Advisor Department Head iii ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION Impact of Lifetime Variations and Secondary Barriers on CdTe Solar-cell Performance The thin-film CdTe solar cell (generally n-CdS/p-CdTe) is one of the leading candidates for terrestrial photovoltaic applications due to its low cost and high efficiency. However, compared with single-crystal cells of comparable band gap, there remains a signi...

OBJECTIVES To determine the strength of evidence for the effectiveness of mental health interventions for patients with three common somatic conditions (chronic fatigue syndrome, irritable bowel syndrome, and chronic back pain). To assess whether results obtained in secondary care can be extrapolated to primary care and suggest how future trials should be designed to provide more rigorous evide...

BACKGROUND Evidence-based clinical practice guidelines may improve treatment quality, but the uptake of guideline recommendations is often incomplete and slow. Recently new low back pain guidelines are being launched in Denmark. The guidelines are considered to reduce personal and public costs. The aim of this study is to evaluate whether a complex, multifaceted implementation strategy of the l...

OBJECTIVES To determine whether advice and training on working techniques and lifting equipment prevent back pain in jobs that involve heavy lifting. DATA SOURCES Medline, Embase, CENTRAL, Cochrane Back Group's specialised register, CINAHL, Nioshtic, CISdoc, Science Citation Index, and PsychLIT were searched up to September-November 2005. REVIEW METHODS The primary search focused on randomi...

The pull-back, push-forward and multiplication of smooth functions can be extended to distributions if their wave front set satisfies some conditions. Thus, it is natural to investigate the topological properties of these operations between spaces D′ Γ of distributions having a wave front set included in a given closed cone Γ of the cotangent space. As discovered by S. Alesker, the pull-back is...