The aim of this thesis is to consider the operation of dredge pump and design new technology of slag removal including return on investment calculation. The operation optimization itself was preceded by analysis of present technology, data collection, calculation of pressure losses and pinpointing the causes of their origin. Subsequently, the measures to elimination of losses were deduced and these measures were implemented into optimization of dredge pump operation itself. The return on investment into the new technology of slag removal is calculated in the last chapter, considering its feasibility in the heating plant.

The subject of this thesis is to simulate the energy balance of the two new buildings, classic brick buildings and light wood construction. On the basis of these simulations are compared effects of various parameters of insulation including panels for building openings on heat loss, energy efficiency cooling and solar gains. Energy simulations were performed with TRNSYS 16_1.

This master´s thesis deals with insulation of the house and it's costs. First part describes the energy performance of building, different methods of thermal insulation and types of thermal isolation. This thesis evaluates the influence of thermal insulation of residential building design for expenses associated with operating the property. This thesis uncludes thermal technical assessment of the condition of the house and then heat the assessment of the options for the thermal insulation on its economic return. In conclusion, the assessment of individual variants insulation is calculated as a simple payback period and the effect on price of this house.

The thesis deals with the assessment of the current proposal for pension envelopes along with proposing alternative plans with emphasis on reducing heating costs. The first section describes the types of buildings according to heating demand and output energy performance of buildings. Work also deals with a list of different variants of thermal insulation materials and design options outer insulation of the building envelope. It outlines fire characteristics of building materials and options of construction budget. The second part is devoted to a specific pension house in the Old Rejviz for which there are designed in three variants of insulation. These variants are then reviewed in terms of thermal insulation. Through research will bedetermined price of implementation of proposed insulation options together with the costs of operation of the pension. The conclusion is to evaluate each proposed version of insulation of the building envelope associated with the economic return on investment.

The aim of this thesis is to compare economic investment in passive houses and conventional construction of a house. Furthermore, this thesis is focused on introducing problematics connected to construction of passive house, main characteristics, differences in used materials including review of advantages and disadvantages of their implementation. Assessment is based on return ability of initial investments generated by lowering operational costs. Main part of this thesis is aimed on compression of costs both before and in use of a house.

Variety of training models are used in large retail organizations in South Carolina. Large retail organizations have leaders educating their employees using multiple methods of training without regard as to how adults learn. Leadership of large retail organizations in South Carolina may be investing in training materials, concepts, and facilitation methods that may not have substantive impact on known performance metrics. Knowles' theory of andragogy has been at the forefront of adult education theory as it has led many researchers to explore new methods for adults to learn effectively. A quasi-experimental study was designed to determine if an andragogy based training models have influenced performance of employees measured by existing performance indicators. The data were collected from a t sample of 715 employees before and after an andragogy style training was administered. The data analysis, using paired t-test. showed significant variance in all three dependent variable metrics. Sales and credit card percent to goal metrics showed negative variance and item locate metric showed a positive variance thus providing quantifiable data from andragogy-style training. This study addressed the gap in the literature regarding the effectiveness of training adults using adult-learner methods and has the potential to contribute to positive social change by affecting the culture of how employers in large retail organizations are training their employees. Management for large retail organizations could find a higher return on investment the training as well as increased morale; while increasing retailer profits and potentially increasing career advancement opportunities and merit increases.

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Studien syftar till att undersöka risker som fastighetsföretag exponeras mot vid ett fastighetsförvärv. Arbetet undersöker även om deras riskexponering ökar i samband med olika marknadsfinansieringar. Tidigare studier har behandlat förhållandet mellan risk och avkastning vid fastighetsinvesteringar, strategier vid fastighetsinvesteringar, den geografisk inverkan på fastighetsinvesteringar samt risk och osäkerhet på fastighetsmarknaden. Syftet med arbetet är att kombinera tidigare forskning för att bygga nya dimensioner genom att sammanfoga marknadsfinansieringar och risker på den svenska fastighetsmarknaden, för att vidare analysera dem. Studien är uppbyggd utifrån en kvalitativ metodinsamling. Resultatet av rapporten påvisar hur risken hos bolagen har ökat i första kvartalet 2022, främst på grund av ränteökningen, vilket kommer leda till ökade finansieringskostnader, tajta marginaler, samt svårighet att få tag på finansiering. Eftersom marknadsfinansieringen i Sverige är så pass ung är det oklart hur den kommer påverkas av en lågkonjunktur. Större bolag med goda relationer med bank och finansiärer, samt stabila kassaflöden kommer ha fortsatt god tillgång till finansiering, men mindre bolag kommer ha det svårare att hitta finansiering. / This thesis aims to analyze and investigate risks to which real estate companies are exposed to in a property acquisition. Furthermore, to investigate whether their risk exposure increases in connection with various capital market financing. Previous studies have examined the relationship between risk and return on real estate investments, strategies for real estate investments, geographical impact on real estate investments and risk and uncertainty in real estate markets. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to combine these dimensions in order to investigate and analyze them further. This study uses qualitative data collection. Results show that the risk that companies face have increased in the first quarter of 2022, the increase in interest rates will lead to increased financing costs, smaller margins, and an increased difficulty of finding financing. Since capital market financing is relatively young in Sweden, it is unclear how it will fare during a recession. Larger companies with a good relationship to the banks and other financiers, with good cash flow will have continued good access to financing, but smaller companies will have a harder time finding financing.

Many projects exist whose purpose is to augment raw data with annotations that increase the usefulness of the data. The number of these projects is rapidly growing and in the age of “big data” the amount of data to be annotated is likewise growing within each project. One common use of such data is in supervised machine learning, which requires labeled data to train a predictive model. Annotation is often a very expensive proposition, particularly for structured data. The purpose of this dissertation is to explore methods of reducing the cost of creating such data sets, including annotated text corpora.We focus on active learning to address the annotation problem. Active learning employs models trained using machine learning to identify instances in the data that are most informative and least costly. We introduce novel techniques for adapting vanilla active learning to situations wherein data instances are of varying benefit and cost, annotators request work “on-demand,” and there are multiple, fallible annotators of differing levels of accuracy and cost. In order to account for data instances of varying cost, we build a model of cost from real annotation data based on a user study. We also introduce a novel cost-conscious active learning algorithm which we call return-on-investment, that selects instances for annotation that contain the most benefit per unit cost. To address the issue of annotators that request instances “on-demand,” we develop a parallel, “no-wait” framework that performs computation while the annotator is annotating. As a result, annotators need not wait for the computer to determine the best instance for them to annotate—a common problem with existing approaches. Finally, we introduce a Bayesian model designed to simultaneously infer ground truth annotations from noisy annotations, infer each individual annotators accuracy, and predict its own accuracy on unseen data, without the use of a held-out set. We extend ROI-based active learning and our annotation framework to handle multiple annotators using this model. As a whole, our work shows that the techniques introduced in this dissertation reduce the cost of annotation in scenarios that are more true-to-life than previous research.

This study analyzes if there is a connection between ESG - which stands for Environmental, Social and Governance, and stock returns over time. The study also analyzes how integrating ESG can impact a company's competitiveness long term. This is done by researching the following two research questions:  How can a multiple regression model be formulated to determine if there is a connection between ESG and stock returns? How are companies integrating ESG and sustainability practices and what are the benefits of doing so? The first question was answered by performing a regression analysis on ESG factors reported on Nordic stocks and determining if the dependent variable ROI could be explained by these. The second question was answered by conducting a literature review and interviews with relevant actors. The results from the multiple regression analysis showed a low adjusted R2 of 0.23 which implied that there is no clear relationship between ESG factors and ROI. The literature review shows that there are positive outcomes associated with a company being sustainable that are not directly related to the financial yield. The interviews examined how different companies are integrating ESG and sustainability work into their business practice to achieve long term competitiveness while also complying with regulations coming from the EU. In conclusion, there is no clear relationship between ESG and stock return, and the focus with ESG lies within ensuring that a company integrates sustainability to keep a competitive spot in the market and reduce risk, while also reducing their environmental and social impact. / Denna studie undersöker om det finns en koppling mellan ESG - vilket står för Environmental, Social and Governance, och avkastning över tid. Studien analyserar även hur integreringen av ESG kan påverka ett företags konkurrenskraft på lång sikt. Detta görs genom att undersöka följande två frågor:  Hur kan en multipel regressionsmodell formuleras för att avgöra om det finns en koppling mellan ESG faktorer och aktiers avkastning? Hur integrerar företag ESG och hållbarhetsprinciper och vilka fördelar för detta med sig? Den första frågan besvarades genom att genomföra en regressionsanalys på ESG faktorer som hade rapporterats för Nordiska börsnoterade bolag och avgöra om den beroende variabeln total avkastning (ROI) kunde förklaras av dessa faktorer. Den andra frågan besvarades genom att genomföra en litteraturstudie och genomföra intervjuer med relevanta aktörer. Regressionsanalysen hade en låg tillförlitlighet och visade på att det inte fanns några tydliga kopplingar mellan ESG-faktorer och avkastningen. Resultatet från litteraturstudien visar att det finns positiva effekter av ESG som inte är kopplade till finansiella mått. Intervjuerna visar på att företag integrerar ESG i sitt arbete för att behålla sin konkurrenskraft på marknaden. Sammanfattningsvis så finns det ingen tydlig koppling mellan ESG-faktorer och aktiers avkastning, och fokus med ESG bör snarare vara att se till att företag arbetar hållbart för att behålla sin del av marknaden, minska risk och samtidigt minska sin påverkan på klimatet.