Protein folding and export to the membrane are crucial events in the cell. Both processes may be initiated already at the ribosome, assisted by factors that bind to the polypeptide as it emerges from the ribosome. The signal recognition particle (SRP) scans the ribosome for nascent peptides destined for membrane insertion and targets these ribosomes to the site for translocation in the membrane. Trigger factor (TF) is a folding chaperone that interacts with nascent chains to promote their correct folding, prevent misfolding and aggregation. In this thesis, we first investigated membrane targeting and insertion of two heterologous membrane proteins in E. coli by using in vitro translation, membrane targeting and cross-linking. We found that these proteins are dependent on SRP for targeting and that they initially interact with translocon components in the same way as native nascent membrane proteins. Moreover we have characterised the SRP and TF interactions with the ribosome both with cross-linking experiments and with quantitative binding experiments. Both SRP and TF bind to ribosomal L23 close to the nascent peptide exit site where they are strategically placed for binding to the nascent polypeptide. Quantitative analysis of TF and SRP binding determined their respective KD values for binding to non translating ribosomes and reveals that they bind simultaneously to the ribosome, thus having separate binding sites on L23. Finally, binding studies on ribosome nascent chain adds clues as to how TF functions as a chaperone.

The telecommunication business has changed in Sweden during the recent years. From being a monopoly, the market has switched into a more competitive market with more competitors that offer more services. TeliaSonera is one of the largest telecommunication providers in Sweden. TeliaSonera is a co-operation between the companies Telia, which was one of the leading telecommunication companies in Sweden, and the Finnish counterpart Sonera. At the present time of this thesis, they provide their customers with services like Broadband, TV, Stationary phone and Mobile phone. These services are provided both to residential and business customers. The aim of this research project is to understand the switching behaviour of former TeliaSonera customers by investigating the background of the customers' motivation to switch. Through analysing the findings, the researchers will be able to make assumptions about customer switching processes. The research has been conducted with an explorative research approach and qualitative interviewing via telephone with 22 former TeliaSonera customers. The questions were related to their behaviour before, while and after the switching from TeliaSonera to a competing provider. From the interviews, the researchers seek to get a better understanding what triggers sway customers to switch. Additionally, it is equally important to understand the switching process customers go through. The theoretical framework is based on prior research on customer behaviour and customer relationship management in the field of service management and marketing. Theories as triggers, active and passive customers or suggestions like the unconscious decision-making are being discussed. Triggers are the point where the customer begins to be aware of a possible switch of services. An active customer searches for the information oneself and a passive customer often are influenced by a third party. The theory about unconscious decision-making questions if the human subconscious can make decision for customers before they are even aware of it. This theory is being applied to the collected data. The results of the research show that there can be found two different switching paths of interviewed customers, which are generated based on the collected customer stories. The two different paths are categorised into a reactional and situational switching path and an influenced switching path.

This paper reviews the effectiveness of vehicle activated signs. Vehicle activated signs are being reportedly used in recent years to display dynamic information to road users on an individual basis in order to give a warning or inform about a specific event. Vehicle activated signs are triggered individually by vehicles when a certain criteria is met. An example of such criteria is to trigger a speed limit sign when the driver exceeds a pre-set threshold speed. The preset threshold is usually set to a constant value which is often equal, or relative, to the speed limit on a particular road segment. This review examines in detail the basis for the configuration of the existing sign types in previous studies and explores the relation between the configuration of the sign and their impact on driver behavior and sign efficiency. Most of previous studies showed that these signs have significant impact on driver behavior, traffic safety and traffic efficiency. In most cases the signs deployed have yielded reductions in mean speeds, in speed variation and in longer headways. However most experiments reported within the area were performed with the signs set to a certain static configuration within applicable conditions. Since some of the aforementioned factors are dynamic in nature, it is felt that the configurations of these signs were thus not carefully considered by previous researchers and there is no clear statement in the previous studies describing the relationship between the trigger value and its consequences under different conditions. Bearing in mind that different designs of vehicle activated signs can give a different impact under certain conditions of road, traffic and weather conditions the current work suggests that variable speed thresholds should be considered instead.

Body-channel communication (BCC) is based on the principle of electrical field data transmission attributable to capacitive coupling through the human body. It is gaining importance now a day in the scenario of human centric communication because it truly offers a natural means of interaction with the human body. Traditionally, near field communication (NFC) considers as a magnetic field coupling based on radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. The RFID technology also limits the definition of NFC and thus reduces the scope of a wide range of applications. In recent years BCC, after its first origin in 1995, regain importance with its valuable application in biomedical systems. Primarily, KAIST and Philips research groups demonstrate BCC in the context of biomedical remote patient health monitoring system. BCC transceiver mainly consists of two parts: one is digital baseband and the other is an analog front end (AFE). In this thesis, an analog front end receiver has presented to support the overall BCC. The receiver (Rx) architecture consists of cascaded preamplifier and Schmitt trigger. When the signals are coming from the human body, they are attenuated around 60 dB and gives weak signals in the range of mV. A high gain preamplifier stage needs to amplify these weak signals and make them as strong signals. The preamplifier single stage needs to cascade for the gain requirement. The single stage preamplifier, which is designed with ST65 nm technology, has an open loop gain of 24.01 dB and close loop gain of 19.43 dB. A flipped voltage follower (FVF) topology is used for designing this preamplifier to support the low supply voltage of 1 V because the topology supports low voltage, low noise and also low power consumption. The input-referred noise is 8.69 nV/sqrt(Hz) and the SNR at the input are 73.26 dB. The Schmitt trigger (comparator with hysteresis) is a bistable positive feedback circuit. It builds around two stage OTA with lead frequency compensation. The DC gain for this OTA is 26.94 dB with 1 V supply voltage. The corner analyzes and eye diagram as a performance matrix for the overall receiver are also included in this thesis work.

The IceCube telescope is built within the ice at the geographical South Pole in the middle of the Antarctica continent. The purpose of the telescope is to detect muon neutrinos, the muon neutrino being an elementary particle with minuscule mass coming from space. The detector consists of some 5000 DOMs registering photon hits (light). A muon neutrino traveling through the detector might give rise to a track of photons making up a straight line, and by analyzing the hit output of the DOMs, looking for tracks, neutrinos and their direction can be detected. When processing the output, triggers are used. Triggers are calculation- efficient algorithms used to tell if the hits seem to make up a track - if that is the case, all hits are processed more carefully to find the direction and other properties of the track. The Track Engine is an additional trigger, specialized to trigger on low- energy events (few track hits), which are particularly difficult to detect. Low-energy events are of special interest in the search for Dark Matter. An algorithm for triggering on low-energy events has been suggested. Its main idea is to divide time in overlapping time windows, find all possible pairs of hits in each time window, calculate the spherical coordinates θ and ϕ of the position vectors of the hits of the pairs, histogram the angles, and look for peaks in the resulting 2d-histogram. Such peaks would indicate a straight line of hits, and, hence, a track. It is not believed that a software implementation of the algorithm would be fast enough. The Master's Thesis project has had the aim of developing an FPGA implementation of the algorithm. Such an FPGA implementation has been developed. Extensive tests on the design has yielded positive results showing that it is fully functional. The design can be synthesized to about 180 MHz, making it possible to handle an incoming hit rate of about 6 MHz, giving a margin of more than twice to the expected average hit rate of 2.6 MHz.

The focuses of this paper are narrative structures and mythological elements in the video game Chrono Trigger. A qualitative method was used to code the game world's seven eras into themes of symbolism, quest-themes, and, characters. These themes were compared with Northrop Frye's archetypal myth theory from Anatomy of Criticism. The results show that each age relates to a season and moves due to the player's influence according to a cyclical pattern. Six out of seven epochs show high correlation to Frye's archetypal model whereas options such as to discard the main hero illustrates the player's control. The seventh era pictures a more female symbolism than the male dominant template proposed by Frye. A hypothesis is presented with the concept of a fluent surface which argues that the player manipulates the basic story to build a personal narrative. Furthermore, the hypothesis emphasizes that the specific game mechanics stimulates the player's sensitivity to the narrative elements when constructing an individual ideal story.

Because of IC technology evolution and the increase of market demand, the communication industry grows vigorously in recent years. The voltage-controlled oscillator plays a key role in the RF transceiver and provides oscillation signals needed for upconversin and downconvertion. Usually, we separate the signals into I/Q channels for modulation and demodulation in upconversin and downconvertion. Because the quality of the local oscillator influences the performance of communication system, designing a voltage-controlled oscillator that can provide two identical signals in accurate quadrature is necessary. In this thesis, a new quadrature voltage-controlled oscillator is presented. We use two identical relaxation oscillators with adjustable Schmitt triggers to construct the cross-coupled architecture. This oscillator has accurate ( <1¢X) and stable quadrature outputs which are independent of operating frequency and process variations. This oscillator circuit is fabricated in TSMC 0.35£gm CMOS Mixed-Signal process provided by National Chip Implementation Center (CIC). Our design is verified by simulation and measurement results.

<p>PAMELA is a satellite-borne cosmic ray experiment. Its primary scientific objective is to study the antiproton and positron components of the cosmic radiation. This will be done with unprecedented statistics over a wide energy range (~10MeV to ~100GeV). The PAMELA experiment consists of a permanent magnetic spectrometer, an electromagnetic calorimeter, a Time-of-Fight system, a neutron detector and a shower tail catcher. An anticoincidence (AC) system surrounds the spectrometer to detect particles which do not pass cleanly through the acceptance of the spectrometer. PAMELA will be mounted on a Russian Earth-observation satellite, and the launch is scheduled for 2006. The anticoincidence system for PAMELA has been developed by KTH, and consists of plastic scintillator detectors with photomultiplier tube read-out. Extensive testing has been performed during the development phase. Results are presented for environmental tests, tests with cosmic-rays and particle beams.</p><p>The design of the digital part of the AC electronics has been realised on an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) and a DSP (Digital Signal Processor). It records signals from the 16 AC photomultipliers and from various sensors for over-current and temperature. It also provides functionality for setting the photomultiplier discrimination thresholds, system testing, issuing alarms and communication with the PAMELA main data acquisition system. The design philosophy and functionality needs to be reliable and suitable for use in a space environment.</p><p>To evaluate the performance of the AC detectors, a test utilizing cosmic-rays has been performed. The primary aim of the test was to calibrate the individual channels to gain knowledge of suitable discriminator levels for flight. A secondary aim was to estimate the AC detector efficiency. A lower limit of (99.89±0.04)% was obtained. An in-orbit simulation study was performed using protons to estimate trigger rates and investigate the AC system performance in a second level trigger. The average orbital trigger rate was estimated to be (8.4±0.6)Hz, consisting of (2.0±0.2)Hz good triggers and (6.4±0.5)Hz background. Inclusion of the AC system in the trigger condition to reduce background (for the purpose of data handling capacity) leads to losses of good triggers due to backscattering from the calorimeter (90% loss for 300GeV electrons and 25% for 100GeV protons). A method, using the calorimeter, for identifying backscattering events was investigated and found to reduce the loss of good events to below 1% (300GeV electrons) and 5% (100GeVn of 70%.</p>

Ce mémoire est une synthèse de mes activités postdoctorales au sein de l'expérience LHCb, en cours d'installation auprès du grand collisionneur de hadrons LHC au Cern, à Genève. Dans le chapitre 1, j'introduis les bases phénoménologiques nécessaires à l'étude de la physique des saveurs en montrant que cette dernière s'inscrit au coeur du modèle standard. Je rappelle les limitations de ce modèle. Puis j'explique comment la physique des saveurs en général, et plus particulièrement celle effectuée à LHCb, permet de rechercher de la nouvelle physique ou de la contraindre. Dans le chapitre 2, après une rapide présentation du détecteur LHCb, je présente le trigger de niveau zéro à muons, en développant deux aspects sur lesquels j'ai plus particulièrement travaillé: la résistance aux radiations des transmetteurs opto-électroniques et les performances physiques simulées du trigger. Le chapitre 3 synthétise les activités liées à l'étiquetage de la saveur des mésons B, activités dont je suis co-organisateur depuis mai 2005. Enfin au chapitre 4, après un rappel des progrès récents accomplis en physique des saveurs lourdes, je donne un aperçu des performances attendues de LHCb, pour quelques mesures clés. Je détaille notamment un aspect auquel j'ai pris part: la recherche de nouvelle physique dans les diagrammes pingouins b->s.

Ce mémoire d'HDR présente une synthèse des travaux que j'ai effectués depuis 7 ans pour la préparation de l'expérience D0 à Fermilab et l'analyse des données du collisionneur à hadrons Tevatron. Il présente deux thématiques principales : système de déclenchement et recherche de nouvelle physique, notamment la recherche de particules supersymétriques et du boson de Higgs du modèle standard.