Many scholars examining desistance from crime have emphasized the importance of social factors in triggering the desistance process. Most notably, the work of Sampson and Laub (1993) focuses on the role of social bonds (e.g., marriage and employment), which serve as turning points in offenders’ lives, while other scholars have emphasized other important social factors, such as antisocial peer influence (Stouthamer-Loeber, Wei, Loeber, Masten, 2004; Warr, 1998, 2002). However, missing from such works is the role of subjective factors (e.g., thinking patterns, expectations, self-identity) in the desistance process, despite evidence that changes in identity and other cognitive transformations promote desistance from criminal offending (Giordano, Cernkovich, & Rudolph, 2002; Maruna, 2001). Examining the combined role of subjective and social factors is important, because it may lead to a more comprehensive understanding of the desistance process. Desistance researchers typically focus on one set of factors, while downplaying the other set of factors. Rarely have researchers examined the effects of social and subjective factors simultaneously (for exceptions, see Healy, 2010; Laub & Sampson, 2003; Morizot & Le Blanc, 2007). And even fewer attempts have been made to examine the interplay between social and subjective factors (for exceptions, see LeBel, Burnett, Maruna, & Bushway, 2008; Simons & Barr, 2012). Further, there is a special need to examine the impact of change in subjective and social factors on the desistance process using within-individual analyses (Farrington, 2007; Horney, Osgood, & Marshall, 1995; Kazemian, 2007). Thus, research on desistance is advanced in the current study in the following three ways. First, the influence of both subjective and social factors on desistance are considered, within the same statistical model. Second, this study is based on within-individual analyses. Third, the interplay between subjective and social factors is explored in this study, including mediation and moderation (interaction) effects. Data used in the current study are drawn from the Pathways to Desistance study (see Mulvey, 2004), following serious adolescent offenders for seven years – from mid-adolescence through early adulthood. The theoretical, policy, and research implications of the findings are discussed.

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Mobile communications has gained a growing interest from both customers and service providers alike in the last 1-2 decades. Visual information is used in many application domains such as remote health care, video –on demand, broadcasting, video surveillance etc. In order to enhance the visual effects of digital video content, the depth perception needs to be provided with the actual visual content. 3D video has earned a significant interest from the research community in recent years, due to the tremendous impact it leaves on viewers and its enhancement of the user’s quality of experience (QoE). In the near future, 3D video is likely to be used in most video applications, as it offers a greater sense of immersion and perceptual experience. When 3D video is compressed and transmitted over error prone channels, the associated packet loss leads to visual quality degradation. When a picture is lost or corrupted so severely that the concealment result is not acceptable, the receiver typically pauses video playback and waits for the next INTRA picture to resume decoding. Error propagation caused by employing predictive coding may degrade the video quality severely. There are several ways used to mitigate the effects of such transmission errors. One widely used technique in International Video Coding Standards is error resilience. The motivation behind this research work is that, existing schemes for 2D colour video compression such as MPEG, JPEG and H.263 cannot be applied to 3D video content. 3D video signals contain depth as well as colour information and are bandwidth demanding, as they require the transmission of multiple high-bandwidth 3D video streams. On the other hand, the capacity of wireless channels is limited and wireless links are prone to various types of errors caused by noise, interference, fading, handoff, error burst and network congestion. Given the maximum bit rate budget to represent the 3D scene, optimal bit-rate allocation between texture and depth information rendering distortion/losses should be minimised. To mitigate the effect of these errors on the perceptual 3D video quality, error resilience video coding needs to be investigated further to offer better quality of experience (QoE) to end users. This research work aims at enhancing the error resilience capability of compressed 3D video, when transmitted over mobile channels, using Multiple Description Coding (MDC) in order to improve better user’s quality of experience (QoE). Furthermore, this thesis examines the sensitivity of the human visual system (HVS) when employed to view 3D video scenes. The approach used in this study is to use subjective testing in order to rate people’s perception of 3D video under error free and error prone conditions through the use of a carefully designed bespoke questionnaire.

The overall aim of this thesis is to increase our knowledge of relevant exposure parameters when discussing possible health implication from exposure to radiofrequency electromagnetic fields (RF), especially effects that might occur at non-thermal levels. In this thesis an effort is made to broaden the exposure assessment and to take the exposure time into account and combine it with the Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) and the field parameters (electric and magnetic field strength) to approach a dose concept. In the first part of the thesis self-reported subjective symptoms among mobile phone users were studied. As a basis for this an epidemiological study among mobile phone users was completed with the main hypothesis that users of the digital transmission system GSM experience more symptoms than users of the older analogue NMT transmission system. The hypothesis was falsified, but an interesting side finding was that people with longer calling time per day experienced more symptoms than people with shorter calling time per day. The time-aspect (long duration phone call etc.) was also found to be relevant for the occurrence of symptoms in association with mobile phone use as well as duration of symptoms. The new suggested dosimetric quantity Specific Absorption per Day (SAD), in which both calling time per day as well as the measured SAR1g are included showed a stronger association to the prevalence of some of the symptoms, such as dizziness, discomfort and warmth behind the ear compared to both CT and SAR1g alone. In the second part whole body exposure conditions were considered. Methods to measure the induced current were examined in an experimental study, where different techniques were compared in different grounding conditions. The results were used in a study of operators of RF plastic sealers (RF operators) where the health status as well as the exposure were studied. The results showed that RF operators are a highly exposed group, which was confirmed by the fact that 16 out of 46 measured work places exceeded the ICNIRP guidelines. Headaches were found to be associated with the mean value of the time integrated E-field during a weld (E-weld) and the warmth sensations in the hands (warm hands) with the time integrated E-field exposure during one day (E-day). The general findings in this thesis indicated that time should be included in the exposure assessment when studying non-thermal effects such as subjective symptoms in connection with RF exposure. The thesis proposes two different methods for doing this, namely timeintegrated exposure [V/m x t and A/m x t] and dose [J/kg].

No description available.

<p>The overall aim of this thesis is to increase our knowledge of relevant exposure parameters when discussing possible health implication from exposure to radiofrequency electromagnetic fields (RF), especially effects that might occur at non-thermal levels.</p><p>In this thesis an effort is made to broaden the exposure assessment and to take the exposure time into account and combine it with the Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) and the field parameters (electric and magnetic field strength) to approach a dose concept.</p><p>In the first part of the thesis self-reported subjective symptoms among mobile phone users were studied. As a basis for this an epidemiological study among mobile phone users was completed with the main hypothesis that users of the digital transmission system GSM experience more symptoms than users of the older analogue NMT transmission system.</p><p>The hypothesis was falsified, but an interesting side finding was that people with longer calling time per day experienced more symptoms than people with shorter calling time per day. The time-aspect (long duration phone call etc.) was also found to be relevant for the occurrence of symptoms in association with mobile phone use as well as duration of symptoms. The new suggested dosimetric quantity Specific Absorption per Day (SAD), in which both calling time per day as well as the measured SAR1g are included showed a stronger association to the prevalence of some of the symptoms, such as dizziness, discomfort and warmth behind the ear compared to both CT and SAR1g alone.</p><p>In the second part whole body exposure conditions were considered. Methods to measure the induced current were examined in an experimental study, where different techniques were compared in different grounding conditions. The results were used in a study of operators of RF plastic sealers (RF operators) where the health status as well as the exposure were studied. The results showed that RF operators are a highly exposed group, which was confirmed by the fact that 16 out of 46 measured work places exceeded the ICNIRP guidelines. Headaches were found to be associated with the mean value of the time integrated E-field during a weld (E-weld) and the warmth sensations in the hands (warm hands) with the time integrated E-field exposure during one day (E-day).</p><p>The general findings in this thesis indicated that time should be included in the exposure assessment when studying non-thermal effects such as subjective symptoms in connection with RF exposure. The thesis proposes two different methods for doing this, namely timeintegrated exposure [V/m x t and A/m x t] and dose [J/kg]. </p>

Multi-view three-dimensional television requires many views, which may be synthesized from two-dimensional images with accompanying pixel-wise depth information. This depth image, which typically consists of smooth areas and sharp transitions at object borders, must be consistent with the acquired scene in order for synthesized views to be of good quality. We have previously proposed a depth image coding scheme that preserves significant edges and encodes smooth areas between these. An objective evaluation considering the structural similarity (SSIM) index for synthesized views demonstrated an advantage to the proposed scheme over the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) intra mode in certain cases. However, there were some discrepancies between the outcomes from the objective evaluation and from our visual inspection, which motivated this study of subjective tests. The test was conducted according to ITU-R BT.500-13 recommendation with Stimulus-comparison methods. The results from the subjective test showed that the proposed scheme performs slightly better than HEVC with statistical significance at majority of the tested bit rates for the given contents.

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Managers and organizational stakeholders are confronted by a range of stimuli, emotions, events, data, paradoxes and ambiguities in endeavouring to understand and make sense of change and the performance of their organizations. However, there is virtually no literature available on sensemaking within organizational performance. Historically sensemaking literature has focused on unusual events, disasters and high reliability settings but there is now a sizeable body addressing sensemaking in strategic organizational change. This literature has been systematically reviewed because of its proximity to organizational performance and in order to assess how sensemaking in organizational performance could be in investigated. Sensemaking in individuals is triggered by the unusual and confounding and is concerned with how people construct meaning from this. While sensegiving is about the role played by leaders, or stakeholders, in generating, articulating and “selling” a construction or interpretation of events emerging from their own sensemaking process. “Mindfulness” can be thought of as how sensemaking is realised and is about responding rather than reacting while using information, attentiveness and clues to make sense of what is happening. The sensemaking studies reviewed are dominated by work with middle managers who are seen by the authors as key organizational change agents. Organizational actors come to sensemaking through mental maps, or schemata that can be re-configured through the sensemaking process often as a way of addressing paradox or equivocation. The view of sensemaking as inter-subjective, discursive and narrative dominates giving scope to managers to facilitate the process. Sensegiving and sensemaking intertwine dialectically in a process which sees sensemaking informing sensegiving and vice versa. There is insufficient information on mindfulness and change to be able to assess it. In conclusion there are sufficient similarities between the processes of organizational change and organizational performance management to warrant its investigation from an inter-subjective, discursive and narrative sensemaking perspective.

No description available.