Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

Revelations of kickbacks from surgical device manufacturers to surgeons raise the question whether surgeons can continue to collaborate with industry and maintain public trust. Using qualitative and quantitative methodology, this thesis explores surgical patients’ views on financial relationships between surgeons and manufacturers and patients’ recommendations for managing these conflicts of interest. A majority of patients approve of surgeon’s relationships with manufacturers that can benefit patients but disapprove of those that primarily benefit the surgeon and the manufacturer. The majority of patients do not endorse disclosure as a sole method of managing these relationships. The majority of patients trust the surgical profession to self-regulate and favour professional oversight rather than by government to ensure financial relationships between surgeons and manufacturers are appropriate. My data supports my argument that there should be professional oversight of financial relationships between surgeons and manufacturers, which may allow continued collaboration with manufacturers while maintaining public trust.

Revelations of kickbacks from surgical device manufacturers to surgeons raise the question whether surgeons can continue to collaborate with industry and maintain public trust. Using qualitative and quantitative methodology, this thesis explores surgical patients’ views on financial relationships between surgeons and manufacturers and patients’ recommendations for managing these conflicts of interest. A majority of patients approve of surgeon’s relationships with manufacturers that can benefit patients but disapprove of those that primarily benefit the surgeon and the manufacturer. The majority of patients do not endorse disclosure as a sole method of managing these relationships. The majority of patients trust the surgical profession to self-regulate and favour professional oversight rather than by government to ensure financial relationships between surgeons and manufacturers are appropriate. My data supports my argument that there should be professional oversight of financial relationships between surgeons and manufacturers, which may allow continued collaboration with manufacturers while maintaining public trust.

Inom riskkapitalfonder är det vanligt med olika former av vinstdelningssystem.Under senare år har en problematik uppdagats vad gäller beskattningen av dendel av vinstdelningen som uppkommer vid avyttring av portföljbolag sombrukar kallas carried interest. Fokus vid diskussionen har främst varit i vilketinkomstslag ersättningen i form av carried interest beskattningsmässigt ska tasupp, antingen som inkomst av tjänst eller som inkomst av kapital. Skatteverketär av uppfattningen att carried interest är prestationsbaserat och att inkomstensåledes ska tas upp och beskattas som inkomst av tjänst hos de personer somutfört arbete som skapat mervärde i portföljbolagen. Andra är av åsikten attcarried interest, som hänför sig till avkastning på kapital, ska beskattas som enkapitalinkomst.Syftet med uppsatsen är att reda ut på vilka grunder beskattningen kan ske i deolika inkomstslagen. Frågan regleras inte uttryckligt i lag utan har i ställetöverlämnats till rättstillämpningen. I ett första steg att klargöra rättslägetbeslutade skattenämnden, som första instans, i två fall vilka båda överklagatstill Förvaltningsrätten. Författarens uppfattning är att Skattverket inte hartillräckligt stark grund för sina yrkanden att beskatta carried interest på annatsätt än som inkomst av kapital. Det finns inget stöd i lag att omklassificera enkapitalinkomst till inkomstslaget tjänst och skatt får inte utgå godtyckligt.Avslutningsvis kan konstateras att rättsläget angående beskattningen av carriedinterest framstår som högst oklart. Innan de aktuella fallen avgörs i Högstaförvaltningsdomstolen eller det införs ny tillfredställande lagstiftning är detsvårt att spekulera i hur carried interest kommer att beskattas i framtiden ochden känsla av rättsosäkerhet som spridit sig på riskkapitalmarknaden kommermed stor sannolikhet bestå.

For open-ended information tasks, users must sift through many potentially relevant documents assessing and prioritizing them based on relevance to current information need, a practice we refer to as document triage. Users often perform triage through their interaction with multiple applications, and to efficiently support them in this process an extensible multi-application architecture Interest Profile Manager(IPM) was developed in the prior research at Texas A & M University. IPM infers user interests from their interactions with documents, especially the interests expressed by the user through an interpretive action like assigning a visual characteristic color, coupled with the document’s content characteristics. IPM equates each specific color and application as an interest class and the main challenge for the user is to consistently maintain interest class-color scheme across applications forever which is not practical. This thesis presents a system that can help reduce potential problems caused by these inconsistencies, by indicating when such inconsistencies have occurred in the past or are happening in the user’s current triage activity. It includes (1)a clustering algorithm to group similar triage interest instances by choosing the factors that could define the similarity of interest instances, and (2)an approach to identify sequences of user actions that provide strong evidence of user’s intent which can be used as constraints during clustering. Constrained and unconstrained versions of three Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering algorithms: (1)Single-Link, (2)Complete-Link, (3) UPGMA(Unweighted Pair Group Method with Arithmetic Mean) have been studied. The contribution of each of the three factors: (1)Content Similarity, (2)Temporal Similarity, and (3)Visual Similarity to the overall similarity between interest instances has also been examined. Our results indicate that the Single-Link algorithm performs better than the other two clustering algorithms while the combination of all three similarity factors defines the similarity between two instances better than considering any single factor. The use of constraints as strong evidence about user’s intent improved the clustering efficiency of algorithms.

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Abstract Most of literature and studies on prediction of exchange rate focus on main industrial countries with few discussions on the exchange rate of the developing countries. For model residual differences can be found in a linear model, so the linear model will adjust to find equilibrium at a fixed speed. However, it is difficult for the linear model to capture the character of dynamic adjustment behavior if a non-linear adjustment relationship exists (Sarno, 2002). Moreover, in case the trading costs exist in the foreign exchange market or the technical analysis is widely used among traders, then the deviations from equilibrium exchange rate may present a non-linear adjustment trend. In view of this, this study employed the STAR (smooth transition autoregression) model developed by Granger and Terasvirta (1993) to discuss the dynamic adjustment process of the deviations from UIP in the seven countries in Latin America. In most of the experimental studies conducted in the past, it was found difficult to establish the assumptions of uncovered interest parity (UIP). Therefore, this study is aimed to verify the experimental studies on UIP in the Latin America under the non-linear framework by means of non-linear model analysis.

Thesis (doctoral)--Vereinigte Friedrichs-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, 1907. / Cover title. Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M. Econ..)--University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 95-99). Also available in electronic version. Access restricted to campus users.