was to evaluate the effectiveness of this internship program in preparing students for employment in the field of interpreting. An expertise-oriented program evaluation case study was conducted using the lens of experiential learning theory. Research questions were used to investigate the strengths and weaknesses of the program and the ways in which the policies, objectives, and assignments prepare students to work as interns and later as professional interpreters. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 2 former administrators who helped establish the program, 13 graduates of the program between 2013 and 2015, and 8 of the internship site directors who worked with interns between 2013 and 2015. The interview data were coded and analyzed following Merriam's approach to identify themes, and document review was used to support the themes. Key findings were that the program provided effective training for interns transitioning to professional employment, but students tended to lack self-confidence in their performances Interviewees also indicated that program documents were helpful but difficult to use, and mentors needed guidance in giving constructive feedback. An evaluation report was constructed as a research project deliverable to provide specific recommendations for program enhancement. The study promotes positive social change by providing stakeholders with the evidence-based data needed to implement further growth for the internship program, and to more effectively train interpreters to work with the Deaf community.

L’objectif principal de l’étude est d’analyser le flux expérientiel de activité de cinq proviseurs afin de mieux comprendre leurs modalités d’action sur des empans temporels courts. Il s’agit aussi de rendre intelligible la complexité de l’activité quotidienne des proviseurs et de mettre en lumière des modalités d’action liées à la gouvernance des établissements. Ils exercent dans des EPLE de 700 élèves à 1700 élèves situés dans deux académies (académies de Clermont-Ferrand et d’Orléans-Tours) et ont 10 ans d’expérience minimum. L'étude s’est appuyée sur les présupposés du programme de recherche du cours d’action (Theureau, 2006, 2009, 2015). Trois types de matériaux ont été recueillis : (i) des enregistrements audiovisuels des actions du chef d’établissement et des communications avec d’autres professionnels ; (ii) des enregistrements d’entretien d’autoconfrontation ; (iii) des notes d’observation destinées à compléter la description de l’activité ainsi que des traces de l’activité du chef d’établissement (mails, documents, etc.). Notre étude souligne que les proviseurs sont contraints à réaliser une multiplicité d’actions. Ils sont amenés à apporter un soin particulier au travail en équipe et à la communication sous toutes ses formes, à la formation et à l’accompagnement de leurs collaborateurs, dans un souci de co-construction les conduisant vers la mise en place d’un leadership partagé. Les résultats de notre étude peuvent ainsi contribuer au développement de nouvelles perspectives de formation. / This thesis mainly aims at analyzing the changes in the nature of the activities undertaken by five school leaders, in order to better understand their short-term actions. It is also a question of clarifying some of the principal’s modes of action while they carry out their everyday activities. It is also a question of making understandable the complexity of the daily role of the school leaders and of highlighting actions and policies connected to the governance of Lycées. The Lycées for which they are responsible have between 700 and 1700 students on role. They are located in two different regional education authorities: that of Clermont-Ferrand and that of Orléans-Tours. These school leaders have at least ten years’ experience in the role. Our study is based on the evaluation of the hypotheses of the research program : “Cours d’action” (Theureau, 2006, 2009, 2015). Three types of evidence were collected: (i) films of the work of the school leaders and their communication with other professionals; (ii) recording of face-to-face interviews; (iii) notes collected during the observation and used to clarify the descriptions of the activity, alongside other evidence eg emails or notes. Our study indicates that school leaders have to perform a large number of different actions. They pay particular attention to teamwork, and all forms of communication. The training and mentoring of staff is carried out with the aim of the establishment of shared leadership. The results of our study can contribute to the development of new types of training courses

<p>Detta projekt har haft som mål att utveckla produktdisplayer för användning i butiker i syfte att exponera produkter som smycken, solglasögon eller liknande. Projektet är utfört som ett examensarbete vid Mälardalens Högskola inom produktutveckling med inriktning formgivning.</p><p>Bakgrunden till projektet är att företaget X-ponent vill utforska en ny marknad. Det vill säga konsumentmarknaden istället för sin vanliga inriktning på industri. X-ponent har fått förfrågningar om produktdisplayer av mindre tillverkare av smycken och säljer idag en enkel variant till dessa.</p><p>Uppdraget har gått ut på att ta fram tre koncept på produktdisplayer ett med ett eget användningsområde; en väggdisplay, för att kunna användas vid vägg; en golv display, för användning på golvet i butiken; och en bordsdisplay, att kunna ställa på bord eller disk. Displayens syfte skulle vara att exponera produkten och locka folk att köpa varför konsument psykologi och marknadsföring i butik studerades. Även semiotik spelade stor roll i konceptens formgivning och studerades noga.</p><p>För att ta reda på marknadens krav och egenskaper användarna ansåg vara bra och dåligt med dagens produkter utfördes en marknadsundersökning i butikerna i Tuna Park i Eskilstuna och på Dustins Elektronikmässa i Annexet i Stockholm. Även en utförlig konkurrensanalys utfördes på konkurrerande produkter.</p><p>Under projektets gång har ett flertal produktutvecklings verktyg används som, funktionsanalys, FEMA och CAD (genom SolidWorks). Arbetsmetoden har varit att ta fram en mängd olika koncept för att sedan metodiskt sålla bort, förbättra och tillslut välja ut slutgilltliga koncept.</p><p>För att göra bästa möjliga val använde jag mig av flera beprövade verktyg. Som Beslutsmatriser, PUGH och QFD. Utöver dessa verktyg hade jag flera diskussioner med uppdragsgivare och handledare.</p><p>En viktig del har varit att presentera koncept som både uppfyller marknadens och uppdragsgivarens krav samtidigt som det är så hållbart för miljön som möjligt. för att göra detta möjligt studerades "sustainable design" (hållbar design).</p><p>De slutgiltiga koncepten presenterades som renderade bilder. Dessa renderades i programmet 3D-Studio max. En säljande produktfolder skapades för att ge koncepten extra tyngd. Även en modell av väggkonceptet togs fram.</p>

<p>This study investigates verbal and visuospatial memory strategies used by individuals with perceptual or cognitive disabilities. The groups concentrated on in this study are deaf individuals who are native sign language users and individuals with dyslexia. </p><p>The study comprises an experiment and an in-depth study in which a pre-test and a questionnaire were used. Nine deaf signers, two persons with dyslexia and 12 persons without any perceptual or cognitive constraints participated. Of these 23 persons, seven were selected to take part in the in-depth study. </p><p>The results indicate individual differences in working memory capacity among the subjects and differences in performance and processing between native sign language users and hearing individuals. Further, all of the participants were using a number of different strategies and shifting between strategies in the experiment. The results demonstrate that the amount of information individuals are able to hold activated in working memory is dependent on a range of factors, both internal factors specific to the individual and external factors relating to how information is presented. Guidelines for information presentation to limit working memory demands based on the findings are suggested.</p>

<p>Legislators steadily increase the demands on lowered emissions from heavy duty vehicles. To meet these demands it is necessary to integrate technologies like Exhaust Gas Recirculation (EGR) and Variable Geometry Turbochargers (VGT) together with advanced control systems. A control structure with PID controllers and selectors is proposed and investigated for coordinated control of EGR valve and VGT position in heavy duty diesel engines. Main control goals are to fulfill the legislated emission levels, to reduce the fuel consumption, and to fulfill safe operation of the turbocharger. These goals are achieved through regulation of normalized oxygen/fuel ratio and intake manifold EGR-fraction. These are chosen as main performance variables since they are strongly coupled to the emissions, compared to manifold pressure or air mass flow, which makes it easy to adjust set-points depending on e.g. measured emissions during an emission calibration process. In addition a mechanism for fuel efficient operation is incorporated in the structure, this is achieved by minimizing the pumping work. To design a successful control structure, a mean value model of a diesel engine is developed and validated. The intended applications of the model are system analysis, simulation, and development of model-based control systems. Model equations and tuning methods for the model parameters are described for each subsystem in the model. Static and dynamic validations of the entire model show mean relative errors that are less than 12%. Based on a system analysis of the model, a key characteristic behind the control structure is that oxygen/fuel ratio is controlled by the EGR-valve and EGR-fraction by the VGT-position, in order to handle a sign reversal in the system from VGT to oxygen/fuel ratio. For efficient calibration an automatic controller tuning method is developed. The controller objectives are captured in a cost function, that is evaluated utilizing a method choosing representative transients. The performance is evaluated on the European Transient Cycle. It is demonstrated how the weights in the cost function influence behavior, and that the tuning method is important in order to improve the control performance compared to if only a standard method is used. It is also demonstrated that the controller structure performs well regarding all control objectives. In combination with its efficient tuning, the controller structure thus fulfills all requirements for successful application.</p> / Report code: LiU-TEK-LIC-2006:52.

<p>This thesis is about a generalization of permutation theory. The concept of pattern avoidance in permutation matrices is investigated in a larger class of matrices - the alternating sign matrices. The main result is that the set of alternating sign matrices avoiding the pattern 132, is counted by the large Schröder numbers. An algebraic and a bijective proof is presented. Another class is shown to be counted by every second Fibonacci number. Further research in this new area of combinatorics is discussed.</p>

<p>I den digitala världen är elektroniska signaturer motsvarigheten till traditionella namnunderskrifter. Många lagregler innehåller ett krav på egenhändig underskrift. Frågan är om elektroniska signaturer kan anses uppfylla det kravet och på så sätt godtas istället för en namnunderskrift. Om inte, måste lagändringar till för att elektroniska signaturer skall accepteras. I förarbeten och doktrin finns skilda meningar om elektroniska signaturers rättsverkan och vad som krävs för att de skall godtas. Vissa anser att det krävs lagändringar medan några säger att elektroniska signaturer kan godtas redan idag, om man ser till syftena bakom kravet på underskrift i de lagrum där kravet är uppställt. Kan syftena med kravet på underskrift uppfyllas lika väl med en elektronisk signatur?</p> / <p>In the digital world a electronic signature can be compared with a signature written with a pencil on a paper. The problem is that many rules of law say that a signature should be handmade. Can an electronic signatures be seen as handmade? This is being disputed in doctrine, some think that legal changes must take place. Others see no reason why electronic signatures cannotbe used today, having a teleologic point of view. Can the purpose to use a handmade signature be fulfilled with an electronic signature?</p>