This study compares standards established by the Cooperative Study of Secondary Schools to the operation and functioning of the Valley View, Texas high school.

The goal of this diploma thesis is designing a medium-sized security x-ray machine used predominantly for screening cabin luggage and middle-sized parcels. The introductory section of the thesis concentrates on general overview of the whole field through analyses of the design and technical parameters of typical products. The latter part of the thesis is concentrated on the designing a new product using the knowledge base and information obtained within the research. The final product is designed with respect to ergonomic and technical requirements, nevertheless it represents a new perspective on the topic.

The thesis focuses on such tools for web applications development that are based on the Model-View-Controller design model. These tools include e.g. Zend Framework, Ruby on Rails, and Spring Framework. The thesis explains the functionality of the tools, their features, methods of data manipulation, and presentation of data to the users. The work contains also an application example.

Background and problem: Due to disruptions in the business environment, the importance of organizational resilience has become increasingly important. The availability of resources and the strategic management of these resources are important for maintaining organizational resilience. This study contributes to the literature by addressing the strategic management of organizational resilience in SMEs and how they maintain resilience, since the SMEs’perspective has not been adequately researched in prior literature. The study is also of practical importance given SMEs’ prominent contribution to the economy. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate how SMEs employ strategies to maintain organizational resilience, including how they deploy their resources and capabilities to maintain organizational resilience. To do this, disruptive events faced by SMEs are also explored. Method: The study adopts a qualitative multiple case study method. Primary data has been collected through interviews, with the chief executive officer of seven SMEs operating in Sweden. Conclusion: The empirical findings reveal strategies that SMEs adopt for maintaining organizational resilience. Categorizing these strategies into resource-based strategies and capability-based strategies reveals how SMEs, which are often limited in resources, focus on developing dynamic capabilities to maintain organizational resilience. The finding also shows that the strategies employed can be proactive and emergent, where these either work separately or combined in a process where proactive strategies can support the emergent strategies.

This dissertation deals with the image-based approach to synthesize a virtual scene using sparse images or a video sequence without the use of 3D models. In our scenario, a real dynamic or static scene is captured by a set of un-calibrated images from different viewpoints. After automatically recovering the geometric transformations between these images, a series of photo-realistic virtual views can be rendered and a virtual environment covered by these several static cameras can be synthesized. This image-based approach has applications in object recognition, object transfer, video synthesis and video compression. In this dissertation, I have contributed to several sub-problems related to image based view synthesis. Before image-based view synthesis can be performed, images need to be segmented into individual objects. Assuming that a scene can approximately be described by multiple planar regions, I have developed a robust and novel approach to automatically extract a set of affine or projective transformations induced by these regions, correctly detect the occlusion pixels over multiple consecutive frames, and accurately segment the scene into several motion layers. First, a number of seed regions using correspondences in two frames are determined, and the seed regions are expanded and outliers are rejected employing the graph cuts method integrated with level set representation. Next, these initial regions are merged into several initial layers according to the motion similarity. Third, the occlusion order constraints on multiple frames are explored, which guarantee that the occlusion area increases with the temporal order in a short period and effectively maintains segmentation consistency over multiple consecutive frames. Then the correct layer segmentation is obtained by using a graph cuts algorithm, and the occlusions between the overlapping layers are explicitly determined. Several experimental results are demonstrated to show that our approach is effective and robust. Recovering the geometrical transformations among images of a scene is a prerequisite step for image-based view synthesis. I have developed a wide baseline matching algorithm to identify the correspondences between two un-calibrated images, and to further determine the geometric relationship between images, such as epipolar geometry or projective transformation. In our approach, a set of salient features, edge-corners, are detected to provide robust and consistent matching primitives. Then, based on the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) of an affine matrix, we effectively quantize the search space into two independent subspaces for rotation angle and scaling factor, and then we use a two-stage affine matching algorithm to obtain robust matches between these two frames. The experimental results on a number of wide baseline images strongly demonstrate that our matching method outperforms the state-of-art algorithms even under the significant camera motion, illumination variation, occlusion, and self-similarity. Given the wide baseline matches among images I have developed a novel method for Dynamic view morphing. Dynamic view morphing deals with the scenes containing moving objects in presence of camera motion. The objects can be rigid or non-rigid, each of them can move in any orientation or direction. The proposed method can generate a series of continuous and physically accurate intermediate views from only two reference images without any knowledge about 3D. The procedure consists of three steps: segmentation, morphing and post-warping. Given a boundary connection constraint, the source and target scenes are segmented into several layers for morphing. Based on the decomposition of affine transformation between corresponding points, we uniquely determine a physically correct path for post-warping by the least distortion method. I have successfully generalized the dynamic scene synthesis problem from the simple scene with only rotation to the dynamic scene containing non-rigid objects. My method can handle dynamic rigid or non-rigid objects, including complicated objects such as humans. Finally, I have also developed a novel algorithm for tri-view morphing. This is an efficient image-based method to navigate a scene based on only three wide-baseline un-calibrated images without the explicit use of a 3D model. After automatically recovering corresponding points between each pair of images using our wide baseline matching method, an accurate trifocal plane is extracted from the trifocal tensor implied in these three images. Next, employing a trinocular-stereo algorithm and barycentric blending technique, we generate an arbitrary novel view to navigate the scene in a 2D space. Furthermore, after self-calibration of the cameras, a 3D model can also be correctly augmented into this virtual environment synthesized by the tri-view morphing algorithm. We have applied our view morphing framework to several interesting applications: 4D video synthesis, automatic target recognition, multi-view morphing.

View Synthesis is the challenging problem of predicting a new view or pose of an object given an exemplar view or set of views. This thesis presents a novel approach for the problem of view synthesis. The proposed method uses global features rather than local geometry to achieve an effect similar to that of the well known view morphing method . While previous approaches to the view synthesis problem have shown impressive results, they are highly dependent on being able to solve for epipolar geometry and therefore have a very precise correspondence between reference images. In cases where this is not possible such as noisy data, low contrast data, or long wave infrared data an alternative approach is desirable. Here two problems will be considered. The proposed view synthesis method will be used to synthesis new views given a set of reference views. Additionally the algorithm will be extended to synthesis new lighting conditions and thermal signatures. Finally the algorithm will be applied toward enhancing the ATR problem by creating additional training data to increase the likelihood of detection and classification.

Virtual reality (VR) head-mounted displays provide a high definition, immersive experi-ence to the viewer. However, most existing technologies have flaws like bulky design and vergence-accommodation conflict that may cause stress in the neck muscles, posture issues, nausea, motion sickness and dizziness. Similarly, augmented reality (AR) displays, which use transparent light modulators, exist, but they possess low field of view and a limited number of discrete depth planes when wide field of view and continuous depth would be ideal. The ultimate goal of my research is use leaky mode waveguide devices to create wide-view angle, transparent near eye holographic displays for AR with strong continuous depth accommo-dation and no vergence-accommodation conflict. The leaky mode platform has the advantages of low fabrication complexity and monolithic design. Unfortunately, bottom-exit leaky mode devices to date have had produced relatively small view angles. The specific objective of this thesis is to explore the use of static structures in leaky mode waveguide devices to increase field of view. In this work I will show that it is theoretically possible to achieve increased field of view with increased resolution and no overlap among view zones. My specific contributions to this research include: i) modeling of integrated Lithium Nio-bate device and testrig that contains quartz substrates on MATLAB, ii) construction of a simulator of the integrated device which involved fabrication of a prototype test rig for intermediate laser induced structures, iii) fabrication of intermediate diffractive structures by photolithography and by femto-second laser ablation which involved - 100 sample test, dose test and creation of sample femtograting on Lithium Niobate substrate. Results which are obtained from the modelling of inte-grated device and the prototype simulator are analysed. This analysis is provided in my manuscript to show how precise is the prototype simulator when compared with integrated device. The ob-tained result of the integrated device is 52.4541° where as it is 69.113° for prototype simulator. This effort was reported in a publication and presentation at Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah.

Bakgrund: Stickrädsla är ett vanligt problem när det gäller barn. Om inte detta problem studeras så att sjuksköterskan kan få en bredare kunskap i omvårdnadsarbetet, kan detta i sin tur leda till att barn inte söker vård i framtiden. Idag saknas det forskning som belyser fenomenet stickrädsla hos barn. Syfte: Var att belysa erfarenheter från stickrädda barn och deras föräldrar i mötet med vården. Metod: Denna litteraturstudie bygger på tio vetenskapliga artiklar som utgått från kvalitativ och induktiv ansats. Datamaterialet analyserades med hjälp av en innehållsanalys. Resultat: Återger faktorer som påverka barnets stickrädsla negativt. Vad barn och föräldrar har haft för förväntningar och föreställningar av mötet i vården. Barnens och föräldrarnas negativa och positiva upplevelser i mötet med vården. Slutsatser: Stickrädda barn behöver få vara mer delaktiga i sin vård oavsett ålder. För att få barnets tillit behöver sjuksköterskan dessutom vara mer lyhörd och ta vara på barnets erfarenheter samt föräldern i mötet. Detta görs för att få ta del av barnets livsvärld. För att ytterligare öka kunskapen och förståelsen utifrån ett stickräddabarns perspektiv och erfarenheter. Det behövs mer kvalitativ forskning inom området, för att kunna skapa en tryggare plats för barnet och stärka sjuksköterskans kunskapsområde.

Cardiolex Medical AB är ett medicintekniskt företag som säljer ett komplett EKG-hanterings system med tillhörande vakuumsystem. Produkten EC View med lagring i EC Store är idag de produkter som Cardiolex säljer till sina kunder för att kunna lagra och hantera EKG-undersökningar på sjukhus och vårdcentraler. Cardiolex önskade utöka EC View med fler sökfunktioner för användning i forskningssyfte. Parametermaterial har länge funnits, men hanteringen har varit manuell, vilket varit tidsineffektivt. Intresset av att kunna sortera ut specifika EKG-undersökningar efter enskilda mätvärden är stort och därmed är en utökad sökfunktion viktig att ha med i ny mjukvara. För att få en djupare inblick i vilka av de vanligaste mätvärdena är, studerades artiklar för att kunna fastställa att den sökfunktion som implementerades var ett användbart tillägg i befintlig produkt. Det mätvärde som ansågs mest attraktivt att skapa en sökfunktion för var ST-amplituden. Funktionen som plockar ut detta värde ur ett lagrat EKG är skapad i Visual Studio, med programspråket T-SQL, där funktionen anropas i en SQL-vy som sammanställer all information för användaren. Fördelen med att använda sig av en SQL-vy presentation är också att information kan sammanställas undertiden en sökning genomförs. / Cardiolex Medical AB has an ambition that ECG should be easy to use, they sell ECG systems compatible with all types of electrodes and has special knowledge in ECG modulation. Today Cardiolex has three products to manage ECG examinations and patient information with EC view and EC Store. Their ECG system is operating with EC Sense and together with EC View and EC Store, Cardiolex offer a complete solution available to use with many softwares and systems at the market. With EC Store, examinations can be saved and found in the database and EC View is a client for reviewing and making medical assessments. Moreover, Cardiolex has a vision to offer a wider functionality for researchers, who research in ECG. Therefore, an extended search tool was important for future functionality in the products. To get a better insight in which of the ECG measurements was of interest to implement in a search function, a literature study of today’s recherche is summarised in this project. The ST-value was considered one of the most common parameters, therefore this parameter was decided to be implemented in the search function. The function which return a ST-amplitude value stored in the examination, was created in Visual Studios, with the language SQL. The data from the function became represented of a SQL-view which can sort data during a searching process in the database.

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