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Zebrafish has become a model organism for the study of developmental biology and genetics. Less is, however, known about the behaviour of this cyprinid fish. A zebrafish is exposed to many unfamiliar objects during its lifetime, and the response to these stimuli is critical for an adaptive behaviour. This book presents a master thesis from the University of Bergen in Norway on the behaviour of zebrafish of different origin and background towar...

Organisations in the Australian public sector have faced significant reforms in recent years. One of these reforms emphasises increased accountability and competition. This study provides an overview of the accountability processes relating to grant funding and the impact of these processes upon New South Wales Bushcare environmental volunteering organisations. Neo-institutional theory is used to explore the accountability structures and revea...

Violence against women and girls is a major social problem affecting millions each year in the US and many more worldwide. Feminist theorists assert that ideology and social structures contribute to this violence, and some have called for broad-scale social change strategies to address it. Research on the development and effectiveness of these types of strategies, however, is limited. This book explores the potential for challenging violence a...

Text-to-speech (TTS) systems are increasingly faced with mixed language input. Most TTS systems allow building synthetic voices for different languages, but each voice \"speaks\" only one language at a time. For synthesizing mixed language input polyglot voices are needed that are able to switch between languages. An inherent problem of unit selection speech synthesis is that its quality depends on the contents of the unit database. Concatena...

In image retrieval scenarios, many methods use interest point detection at an early stage to find regions in which descriptors are calculated. Finding salient locations in image data is crucial for these tasks. Observing that most current methods use only the luminance information of the images, we investigate the use of colour information in interest point detection. Based on the Harris corner detector, a way to use multi-channel images is ex...

This paper presents an empirical research and evaluation of trading strategies that buy past winners and sell past losers, also called relative strength or momentum strategies. The sample data is based on the monthly stock prices of all 378 shares traded on the Bulgarian Stock Exchange (BSE), covering the period from 2000 to 2010. Relying on time-series patterns in security returns, three sets of sixteen strategies each are implemented and ana...

Biosorption is being demonstrated as a useful alternative to conventional systems for the removal of toxic metals from industrial effluents. Metal affinity to the biomass can be increase by pre treating the biomass with different chemicals. Current study was deigned to assess the Ni(II) and CCu(II) removal capability of two microfungi viz. Aspergillus niger and Rhizopus arrhizus. Biomass of both fungal species was pretreated with alkalies, aci...

In Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) mobile environment, transmitter and receiver signals are heavily influenced by the effect of clutter. The ability to optimize a CDMA system is then dependent on the initial system configuration at the deployment stage. This includes the site location, antenna type, orientation, down-tilt and the choice of propagation model which contributes greedily to a better optimization of the network. For the prior ...

The polarization is the true measure of the degree of ferroelectricity. Generally, ceramic materials with high value of remanent polarization show usable piezoelectric effects. Accordingly, electric poling is one of the crucial intermediate stages of the manufacturing process of the piezoceramics devices. In this thesis, the ferroelectric, pyroelectric and piezoelectric properties and aftereffects in soft and hard PZT are studied. The properti...

In order to achieve interactive rendering of complex models comprising several millions of polygons, the amount of processed data has to be substantially reduced. Two of the most common approaches, orthogonal between each other, to accomplishing this task are: level-of-detail and occlusion culling. This thesis mainly aims at combining these two approaches. A novel error metric is presented which takes visibility information gathered from Hardw...

In the last two decades insulin signalling and protection in brain has emerged as a novel field of research.Although growing evidence supports the hypothesis that dysfunction of neuronal glucose utilization and metabolism and/or in insulin receptor signal transduction cascade is involved in Alzheimer's disease pathogenesis, the role of insulin on oxidative stress- and diabetes-induced neuronal dysfunction and death has been less investigated.T...

The relationship between organisational behaviour research and commercial companies is complex, primarily because academic researchers and companies expect different outcomes from participation in the research. Businesses are usually looking to improve organisational performance and seek immediate, practical and applicable outcomes. Academic researchers seek an extension of theoretical knowledge and a contribution to the advancement of their f...

The focus of a two-photon microscope is often degraded by inhomogeneities in the refractive index within biological specimens. In this book it is shown for various specimens, even for living zebrafish, that the resolution and the fluorescence signal of a two-photon microscope can be substantially improved by using adaptive optics, i.e. wavefront correction based on coherence-gated wavefront sensing (CGWS). The advantage of using CGWS relies on...

How do we order our thoughts so that they make sense? What causes one thought to follow another? Do babies think like we do? Are you curious about the way you think? Longstanding arguments in the philosophy of mind in conjunction with recent advances in computing have opened new avenues in cognitive studies. These avenues are not without problems, interaction, semantic ambiguity, the role of consciousness, and issues regarding causation all st...

The present work consists of two parts. First, methods for proving non-holonomicity of sequences and functions are discussed. Holonomic sequences, which are defined by linear difference equations with polynomial coefficients, are a popular object of study in combinatorics. The presentation of methods for finding out whether a given sequence is in this class or not takes the reader through number theory, complex analysis, and analytic combinato...

The purpose of this study was to explore Taiwanese children\'s production and perception of the speech act of threatening. Childrens linguistic forms of uttering threats, how they produce and perceive threats in different ages were investigated. Moreover, four selected cartoon settings (assertion, insult, refusal and threat) that may provoke children to issue a threat were examined. Children\'s understanding of the appropriateness of uttering ...

Investigation of the links between stress and physical health is a continuing area of research, though many facets of the stress-health relationship remain unexplored, particularly in research investigating the role of chronic psychological stressors to health, such as low SES. Research has focused on assessing stress due to lower SES with more encompassing, objective measures such as income or occupation, however, this approach fails to accou...

Seit dem 17. Jahrhundert gibt es Bestrebungenchinesische Klassiker auf christliches oderbiblisches Gedankengut hin zu untersuchen. Damals wares eine spezielle Gruppe der Jesuiten, diesogenannten Figuristen, die eine christlicheInterpretationslinie verfochten. Doch auch in neuererZeit weckt dieses höchst interessante Thema denForschungswillen verschiedenster Menschen. Könntendie alten Chinesen an den biblischen Gott geglaubthaben? Hat dieser si...

In the field of Applied Linguistics, there are lively and critical discussions about the impact of the spread of English in the world. It is not clear, however, to what extent these discussions are being taken up by native English speakers who are hired to teach English as a Foreign Language primarily on the basis of their native speakership. This M.A. thesis study addresses this gap. The context for the study is the Japan Exchange and Teachin...

The book presents a first systematic approach for the cross layer design in wireless sensor networks, where the optimizations for energy efficiency and application QoS are required. A reference model of the network architecture, Embedded Wireless Interconnect, is firstly concluded from the presented studies, as a potential standardized way of the cross layer design in wireless sensor networks. This architecture is also later extended to large-...