Whilst critical realism (CR) is becoming recognised as a significant meta-theory for the social sciences, there is little guidance on how to produce research which is consistent with its ontological and epistemological assumptions. This article contributes to an emerging discussion about how CR can be applied, drawing on an example of a qualitative study that has sought to understand and explain t

The Transmission Loss of different kind of layered structures is investigated by means of a four microphone technique in a plane wave tube. By using the decomposition technique, incident, reflected and transmitted contributions are separated and transmission coefficient is easily calculated. In this paper a single measurement approach based on transfer matrix, taking into account reflection contri

Rotavirus (RV) infections remain the leading cause of world-wide diarrhea-associated morbidity and mortality among children 200,000 deaths annually mostly in the low-income countries of Africa and Asia. Efficient clearance of the primary RV infection and protection from future re-infections is mediated by adaptive immune responses. The aim of the work presented in this thesis was to investigate th

Purpose: To evaluate the interday repeatability in the measurement of parameters used for the detection of progression of keratoconus by prediction limits (PL) for single measurements, and the repeatability coefficient (RC) for the mean of replicate measurements. Design: Prospective reliability analysis for cases and control eyes. Methods: Twenty-five eyes in 25 subjects with KC and 25 eyes in 25

Background: Drying is an important method to preserve food products. Although many traditional drying technologies (hot air, freeze, microwave drying) have been applied successfully to various food products, each drying technique has its own advantages and disadvantages. Novel drying methods such as infrared drying, have become very popular. Scope and approach: This study gives an overview on the

Up to 10% of pediatric cancer patients harbor pathogenic germline variants in one or more cancer susceptibility genes. A recent study from the US reported pathogenic variants in 22 out of 60 analyzed autosomal dominant cancer susceptibility genes, implicating 8.5% of pediatric cancer patients. Here we aimed to assess the prevalence of germline pathogenic variants in these 22 genes in a population-

Dockless bike-sharing systems (DLBS) have gained much popularity due to their environmentally friendly features. This study puts forward a distinctive framework for assessing the environmental influences of DLBS in high resolution based on DLBS transaction data. The proposed framework firstly estimates the transport mode substituted by DLBS for each recorded bike-sharing trip by utilizing the rout

Many years after the introduction of the innovation system concept in innovation policy design, it is still not clear whether innovation policy evaluation practices follow a system approach. Building on evaluation and innovation studies, this article develops the concept 'system oriented innovation policy evaluation’ based on four attributes (coverage, perspective, temporality and expertise). The

Many functions of operating systems are keen to be realised as feedback controllers. Doing so has a non negligible design impact, but also a significant payoff in terms of simplicity and generality. This paper presents a complete operating system scheduler, at present implemented in a microcontroller kernel, entirely composed of a PI-based control structure. The proposed scheduler is experimented

Tuning an ideal PID and then using its parameters in a real one, can yield undesired results. Nonetheless, many rules conceived for the ideal PID are successfully used in practice, owing to their greater flexibility. A systematic method would thus be useful to extend ideal PID tuning rules to the real PID, so as to preserve said flexibility while synthesising a realistic controller. This manuscrip

This manuscript addresses the problem of process scheduling in a multitasking computing environment. The mainstream feedback-based approach to that problem preserves the existing scheduler, and adapts some of its parameters by means of convenient loops. On the contrary, in this research, the scheduler is entirely replaced by suitable control structures, synthesised and analysed in the discrete-tim

Solceller är en eftertraktad teknik för att mildra de globala klimatförändringarna. Samtidigt finns det en växande oro att denna teknik är både skadlig för miljön och orättvist fördelad i världsekonomin. Forskare och miljöaktivister är oeniga i frågan om en global maktrelation är ofrånkomligt kopplad till solcellsteknik. Denna avhandling undersöker i vilken utsträckning de globala sociala och mateSolar photovoltaic (PV) technology is one of the most favored means of mitigating climate change. At the same time, there is a growing concern over how this technology is both environmentally harmful and unevenly distributed in the world economy. Researchers and environmentalists differ on whether a global relation of power is inherent in solar technology. This thesis investigates to what extent t