With the fast development in industry and commerce in Taiwan in recent years, a great deal of waste is called into being. Because the waste yards in every region reach saturation sequentially, it has become the domestic trend to build recycling plants in order to properly cope with the garbage problems. However, the conventional way the government puts up capital to build public works has to be confronted with adjustment owe of the governmental functions and the limits in finance. Therefore, privatizing the public works to introduce the non-governmental flexible operating methods and getting abundant capital to speed up the establishment of recycling plants and efficient operating goals have become the new critical points of public works in governmental environmental protection. The establishment of recycling plants takes a large number of funds and long period, during which there are many variables and high risk, and the main consideration of BOT invested by private enterprises is the rate of return on investment, so private enterprises have to study and analyze very carefully and map out the investment policies about how to carry out an investment evaluation and how to minimize or circumvent all kinds of risks in the executive process. Aimed at BOT¡¦s special properties of recycling plants, this research adopts the cash flow analysis and probes into the financial projects and risk control to provide the reference materials to factory owners who are interested in BOT and also the consideration of amending the BOT-related provisions to the relevant departments in government.

As a distinctive type of investment, BOT indicates distinct attraction in many aspects. The government adopts BOT¡]Build-Operate-Transfer¡^format to reprieve financial stress, to attract folk enterprise to join grand-scale public construction projects, to infuse the operation of the government department with the spirit of enterprise, to expect efficient build and operation of grand-scale public construction projects, to make bigger economic efficiency and profit for the country. There are some characteristics for BOT, inclusive of long-term build eviction, unreversibility of investment, huge amount of investment, uncontrollable risks on scheme, build and operation, and the privilege for the enterprise. In theory, BOT format can reduce the financial stress and human-resource expense of the public department, raise the economic efficiency on management and disperse the investment risks of the government. Complete experiences are lacking from the operation of development project, bank financing to risk assessment and management because of the enforcement of public construction projects through the BOT format in Taiwan is still in the beginning. This thesis mainly examined Kaohsiung MRT Project, and analyzed foreign successful or discussible cases to explore why the enforcement of BOT format in Taiwan was difficulty, and severely criticized. The purpose of this thesis is to identify the various issues of BOT format by interviewing with the industrial advanced, official advanced and scholar to examine the BOT spirits is implemented or twisted, and hope the government¡¦s development project in the further can be practically benefited by this research. Keywords¡GBOT, Kaohsiung MRT, Analytic Hierarchy Process

Thesis (doctoral)--University of Göteborg, 1984. / Extra t.p. with thesis statement inserted. Includes bibliographical references.

Observing the deficiencies of traditional methods in meeting the demands of today&rsquo / s infrastructure development has been motivating countries towards privatization of these sectors. However, due to the differences in these sectors as compared to other businesses, privatization can not be performed without strict regulations. Today, concession agreements like BOT models seem the best way for solving the problems. Financing of concession agreements plays a key role. In Turkey, most BOT projects are financed by capital structure that has a maximum debt ratio, which is allowed by the law. The objective of this study is to examine whether the maximum amount of debt ratio is the optimum amount of debt ratio. Optimization is carried out by analyzing the trade off between benefits of tax shield and the loss due to financial failure as a result of change in leverage, assuming other things are the same. A theoretical framework is developed for the analysis by selecting Adjusted Present Value Method as a financial tool. Energy generation sector in Turkey is analyzed, stock market data in Turkey is used for the analysis, and a bankruptcy prediction model is proposed for BOT projects in Turkey. Finally, by using the theoretical framework, an actual BOT model hydro electric power plant proposal is analyzed for optimization of capital structure.

Recently, research has postulated that stuttering is a motor disorder that results from brain abnormalities within the central nervous system. Based on evidence of numerous irregularities within various motor systems, it has been suggested that other motor domains may be comprised. In particular, research in individuals who stutter has found fine, gross, and visual-spatial motor impairment. These studies, though, are dated, have numerous methodological concerns, or yielded contradictory results. Thus, this study investigated whether motor skills in children who stutter (CWS) were compromised. Fine motor skills are important in a school environment because students are required to utilize these skills to complete various assignments and projects, such as cutting and folding paper. Gross motor skills are equally as important as children use these skills to move around their environment. Visual-spatial motor skills are vital for children as they are often required to copy notes off of the board. Deficits in any of these areas may have potentially harmful effects on school performance. Thus, in a school setting, school psychologists are a valuable asset, as they are trained to consult and work with "at risk" populations to prevent long-term problems. Given the potential motor deficits in CWS, school psychologists can intervene and provide appropriate accommodations to remediate any motor deficits. Participants included 12 CWS and 12 children who do not stutter (CWNS). Participants were recruited from a large urban school district and were administered the Bruininks-Oseretsky Test of Motor Proficiency-Second Edition (Bruininks & Bruininks, 2005; BOT-2). Parents completed a demographic questionnaire. One Way Analyses of Variance (ANOVAs) were calculated to compare group means. Results indicated that CWS performed poorer on all but one motor area. Given these results, when a child is identified with a disfluency problem, a broader consideration of issues that may be facing the child is warranted. In particular, school psychologists are in a position to intervene and provide appropriate services to an "at risk" population (i.e., CWS) by conducting a brief motor assessment to identify motor strengths and weaknesses. If warranted, school psychologists can provide accommodations and services to address any identified weaknesses in motor areas.

Thesis (doctoral)--University of Göteborg, 1984. / Extra t.p. with thesis statement inserted. Includes bibliographical references.

Invasive plant species have widespread effects on the ecosystems they inhabit. Extensive research has been done on the economic and ecological impact of invasive species in relation to native plant species, but little is known about the effect of these species on native fauna. My study examined the impact of an invasive plant species Elaeagnus umbellata (autumn olive) on small mammals populations in southern Illinois. Elaeagnus umbellata is a native shrub of southeast Asia and was introduced to the United States in the 1830s. It is now the fifth most abundant invasive plant species in the state of Illinois. To determine the impact of this invasive shrub on small mammal populations, Sherman traps were set up in six separate trapping webs, three in upland forests with heavy E. umbellata cover and three in upland forests with little to no E. umbellata cover (control). Trapping spanned three seasons from March-August 2013. Through the use of capture and release methods, individuals were measured, weighed, and marked for possible recapture. Beginning in season 3, Cuterebra fontinella (bot fly) abundance in small mammals was also assessed. Differences in relative abundance of small mammal populations were determined using a repeated measures ANOVA with a Tukey test. T-tests were used to determine any significant difference among small mammals between forest types. Very little difference was found among the measured variables between the invaded and control forest sites. Prevalance of C. fontinella was also similar, but the resulting percentage of infection was much higher when compared to other studies in the literature. These results indicate there is little effect of E. umbellata on small mammal populations, although the long-term impacts of this invasive species may need further research.

aus der Einführung und Motivation: Unser Beitrag stellt eine webbasierte modellgesteuerte Umgebung für soziale Bots vor mit der wir CoPs die Möglichkeit geben, ihre eigenen Lernassistenten zu erstellen. Unser Ansatz kann verwendet werden, um soziale Bots für die eigene Organisation zu erstellen und auf Webdienste zurückgreifen kann, indem man sich auf RESTful APIs it OpenAPI-Spezifikation verlässt, um die Aktionen des sozialen Bots innerhalb der Anwendung zu definieren. Abschließend werden drei Beispiele von Mentoring Bots vorgestellt, die mit dem Framework erstellt wurden und zeigen das große Potential der Anwendung. Mit den Bots erhalten Studierenden personalisiertes Feedback, ohne dass die Lehrkräfte zusätzlich belastet werden.

In recent years, machine learning (ML) has been explored and employed in many fields. However, there are growing concerns about the robustness of machine learning models. These concerns are further amplified in security-critical applications — attackers can manipulate the inputs (i.e., adversarial examples) to cause machine learning models to make a mistake, and it's very challenging to obtain a large amount of attackers' data. These make applying machine learning in security-critical applications difficult. In this dissertation, we present several approaches to robustifying three machine learning based security applications. First, we start from adversarial examples in image recognition. We develop a method to generate robust adversarial examples that remain effective in the physical domain. Our core idea is to use an image-to-image translation network to simulate the digital-to-physical transformation process for generating robust adversarial examples. We further show these robust adversarial examples can improve the robustness of machine learning models by adversarial retraining. The second application is bot detection. We show that the performance of existing machine learning models is not effective if we only have the limit attackers' data. We develop a data synthesis method to address this problem. The key novelty is that our method is distribution aware synthesis, using two different generators in a Generative Adversarial Network to synthesize data for the clustered regions and the outlier regions in the feature space. We show the detection performance using 1% of attackers' data is close to existing methods trained with 100% of the attackers' data. The third component of this dissertation is phishing detection. By designing a novel measurement system, we search and detect phishing websites that adopt evasion techniques not only at the page content level but also at the web domain level. The key novelty is that our system is built on the observation of the evasive behaviors of phishing pages in practice. We also study how existing browsers defenses against phishing websites that impersonate trusted entities at the web domain. Our results show existing browsers are not yet effective to detect them. / Doctor of Philosophy / Machine learning (ML) is computer algorithms that aim to identify hidden patterns from the data. In recent years, machine learning has been widely used in many fields. The range of them is broad, from natural language to autonomous driving. However, there are growing concerns about the robustness of machine learning models. And these concerns are further amplified in security-critical applications — Attackers can manipulate their inputs (i.e., adversarial examples) to cause machine learning models to predict wrong, and it's highly expensive and difficult to obtain a huge amount of attackers' data because attackers are rare compared to the normal users. These make applying machine learning in security-critical applications concerning. In this dissertation, we seek to build better defenses in three types of machine learning based security applications. The first one is image recognition, by developing a method to generate realistic adversarial examples, the machine learning models are more robust for defending against adversarial examples by adversarial retraining. The second one is bot detection, we develop a data synthesis method to detect malicious bots when we only have the limit malicious bots data. For phishing websites, we implement a tool to detect domain name impersonation and detect phishing pages using dynamic and static analysis.

Title: The significance of relation-ship between mesomorphy component and neuromotor development at football players population U12 selected from the highest czech league. Objectives: The aim of this thesis is to determine the link between the level of mesomorphy (one of the components of somatotype) and neuromotor age at the first league football players U12 from FK Dukla Praha and Bohemians 1905. Methods: The main research method was the method of observation. The research sample contained a total of 41 footballers. For determining the somatotype we used the methodology from Heath - Carter 1967. The degree of neuromotor development was assessed by Bruininks Oseretsky Test of Motor Proficiency (BOT - 2). The estimation of the biological age was calculated from the proportional, growth and weight age and for the calculation of the decimal age we used the equation from Šelingerová (1992). In order to analyse the data we used the basic descriptive statistics, the two-sample T - test, the analysis of variance, the correlation and the linear regression. Results: The results revealed that there is no significant relationship r2 = 0,04 % between the level of mesomorphy (rated by Heath - Carter) and the performance in neuromotoric. Further, subsequent analysis of the separate muscle component in...