The topic of this thesis is conditional discontinuance of criminal prosecution. This institute is one of the alternative ways of handling the criminal case, which are collectively called diversions. Their theoretical basis is a concept called restorative justice. Conditional discontinuance of criminal prosecution is an institute of criminal procedure that is a significant manifestation of the subsidiarity of criminal repression. This institute represents the provision of certain privileges to the accused that lie in the fact that the criminal proceedings are not brought to its standard end in exchange for reimbursing the relationship with the victim, disturbed by the criminal offence. The thesis is divided into six chapters, which seek to render the chosen theme as well as its broader context. At thebeginning, attention is paid to the concept of restorative justice and the concept of diversions. The main part of this thesis is in the third chapter and is entirely exclusively devoted to conditional discontinuance of criminal prosecution. Author's goal is to cover all aspects of this concept and its application. The following chapter is devoted to other types of diversions. Given the limited scope for this thesis,this attention is however only marginal.. Within the penultimate chapter, the thorough...

In this thesis I describe the conceptual model of three kinds of instability in terms of precipitation. I describe ways of evaluating their presence in the atmosphere. They are: conditional instability, potential instability and symmetric instability. I have selected three events with strong precipitation in the Czech Republic so that the formation of each of them is with high probability involved in just one of the three kinds of instability. Events are first described using distance and station measurements. Through the NWP model COSMO are created prognostic fields of precipitation and several derived thermodynamic quantities for each event. On the horizontal (for the whole country) and vertical (for selected areas of the Czech Republic) distribution of these variables are demonstrated favourable conditions for the occurrence of the types of instability in the atmosphere. In the event of conditional instability the rainfall occurs in areas with high CAPE and negative or very small positive vertical lapse rate of potential temperature. The event with the potential instability is characterized by the occurrence of negative vertical lapse rate of equivalent potential temperature in the broad layers. The occurrence of symmetric instability suggests a number of indicators. The necessary occurence...

Residual-based shadings for enhancing mosaic and association plots to visualize independence models for contingency tables are extended in two directions: (a) perceptually uniform HCL colors are used and (b) the result of an associated significance test is coded by the appearance of color in the visualization. For obtaining (a), a general strategy for deriving diverging palettes in the perceptually-based HCL space is suggested. As for (b), cut offs that control the appearance of color are computed in a data-driven way based on the conditional permutation distribution of maximum-type test statistics. The shadings are first established for the case of independence in 2-way tables and then extended to more general independence models for multi-way tables, including in particular conditional independence problems. / Series: Research Report Series / Department of Statistics and Mathematics

Cardiac fibrosis contributes to heart failure by dramatically impairing cardiac function, increasing patient morbidity and mortality. The primary fibrillar collagen expressed in the heart is type I, and increased collagen synthesis is the hallmark of cardiac fibrosis. Our laboratory has shown that the transcription factor scleraxis is sufficient to regulate the gene encoding collagen Iα2. The present thesis identifies and focuses on three key functions of scleraxis in the heart. First, we show that scleraxis is required for production of the cardiac extracellular matrix. Using in vitro and in vivo models, we observed a significant upregulation/reduction of matrix genes in response to induction/loss of scleraxis gene function respectively. In fact, scleraxis overexpression was sufficient to rescue matrix synthesis in scleraxis-null cells. In a murine model of cardiac pressure overload, scleraxis gene deletion blunted the induction of fibrotic collagen gene expression. Second, we provide evidence that scleraxis governs fibroblast-myofibroblast phenotype transition and fibroblast number. Scleraxis gene induction promoted cardiac myofibroblast phenoconversion while knockdown reduced myofibroblast marker gene expression. Scleraxis exerts direct transcriptional control on the a-smooth muscle actin gene-an established marker of myofibroblasts. Scleraxis null mice exhibited a dramatic reduction in cardiac fibroblast numbers- this is attributed to impairment of the epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition program which was marked by a corresponding loss of mesenchymal markers and increased epithelial markers. Loss-of-function experiments using primary cardiac proto-myofibroblasts recapitulated this paradigm, whereas scleraxis gene induction showed a reciprocal effect on mesenchymal markers. Third, data from this study supports the required role of scleraxis in the TGFb/Smad signaling pathway. Scleraxis is strongly upregulated by the potent pro-fibrotic cytokine TGFb, and works synergistically with the canonical Smad signaling pathway to increase Col1a2 expression by cardiac fibroblasts and myofibroblasts. Smad3 induced expression of the fibrillar collagens – an effect that was significantly attenuated following scleraxis knockdown. Smad3 binding to the Col1a2 gene promoter was significantly reduced in scleraxis null hearts. This study involved a comprehensive series of in vitro and in vivo experiments, and is the first to identify scleraxis as a key regulator of multiple fibroblast functions and a potential future target for therapeutic intervention in cardiac fibrosis. / May 2016

Functional analysis is a method of behavioural assessment used to determine the environmental variables maintaining a specific behaviour. While functional analysis is often used with individuals with developmental and intellectual disabilities, problem behaviours in people with dementia are rarely assessed using functional analysis methodology. The purpose of the present study was to conduct descriptive and functional analyses of problem behaviours among individuals with dementia to determine: (a) if a descriptive assessment would identify a function of the challenging behaviour assessed; (b) the extent to which stimuli identified in the descriptive assessment were needed to conduct a functional analysis; and (c) if a standard functional analysis is an effective assessment method for this population. The participants were two individuals with dementia who exhibited inappropriate vocalizations, consisting of swearing and delusional speech. For both participants, the results of the descriptive assessments suggested that the function of the behaviour was positive reinforcement in the form of attention from staff members. The findings of the descriptive analyses were confirmed in the functional analyses. The results suggest that a functional analysis informed by a descriptive analysis can identify the function of problem behaviour in individuals with dementia in a residential setting. / May 2016

M.Com. (Economic Development and Policy Issues) / This research analyses the effect of exchange rate volatility on exports using a sample of nine emerging countries – Argentina, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Malaysia, Poland, South Africa and Thailand – between 1995 and 2010. The study uses panel data models, with a standard exports equation with exports performance determined by exchange rate volatility, the level of exchange rate, demand conditions in major countries as well as terms of trade. Exchange rate volatility is measured by Generalised Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (GARCH) and conventional standard deviation in order to determine if the instrument of volatility used influences the nature of the relationship between exchange rate volatility and exports. The results show that exchange rate volatility has a significant negative effect on the performance of exports regardless of the measure of volatility used. The Pedroni residual cointegration method was used to test for panel cointegration to determine if there is a long-run relationship among the variables, and the test showed that a long-run relationship does exists. Generally, the study concludes that policy mix that will reduce exchange rate volatility (such as managed exchange rate regimes) and relatively competitive exchange rates are essential for emerging markets in order to sustain their exports performance.

The first part of this dissertation examines the presence of the financial contagion across European stock markets with respect to the Greece sovereign debt crisis by estimating the time-varying conditional correlations of stock returns between Greece and other European countries over 2001 to 2012. We find that the correlations vary over time and reach the peaks in the late 2008 during theU.S.subprime crisis, and in the beginning of 2010 of the height of European debt crisis. Further, the correlations between stock index returns of Greece and Spain, France, Ireland, Netherlands are significantly increased by Greek sovereign credit rating downgrade announcements. The second part of this dissertation examines the correlations of gold, dollar and U.S. stock returns over 2001 to 2012 using ADCC-GARCH model. The conditional correlations of gold-dollar returns are negative during all sub-sample periods and significantly increase in magnitude during both subprime crisis and sovereign debt crisis. The conditional correlations of gold-stock returns are positive on average over time. However, gold-stock correlation falls below zero during subprime crisis and sovereign debt crisis. Gold-stock correlation is significantly negatively affected by positive CPI announcements. And gold-dollar correlation is significantly negatively affected by negative GDP announcements and positive unemployment announcements. The effects of macroeconomic announcements are stronger during economic recessions.

The probability that a sum of random variables (RVs) exceeds (respectively falls below) a given threshold, is often encountered in the performance analysis of wireless communication systems. Generally, a closed-form expression of the sum distribution does not exist and a naive Monte Carlo (MC) simulation is computationally expensive when dealing with rare events. An alternative approach is represented by the use of variance reduction techniques, known for their efficiency in requiring less computations for achieving the same accuracy requirement. For the right-tail region, we develop a unified hazard rate twisting importance sampling (IS) technique that presents the advantage of being logarithmic efficient for arbitrary distributions under the independence assumption. A further improvement of this technique is then developed wherein the twisting is applied only to the components having more impacts on the probability of interest than others. Another challenging problem is when the components are correlated and distributed according to the Log-normal distribution. In this setting, we develop a generalized hybrid IS scheme based on a mean shifting and covariance matrix scaling techniques and we prove that the logarithmic efficiency holds again for two particular instances. We also propose two unified IS approaches to estimate the left-tail of sums of independent positive RVs. The first applies to arbitrary distributions and enjoys the logarithmic efficiency criterion, whereas the second satisfies the bounded relative error criterion under a mild assumption but is only applicable to the case of independent and identically distributed RVs. The left-tail of correlated Log-normal variates is also considered. In fact, we construct an estimator combining an existing mean shifting IS approach with a control variate technique and prove that it possess the asymptotically vanishing relative error property. A further interesting problem is the left-tail estimation of sums of ordered RVs. Two estimators are presented. The first is based on IS and achieves the bounded relative error under a mild assumption. The second is based on conditional MC approach and achieves the bounded relative error property for the Generalized Gamma case and the logarithmic efficiency for the Log-normal case.

[pt] Esse artigo realiza um estudo dos efeitos do Programa Bolsa Escola Federal sobre as despesas das famílias. A base de dados utilizada foi a Pesquisa dos Orçamentos Familiares (POF), que por tratar de forma detalhada das despesas das famílias e por fornecer o valor recebido pelas famílias do Programa Bolsa Escola Federal, propicia uma excelente oportunidade de responder a questão referente ao destino do dinheiro recebido do programa. O principal resultado é que famílias que recebem a bolsa do Programa Bolsa Escola tendem a gastar mais em alimentos e não reduzem seus gastos em educação. / [en] This article studies the effects of the Brazilian conditional cash transfer program, the Bolsa Escola Federal, on household expenditures. The dataset used was a survey of household budgets (Pesquisa dos Orçamentos Familiares), which, in providing detailed information regarding family expenditures and the value households received through the Bolsa Escola Federal Program, offers an excellent opportunity to answer the question concerning the destination of the money received through the program. The main result of the article is that households receiving the grant from the program tend to spend more on food and do not reduce their expenditures on education.

Since the introduction univariate GARCH models number of available models have grown rapidly and has been extended to the multivariate area. This paper compares three different multivariate GARCH models and they are evaluated using out of sample Value at Risk of dif- ferent portfolios. Sector portfolios are used with different market capitalization. The models compared are the DCC,CCC and the GO-Garch model. The forecast horizon is 1-day, 5-day and 10-day ahead forecast of the estimated VaR limit. The DCC performs best with regards to both conditional anc unconditional violations of the VaR estimates.