Mindfulness meditation-the practice of attending to present moment experience and allowing emotions and thoughts to pass without judgment-has shown to be beneficial in clinical populations across diverse outcomes. However, the basic neural mechanisms by which mindfulness operates and relates to everyday outcomes in novices remain unexplored. Focused attention is a common mindfulness induction w...

This is to certify that I have examined this copy of a master's thesis by Salil G. Bapat and have found that it is complete and satisfactory in all respects, and that any and all revisions required by the final examining committee have been made. Acknowledgements I would like to take this opportunity to thank several people who have contributed towards the successful completion of this thesis. ...

Whereas common Vickers indentation segmentation algorithms are precise with high quality images, low quality images often cannot be segmented appropriately. We investigate an approach, where unfocused images are segmented. On the one hand, the segmentation accuracy of low quality images can be improved. On the other hand we aim in reducing the overall runtime of the hardness testing method. We ...

Using a language game to elicit short sentences in various information structural conditions, we found that Finnish 4- to 5-year-olds already exhibit a characteristic interaction between prosody and word order in marking information structure. Providing insights into the acquisition of this complex system of interactions, the production data showed interesting parallels to adult speakers of Fin...

This paper looks at the distributional pattern of NPIs under the exclusive focus particle only. Despite the commonly accepted view that only can license an NPI that appears within the unfocused part of its immediate scope, Wagner (2006) observes evidence contra this view from both DP-only and VP-only: (i) DP-only does not license an NPI that appears within the unfocused part of its left argumen...

It is commonly argued that weak negative polarity items (NPIs) (e.g., any) can occur in any (Strawson) downward-entailing environment. This generalization, however, is challenged byWagner’s (2006) observations with the NPI-licenser only: although an only-clause is (Strawson) downward-entailing in its unfocused part, NPIs are not necessarily licensed there. In particular, DPonly does not license...

Information retrieval systems aim to retrieve precise and relevant information in response to a user's query. In past years entire documents which were considered to be relevant or highly correlating were returned to users. However with growth of the web and large numbers of XML documents, smaller elements or passages can be returned to the user for more precise results. This thesis explains Fl...