There is a lack in research on the perspectives of different managerial roles on data about software projects in software analytics tools, such as the perspectives of chief financial officers (CFOs), chief executive officers (CEOs) and compliance officers. Today, software analytics tools are mainly developed to address the needs of technical stakeholders such as developers, but research shows that there exist potentials of expanding this technical users’ scope of focus to also include higher level stakeholders, such as managers. The goal of this study is to explore what managers working in software development organizations consider to be useful data to have about software projects in software analytics tools, as well as examining how they want data about software projects to be presented to them in such tools. This study was done in four steps. First, a literature review was conducted. Second, a questionnaire was conducted with four CFOs, one CEO and one compliance officer working in six different Swedish software development organizations. Third, semi-structured interviews were conducted with three CFOs, one CEO and one compliance officer working in five different Swedish software development organizations. Fourth, a visual prototype simulating a software analytics tool was constructed based on the data gathered from the interviews. The result of this study shows that abstraction, limitation, and visualization of data about software projects, as well as presentation of useful data in software analytics tools that support the work tasks of managers, is helpful in addressing the perspectives and views of the target group.

The primary objective of this study was to survey the usefulness of the 4-H members' project manual according to the opinions of members, parents, and adult leaders in Cache County, State of Utah. Two USU Extension Agents, 140 4-H members, 119 parents, and 30 leaders cooperated in this survey. A separate questionnaire accompanied by a cover letter by the Extension Agents and a letter of explanation by the author was sent to each person in the three categories mentioned. Questionnaires were mailed to 200 4-H male members, 190 parents and 46 adult leaders. Evaluation of the usefulness of the manuals was made in three age groups: 9-12 years old, 13-16 years old, and 17-19 years old. It was generally agreed by member, parent, and leader respondents that the age group 9-12 years old made the most use of the manuals. About 56 percent of the members indicated that a project could not be done without the manual; nearly 50 percent of the parents indicated that their children could not do a project without the manual; and slightly more than half of the leaders indicated that they could not conduct a satisfactory project without members having manuals. About four-fifths of all parents expressed their willingness to pay a minimal fee for their children to obtain manuals while three-fifths of the leaders thought that the parents would be willing to pay a minimal fee for manuals for their children.

Humans are less exposed to natural light during the day and less to darkness at night. Good daylighting provides visual comfort for performing tasks but also influences non-visual comfort. According to various studies, good daylight conditions can influence human physiology and behaviour, like sleep, alertness, mood and cognitive functions. Having good daylight conditions in our homes or student homes can be challenging, even more in Nordic countries. This research focuses on daylight in student dorms, located in Sweden. The influence of orientations and seasonality on daylight qualities is researched by using a survey with subjective evaluations and computer-simulated results. The survey and computer simulations show slight differences between the orientations for the existing situations in the student dorms. In summer and spring, daylight generally has more qualities than in winter and autumn, in some cases, glare can cause discomfort. Larger window dimensions result in more daylight entering future student homes. This improves the daylight conditions in winter and autumn, but east, south and west-facing rooms would benefit from shading to avoid potential glare. The amount of sky present in the outdoor view strongly influences the daylight qualities of a room.

Sistaårsstudenter som lämnar högskola/universitet och ska ut i arbetslivet ställs inför tuffa utmaningar. Syftet med studien var att undersöka beteendevetenskapliga sistaårsstudenters förväntningar inför arbetslivet och deras möjligheter att använda kunskapen från utbildningen i praktiken. Semistrukturerade intervjuer utfördes med 10 sistaårsstudenter inom beteendevetenskap på ett svenskt lärosäte. Intervjuerna tematiserades och 5 teman framkom varav 3 teman beskrev förväntningarna på arbetslivet och 2 teman beskrev vad studenterna tar med för kunskap ut i arbetslivet. Tidigare forskning visade att studenter känner ångest angående den osäkra arbetsmarknaden och sin anställningsbarhet. Resultatet från vår studie visade att deltagarna kände oro inför framtiden och vad som väntar dem efter examen. Beteendevetarna var i huvudsak oroliga för att inte få arbete efter avslutade studier. Resultatet visade även att deltagarna kommer ta med sig personlig utveckling och ett nytt tankesätt från sina utbildningar. Studien kan bidra med en större förståelse för lärare och lärosäten om utvecklingsmöjligheter för beteendevetenskapliga kurser och program.

This thesis focuses on obtaining better estimates of remaining life for on-condition (OC) parts in aircraft engines. Aircraft engine components are commonly classified into three categories, life-limited parts (LLP), OC-parts and consumables. Engine maintenance typi-cally accounts for 10% to 20% of aircraft-related operating cost. Current methods to esti-mate remaining life for OC parts have been found insufficient and this thesis aims to devel-op a method that obtains better life estimates of OC part. Improved life estimates are es-sential to facilitate more reliable maintenance plans and lower maintenance costs. In the thesis, OC parts that need a better life estimates are identified and suitable prognosis methodologies for estimating the remaining life are presented. Three papers are appended to the thesis. The first paper lays out the main principles of air-craft engine maintenance and identifies the potential for improving maintenance planning by improving the remaining life estimation for the OC parts. The paper concludes that re-search is needed to find better estimates so that the right amount of maintenance is per-formed at each maintenance occasion. The second paper describes the aircraft and its engine from a system of system perspective. The aim of the paper is to show that no system is stronger than its weakest part and that there is a potential to increase the availability and readiness of the complete system, the aircraft engine, by introducing better life estimates for OC parts. Furthermore, a review of all engine parts, no matter if they are life-limited or on-condition, which needs to be incor-porated in a replacement model for maintenance optimization, is given. The paper con-cludes that the reliability of the complete aircraft engine would be increased if better life estimates are presented also for the OC parts. The third paper includes an evolved analysis of the subject and the analysis moves deeper in to a subsystem/module of the engine, the low pressure turbine. The specific subsys-tem/module is further analyzed to show the potential of increased reliability for the subsys-tem/module and the complete system, the aircraft engine, if better life estimates for the OC parts are obtained. Methods on how to estimate remaining life is discussed in this paper. It is stated that life estimates can be based on visual inspections, available testing methods (e.g. non destructive testing ) or new techniques that may be need to be developed based on remaining useful life estimations. To estimate the remaining life for the OC parts well es-tablished prognostic techniques such as physic-based, data-driven, symbolic, hybrid, or context awareness approaches that combine contextual/situation information awareness will be considered.

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No description available.

Numerous studies have shown that cardiac diastolic dysfunction and diastolic filling play a critical role in dictating overall cardiac health and demonstrated that the filling wave propagation speed is a significant index of the severity of diastolic dysfunction. However, the governing flow physics underlying the relationship between propagation speed and diastolic dysfunction are poorly understood. More importantly, currently there is no reliable metric to allow clinicians the ability to diagnose cardiac dysfunction. There is a greater need than ever for more accurate and robust diagnostic tools with the increasing number of deaths caused by this disease. Color M-mode (CMM) echocardiography is a technique that is commonly used in the diagnosis of Left Ventricular Diastolic Dysfunction (LVDD) and is used as the image modality in this work. The motivation for the current work is a hypothesized change in the mechanism driving early diastolic filling. The early filling wave of a healthy patient is driven by a rapid early diastolic relaxation creating a pressure difference within the left ventricle despite the fact the left ventricular volume is increasing. As diastolic dysfunction progresses, the left ventricular relaxation declines and it is hypothesized that the left atrial pressure rises to create the favorable pressure difference needed to drive early diastole. This changes the mechanism driving early diastolic filling from a pulling mechanism primary driven by left ventricular relaxation to a pushing mechanism primarily driven by high left atrial pressure. Within this study, CMM echocardiography images from 125 patients spanning healthy and the three stages of LVDD are analyzed using a newly developed automated algorithm. For the first time, a series of isovelocity contours is utilized to estimate the conventional propagation velocity. A critical point within the early filling wave is quantified as the point of early filling velocity deceleration. The clinically used propagation velocity is compared to a novel critical point propagation velocity calculated as a weighted average of the propagation velocities before and after the critical point showing an increase in the correlation between decreasing diastolic dysfunction stage and decreasing propagation velocity. For the first time the spatial pressure distributions calculated as the pressure relative to the mitral valve pressure at each location from the mitral valve to the ventricular apex, are quantified and analyzed at the instant of peak mitral to apical pressure difference for patients with varying stages of LVDD. The analysis of the spatial pressure distribution revealed three filling regions present in all patients. The pressure filling regions were used to calculate a useful filling efficiency with healthy patients having a useful filling efficiency of 64.8 ± 12.7% and severely diseased filling patients having an efficiency of 37.1 ± 12.1%. The newly introduced parameters and analysis of the CMM echocardiography data supports the hypothesis of a change in the mechanism driving early diastolic efficiency by displaying a decline in the early diastolic propagation velocity earlier into the left ventricle for severely diseased patients than for healthy filling patients and a premature breakup of the progressive pressure gradient fueling early diastolic filling in severely diseased patients. / Master of Science

Ces dernières années ont vu apparaître sur le marché les premiers transistors de puissance de type MOSFET en carbure de silicium. Ce type de composant est particulièrement adapté à la réalisation d’équipement électrique à haut rendement et capable de fonctionner à haute température. Néanmoins, la question de la fiabilité doit être posée avant de pouvoir envisager la mise en œuvre de ces composants dans des applications aéronautiques ou spatiales. Les mécanismes de défaillance liés à l’oxyde de grille ont pendant longtemps retardé la mise sur le marché des transistors à grille isolée en carbure de silicium. Cette étude s’attache donc à estimer la durée de vie des MOSFET SiC de 1ére génération. Dans un premier temps, le mécanisme connu sous le nom de Time Dependent Dielectric Breakdown(TDDB) a été étudié au travers de résultats expérimentaux issus de la bibliographie. Notre analyse nous a permis de justifier de l’emploi d’une loi de Weibull pour modéliser la distribution des temps à défaillance issue de ces tests. Les résultats nous ont également permis de confirmer l’amélioration significative de la fiabilité de ces structures vis-à-vis de ce mécanisme. Dans un second temps, l’impact du mécanisme d’instabilité de la tension de seuil sur la fiabilité a été quantifié au travers de tests de vieillissement de type HTGB. Les données de dégradation ainsi collectées ont été modélisées à l’aide d’un processus gamma non-homogène, qui nous a permis de prendre en compte la variabilité entre les composants testés dans des conditions identiques et de proposer des facteurs d’accélération en tension et en température pour ce mécanisme. Enfin, ces travaux ont permis d’ouvrir la voie à la mise en œuvre d’outils de pronostic de la durée de vie résiduelle pour les équipements électriques. / Recent years have seen SiC MOSFET reach the industrial market. This type of device is particularly adapted to the design of power electronics equipment with high efficiency and high reliability capable to operate in high ambient temperature. Nevertheless the question of the SiC MOSFET reliability has to be addressed prior to considering the implementation of such devices in an aeronautic application. The failure mechanisms linked to the gate oxide of the SiC MOSFET have for a long time prevented the introduction of the device. In this manuscript we propose to study the reliability of the first generation of SiC MOSFET. First, the mechanism known as the Time–Dependent Dielectric Breakdown is studied through experimental results extracted from literature. Our study shows the successful application of a Weibull law to model the time-to-failure distribution extracted from the accelerated tests. The results show also a significant improvement of the SiC MOSFET structure with respect to this phenomenon. In a second step, the impact of the threshold voltage instability is quantified through accelerated tests known as High Temperature Gate Bias. The collected degradation data are modeled using a non-homogeneous Gamma process. This approach allows taking into account the variability between devices tested under the same conditions. Acceleration factors have been proposed with respect to temperature and gate voltage. Eventually the study delivers a primary estimation of the remaining useful lifetime of the SiC MOSFET in a typical aeronautic application.

SIMS est une technique d'analyse sensible de la surface. La probabilité d'ionisation dépend de l'état chimique de la surface. La génération des ions positifs est améliorée par le bombardement de la surface avec des éléments électronégatifs.Sur le NanoSIMS 50 de CAMECA, dont la configuration optique nécessite une polarité opposée entre ions primaires et secondaires, l'analyse des ions positifs se fait sous bombardement d'ions O-, générés dans un duoplasmatron. La faible brillance de la source en mode O- a comme conséquence une faible résolution latérale des analyses. Pour y remédier, nous avons étudié la possibilité de générer d’autres faisceaux d’ions primaires négatifs. Dans cet objectif, nous avons étudié la génération par duoplasmatron d'ions F-, Cl-, Br- et I- en fonction du champ magnétique, du courant d'arc et de la pression totale des gaz. Le courant d'ions et le diamètre du faisceau ont été mesurés afin de déterminer la brillance de la source en mode F-, Cl-, Br- et I-. Une brillance 5 fois plus élevée en mode F- qu'en mode O- a été déterminée.En utilisant les faisceaux F-, Cl-, Br- et I-, le rendement de pulvérisation, la concentration d'ions primaires implantés et le rendement utile ont été mesurés pour des semi-conducteurs et des métaux. Suite à une faible concentration en halogène à la surface des semi-conducteurs, résultant des processus de décapage, le rendement utile sous bombardement halogène était plus faible que sous bombardement O-. Pour les métaux (p.ex. Ni, Cu et Ag) par contre, une amélioration du rendement utile sous bombardement halogène jusqu'à deux ordres de grandeurs, comparé au bombardement O-, a été mesurée / Secondary Ion Mass spectrometry (SIMS) is a powerful surface analysis technique. The ionisation probability strongly depends on the chemical surface state. The generation of positive secondary ions can be enhanced by surface bombardment with electronegative elements.Due to the optical configuration of the CAMECA NanoSIMS 50, that necessitates an opposite polarity of incoming and ejected ions, analyses of positive ions are realized with primary O- ions, generated in a duoplasmatron ion source. As a consequence of the low O- brightness of the duoplasmatron source, the lateral resolution of the analyses on the NanoSIMS 50 is not satisfactory in the positive secondary mode. In this work, we studied the feasibility of different alternative negative primary ion beams. We investigated the possibility of F-, Cl-, Br- and I- ion generation with a duoplasmatron as a function of the source parameters, notably the magnetic field strength, the arc current and the total gas pressure. The ion current and the beam diameter were measured in order to determine the F-, Cl-, Br- and I- brightness of the source. A comparative study with the O- brightness demonstrates an increase of the F- brightness by a factor of 5.By using the F-, Cl-, Br- and I- bombardment, the sputtering yield, the concentration of implanted primary ions and the useful yield of different semi-conductor and metal samples were analysed. As a consequence of a low halogen concentration, related to etching effects, no enhancement of the useful yield could be noticed for the semi-conductors. For metals however (e.g. Ni, Cu and Ag), useful yield enhancements by up to a factor of 100 compared to the O- bombardment could be demonstrated