Yes / This paper examines how deviation from firms’ target leverage influences their decisions on undertaking foreign acquisitions. Using a sample of 5746 completed bids by UK acquirers from 1987 to 2012, we observe that over-deviated firms are more likely to acquire foreign targets. Consistent with co-insurance theory, we find that over-deviated firms engage in foreign acquisition deals to relieve their financial constraints and to mitigate their financial distress risk. We also note that foreign acquisitions enhance over-deviated firms’ value and performance, measured by Tobin’s q and return on assets (ROA) respectively. These findings support the view that over-deviated firms pursue the most value-enhancing acquisitions. Overall, this paper suggests that co-insurance effects, value creation and performance improvements are the main incentives for over-deviated firms’ involvement in foreign acquisitions. / Financial support of Zagazig University in Egypt / The full-text of this article will be released for public view at the end of the publisher embargo on 02 Mar 2019.

The solar energy, or photovoltaic (PV) industry, driven by economic competition with traditional fossil energy sources, strives to produce solar panels of the highest conversion efficiency and best reliability at the lowest production cost. Solar cells based on crystalline silicon are currently the dominant commercial PV technology by a large margin, and they are likely to remain dominant for at least one decade. The problem of improvement mechanical stability of silicon wafers and finished solar cell is one of the most critical for entire PV industry. Mechanical defects in wafer and cells in the form of periphery or internal cracks can be initiated at various steps of the manufacturing process and becomes the trigger for the fracture. There are a limited number of characterization methods for crack detection but only a few of those are able to satisfy PV industry needs in sensitivity of the crack detection incorporated with the analysis time. The most promising are a Resonance Ultrasonic Vibrations (RUV) technique and Photoluminescence (PL) imaging. The RUV method was further developed in this thesis project for fast non-destructive crack detection in full-size silicon wafers and solar cells. The RUV methodology relies on deviations of the resonance frequency response curve measured on a wafer with peripheral or bulk millimeter-length crack when it is compared with identical non-cracked wafers. It was observed that statistical variations of the RUV parameters on a similarly processed silicon wafers/cells with the same geometry lead to false positive events reducing accuracy of the RUV method. A new statistical approach using three independent RUV crack detection criteria was developed and applied to resolve this issue. This approach was validated experimentally. Crack detection using RUV technique was applied to a set of production-grade Cz-Si wafers and finished solar cells from the Isofoton's S.A. (Spain) production line. Cracked solar cells rejected by the RUV method using the statistical approach were imaged with room temperature PL mapping and independently controlled with Scanning Acoustic Microscopy (SAM). A comparison of three independent techniques for crack detection, RUV, PL and SAM, was performed on selected samples. A high accuracy and selectivity of the RUV method to identify mm-size cracks in wafers and cells was confirmed.

The concurrent development (CD) project is defined as the concurrent development of both hardware and software that is integrated together later for a deliverable product. The CD Scheduling Problem (CDSP) is defined as most CD baseline project schedules being developed today are overly optimistic. That is, they finish late. This study researches those techniques being used today to produce CD project schedules and looks for ways to close the gap between the baseline project schedule and reality. In Chapter 1, the CDSP is introduced. In Chapter 2, a review is made of published works. A review is also made of commercial scheduling software applications to uncover their techniques as well as a review of organizations doing research on improving project scheduling. In Chapter 3, the components of the CDSP are analyzed for ways to improve. In Chapter 4, the overall methodology of the research is discussed to include the development of the Concurrent Development Scheduling Model (CDSM) that quantifies the factors driving optimism. The CDSM is applied to typical CD schedules with the results compared to Monte Carlo simulations of the same schedules. The results from using the CDSM on completed CD projects are also presented. The CDSM does well in predicting the outcome. In Chapter 5, the results of the experiments run to develop the CDSM are given. In Chapter 6 findings and recommendations are given. Specifically, a list of findings is given that a decision maker can use to analyze a baseline project schedule and assess the schedules optimism. These findings will help define the risks in the CD schedule. Also included is a list of actions that the decision maker may be able to take to reduce of the risk of the project to improve the chances of coming in on time.

<p>During the last decades major changes has occurred at the financial markets, meaning an increasing supply and a greater variation of financial instruments. The saving habits of the Swedish people have gone from traditional bank deposits to investments in equities, funds and bonds. All this together with the great rise in the stock market at the late 90’s has brought words like risk and return up-to-date, and is the background to the development of a new law concerning financial advising which come into force the 1th of July 2004. </p><p>The contents of the thesis can be described as three bricks, representing the survey questions. The thesis starts with descriptions of which risk- and return concepts that exists and which are used by the contemporary financial institutions. Further on, the thesis deals with the individuals’ perception of risk, in particular financial risk. To end with, details regarding how a message should be conveyed are given. The three bricks together fulfil the purpose of the thesis; To investigate how the meaning of financial risk in a simple and pedagogical way can be explained to a person not familiar with financial literature, and to develop questions that facilitate when an individuals risk profile is ascertained. </p><p>We have found that standard deviation is the risk concept that dominates in financial theory, and together with Value at Risk is the most common used in practise. Good knowledge about risk is required when explaining risk. It is important to describe the information in an attractive way and use examples and illustrations. For financial advisers it also is important to have knowledge about the human behaviour, because ascertain the clients risk profile is an important part of the risk explanation. A clients risk profile is best ascertain with so called open questions where both what the clients answer and how he or she answer can form the basis for the judgement.</p>

<p>In the human body, turbulent flow is associated with many complications. Turbulence typically occurs downstream from stenoses and heart valve prostheses and at branch points of arteries. A proper way to study turbulence may enhance the understanding of the effects of stenoses and improve the functional assessment of damaged heart valves and heart valve prostheses.</p><p>The methods of today for studying turbulence in the human body lack in either precision or speed. This thesis exploits a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) phenomenon referred to as signal loss in order to develop a method for estimating turbulence intensity in blood flow.</p><p>MRI measurements were carried out on an appropriate flow phantom. The turbulence intensity results obtained by means of the proposed method were compared with previously known turbulence intensity results. The comparison indicates that the proposed method has great potential for estimation of turbulence intensity.</p>

During the last decades major changes has occurred at the financial markets, meaning an increasing supply and a greater variation of financial instruments. The saving habits of the Swedish people have gone from traditional bank deposits to investments in equities, funds and bonds. All this together with the great rise in the stock market at the late 90’s has brought words like risk and return up-to-date, and is the background to the development of a new law concerning financial advising which come into force the 1th of July 2004. The contents of the thesis can be described as three bricks, representing the survey questions. The thesis starts with descriptions of which risk- and return concepts that exists and which are used by the contemporary financial institutions. Further on, the thesis deals with the individuals’ perception of risk, in particular financial risk. To end with, details regarding how a message should be conveyed are given. The three bricks together fulfil the purpose of the thesis; To investigate how the meaning of financial risk in a simple and pedagogical way can be explained to a person not familiar with financial literature, and to develop questions that facilitate when an individuals risk profile is ascertained. We have found that standard deviation is the risk concept that dominates in financial theory, and together with Value at Risk is the most common used in practise. Good knowledge about risk is required when explaining risk. It is important to describe the information in an attractive way and use examples and illustrations. For financial advisers it also is important to have knowledge about the human behaviour, because ascertain the clients risk profile is an important part of the risk explanation. A clients risk profile is best ascertain with so called open questions where both what the clients answer and how he or she answer can form the basis for the judgement.

This thesis studies some fundamental aspects of wireless systems with partial channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT), with a special emphasis on the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime. The first contribution is a study on multi-layer variable-rate communication systems with quantized feedback, where the expected rate is chosen as the performance measure. Iterative algorithms exploiting results in the literature of parallel broadcast channels are developed to design the system parameters. Necessary and sufficient conditions for single-layer coding to be optimal are derived. In contrast to the ergodic case, it is shown that a few bits of feedback information can improve the expected rate dramatically. The next part of the thesis is devoted to characterizing the tradeoff between diversity and multiplexing gains (D-M tradeoff) over slow fading channels with partial CSIT. In the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) case, we introduce the concept of minimum guaranteed multiplexing gain in the forward link and show that it influences the D-M tradeoff significantly. It is demonstrated that power control based on the feedback is instrumental in achieving the D-M tradeoff, and that rate adaptation is important in obtaining a high diversity gain even at high rates. Extending the D-M tradeoff analysis to decode-and-forward relay channels with quantized channel state feedback, we consider several different scenarios. In the relay-to-source feedback case, it is found that using just one bit of feedback to control the source transmit power is sufficient to achieve the multiantenna upper bound in a range of multiplexing gains. In the destination-to-source-and-relay feedback scenario, if the source-relay channel gain is unknown to the feedback quantizer at the destination, the diversity gain only grows linearly in the number of feedback levels, in sharp contrast to an exponential growth for MIMO channels. We also consider the achievable D-M tradeoff of a relay network with the compress-and-forward protocol when the relay is constrained to make use of standard source coding. Under a short-term power constraint at the relay, using source coding without side information results in a significant loss in terms of the D-M tradeoff. For a range of multiplexing gains, this loss can be fully compensated for by using power control at the relay. The final part of the thesis deals with the transmission of an analog Gaussian source over quasi-static fading channels with limited CSIT, taking the SNR exponent of the end-to-end average distortion as performance measure. Building upon results from the D-M tradeoff analysis, we develop novel upper bounds on the distortion exponents achieved with partial CSIT. We show that in order to achieve the optimal scaling, the CSIT feedback resolution must grow logarithmically with the bandwidth ratio for MIMO channels. The achievable distortion exponent of some hybrid schemes with heavily quantized feedback is also derived. As for the half-duplex fading relay channel, combining a simple feedback scheme with separate source and channel coding outperforms the best known no-feedback strategies even with only a few bits of feedback information. / QC 20100817

In the human body, turbulent flow is associated with many complications. Turbulence typically occurs downstream from stenoses and heart valve prostheses and at branch points of arteries. A proper way to study turbulence may enhance the understanding of the effects of stenoses and improve the functional assessment of damaged heart valves and heart valve prostheses. The methods of today for studying turbulence in the human body lack in either precision or speed. This thesis exploits a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) phenomenon referred to as signal loss in order to develop a method for estimating turbulence intensity in blood flow. MRI measurements were carried out on an appropriate flow phantom. The turbulence intensity results obtained by means of the proposed method were compared with previously known turbulence intensity results. The comparison indicates that the proposed method has great potential for estimation of turbulence intensity.

服務差異，意即服務供應者所提供的服務品質與顧客使用後所感受到的服務品質間的落差，可能出現在服務傳遞過程中的任何環節裡。由於顧客通常根據他們所感受到的服務品質與他們購買前的期望來評估一項服務的品質，因此服務差異可能將引起顧客的不滿意感受，並促使顧客對服務供應者採取某些表達其不滿感受的行動。若大部分不滿意的顧客最後都採取轉換服務供應者的行動，原本的服務供應者的市佔率與未來的獲利勢必都將面臨威脅，因此服務供應廠商應了解於其所提供的服務類型中可能存在哪些類型的服務差異。 　　然服務差異不僅存在於現實生活中的服務，亦存在於透過網際網路傳遞的e-service中。由於網際網路的普及與通訊科技的進步，越來越多的服務提供者與產品提供者將其市場拓展的網路平台上。然e-service與現實生活中的服務仍有些不同，例如：實體服務是透過人來傳遞，而e-service則是透過網路平台提供服務給顧客，因此顧客必須自己完成所需的服務。也由於e-service與實體服務存在這些不同的特性，因此存在於e-service中的服務差異可能也與發生於實體服務中的有些不同。 　　本研究期望能了解不同類型的e-service的顧客可能經歷哪些類型的服務差異，並期望找出影響這些曾有過不滿意經驗的顧客留下來繼續使用的因素可能有哪些？透過文獻探討與案例蒐集，本研究整理出顧客最常經歷的服務差異類型與主要影響不滿意的顧客繼續使用服務的因素，並發現其實僅有少數經歷服務差異的顧客最後選擇離開原本的服務提供者。爾後，本研究進一步使用問卷調查了解這些服務差異與影響因素是否與發生於實體服務中的有所不同，並了解不同類型的e-service於服務差異與影響因素是否存在差異。 　　研究結果發現：部分發生於e-service的服務差異並未存在實體服務中，且影響不滿意的顧客仍繼續使用此e-service的因素也與影響實體服務顧客的因素有些許不同。此外，我們亦發現，不同類型的e-service於服務差異和影響因素上也會有所不同。期望本研究發現能協助e-service服務提供者能更加了解其顧客的行為。 / Service deviation, which refers to the existing gap between service delivered by a service provider and that perceived by the customer, can occur anywhere in the process of service delivery. Because customers typically evaluate service quality in relation to service they have previously received and pre-purchase expectations, service deviation may lead to customer dissatisfaction expressed through specific behavior. For instance, some customers might complain to service providers, others may spread negative opinions of the service through word of mouth, and still other customers may respond by searching for alternative service providers. If dissatisfied customers follow through and switch providers, the service provider being abandoned can expect their market share to decrease and further influence their profits. Thus, firms can benefit from understanding the possible and probable service deviations related to the services they provide. Service deviation not only exists in general services but also in Internet service environments. Given that the Web and related communication technologies are continually enhanced, firms are expanding their markets to include e-services. The characteristics of e-services lead to specific types of service deviation in response to customer dissatisfaction. However, not all dissatisfied customers who intend to switch actually follow through. For example, both Google and Facebook receive many complaints, but they are still the largest and second-largest sites in the world. Why do dissatisfied customers stay with a provider despite perceiving the potential for service deviation? This study tries to explore the types of service deviation that Internet customers experience in relation to various e-platforms, and examine why dissatisfied customers choose to stay with e-service providers despite having contemplated deviation. Using literature review and a case analysis, the researcher determined the most frequent deviation types and factors that usually influence customers’ switching behavior, and found that only a minority of service deviations result in a customer switching to another e-platform. By using questionnaire the study further assess whether these service deviations and factors are different from those happen in general service. It is found that various types of e-service have different types of service deviation and factors. Some of the service deviations happen on e-platforms do not occur in general services, while factors that keep customers stay with dis-satisfied e-services are also different. It is hoped that the findings can help e-service providers to better understand the characteristics of e-service customer behavior.

For the past several decades the South has moved toward one-party Republican control, and yet the mega-southern state of Florida has not kept pace with the greater Southern Republican realignment for candidates running for statewide office. Instead, Florida has exhibited a Southern lag, where rural counties maintain higher Democratic registration than voting levels in supporting Democratic candidates for governor and U.S. Senate in the same general election year. There has been a gradual regional dealignment occurring in rural counties that are closer to the Deep Southern states of Alabama and Georgia. Using a range of aggregate Florida county election and registration data, research found the percentage of white voters and percentage of registered Democrats that comprise counties effect the Democratic deviation. These results have implications for campaign strategy and can be used in campaign targeting efforts.