This diploma thesis deals with evaluation methods of athletic multicontests, especially man decathlon. The main aim of the work is to analyze thoroughly a contemporary way of classification of points that has been used since 1984 and then propose new methods to modify or substitute the contemporary way of classification if needed. The main criterion for evaluation will be the equal way of classification of all disciplines. These methods are described in the theoretical part of the work and they are divided into mere adjustments of current curves for particular disciplines and methods drown from multicriterion evaluation of options. In the practical part, these methods are applied on real results, specifically on 100 best decathlons in history and on the last Olympic race. A specific evaluation of the application results emanates from the results of the application as well as final recommendation.

With the advent of the internet and the development of Information and Communication technology, new reinvented forms of Trade Promotion Organizations have emerged. The globalization of today’s trading environment has forced economies to prioritize the development of the export competitiveness of their SMEs sector, as to be able to survive amidst the fierce global competition. The digital economy has created new means and channels of overcoming barriers of trade faced by SMEs due to their size and limited resources. To this end the International trade center has launched the Global Trade Point Network in 1993. The objective of this new electronic form of TPO is to assist firms in developing countries to explore business opportunities effectively by providing them with targeted market information and facilitating exporting procedures at a relatively low cost. With the expanding number of interconnected Trade Points, The GTPNet is rising to be the main global network for trade-related information streams. This study explored the extent of usefulness of these trade points in providing SMEs with real export opportunities as well as boosting their export competitiveness in Egypt, due to it being the one country with the highest number of operating trade points. The study used a mixed sequential methodology, combining both a semi structured interview based qualitative analysis followed by a questionnaire based large scale survey. This study was built around the theory of stages of internationalization, to reflect the fact that SMEs in the new evolving digital environment, are still in need of acquiring export market knowledge throughout the different stages of the internationalization process through secondary sources. Export market-knowledge as a firm resource boosts its competitive position and in turn to increased commitment to the export operation. On a theoretical level, a perceived usefulness construct for International trade points has been developed using exploratory factor analysis that paves the way to empirical tests of the different recommendations in the export promotion literature. The domain incorporates a new factor pertinent to the unique nature of International trade points, as being dependent on an electronic matching system supported by a global network, the proposed definition and usefulness of International trade points provides a conceptual framework in an area where little prior research has been conducted. Based on the findings, Egyptian Small and Medium Enterprises did not appreciate this new developed service due to their lack of e-readiness and resilience to engage in this process. From a practical perspective, the study has supported the findings of previous empirical studies, that pointed out that Export promotion Organizations are not targeting the real potential disadvantaged firms as committed exporters with high export intensity were the main recipients of successful trading opportunities through International Trade Points, as well as the ones that perceived these governmental sponsored organizations to be more useful. Moreover, the study revealed the shortcomings in the performance of International trade points, which are to a great extent attributable to their inefficient governmental organizational and managerial structure.

M.Tech. / This study aimed to determine the difference between the standard dry needling technique versus the rapid dry needling technique with regards to which technique would provide quicker relief of symptoms, as measured by an increase in participant’s pressure tolerance and range of motion and a decrease in subjective pain. Subjectively it was seen that both groups had a statistical decrease in the participants perceived pain with the Oswestry Disability Index, the McGill’s Pain Questionnaire and the Numeral Pain Rating Scale. Both groups showed significant changes over the two time variables (pre-Treatment one and post-Treatment four) with regards to all the questionnaires. Group 2 showed the most significant change when comparing the two groups with regards to the Oswestry Disability Index and the Numeral Pain Rating Scale. From these results it is seen that subjectively all the participants felt relief with respect to their perceived pain. However, objectively the rapid dry needling technique proved to improve pain faster and more consistently throughout the treatment period over the standard intra-muscular dry needling technique. Therefore the rapid dry needling technique is more effective in treating active Gluteus medius muscle trigger points.

The acceptance-rejection algorithm is often used to sample from non-standard distributions. For this algorithm to be efficient, however, the user has to create a hat function that majorizes and closely matches the density of the distribution to be sampled from. There are many methods for automatically creating such hat functions, but these methods require that the user transforms the density so that she knows the exact location of the transformed density's inflection points. In this paper, we propose an acceptancerejection algorithm which obviates this need and can thus be used to sample from a larger class of distributions. / Series: Research Report Series / Department of Statistics and Mathematics

The aim of this thesis is to estimate monthly probability that the Czech economy is in a recession. For this purpose, I construct indexes of coincident and leading variables from multiple time series by Maximum Likelihood. Changes in coincident index are preceded by changes in the leading index by almost one year for peaks and about one month for troughs on average. To assess the probability of recession, I estimate multiple mixture models for growth rates of coincident index focusing on Markov-Switching specification for the latent business cycle process. I found that the two-state Markov-Switching AR (1) is superior to other models based on information criteria. Lagged values of leading index further improve the model fit but the model provides less clear signals of recessions compared to models based solely on coincident index.

A popularização do GPS tem gerado uma massiva quantidade de dados que são organizados em trajetórias geográficas. Trajetórias geográficas são sequências ordenadas de coordenadas geográficas que representam um caminho de um objeto móvel. Para melhorar a compreensão destas trajetórias, são detectados locais de maior importância que são chamados de pontos de permanência, que indicam que um usuário permaneceu neste local por um tempo significativo. Pontos de permanência são comumente transformados em vértices de redes geolocalizadas para facilitar a mineração de trajetórias, a transformação é feita agrupando pontos geograficamente próximos. Porém, é pouco discutido na literatura a qualidade destas redes. Portanto, este projeto aborda esta lacuna e apresenta duas novas abordagens para construção de redes sociais geolocalizadas a partir de pontos de permanência. A abordagem proposta utiliza a fase de contração do paradigma multinível para realizar a transformação de pontos de permanência em vértices de redes. A fase de contração contrai uma rede original iterativamente até ser obtida uma rede solução, a contração leva em conta a estrutura topológica da rede. Os resultados mostram que as novas abordagens conseguem representar com maior precisão, por meio de redes geolocalizadas, o mundo real. / The popularization of GPS has generated a massive amount of geographic data organized in raw trajectories. Raw trajectories are ordered sequences of geographic coordinates that represent a path of a moving object. To improve the understanding of raw trajectories, important places, referred to as stay points, are detected. They indicate that a user has remained in this correspondent place for a significant time. Stay points are commonly turned into vertices of location-based networks to facilitate trajectory mining, the turning into vertices is done by grouping geographically close points. Nonetheless, to the best of our knowledge, there is a lack of studies addressing the quality of these networks. This piece of research addresses this gap and presents two new approaches to using stay points for building location-based social networks. The proposed approach uses the contraction phase of the multilevel partitioning to turned stay points into vertices. The contraction phase contracts an original network iteratively until a solution network is obtained, the contraction is done considering the topological structure of the network. The results show that the new approaches are able to represent more accurately, through location-based networks, the real world.

Reza a literatura neo-institucionalista que as normas que regem um processo decisório terão grande influência sobre o resultado final. Isto vale também para Assembleia Nacional Constituinte de 1987-1988. Não fosse assim um agrupamento de parlamentares descontentes com o andamento dos trabalhos constituintes não teria insurgido com uma proposta para a reformulação do Regimento Interno após quase um ano de funcionamento. Entender a importância do arcabouço institucional para as disputas políticas e o resultado final da ANC éa questão central desta dissertação. Desta forma, pretende-seresponder a seguinte pergunta: quais os efeitos tanto das normas que regularam o processo de formação/convocação da ANC, quanto do seu regimento que foi alterado ao longo dos trabalhos sobre o resultado final? O modelo de constituinte aprovado na convocação (congressual e não exclusiva) e o formato dos trabalhos constituintes (descentralização em subcomissões e comissões temáticas) foram amplamente contestados e disputados pelas consequências que os atores políticos antecipavam ou projetavam sobre elas. Os atores políticos sempre sabem que regras afetam resultados. Resta saber se eles sempre anteciparam corretamentee, para tanto, é possívelatentar para como eles se comportaram. Com o intuito de aprofundar o debate sobre a interação estratégica noprocesso constituinte, são analisadas as votações nominais no plenário da Constituinte para compreender como atores coletivos organizam preferências, reunindo maiorias em disputas políticas radicalizadas. / According to the new institutionalist literature, the rules regulating a decision making process play great influence on its final result. Thisassumption applies to the 1987-1988 National Constituent Assembly (NCA). Otherwise, a group of legislators dissatisfied with the works course would not have risen with a proposal to reform the Internal Rules after two years of Assembly. The main goal of this work is tocomprehend the importance of the institutional structure for the political contests and the final result of the NCA. Thus, I aim to answer the following question: what are the effects of the rules regulating the convocation of the NCA, as well as the rules regulating its works which have changed during theprocess on the final results? The constitution-making design approved at the beginning (a congressional one instead of an exclusive one) and the organization form of the works (decentralized in thematic commissions) were largely contested because of the consequences political actors were anticipating and looking forward to, since they are always aware of the rule´s impact. The question is whether or not they anticipated it correctly, and for such it is possible to watch how they have behaved. Attempting to deepen the debate about strategic interaction on the constitutional process, the roll calls will be analyzed in order to understand how collective actors organize their preferences, building majorities in radicalized political contests.

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Avec l'évolution des dispositifs d'acquisition 3D, les nuages de points sont maintenant devenus une représentation essentielle des scènes numérisées. Les systèmes récents sont capables de capturer plusieurs centaines de millions de points en une seule acquisition. Comme plusieurs acquisitions sont nécessaires pour capturer la géométrie de scènes de grande taille, un site historique par exemple, nous obtenons des nuages de points massifs, i.e., composés de plusieurs milliards de points. Dans cette thèse, nous nous intéressons à la structuration et à la manipulation de nuages de points issus d'acquisitions générées à partir de LiDARs terrestres. A partir de la structure de chaque acquisition, des graphes, représentant chacun la connectivité locale de la surface numérisée, sont construits. Les graphes créés sont ensuite liés entre eux afin d'obtenir une représentation globale de la surface capturée. Nous montrons que cette structure est particulièrement adaptée à la manipulation de la surface sous-jacente aux nuages de points massifs, même sur des ordinateurs ayant une mémoire limitée. Notamment, nous montrons que cette structure permet de traiter deux problèmes spécifiques à ce type de données. Un premier lié au ré-échantillonnage de nuages de points, en générant des distributions de bonne qualité en termes de bruit bleu grâce à un algorithme d'échantillonnage en disques de Poisson. Un autre lié à la construction de diagrammes de Voronoï centroïdaux, permettant l'amélioration de la qualité des distributions générées, ainsi que la reconstruction de maillages triangulaires. / With the evolution of 3D acquisition devices, point clouds have now become an essential representation of digitized scenes. Recent systems are able to capture several hundreds of millions of points in a single acquisition. As multiple acquisitions are necessary to capture the geometry of large-scale scenes, a historical site for example, we obtain massive point clouds, i.e., composed of billions of points. In this thesis, we are interested in the structuration and manipulation of point clouds from acquisitions generated by terrestrial LiDARs. From the structure of each acquisition, graphs, each representing the local connectivity of the digitized surface, are constructed. Created graphs are then linked together to obtain a global representation of the captured surface. We show that this structure is particularly adapted to the manipulation of the underlying surface of massive point clouds, even on computers with limited memory. Especially, we show that this structure allow to deal with two problems specific to that kind of data. A first one linked to the resampling of point clouds, by generating distributions of good quality in terms of blue noise thanks to a Poisson disk sampling algorithm. Another one connected to the construction of centroidal Voronoi tessellations, allowing to enhance the quality of generated distributions and to reconstruct triangular meshes.

Thesis (M. Sc. (Soil Science)) -- University of Limpopo, 2019 / Water scarcity poses significant risks to global food security. The use of treated wastewater for irrigation could be a sustainable remedy for water scarcity in arid to semi-arid regions. Furthermore, it has been the most readily available source of water which can serve as an adaptation strategy to shortage of irrigation water. The objectives of the study were to determine (1) whether different disposal points following wastewater treatment could have effects on the quality of treated wastewater used for irrigation at the University of Limpopo (UL) experimental farm and (2) the response of selected critical nutrients, microbial and enzyme activities on soils irrigated with treated wastewater at the UL Experimental Farm. Water samples were collected monthly at three disposal points, namely, the exit point of treated wastewater from the treatment plant (Pond 16), the entry point into the night-dam and the exit point from the night-dam at the UL Experimental Farm. The water samples were analysed for pH, electrical conductivity (EC), sodium (Na), nitrate (NO3-), phosphate (PO42-), sulphate (SO42-), salinity, magnesium (Mg), calcium (Ca), potassium (K), chlorine (Cl), total dissolved solids (TDS), total soluble salts (TSS), lead (Pb), copper (Cu), cadmium (Cd), zinc (Zn), Ascaris lumbricoides, Escherichia coli, Shigella spp., Salmonella spp. and Vibrio cholera. A field experiment was conducted on a separate 4-ha virgin field (VF), cultivated field (CF) and fallowed field (FF), with soil samples collected from 0- 5, 5-15 and 15-30 cm soil depth in each field and analysed for pH, EC, mineralisable P, NH4+, NO3-, organic carbon (OC), active carbon (AC), potential mineralized nitrogen (PMN), fluorescein diacetate (FDA) and phosphatase (PTS) enzyme activity. All data were subjected to ANOVA using Statistix 10.1. The treated wastewater had, at the three sampling points, significantly different EC, Na, NO3-, PO42-, SO42-, Cu, Zn, Shigella spp., V. cholerae, A. lumbricoides and E. coli, whereas salinity, pH, Mg, Ca, K, Cl and Cd were not affected by the sampling point. Generally, the night-dam entry and exit points had significant increases in PO42-, K and Ca when compared to Pond 16 exit. In contrast, the flow of wastewater from Pond 16 through the furrow to the entry and exit of the night-dam resulted in decreases of Na, NO3- and Cl. The exit point of water from the night-dam at UL Experimental Farm had the least harmful materials, rendering it the safest point with the best water quality for irrigation. In the field study, NH4+, NO3- and PMN were significantly different in soil depth. However, NO3- field × depth interaction effects were not significantly different. In contrast to all soil parameters, FDA and PTS activity for both soil depth and field × depth interaction effects were highly significantly different. The EC and pH were not affected by soil depth or field type. The negative effects of treated wastewater were mainly observed in the cultivated field. In conclusion, treated wastewater with fallowing could be used as the best approach to overcome water shortages, with the uses having the potential to reduce the need to apply high synthetic chemical fertilisers. Keywords: water reuse, disposal points, essential nutrients, microbial activities