This paper investigates whether managers that have a propensity for personal tax aggressiveness are associated with tax avoidance at the firm level. Motivated by Dhaliwal, Erickson, and Heitzman (2009) and Hanlon and Heitzman (2009), I construct a measure of personally tax aggressive ("aggressive") managers and determine whether corporate tax avoidance activities increase in their presence. The results of my study indicate that aggressive managers are associated with firm-level tax avoidance. The neoclassical view would suggest that aggressive managers' tax expertise could benefit shareholders through lower tax payments. Since aggressive managers extract their personal tax savings from shareholders, non-tax agency costs potentially increase in their presence. This has implications for the association between aggressive managers and firm value. Using the framework established through the agency view of tax avoidance (Desai and Dharmapala, 2008) I find that on average the presence of aggressive managers is associated with increased firm value. However, consistent with recent research, governance is an important moderating factor whereby firm value in the presence of aggressive managers tends to increase only for relatively better-governed firms.

Learner participation in language learning opportunities has been configured differently by different learning theories. In the domain of Second Language Acquisition (SLA), the cognitive view of learning has been dominant in explaining learner participation. It has been widely accepted that it should be in the form of participation in oral activities which leads to gains in linguistic competence. The aim of this thesis is to understand the issue of learner participation from the social perspective, where a broader understanding of learning will be employed informed by the work of Lave and Wenger (1991) and others. To do so, this study investigates the forms of participation of six ESL learners in suburban Malaysia in two contexts: in-class and out-of-class. In order to understand the issue of learner participation from a social view point, data were collected using classroom observations, learners’ interviews, learner diaries, and photographs taken by them. All the data were transcribed and analysed qualitatively. In order to handle the large amount of data, the Nvivo software package was used for organisation and retrieval purposes. The findings reveal several insights about learner participation. First, learners are active agents where they constantly make decisions on what to engage with and how, and act on the norms and expectations that are imposed on them in a particular sociocultural context. Second, the six learners are members of or aspired to become members of several communities: academically successful learners; successful ESL learners; proficient speakers of the target language; the classroom; and youth. Thus, they aligned their forms of participation with these various communities. Third, learners in this study tended to distinguish between learning and other kinds of engagement. They tended to equate certain forms of participation as actions that one needed to take to learn the language; thus other forms of participation accorded less value. In this study, some insights from Communities of Practice (CoP) theory- learning as a process of gaining membership in a particular community and that learners move from peripheral to core membership- were used to understand the issue of learner participation. However, upon understanding and interpreting the data, it was found that CoP theory is limited in several ways. First, CoP focuses only on one type of community (e.g. the classroom) in one temporal dimension. Yet, findings indicate that there are several other communities that exist in the classroom at one time. Due to this shortcoming, this study has turned to the concept of ‘figured worlds’ (Holland et al, 2001). Secondly, CoP theory argues for a group dynamic. Less recognition is given to the fact that individual learners are also dynamic and agentive. Akkerman and Meijer (2011) suggest dialogical views on identity; in which a framework is provided that acknowledges the multiple, discontinuous and social nature of identity (a postmodern view), while at the same time assumes identity as being unitary, continuous and individual (a modern view). Thirdly, CoP tends to focus on a singular “identity-in-practice (Tan and Barton (2008)). Tan and Barton (ibid: 50) argue for the plurality of identities-in-practice (IdPs); rather than a singular “identity-in-practice (IdP) as suggested by Lave and Wenger (1991). The view of learning as boundary crossing seems to better describe the kinds of participation and learning that have been suggested by the findings generated in the study. Instead of looking at learning as participation in a particular community, learning as boundary crossing better captures the dynamic of learner participation in language learning opportunities, of learners as whole persons (rather than fragmented identities), and of learners as agentive beings.

This thesis will explore E. E. Cummings' theory of life and the poetry which concerns this theory. This will involve: a brief explanation of the three major concepts--growth, self-fidelity, and life in the present; those aspects of life which Cummings rejects; Cummings' affirmation; and a general summary statement concerned with Cummings' "complex truth."

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This thesis studies the intersection between contemporary international political theory and global environmental politics. It asks whether concern for global environmental degradation requires a rethinking of the assumptions that underlie international political theory as a field of study within the discipline of International Relations. Answering this question, the thesis introduces three ‗images‘ of international political theory: the liberal cosmopolitan, the critical-theoretical, and the anti-foundationalist. It investigates the contributions of these three images of international political theory to global environmental politics. Assessing, through the three images, the status of contemporary international political theory in light of environmental concerns, the thesis suggests that while international political theory offers many important insights into discussions of global environmental politics it also appears significantly limited when dealing with environmental concerns. Key among its limitations is the human-centred framework and mission of contemporary international political theory that an encounter with environmental concerns helps expose. The thesis argues that international political theory, both to be true to its purpose – that is, the extension of moral and political inclusion in world politics – and to maintain its relevance in the contemporary world, must seek a more thorough engagement with environmental concerns. The thesis contends that a fundamental rethinking of the assumptions that underlie contemporary international political theory forms an important – and necessary – part of this engagement.

This paper sketches a hypothetical cortical architecture for visual 3D object recognition based on a recent computational model. The view-centered scheme relies on modules for learning from examples, such as Hyperbf-like networks. Such models capture a class of explanations we call Memory-Based Models (MBM) that contains sparse population coding, memory-based recognition, and codebooks of prototypes. Unlike the sigmoidal units of some artificial neural networks, the units of MBMs are consistent with the description of cortical neurons. We describe how an example of MBM may be realized in terms of cortical circuitry and biophysical mechanisms, consistent with psychophysical and physiological data.

A variety of modelling methods has been used to modelconstruction processes and projects, either during normalproject planning or for process re-engineering efforts orresearch. One common method, which is widely used byconstruction industry practitioners, is scheduling. In additionto schedules, some companies have used a simple box-and-arrowmethod, which graphically resembles schedules, for analysingtheir working processes. More formal methods such as IDEF0 havebeen used in re-engineering projects and by researchers. Allthese methods are limited in scope and cannot be used to modelall the aspects of the processes that practitioners areinterested in. A new generic construction process modelling method, GEPM,was developed to overcome the deficiencies of the currentmethods. GEPM uses object-oriented principles, and has borrowedfeatures, such as activity, task, and temporal dependency, frommethods like IDEF0 and scheduling. GEPM is flexible in thesense that the conceptual model can be changed to achieveadditional special features. This capability is also supportedby the database implementation, which enables users to interactwith the developed process models through views that representpartial models. The views support the IDEF0, scheduling, andsimple flow methods. There are, though, rules for how toconvert between the partial models through views. The evaluation of GEPM showed that more modelling features,i.e. modelling power, are obtained in comparison with theearlier methods. One of the essential features of GEPM is thedistinction between activities and tasks. Activities define howan action will be carried out, generally using predeterminedinputs to achieve a predetermined output, whereas tasks areactivities with additionally specified starting and finishingtimes, duration and location. Moreover, a task has atype-attribute that refers to an activity where its overalltemplate is defined. Before the actual evaluation, case material from a realproject was preliminarily tested with GEPM along with theprototype application. It turned out that some additions wereneeded to the conceptual model of GEPM and to the prototypeapplication. GEPM can be used for process improvement, processmanagement, and for enhancing communication in a constructionprocess. One usage scenario for GEPM is to define qualitysystems and reference models, using the activity sub-model andstoring the results in the GEPM database. A project-specificmodel can be derived from the reference model using conversionrules, and it eventually turns into a project specific-schedulewith tasks. <b>Keywords:</b>process, modelling, generic, method, model,database, view

The distortion by using traditional video encoders (e.g. H.264) on the depth discontinuity can introduce disturbing effects on the synthesized view. The proposed scheme aims at preserving the most significantdepth transition for a better view synthesis. Furthermore, it has a scalable structure. The scheme extracts edge contours from a depth image and represents them by chain code. The chain code and the sampleddepth values on each side of the edge contour are encoded by differential and arithmetic coding. The depthimage is reconstructed by diffusion of edge samples and uniform sub-samples from the low quality depthimage. At low bit rates, the proposed scheme outperforms HEVC intra at the edges in the synthesized views, which correspond to the significant discontinuities in the depth image. The overall quality is also better with the proposed scheme at low bit rates for contents with distinct depth transition. © 2012 IEEE.

Multi-view three-dimensional television relies on view synthesis to reduce the number of views being transmitted.  Arbitrary views can be synthesized by utilizing corresponding depth images with textures. The depth images obtained from stereo pairs or range cameras may contain erroneous values, which entail artifacts in a rendered view. Post-processing of the data may then be utilized to enhance the depth image with the purpose to reach a better quality of synthesized views. We propose a Partial Differential Equation (PDE)-based interpolation method for a reconstruction of the smooth areas in depth images, while preserving significant edges. We modeled the depth image by adjusting thresholds for edge detection and a uniform sparse sampling factor followed by the second order PDE interpolation. The objective results show that a depth image processed by the proposed method can achieve a better quality of synthesized views than the original depth image. Visual inspection confirmed the results.

Multi-view three-dimensional television requires many views, which may be synthesized from two-dimensional images with accompanying pixel-wise depth information. This depth image, which typically consists of smooth areas and sharp transitions at object borders, must be consistent with the acquired scene in order for synthesized views to be of good quality. We have previously proposed a depth image coding scheme that preserves significant edges and encodes smooth areas between these. An objective evaluation considering the structural similarity (SSIM) index for synthesized views demonstrated an advantage to the proposed scheme over the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) intra mode in certain cases. However, there were some discrepancies between the outcomes from the objective evaluation and from our visual inspection, which motivated this study of subjective tests. The test was conducted according to ITU-R BT.500-13 recommendation with Stimulus-comparison methods. The results from the subjective test showed that the proposed scheme performs slightly better than HEVC with statistical significance at majority of the tested bit rates for the given contents.