There is no abstract available for this thesis.

This paper examines the efficiency of pricing in the NFL point spread betting market, as hypothesized by the Efficient Market Hypothesis, through both statistical and economic tests. This market provides a simpler framework to test such economic hypotheses than conventional financial markets. Using a larger sample size than past literature, this paper finds that while the market is efficient in the aggregate sense, there are still some profit opportunities which imply pricing inefficiencies.

Within a wave energy converter's operational bandwidth, device operation tends to be optimal in converting mechanical energy into a more useful form at an incident wave period that is proximal to that of a power-producing mode of motion. Point absorbers, a particular classification of wave energy converters, tend to have a relative narrow optimal bandwidth. When not operating within the narrow optimal bandwidth, a point absorber's response and efficiency is attenuated. Given the wide range of sea-states that can be expected during a point absorber's operational life, these devices require a means to adjust, or control, their natural response to maximize the amount of energy absorbed in the large population of non-optimal conditions. In the field of wave energy research, there is considerable interest in the use of non-linear control techniques to this end. Non-linear control techniques introduce time-varying and state dependent control parameters into the point absorber motion equations, which usually motivates a computationally expensive numerical integration to determine the response of the device - important metrics such as gross converted power and relative travels of the device's pieces are extracted through post processing of the time series data. As an alternative, the work presented in this thesis was based on a closed form perturbation based approach for analysis of the response of a device with periodically-varying control parameters, subject to regular wave forcing, in the frequency domain. The proposed perturbation based method provides significant savings in computational time and enables the device's response to be represented in a closed form manner with a relatively small number of solution components - each component is comprised of a complex amplitude and oscillation frequency. This representation of the solution was found to be very concise and descriptive, and to lend itself to the calculation of gross absorbed power and travel constraint violations, making it extremely useful in the automated design optimization process; the methodology allows large number of design iterations, including both physical design and control variables, to be evaluated and conclusively compared. In the development of the perturbation method, it was discovered that the device's motion response can be calculated from an in nite series of second order ordinary differential equations that can be truncated without destroying the solution accuracy. It was found that the response amplitude operator for the generic form of a solution component provides a means to gauge the device's response to a given wave input and control parameter variation, including a gauge of the solution process stability. It is unclear as of yet if this is physical, a result of the solution process, or both. However, for a given control parameter set resulting in an unstable solution, the instability was shown to be, at least in part, a result of the device's dynamics. If the stability concerns can be addressed through additional constraints and updates to the wave energy converter hydrodynamic parameters, the methodology will expand on the commonly accepted boundaries for wave energy converter frequency domain analysis methods and be of much practical importance in the evaluation of control techniques in the field of wave energy converter technology. / Graduate

No description available.

In this study, we explore the relationship between the components of a hybrid process consisting of a spatial point process arid a lattice process using two-dimensional spectral techniques. Simulated spatial point-lattice patterns are used to demonstrate how the different cross-spectral statistics can reveal correlation between the two components. A method to adjust for jumps that normally occur in the cross-spectral phase statistic is then proposed. Such adjustment is needed to enable us to calculate the slope of the phase spectrum which measures the shift between the two components. Several methods to calculate the slope are investigated. Asymptotic properties of the cross-spectral statistics are derived and their confidence intervals estimated. .A test that the components are independent is described. In a study region, lattice processes are observed at regular grids whereas point, processes can be observed anywhere. In order to account for discrepancies that. might arise due to this, methods to discretise the point pattern are suggested. Cross-spectral techniques are then applied to analyse the joint process of the discretised point pattern and the lattice pattern. Finally, we apply the techniques suggested above to study the joint properties of two data sets. The first consists of altitude data of a region in a rain forest in French Guyana together with the locations of a number of tree species in that region. The second set consists of altitude data of the Sahel region of Africa together with location of storms and some of their characteristics. In order to incorporate the storm characteristics in the analysis, cross-spectral tools used to analyse two components are extended to three components.

The thesis consists of two main results. The first main result is a proof that C^1 rigidity holds for circle maps with a break point for almost all rotation numbers. The second main result is a proof that C^1 robust rigidity holds for circle maps in the fractional linear transformation (FLT) pair family. That is, for this family, C^1 rigidity holds for all irrational rotation numbers. The approach taken here of proving a more general theorem that C^1 rigidity holds for circle maps with a break point satisfying a `derivatives close condition', allows us to obtain both of our main results as corollaries of this more general theorem.

Background: Tobacco marketing has been established as the main motivator for tobacco use among youth. A proliferation of tobacco promotional activities in retail stores has been observed yet little is known about its impact on adolescent smoking behaviours. The purpose of this study is to use secondary data to describe the prevalence of retail tobacco point-of-purchase (PoP) activities, examine its associations with adolescent smoking behaviours, and determine what ecological factors moderate the relationship between PoP activities and student smoking behaviours in British Columbia. Methods: This cross-sectional study surveyed grade 10-11 students from 22 randomly-selected schools in BC on student smoking behaviour and conducted observations in 57 retail stores on tobacco PoP activities located within a 1 km radius of these schools. Descriptive analysis was conducted on retail tobacco PoP variables. Individual data on smoking behaviour and school level data on retailers were linked to analyse the association between retail tobacco PoP activities and student smoking behaviour using logistic regression. Moderating effects of contextual factors were also examined. GIS maps were generated to illustrate study findings. Result: A moderate to strong presence of tobacco PoP activities was observed in all tobacco retail stores located in BC school neighbourhoods. Nearly all stores displayed cigarette products in a visible manner (98.25%) and posted tobacco control signage (94.74%). In this model, proportion of stores in the school neighbourhood with presence of tobacco advertising increased the odds of a student being a smoker (OR = 1.28-3.27). Proportion of stores in the school neighbourhood with presence of tobacco control signage decreased the odds of a student being a smoker (OR = 0.11-0.66). The odds of a student being a smoker increased if they resided on the island compared to living in the lower mainland (OR = 1.11-1.75). Discussion: Convenience stores exhibited more tobacco PoP activities than other store types. Retailers in the school neighbourhood that had tobacco advertisements and tobacco control signage exhibited both detrimental and protective effects on student smoking. This provides supportive evidence to ban tobacco advertising in retail stores and increase efforts for creating an anti-tobacco environment in neighbourhood retail stores. Maps generated served descriptive and hypothesis generating purposes.

While Application Specific Instruction Set Processors (ASIPs) have allowed designers to create processors with custom instructions to target specific applications, floating-point units (FPUs) are still instantiated as non-customizable general-purpose units, which if under utilized, wastes area and performance. However, customizing FPUs manually is a complex and time-consuming process. Therefore, there is a need for an automated custom FPU generation scheme. This thesis presents a methodology for generating application-specific FPUs customized at the instruction level, with integrated datapath merging to minimize area. The methodology reduces the subset of floating-point instructions implemented to the minimum required for the application. Datapath merging is then performed on the required datapaths to minimize area. Previous datapath merging techniques failed to consider merging components of different bit-widths and thus ignore the bit-alignment problem in datapath merging. This thesis presents a novel bit-alignment solution during datapath merging. In creating the custom FPU, the subset of floating-point instructions that should be implemented in hardware has to be determined. Implementing more instructions in hardware reduces the cycle count of the application, but may lead to increased delay due to multiplexers inserted on the critical path during datapath merging. A rapid design space exploration was performed to explore the trade-offs. By performing this exploration, a designer could determine the number of instructions that should be implemented as a custom FPU and the number that should be left for software emulation, such that performance and area meets the designer's requirements. Customized FPUs were generated for different Mediabench applications and compared to a fully-featured reference FPU that implemented all floating-point operations. Reducing the floating-point instruction set reduced the FPU area by an average of 55%. Performing instruction reduction and then datapath merging reduced the FPU area by an average of 68%. Experiments showed that datapath merging without bit-alignment achieved an average area reduction of 10.1%. With bit-alignment, an average of 16.5% was achieved. Bit-alignment proved most beneficial when there was a diverse mix of different bit-widths in the datapaths. Performance of Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) used for floating-point applications is poor due to the complexity of floating-point arithmetic. Implementing floating-point units on FPGAs consume a large amount of resources. Therefore, there is a need for embedded FPUs in FPGAs. However, if unutilized, they waste area on the FPGA die. To overcome this issue, a novel flexible multi-mode embedded FPU for FPGAs is presented in this thesis that can be configured to perform a wide range of operations. The floating-point adder and multiplier in the embedded FPU can each be configured to perform one double-precision operation or two single-precision operations in parallel. To increase flexibility further, access to the large integer multiplier, adder and shifters in the FPU is provided. It is also capable of floating-point and integer multiply-add operations. Benchmark circuits were implemented on both a standard Xilinx Virtex-II FPGA and on the FPGA with embedded FPU blocks. The implementations on the FPGA with embedded FPUs showed mean area and delay improvements of 5.2x and 5.8x respectively for the double-precision benchmarks, and 4.4x and 4.2x for the single-precision benchmarks.

While Application Specific Instruction Set Processors (ASIPs) have allowed designers to create processors with custom instructions to target specific applications, floating-point units (FPUs) are still instantiated as non-customizable general-purpose units, which if under utilized, wastes area and performance. However, customizing FPUs manually is a complex and time-consuming process. Therefore, there is a need for an automated custom FPU generation scheme. This thesis presents a methodology for generating application-specific FPUs customized at the instruction level, with integrated datapath merging to minimize area. The methodology reduces the subset of floating-point instructions implemented to the minimum required for the application. Datapath merging is then performed on the required datapaths to minimize area. Previous datapath merging techniques failed to consider merging components of different bit-widths and thus ignore the bit-alignment problem in datapath merging. This thesis presents a novel bit-alignment solution during datapath merging. In creating the custom FPU, the subset of floating-point instructions that should be implemented in hardware has to be determined. Implementing more instructions in hardware reduces the cycle count of the application, but may lead to increased delay due to multiplexers inserted on the critical path during datapath merging. A rapid design space exploration was performed to explore the trade-offs. By performing this exploration, a designer could determine the number of instructions that should be implemented as a custom FPU and the number that should be left for software emulation, such that performance and area meets the designer's requirements. Customized FPUs were generated for different Mediabench applications and compared to a fully-featured reference FPU that implemented all floating-point operations. Reducing the floating-point instruction set reduced the FPU area by an average of 55%. Performing instruction reduction and then datapath merging reduced the FPU area by an average of 68%. Experiments showed that datapath merging without bit-alignment achieved an average area reduction of 10.1%. With bit-alignment, an average of 16.5% was achieved. Bit-alignment proved most beneficial when there was a diverse mix of different bit-widths in the datapaths. Performance of Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) used for floating-point applications is poor due to the complexity of floating-point arithmetic. Implementing floating-point units on FPGAs consume a large amount of resources. Therefore, there is a need for embedded FPUs in FPGAs. However, if unutilized, they waste area on the FPGA die. To overcome this issue, a novel flexible multi-mode embedded FPU for FPGAs is presented in this thesis that can be configured to perform a wide range of operations. The floating-point adder and multiplier in the embedded FPU can each be configured to perform one double-precision operation or two single-precision operations in parallel. To increase flexibility further, access to the large integer multiplier, adder and shifters in the FPU is provided. It is also capable of floating-point and integer multiply-add operations. Benchmark circuits were implemented on both a standard Xilinx Virtex-II FPGA and on the FPGA with embedded FPU blocks. The implementations on the FPGA with embedded FPUs showed mean area and delay improvements of 5.2x and 5.8x respectively for the double-precision benchmarks, and 4.4x and 4.2x for the single-precision benchmarks.

Many national parks in Australian rangelands were formerly grazing properties. Even after domestic stock has been removed, the landscapes, especially those near artificial watering points, remained degraded with little or no regeneration of native plants. Congregating large macropods have often been blamed for impeding regeneration of plant communities and rehabilitation of these degraded landscapes. Following a severe drought which reduced densities of large macropods very significantly in Idalia National Park, central-western Queensland, I investigated whether closure of watering points would hamper their recolonisation and influence their grazing distribution and forage selection in the park. I also determined the spatial and temporal pattern of degradation around the watering points, using a suite of indicators. A BACI (Before After Control Impact) type experiment was conducted using two replicate watering points each for impact (fenced) and control (unfenced) treatments. Two watering points were fenced off behind a kangaroo-proof fence in August and December 2002, respectively, in the deepening drought. Walked 4 km line transects were used to estimate densities of red kangaroos (Macropus rufus) and wallaroos (M. robustus) in areas within a 4 km radius of each watering point. The accumulation of dung pellets was used to estimate the grazing distribution of large macropods around water. Abundance and composition of vegetation were monitored on fixed transects using a 0.5 * 0.5 m quadrat 0.5 to 4 km from each watering point. Herbivore offtake was monitored using a movable cage technique. Measures of landscape function (stability, infiltration and nutrient rating) and ant composition were monitored at various distances from each watering point. Monitoring was commenced two to six months before the closure of watering points and completed 21 and 25 months following the closure, every two to five monthly to follow changes in large macropod densities and vegetation communities. Prior to the drought, densities up to 130 large macropods km-2 were recorded in the park. The average density of wallaroos declined by 97.7% during the drought whereas that of red kangaroos declined by 83.8%. The first substantial rain fell in January 2003, but rainfall throughout the study period continued to be much lower than the long-term median, except for January 2004 when more than half the average annual rainfall fell, causing major flooding. Closure of watering points coincident with the drought inhibited red kangaroo recolonisation by 40% in the areas surrounding fenced watering points for up to 21 months following the closure, with distances to alternative watering points being 3.8-6.6 km. Red kangaroos in an area surrounding one of the unfenced watering point recovered to the pre-drought average density. The grazing distribution of large macropods within 4 km from the watering points, however, was determined primarily by where plentiful food resources were, not by the location of water. Large macropods in the areas without access to water did not select forage with higher water contents, compared to those in the areas with water access. Differences in their forage preference between the two areas appeared to reflect the difference in vegetation composition between the areas. Sida filiformis, Cynodon dactylon and Tragus australianus, were identified as grazing sensitive plant species. In some cases, closing watering points helped these plants to increase their abundance following the drought. Most indicators (the percentage of bare soil, biomasses of perennial grasses and round-leaved chenopods, ant functional groups and the measures of landscape function) showed that the exclusion of mammalian grazing for more than a decade from long-term exclosures had facilitated regeneration of perennial grasses and landscape rehabilitation at least at some sites. At one long-term exclosure, where topsoil and seed bank had presumably been lost already, no regeneration occurred. When several indicators were used to determine land conditions around watering points, their responses were not always consistent. Nevertheless, the overall spatial patterns of degradation did not match the spatial pattern of grazing distribution by large macropods around water. Therefore, the current degradation appears to be a legacy of the livestock overgrazing that had continued for more than 100 years prior to the park establishment. The large drought-induced reduction in the large macropod densities did not result in any conspicuous reversal of the patterns of degradation around the watering points.