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Magister Commercii (Industrial Psychology) - MCom(IPS) / The financial industry revolves around organisations that provide financial services to people in the community. The largest contributor is the banking sector followed by the insurance sector. Financial services organisations face an ever-changing working environment that is constantly increasing in its complexity. New market entrants such as banks provide insurance products, customer preferences change, technology changes quickly, and ever-changing legislation governs the way in which insurance organisations conduct business with customers. Having to continuously contend with the losses, regulatory changes, and risk management, while having to increase the shareholders’ value, all impact on the global financial services industry. They in turn increase the job demands on employees.

The thesis is focused on the problem of endowment and its importance to the Foundation. The thesis examines the endowment as one of the essential characteristics of the Foundation of Law and Economics. Legal perspective focuses on legislative action endowment today, and the previous legislation. Investigates conditions for increasing the endowment, the possibility of using the endowment to create the Foundation ond proceeds to establish the conditions for the foundation. The thesis describes the procedure for increasing the endowment. The economic part is evaluated by a set of economi indicators that were identified from the results of operations of the Foundation. The resulting set of economic indicators is processed into graphs. Individual graphs show the specific economic indicators examined in relation to a set of foundations surveyed. The results are used to process the graphical analysis of the relationship of main economic indicators, the comparison can be concluded about the importance of the endowment for the comparison subjects.

According to national and international policies in order to protect environment regarding renewable sources of energy, biogas is one of the best alternative to reduce waste and pollution and getting energy. Biogas is the gas that is produced by some kinds of microorganisms in anaerobic condition from organic waste treatment. Technology of biogas plants is varies and there is no standard procedure that is applicable worldwide. Methane (biogas), which is produced from wastes and it is known widely since 1973. By organic waste degradation methane is produced and waste volume will be reduced. Some surveys prove that during anaerobic digestion only 50% of organic matter is degraded. Anaerobic degradation has some steps that are hydrolysis, acidogenesis, acetogenesis and methanogenesis. Since hydrolysis is rate-limited step it can be improved by some pretreatment and some action like improving monitoring system can show that the efficiency of biogas will increase. There are three main pretreatment methods. During this study digestate sludge from different waste treatment plants were pretreated. First experience was pretreating digestate sludge from Sobacken, Falköping, Västerås by Enzyme Addition (Cellolase) and the measuring of biogas (methane) has done by Gas Chromatograph (GC). Second experience was pretreating digestate sludge by Acid (Sulfuric acid). The data of those measurements are shown that the amount of biogas was increased two times in the case of Västerås by enzyme addition, which is about 70% of theoretical expectation of this pretreatment and pretreating digestate sludge of Sobacken by acid pretreatment could increase the amount of biogas two times as well that was about 60% of theoretical estimation. By proper gas chromatograph and choosing one kind of waste and pretreating that by just one kind of pretreatment in each experience and following the results and going further the biogas efficiency will increase significantly because still 50% organic matter is inside the digester. / Uppsatsnivå: D

Given a string S = {a1, a2, a3, ..., an}, the longest increasing subsequence (LIS) problem is to find a subsequence of the given string such that the subsequence is increasing and its length is maximal. In a previous result, to find the longest increasing subsequences of each sliding window with a fixed size w of a given string with length n can be solved in O(w log log n+OUTPUT) time, where O(w log log n+ w^2) time is taken for preprocessing and OUTPUT is the sum of all output lengths. In this thesis, we solve the problem for finding the longest increasing subsequence of every substring of S. With the straightforward implementation of the previous result, the time required for the preprocessing would be O(n^3). We modify the data structure used in the algorithm, hence the required preprocessing time is improved to O(n^2). The time required for the report stage is linear to the size of the output. In other words, our algorithm can find the LIS of every substring in O(n^2+OUTPUT) time. If the LIS's of all substrings are desired to be reported, since there are O(n^2) substrings totally in a given string with length n, our algorithm is optimal.

The distribution theory of runs and patterns has a long and rich history. In this dissertation we study the distribution of some run-related statistics in sequences and random permutations of arbitrary multi-sets. Using the finite Markov chain imbedding technique (FMCI), which was proposed by Fu and Koutras (1994), we proposed an alternative method to calculate the exact distribution of the total number of adjacent increasing and adjacent consecutive increasing subsequences in sequences. Fu and Hsieh (2015) obtained the exact distribution of the length of the longest increasing subsequence in random permutations. To the best of our knowledge, little or no work has been done on the exact distribution of the length of the longest increasing subsequence in random permutations of arbitrary multi-sets. Here we obtained the exact distribution of the length of the longest increasing subsequence in random permutations of arbitrary multi-sets. We also obtain the the exact distribution of the length of the longest increasing subsequence for the set of all permutations of length N generated from {1,2,...,n}. / February 2016

This is a sociological essay, named Reshaping Samoan Relations – a study on the increasing reports and regarding violence against women in Samoa, written by Shahab Mirbabaei. The aim of this study was to explain the reason, or reasons, for the increasing reports of violence against women to the police and help-organizations in Samoa.The study was done in Samoa by conducting semi-structured interviews with women, from the rural and urban areas, and with workers from relevant organizations that are involved with questions regarding violence against women. The women were primarily asked for general Samoans changing views of gender, violence and trust for police and help-organizations. The workers were primarily asked for changes in the working process in their organization.The main theoretical choices were Outsiders, by Howard S. Becker, and Masculinities by R.W. Connell. These theories allowed this this study to capture all the important elements by offering a terminology that focuses on gender and deviance.The main results show that different organizations have created a new set of rules for the Samoan society, which in the same time has weakened the Fa’a Samoa system. With the help of awareness, these organizations have criminalized domestic violence towards women in Samoa and offered solutions to women to combat violent occurrences. The awareness has extended the possibilities of women in Samoan society, and allowed them to challenge the authority that upholds the hegemonic rule of men. This challenge is partly seen by the increasing number of women that work in the public, and by women combating the violent occurrences by reporting the matter to outside parties.

Standard economic theory suggests that capital should flow from rich countries to poor countries. However, capital has predominantly flowed to rich countries. The three essays in this dissertation attempt to explain this phenomenon. The first two essays suggest theoretical explanations for why capital has not flowed to the poor countries. The third essay empirically tests the theoretical explanations. The first essay examines the effects of increasing returns to scale on international lending and borrowing with moral hazard. Introducing increasing returns in a two-country general equilibrium model yields possible multiple equilibria and helps explain the possibility of capital flows from a poor to a rich country. I find that a borrowing country may need to borrow sufficient amounts internationally to reach a minimum investment threshold in order to invest domestically. The second essay examines how a poor country may invest in sectors with low productivity because of sovereign risk, and how collateral differences across sectors may exacerbate the problem. I model sovereign borrowing with a two-sector economy: one sector with increasing returns to scale (IRS) and one sector with diminishing returns to scale (DRS). Countries with incomes below a threshold will only invest in the DRS sector, and countries with incomes above a threshold will invest mostly in the IRS sector. The results help explain the existence of a bimodal world income distribution. The third essay empirically tests the explanations for why capital has not flowed from the rich to the poor countries, with a focus on institutions and initial capital. I find that institutional variables are a very important factor, but in contrast to other studies, I show that institutions do not account for the Lucas Paradox. Evidence of increasing returns still exists, even when controlling for institutions and other variables. In addition, I find that the determinants of capital flows may depend on whether a country is rich or poor.

This project explores the rapidly expanding area of AC direct drive for LED lighting. AC LED driving does not use typical DC-DC converter-based driving but uses semiconductor switches and a linear regulator to activate a number of LEDs proportional to the input voltage at any given time. This allows bulky, expensive magnetics to be eliminated from the system. The goal of this project was to design a scaled-down physical AC LED direct drive system to validate the conclusions of methods for improving efficiency from a previous investigation that found minimizing voltage across the linear regulating MOSFET led to higher efficiency at the cost of increased input current THD. This project found that this conclusion is physically realizable, with a final efficiency of 94.46% and an input current THD of 58.9%. This result was achieved by taking the previous investigation’s final design as a starting point and replacing ideal switches and control signals with discrete components. The final version uses a set of comparators and sense resistors to determine when a given LED stack should be on for a simple, analog control solution. Once the system was simulated this way, the assembled version was used to measure efficiency, power factor, current THD, flicker index, and DC supply power. Additional plots of the stack voltages and control signals were collected to verify proper operation and compare to simulation. The final measurements aligned with trends from simulation and result in a simple AC direct drive solution that requires no specialty ICs.