Global health is an emerging concern in a rapidly changing world in which health issues transcend international borders. This study developed and validated a new self-report questionnaire to assess self-perceived global health competencies among international medical students and how they are influenced by international clinical experiences. A tool consisted of two scales and four subscales with moderate internal consistency. Comparisons between participants who completed retrospective pretest (after the intervention retrospectively) and those who completed traditional pretest (before the intervention) revealed that those participants who completed the questionnaires retrospectively provided lower pretest scores, suggesting that response-shift bias had occurred. Significant increases in scores after international clinical experience were reported for the majority of global health competency measures in IFMSA group. Linear regression identified participant’s age, gross national income (GNI) of country of medical studies, GNI of the country visited, duration of international clinical experience and years of medical school completed, as significant predictors of global health scores. This study contributes valuable information about the newly developed global health competencies measurement tool.

Over the past decade, there has been a tremendous development in e-publishing tools. The Arab world tendency towards electronic publishing has facilitated the prosperity of Arabic e-publishing over the Internet. Likewise, it has enabled the ordinary user to deploy documents, letters, opinions, and ideas with freedom and ease of use. Although freedom of expression should be guaranteed to everyone, it may be used to disseminate false or distorted information. This may lead to the loss of ordinary user's confidence in e-content. However, the user's confidence in e-content will increase if the credibility of the content is emphasized. There are many factors that challenge this task including not only the rapidly growth of Arabic digital publishing, the absent from control over electronic content, and the lack of e-publishing regulations and laws, but also how to develop an efficient framework to confirm the digital content authenticity. Therefore, the need to monitor the credibility of Internet content while maintaining freedom of expression to its users has become an urgent matter of debate. A flexible framework needs to be developed that will overcome these issues and allow for a comprehensible and comfortable content validation environment that would satisfy the end users' desires. This thesis proposes a framework that serves to confirm fundamental text authenticity in Arabic scripts on the Internet. This framework will demonstrate the design and the development of new quotes verification algorithm and the necessary components of framework design, development and implementation based on Service Oriented architecture.

The aim of this study was to find out how journalism students at two universities in Sweden, Gothenburg University and Linnaeus University in Kalmar, use the social networking service Twitter. We were primarily interested in whether the students are using Twitter as a journalistic tool, which includes gathering, production and distribution of material. The study focused on journalism students because they soon will enter the working life and therefore can provide an indication of whether Twitter is a part of the future of journalism. We have used theories of mass communication to describe the development in the area and explore how journalism has adapted to this change. The study was conducted in the form of a survey in which the students answered questions about how they use Twitter and what they think about the social networking service. The results show that a large percentage of the journalism students use Twitter as a journalistic tool, but not in a particularly high degree. We noticed, however, that their usage differ from their thoughts and that many see Twitter as a useful tool in journalism.

The amount of energy consumed during a tillage operation depends on three categories of parameters: (1) soil parameters (2) tool parameters and (3) operating parameters. Although many research works have been reported on the effects of those parameters on tillage energy, the exact number of affecting parameters and the contribution of each parameter in total energy requirement have not been specified. A study with the objectives of specifying energy consuming components and determining the amount of each component for a vertical narrow tool, particularly at high speeds of operation, was conducted in the soil bin facilities of the Department of Agricultural and Bioresource Engineering, University of Saskatchewan. <p>Based on studies by Blumel (1986) and Kushwaha and Linke (1996), four main energy consuming components were assumed: <p>(1) energy requirements associated with soil-tool interactions;<p>(2) energy requirements associated with interactions between tilled and fixed soil masses;<p>(3) energy requirements associated with soil deformation; and <p>(4) energy requirements associated with the acceleration of the tilled soil. <p> Energy requirement of a vertical narrow tool was calculated based on the draft requirement of the tool measured in the soil bin. The effects of three variables, moisture content, operating depth and forward speed, were studied at different levels: (1) moisture content at 14% and 20%; (2) depth at 40, 80, 120 and 160 mm; and (3) speed at 1, 8, 16 and 24 km h-1. Total energy requirement was divided into these four components based upon the procedure developed in the research. <p>Regression equations for different energy components were developed based on experimental data of two replicates and then validated by extra soil bin experiments conducted at same soil and tool but different operational conditions. The set up of energy components data in the model development showed good correlation with the available experimental data for all four components. Coefficients of all regression equations showed a first order energy-moisture content relationship best applicable to those equations of energy components. For the acceleration component, energy-depth relationship at all speed levels resulted in an equation which included first and second orders of depth. In contrast, if only two higher levels of speed were used in the regression model, the relationship between acceleration energy and depth resulted in the second order of depth. When experimental data of acceleration energy at 8, 16, and 24 km h-1 speeds were used in the regression equation, the acceleration energy-speed relationship resulted in both linear and quadratic relationships. It was concluded that for the tool and soil conditions used in the experiments, 8 km h-1 speed resulted in only linear relationship. On the other hand, 16 and 24 km h-1 speeds resulted in a quadratic relationship. Therefore, for all 3 speeds used in experiments, both linear and quadratic relationships were obtained. Considering that the tool was operating at high speeds, this research is expected to contribute valuable experimental data to the researchers working in the field of soil dynamics.

The increasing use of electronic components in today&rsquo / s automobiles demands more powerful in-vehicle network communication protocols. FlexRay protocol, which is expected to be the de-facto standard in the near future, is a deterministic, fault tolerant and fast protocol designed for in vehicle communication. For proper operation of a FlexRay network the communication schedule needs to be computed and the nodes need to be configured before startup. Current software tools that are geared towards FlexRay only deal with the configuration process. The schedule needs to be computed by a network designer manually and it is necessary to input the designed schedule and the configurable parameters by hand. This thesis improves upon a previous scheduling software to automatically compute the network schedule, and then generate a universally acceptable FIBEX file that can be imported to available software tools to produce the necessary FlexRay node configuration files.

The aim of this research is to develop an optimisation tool to support the preliminary design of gas turbine combustors by providing a partial automation of the design process. This tool is to enable better design to be obtained faster, providing a reduction in the development costs and time to market of new engines. The first phase of this work involved the analysis of the combustor design process with the aim of identifying the critical tasks that are suitable for being automated and most importantly identifying the key parameters describing the performance of a combustor. During the second phase of this work an adequate design methodology for this problem was defined. This led to the development of a design optimisation Toolbox based on genetic algorithms, containing the tools required for it's proper integration into the combustor preliminary design environment. For the development of this Toolbox, extensive work was performed on genetic algorithms and derived techniques in order to provide the most efficient and robust optimisation method possible. The optimisation capability of the Toolbox was first validated and metered on analytical problems of known solution, where it demonstrated excellent optimisation performance especially for higher-dimensional problems. In a second step of the testing and validation process the combustor design capability of the Toolbox was demonstrated by applying it to diverse combustor design test cases. There the Toolbox demonstrated its capacity to achieve the required performance targets and to successfully optimise some key combustor parameters such as liner wall cooling flow and NOx emissions. In addition, the Toolbox demonstrated its ability to be applied to different types of engineering problems such as wing profile optimisation.

Sentiment analysis is a field of computational linguistics involving identification, extraction, and classification of opinions, sentiments, and emotions expressed in natural language. Sentiment classification algorithms aim to identify whether the author of a text has a positive or a negative opinion about a topic. One of the main indicators which help to detect the opinion are the words used in the texts. Needless to say, the sentiments expressed in the texts also depend on the syntactic structure and the discourse context. Supervised machine learning approaches to sentiment classification were shown to achieve good results. Classifying texts by emotions requires finer-grained analysis than sentiment classification. In this thesis, we explore the task of emotion and mood classification for blog postings. We propose a novel approach that uses the hierarchy of possible moods to achieve better results than a standard flat classification approach. We also show that using sentiment orientation features improves the performance of classification. We used the LiveJournal blog corpus as a dataset to train and evaluate our method. Another contribution of this work is extracting paraphrases for emotion terms based on the six basics emotions proposed by Ekman (\textit{happiness, anger, sadness, disgust, surprise, fear}). Paraphrases are different ways to express the same information. Algorithms to extract and automatically identify paraphrases are of interest from both linguistic and practical points of view. Our paraphrase extraction method is based on a bootstrapping algorithms that starts with seed words. Unlike in previous work, our algorithm does not need a parallel corpus. In Natural Language Generation (NLG), paraphrasing is employed to create more varied and natural text. In our research, we extract paraphrases for emotions, with the goal of using them to automatically generate emotional texts (such as friendly or hostile texts) for conversations between intelligent agents and characters in educational games. Nowadays, online services are popular in many disciplines such as: e-learning, interactive games, educational games, stock market, chat rooms and so on. NLG methods can be used in order to generate more interesting and normal texts for such applications. Generating text with emotions is one of the contributions of our work. In the last part of this thesis, we give an overview of NLG from an applied system's points of view. We discuss when NLG techniques can be used; we explained the requirements analysis and specification of NLG systems. We also, describe the main NLG tasks of content determination, discourse planning, sentence aggregation, lexicalization, referring expression generation, and linguistic realisation. Moreover, we describe our Authoring Tool that we developed in order to allow writers without programming skills to automatically generate texts for educational games. We develop an NLG system that can generate text with different emotions. To do this, we introduce our pattern-based model for generation. We show our model starts with initial patterns, then constructs extended patterns from which we choose ``final'' patterns that are suitable for generating emotion sentences. A user can generate sentences to express the desired emotions by using our patterns. Alternatively, the user can use our Authoring Tool to generate sentences with emotions. Our acquired paraphrases will be employed by the tool in order to generate more varied outputs.

The present Master thesis was written during an internship at Deutsche Post DHL Solutions&amp; Innovations, a subsidiary of Deutsche Post DHL. The main purpose was to make a patent portfolio benchmark for the previously identified business competitors of the DPDHL group. The research questions aimed to find out how relevant the patent portfolio analysis is for comparing competitors and whether or not the results can be matched with other types of rankings. The benchmark was made using the PatentSight software tool. PatentSight allows the patent portfolio analysis of individual companies as well as groups of companies (competitors). The software tool is based on a new approach to benchmark patent portfolios called Patent Asset Index. This approach uses several indicators to measure the patent portfolios strengths. The indicators are based on relatively widely used measures of patent analysis such as the number of citations that a patent has received. However, these measures are further adjusted by the PatentSight indicators in order to prevent false results due to the difference in patents’ ages, for instance. The results of the patent portfolio benchmark and their comparison with other rankings have confirmed previous research findings that the patent portfolio analysis is a useful tool which can remove uncertainties and provide new perspectives but cannot be used as single indicator of the competitors’ strength.

We all have a body : our own body and just one body. Through it, we move, we interact with the world and other persons, we perceive, basically we live. It's a unique essential object. If it is true that we have only one physical body, we also have many representations of it in the brain. There is little agreement about the exact number of body representations in the brain, but not on the fact that we have more than one. The multi-componential models of body representation are based on the notion, supported by scientific evidence that different activities demand and rely on specifically adapted representations. In my thesis, I studied one particular body representation that is used and involved in action planning and execution, i.e. the Body Schema. I have been able to describe and measure the plasticity of the Body Schema and its level of specificity in healthy individuals. In particular, using a tool-use paradigm, I showed that the Body Schema is quickly and efficiently updated once a change in the body configuration occurs. With a series of kinematic studies, I contributed unveiling the ingredients that rule the plasticity of the BS and the sensory information that is used to this purpose. As a result of my thesis, I suggest that a clearer definition and operational description of the Body Schema, as an action-devoted repertoire of effectors representations, is possible, particularly thanks to its plastic features

The aim and purpose of this essay is to investigate how literature can be used as an educational tool and as a source for learning acquisition. More specifically, this essay investigates whether literature can facilitate vocabulary acquisition by exploring different aspects of learning through literature and by implementing a study to see how literature contributes to the development of vocabulary. The results of the study show improvement on vocabulary breadth with the help of literature and consequently serve to reinforce the importance of literature and substantiate the reasons why literature is used in school. This essay can serve as supplementary evidence for the significance and relevance of literature as an educational tool.