On the Canadian Prairies, canola is a main source for biodiesel production and wheat is the primary feedstock for bioethanol production. To raise biofuel production requires a movement of resources and land away from food and grain crops, which would cause food to become scarcer and increase its price. This paper determines the impact of more biofuels production on the food industry. It considers the simultaneous estimation of share equations from both revenue function and distance function. Econometric results exploit the non-stationary nature of the data and the correlations among shares between primal and dual models are exploited by cointegration techniques. Johansen’s maximum likelihood estimator is applied to 1971-2007 data from Manitoba, Alberta and Saskatchewan. Morishima elasticity estimates indicate high long run substitutions among crops (wheat, feed grains and canola). A rise in the production of biofuel crops could cause food prices to increase, both for meat and bread.

Yes / This communication complements the DEA model proposed by Lovell and Pastor (1999), by incorporating both positive and negative criteria in the model. As such, we propose a DEA model, known as pure DEA, using a directional distance function approach.

Three Essays in Energy and Environmental Economics Author: Mgr. Lukáš Rečka Supervisor: Mgr. Milan Ščasný, Ph.D. Academic Year: 2018/2019 Abstract This thesis consists of three articles that share the main theme - energy and environment. The dissertation aims mainly at the Czech energy system and analyses it development after the Velvet Revolution and its possible future development. The first article applies Logarithmic Mean Divisia Index decomposition to analyses the main driving forces of significant reduction in air quality pollutants during the transition of the Czech economy towards market economy in the 1990s. It continues then to investigate how the driving forces affected the emissions volumes during succeeding the post-transition period up to 2016. The second article reacts on the 2015 governmental decision to lift brown coal mining limits in the North Bohemia coal basin. The paper analyses the impacts of maintaining the ban on mining coal reserves and compares them with three alternative options that would each weaken the environmental protections of the ban. The impacts of each of these alternative governmental propostions are analysed on the Czech energy system, the fuel- and the technology-mix, the costs of generating energy, related emissions and external costs associated with the emissions....

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In recent years several depth cameras have emerged on the consumer market, creating many interesting possibilities forboth professional and recreational usage. One example of such a camera is the Microsoft Kinect sensor originally usedwith the Microsoft Xbox 360 game console. In this master thesis a system is presented that utilizes this device in order to create an as accurate as possible 3D reconstruction of an indoor environment. The major novelty of the presented system is the data structure based on signed distance fields and voxel octrees used to represent the observed environment. / Under de senaste åren har flera olika avståndskameror lanserats på konsumentmarkanden. Detta har skapat många intressanta applikationer både i professionella system samt för underhållningssyfte. Ett exempel på en sådan kamera är Microsoft Kinect som utvecklades för Microsofts spelkonsol Xbox 360. I detta examensarbete presenteras ett system som använder Kinect för att skapa en så exakt rekonstruktion i 3D av en innomhusmiljö som möjligt. Den främsta innovationen i systemet är en datastruktur baserad på signed distance fields (SDF) och octrees, vilket används för att representera den rekonstruerade miljön.

The aim of this study is to measure Swedish district courts’ technical efficiency for the period between 2000 and 2016 by applying the stochastic distance function approach. Although a very important issue from a policy perspective, a few studies have measured the efficiency of the courts. The narrow literature is also limited to using nonparametric methods, such as the DEA. The stochastic distance function has not been used for this purpose before and hence this is the first study to do so. The estimated mean score of technical efficiency is 93%. However, this study observes that efficiency levels increase throughout the studied period. Large variations between efficiency levels of different courts are also observed. Policy recommendations are to learn from courts with higher efficiency levels.

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Previamente à cada estimativa ou simulação geoestatística os domínios geológicos do depósito devem ser modelados, o que tradicionalmente é feito de forma manual por um geomodelador, em um processo laborioso, demorado e subjetivo. Por essa razão novas técnicas conhecidas como métodos implícitos veem surgindo. Essas técnicas fornecem algoritmos que substituem o processo de digitalização manual dos métodos explícitos por alguma forma de procedimento automático. Essa dissertação visita alguns métodos implícitos bem estabelecidos com atenção especial à modelagem geológica implícita com funções distância assinalada. Um estudo de caso em um banco de dados real é apresentado e a aplicabilidade do método discutida. Embora não substitua por completo um geomodelador experiente, o método provou ser capaz de gerar modelos geológicos semi-automáticos realistas a partir dos dados amostrais, e se mostra útil principalmente nas fases iniciais da pesquisa mineral. / Prior to every geostatistical estimation or simulation study there is a need for delimiting the geologic domains of the deposit, which is traditionally done manually by a geomodeler in a laborious, time consuming and subjective process. For this reason, novel techniques referred to as implicit modelling have appeared. These techniques provide algorithms that replace the manual digitization process of the traditional methods by some form of automatic procedure. This dissertation covers a few well established implicit methods currently available with special attention to the signed distance function methodology. A case study based on a real dataset was performed and its applicability discussed. Although it did not replace an experienced geomodeler, the method proved to be capable in creating semi-automatic geological models from the sampling data, especially in the early stages of exploration.

<p>In this Master Thesis, a model of a video coding system that uses the transportation plan taken from the calculation of the Kantorovich distance is developed. The coder uses the transportation plan instead of the differential image and sends it through blocks of transformation, quantization and coding. </p><p>The Kantorovich distance is a rather unknown distance metric that is used in optimization theory but is also applicable on images. It can be defined as the cheapest way to transport the mass of one image into another and the cost is determined by the distance function chosen to measure distance between pixels. The transportation plan is a set of finitely many five-dimensional vectors that show exactly how the mass should be moved from the transmitting pixel to the receiving pixel in order to achieve the Kantorovich distance between the images. A vector in the transportation plan is called an arc. </p><p>The original transportation plan was transformed into a new set of four-dimensional vectors called the modified difference plan. This set replaces the transmitting pixel and the receiving pixel with the distance from the transmitting pixel of the last arc and the relative distance between the receiving pixel and the transmitting pixel. The arcs where the receiving pixels are the same as the transmitting pixels are redundant and were removed. The coder completed an eleven frame sequence of size 128x128 pixels in eight to ten hours.</p>