With the invention of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin in 2009, the world's first blockchain application was developed. While academic research gradually begins to investigate cryptocurrencies more closely and attempt to understand their functioning, technology is rapidly evolving and ecosystems grow exponentially. The research is still scattered and chaotic and has not produced common guidelines. Therefore, the question remains: how sustainable cryptocurrencies and their digital ecosystems are.Only a few models and frameworks take a holistic view on digital sustainability. Only two frameworks were identified that take distributed ledger technologies (blockchain) or cryptocurrencies into consideration: the three governance strategies for digital sustainability of Linkov et al. (2018) and 10 basic conditions of sustainable digital artifacts according to Stuermer, Abu-Tayeh and Myrach (2016). These two frameworks were combined into a new integrated sustainability framework for cryptocurrencies. The developed integrated sustainability framework consists of four dimensions and 12 categories.Existing secondary data, self-conducted social media interviews and practical insights gained through an ASIC mining experiment were used to fill the framework with sufficient data. It confirms Bitcoin's sustainability problems in energy consumption and scalability, highlights Ethereum's great potential as a blockchain platform and explains the higher scalability and faster payment of Ripple and IOTA.While 2017 marked the temporary peak of the cryptocurrency hype, 2018 was a transformative year in which the leading cryptocurrencies were increasingly occupying more specialised niches.

Submitted by Maicon Juliano Schmidt (maicons) on 2015-04-24T17:16:42Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Daniel Pedro Puffal.pdf: 1357318 bytes, checksum: e4666cd76289f185cb65c0d7c416ddc3 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2015-04-24T17:16:42Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Daniel Pedro Puffal.pdf: 1357318 bytes, checksum: e4666cd76289f185cb65c0d7c416ddc3 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011-03-30 / CAPES - Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / A interação entre a academia e a indústria tem sido apresentada como um importante mecanismo para o desenvolvimento tecnológico das empresas, regiões e países. Com objetivo de contribuir para a compreensão e o esclarecimento das características da interação universidade-empresa e a relação com o desempenho tecnológico das empresas brasileiras, este trabalho busca identificar se os determinantes da interação universidade-empresa e os tipos de interação influenciam no desempenho relativo à inovação tecnológica em produtos e processos das empresas, além de verificar se estas características são distintas para as empresas instaladas no estado do Rio Grande do Sul. A partir da apresentação dos conceitos centrais ao estudo, da descrição do sistema de inovação brasileiro e da estrutura do sistema de inovação do estado do Rio Grande do Sul, utilizando-se uma base de dados constituída exclusivamente por empresas que desenvolveram interação com universidades ou institutos de pesquisa, as análises foram realizadas com a utilização de estatística descritiva, regressão logística e teste de médias e variâncias. Confirmou-se a hipótese de que o tipo de interação universidade-empresa apresenta relação com o desempenho tecnológico relativo à inovação em produtos e processos das empresas brasileiras. As evidências apontam que, empresas que atribuem maior importância às interações que utilizam informações técnicas como fontes de informação têm menores chances de introduzir produtos novos para o mercado nacional. Por sua vez, aquelas que atribuem maior importância para interações com informações sobre patentes apresentam maiores possibilidades de introduzirem produtos e processos novos para mercado mundial. Por outro lado, as evidências também indicam que interações com objetivo de acessar recursos da universidade ou instituto de pesquisa não aumentam a probabilidade de inovação em produtos e processos. Os resultados também indicam que as razões das empresas para estabelecer uma interação com universidades ou institutos de pesquisa, não apresentam relação significativa com os resultados das empresas em relação à introdução de inovação em produtos ou processos. O estudo ainda indicou que os determinantes da interação: tamanho da empresa, a intensidade de P&D, e o setor industrial guardam alguma relação com seu desempenho tecnológico, enquanto que o financiamento público não apresentou uma relação significativa. Já para as empresas localizadas no estado do Rio Grande do Sul o estudo indica que essas têm comportamento semelhante as do restante do país, pois não foram encontradas diferenças significativas nas médias e variâncias, apenas foi constatado que no RS as empresas têm significativamente maior média de introdução de inovações em processos para o mercado nacional, contudo não apresenta ligação direta com a interação universidade-empresa. O trabalho apresenta, como contribuição para o tema estudado, uma forma alternativa à utilização da informação relativa a gastos com P&D como proxy para intensidade de P&D, propondo uma nova composta pelo número de empregados em P&D, definição de atividade contínua ou não e existência de setor de P&D na empresa. Outra contribuição é a proposição de uma taxonomia para análise dos tipos de interação universidade-empresa, composta por três tipos: interações com uso de informação técnica, interação com uso de recursos da universidade ou instituto de pesquisa, e interação com uso de informações sobre patentes. / The academy-industry interaction has been presented as an important mechanism for firms, regions and countries technological development. Aiming to contribute to the understanding and clarification of the academy-industry interaction characteristics and its relation with the technological performance of Brazilian firms, this study attempts to identify whether the determinants of academy-industry interaction and the types of interactions influence on the relative performance to the technological innovation in products and processes of firms, besides verifying whether these features are distinct for the firms located in the state of Rio Grande do Sul. From the presentation of the central concepts or the study, the description of the Brazilian innovation system and the structure of the innovation system of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, using a database consisting exclusively of firms that have developed interaction with universities or research institutes, the analysis were done using descriptive statistics, logistic regression and means and variances tests. It was confirmed the hypothesis that the type of academy-industry interaction is correlated with the technological performance related to the innovation in products and processes of Brazilian firms. The evidences indicate that firms that assign more importance to the interaction techniques that use technical information as information sources are less likely to introduce new products to the local market. In turn, those who assign greater importance to interactions with information about patents present higher probabilities of introducing new products and processes for the world market. On the other hand, the evidences also indicate that interactions aiming to access physical resources of the university or research institute do not increase the likelihood probability of innovation in products and processes. The results also indicate that the reasons for the firms to establish an interaction with universities or research institutes have no significant relation with the firms results in relation to the introduction of innovative products or processes. The study also indicated that the interaction determinants: firm size, the R&D intensity, and the industry have some association with their technological performance, whereas public funding did not show a significant relationship. As for firms located in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, the study indicates that these behave like the rest of the country, since there were no significant differences in mean and variance, it was only found that in the RS the firms have significantly higher mean of introduction of processes innovations to the local market, however it has no direct connection with the academy-industry interactions. The paper presents as a contribution to the topic understudy, an alternative to the use of the information relating to R&D expenditure as a proxy for the R&D intensity, proposing a new one consisted by the number of R&D employees, existence of continuous R&D activity or not and existence of R&D department in the firm. Another contribution is the propose of a taxonomy for the analysis of the academy-industry interactions types, consisting of three types: interactions with the use of technical information, interaction with the use of physical resources of the university or research institute, and interaction with the use of information about patents.

SRAM-based FPGAs provide valuable computation resources and reconfigurability; however, ionizing radiation can cause designs operating on these devices to fail. The sensitivity of an FPGA design to configuration upsets, or its SEU sensitivity, is an indication of a design's failure rate. SEU mitigation techniques can reduce the SEU sensitivity of FPGA designs in harsh radiation environments. The reliability benefits of these techniques must be determined before they can be used in mission-critical applications and can be determined by comparing the SEU sensitivity of an FPGA design with and without these techniques applied to it. Many approaches can be taken to evaluate the SEU sensitivity of an FPGA design. This work describes a low-cost easier-to-implement approach for evaluating the SEU sensitivity of an FPGA design. This approach uses additional logic resources on the same FPGA as the design under test to determine when the design has failed, or deviated from its specified behavior. Three SEU mitigation techniques were evaluated using this approach: triple modular redundancy (TMR), configuration scrubbing, and user-memory scrubbing. Significant reduction in SEU sensitivity is demonstrated through fault injection and radiation testing. Two LEON3 processors operating in lockstep are compared against each other using on-chip error detection logic on the same FPGA. The design SEU sensitivity is reduced by 27x when TMR and configuration scrubbing are applied, and by approximately 50x when TMR, configuration scrubbing, and user-memory scrubbing are applied together. Using this approach, an SEU sensitivity comparison is made of designs implemented on both an Altera Stratix V FPGA and a Xilinx Kintex 7 FPGA. Several instances of a finite state machine are compared against each other and a set of golden output vectors, all on the same FPGA. Instances of an AES cryptography core are chained together and the output of two chains are compared using on-chip error detection. Fault injection and neutron radiation testing reveal several similarities between the two FPGA architectures. SEU mitigation techniques reduce the SEU sensitivity of the two designs between 4x and 728x. Protecting on-chip functional error detection logic with TMR and duplication with compare (DWC) is compared. Fault injection results suggest that it is more favorable to protect on-chip functional error detection logic with DWC than it is to protect it with TMR for error detection.

The competitive environment of the 21st century, failure of U.S. companies, and the financial crisis of 2008 have moved leadership expectations to the forefront of research. However, there is a lack of empirical research about organizational reporting outcomes of self-identified servant leadership (SL) organizations compared to self-identified nonservant (non-SL) organizations. Guided by Greenleaf's SL theory, the purpose of this study was to compare information on organizational data for triple bottom line (TBL) reporting outcomes in SL organizations and non-SL organizations. Using causal comparative research design and global reporting initiative data with a sample of 12 organization reports, reporting outcomes were compared from 6 SL and 6 non-SL organizations. The independent variables were SL and non-SL organizations. The dependent variables were TBL outcomes (social, financial, and environmental) with 55 intervening variables such as economic impact, greenhouse gas emissions, and human rights. Data analysis included descriptive statistics such as comparative analysis of the total and average of reporting outcomes and inferential statistics such as t tests. Findings of the study showed no statistically significant differences existed between TBL reporting outcomes of SL and non-SL organizations. Implications for positive social change lie in the focus on humanism in leadership in which organizational reports provide reliable outcome data for future community building and influence on social good.

Hospital administrators face challenges that arise from environmental factors or psychosocial factors, and lack resources to deliver valuable medical services to stakeholders, including patients and employees. A multicase study served to explore experiences and gain a broader perspective of hospital administrators' use of strategies to optimize patient services. Ten hospital administrators from acute care hospitals in Nevada and California were purposefully selected from the population of hospital managers with a minimum of 2 years of documented experience in successfully implementing management strategies to improve patient services. The conceptual framework was Drucker's management theory. Data were collected from semistructured interviews with 10 administrators, from the participants' archival documents, and from hospital archives. Interview transcripts and data from multiple hospital locations were coded and analyzed using methodological triangulation. Five themes identified from data analysis were triple-aim strategy, evidence-based practice, lean methodology, public health strategy, and innovation strategy. Implementing the appropriate strategy in each hospital setting might facilitate identification of elements that are lacking, mitigating, or slowing down the hospital improvement process. The findings of this study might contribute to positive social change by creating platforms for sharing information among patients and providers, payors, pharmacies, and policymakers.

This dissertation studies the effects of radiation-induced single-event upsets (SEUs) on digital signal processing (DSP) systems designed for field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). It presents a novel method for evaluating the effects of radiation on DSP and digital communication systems. By using an application-specific measurement of performance in the presence of SEUs, this dissertation demonstrates that only 5-15% of SEUs affecting a communications receiver (i.e. 5-15% of sensitive SEUs) cause critical performance loss. It also reports that the most critical SEUs are those that affect the clock, global reset, and most significant bits (MSBs) of computation. This dissertation also demonstrates reduced-precision redundancy (RPR) as an effective and efficient alternative to the popular triple modular redundancy (TMR) for FPGA-based communications systems. Fault injection experiments show that RPR can improve the failure rate of a communications system by over 20 times over the unmitigated system at a cost less than half that of TMR by focusing on the critical SEUs. This dissertation contrasts the cost and performance of three different variations of RPR, one of which is a novel variation developed here, and concludes that the variation referred to as "Threshold RPR" is superior to the others for FPGA systems. Finally, this dissertation presents several methods for applying Threshold RPR to a system with the goal of reducing mitigation cost and increasing the system performance in the presence of SEUs. Additional fault injection experiments show that optimizing the application of RPR can result in a decrease in critical SEUs by as much 65% at no additional hardware cost.

This thesis consists of seven chapters. Chapter 1 is an introduction to the infinite products. Here we provide a proof for representing sine function as an infinite product. This chapter also describes the notation used throughout the thesis as well as the method used to prove the identities. Each of the other chapters may be read independently, however some chapters assume familiarity with the Jacobi triple product identity. Chapter 2 is about the Jacobi triple product identity as well as several implications of this identity. In Chapter 3 the quintuple product identity and some of its special cases are derived. Even though there are many known proofs of this identity since 1916 when it was first discovered, the proof presented in this chapter is new. Some beautiful formulas in number theory are derived at the end of this chapter. The simplest two dimensional example of the Macdonald identity, A2, is investigated in full detail in Chapter 4. Ian Macdonald first outlined the proof for this identity in 1972 but omitted many of the details hence making his work hard to follow. In Chapters 5 and 6 we somewhat deviate from the method which uses the two specializations to evaluate the constant term and prove Winquist's identity and Macdonald's identity for G2. Some of the work involved in proving G2 identity is new. Finally in Chapter 7 we discuss the work presented with some concluding remarks as well as underlining the possibilities for the future research. Throughout the thesis we point to the relevant papers in this area which might provide different strategies for proving above identities.

<p>The purpose of this Master's Thesis is to investigate the outlooks for a seed stage venture capital fund investing in biotechnology-related spinouts from public research to be established in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Germany. Recommendations on how to improve any discovered deficits of the fund's prerequisites are also to be presented. </p><p>Analyses showed that the spinout potential of the research in the region is weak. The entrepreneurial prerequisites of the researchers, in terms of previous experience, business knowledge and a track record that would vouch for them being suitable entrepreneurs, are generally poor. Nor is there sufficient industry in the region to facilitate the establishment of and subsequent businesses for the spinouts. The seed fund must therefore provide any future portfolio ventures with a substantial amount of Hands-on Management. </p><p>To improve the prerequisites for the seed fund, PVA-MV must influence the researchers'attitude towards spinouts and make the monetary gains more visible. The researchers must be imbued with a business approach in their research and PVA-MV must market its services as being the intermediary of government, universities and industry and as being able to create opportunities for researchers as well as for industry. PVA-MV should also focus on the few institutes and individual researchers that do have some favourable entrepreneurial characteristics, in order to evoke professional entrepreneurs with a forming track record. To cope with the deficient prerequisites of the fund, PVA-MV must expand the competence of its own work force and focus on the rate of return rather than on building regional infrastructure pro bono as a governmental agency.</p>

<p>In spite of Sweden´s lack of formal regions, the country is evolving towards regional administrations. The regional level are to a growing extent viewed as important bases for economic growth and development. The concept of the triple helix implies that interaction between the public sector, the industry and universities is a source to economic and social development. Research has though implied that the interaction between the triple helix actors could be problematic from a multi-level governance perspective. It has been shown that since the institutional setting is horizontal and vertical fragmented, cooperation between different institutions and actors becomes difficult. In year 2005-2006 the Värmland region was one of fourteen regions in twelve countries that was included in a OECD project, that was a response to the multiplicity of initiatives across the OECD countries concerning regional development. In the report that evolved from the project actors in Värmland was recommended to improve the cooperation concerning regional development in the county. This thesis investigates the cooperation between the triple helix actors for regional growth and development in the Värmland region 1998-2008. My research questions are: Is there evidence of a lack of cooperation between the university, the public sector and the industrial actors in Värmland? And if this is the case, could these problems be related to the fragmentation of the institutional setting? The thesis is a qualitative case study, conducted through elite-interviews and document analysis. My findings implies that the cooperation between the triple helix actors in Värmland has developed dramatically the last decade. From a strive for coordination that was pervaded by institutional fragmentation to an increased closeness and mutual involvement that has come to over-bridge the institutional fragmentation on the regional level. Although, it seems like the vertical fragmentation between the regional and national level, which could impede growth and development in the region, to a great degree remains.</p>

The purpose of this Master's Thesis is to investigate the outlooks for a seed stage venture capital fund investing in biotechnology-related spinouts from public research to be established in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Germany. Recommendations on how to improve any discovered deficits of the fund's prerequisites are also to be presented. Analyses showed that the spinout potential of the research in the region is weak. The entrepreneurial prerequisites of the researchers, in terms of previous experience, business knowledge and a track record that would vouch for them being suitable entrepreneurs, are generally poor. Nor is there sufficient industry in the region to facilitate the establishment of and subsequent businesses for the spinouts. The seed fund must therefore provide any future portfolio ventures with a substantial amount of Hands-on Management. To improve the prerequisites for the seed fund, PVA-MV must influence the researchers'attitude towards spinouts and make the monetary gains more visible. The researchers must be imbued with a business approach in their research and PVA-MV must market its services as being the intermediary of government, universities and industry and as being able to create opportunities for researchers as well as for industry. PVA-MV should also focus on the few institutes and individual researchers that do have some favourable entrepreneurial characteristics, in order to evoke professional entrepreneurs with a forming track record. To cope with the deficient prerequisites of the fund, PVA-MV must expand the competence of its own work force and focus on the rate of return rather than on building regional infrastructure pro bono as a governmental agency.