No / This paper presents the experimental and numerical investigation into the behaviour of headed shear studs in composite beams with profiled metal deck flooring. A new single-sided horizontal push test arrangement is proposed to evaluate the shear capacity of the headed shear connectors in pairs with metal deck profiled sheeting. The characteristic resistance obtained from the horizontal push test is compared with Eurocode 4. A three-dimensional finite element model was developed using general purpose finite element program ABAQUS/Explicit. The shear connector capacity, load-slip behaviour and failure modes are validated against experimental results and close correlations were obtained.

yes / This paper presents an experimental study on shear strength, stiffness and ductility of demountable shear connectors in metal decking composite slabs through push-off tests. Twelve full-scale push-off tests were carried out using different concrete strength, number of connectors and different connector diameter. The experimental results showed that the demountable shear connectors in metal decking composite slabs have similar shear capacity and behaviour as welded shear studs and fulfilled the minimum ductility requirement of 6mm required by Eurocode 4. The shear capacity was compared against the prediction methods used for the welded shear connections given in Eurocode 4, AISC 360-10, ACI 318-08 and method used for bolted connection in Eurocode 3. It was found that the AISC 360-10 method overestimated the shear capacity while the ACI 318-08 method underestimated the shear capacity of specimens with single shear connector per trough. The Eurocodes method was found to provide a safe prediction for specimens with single and pair demountable connectors per trough. In addition, prediction methods given in both AISC 360-10 and ACI 318-08 for welded shear studs overestimated the shear capacity of specimens with 22 mm diameter demountable connectors that failed in concrete crushing. / PhD work from EPSRC studentship

This dissertation consists of three independent essays. The first essay, “Long Waves and Short Cycles in a Model of Endogenous Financial Fragility,” presents a stock flow consistent macroeconomic model in which financial fragility in firm and household sectors evolves endogenously through the interaction between real and financial sectors. Changes in firms’ and households’ financial practices produce long waves. The Hopf bifurcation theorem is applied to clarify the conditions for the existence of limit cycles, and simulations illustrate stable limit cycles. The long waves are characterized by periodic economic crises following long expansions. Short cycles, generated by the interaction between effective demand and labor market dynamics, fluctuate around the long waves. The second essay,“Macroeconomic Implications of Financialization,” examines macroeconomic effects of changes in firms’ financial behavior (retention policy, equity financing, debt financing), and household saving and portfolio decisions using models that pay explicit attention to financial stock-flow relations. Unlike the first essay, the second essay focuses on the effects of financial change on steady growth path. The results are insensitive to the precise specification of household saving behavior but depend critically on the labor market assumptions (labor-constrained vs dual) and the specification of the investment function (Harrodian vs stagnationist). The last essay, “Finance, Sectoral Structure and the Big Push,” studies the role of finance in the presence of investment complementarities using a big push model. Due to complementarities between different investment projects, simultaneous industrialization of many sectors (big push) may be needed for an underdeveloped economy to escape from an underdevelopment trap. Such simultaneous industrialization requires costly coordination by a third party, such as the government. Some recent papers show that private banks with significant market power may also solve the problem of coordination failure. We show that private coordination may not work since even large private banks may find it more profitable to finance firms in the traditional sector than in the modern sector.

An ever-increasing number of Internet applications, such as content and software distribution, distance learning, multimedia streaming, teleconferencing, and collaborative workspaces, need efficient and secure multicast communication. However, efficiency and security are competing requirements and balancing them to meet the application needs is still an open issue. In this thesis we study the efficiency versus security requirements tradeoffs in group key management for multicast communication. The efficiency is in terms of minimizing the group rekeying cost and the key storage cost, while security is in terms of achieving backward secrecy, forward secrecy, and resistance to collusion. We propose two new group key management schemes that balance the efficiency versus resistance to collusion. The first scheme is a flexible category-based scheme, and addresses applications where a user categorization can be done based on the user accessibility to the multicast channel. As shown by the evaluation, this scheme has a low rekeying cost and a low key storage cost for the controller, but, in certain cases, it requires a high key storage cost for the users. In an extension to the basic scheme we alleviate this latter problem. For applications where the user categorization is not feasible, we devise a cluster-based group key management. In this scheme the resistance to collusion is measured by an integer parameter. The communication and the storage requirements for the controller depend on this parameter too, and they decrease as the resistance to collusion is relaxed. The results of the analytical evaluation show that our scheme allows a fine-tuning of security versus efficiency requirements at runtime, which is not possible with the previous group key management schemes. / <p>Report code: LiU-TEK-LIC-2003:53.</p>

Entrepreneurship accounted by women has become important all over the world, especially in developing countries where it plays not only an economic role but a social role as well, changing communities and consequently, the whole society. The purpose of this paper is to identify the main motivation and barriers faced by women in developing countries, especially concerning the case study, namely Brazil and Egypt. In order to accomplish that, a deep literature review has been done and ten cases were analysed from a qualitative perspective. The main results found were that most of women in those countries are pushed into entrepreneurship rather than pulled and the main barriers are more aligned to the social context, lack of education, gender inequality issues rather than barriers related to business expertise. We do believe that the main contribution might relies on the fact that it brings different perspectives within female entrepreneurship from two different countries.

This thesis examines the transmission of monetary policy and the effects of persistent cost-push shocks in the presence of high household indebtedness (DTI) and frictions in fixed-rate mortgage (FRM) interest rates. A dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model incorporating housing, household debt, and long-term FRMs is estimated to accomplish this. The key findings can be summarized as follows: (i) A higher DTI leads to a stronger transmission of monetary policy, although this effect is dampened by the degree of interest rate fixation periods. (ii) Cost-push shocks propagates more strongly to inflation when the interest rate fixation periods is longer, resulting in delayed and slightly muted effects on output and consumption compared to adjustable-rate mortgages (ARM). (iii) While stronger responses to inflation help mitigate the cost-push shock, this comes at the expense of a larger output gap but with a slightly faster stabilization of the economy with a somewhat steeper recovery.

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Advances in wireless networking and the Internet move us toward ubiquitous and embedded computing. Ubiquitous and embedded computing enhances computer use by making computers available throughout the physical environment while making them effectively invisible to the user. In the ubiquitous and embedded computing era, computers in the traditional sense gradually fade, and information mediated by computers is available anywhere and anytime through devices that are embedded in the environment. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is one of the key technologies of the ubiquitous and embedded computing era. RFID is a technology used to identify, track, and trace a person or object and enables the automated collection of important business information. RFID minimizes human intervention in the person and object identification process by using electronic tags and is expected to complement or replace traditional barcode technology. RFID is a highly beneficial technological advancement which ultimately may change the way of doing business. This study examines the RFID adoption decision process and proposes a model predicting the likelihood of adopting RFID within organizations in the healthcare industry. A considerable number of studies have been conducted regarding organizational information technology (IT) adoption, but the nature of the organizational IT adoption process is still not well understood. It is even posited that the only consistency found in the organizational adoption literature is the inconsistency of research results. The inconsistency of results is partially explained by changes in technological, organizational, and environmental statuses. Therefore, factors explaining traditional IT adoption may not justify RFID adoption and should be revisited and revalidated. In addition, given the ongoing importance of RFID, it is very important to identify the unique factors that contribute to the likelihood of adopting RFID. In this study, an organizational RFID adoption model is proposed and empirically tested by a survey using a sample of 865 senior executives in U. S. hospitals. The model posits that three categories of factors, technology push, need pull, and decision maker characteristics, determine the likelihood of adopting RFID within organizations. The relationships between those three categories and the likelihood of adopting RFID are strengthened or weakened by organizational readiness. This study may serve as the theoretical and empirical basis for research on other forms of ubiquitous and embedded computing systems.

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