Now showing items 3154-3173 of 3185

    Walking for transportation : estudio de los factores individuales y contextuales que influyen en el caminar como medio de transporte y de sus implicaciones en salud 

    Olabarria Saenz de Viguera, Marta (Date of defense: 2013-05-08)

    Desplazarse a pie es una actividad física moderada, rutinaria e integrada en la vida diaria que podría convertirse en una herramienta para disminuir la tendencia creciente del sedentarismo de la población. El objetivo ...

    Water pollution, cancer and molecular mechanisms 

    Salas Díaz, Lucas Andrés (Date of defense: 2015-07-09)

    Disinfection by-products (DBP) are complex mixtures of toxicants derived from drinking water treatment. Trihalomethanes (THM) and haloacetic acids (HAA) are the most prevalent DBP in chlorinated waters, which are used as ...

    Wavelet-based spatial audio framework : from ambisonics to wavelets: a novel approach to spatial audio 

    Scaini, Davide (Date of defense: 2019-12-16)

    Ambisonics is a complete theory for spatial audio whose building blocks are the spherical harmonics. Some of the drawbacks of low order Ambisonics, like poor source directivity and small sweet-spot, are directly related ...

    Weakly-supervised learning for automatic facial behaviour analysis 

    Ruiz Ovejero, Adrià (Date of defense: 2017-11-23)

    In this Thesis we focus on Automatic Facial Behavior Analysis, which attempts to develop autonomous systems able to recognize and understand human facial expressions. Given the amount of information expressed by facial ...

    Wh-questions in Catalan sign language 

    Alba de la Torre, Celia (Date of defense: 2016-01-26)

    This dissertation offers a characterization and an analysis of wh-questions in Catalan Sign Language, which show the particularity of placing wh-expressions canonically in sentence final position. This feature, specific ...

    What do we owe parents?: distributing the costs of children 

    Trifan, Isabella Ana-Maria (Date of defense: 2019-07-26)

    The topic of this thesis is the just distribution of the costs of children. In particular, it asks whether an ideal liberal egalitarian society owes it to the parents to ensure that the costs of children are shared between ...

    What holds a multinational state together?: the political stability of the Spanish "state of autonomies" 

    Holesch, Adam (Date of defense: 2016-11-31)

    In this PHD thesis I answer the question: “What holds a multinational state together?” by analyzing the political developments in the Spanish “State of Autonomies”. The results show that among the individual factors a dual ...

    What's in a job? An exploration of what we do and how it affects labor and family outcomes 

    Goulart, Kimberly (Date of defense: 2023-05-23)

    The objective of this thesis is to explore what makes up a job–the tasks, skills, personality traits, and rewards–and determine how a job impacts our daily lives. Much of the literature quantifies and describes jobs by ...

    When Code replaces scripture: Black Mirror, Technology and the Specter of Cristianity 

    Peters, Rebecca Anne (Date of defense: 2021-07-06)

    This thesis analyzes 12 episodes from the dystopian science fiction anthology series, Black Mirror (2011-present). Episodes selected are those that, as argued in this text, depict the role of technology as replacing that ...

    Where, why and how scientific knowledge on health inequalities is generated? : An integrated perspective to strengthen understanding of health inequalities research capacities : Key insights from the United Kingdom and the city of Barcelona 

    Cash-Gibson, Lucinda (Date of defense: 2020-11-12)

    This dissertation aims to understand where, why and how scientific knowledge on health inequalities is produced, why and how some places have strong capacity to produce this, and what determines this capacity. It consists ...

    Which factors drive illegal immigration? : an empirical analysis of the U.S. and the E.U. 

    Costantino, Fabrizio (Date of defense: 2014-02-21)

    This thesis aims to provide quantitative evidence on the flows of illegal immigrants in the U.S. and the E.U. After describing the flows in space and time (years 2000-2011), the actors involved, and the role of criminal ...

    Who manages the money at home?: household financial organization and gender inequalities 

    Çineli, Beyda (Date of defense: 2021-09-27)

    This PhD dissertation addresses how couples manage their money in intimate relationships. It is composed of 4 articles. The first one focuses on the individual and couple level dynamics behind money management systems in ...

    Why do negotiation processes matter?: informal capabilities as determinants of EU member states bargaining success in the Council of the EU 

    Perarnaud, Clément (Date of defense: 2021-07-29)

    How do differences in the informal capabilities of Member States impact their bargaining success at the EU level? Based on new datasets collected via 145 semi-structured interviews with national negotiators and EU officials ...

    Why language(s) matter to people: a theoretical and comparative approach to linguistic justice in western democracies : the case of mixed societies 

    Riera Gil, Elvira (Date of defense: 2016-10-03)

    This dissertation examines two ideological clashes underlying contemporary political theories of linguistic justice (instrumentalism/constitutivism; monism/pluralism) with the aim to elucidate (a) why languages matter to ...

    Width-Based Planning and Learning 

    Junyent Barbany, Miquel (Date of defense: 2021-10-15)

    Optimal sequential decision making is a fundamental problem to many diverse fields. In recent years, Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods have experienced unprecedented success, largely enabled by the use of deep learning ...

    The wiring diagram of antennal lobe and mapping a brain circuit that controls chemotaxis behavior in the Drosophila larva 

    Khandelwal, Avinash (Date of defense: 2017-01-19)

    Drosophila larvae present unique opportunity for anatomical and functional mapping of their nervous system because of features such as numerical simplicity of neurons its nervous system is composed of, and ability to exhibit ...

    WNT signaling, hypoxia and GATA6 : their role in colorectal cancer, stem cells and disease progression 

    Whissell, Gavin (Date of defense: 2013-12-03)

    The recent discovery that intestinal adenomas are built on a stem cell hierarchy has raised great interest in understanding the signals that maintain tumor stem cells. We unveiled the existence of a transcriptional circuit ...

    Wnt/beta-catenin activity controls the stability of imprinted genes in mouse embryonic stem cells 

    Theka, Ilda (Date of defense: 2017-02-06)

    Las células madre embrionarias (ESCs) derivan de la masa cellular interna de los blastocistos y son capaces de generar las tres capas germinales. Muchos factores controlan la pluripotencia incluyendo la ruta Wnt/β-catenina. ...

    Women in executive office in advanced industrial democracies : presence, portfolios and post-ministerial occupation 

    Claveria i Alias, Sílvia (Date of defense: 2014-12-19)

    This thesis is focused on women in executive office. Whereas the literature on women's political representation in national parliaments is now well established, analyses of women in cabinets are rather limited. The ...

    Word embeddings with applications to web search and advertising 

    Edizel, Necati Bora (Date of defense: 2019-07-26)

    Word embeddings are a building block of many practical applications across NLP and related disciplines. In this thesis, we present theoretical analysis and algorithms to learn word embeddings. Moreover, we present applications ...