Budgetary control has been used and researched for years by both Western academics and practitioners. In China, it is re-emerging as a tool to implement management control, but might be used in different ways both in terms of understanding and operation. The research objective of this thesis is to examine the applicability of Western theories of change in management accounting in the context of budgeting in Chinese corporations. Challenges can exist because of the differences between Western assumptions and Chinese reality. The current thesis focuses on difficulties Chinese companies encounter in practical and deeper ideological ways: firstly, Western market-based ideology conflicts with an ideology which has been shaped by central-planning for decades; secondly, difficulties stem from the different cultural context of China which emphasizes hierarchical politeness, kinship ties, trust based on personal relationships, collectivism and social harmony, diligence and individual modesty, and less developed modern legal regulatory systems – these all contribute to China’s own way of doing things. This thesis also focuses on the transition process in China. Based on the assumption that budgetary changes do not happen in isolation from other management accounting changes, this thesis discusses these changes which synchronically took place while the case-study companies were implementing budgetary systems. This thesis adopts a longitudinal and in-depth qualitative case study research design, after adjustments made during the learning experience of the pilot study. It takes an interpretive and constructive philosophical underpinning, which allows the researcher to observe and understand the process of change, as well as the differences between Chinese practices and Western theories. Findings show that certain Western management accounting theories of change and Western theories of budgeting work in the case study Chinese corporations. Management accounting theories using an interpretive approach (for example, Berry et al., 1985; Scapens and Roberts, 1993; Ahrens and Chapman, 2002) lead the researcher to interpret management accounting practices from the practitioner’s points of view, and they have provided a range of terms to explain success or failure of management accounting changes. This approach together with Scapens et al.’s Institutional theory approach in management accounting have been found especially useful, in explaining the differences between Chinese vs. Western context. Furthermore, the contingency theory approach in management accounting gives a ‘platform’ which allows the researcher to assess a wide range of possible factors and their relationships with budgetary systems in studied companies. This approach is found useful in this thesis to present changes in other management accounting perspectives. Last but not least, this thesis finds existing Western literature in technical perspective of budgetary objectives, budgetary evaluation and participation, and budgetary effectiveness useful in a different context of China. By describing the change management process, an aspect which is not addressed frequently in the research literature, this thesis argues that to sufficiently understand Chinese companies’ budgetary changes, one also needs to understand unique cultural, social-economical and religious circumstances, and to adjust literature and methodology to adapt to these circumstances. This thesis provides an empirical experience concerning these issues. This thesis contributes to the understanding of management accounting change in China, and the tension which exists when Chinese companies are moving into Western management accounting practices.

Over the last few years, numerous studies and discussions have taken place regarding the results achieved by doctorates with education completed in Brazil and abroad, and they have raised questions about the programs contributions to the scientific, technical, cultural, and innovation in the area of the Biological Sciences II discipline. Primarily, the studies main purpose was to verify quantitatively the data referring to the scientific productivity of the participants of the Capes PhD programs in Brazil and overseas. The data was compiled using their professional experience, completed academic supervisions, and published articles. The quantitative data analysis, which included a sample of 37 former fellows in each modality, showed no significant difference between the two programs. There was a predisposition of the Brazilians students to publish a greater number of articles. On average, they had published 1.29 more articles, when compared to the students abroad. There were 808 articles published by 36 the participants in the country; versus 517 published article by 24 overseas students. One scholarship recipient in Brazil did not present results regarding the scientific production. As for the participants abroad that number was 13. The number of participants that were working in this particular field of study was also higher for those who held a doctorate in Brazil, with 31 researchers, compared to 23 of the total number of students who did their PhD studies in a foreign country. With respect to academic supervisions, students who studied abroad supervised 91 students, while students, whose studies were held in Brazil, supervised 82 students on average. Some of the participants that held their PhD outside of Brazil went to universities with an aggregated institutio nal prestige that was deemed lower when compared to the Brazilian universities. It was concluded that, in the case of Biological Sciences II, Capes could improve its selective process for those seeking a full PhD scholarship outside of the country by establishing a more stringent selection process. The objective would be to produce a more effective process that would benefit both the students and CAPES. This improved process could facilitate the re- integration back into the academic life as well as assist the scientific productivity of the students after they have finished their studies abroad. / Ao longo dos últimos anos, inúmeras discussões e estudos surgiram a respeito dos resultados alcançados com a formação plena de doutores no Brasil e no Exterior, colocando em questão as suas contribuições para o cenário técnico-científico, cultural e inovador brasileiro. O presente trabalho objetivou verificar, de forma preliminar, a atuação profissional, bem como a colaboração científica dos ex-bolsistas da Capes, durante e após a realização do Doutorado Pleno no Exterior e no País, na área de Ciências Biológicas II, tendo como base o número de artigos publicados, assim como as informações sobre o local de realização dos estudos, o vínculo funcional e as orientações realizadas. Os dados apresentaram 37 exbolsistas para cada modalidade, sendo que diferenças significativas entre os dois programas não foram notadas. Percebeu-se a tendência dos ex-bolsistas no país em apresentarem uma maior produção cient ífica. Em média, estes publicaram 1,29 artigos a mais, se comparados aos ex-bolsistas no exterior. Foram 808 artigos publicados por 36 ex-bolsistas do país; 517 publicados por 24 ex-bolsistas do exterior. Um único ex-bolsista no Brasil não apresentou resultados quanto à produção científica. Quanto aos ex-bolsistas no exterior esse núme ro é de 13. O número de ex-bolsistas com vinculação empregatícia também se mostrou superior para os que realizaram o Doutorado no Brasil, constando 31 pesquisadores com vínculo, contra 23 do total de ex-bolsistas que desenvolveram as atividades plenas no exterior. Com relação às atividades de ensino e pesquisa, os ex-bolsistas que realizaram seus estudos no exterior orientaram pouco mais alunos (91), quando comparados aos ex-bolsistas do país (82). Alguns ex-bolsistas do Doutorado Pleno no Exterior tiveram como destino instituições de prestígio abaixo de algumas universidades brasileiras, onde os ex-bolsistas do Doutorado Pleno no País realizaram seus estudos. Concluiu-se que, em se tratando da CB-II, a Capes deve aumentar o rigor para conceder bolsas de Doutorado Pleno no Exterior, estabelecendo, possivelmente, um processo indutivo de seleção de bolsa, a fim de garantir procedimentos mais efetivos que facilitem a inserção acadêmica, assim como a manutenção do processo de produção cientifica dos bolsistas egressos do exterior.

This research aims to understand the different practices and strategies early career researchers and PhD students from the social sciences have in Social Networking Sites (SNSs) for science communication in one particular country: Brazil. Following this purpose, the central research question is which are the motives and rationale of the researchers for using social networking sites for science communication. Two sub-questions arise from this general research question: How do practices and strategies relate to the academic system of this country? And How do the traditional science communication practices translate into the use of Social Networking Sites (SNS)? This research is empirically oriented building up on case studies in Brazil. This study makes use of the adaptation that Van Dijck (2013) made of the Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and the review of affordances of social media platforms (Bucher & Helmond, 2016) to apply it to the study of social media as the theoretical approach. The methodological approach of this research is qualitative, using both interviews and netnography as research methods. The primary motivations for using different Social Networking Sites are all related to connectivity: communication with peers, to the public and research subjects, updating themselves about their research issue, dissemination of research, availability of papers, self-branding and participation in interest groups are the most mentioned. These motivations translate into cross-posting practices and integrated communication strategies -combining online and offline elements- on the different Social Networking Sites. These motivations translate into perceived affordances all related to social affordances, therefore, social capital processes: availability, scalability, visibility and multimediality. The academic system of the country has remained unchanged as it privileges traditional scholarly academic formats; therefore, early career researchers and PhD students from the social sciences only use the different Social Networking Sites (SNS) as a side aid but not as a primary means of communication. Social media is underused as a means of public science communication, even though these platforms offer a lot of advantages for pursuing such issue. Traditional science communication practices translate into the use of Social Networking Sites (SNSs). The most important issue that came out in this report was the fact that social affordances provided by Social Networking (SNSs) are still required to be endorsed by real life meeting to start further collaboration and the fact that English is the preferred language for such issues.

Le De anima marque un tournant dans la vie de Cassiodore, aristocrate romain, né vers 484, dont la famille s'était mise au service des rois Goths. Ayant terminé son parcours politique, il a fait ce qu' il a appelé sa« conversion » qui l'amènera à fonder le monastère de Vivarium et à s'y retirer. C'est au moment de ce changement de vie qu'il écrivit un traité sur l'âme et ses vertus, réflexion anthropologique, psychologique et morale, qui s'appuyait sur des écrits philosophiques, des écrits physiologiques empruntés à la tradition médicale, mais aussi sur les écrits scripturaires et l'œuvre de saint Augustin. C'est un traité plein de dévotion ; cherchant à connaître son âme, Cassiodore veut arriver à la connaissance de Dieu, et cet itinéraire de l'âme à Dieu constitue le cœur du traité. Cassiodore a christianisé le précepte de Socrate « nosce te ipsum » , et a suivi la démarche de saint Augustin : deum et animam scire cupio.La seule traduction française, à peu prés complète (il manque le chapitre XII et la prière finale), que nous avons, est de Stéphane de Rouville ; elle date de 1874. Il nous a paru intéressant de proposer une nouvelle traduction de ce texte, de le commenter et de l'annoter. C'est le but de ce travail.Mots clés :Âme, antiquité tardive, Saint Augustin, Écritures Saintes, Littérature au Moyen Âge. / The De anima marks a turning point in the life of Cassiodorus, an Roman aristocrat, born around 484, whose family was at the service of the kings Goths. When he ended his political career, he made what he called his« conversion » which will bring him to create the the monastery of Vivarium where he retired. At this change of his life, he wrote a treaty on the soul and its virtues, an anthropological, psychological and moral reflection, which leaned on philosophic and physiological writings borrowed from the medical tradition, but it also leaned on scriptural writings and on the writings of saint Augustin. It is a treaty full of devotion seeking to find your soul. Cassiodore wants to attain the knowledge of God, and this route of the soul to God constitutes the heart of the treaty. Cassiodore christianized the rule of Socrates « nosce te ipsum », and followed the approach of saint Augustin : deum and animam scire cupio.The only french translation, almost complete (the chapter XII and the final prayer are missing), that we have, is of Stéphane de Rouville from 1874. It seems interesting to us to propose a new translation of this text with our comments and annotations. It is the purpose of this work.Key words : soul, late antiquity, saint Augustin, Holy Writings, Literature in the Middle Ages

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Die Dissertation beschreibt Arbeiten zur Herstellung neuer Cetrorelixkomplexe, zur Kinetik der dynamischen Liberation, zur Struktur von Aggregaten und Komplexen von Cetrorelix und zur Berechnung von Komplexeigenschaften mit Molecular Modeling. / Presented are results about new complexes of cetrorelix, the kinetics of dynamical liberations, the structure of Cetrorelix aggregates and complexes and the computation of properties of complexes by molecular modeling.

Multiple target tracking (MTT) is the process of identifying the number of targets present in a surveillance region and the state estimates, or track, of each target. MTT remains a challenging problem due to the NP-hard data association step, where unlabeled measurements are identified as either a measurement of an existing target, a new target, or a spurious measurement called clutter. Existing techniques suffer from at least one of the following drawbacks: divergence in clutter, underlying assumptions on the number of targets, high computational complexity, time-consuming implementation, poor performance at low detection rates, and/or poor track continuity. Our goal is to develop an efficient MTT algorithm that is simple yet effective and that maintains track continuity enabling persistent tracking of an unknown number of targets. A related field to tracking is regression analysis, where the parameters of static signals are estimated from a batch or a sequence of data. The random sample consensus (RANSAC) algorithm was developed to mitigate the effects of spurious measurements, and has since found wide application within the computer vision community due to its robustness and efficiency. The main concept of RANSAC is to form numerous simple hypotheses from a batch of data and identify the hypothesis with the most supporting measurements. Unfortunately, RANSAC is not designed to track multiple targets using sequential measurements.To this end, we have developed the recursive-RANSAC (R-RANSAC) algorithm, which tracks multiple signals in clutter without requiring prior knowledge of the number of existing signals. The basic premise of the R-RANSAC algorithm is to store a set of RANSAC hypotheses between time steps. New measurements are used to either update existing hypotheses or generate new hypotheses using RANSAC. Storing multiple hypotheses enables R-RANSAC to track multiple targets. Good tracks are identified when a sufficient number of measurements support a hypothesis track. The complexity of R-RANSAC is shown to be squared in the number of measurements and stored tracks, and under moderate assumptions R-RANSAC converges in mean to the true states. We apply R-RANSAC to a variety of simulation, camera, and radar tracking examples.

<p>This thesis seeks to explain the way in which assisted housing and health policies evolved in Canada and the United States during four watershed periods: the mid-1940s, the late 1960s, the late 1970s, and the mid-1980s. To achieve this objective, it discusses the concepts of health, the broader determinants of health, disease prevention, and health promotion; it reviews documents which urge that greater attention be paid to the broader determinants of health during policy formulation; and it examines recent studies which stress the value of linking assisted housing and health policies.</p> <p>After an overview of assisted housing and health policy development in Europe, the thesis explores the evolution of these policy fields in Canada and the United States up to the mid-1940s, and investigates the reasons why these nations followed the policy paths they did.</p> <p>Using the neo-institutional approach to explain the complex interplay among the various institutions, actors, and events that affect the public policy process, the thesis discusses eight major institutional and behavioral variables that contribute to the shaping of policy over time. It then studies the influence which these variables had on assisted housing and health policies during the four watershed periods.</p> <p>Examination of postwar Canadian and US policy trends shows that although housing was treated in both countries mainly as an economic issue and only secondarily as a determinant of well-being, Canada dealt with healthcare essentially as a social issue and adopted a public system, while the US treated it as a socioeconomic issue and relied heavily on the private sector. Despite these policy differences, a potential for linking assisted housing and health policy manifested itself in both countries during the mid-1940s and late 1960s, but declined after the late 1970s.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This thesis addresses the problem of tracking multiple ground targets whose motion is dependent on one another. Multiple approaches which integrate the social force based motion model into different filtering algorithms are proposed. The social force concept has previously been used to model pedestrian motion where the interactions among pedestrians are described using social forces. First, the social force based motion model integrated into the Probability Hypothesis Density (PHD) framework is proposed. Two different implementations, namely, the Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) technique and the Gaussian Mixture (GM) technique, are derived to implement the proposed Social Force PHD (SF-PHD) filter in ground target tracking scenarios. Next, a social-force-based motion model integrated into the stacked Kalman filter (stacked SF-KF) is developed and its multiple model (stacked IMM-SF-KF) variant is derived. Then, the assumption used in the proposed algorithms, that the actual values of the social force parameters are known, is not valid at all times and the assumption is relaxed. Hence, simultaneous parameter estimation techniques for the social force parameters during the tracking are proposed. Three approaches based on the state augmentation method, the Expectation Maximization (EM) method and the maximum likelihood method are derived. The maximum likelihood method can be implemented offline or online, depending on the requirement. The traditional Posterior Cramer Rao Lower Bound (PCRLB), which is the inverse of the Fisher information matrix, gives a bound on the optimal achievable accuracy of the estimated state of a target with independent motion. Subsequently, a modified performance measure based on the PCRLB for targets whose motion is dependent on each other is derived to validate the performance of the proposed algorithms. Finally, the PCRLB that accounts for unknown interactions is derived to validate the proposed simultaneous parameter estimation techniques. Simulated and real data are used to show the performance of the proposed algorithms and simultaneous parameter estimation techniques compared to the algorithms in the literature. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This thesis addresses the problem of tracking multiple ground targets whose motion is dependent on one another. In target tracking literature, it is commonly assumed that a target’s motion follows a nearly constant velocity, constant turn or a constant acceleration model independent of the motion of other targets. But the actual behavior of a ground target may be more intricate than that and it is often affected by the motion of other targets, obstacles in the surrounding and its intended destination. Hence, a more sophisticated motion modeling technique, which integrates the various factors that affect the motion of ground targets, is needed. In this thesis, multiple approaches which integrate the social force based motion model into different filtering algorithms are proposed. The social force concept has previously been used to model pedestrian motion where the interactions among pedestrians are described using social forces. First, the social force based motion model integrated into the Probability Hypothesis Density (PHD) framework is proposed. Two different implementations, namely, the Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) technique and the Gaussian Mixture (GM) technique, are derived to implement the proposed Social Force PHD (SF-PHD) filter in ground target tracking scenarios. Next, a social-force-based motion model integrated into the stacked Kalman filter (stacked SF-KF) is developed and its multiple model (stacked IMM-SF-KF) variant is derived. Then, the assumption used in the proposed algorithms, that the actual values of the social force parameters are known, is not valid at all times and the assumption is relaxed. Hence, simultaneous parameter estimation techniques for the social force parameters during the tracking are proposed. Three approaches based on the state augmentation method, the Expectation Maximization (EM) method and the maximum likelihood method are derived. The maximum likelihood method can be implemented offline or online, depending on the requirement. The traditional Posterior Cramer Rao Lower Bound (PCRLB), which is the inverse of the Fisher information matrix, gives a bound on the optimal achievable accuracy of the estimated state of a target with independent motion. Subsequently, a modified performance measure based on the PCRLB for targets whose motion is dependent on each other is derived to validate the performance of the proposed algorithms. Finally, the PCRLB that accounts for unknown interactions is derived to validate the proposed simultaneous parameter estimation techniques. Simulated and real data are used to show the performance of the proposed algorithms and simultaneous parameter estimation techniques compared to the algorithms in the literature.

Intention of this thesis is the Workcenter PKS system implementation project in Precheza a.s., Přerov, implementation outputs and assessment of implementation advantages for the company and its employees. Currently the WPKS system has been purchased and comes over from the analytic phase to the implementation phase. In the designing section I will concentrate on implementation detailed planning, i.e. on detailed elaboration of production process maps, on process sequence designing, project team members and on drawing the total WPKS system implementation schedule. Also, financial contribution of the project will be assessed from the cost and effectiveness point of view.