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This thesis has two aims. One is to motivate the claim that challenging what I call a “sameness of evidence thesis” is a particularly promising approach to external world scepticism. The other is to sharpen an underexplored issue that arises when challenging the sameness of evidence thesis. The second aim is the primary aim of the thesis. Pursuing the first aim, I start by examining a predominant formulation of external world scepticism known as the “closure argument” for knowledge. I examine three main strategies for responding to external world scepticism and highlight their major challenges (DeRose 1995; Dretske 1979; Nozick 1981; Sosa 1999). The goal is not to demonstrate that these challenges cannot be met, but rather to highlight a deeper issue that arises when responding to the closure problem for knowledge. In particular, I take the discussion to motivate looking at what I will call “scepticism about evidential justification” (Feldman 2000; Kornblith 2001; Pritchard forthcoming). The general argument in favour of a shift to scepticism about evidential justification is based on considerations about what an adequate response to external world scepticism should hope to achieve. I argue that one condition of adequacy is being able to account for radical forms of scepticism that challenge not only that our beliefs enjoy the epistemic status of knowledge (however that status is conceived) but also that our ordinary empirical beliefs are justified, or that we are reasonable in holding them. There are different varieties of scepticism about evidential justification. I focus in some detail on the anti-sceptical strategies of Pryor (2000; 2004) and Wright (2004) as examples of strategies that engage with scepticism about evidential justification. But I argue that one form of evidential scepticism known as the “underdetermination argument”—which Pryor and Wright do not directly engage with—is of particular importance. The main assumption in the underdetermination argument I focus on is about the nature of evidence. More specifically, the underdetermination argument presupposes that one’s evidence is the same in so-called “bad” and “good” cases in which an agent forms an empirical belief. This is the “sameness of evidence thesis.” Pursuing the main aim of the thesis, I introduce two forms an anti-sceptical strategy that involves challenging the sameness of evidence thesis. The two forms I consider differ in their commitments concerning a condition of accessibility on our evidence. Pritchard (2006; 2007; 2012; forthcoming) maintains that one’s evidence is “reflectively accessible.” Williamson (2000; 2009) rejects this claim. The central issue I aim to sharpen is that while accepting the condition of accessibility leads to serious challenges in rejecting the sameness of evidence thesis, rejecting it leads to counterintuitive consequences if we grant that there is a normative principle that requires us to proportion our beliefs to the evidence. A central part of the thesis involves examining these counterintuitive consequences and showing what accounting for them requires. This is an underexplored project in the context of external world scepticism. I look at three different approaches to spelling out the counterintuitive consequences. My preferred account turns on a distinction between three different kinds of responsibility (Shoemaker 2011). I claim that there is a notion of responsibility – “attributability” – that is centrally connected to normative judgments. I argue for a “condition of accessibility” on attributability. Taken together, these two claims comprise an account of what is problematic about rejecting an access condition on our evidence. I then claim that there are two ways forward. One is to accept the condition of accessibility on our evidence that my account implies; the other is to challenge my claims about the connection between attributability and normative judgments, or the accessibility condition on attributability, or both. Although I claim that the prospects look better for taking the second option when it comes to rejecting the sameness of evidence thesis, drawing on recent work from Gibbons (2006; 2013) and Daniel Greco (2013), I argue that the first option is still a live possibility. The main aim in this part of the thesis is not to decide what the best way of rejecting the sameness of evidence thesis is, but rather to examine the challenges that arise when we reject it in one way or another. The question of what sort of access we have to our normative requirements is the focus of an increasingly sophisticated discussion in contemporary epistemology. An important upshot of this thesis is that it brings the problem of external world scepticism directly within the scope of that debate.

There are two main objectives of this thesis. First, to review the social science evidence on the extent to which different police practices have been proven to reduce crime, or not reduce crime, as well as those cases where the evidence is not clear. This thesis synthesizes crime reduction strategies to short-list those practices that are proven to reduce crime. Second, it uses the evidence collected to facilitate an exploratory case study with three key informants from the Ottawa Police Service (OPS). The case study examines the current use and perceived future role of the police in evidence-based crime prevention efforts. Overall, the research study seeks to answer the following four research questions: 1. What sources of literature provide well-researched and reliable data on effectiveness of policing in crime reduction? 2. In this literature, what policing strategies/practices are shown to reduce crime, not reduce crime or are promising in reducing crime? 3. To what extent is the OPS using evidence-based knowledge to guide their policing strategy/practices? 4. To what extent is the OPS open to using evidence-based knowledge to guide their policing strategy/practices in the future?

Hlavním cílem této práce je shrnutí základních evidenčních povinností individuálního podnikatele. Jaké jsou kladeny požadavky na jeho znalosti a jak velká je administrativní náročnost. Na začátku práce vysvětluji pojem definice podnikání, a shrnuji základní evidenční povinnosti podnikatele vůči finančnímu úřadu, správě sociálního a zdravotního pojištění, povinnostem v oblasti mzdové evidence a daně z přidané hodnoty. V další části své práce stručně definuji vedení účetnictví a daňové evidence. Jejich náročnost a informační přínos pro podnikatele porovnávám na závěr v fiktivním příkladu.

This thesis is focused on individuals who decided to set up their own business. It describes all steps and conditions necessary to establish and carry on the business according to the Czech legislation (i.e. registration with competent authorities, payments for health and social insurance, tax payments). The major part of the thesis deals with the main entrepreneur's obligation - keeping an evidence in order to calculate the individual income tax. This evidence can be in the form called "tax evidence" based on cash basis (in other word it means evidence of incomes and expenditures). One chapter also deals with the question of the transition between the tax evidence and the accounting. The last chapter shows a practical example of keeping tax evidence, calculating tax liability and height of the insurance including completed forms.

The study demonstrates that mental health professionals, more specifically psychiatrists and psychologists, conducting psycho-legal assessments in South Africa, play a pivotal role in assisting the courts in ensuring that justice is done. Mental health professionals are involved in numerous matters, ranging from criminal cases, such as conducting psycho-legal assessments regarding criminal capacity, civil proceedings concerning care and contact evaluations, personal injury claims, and many more. In reviewing case law and the complaints lodged with, and rulings made by, the Health Professions Council of South Africa, it is evident that psycho-legal assessments are often problematic. The problems relate to an inadequate level of performance in evaluations and testimony and unethical behaviour. It is argued that the lack of regulation of psycho-legal assessments is one of the main contributing factors in the increasing challenges experienced. The study examines the current regulatory framework regarding psycho-legal assessments in South Africa by first examining the procedural and evidentiary rules that control the admissibility and evaluation of expert testimony, and secondly, the self-regulation by the mental health professions. To address the shortcomings, the regulatory mechanisms in the international context is analysed by turning to the United Kingdom as well as the United States of America. Both jurisdictions have strong ties to South Africa and a rich history concerning regulating psycho-legal assessments and psychological and psychiatric evidence in general. Drawing from the regulatory frameworks in the comparator countries recommendations for the South African context is made. The recommendations take a multi-level approach, focusing on the rules of evidence and other procedural rules within the legal system and self-regulation of mental health professions. / Thesis (LLD)--University of Pretoria, 2020. / Public Law / LLD / Unrestricted

The text describes the process of designing and developing mobile applications for electronic sales records. The work also describes the procedure of electronic registration and also contains an analysis of existing solutions.

Meta-analysis is an important statistical tool for systematic reviews and evidence-based medicine. Extracting the observed effect sizes, assessing the magnitude of heterogeneity, choosing the suitable statistical model, and interpreting the summary effect size are four key steps in meta-analysis. It is known that each of the above steps has its own unique characteristics and may require some specific attention. As an example, the observed effect sizes from individual studies may not be reported in the same scale and hence cannot be combined directly. Another example is on selecting a model for meta-analysis from the common-effect model and the random-effects model. When a meta-analysis contains only few studies, the common-effect model and the random-effects model will often lead to misleading or unreliable results. In the first part of the thesis, we give a brief introduction on evidence-based medicine, systematic reviews and meta-analysis. We will also show their practical importance, display their relationships, and present a motivating example for conducting a meta-analysis. In Chapter 2, we first review the common effect sizes in meta-analysis for both continuous data and binary data. How to combine different categories of effect sizes is a critical issue after extracting the observed effect sizes from the clinical studies in the literature. For continuous data, researchers have recently proposed methods that transform the five number summary to the sample mean and standard deviation (Hozo et al., 2005; Wan et al., 2014; Luo et al., 2018). For binary data, the transformation from the odds ratio (OR) to the relative risk (RR) in the cohort study was proposed by Zhang and Yu (1998). To the best of our knowledge, however, there is little work in the literature that converts OR to RR in the case-control study. In view of this, we establish a new formula for this transformation to fulfill the gap. The performance of the new method will be examined through simulations and real data analysis. Our method and formulas can not only handle meta-analyses with different effect sizes, but also offer some insights for medical researchers to further understand the meaning of OR and RR in both cohort and case-control studies. In Chapter 3, we first give a brief introduction on the three available models in meta-analysis: the common-effect model, the random-effects model, and the fixed-effects model. When a meta-analysis contains only few studies, the common-effect model and the random-effects model will often lead to misleading or unreliable results. In contrast, the fixed-effects model is capable to provide a good compromise between the existing two models. In this chapter, we propose to further improve the estimation accuracy of the average effect in the fixed-effects model by assigning different weight for each study as well as fully utilizing the information in the within-study variances. Through theory and simulation, we demonstrate that the fixed-effects model can serve as the most convincing model for meta-analysis with few studies. And most importantly, with a total of three models, we expect that meta-analysis can be conducted more flexibly, more meaningfully, and more accurately. In Chapter 4, we first give a brief introduction on the heterogeneity in meta-analysis. We then review the methods for quantifying heterogeneity in three directions as follows: the tests for heterogeneity, the estimates of the between-study variance, and the measures of the impact of heterogeneity. Note that most existing methods were derived under the assumption of known within-study variances. In practice, however, a direct use of the reported within-study variance estimates may largely reduce the power of the tests and also lower the accuracy of the estimates, especially when the sample sizes in some studies are not sufficiently large. To overcome this problem, we propose a family of shrinkage estimators for the within-study variances that are able to borrow information across the studies, and derive the optimal shrinkage parameters under the Stein loss function. We then apply the new estimates of the within-study variances to some well-known methods for measuring heterogeneity. Simulation studies and real data examples show that our shrinkage estimators can dramatically reduce the estimation bias and hence improve the exiting literature. Keywords: Common-effect model, Effect size, Fixed-effects model, Heterogeneity, Meta-analysis, Odds ratio, Random-effects model, Relative risk, Risk ratio

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Denna kvalitativa studie genomfördes för att undersöka vilken roll utvärdering av belöningssystem har i företag verksamma i Sverige. Studien utgår från teorin Evidence- Based Practice och dess underkategorier som specifikt behandlar belöningssystem. Dessa teorier applicerades på data inhämtad från intervjuer med personer ansvariga för belöningssystem på olika företag. I studien framkom, i likhet med de få tidigare studier som genomförts inom området, att utvärdering av belöningssystem inte har någon central roll hos de undersökta företagen. Anledningen till denna undanskymda roll anses dock inte vara en misstro mot behovet av det. Istället framkom att en starkt bidragande orsak till det restriktiva utförandet av utvärdering är att området anses komplext med stora problem relaterade till att identifiera lämpliga metoder för det praktiska utförandet.