No / Fairness in bandwidth resource allocation is highly significance to the advancement of the future generation mobile and wireless technologies. It is likely that restriction of bandwidth due to the employment of some scheduling scheme would not be an appropriate option for the future development of communication systems. However, there is need to consider an implementation that would lead to good network performance and avoid unguaranteed bandwidth delivery. This paper focusses on evaluating the performance of Bandwidth Allocation using Dynamic Label Switching Paths (LSPs) Tunnelling and Label Distribution Protocol (LDP) signalling in Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) network. This will make provision for bandwidth allocation and reservation possible. An appropriate bandwidth allocation would have a positive impact on throughput as well as the delay. The results of an IP (Internet Protocol) Network without MPLS enabled is compared with MPLS model network. Furthermore, implementation of dynamic and static LSPs models are presented with about 75% decrease in packet delay variation for dynamic LSP when compared from static LSP. In addition, the models of bandwidth estimation, bandwidth allocation, delay and jitter are provided. Performance metrics used in this respect for multimedia services (Voice and Video conferencing) confirm that the modified models are improved in comparison with the baseline, having highest throughput of about 51% increment, and packet delay variation decreases drastically.

Today there is a lack of official environmental labels for mobile phones. In addition, at the moment it does not necessarily mean that a product is more sustainable because it is marketed as green or as environmentally friendly. It has to be easier for consumers to evaluate and pit “green” products against each other, as well as create a picture of which model is the most environmentally adopted and within which issues the biggest environmental benefits lay. The aim of this study is to analyse a selection of smartphones, which are sold by TDC SE, through a lifecycle perspective. The selection will be limited to the major suppliers and their most commonly sold phones by TDC. The purpose of the analysis is to classify the selected models based on their environmental and social impacts in their different lifecycle stages, and to present the results to the customers so they can consider that in their decisions. The following models were assessed in the study: iPhone 5s, iPhone 6 and iPhone 6s from Apple; Lumia 550, Lumia 650 and Lumia 950 from Microsoft; Galaxy A3 2016, Galaxy Xcover3 and Galaxy S6 from Samsung; as well as Xperia Z5, Xperia M4 Aqua and Xperia M5 from Sony. The study has developed a tool for analysing and characterizing the Smartphones’ sustainability performance. Several sustainability categories was developed, which each consists of a set of sustainability criterions, in order to analyse the models sustainability performances. The analysis has considered key issues, problem areas and impacts reading the smartphones sustainability performance. The characterization applies a scoring system in regards to how the models perform within the selected criteria compared to the industry’s average performance level (representing industry standard) as well as best practice examples. The assessed sustainability criterions are then additionally analysed through a multi-criteria analysis (MCA). In the MCA the criterions relevance are weighted and combined to an overall sustainability score of the models performance in each category. The study also examines the possibility for consumers to weight the different sustainability categories into an overall sustainability score for each model. This enable the customers to rank the models sustainability performance based on their preference (which categories that is more or less important to them). Regarding the models characterised sustainability performance it is clear that Samsung Galaxy S6 overall performs the highest of the studied models. In addition, all the Samsung models preformed high in general (except that Galaxy Xcover3 and A3 preformed the lowest of all the models in regards to environmentally preferable alternatives). Microsoft generally performed quite high and especially high in regards to life prolonging features and the use phase (were Lumia 950 scored especially high). Although, Microsoft performed quite low in regards to environmentally preferable alternatives as well as lifecycle thinking. Apple preformed high (scored higher than the other suppliers) in regards to environmentally preferable alternatives. However, in general Apple performed quite low, especially regarding life prolonging features and iPhone 5s also scored the lowest of all models in regards to substances of concern. Sony preformed very high in regards to I lifecycle thinking and the use phase and in general quite high in most categories (expect that the Xperia M5 model preformed among the lowest in regards to transportation). The result of the study has been highly affected by the degree of available information concerning the different models and suppliers. It is also interesting that models from different suppliers (with similar degree of available information) ranked differently relative to each other depending on the weighting (preference) between the different sustainability categories. Moreover, the study had to consider and find a balance between available information and desirable information. This mainly refers to the development and definition of industry standards and best practice levels. The study had to consider and decide what could be expected and measured/evaluated in regards to the independent demands, criticism and issues which the industry face. After concluding the study it is clear that the result has been greatly affected by the degree of available information for the studied models. It is also clear that today there is a great lack of model specific information and data. The study also found that it is important with feedback and follow-up communication with the suppliers, in order to correct misunderstandings and provide clarifications. In conclusion, the result of the study can be used as a decision basis for customers who wish to consider the smartphones’ sustainability performance is their choice. / Pris och funktion är fortfarande de avgörande faktorerna vid köp, men miljön håller mer och mer på att bli ett avgörande kriterium och intresset för ”grön” IT ökar. De officiella miljömärkningarna och oberoende granskningarna av elektronikföretag kan hjälpa konsumenter att göra bra val bland butikernas utbud. I Sverige finns det dock endast en officiell miljömörkning för mobiltelefoner, TCO certifieringen. Det blir dock mer och mer vanligt med eco-ratings, till exempel Eco Rating 2.0 och certifiering enligt UL 110 standarden för mobiltelefoner. Idag finns det alltså en brist på officiella miljömärkningar för mobiltelefoner och för tillfället så betyder det inte nödvändigtvis att en produkt är mer miljövänlig bara för att den marknadsförs som grön eller som miljöanpassad. Därför måste det bli enklare för konsumenter att utvärdera och ställa gröna produkter mot varandra samt att bilda sig en bild över vilken modell som tar mest hänsyn till miljön och inom vilka frågor som den största miljönyttan ligger. Målet med studien har varit att analysera ett urval av smartelefoner som säljs av TDC utifrån ett livscykelperspektiv. Urvalet har begränsats till de största leverantörerna och deras telefoner som vanligtvis säljs mest av TDC. Syftet med analysen har varit att klassificera de utvalda modellerna baserat på deras miljömässiga och sociala påverkan i deras olika livscykelfaser, samt att presentera resultatet till kunderna så de kan ta hänsyn till detta i deras val. De följande modellerna utvärderade i studien: iPhone 5s, iPhone 6 och iPhone 6s från Apple; Lumia 550, Lumia 650 och Lumia 950 från Microsoft; Galaxy A3 2016, Galaxy Xcover3 and Galaxy S6 from Samsung; samt Xperia Z5, Xperia M4 Aqua och Xperia M5 från Sony. Studien har utvecklat ett verktyg för att analysera och karakterisera smarttelefonernas hållbarhetsprestanda. Flera hållbarhetskategorier utvecklade och tog fram, som i sin tur består av ett flertal hållbarhetskriterier, för att kunna analysera modellernas hållbarhetsprestanda. Analysen har tagit hänsyn till nyckelfrågor, problemområden och påverkan rörande smarttelefonernas hållbarhetsprestanda. Hållbarhetskriterierna har valts ut baserat på informationen som samlats in i screeningen, käraktaren hos de data som erhållits från leverantörerna samt tillgängliga mått och möjligheten att utvärdera de valda kriterierna. I karakteriseringen så tillämpas ett betygsystem relaterat till hur modellerna presterar inom de vala kriterierna jämfört med industrins genomsnittliga prestationsnivå (representerar industristandard) och best praxis exempels. Där den högsta nivån innebär att hållbarhetskriteriet behandlas utöver industristandard (representerar best practice). Den mellersta nivån innebär att hållbarhetskriteriet behandlas på samma nivå som industristandarden. Och den lägsta nivån innebär att hållbarhetskriteriet inte finns tillgänglig för allmänheten. De utvärderade hållbarhetskriterierna blir sen ytterligare analyserade med hjälp av en Multi- kriterium analys (MCA), där kriterierna viktas baserats på deras relevans och kombineras till ett övergripande poäng av modellens prestation i varje kategori. Viktningen tar även hänsyn till hur (progressiv) svårt det är att uppnå best practice nivån jämfört med industristandarden samt att uppnå industristandarden. Studien undersöker även möjligheten för kunderna att vikta de olika hållbarhetskategorierna till ett övergripande poäng för varje modell. Detta görs för att kunna ranka modellernas hållbarhetsprestanda basrat på kundernas preferens (vilka kategoriers som är mer eller mindre viktiga för dem). <img src="file:///page6image25648" /> Baserat på modellernas karakteriserade hållbarhetsprestanda är det klart att Samsung Galaxy S6 på det hela taget presterade högst av alla de studerade modellerna. Alla Samsungs modeller presterar också generellt väldigt högt (bortsett från att Galaxy Xcover3 and A3 presterade lägst III av alla modeller med hänsyn till miljövänliga alternativ). Mikrosoft presterade generellt ganska högt och speciellt högt med hänseende till livsförlängande funktioner och användarfasen (där Lumia 950 presterade speciellt högt). Dock så presterade Microsoft ganska lågt inom miljövänliga alternativ samt livscykeltänkande. Apple presterade högt (fick högre poäng än de andra leverantörerna) inom miljövänliga alternativ. Dock så presterade Apple generellt ganska lågt, speciellt med hänsyn till livsförlängande funktioner och iPhone 5s presterade också lägst av alla modeller inom potentiellt farliga ämnen. Sony presterade väldigt högt med hänsyn till livscykeltänkande och användarfasen, samt ganska högt in de flesta kategorierna (förutom att Xperia M5 modellen presterade bland de lägst inom transporter). Studiens resultat har till stor del påverkats av de olika graderna av tillgänglig information för de olika modellerna. Det är också väldigt intressant att modeller från olika leverantörer (med liknande grad av tillgänglig information) rankades olika relaterat till varandra beroende på viktningen (preferensen) mellan de olika hållbarhetskategorierna. Studien har också till stor del behövt ta hänsyn till och hitta en balans mellan tillgänglig information och önskad information. Detta referera främst till framtagningen och definitionen av industristandards och best practice nivåerna. Studien har behövt betrakta och bestämma vad som kan förväntas, mätas och utvärderas relaterat till de oberoende krav, kritik och frågor som industrin står inför. Efter att studien slutförts är det klart att resultatet till stor del har påverkats av de olika graderna av tillgänglig information för de studerade modellerna. Det är även klart att der finns en stor brist på modellspecifik information för de studerade modellerna. Studien kom fram till att det är viktigt med återkoppling och uppföljande kommunikation med leverantörerna, för att rätta till missförstånd och tillhandahålla klargöranden. Avslutningsvis så kan studiens resultat användas som beslutsunderlagg för kunder som vill ta hänsyns till smarttelefonernas hållbarhetsprestanda i sitt val.

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<p> </p><p>Ecological issues are current topics which consumers face in every-day life. The growing awareness by the consumers that they can have an impact on protection of the environment, animals and their own health is the reason of the growing market of ecological products (Kinnear, Talor and Ahmed, 1974; Polonsky, 1994). According to the Swedish consumer agency the agricultural sector had increased highly since the 1990s. Hence the companies had increased its market activities significant under the last decade (Konsumentverket, 2007).</p><p>It appears more and more that the most important aspect for competitive positioning of companies providing ecological food is to understand the factors which drive consumers to purchase ecological food products. The KRAV label appears as an essential part of market ecological food. In this context it is very interesting to identify in which degree the consumer is affected by the third-party label KRAV.</p><p>The purpose of the paper is to identify information about the ecological consumer as well as the factors that influence consumers to buy ecological food products and in this context examine the awareness and importance of ecological labels, in Jönköping County.</p><p>The thesis is limited in its geographical area because the consumer survey is done in several cities in Jönköping County. The thesis considers general the ecological food industry and does not include other ecological industries such as clothes or furniture.</p><p>By studying former surveys and conducting a previous study a survey questionnaire was developed. 102 respondents from Jönköpings County were asked to fill in this questionnaire. The collected data were evaluated with the statistical program SPSS. Analysis of variance, correlation analysis and descriptive analysis were used.</p><p>The authors have got the impression that the ecological consumer in Jönköping County is mostly female and higher educated. The most important factors that influence the consumer positively to choose the ecological products are healthiness, environmental friendliness and better taste. If products do not include pesticides and are produced “animal friendly” it also influence the consumer positive. Negative factors that influence consumers are still a too high price, unavailability and bad/no information.</p><p> </p>

2 pp. / Food labels are designed to help consumers to make healthy food choices. Yet Nutrition Facts label is not always easy to understand due to a lot of technical information. The step-by-step approach in this publication is easy to follow, and may help consumers to build skills how to read and use the information on a Nutrition Facts label more easily and effectively for their needs. The 2-pages information sheet is useful, especially when a nutrition educator teaches a lay person those tricky foods labeling terms and recommends healthy alternative in his/her diet.

The distinct stages of cotton fiber development and maturation serve as a single-celled model for studying the molecular mechanisms of plant cell elongation, cell wall development and cellulose biosynthesis. However, this model system of plant cell development is compromised for proteomic studies due to a lack of an efficient protein extraction method during the later stages of fiber development, because of a recalcitrant cell wall and the presence of abundant phenolic compounds. Here, we compared the quality and quantities of proteins extracted from 25 dpa (days post anthesis) fiber with multiple protein extraction methods and present a comprehensive quantitative proteomic study of fiber development from 10 dpa to 25 dpa. Comparative analysis using a label-free quantification method revealed 287 differentially-expressed proteins in the 10 dpa to 25 dpa fiber developmental period. Proteins involved in cell wall metabolism and regulation, cytoskeleton development and carbohydrate metabolism among other functional categories in four fiber developmental stages were identified. Our studies provide protocols for protein extraction from maturing fiber tissues for mass spectrometry analysis and expand knowledge of the proteomic profile of cotton fiber development.

The internationalization started to be seen as an opportunity for many companies, a strategic way to grow; therefore they assume different levels of commitment in the international market. This dissertation analyzes which internationalization strategies are being used by Brazilian companies in the textile industry and why these companies have chosen these strategies along the time line. The chosen method is a qualitative approach with semi-structured interviews. The companies chosen are Cia. Hering, Dudalina and Karsten; all three have long history in the textile industry and started to export at least more than 30 years ago. Analyzing the companies within the frame of Kraus theory (2000, 2006), it was possible found that the main strategies along the time were: exporting via private label manufacturing, FDI, exporting the own brand and franchising. The internationalization strategies of the companies in the beginning were related to the significant production capacity that boosted their exports, mainly exporting private label. Another remarkable fact was the positive moment of the Brazilian economy that facilitated their exports. Enjoying the positive moment, Cia. Hering and Karsten reached the most committed level of involvement in international operations. With no consolidate brand abroad therefore the Asian competition and not favorable currency exchange rates, they had to return and operate mainly to the domestic market. The companies had no consolidate strategy in the beginning; nevertheless now, all them are concerned in building stronger brands than in past, since they are leaving or at least decreasing the private label exports. The companies have changed focus from production to the market.

This thesis describes a detailed study of advanced fibre optic sensors and their applications for label-free biochemical detection. The major contributions presented in this thesis are summarised below. A self-assembly based in-situ layer-by-layer (i-LbL) or multilayer deposition technique has been developed to deposit the 2D material nanosheets on cylindrical fibre devices. This deposition technique is based on the chemical bonding associated with the physical adsorption, securing high-quality 2D materials coating on specific fibre cylindrical surface with strong adhesion as well as a prospective thickness control. Then a " Photonic-nano-bio configuration", which is bioprobes immobilised 2D-(nano)material deposited fibre grating, was built. 2D material overlay provides a remarkable analytical platform for bio-affinity binding interface due to its exceptional optical and biochemical properties. EDC (1-ethyl-3-(3-dimethylaminopropyl)carbodiimide) and NHS (NHydroxysuccinimide) were used to immobilise bioprobes. This kind of configuration is considered to have many advantages such as: enhanced RI sensitivity, enrich immobilisation sites, improved binding efficiency, selective detection. Followed by this configuration, several label-free biosensors were developed. For example, graphene oxide coated dual-peak long period grating (GO-dLPG) based immunosensor has been implemented for ultrasensitive detection of antibody/antigen interaction. The GO-LPG based biosensor has been developed for label-free haemoglobin detection. Apart from biosensors, the black phosphorus (BP) integrated tilted fibre grating (TFG) has been proposed, for the first time, as BP-fibre optic chemical sensor for heavy metal (Pb2+ ions) detection, demonstrating ultrahigh sensitivity, lower limit of detection and wider concentration range. Ultrafast laser micromachining technology has been employed to fabricate long period grating (LPG) and microstructures on optical fibre. The ultrafast laser micromachined polymer optical fibre Bragg grating (POFBG) has been developed for humidity sensing, showing the significant improvement with the reduced response time.

Le partitionnement consiste à rechercher une partition d'éléments, de sorte que les éléments d'un même cluster soient plus similaires que les éléments de différents clusters. Les données proviennent de différentes sources et prennent des formes différentes. L'un des défis consiste à concevoir un système capable de tirer parti des différentes sources de données. Certaines contraintes peuvent être connues sur les données. On peut savoir qu'un objet est d'un certain type ou que deux objets partagent le même type ou sont de types différents. On peut également savoir qu'à l'échelle globale, les différents types d'objets apparaissent avec une fréquence connue. Dans cette thèse, nous nous concentrons sur le partitionnement avec trois types de contraintes: les contraintes d'étiquettes, les contraintes de paires et les contraintes de lois de puissance. Une contrainte d'étiquette spécifie dans quel cluster appartient un objet. Les contraintes par paire spécifient que les paires d'objets doivent ou ne doivent pas partager le même cluster. Enfin, la contrainte de loi de puissance est une contrainte globale qui spécifie que la distribution des tailles de cluster est soumise à une loi de puissance. Nous voulons montrer que l'introduction de la semi-supervision aux algorithmes de clustering peut modifier et améliorer les solutions retournées par des algorithmes de clustering non supervisés. Nous contribuons à cette question en proposant des algorithmes pour chaque type de contraintes. Nos expériences sur les ensembles de données UCI et les jeux de données en langage naturel montrent la bonne performance de nos algorithmes et donnent des indications pour des travaux futurs prometteurs. / Clustering is the task of finding a partition of items, such that items in the same cluster are more similar than items in different clusters. One challenge consists in designing a system capable of taking benefit of the different sources of data. Among the different forms a piece of data can take, the description of an object can take the form of a feature vector: a list of attributes that takes a value. Objects can also be described by a graph which captures the relationships objects have with each others. In addition to this, some constraints can be known about the data. It can be known that an object is of a certain type or that two objects share the same type or are of different types. It can also be known that on a global scale, the different types of objects appear with a known frequency. In this thesis, we focus on clustering with three different types of constraints: label constraints, pairwise constraints and power-law constraint. A label constraint specifies in which cluster an object belong. Pairwise constraints specify that pairs of object should or should not share the same cluster. Finally, the power-law constraint is a cluster-level constraint that specifies that the distribution of cluster sizes are subject to a power-law. We want to show that introducing semi-supervision to clustering algorithms can alter and improve the solutions returned by unsupervised clustering algorithms. We contribute to this question by proposing algorithms for each type of constraints. Our experiments on UCI data sets and natural language processing data sets show the good performance of our algorithms and give hints towards promising future works.

The majority of current multi-label classification research focuses on learning dependency structures among output labels. This paper provides a novel theoretical view on the purported assumption that effective multi-label classification models must exploit output dependencies. We submit that the flurry of recent dependency-exploiting, multi-label algorithms may stem from the deficiencies in existing datasets, rather than an inherent need to better model dependencies. We introduce a novel categorization of multi-label metrics, namely, evenly and unevenly weighted label metrics. We explore specific features that predispose datasets to improved classification by methods that model label dependence. Additionally, we provide an empirical analysis of 15 benchmark datasets, 1 real-life dataset, and a variety of synthetic datasets. We assert that binary relevance (BR) yields similar, if not better, results than dependency-exploiting models for metrics with evenly weighted label contributions. We qualify this claim with discussions on specific characteristics of datasets and models that render negligible the differences between BR and dependency-learning models.