We define and study multivariate and matrix variate skew Pearson type VII and skew t-distributions. We derive the marginal and conditional distributions, the linear transformation, and the stochastic representations of the multivariate and matrix variate skew Pearson type VII distributions and skew t-distributions. Also, we study the limiting distributions.

Diese Arbeit untersucht, ob (i) das Ausmaß von conditional conservatism und (ii) die Prognosegenauigkeit sowie (iii) Persistenz der Erfolgsgrößen und Cash Flows durch unternehmensspezifische rechtliche Rahmenbedingungen wie die (i) Rechnungslegung, (ii) Kapitalmarktorientierung und (iii) Abschlussprüfung beeinflusst werden. Zum einen lässt sich im Rahmen der Analyse durch die Gegenüberstellung zweier Unternehmensgruppen die Implikationen der IFRS und des HGB und zum anderen aber auch die der Anreizsteuerung über die Agencybeziehungen des Unternehmens zu den Bilanzadressaten auf die Finanzberichterstattung der Unternehmen beschreiben. Es soll demnach explizit der Frage nachgegangen werden, ob diese Implikationen die Informationsfunktion der Finanzberichterstattung hinsichtlich einer Erhöhung der Earnings Quality unterstützen und somit eine weitere Regulierung dieser rechtlichen Rahmenbedingungen sinnvoll erscheint. Es wird innerhalb dieser Arbeit zudem gezeigt, dass das Modell von Basu (1997) nicht für eine angemessene Persistenzmessung geeignet ist, sondern vielmehr die unit root-Spezifikationen von Dickey und Fuller (1979,1981) oder die Threshold-Modelle von Enders und Granger (1998) herangezogen werden sollten. Darüber hinaus wird eine Vielzahl von Spezifikationstests vorgestellt, die u.a. einen multivariaten Ansatz zur Outlierkorrektur und verschiedene Formen der Berücksichtigung von fixed effects in den Regressionen umfasst. Die Resultate der empirischen Untersuchung der deutschen Unternehmen sprechen für eine höhere Persistenz der Erfolgsgrößen der börsennotierten HGB-Bilanzierer sowohl im Vergleich mit den börsennotierten IFRS-Bilanzierern als auch mit den nicht börsennotierten Unternehmen. Conditional conservatism wird jeweils für jede Unternehmensgruppe, jedoch nicht im Verhältnis der Gruppen zueinander, nachgewiesen. Die Rechnungslegung, Kapitalmarktorientierung und Abschlussprüfung besitzen folglich keinen eindeutigen Einfluss auf das Ausmaß von conditional conservatism. Eine weitgehend fehlende Assoziation der drei getesteten rechtlichen Rahmenbedingungen offenbart sich ebenfalls innerhalb der angewendeten Modelle zur Prognose des Cash Flows. Die die Zeitreiheneigenschaften der Erfolgsgrößen und Cash Flows determinierenden Faktoren sind dahingehend eher in der operativen Geschäftstätigkeit eines Unternehmens, bei anderen rechtlichen Rahmenbedingungen oder makroökonomischen Effekten wie der konjunkturellen Entwicklung zu suchen. In der Gegenüberstellung der verschiedenen ökonometrischen Methoden zeigt sich, dass vor allem die Hadi (1994)-Outlierkorrektur das R² erhöht und den Prognosefehler im Verhältnis zur in der Accounting-Literatur vorherrschenden Standardoutlierkorrektur senkt. Die unit root-Spezifikationen nach Dickey und Fuller (1979,1981) bieten im Vergleich zur Spezifikation von Basu (1997) ebenfalls höhere R² und geringere Prognosefehler. Des Weiteren weisen ökonometrische Modelle, welche die Implikationen von conditional conservatism berücksichtigen, jeweils bessere Resultate als Modelle ohne eine Integration dieser Komponente auf. Die in dieser Arbeit vorgestellten Spezifikationstests und alternativen Modelle führen somit durchweg zu einer Verbesserung der betrachteten Gütekriterien und sollten bei einer empirischen Analyse, insbesondere von Paneldaten, zukünftig in der Accounting-Literatur ihre Berücksichtigung finden. Wesentliche Abschnitte dieser Dissertation basieren auf den beiden folgenden Aufsätzen: "A Note on the Time Series Measure of Conservatism", CESifo Working Paper No. 2968, zusammen mit Frank Westermann und "Does the Introduction of IFRS Change the Timeliness of Loss Recognition? Evidence from German Firms", Institute of Empirical Economic Research Working Paper No. 87, zusammen mit Frank Westermann und Carl-Friedrich Leuschner.

In this era of increasingly rapid availability of resources of all kinds, a widespread need to characterize, filtrate, use, and evaluate what could be necessary and useful becomes a crucially vital everyday task. Neither research in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) nor in cognitive science (CogSci) is an exception (let alone within a crossing of both paths). A promised goal of AI was to primarily focus on the study and design of intelligent artifacts that show aspects of human-like general intelligence (GI). That is, facets of intelligence similar to those exhibited by human beings in solving problems related to cognition. However, the focus in achieving AI’s original goal is scattered over time. The initial ambitions in the 1960s and 1970s had grown by the 1980s into an "industry", where not only researchers and engineers but also entire companies developed the AI technologies in building specialized hardware. But the result is that technology afforded us with many, many devices that allegedly work like humans, though they can only be considered as life facilitators (if they even do). This is mainly due to, I propose, basic changes on viewing what true essences of intelligence should have been considered within scientific research when modeling systems with GI capacities. A modern scientific approach to achieving AI by simulating cognition is mainly based on representations and implementations of higher cognition in artificial systems. Luckily, such systems are essentially designed with the intention to be acquired with a "human like" level of GI, so that their functionalities are supported by results (and solution methodologies) from many cognitive scientific disciplines. In classical AI, only a few number of attempts have tried to integrate forms of higher cognitive abilities in a uniform framework that model, in particular, cross-domain reasoning abilities, and solve baffling cognition problems —the kind of problems that a cognitive being (endowed with traits of GI) could only solve. Unlike classical AI, the intersection between the recent research disciplines: artificial general intelligence (AGI) and CogSci, is promising in this regard. The new direction is mostly concerned with studying, modeling, and computing AI capabilities that simulate facets of GI and functioning of higher cognitive mechanisms. Whence, the focus in this thesis is on examining general problem solving capabilities of cognitive beings that are both: "human-comparable" and "cognitively inspired", in order to contribute to answering two substantial research questions. The first seeks to find whether it is still necessary to model higher cognitive abilities in models of AGI, and the second asks about the possibility to utilize cognitive mechanisms to enable cognitive agents demonstrate clear signs of human-like (general) intelligence. Solutions to cross-domain reasoning problems (that characterize human-like thinking) need to be modeled in a way that reflects essences of cognition and GI of the reasoner. This could actually be achieved (among other things) through utilizing cross-domain, higher cognitive mechanisms. Examples of such cognitive mechanisms include analogy-making and concept blending (CB), which are exceptional as active areas of recent research in cognitive science, though not enough attention has been given to the rewards and benefits one gets when they interact. A basic claim of the thesis is that several aspects of human-comparable level of GI are based on forms of (cross-domain) representations and (creative) productions of conceptions. The thesis shows that computing these aspects within AGI-based systems is indispensable for their modeling. In addition, the aspects can be modeled by employing certain cognitive mechanisms. The specific examples of mechanisms most relevant to the current text are computation of generalizations (i.e. abstractions) using analogy-making (i.e. transferring a conceptualization from one domain into another domain) and CB (i.e. merging parts of conceptualizations of two domains into a new domain). Several ideas are presented and discussed in the thesis to support this claim, by showing how the utilization of these mechanisms can be modeled within a logic-based framework. The framework to be used is Heuristic-Driven Theory Projection (HDTP), which can model solutions to a concrete set of cognition problems (including creativity, rationality, noun-noun combinations, and the analysis of counterfactual conditionals). The resulting contributions may be considered as a necessary, although not by any means a sufficient, step to achieve intelligence on a human-comparable scale in AGI-based systems. The thesis thus fills an important gap in models of AGI, because computing intelligence on a human-comparable scale (which is, indeed, an ultimate goal of AGI) needs to consider the modeling of solutions to, in particular, the aforementioned problems.

L'objectif de cette thèse est de développer des méthodes statistiques basées sur la théorie des valeurs extrêmes pour estimer des probabilités d'évènements rares et des quantiles extrêmes conditionnelles. Nous considérons une suite de variables aléatoires indépendantes X_{t_1}$, $X_{t_2}$,...$,$X_{t_n}$ associées aux temps $0≤t_{1}< … <t_{n}≤T_{\max}$ où $X_{t_i}$ a la fonction de répartition $F_{t_i}$ et $F_t$ est la loi conditionnelle de $X$ sachant $T=t \in [0,T_{\max}]$. Pour chaque $t \in [0,T_{\max}]$, nous proposons un estimateur non paramétrique de quantiles extrêmes de $F_t$. L'idée de notre approche consiste à ajuster pour chaque $t \in [0,T_{\max}]$ la queue de la distribution $F_{t}$, par une distribution de Pareto de paramètre $\theta_{t,\tau}$ à partir d'un seuil $\tau.$ Le paramètre $\theta_{t,\tau}$ est estimé en utilisant un estimateur non paramétrique à noyau de taille de fenêtre $h$ basé sur les observations plus grandes que $\tau$. Sous certaines hypothèses de régularité, nous montrons que l'estimateur adaptatif proposé de $\theta_{t,\tau} $ est consistant et nous donnons sa vitesse de convergence. Nous proposons une procédure de tests séquentiels pour déterminer le seuil $\tau$ et nous obtenons le paramètre $h$ suivant deux méthodes : la validation croisée et une approche adaptative. Nous proposons également une méthode pour choisir simultanément le seuil $\tau$ et la taille de la fenêtre $h$. Finalement, les procédures proposées sont étudiées sur des données simulées et sur des données réelles dans le but d'aider à la surveillance de systèmes aquatiques. / The objective of this PhD thesis is to develop statistical methods based on the theory of extreme values to estimate the probabilities of rare events and conditional extreme quantiles. We consider independent random variables $X_{t_1},…,X_{t_n}$ associated to a sequence of times $0 ≤t_1 <… < t_n ≤ T_{\max}$ where $X_{t_i}$ has distribution function $F_{t_i}$ and $F_t$ is the conditional distribution of $X$ given $T = t \in [0,T_{\max}]$. For each $ t \in [0, T {\max}]$, we propose a nonparametric adaptive estimator for extreme quantiles of $F_t$. The idea of our approach is to adjust the tail of the distribution function $F_t$ with a Pareto distribution of parameter $\theta {t,\tau}$ starting from a threshold $\tau$. The parameter $\theta {t,\tau}$ is estimated using a nonparametric kernel estimator of bandwidth $h$ based on the observations larger than $\tau$. We propose a sequence testing based procedure for the choice of the threshold $\tau$ and we determine the bandwidth $h$ by two methods: cross validation and an adaptive procedure. Under some regularity assumptions, we prove that the adaptive estimator of $\theta {t, \tau}$ is consistent and we determine its rate of convergence. We also propose a method to choose simultaneously the threshold $\tau$ and the bandwidth $h$. Finally, we study the proposed procedures by simulation and on real data set to contribute to the survey of aquatic systems.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(工学) / 甲第19750号 / 工博第4205号 / 新制||工||1649(附属図書館) / 32786 / 京都大学大学院工学研究科合成・生物化学専攻 / (主査)教授 濵地 格, 教授 森 泰生, 教授 杉野目 道紀 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Philosophy (Engineering) / Kyoto University / DFAM

No description available.

No description available.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / Introduced in 2010, the Dispensation Zimbabwe Program (DZP) regularised undocumented Zimbabwean immigrants in South Africa. When DZP was closed, the Zimbabwe Special Permit was introduced, which was also replaced by the Zimbabwe Exemption Permit. This thesis examines the lived experiences of Zimbabwean migrants from the time they arrived in South Africa without papers, visas, or permits. It then examines the processes of acquiring DZP papers, processes of replacing it, and how conditions on the permits reinforce a particular notion of belonging for Zimbabwean immigrants. I draw on work inspired by the anthropologist Victor Turner’s (1967) concept of liminality to show that Zimbabwean migrants had been going through various phases of uncertain legal statuses which are all liminal. Through accounts of lived experiences and biographical narratives of migrants who see themselves as ‘entrepreneurs’ in Cape Town, I consider how migrant’s experience the structural effects of documentation and having or not having ‘papers’. It starts with a state of “illegality” because of being an undocumented migrant in South Africa. It proceeds to “amnesty” from deportation following the announcement of DZP. It then proceeds to the filling of application forms for legalisation at Home Affairs. The DZP permits make them “liminal citizens” in that they got political citizenship by virtue of being documented, but at the same time, the migrants do not enjoy full citizenship status economically. There is also “legal suspension” as in the period between applications for replacement of the permit with another for example from Zimbabwe Special Permit (ZSP) to Zimbabwe Exemption Permit (ZEP). The imposition of conditions in permits that it will not be renewed or extended throws them into a condition of “temporary conditional legality”. As a result, the liminality experienced is both existential and juridical. Juridical liminality results from uncertain legal status whether the migrant is documented or not. Juridical liminality is inherent in law and immigration policy. Existential liminality is because the uncertain legal status permeates all aspects of Zimbabwean immigrants’ lives and delimits their range of action in different spheres. This includes jobs, transnational capabilities, business, family, housing, and schooling for their children. Most studies on migration do not extend their arguments beyond that permits matter as they see them as giving immediate access to social and economic rights. In this thesis, I do not only examine how a condition of being an undocumented immigrant shapes aspects of immigrants’ lives but I further examine the experiences of living with temporary visas and their impact on their lives and family. Whereas in a rite of passage, the liminal stage is temporary, Zimbabweans in South Africa are living in chronic liminality. In all phases of liminal legality, the thesis demonstrates state power through documents/visas in shaping migrant lives deepening our understanding of immigrant incorporation, exclusion, citizenship and belonging.

In this research, our goal was to pinpoint the crucial characteristics that make a voice suitable for an AI psychologist. More importantly, we wanted to explore how Text-To-Speech (TTS) combined with conditional voice controlling, also known as ”prompting”, could be used to incorporate these traits into the voice generation process. This approach allowed us to create synthetic voices that were not just effective, but also tailored to the specific needs of an AI psychologist role. We conducted an exploratory survey to identify key traits such as trustworthiness, safety, sympathy, calmness, and firmness. These traits were then used as prompts in the generation of AI voices using Tortoise, a state-of-the-art text-to-speech system. The generated voices were evaluated through a survey study, resulting in a mean opinion score for different categories corresponding to the prompts. Our findings showed that while the AI-generated voices did not quite match the quality of a real human voice, they were still quite effective in capturing the essence of the prompts and producing the desired voice characteristics. This suggests that prompting within TTS, or the strategic design of prompts, can significantly enhance the effectiveness of AI voices. In addition, we explored the potential impact of AI on the labor market, considering factors such as job displacement and creation, changes in salaries, and the need for reskilling. Our study highlights that AI will have a significant impact on the job market, but the exact nature of this impact remains uncertain. Our findings offer valuable insights into the potential of AI in psychology and highlight the importance of tailoring voice synthesis to specific applications. They lay a solid foundation for future research in this area, fostering continued innovation at the intersection of AI, psychology, and economic viability. / I den här forskningen var vårt mål att lokalisera de avgörande egenskaperna som gör en röst lämplig för en AI-psykolog. Vi ville även utforska hur ”Text-Till-Tal” (TTS) i kombination med villkorlig röststyrning, också kallat prompting, kan användas för att införliva dessa egenskaper i röstgenereringsprocessen. Detta tillvägagångssätt gjorde det möjligt för oss att skapa syntetiska röster som inte bara var effektiva, utan också skräddarsydda för de specifika behoven hos en roll som AI-psykolog. Vi genomförde en utforskande undersökning för att identifiera nyckelegenskaper som pålitlighet, säkerhet, sympati, lugn och fasthet. Dessa egenskaper användes sedan som uppmaningar i genereringen av AI-röster med hjälp av TorToise, ett modern TTS-system. De genererade rösterna utvärderades genom en enkätstudie, vilket resulterade i en genomsnittlig åsiktspoäng för olika kategorier som motsvarar uppmaningarna. Våra resultat visade att även om de AI-genererade rösterna inte riktigt matchade kvaliteten på en riktig mänsklig röst, var de fortfarande ganska effektiva för att fånga kärnan i uppmaningarna och producera de önskade röstegenskaperna. Detta tyder på att TTS kombinerat med prompting, eller den emotionella styrningen av TTS, avsevärt kan förbättra effektiviteten hos AI-röster. Dessutom undersökte vi den potentiella effekten av AI på arbetsmarknaden, med hänsyn till faktorer som förskjutning och skapande av jobb, förändringar i löner och behovet av ny kompetens. Vår studie visar att AI kommer att ha en betydande inverkan på arbetsmarknaden, men den exakta karaktären av denna påverkan är fortfarande osäker. Våra resultat ger värdefulla insikter om potentialen för AI inom psykologi och belyser vikten av att skräddarsy röstsyntes för specifika applikationer. De lägger en solid grund för framtida forskning inom detta område och främjar fortsatt innovation i skärningspunkten mellan AI, psykologi och ekonomisk bärkraft.

<p>Wildlife species generate value through their consumptive and non-consumptive uses. Consumptive uses of these species include hunting and trapping, while wildlife watching is an example of a non-consumptive use. Understanding the value of various wildlife is imperative for public agencies’ management decisions regarding different wildlife areas (e.g., nature preserves, state forests/parks, reservoirs, county/city parks). Individuals’ values for wildlife interactions on public lands can depend on the context in which these interactions occur as well as the probability of an interaction occurring. We utilize a stated preference choice experiment to estimate Indiana residents’ willingness to pay (WTP) for a marginal increase in the chance of seeing white-tailed deer and five furbearing species (bobcat, coyote, river otter, raccoon, red fox) while engaging in their favorite activities at Indiana recreational areas. Our WTP estimates are analogous to value of statistical life (VSL) calculations, and hence we refer to them as the “value of a statistical species” (VSS). We find that the VSS of a bobcat ranges from $22.73 to $41.30, the VSS of a coyote ranges from -$1.94 to $9.74, the VSS of a raccoon ranges from $5.25 to $21.69, the VSS of a red fox ranges from $43.31 to $62.52, the VSS of a white-tailed deer ranges from $22.70 to $27.00, and the VSS of a river otter ranges from $23.18 to $45.98. Our analysis suggests that individuals’ values for wildlife depend on the activity they are undertaking when they see the wildlife.  </p>