Doctoral thesis. / Format: PDF. Bibl.

In 1866 the seat of Manatee County was moved to Pine Level, a newly-formed town in the wilderness of south Florida. By the 1880s, it contained stores, boardinghouses, churches, and government buildings. In 1887, Pine Level became DeSoto County’s first seat. However, when it lost county seat status to Arcadia only 18 months later, in 1888, Pine Level rapidly declined in population and importance, and eventually died out. The investigations of the Pine Level site detailed in this thesis were carried out as a public archaeology project, involving the DeSoto County Historical Society, University of South Florida, and the Florida Public Archaeology Network West Central Region. As a public archaeology project, one central goal of this work was to involve the local community in the fieldwork and ongoing research. The efforts of community volunteers, along with graduate and undergraduate students, were critical to several phases of this project, which is presented in this thesis. The second goal of the project was to learn as much as possible about the little-studied site of Pine Level and its inhabitants, and to contextualize its founding, growth, and downfall within the development of the south Florida region. Specifically, one goal was to learn more about the people who moved to this rural town, including their ethnicity, social status, livelihoods, and political outlook. The second research question was discovering how Pine Level had been spatially organized, whether this layout had changed over time, and x what this spatial patterning could reveal about the town’s function within greater south Florida. Historical and archaeological research methods were used to try to answer these questions. Historical research into the Reconstruction era placed Pine Level in context within the tumultuous changes of this period. Study of primary documents revealed information about how the town was organized, and how several buildings at the site were probably constructed. Oral history interviews were also conducted with community members who had knowledge of Pine Level. Archaeological investigations at the site included a surface survey, artifact collection, shovel testing, and unit excavation. This work was focused on ground-truthing the information gathered during the historical research and oral histories. Last, analysis of the ceramic, glass, and metal artifacts at the site added to the interpretation of the social status of Pine Level’s citizens, contributed to an evaluation of the site’s spatial patterning, and underscored functional differences between certain areas of Pine Level. The research presented in this thesis shows that Pine Level was the creation of a Republican politician, and that it functioned as an enclave of Republican power during the Reconstruction era. During this time, Pine Level’s growth was sluggish, and it remained unpopular with many citizens in Manatee County. It consisted of a few government buildings in the center of the town, but little else. However, with the fall of the Manatee County Republicans in 1876, Pine Level suddenly began to prosper, adding many new landowners and businesses. A distinct business district developed, and areas of the town near the major roads garnered particularly high prices. Artifact analysis shows that the income level of these newcomers was probably modest, but that they had xi access to consumer goods from across the United States and as far away as England. The town’s prosperity was short-lived, though. As detailed in this thesis, once Pine Level lost county seat status, it immediately began to decline, and businesses quickly moved to Arcadia. The town continued on as a small community through at least the first decade of the twentieth century, but eventually became a nothing more than a spot on a map.

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From the idea of efficiency raised by Koopmans in 1951, and the panel data first introduced into the efficiency analysis by Pitt and Lee (1981) and Schmidt and Sickles (1984), the techniques of stochastic frontier analysis are fast developed and the applications of stochastic frontier are widely used in different areas, such as education, industry and hospital. But most researchers focus on only one aspect, either the development of new models or empirical applications. This thesis attempts to fill the gap to get a general idea of the properties of different panel data stochastic frontier models, on both statistical aspects and economic aspects, by the comparison of different models applied to different production applications. The thesis is also attempt to shed light on whether particular panel data stochastic frontier models are better suited to different data sets. The models selected capture the simplest situation, with no heterogeneity or heteroscedasticity, and complicated ones, with exogenous variables included in the models. Not only the classical models, such as the Pitt and Lee (1981) and Battese and Coelli (1992.1995), but also the new developed models, such as the latent class model and fixed management model are detected in the thesis. On the economic aspect, the data selected captures both microeconomic and macroeconomic, with the application to the World GDP and the Italian manufacturing industry. The results show that: the panel data stochastic frontier models perform better on the microeconomic level than on the macroeconomic level; the classical models perform better than the new developed ones; some panel data stochastic frontier models make ideal assumptions but the requirements to the dataset are hard to achieve; that the influence from the exogenous variables is quite strong.

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In this thesis, portfolio optimisation is used to evaluate if a specific sample of portfolios have a higher risk level or lower expected return, compared to what may be obtained through optimisation. It also compares the return of optimised portfolios with the return of the original portfolios. The risk analysis software Aegis Portfolio Manager developed by Barra is used for the optimisations. With the expected return and risk level used in this thesis, all portfolios can obtain a higher expected return and a lower risk. Over a six-month period, the optimised portfolios do not consistently outperform the original portfolios and therefore it seems as though the optimisation do not improve the return of the portfolios. This might be due to the uncertainty of the expected returns used in this thesis.

This paper offers to measure efficiency of banks in Sub Saharan Africa and its determining input andout put factors on two fonts. At this purpose, we applied the first font; Data Envelopment Analysis(DEA) for assessing efficiency level. The actual and target level of inputs/outputs to foster efficiencyare shown in the results. Secondly, the banks ratio analysis measuring banks performance throughreturns volatility for each bank, asset utilization and provision for bad and doubtful debts over thestudy period are all used as tools for this analysis. Our results suggest that Sub Saharan AfricanBanks are about 98.35% efficient. We are aware that the level of efficiency could be subject to up anddown swing if environmental factors influencing banks efficiency where taken into consideration.Finally, our result (DEA) is more sensitive to loans, other liabilities, other non interest expense,securities and deposit.

Stabilieji skirstiniai yra plati tikimybinių skirstinių klasė. Atsitiktiniai dydžiai, pasiskirstę pagal stabiliuosius skirstinius, pasižymi savybe – jų suma taip pat yra stabili. Šie pasižymi sunkiomis uodegomis ir, kai kuriais atvejais, asimetriškumu. Taigi jie gerai aprašo duomenis. Pagrindinis šių skirstinių trūkumas yra tas, kad nežinomos tikslios pasiskirstymo ir tankio funkcijų išraiškos (išskyrus kelis atvejus: normalusis, Koši ir Levi skirstiniai). Darbo pradžioje pateikta stabiliųjų skirtinių apžvalga bei jų pritaikymas finansų rinkose. Aprašytos pagrindinės stabiliųjų skirstinių savybės, įverčių skaičiavimo algoritmai bei optimalaus portfelio sudarymas ir jo vertės pokyčio rizikos mato (VaR) skaičiavimas. Antroje darbo dalyje nagrinėjamas optimaliojo investicinio portfelio „normalioje“ ir „stabilioje“ rinkoje sudarymas. Rizikos matu laikomas sklaidos parametras (stabiliuoju atveju) arba standartinis nuokrypis, padalintas iš kvaratinės šaknies iš 2, (normaliuoju atveju). Palyginami portfeliai, sudaryti iš septyniolikos lietuviškų akcijų, gauti pagal skirtingas tikimybines prielaidas. Parodyta, kad optimalieji portfeliai skiriasi, kuomet duomenys yra pasiskirstę pagal stabilųjį ir normalųjį skirstinius. / Stable distributions are a rich class of probability distributions that allow skewness and heavy tails. The lack of closed formulas for densities and distribution functions for all distributions (except Gaussian, Cauchy and Levy distributions) is the major drawback. There is an overview of the stable distributions and their applications in finance markets at the beginning of this paper. There are described basic properties of stable distributions, estimation algorithms and optimal asset allocation and stable computation of Value at Risk in the first part of the work. We analyze an investment allocation problems in this work. We consider as the risk measure the estimate of scale parameter (in the stable case) or the expected value of absolute deviation divided by square root of 2 (in Gaussian case). We examine the optimal allocation between seventeen risky assets with normal or stable distributed returns and then we compare the allocation obtained under the Gaussian and stable distributional assumptions. We show that there are differences in the allocation when the data follow the stable non-Gaussian and the normal distribution.

In current online games, player positions are synchronized by means of continual broadcasts through the server. This solution is expensive, forcing any server to limit its number of clients. With a hybrid networking architecture, player synchronization can be distributed to the clients, bypassing the server bottleneck and decreasing latency as a result. Synchronization in a decentralized fashion is difficult as each player must communicate with every other player. The communication requirements can be reduced by computing and exploiting frontier sets: For a pair of players in an online game, a player's frontier is the region of the game space where the player may move without seeing (and without communicating to) the other player. A pair of frontiers is called a frontier set. This thesis describes the first fast and space-efficient method of computing frontier sets in large terrains. Frontier sets are computed by growing regions in a connected set of quads in a hierarchical decomposition of the terrain. The solution involves the precomputation of a potentially visible set (PVS) for each quad in the decomposition, which stores all the quads potentially visible from any point within the current quad. Since the memory needed to store the PVSs for all the quads is quite large, a compression technique is introduced which controls the size of each PVS. A PVS merging algorithm, with both lossless and lossy variations, is also described which permits adding the PVS of a point or quad to the PVS of a growing region. The new algorithm is compared to a simple region growing approach where frontiers are grown along the individual terrain points. Using similar merging techniques, the new algorithm performs better, producing larger frontier sets with faster execution times. / Thesis (Master, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2010-05-25 14:53:24.375