Cette thèse étudie les problèmes liés à l’association des principaux composants des réseaux électriques.La nature inductive des éléments à connecter pose des problèmes lors de leur association dans un nœud de connexion commun. Deux solutions sont proposées pour résoudre ce problème et rendre ainsi possible la simulation. Une première solution accepte la présence de causalités dérivées, la deuxième consiste à simplifier les modèles en supprimant localement les régimes dynamiques pour faciliter leur association.La mise en évidence graphique de la causalité dans le modèle global d’un micro réseau à structure variable montre que différentes configurations sont possibles, avec pour chacune un comportement et un fonctionnement différents pour les composants. L’outil bond graph a été choisi pour la modélisation des différents éléments, l’analyse des propriétés des modèles et la conception de lois de commande par modèle inverse à l’aide de la bicausalité. La robustesse de la commande pour le convertisseur d’électronique de puissance est analysée d’une manière classique pour tester ses performances par rapport aux incertitudes paramétriques, en faisant varier la charge connectée au convertisseur. La commande est validée par simulation et de manière expérimentale / This thesis concerns the problem linked to the association of the main components of an electrical network.The inductive nature of the elements to be connected involved some problems for their association through a common connection node. Two solutions are proposed to solve this problem and thus make possible the simulation. One solution accepts the presence of derivative causality in the global model, the second one consists in simplifying the models by removing locally dynamic modes to facilitate their association.The graphical description of causality in the global model of a micro grid with variable structure shows up that different configurations are possible, with different behavior and functioning for the components in each case.The bond graph tool has been chosen for modeling the different components, analyzing the model properties and designing control laws based on inverse models derived from bicausal bond graph. Robustness to parameter uncertainties of the electronic power converter control law is analyzed in a traditional way, by varying the load connected to the power converter. The control law is validated by simulation and experimentally

No description available.

Många anhöriga till officerare som tjänstgjort i internationell insats har upplevt negativa fysiska och psykiska besvär under och efter insatsen. Men hur påverkar detta officeren när denne ska återgå till det ordinarie arbetet eller åka på nästa insats, sett från en psykosocial arbetsmiljöaspekt? Och förändras detta med anledning av de nya lagstadgade kraven om tjänstgö-ringsskyldighet och uppföljningsansvar? Detta handlar en del av studien om. Den andra delen av studien beskriver hur ett framtida anhörigstöd kan utformas, kopplat till de nya kraven. Studien syftar till att ge en ökad förståelse till att officer och anhöriga tillsammans utgör en ge-mensam social ordning och att ge underlag till fortsatt forskning. Vidare syftar studien till att bidra med konkreta förslag till anhörigstöd till myndigheter och organisationer som idag arbetar med det. Studiens empiri erhålls genom djupintervjuer med sex långvariga partner till officerare som kom-pletteras med textempiri. Studien påvisar att det finns tendens till ett meningssamband mellan anhörigas upplevda välbefin-nande och officerens psykosociala arbetsmiljö. Studien föreslår vidare att det framtida anhörigstö-det utformas utifrån principerna erfarenhetsbaserat, flexibelt och tillgängligt, där en begränsad del föreslås bli obligatoriskt. / A lot of relatives to officers who has served in international operations have been af-fected by negative physical and psychological impacts. But in what way has this affected the officer when it’s time to readjust to the normal work or when preparing the next mission from a psychosocial working environment point-of-view? And does this change in accordance with new Swedish laws of official duty and rehabilitation responsibility? That´s the first issue in the essay. The other issue covers how the future Swedish relative support can be designed. The essay has shown a tendency to causality between the relatives’ perception of well-being and the officer´s psychosocial working environment. Further, the essay proposes that future relative support shall be based on the principles previous experienced, flexibility and availability with a limited mandatory part.

In this work, we study and extend algorithms for Sparse Regression and Causal Inference problems. Both the problems are fundamental in the area of Data Science. The goal of regression problem is to nd out the \best" relationship between an output variable and input variables, given samples of the input and output values. We consider sparse regression under a high-dimensional linear model with strongly correlated variables, situations which cannot be handled well using many existing model selection algorithms. We study the performance of the popular feature selection algorithms such as LASSO, Elastic Net, BoLasso, Clustered Lasso as well as Projected Gradient Descent algorithms under this setting in terms of their running time, stability and consistency in recovering the true support. We also propose a new feature selection algorithm, BoPGD, which cluster the features rst based on their sample correlation and do subsequent sparse estimation using a bootstrapped variant of the projected gradient descent method with projection on the non-convex L0 ball. We attempt to characterize the efficiency and consistency of our algorithm by performing a host of experiments on both synthetic and real world datasets. Discovering causal relationships, beyond mere correlation, is widely recognized as a fundamental problem. The Causal Inference problems use observations to infer the underlying causal structure of the data generating process. The input to these problems is either a multivariate time series or i.i.d sequences and the output is a Feature Causal Graph where the nodes correspond to the variables and edges capture the direction of causality. For high dimensional datasets, determining the causal relationships becomes a challenging task because of the curse of dimensionality. Graphical modeling of temporal data based on the concept of \Granger Causality" has gained much attention in this context. The blend of Granger methods along with model selection techniques, such as LASSO, enables efficient discovery of a \sparse" sub-set of causal variables in high dimensional settings. However, these temporal causal methods use an input parameter, L, the maximum time lag. This parameter is the maximum gap in time between the occurrence of the output phenomenon and the causal input stimulus. How-ever, in many situations of interest, the maximum time lag is not known, and indeed, finding the range of causal e ects is an important problem. In this work, we propose and evaluate a data-driven and computationally efficient method for Granger causality inference in the Vector Auto Regressive (VAR) model without foreknowledge of the maximum time lag. We present two algorithms Lasso Granger++ and Group Lasso Granger++ which not only constructs the hypothesis feature causal graph, but also simultaneously estimates a value of maxlag (L) for each variable by balancing the trade-o between \goodness of t" and \model complexity".

Submitted by Marcia Bacha (marcia.bacha@fgv.br) on 2011-05-06T18:11:59Z No. of bitstreams: 1 1417127.pdf: 5400521 bytes, checksum: b6ddcc4cf2fe2855e50cb7bc0be5c242 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Marcia Bacha(marcia.bacha@fgv.br) on 2011-05-06T18:12:06Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 1417127.pdf: 5400521 bytes, checksum: b6ddcc4cf2fe2855e50cb7bc0be5c242 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Marcia Bacha(marcia.bacha@fgv.br) on 2011-05-06T18:12:15Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 1417127.pdf: 5400521 bytes, checksum: b6ddcc4cf2fe2855e50cb7bc0be5c242 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2011-05-06T18:12:24Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 1417127.pdf: 5400521 bytes, checksum: b6ddcc4cf2fe2855e50cb7bc0be5c242 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2010-03-26 / A incerteza é o principal elemento do futuro. Desde os primórdios, o homem busca métodos para estruturar essas incertezas futuras e assim poder guiar suas ações. Apenas a partir da segunda metade do século XX, porém, quando os métodos projetivos e preditivos já não eram mais capazes de explicar o futuro em um ambiente mundial cada vez mais interligado e turbulento, é que nasceram os primeiros métodos estruturados de construção de cenários. Esses métodos prospectivos visam lançar a luz sobre o futuro não para projetar um futuro único e certo, mas para visualizar uma gama de futuros possíveis e coerentes. Esse trabalho tem como objetivo propor uma nova abordagem à construção de cenários, integrando o Método de Impactos Cruzados à Análise Morfológica, utilizando o conceito de Rede Bayesianas, de fonna a reduzir a complexidade da análise sem perda de robustez. Este trabalho fará uma breve introdução histórica dos estudos do futuro, abordará os conceitos e definições de cenários e apresentará os métodos mais utilizados. Como a abordagem proposta pretende-se racionalista, será dado foco no Método de Cenários de Michel Godet e suas ferramentas mais utilizadas. Em seguida, serão apresentados os conceitos de Teoria dos Grafos, Causalidade e Redes Bayesianas. A proposta é apresentada em três etapas: 1) construção da estrutura do modelo através da Análise Estrutural, propondo a redução de um modelo inicialmente cíclico para um modelo acíclico direto; 2) utilização da Matriz de Impactos Cruzados como ferramenta de alimentação, preparação e organização dos dados de probabilidades; 3) utilização da Rede Bayesiana resultante da primeira etapa como subespaço de análise de uma Matriz Morfológica. Por último, um teste empírico é realizado para comprovar a proposta de redução do modelo cíclico em um modelo acíclico.

The thesis deals with the problem of the existence of consciousness in the physical world. It denies the approach that is prevailing in the contemporary philosophy of mind that treats the phenomenal consciousness and intentionality separately. The position held in this thesis is to claim that the phenomenal character of consciousness and intentionality are inseparable and that it is impossible to understand the former without understanding the latter, and vice versa. The problem of the existence of consciousness in the physical world is viewed as the problem of the existence of (conscious) intentionality in the physical world. With the aim to achieve an analysis of intentionality that would keep its phenomenal character and the first person point of view, and, at the same time, shed light on its realization in the physical world, thoughts of Peter Strawson, G. E. M. Anscombe, Tim Crane, Colin McGinn and John Searle are discussed. The result is an outline of intentionality that allows to explain the fundamental level of intentionality as a physical process and the higher levels of intentionality as a development of the fundamental level. Two principles are crucial for this approach: the development of intentionality from the fundamental level to the higher level is comprehensible only if we keep the...

Trade liberalization in Kenya started in the early 1980s with the structural adjustment programmes, and continued under the multilateral framework of the WTO. During the same period, the incidence of poverty and level of inequality also worsened. The government’s focus on trade negotiations has been to ensure that there is policy space for the daily running of the economy even though welfare impacts are also important. Non-state actors have argued that trade liberalization has negatively affected the poor; particularly the farmers, since they cannot compete with the developed countries whose farmers enjoy significant government support through subsidies, making their products much cheaper in the world market. Government officials, on the other hand, contend that trade liberalization is good as it brings in competition and transfer of technology which is good for an economy. It is important to examine how trade liberalization has affected household’s welfare in Kenya, given that this kind of analysis has not been conducted in Kenya. This study is unique because it does not assume the existence of a trade liberalization– poverty relationship, unlike most studies. It uses a multi-method approach to first test the hypothesis that there is no statistically significant relationship between trade liberalization and poverty, it further tests for multiplier effects of trade liberalization on poverty determinants. Trade Liberalization and poverty is found to have a stochastic relationship, furthermore investments and capital stock were found to significantly affect poverty determinants in the stochastic model. Due to unavailability of household welfare measure data in time series, a CGE model was used to establish the dynamics of trade liberalization on poverty at a point in time using the 2003 Social Accounting Matrix Data for Kenya. Overall, trade liberalization accompanied by FDI had the greatest impact on household welfare. Trade liberalization had a positive impact on household welfare since household incomes and consumption increased. Micro simulations results, based on changes in consumption, also showed that poverty incidence reduced for all households, even though the urban households experienced higher decreases. The study found that there was little difference in protecting sensitive products and not protecting them; secondly, trade liberalization accompanied by foreign direct investment had greater impact on improving the household welfare. Consumption and incomes increased, resulting in overall poverty reduction. The welfare of urban households was much higher than rural households in terms of income and consumption increases. However, income inequality was much higher in urban than rural areas. / Economics / D. Litt. et Phil. (Economics)

Exponential smoothing algorithms are very attractive for the practical world such as in industry. When considering bivariate exponential smoothing methods, in addition to the properties of univariate methods, additional properties give insight to relationships between the two components of a process, and also to the overall structure of the model. It is important to study these properties, but even with the merits the bivariate exponential smoothing algorithms have, exponential smoothing algorithms are nonstatistical/nonstochastic and to study the properties within exponential smoothing may be worthless. As an alternative approach, the (bivariate) ARIMA and the structural models which are classes of statistical models, are shown to generalize the exponential smoothing algorithms. We study these properties within these classes as they will have implications on exponential smoothing algorithms. Forecast properties are studied using the state space model and the Kalman filter. Comparison of ARIMA and structural model completes the study. / Mathematical Sciences / M. Sc. (Statistics)

Text in Afrikaans / Summaries in English and Afrikaans / Key terms in English and Afrikaans / Die doel van die studie was om organisasietraagheid as stremmende fenomeen te konseptualiseer en die manifestasie daarvan te ondersoek binne 'n tipiese werkorganisasie. Aandag is gegee aan organisasietransformasie binne die raamwerk van 'n diagnostiese model vir organisasie- en individuele ontwikkeling. Die empiriese studie bevestig die manifestasie van organisasietraagheid ten opsigte van die teikenorganisasie. Resultate bevestig dat respondente ten gunste is van veranderingsinisiatiewe, maar ondergeskiktes toon 'n emstige behoefte aan leierskap. Dit blyk ook dat die organisasie nie die vermoe het om vinnig op omgewingsveranderings te reageer nie. Gesonde bestuurspraktyke word nie gevolg nie en kreatiwiteit word nie aangemoedig nie. By ondergeskiktes bestaan ook twyfel oor veranderingsagente se vermoe om verandering te fasiliteer. / The purpose of the study was to conceptualise organisation inertia as a retarding phenomenon and to investigate its manifestation within a typical work organisation. Attention was given to organisational and individual development within the framework of a diagnostic model. The empirical study focussed on the manifestation of organisational inertia within the target organisation. Results confirmed that respondents are in favour of change initiatives but that the stimulation thereof do not exist. Subordinates are not encouraged to show creativity. The organisation demonstrates an incapability to respond to environmental changes and reflects a non-existence of healthy management practices. Little trust exists in the capability of change agents to facilitate change. / Economics and Management Sciences / M.A. (Industrial Psychology)

This study provides evidence of the relationship between bank-granted credit and business cycles in South Africa. The study is conducted in three phases, namely qualitative research (Phase I), quantitative research (Phase II) and econometric analysis (Phase III). A sequential (connected data) mixed methodology (Phase I and II) is used to collect and analyze primary data from market participants. The qualitative research (Phase I) involves structured interviews with influential or well informed people on the subject matter. Phase I of the study is used to understand the key determinants of bank credit in South Africa and to appreciate how each of the credit aggregates behaves during alternate business cycles. Qualitative survey results suggest key determinants of commercial bank credit in South Africa as economic growth, collateral value, bank competition, money supply, deposit liabilities, capital requirements, bank lending rates and inflation. The qualitative results are used to formulate questions of the structured survey questionnaire (Quantitative research- Phase II). The ANOVA and Pearman’s product correlation analysis techniques are used to assess relationship between variables. The quantitative results show that there is direct and positive relationship between bank lending behavior and credit aggregates namely economic growth, collateral value, bank competition and money supply. On the other hand, the results show that there is a negative relationship between credit growth and bank capital and lending rates. Overall, the quantitative findings show that bank lending in South Africa is procyclical. The survey results indicate that the case for demand-following hypothesis is stronger than supply-leading hypothesis in South Africa. The econometric methodology is used to augment results of the survey study. Phase III of the study re-examines econometric relationship between bank lending and business cycles. The study employs cointegration and vector error correction model (VECM) techniques in order to test for existence of long-run relationship between the selected variables. Granger causality test technique is applied to the variables of interest to test for direction of causation between variables. The study uses quarterly data for the period of 1980:Q1 to 2013:Q4. Business cycles are determined and measured by Gross Domestic Product at market prices while bank-granted credit is proxied by credit extension to the private sector. The econometric test results show that there is a significant long-run relationship between economic growth and bank credit extension. The Granger causality test provides evidence of unidirectional causal relationship with direction from economic growth to credit extension for South Africa. The study results indicate that the case for demand-following hypothesis is stronger than supply-leading hypothesis in South Africa. Economic growth spurs credit market development in South Africa. Overall, the results show that there is a stable long-run relationship between macroeconomic business cycles and real credit growth in South Africa. The results show that economic growth significantly causes and stimulates bank credit. The study, therefore, recommends that South Africa needs to give policy priority to promotion and development of the real sector of the economy to propel and accelerate credit extension. Economic growth is considered as the significant policy variable to stimulate credit extension. The findings therefore hold important implications for both theory and policy. / Business Management / D.B.L.