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It is often observed that there is a high individual variability in the response to exercise-induced muscle damage (EIMD), even when tested in a homogeneous cohort accounting for age, sex, ethnicity and physical activity. The response to EIMD is very complex as several tissues, including skeletal muscle fibres, the extra-cellular matrix (ECM), and tendon, play a potential role in the damage response. Therefore, the overall aim of this PhD thesis was to investigate the physiological and genetic factors underpinning the response to muscle damaging exercise. For that, the following objectives were (i) to comprehensively assess the physiological mechanisms and recovery pattern of neuromuscular fatigue of the hamstring muscle group following an intermittent sprint (IS) intervention; (ii) to investigate inter-individual differences in skeletal muscle repair/recovery after an artificial wounding (scratch) assay using of primary human skeletal muscle cells in vitro; (iii) to ascertain whether multiple genetic variations, which are linked to varying tissues, forming a polygenic profile could distinguish between high and low responders following muscle damage in vivo and in vitro; and (iv) to assess whether a genetic profile is linked with the response to both EIMD and chronic resistance exercise. The methodological and analytical approaches utilised in this thesis identified a number of important, novel and impactful findings. Following IS, the impaired hamstring muscle function and delayed recovery is probably caused primarily by damage to the contractile tissue, and participants with a greater force generating capacity (larger physiological cross-sectional area) of the biceps femoris long head were less susceptible to hamstring strength loss immediately after IS, providing evidence that the structure of the muscle protects it against peripheral fatigue/damage. The in vitro study showed that skeletal muscles with an increased number of stem cells of the connective tissue (fibroblasts) might have a better capacity to reorganise the complex ECM, which results in a faster muscle strength recovery after muscle damaging exercise. However, a larger number of active muscle stem cells (myoblasts) seems to be important for the latter stage of muscle regeneration. Individuals possessing a non-preferential genetic profile demonstrated increased rate of muscle damage biomarkers than individuals with a preferential genetic profile. Lastly, we calculated a second polygenic profile which was linked with both the EIMD and the chronic resistance exercise response. These polygenic profiles may be used to anticipate an individual's response/adaptation to EIMD and to chronic resistance exercise, thus enabling resistance exercise to be prescribed on a personalised level to improve muscle health and function.

Research on Bose Einstein condensates has over the past few years developed into an interesting field of physics. Current research aims for the creation of working quantum simulators which may be able to help explain and understand condensed matter physics phenomena which as yet cannot be explained. The research leading up to the experiment outlined in this thesis is intended to contribute to the understanding of these phenomena particularly that of 2D quantum systems. In the course of this thesis trapping and manipulation schemes for dipole traps and optical lattices will be introduced. Numerical simulations have been conducted to assess the dependency of parameters leading to a stable, optimised dipole trap. The design of an aspherical dipole trap was used, set up and characterised. Numerical simulations of maximally localized Wannier functions were carried out to obtain and understand the interactions in optical lattices and to postulate further parameters for the experiment. A fast and stable computer control was devised using the latest field-programmable-gate-array (FPGA) technology. The robustness and versatility of this technology was proved by adapting the software to suit different hardware and using the control in four different experiments. The electronic systems for the hardware used have been developed to yield a timing of 25ns for the digital channels and 1μs for the analogue channels.

Presents the dissertation entitled "Value Transmission to Adolescents Within the Family System." Family system thinking; Values of family systems; Characteristics of adolescent development.

Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is a pandemic that has infected nearly 1% of the world population. Despite numerous FDA approved antiviral drugs, HIV drug resistance remains a large challenge. HIV protease is an enzyme that is required by the virus to cleave Gag and Gag-Pol polyproteins into functional and structural proteins necessary for viral maturation. Currently, nine clinical inhibitors target HIV protease, but multiple clinical viral strains have developed resistance to these drugs. Therefore, it is necessary to continue developing new drugs to tackle the problem of HIV drug resistance, and X-ray crystallography is one tool that is used to study how drug candidates bind to HIV-1 protease. In order to study the interactions between inhibitor atazanavir and HIV-1 protease, the crystal structure of the complex has been solved at atomic resolution (1.09 Å). This structure will improve the design of new inhibitors for resistant protease.

Since the 1800’s, the consolidation of rural schools in the United States has been a controversial topic for policymakers, school administrators, and rural communities. Primary concerns with consolidation include budget, efficiency, student achievement levels, school size, and community identity. In the history of American education, consolidation has been an alternative way to solve rural issues. Currently, rural schools and communities facing declining enrollments and financial cutbacks are challenged by the growing trend of consolidation and school reorganization. Debates continue today, whether the consolidation movement is considered a success. Opponents of school consolidation point to research that suggests consolidation may not lead to cost savings and in some cases may even lead to increased costs for transportation and specialized staff. Furthermore, towns that lose a school to consolidation may face a loss of social and fiscal capacity. However, some projects have brought attention to the strengths of rural and small schools. Advocates for small schools, opposing consolidation, express the low teacher/student ratio, personal environment, higher number of students in extracurricular activities, cooperative learning, and integrated curriculum. Socially, schools in rural areas act as the main social activity, allowing students to have a strong connection to their community and immediate environment. School district consolidation has a long and jagged history in Nebraska. The historical trend has been towards fewer school districts. In fact, in 2005 the passage of Legislative Bill 126 in the Nebraska Unicameral encouraged the merger of many small rural school districts with larger K-12 districts, signaling a move toward district consolidation. In recent years, changes in the state school aid formula have encouraged voluntary school district consolidation. For this reason, the idea of consolidation has breached my hometown and nearby communities. Knowing that consolidation is currently being considered, I wanted to devote my efforts towards creating a unified and more up-to-date school environment for the rural communities of Clarkson, Howells and Dodge. In addition to the school consolidation conflict, there is a pedagogical shift occurring within schools across the nation. The current Information Age is a period of American history representing a time of great cultural transformation from the industrial factory model to a new paradigm that is more student-centered. Educational approaches to accommodate media saturated students have created experimentation and controversy. The current situation between Clarkson, Howells and Dodge allows the unified school board to finally capitalize on those missed opportunities to create better school facilities and incorporate newer teaching pedagogies.

This dissertation considers several common notions of complexity that arise in large-scale systems optimization; namely, noisy objective functions, difficult to fathom feasible regions and high dimensional problems with highly interdependent decision variables. While deterministic optimization methods for such problem classes is either not possible or impractical, we develop novel stochastic search algorithmic frameworks to address each of these challenging notions of complexity. We lend support to each of these techniques in theory and in practice. For the optimization of noisy objective functions (e.g. simulation optimization), we consider a new method of estimation that requires only samples of size one from the objective function. This method, called estimating shrinking balls, approximates the objective function at a point by averaging the observed samples of the objective function within a small ball around the point. For the simplest of stochastic search algorithms, Pure Random Search, we provide a sufficient rate to shrink the ball so that the algorithm converges to an optimum in probability. For optimization problems on difficult to fathom feasible regions on finite state spaces, we propose a new Markov chain sampler called Discrete Hit-and-Run which makes global moves over the state space. Under weak conditions on the objective function, for a fixed temperature, a Metropolis version of this algorithm converges to the Boltzmann distribution in variational distance in polynomial order O(n4), where n is the dimension of the problem. We apply this method to a problem in spot welding pattern optimization. For problems with a large state space and highly interdependent variables, such as large scale dynamic programming, we consider a framework for using a behavioral paradigm for optimization called Sampled Fictitious Play. We illustrate an application of this framework through a proof of concept production systems problem for the joint optimization of capital investment, revenue management and production scheduling.