Real time maximum power conversion tracking and resonant frequency modification for high power piezoelectric ultrasound transducer

Piezoelectric ultrasound transducers are commonly used to convert mechanical energy to electrical energy and vice versa. The transducer performance is highly affected by the frequency at which it is excited. If excitation frequency and main resonant frequency match, transducers can deliver maximum power. However, the problem is that main resonant frequency changes in real time operation resulting in low power conversion. To achieve the maximum possible power conversion, the transducer should be excited at its resonant frequency estimated in real time. This paper proposes a method to first estimate the resonant frequency of the transducer and then tunes the excitation frequency accordingly in real time. The measurement showed a significant difference between the offline and real time resonant frequencies. Also, it was shown that the maximum power was achieved at the resonant frequency estimated in real time compare to the one measured offline.

Cultural adaptation and resilience: Controversies, issues and emerging models

What enables people to bounce back from stressful experiences? How do certain individuals maintain a sense of purpose and direction over the long term, even in the face of adversity? This is the first book to move beyond childhood and adolescence to explore resilience across the lifespan. Coverage ranges from genetic and physiological factors through personal, family, organizational, and community processes. Contributors examine how resilience contributes to health and well-being across the adult life cycle; why—and what happens when—resilience processes fail; ethnic and cultural dimensions of resilience; and ways to enhance adult resilience, including reviews of exemplary programs.

Spanish version of the screening Orebro Musculoskeletal Pain Questionnaire: A cross-cultural adaptation and validation

Background Spanish is one of the five most spoken languages in the world. There is currently no published Spanish version of the Örebro Musculoskeletal Pain Questionnaire (OMPQ). The aim of the present study is to describe the process of translating the OMPQ into Spanish and to perform an analysis of reliability, internal structure, internal consistency and concurrent criterion-related validity. Methods Design: Translation and psychometric testing. Procedure: Two independent translators translated the OMPQ into Spanish. From both translations a consensus version was achieved. A backward translation was made to verify and resolve any semantic or conceptual problems. A total of 104 patients (67 men/37 women) with a mean age of 53.48 (±11.63), suffering from chronic musculoskeletal disorders, twice completed a Spanish version of the OMPQ. Statistical analysis was performed to evaluate the reliability, the internal structure, internal consistency and concurrent criterion-related validity with reference to the gold standard questionnaire SF-12v2. Results All variables except “Coping” showed a rate above 0.85 on reliability. The internal structure calculation through exploratory factor analysis indicated that 75.2% of the variance can be explained with six components with an eigenvalue higher than 1 and 52.1% with only three components higher than 10% of variance explained. In the concurrent criterion-related validity, several significant correlations were seen close to 0.6, exceeding that value in the correlation between general health and total value of the OMPQ. Conclusions The Spanish version of the screening questionnaire OMPQ can be used to identify Spanish patients with musculoskeletal pain at risk of developing a chronic disability.

Authorisation management in business process environments: An authorisation model and a policy model

This thesis provides two main contributions. The first one is BP-TRBAC, a unified authorisation model that can support legacy systems as well as business process systems. BP-TRBAC supports specific features that are required by business process environments. BP-TRBAC is designed to be used as an independent enterprise-wide authorisation model, rather than having it as part of the workflow system. It is designed to be the main authorisation model for an organisation. The second contribution is BP-XACML, an authorisation policy language that is designed to represent BPM authorisation policies for business processes. The contribution also includes a policy model for BP-XACML. Using BP-TRBAC as an authorisation model together with BP-XACML as an authorisation policy language will allow an organisation to manage and control authorisation requests from workflow systems and other legacy systems.

In Perpetual Motion: Theories of Power, Educational History, and the Child

"In Perpetual Motion is an "historical choreography" of power, pedagogy, and the child from the 1600s to the early 1900s. It breaks new ground by historicizing the analytics of power and motion that have interpenetrated renditions of the young. Through a detailed examination of the works of John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Herbart, and G. Stanley Hall, this book maps the discursive shifts through which the child was given a unique nature, inscribed in relation to reason, imbued with an effectible interiority, and subjected to theories of power and motion. The book illustrates how developmentalist visions took hold in U.S. public school debates. It documents how particular theories of power became submerged and taken for granted as essences inside the human subject. In Perpetual Motion studiously challenges views of power as in or of the gaze, tracing how different analytics of power have been used to theorize what gazing could notice."--BOOK JACKET.

The regional differences between countries in traffic safety: A cross-cultural study and Turkish Case

Road traffic accidents are a large problem everywhere in the world. However, regional differences in traffic safety between countries are considerable. For example, traffic safety records are much worse in Southern Europe and the Middle East than in Northern and Western Europe. Despite the large regional differences in traffic safety, factors contributing to different accident risk figures in different countries and regions have remained largely unstudied. The general aim of this study was to investigate regional differences in traffic safety between Southern European/Middle Eastern (i.e., Greece, Iran, Turkey) and Northern/Western European (i.e., Finland, Great Britain, The Netherlands) countries and to identify factors related to these differences. We conducted seven sub-studies in which I applied a traffic culture framework, including a multi-level approach, to traffic safety. We used aggregated level data (national statistics), surveys among drivers, and data on traffic accidents and fatalities in the analyses. In the first study, we investigated the influence of macro level factors (i.e., economic, societal, and cultural) on traffic safety across countries. The results showed that a high GNP per capita and conservatism correlated with a low number of traffic fatalities, whereas a high degree of uncertainty avoidance, neuroticism, and egalitarianism correlated with a high number of traffic fatalities. In the second, third, and fourth studies, we examined whether the conceptualisation of road user characteristics (i.e., driver behaviour and performance) varied across traffic cultures and how these factors determined overall safety, and the differences between countries in traffic safety. The results showed that the factorial agreement for driver behaviour (i.e., aggressive driving) and performance (i.e., safety skills) was unsatisfactory in Greece, Iran, and Turkey, where the lack of social tolerance and interpersonal aggressive violations seem to be important characteristics of driving. In addition, we found that driver behaviour (i.e., aggressive violations and errors) mediated the relationship between culture/country and accidents. Besides, drivers from "dangerous" Southern European countries and Iran scored higher on aggressive violations and errors than did drivers from "safe" Northern European countries. However, "speeding" appeared to be a "pan-cultural" problem in traffic. Similarly, aggressive driving seems largely depend on road users' interactions and drivers' interpretation (i.e., cognitive biases) of the behaviour of others in every country involved in the study. Moreover, in all countries, a risky general driving style was mostly related to being young and male. The results of the fifth and sixth studies showed that among young Turkish drivers, gender stereotypes (i.e., masculinity and femininity) greatly influence driver behaviour and performance. Feminine drivers were safety-oriented whereas masculine drivers were skill-oriented and risky drivers. Since everyday driving tasks involve not only erroneous (i.e., risky or dangerous driving) or correct performance (i.e., normal habitual driving), but also "positive" driver behaviours, we developed a reliable scale for measuring "positive" driver behaviours among Turkish drivers in the seventh study. Consequently, I revised Reason's model [Reason, J. T., 1990. Human error. Cambridge University Press: New York] of aberrant driver behaviour to represent a general driving style, including all possible intentional behaviours in traffic while evaluating the differences between countries in traffic safety. The results emphasise the importance of economic, societal and cultural factors, general driving style and skills, which are related to exposure, cognitive biases as well as age, sex, and gender, in differences between countries in traffic safety.

Undead yakuza: The Japanese zombie movie, cultural resonance and generic conventions

The zombie has long been regarded as a “fundamentally American creation” (Bishop 2010) and a western monster representing the fears and anxieties of Western society. Since the renaissance of the zombie movie in the early 2000s, a subsequent surge in international production has seen the release of movies from Norway, Cuba, Pakistan and Thailand to name a few. Although Japanese zombie movies have been far more visible for Western cult audiences than in mainstream markets, Japanese cinema has emerged as one of the more prolific producers of zombie films outside of Anglophone or Western European countries in recent years. Films such as Helldriver (2010), Zombie TV (2013), Versus (2000), Tokyo Zombie (2005), Happiness of the Katakuris (2001) and anime television series High School of the Dead (2010) have generated varying degrees of popularity and critical attention internationally. At first glance Japanese zombie films, with musical zombie interludes, undead yakuza henchmen and revenge-seeking yūrei zombies, appear fundamentally different to their Western counterparts. Yet, on closer examination, the Japanese zombie movie could be regarded as a hybrid and intertextual generic form drawing on syntactic conventions at the core of a universal zombie sub-genre established by Western filmmaking traditions, while also distilling culturally specific tropes unique to various Japanese horror cinema sub-genres. Most importantly, the Japanese zombie film extracts, emphasises and revises particular conventions and motifs common within Western zombie films that are particularly relevant to Japanese audiences. This chapter investigates the cultural resonance of key generic motifs identifiable in the Japanese zombie film. It establishes a production context and the influence of Japanese horror cinema on style and thematic concerns. It then examines the function of prominent narrative conventions, namely: the source, outbreak and spread of infection; mutation and the representation of the monster; and the inclusion of supernatural and religious motifs.

Chinese cultural competency and Australian law students: Reflections on the design of short term mobility programs

There is an emerging need for Australia’s law graduates to better understand the unique challenges and opportunities in our largest trading partner, China. Similarly, as China opens up to the world, its graduates are increasingly well-poised to make an indelible mark on Chinese-Australian relations, particularly in the areas of finance, property, trade and commerce. Chinese and Australian law schools must urgently develop a deeper awareness of each other’s language, culture and political systems in their graduates. The purpose of this article is to highlight the importance of Chinese cultural competency to Australian legal education and reflect on projects that enable students to attain a level of cultural competency over a short period. We do this by considering a recent ‘short term mobility project’ in Wuhan, China.

Educating to secure the national interest

In this paper I examine how one political actor–former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd–proposes to use education for the purpose of securing national productivity and foreign policy. I work with Foucault’s suggestion that the apparatus of security is the essential technical instrument of governmentality and that the production of milieu, made up of human, spatial, temporal and cultural objects, and the government of risk are key strategies in the bio-politicisation of security. The discourse analysis also draws on Bacchi to problematise statements that (a) represent both the nation and regional neighbours as governable milieu within the ambit of a whole of government approach, and (b) locate literacy and education as both risk and solution in a security apparatus. My examination of the emergence of literacy and education as security technologies, takes account of the discursive effects of Rudd’s representation of the spaces and scale of national, geopolitical and global policy problems. I argue that in these examples of policy texts, education is used as a discursive tool to secure education workers and youth as subjects of economic interest and sovereign rule.

State Agent, Identity and the "New World Order" : Reconstructing Polish Defence Identity after the Cold War Era

National identity signifies and makes state s defence- and foreign policy behaviour meaningful. National consciousness is narrated into existence by narratives upon one s own exceptionalism and Otherness of the other nations. While national identity may be understood merely as a self-image of a nation, defence identity refers to the borders of Otherness and issues that have been considered as worth defending for. As national identities and all the world order models are human constructions, they may be changed by the human efforts as well; states and nations may deliberately promote communitarian or even cosmopolitan equality and tolerance without borders of Otherness. The main research question of the thesis is: How does Poland constitute herself as a nation and a state agent in the current world order and to what extent have contextual foreign and defence policy interactions changed the Polish defence identity during the post-Cold War era? The main empirical argument of the thesis is: Poland is a narrated idea of a Christian Catholic nation-state, which the Polish State, the Catholic Church of Poland, the Armed Forces of Poland as well as a majority of the Polish nation share. Polish defence identity has been almost impenetrable to contextual foreign and defence policy interactions during the post-Cold War era. While Christian religious ontology binds corporate Poland together, allowing her to survive any number of military and political catastrophes, it simultaneously brings her closer to the USA, raises tensions in the infidel EU-context, and restrains corporate Poland s pursuit of communitarian, or even cosmopolitan, global equality and tolerance. It is not the case that corporate Poland s foreign and defence policy orientation is instinctively Atlanticist by nature, as has been argued. Rather, it has been the State s rational project to overcome a habituated and reified fear of becoming geopolitically sandwiched between Russian and German Others by leaning on the USA; among the Polish nation, support for the USA has been declining since 2004. It is not corporate Poland either that has turned into a constructive European , as has been argued, but rather the Polish nation that has, at least partly, managed to emancipate itself from its habituation to a betrayal by Europe narrative, since it favours the EU as much as it favours NATO. It seems that in the Polish case a truly common European CFSP vis-à-vis Russia may offer a solution that will emancipate the Polish State from its habituated EU-sceptic role identity and corporate Poland from its narrated borders of Otherness towards Russia and Germany, but even then one cannot be sure whether any other perspective than the Polish one on a common stand towards Russia would satisfy the Poles themselves.

Ageing and learning in Australia: Arguing an evidence base for informed and equitable policy

Given Australia’s population ageing and predicted impacts related to health, productivity, equity and enhancing quality of life outcomes for senior Australians, lifelong learning has been identified as a pathway for addressing the risks associated with an ageing population. To date Australian governments have paid little attention to addressing these needs and thus, there is an urgent need for policy development for lifelong learning as a national priority. The purpose of this article is to explore the current lifelong learning context in Australia and to propose a set of factors that are most likely to impact learning in later years.

Tax Reform and Payout Policy:Do Shareholder Clienteles or Payout Policy Adjust?

Changes in taxation of corporate dividends offer excellent opportunities to study dividend clientele effects. We explore payout policies and ownership structures around a major tax reform that took place in Finland in 2004. Consistent with dividend clienteles affecting firms’ dividend policy decisions, we find that Finnish firms altered their dividend policies based on the changed tax incentives of their largest shareholders. While firms adjust their payout policies, our results also indicate that ownership structures of Finnish firms also changed around the 2004 reform, consistent with shareholder clienteles adjusting to the new tax system.