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Boundary value problems for pseudodifferential operators (with or without the transmission property) are characterised as a substructure of the edge pseudodifferential calculus with constant discrete asymptotics. The boundary in this case is the edge and the inner normal the model cone of local wedges. Elliptic boundary value problems for non-integer powers of the Laplace symbol belong to the examples as well as problems for the identity in the interior with a prescribed number of trace and potential conditions. Transmission operators are characterised as smoothing Mellin and Green operators with meromorphic symbols.

This dissertation posits that the sin that might be termed "biolatry"--i.e., the worship of (human) life--contradicts the biblical articulation of the value of human life and results in an ethic of honoring that life above the ordinance of the God who both created and orders life and death in accord with his own infinitely good and holy purposes. The treatise aims to reorient the view by reestablishing divine revelation's assessment of the value of human life over that of the creature, resulting in joyful embrace of a biblical portrait of the value of human life in relation to the infinitely greater ethic of the glory of God, Lord of life and death. Chapter 1 assesses the current cultural pathos regarding death. The thesis and methodology are presented, including the narrowing of the scope within the much broader context of a biblical thanatology. Chapter 2 provides a briefing on the design and origin of death. Chapters 3 and 4 continue this briefing with exegesis, respectively, of the Old and New Testament's articulation of the value of human life and God's instrumental usage and vanquishing of death. Chapter 5 presents various anthropological constructs in order to assert a biblical understanding of the nature and constitution of human being in light of the unparalleled reordering of the anthropological constitution effected by death. Having grounded rationale for praxis in divine revelation, chapter 6 follows by holding forth as paradigms those offspring of Adam who rightly valued their own lives in relation to the higher ethic of joyful submission to the ordinance of humanity's Creator. These "resisted to the point of shedding blood in striving against sin" (Heb 12.4), thereby imitating the "sufferings of [their] God." The excursus of chapter 7 addresses the providence of God in those especially emotionally difficult occurrences of death, including infant death. The concluding chapter summarizes the premise and argumentation of previous chapters and provides admonition concerning a proper disposition toward death. Further, because death is not ultimate victor, the dissertation closes with a discussion concerning the hope of the consummation of life as its Creator intended it.

The after market is of great importance of a company’s competitiveness and an increasing part of its revenues can be derived from it. Remanufacturing, in focus of this thesis, is a great business opportunity and the European market has an enormous growth potential. In the USA it is a major business and the automotive industry, targeted in this thesis, sells approximately 60 million remanufactured automotive products compared to 15 million products in Europe for an equivalent stock of vehicles Compared to manufacturing, the remanufacturing environment is a more complex business due to the high degree of uncertainty in the production process, mainly caused by two factors: the quantity and quality of returned cores. Overall, seven characteristics that make the remanufacturing material flow harder to control have been identified. Emerging in the 1990’s the concept of Lean production is a well-known method for improving the manufacturing capabilities of a company. Lean production, which is said to increase productivity, decrease lead-time and costs and enhance quality, is widely adopted. In this thesis, the purpose is to explore what characteristics of the remanufacturing environment that can hinder the implementation of Lean production principles of material flows and how Lean principles can be employed in a remanufacturing environment. In accordance, the theories of Lean production and Remanufacturing are used and the research methodology chosen that of a case study. To assess material flow, the production flows of five major product groups in a car engine are assessed. For the collection of data, Value Stream Mapping (VSM) methodology has been used. The main result about material flows and how Lean principles can be employed in a remanufacturing environment have resulted in eight generic proposals. The main conclusion from these proposals is that the inherent characteristics of variable processing times and uncertainty in materials recovered have major negative impact for implementing a lean production process. Vice versa, given an accurate supply of parts for reassembly, all the principles of Lean production can be fully implemented in the phases of reassembly and testing.

Purpose – During the past decades, implementing reforms becomes a popular topic for most manufacturers. With the aim to cope with the environment changes, there are urgent needs for these manufacturing companies to carry on reforms on the existing businesses. At the same time, value creation under a new service dominant logic for manufacturers are cited by many scholars. The aim of this paper is to analyze the new dominant logic, with the comparison of traditional goods dominant logic, recognize the advanced value creation model. To go a step further, this paper also discusses about the way of implementing reforms and new business logic for manufacturers. Methodology – This paper mainly takes the methodology of literature review. The literatures reviewed here include academic papers, books, and website information. The main field of literatures include: service definition and service characteristics; goods-dominant logic versus service dominant logic; and value creation (co-creation). On the other hand, some small case studies can also be found in this paper. Findings – After the comparing between goods dominant logic and service dominant logic, this paper suggests the service-dominant logic as a preferred business logic. Because it provides a more interactive way of consumption, presents a value-in-use view rather than value-in-exchange, and requires manufacturers playing a role of assisting customers in value creating process. For those manufacturers wish to implement the service dominant logic, this paper suggests them to take innovations on their business, which including the innovations on products/services, business processes, and business models. Research limitations/implications – As a relative new field of study, the research is mostly taken by literature review. However, the research on the implementing of new business logic and reforms requires more voice from the real industry.   Practical implications – Manufacturers may position themselves to new roles by involving in the customers’ value creating process. Taking innovations from a integrated view may help manufacturers to achieve the higher value under service dominant logic. Originality/value – This paper concluded the ongoing service dominant logic development, after which, offers a discussion on the implementing of which for the manufacturing companies.

Background: Uncertainty in parameters is present in many risk assessment and decision making problems and leads to uncertainty in model predictions. Therefore an analysis of the degree of uncertainty around the model inputs is often needed. Importance analysis involves use of quantitative methods aiming at identifying the contribution of uncertain input model parameters to output uncertainty. Expected value of partial perfect information (EVPPI) measure is a current gold- standard technique for measuring parameters importance in health economics models. The current standard approach of estimating EVPPI through performing double Monte Carlo simulation (MCS) can be associated with a long run time. Objective: To investigate different importance analysis techniques with an aim to find alternative technique with shorter run time that will identify parameters with greatest contribution to uncertainty in model output. Methods: A health economics model was updated and served as a tool to implement various importance analysis techniques. Twelve alternative techniques were applied: rank correlation analysis, contribution to variance analysis, mutual information analysis, dominance analysis, regression analysis, analysis of elasticity, ANCOVA, maximum separation distances analysis, sequential bifurcation, double MCS EVPPI,EVPPI-quadrature and EVPPI- single method. Results: Among all these techniques, the dominance measure resulted with the closest correlated calibrated scores when compared with EVPPI calibrated scores. Performing a dominance analysis as a screening method to identify subgroup of parameters as candidates for being most important parameters and subsequently only performing EVPPI analysis on the selected parameters will reduce the overall run time.

Value-at-Risk (VaR ) is an industrial standard for monitoring market risk in an investment portfolio. It measures potential osses within a given confidence level. VaR was first used by major financial institutions in the early 1990’s, and widely developed after the release of J.P. Morgan’s Riskmetrics Technical Document in 1996. The efficient calculation, implementation, interpretation and optimization of VaR are a challenge in the practice of risk management when the number of market factors in the portfolio is high. In this thesis, we are concerned with the quadratic analytical estimation of VaR and we present a methodology for an approximation to VaR that is based on the principal components of a sensitivity-adjusted covariance matrix. The result is an explicit expression in terms of portfolio deltas, gammas, and the mean and covariance matrix. It can be viewed as a non-linear extension of the linear model given by the delta-normal-VaR of RiskMetrics, a standard calculation for the risk in the financial sector. We obtain an asymptotic expansion for VaR in the limit when the confidence level approaches 1 and precise estimates of the reminder. We then optimize the approximated VaR with respect to the gradient or delta of the portfolio, a quantity which can be changed by trading the underlying assets (stocks), without entering into any derivative transactions. This analysis provides an optimal trading strategy of the portfolio that minimizes the risk.

The goal of this research is to develop an equation describing the two, dimensional motion of an inviscid incompressible fluid in the rectangular wavemaker of constant depth. The boundary value problem of the rectangle is transformed to the upper half plane with the use of Jacobian elliptical functions. The boundary value problem is then transformed to the unit disc. The solution to the mixed value problem of the disc is found using a general solution satisfying the Laplace equation in polar coordinates. In order to solve the coefficients of the general solution, a system of equations is developed using a method similar to the one applied for the coefficients of a Fourier series. The system is converted to matrix form and the coefficients are calculated using Mathematica. Four approximate solutions are calculated for depths of 3.96 m and 4.42 m with N equal to 2 and 10. / Graduation date: 1993

The management consulting industry is growing. The industryis also described as being exposed to increased pressure fromthe environment. An interesting question is then how resourcesare managed in management consulting firms in order tosustain competitive advantage. The purpose with this thesis isto investigate how firms in the management consulting industrymanage their resources through the lens of the resourcemanagement framework and if there are any signs of change.Through a multiple case study of the processes in two largemanagement consulting firms, the activity (i.e. the use ofresources) perceived as important for the leveraging ofcompetitive advantage is studied. The findings suggest thatcustomers have a much more central part in the resourcemanagement process than depicted in the resourcemanagement framework. The clearest signs of change refer tothe development of new career paths and an increased globalintegration of competencies.

This study examines the pattern of stock option time value decay and the implications of the time value decay pattern for option writing strategies. I also consider the returns to various options writing strategies. The central question is whether option writers can utilize a writing strategy that captures the time value of options as revenue to cover their risks and provides return on their investments. Using transaction data, I find that the time value of options that are near-the-money decays at a decreasing rate. The implications of this result are that a significant portion of the time value of near-the-money options decays in the early days of writing an option and the decay slows down as time to expiry approaches. This motivates us to compare over the same holding periods the writing returns of options with long times to expiry with the returns of options with short times to expiry. Overall, the results suggest that trading of options face significant transaction costs and it is mainly motivated by hedging or speculation as I did not find a systematic way to profit from option writing strategies.<p> In addition, I examine the impact of market sentiment on the time value of options. The period of the study includes a sub-period when the general trend in the stock market was positive and another sub-period when the trend was negative. In particular, I study the price of puts relative to the price of calls during these two distinct market periods. I find that during bear markets both call and put options are more expensive than call and put options during bull markets. Yet, the ratio of put premiums to call premiums during rising markets is generally higher than the same ratio during bear markets. This observation suggests that speculators may be the dominant traders in options markets. Overall, I find that option writing strategies are not profitable. One of the reasons for this observation is transaction costs, which are significant in all the strategies that I examine. The bid-ask spread in the options market is large in comparison to the bid-ask spread in the underlying stock market.