An analytical method for determining the crack spacing and crack width in reinforced concrete beams and one-way slabs is presented in this thesis. The locations and the distribution of cracks developed in a loaded member are predicted using the calculated concrete stress distributions near flexural cracks. To determine the stresses, a concrete block bounded by top and bottom faces and two transverse sections of the beam is isolated and analysed by the finite element method. Two types of blocks are analysed. They are: (i) block adjacent to the first flexural crack, and (ii) block in between successive cracks. The calculated concrete stress distribution adjacent to the first flexural crack is used to predict the locations of primary cracks (cracks formed at sections where the stresses have not been influenced by nearby cracks). The concrete stress distributions in between successive cracks, calculated for various crack spacings and load levels, are used to predict the formation of secondary cracks in between existing cracks. The maximum, minimum and the average crack spacing at a given load level are determined using the particular crack spacing that would produce a concrete tensile stress equal to the flexural strength of concrete. The resulting crack width at reinforcement level is determined as the relative difference in elastic extensions of steel and surrounding concrete. The accuracy of the present method is verified by comparing the predicted spacing and width of cracks with those measured by others. The analytical method presented in this thesis is subsequently used to investigate the effects of various variables on the spacing and width of cracks, and the results are presented. These results are used to select the set of parameters that has the most significant effect. A parametric study is then carried out by re-calculating the spacing and width of cracks for the selected parameters. Based on the results of this parametric study, new formulas are developed for the prediction of spacing and width of cracks. The accuracy of these formulas is ascertained by comparing the predicted values and those measured by other investigators on various types of beams under different load levels. The calculated stress distributions between successive cracks are also used to develop a new method of incorporating the tension stiffening effect in deflection calculation. First, curvature values at sections between adjacent cracks are determined under different load levels, using the concrete and steel stresses. These results are used to develop an empirical formula to determine the curvature at any section between adjacent cracks. To verify the accuracy of the new method, short-term deflections are calculated using the curvature values evaluated by the proposed formula for a number of beams, and the results are compared with those measured by others.

My aim in this study is to develop more theoretically informed praxis - and practically informed theory - about two seminal questions:

本文所討論的是開票一路領先問題。假設有A、B兩位候選人，開票結果A得m票、B得n票，開票過程中A的票數一路領先B的票數，我們將開票過程建立在平面的方格上，由(0,0)開始，A得1票記錄成向量(1,0)，B得1票記錄成向量(0,1)，分解成路徑後，A一路領先的開票方法數，就是對角線下的全部路徑數。但是算式及轉換步驟有點複雜，所以我們希望能建構一種簡單的模型對應來解決這個問題。 本文找出A至少一路領先m票的方法數，會對應到m×n的全部路徑走法，最後證明這樣的對應是一對一且映成，並猜想若有多位候選人，其中一人一路領先其他候選人的開票過程，也會有相似的對應方法。 / Suppose A and B are candidates for all election. A receives m votes and B receives n votes. If A stays ahead of B as the ballots are counted, we can think of a ballot permutation as a lattice path starting at (0,0), where votes for A are expressed as east (1,0) and votes for B are expressed as north (0,1). How to calculate the number of paths that A is always in the lead? We just count these paths from (0,0) to (m,n) that are under or touch the diagonal. However, the formula of combinatorial mathematics is not easy to obtain. So we hope to construct a model to resolve this problem. In this paper, we establish a one-to-one correspondence. The ways of A to receive at least m votes are always ahead the same as counting paths from (0,0) to (m,n). Finally, we find a bijective proof in the ballot problem. If there are many candidates, it will be a similar correspondence of one candidate leading the others.

<p>The purpose with this essay was to study the knowledge of children today between six and eight years old about the human body and its function. A second purpose was to study how junior-level educationalist were carrying through there tuition about the human body. I wanted to investigate if the children today hade another knowledge about the human body than children that participated in previous similar investigations. I wanted to investigate this because today we live in another society than before with  more access to information. My first question was to find out what children thought that we humans looked like inside the body and how its works. My second question was how junior-level educationalist do carry out  their tuition. Ten children and tree junior-level educationalist participated in qualitative interviews, interviewed one by one. During the interviews the children were given a picture with a contour of the human body where they could fill in different organ. The most common organs that the children painted on their pictures of the human body where brain, heart, stomach, skeleton and lungs. The children also had some knowledge about the different organs like the skeletons function was to make the body hard, the hearts function was to pump the blood around in our body, the brain control the whole body and the stomach purpose was to take care of the food we eat. The educationalist replied that they used a lot of concrete material and they tried to have miscellaneous tuition. The result of this study is that the children today don’t have so much more knowledge of the human body than children that have been interview in older days. The result also showed that the way the educationalist were teaching hade a positive influents on the students learning.</p> / <p>Syftet med undersökningen var att se vad barn mellan sex och åtta års ålder idag hade för tankar om hur vi människor ser ut inuti vår kropp och hur det fungerar inuti oss men också att undersöka hur lågstadiepedagoger går tillväga vid undervisningen om människokroppen. Jag ville undersöka om barnen idag hade mer kunskap om människokroppen än de barn som ingått i liknande studier tidigare, eftersom vi idag lever i ett informationssamhälle. Min första frågeställning blev att ta reda på barnens tankar om människokroppens inre och hur det fungerar inuti oss. Min andra frågeställning blev hur lågstadiepedagoger gick tillväga med sin undervisning om människokroppen. Tio barn och tre lågstadiepedagoger har medverkat i kvalitativa intervjuer där de intervjuades en och en. Under intervjutillfällena fick barnen en bild med människokroppens kontur för att fylla i olika organ. De vanligaste organen som barnen ritade var hjärna, hjärta, magsäck, skelett och lungorna. Barnen berättade också bl.a. att skelettets funktion var att göra kroppen hård, hjärtat pumpade runt blod i kroppen, hjärnan styrde kroppen, magen tog hand om vår mat. Pedagogerna svarade att de använde mycket konkret material och att de försökte ha en så varierad undervisning som möjligt. Resultatet från denna studie visade att barnen idag inte har så mycket mer kunskap än de barn som ingått i liknande studier från förr. Resultatet visade också att det sätt pedagogerna undervisade på hade en positiv inverkan på elevernas lärande.</p>

<p>Antisense RNAs regulate gene expression in many bacterial systems. The best characterized examples are from prokaryotic accessory elements such as phages, plasmids and transposons. Many of these antisense RNAs have been identified as plasmid copy number regulators where they regulate the replication frequency of the plasmid by negative feedback. Instability and fast binding kinetics is crucial for the regulatory efficiency of these antisense RNAs. </p><p>In this thesis, the interaction of the cis-encoded antisense RNA CopA with its target CopT was studied in detail using <i>in vivo</i> reporter gene fusion expression and different <i>in vitro </i>methods, such as surface plasmon resonance, fluorescence resonance energy transfer, and gel-shift assays.</p><p>Formation of inhibitory complexes differs from simple hybridization reactions between complementary strands. E.g., the binding pathway of CopA and CopT proceeds through a hierarchical order of steps. It initiates by reversible loop-loop contacts, resulting in a helix nucleus of two or three base pairs. This is followed by rapid unidirectional helix progression into the upper stems, resulting in a four-way helical junction structure. It had been suggested that the loop of CopT carries a putative U-turn, a structure first found in tRNA anticodon loops. We showed that this putative U-turn is one of the structural elements of CopA/CopT required to achieve fast binding kinetics. Furthermore, the hypothetical U-turn structure determines the direction of helix progression when the kissing complex progresses to a four-way helical junction structure. Another structural element in CopT is the helical stem adjacent to the recognition loop. This stem is important to present the recognition loop appropriately to provide a scaffold for the U-turn.</p><p>Furthermore, the role of protein Hfq in the interaction of antisense/target RNA was investigated, since several trans-encoded antisense RNAs had been shown to need this protein to exert their function. In contrast, studies of two cis-encoded antisense RNA systems showed that these antisense RNAs do not rely on Hfq for activity. In this study it was also shown that MicF, a trans-encoded antisense RNA which is dependent on Hfq, is greatly stabilized by this protein.</p>

Thesis (M.A. (Communication Studies))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2007.

The present thesis was born and evolved within the RAdial Velocity Experiment (RAVE) with the goal of measuring chemical abundances from the RAVE spectra and exploit them to investigate the chemical gradients along the plane of the Galaxy to provide constraints on possible Galactic formation scenarios. RAVE is a large spectroscopic survey which aims to observe spectroscopically ~10^6 stars by the end of 2012 and measures their radial velocities, atmospheric parameters and chemical abundances. The project makes use of the UK Schmidt telescope at Australian Astronomical Observatory (AAO) in Siding Spring, Australia, equipped with the multiobject spectrograph 6dF. To date, RAVE collected and measured more than 450,000 spectra. The precision of the chemical abundance estimations depends on the reliability of the atomic and atmosphere parameters adopted (in particular the oscillator strengths of the absorption lines and the effective temperature, gravity, and metallicity of the stars measured). Therefore we first identified 604 absorption lines in the RAVE wavelength range and refined their oscillator strengths with an inverse spectral analysis. Then, we improved the RAVE stellar parameters by modifying the RAVE pipeline and the spectral library the pipeline rely on. The modifications removed some systematic errors in stellar parameters discovered during this work. To obtain chemical abundances, we developed two different processing pipelines. Both of them perform chemical abundances measurements by assuming stellar atmospheres in Local Thermodynamic Equilibrium (LTE). The first one determines elements abundances from equivalent widths of absorption lines. Since this pipeline showed poor sensibility on abundances relative to iron, it has been superseded. The second one exploits the chi^2 minimization technique between observed and model spectra. Thanks to its precision, it has been adopted for the creation of the RAVE chemical catalogue. This pipeline provides abundances with uncertains of about ~0.2dex for spectra with signal-to-noise ratio S/N>40 and ~0.3dex for spectra with 20>S/N>40. For this work, the pipeline measured chemical abundances up to 7 elements for 217,358 RAVE stars. With these data we investigated the chemical gradients along the Galactic radius of the Milky Way. We found that stars with low vertical velocities |W| (which stay close to the Galactic plane) show an iron abundance gradient in agreement with previous works (~-0.07$ dex kpc^-1) whereas stars with larger |W| which are able to reach larger heights above the Galactic plane, show progressively flatter gradients. The gradients of the other elements follow the same trend. This suggests that an efficient radial mixing acts in the Galaxy or that the thick disk formed from homogeneous interstellar matter. In particular, we found hundreds of stars which can be kinetically classified as thick disk stars exhibiting a chemical composition typical of the thin disk. A few stars of this kind have already been detected by other authors, and their origin is still not clear. One possibility is that they are thin disk stars kinematically heated, and then underwent an efficient radial mixing process which blurred (and so flattened) the gradient. Alternatively they may be a transition population" which represents an evolutionary bridge between thin and thick disk. Our analysis shows that the two explanations are not mutually exclusive. Future follow-up high resolution spectroscopic observations will clarify their role in the Galactic disk evolution. / Die vorliegende Doktorarbeit wurde im Rahmen des RAdial Velocity Experiment (RAVE) angefertigt. Ihr Ziel ist es, chemische Elementhäufigkeiten an RAVE-Spektren zu messen und zur Untersuchung chemischer Gradienten in der Milchstrassenebene zu benutzen, um verschieden Szenarien der Galaxienentstehung einzugrenzen. RAVE ist eine große spektrokopische Durchmusterung, deren Ziel es ist, bis zum Ende des Jahres 2012 insgesamt 10^6 Sterne zu spektroskopieren, um deren Radialgeschwindigkeiten, sternatmosphärische Parameter und chemische Häufigkeiten zu messen. Das Projekt benutzt das UK Schmidt Teleskop am Australian Astronomical Observatory (AAO) in Siding Spring, Australien, welches mit dem Multiobjekt-Spektrographen 6dF bestückt ist. Bis heute hat RAVE die Spektren von mehr als 450,000 Sternen gesammelt und untersucht. Die Genauigkeit, mit der die Elementhäufigkeiten abgeschätzt werden können, hängt von der Zuverlässigkeit der verwendeten Parameter, (insbesondere der Oszillatorstärken der Absorptionslinien sowie von der effektiven Temperatur, Schwerebeschleunigung und der Metallizität des gemessenen Sterns) ab. Daher identifizierten wir zunächst 604 Absorptionslinien im Wellenlängenbereich von RAVE und verbesserten deren Oszillatorstärken durch eine inverse Spektralanalyse. Dann wurden die stellaren Parameter von RAVE verbessert, indem die RAVE Pipeline und die stellaren Parameter, auf denen sie beruht, modifiziert wurden. Die Änderungen eliminierten einen Teil der systematischen Fehler von stellaren Parametern, die im Laufe dieser Arbeit gefunden wurden. Um Elementhäufigkeiten zu bestimmen, haben wir zwei verschiedene Prozessierungs-Pipelines entwickelt. Beide berechnen die Elementhäufigkeiten unter der Annahme von Sternatmosphären im lokalen thermischen Gleichgewicht (local thermal equilibrium, LTE). Die erste Pipeline berechnete Elemenhäufigkeiten anhand der Äquivalentbreiten von Absorptionslinien. Da diese Methode eine geringe Empfindlichkeit für die Elementhäufigeiten relativ zu Eisen erreichte, wurde sie ersetzt. Die neue Pipeline benutzt chi^2-Fits von Modellspektren an die beobachteten Spektren. Dank Ihrer Präzision wurde diese für die Erstellung des RAVE-Katalogs von Elementhäufigkeiten verwendet. Diese Pipeline liefert Elementhäufigkeiten mit einer Genauigkeit von ~0.2dex, während für Spektren mit 20>S/N>40 immerhin noch ~0.3dex Genauigkeit erreicht werden. Für die vorliegende Arbeit wurden für 217.358 Sterne die Häufigkeiten von sieben chemischen Elementen bestimmt. Mit diesen Daten wurde der radiale chemische Gradient unserer Milchstraße untersucht. Wir finden, dass Sterne mit kleinen vertikalen Geschwindigkeiten |W|, die also nahe der galaktischen Ebene bleiben, einen radialen Gradienten der Eisenhäufigkeit zeigen, der mit früheren Studien übereinstimmt (~-0.07 dex Kpc^-1), während Sterne mit großen |W|, also solche, die größere galaktische Höhen erreichen, einen progressiv flachere Gradienten zeigen. Die Gradienten der anderen Element folgen dem gleichen Trend. Das lässt darauf schließen, dass entweder die Durchmischung der galaktischen dicken Scheibe effizient arbeitet oder aber dass die dicke Scheibe aus interstellarer Materie gebildet wurde, die chemisch recht homogen war. Speziell fanden wir hunderte von Sternen, die zwar kinematisch als zur dicken Scheibe zugehörig klassifiziert werden können, die aber die typische chemische Zusammensetzung der dünnen Scheibe aufweisen. Einige wenige dieser Sterne wurden bereits von anderen Autoren entdeckt, aber ihre Herkunft bleibt immer noch unklar. Eine Möglichkeit ist, dass die Sterne der dünnen Scheibe kinematische geheizt werden, sodass sie effizienter radial gemischt werden, was die chemischen Gradienten verwischt und auch flacher macht. Alternativ dazu könnten diese Sterne einer "Übergangspopulation" angehören, welche hinsichtlich der Scheibenevolution die Verbindung zwischen der dünnen und der dicken Scheibe darstellt. Unsere Untersuchung zeigt, dass sich diese beiden Erklärungen gegenseitig nicht ausschließen. Künftige Nachspektroskopierung mit hoher Auflösung wird die Rolle dieser Sterne in der Entwicklungsgeschichte der galaktischen Scheibe aufklären.

Antisense RNAs regulate gene expression in many bacterial systems. The best characterized examples are from prokaryotic accessory elements such as phages, plasmids and transposons. Many of these antisense RNAs have been identified as plasmid copy number regulators where they regulate the replication frequency of the plasmid by negative feedback. Instability and fast binding kinetics is crucial for the regulatory efficiency of these antisense RNAs. In this thesis, the interaction of the cis-encoded antisense RNA CopA with its target CopT was studied in detail using in vivo reporter gene fusion expression and different in vitro methods, such as surface plasmon resonance, fluorescence resonance energy transfer, and gel-shift assays. Formation of inhibitory complexes differs from simple hybridization reactions between complementary strands. E.g., the binding pathway of CopA and CopT proceeds through a hierarchical order of steps. It initiates by reversible loop-loop contacts, resulting in a helix nucleus of two or three base pairs. This is followed by rapid unidirectional helix progression into the upper stems, resulting in a four-way helical junction structure. It had been suggested that the loop of CopT carries a putative U-turn, a structure first found in tRNA anticodon loops. We showed that this putative U-turn is one of the structural elements of CopA/CopT required to achieve fast binding kinetics. Furthermore, the hypothetical U-turn structure determines the direction of helix progression when the kissing complex progresses to a four-way helical junction structure. Another structural element in CopT is the helical stem adjacent to the recognition loop. This stem is important to present the recognition loop appropriately to provide a scaffold for the U-turn. Furthermore, the role of protein Hfq in the interaction of antisense/target RNA was investigated, since several trans-encoded antisense RNAs had been shown to need this protein to exert their function. In contrast, studies of two cis-encoded antisense RNA systems showed that these antisense RNAs do not rely on Hfq for activity. In this study it was also shown that MicF, a trans-encoded antisense RNA which is dependent on Hfq, is greatly stabilized by this protein.

This thesis studies a two-way relay network (TWRN), which consists of two single antenna source nodes and a multi-antenna relay node. The source nodes exchange information via the assistance of the relay node in the middle. The relay scheme in this TWRN is amplify-and-forward (AF) based analog network coding (ANC). A robust beamforming matrix optimization algorithm is presented here with the objective to minimize the transmit power at the relay node under given signal to interference and noise ratio (SINR) requirements of source nodes. This problem is first formulated as a non-convex optimization problem, and it is next relaxed to a semi-definite programming (SDP) problem by utilizing the S-procedure and rank-one relaxation. This robust beamforming optimization algorithm is further validated in a MATLAB-based orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) MIMO two-way relay simulation system. To better investigate the performance of this beamforming algorithm in practical systems, synchronization issues such as standard timing offset (STO) and carrier frequency offset (CFO) are considered in simulation. The transmission channel is modeled as a frequency selective fading channel, and the source nodes utilize training symbols to perform minimum mean-square error (MMSE) channel estimation. BER curves under perfect and imperfect synchronization are presented to show the performance of TWRN with ANC. It is shown that the outage probability of robust beamforming algorithm is tightly related to the SINR requirements at the source nodes, and the outage probability increases significantly when the SINR requirements are high.

This research is in three parts with different although related objectives. The first part developed an efficient, modified simulated annealing algorithm to solve the D-optimal (determinant maximization) design problem for 2-way polynomial regression with correlated observations. Much of the previous work in D-optimal design for regression models with correlated errors focused on polynomial models with a single predictor variable, in large part because of the intractability of an analytic solution. In this research, we present an improved simulated annealing algorithm, providing practical approaches to specifications of the annealing cooling parameters, thresholds and search neighborhoods for the perturbation scheme, which finds approximate D-optimal designs for 2-way polynomial regression for a variety of specific correlation structures with a given correlation coefficient. Results in each correlated-errors case are compared with the best design selected from the class of designs that are known to be D-optimal in the uncorrelated case: annealing results had generally higher D-efficiency than the best comparison design, especially when the correlation parameter was well away from 0. The second research objective, using Balanced Incomplete Block Designs (BIBDs), wasto construct weakly universal optimal block designs for the nearest neighbor correlation structure and multiple block sizes, for the hub correlation structure with any block size, and for circulant correlation with odd block size. We also constructed approximately weakly universal optimal block designs for the block-structured correlation. Lastly, we developed an improved Particle Swarm Optimization(PSO) algorithm with time varying parameters, and solved D-optimal design for linear regression with it. Then based on that improved algorithm, we combined the non-linear regression problem and decision making, and developed a nested PSO algorithm that finds (nearly) optimal experimental designs with each of the pessimistic criterion, index of optimism criterion, and regret criterion for the Michaelis-Menten model and logistic regression model.