Magasinprogrammet Go’kväll sänder i regel fem program per vecka under hela vinterhalvåret. Programmet produceras och sänds ut av SVT allmän-TV i Umeå. Till vissa delar av programmet önskas gäster som uttalar sig om aktuella ämnen. Vid några tillfällen har redaktionen upplevt att man inte kunnat plocka in de mest optimala gästerna för kommentarer på grund av rent logistiska skäl, i regel att den efterfrågade gästen i fråga inte kunnat närvara fysiskt i Umeå, ofta på grund av kort varsel, något som nuvarande programutformning kräver av alla som medverkar i direktsändning. Det som efterfrågades var en lösning för att kunna inkludera konceptet gäst via direktlänk i kortare segment av programmet. I utgångsläget fanns ingen budget eller möjlighet till stora ekonomiska investeringar just för detta ändamål. Problemformuleringen blev därför: Hur implementerar man konceptet gäst via länk med hjälp av de resurser SVT idag och inom den närmsta framtiden förfogar över? TV-verksamheten inom SVT är primärt indelad i tre olika divisioner: allmän-tv (dit hör exempelvis barn-, nöje-, fakta- och kulturprogram), nyheter (nyhetsbevakning, sport, regionala nyheter etc.) och SVTi (teknisk utveckling). Allmän-TV (ATV) produceras av SVT på fyra orter som är Stockholm, Göteborg, Malmö och Umeå. De fyra ATV-orterna har utrustning för att sända HDTV och producerar även i HD. Nyheter, och framförallt de regionala nyheterna inkluderar redan i dagsläget olika direktsända inslag från fältet i sina produktioner men skillnaden är att allt produceras i det gamla SD-formatet. I praktiken innebär detta att HD endast kan sändas mellan ATV-orterna och sedan ut i rutan utan att infrastrukturen ändras. Den stora utmaningen blev följaktligen att hitta en lösning där så mycket av befintlig infrastruktur och personalresurs som möjligt kan utnyttjas och samtidigt möta de krav på bildkvalitet som efterfrågas. Med hjälp av intervjuer och interna dokument kartlades befintliga resurser och resultatet blev att möjligheter för att lösa problemet med hjälp av befintlig infrastruktur och bemanning torde vara fullt genomförbart och möjligt att implementera snarast. / The talk-show Go'kväll (Good evening) broadcast five shows per week during the autumn, winter and spring. The show is produced and broadcasted by the non-news section (ATV) of SVT in Umeå. In some parts of the show, guests who gives comments to various recent events is wanted. Some particular times, the editorial staff has experienced that the most ideal guests could not be present in the show, mainly according to the circumstance that they have to be physically present in the studio in Umeå in order to participate in the show, often made impossible by travel logistics. The production wanted a solution for using the concept of remote located quests participating live via video link in chosen segments of the show. There was no economical budget for the project, so the question was: How to implement the concept of using remote located quests live in Go'kväll, only using present infrastructure and other resources? The TV-operations within the company of SVT is divided into three different divisions, ATV, News section (news, sport) and SVTi (Technichal development). ATV is produced and broadcasted from Stockholm, Gothenburg, Malmö and Umeå. These four facilities produce and broadcast in HD-format while the news division mainly broadcasts in SD. Practically, this means that with no change at all in infrastructure, HD can only be transmitted between and from the ATV-locations. The main challenge then, become finding a solution where as much as possible of resources in terms of infrastructure and staff could be used and also meet the requirements of video quality. By making interviews and reading internal working documents, existing resources were surveyed and the results shows that possibilities to solve the problem using existing technical infrastructure and labour exists and should be implementable instantly, if requested.

This thesis is driven by the motivation to explore a way of working collaboratively that closely reflects the World Wide Web (WWW), more specifically the potential of the Web architecture built on Semantic Web technologies and Linked Data. The goal is to describe a generic approach and architecture that satisfies the needs for loose collaboration and collective knowledge construction as exemplified by the applications described in this thesis. This thesis focuses on a contribution-centric architecture which allows for flexible applications that support loose forms of collaboration. The first research question deals with how Web-based collective knowledge construction can be supported. The second research question explores the characteristics of collective knowledge construction with respect to the Open World Assumption (OWA). The OWA implies that complete knowledge about a subject cannot be assumed at any time, which is one of the most fundamental properties of the WWW. The third research question investigates how Semantic Web technologies be used in order to support such a contribution-centric architecture. The thesis and its underlying publications are of a technical character and are always grounded in theoretical models and considerations that have led to functional implementations. The research has evolved in iterative development processes and was explicitly directed at building applications that can be used in collaborative settings and that are based on standardized Web technologies. One of the main outcomes, an information model, was developed together with such an application and provides a number of novel approaches in the context in which it was designed. The validity of the presented research is supported by evaluations from different perspectives: a list of implemented applications and showcases, results from structured interviews that have investigated the suitability for various resource annotation processes, as well as scalability aspects. The thesis concludes that it is ultimately up to the application how "loose" the collaboration should be and to which extent the OWA is incorporated. The presented architecture provides a toolkit to support the development of loosely collaborative applications. The showcased applications allow the construction of collaborative conceptual models and to collaboratively annotate educational resources. They show the potential of the used technology stack and the introduced contribution-centric architecture that sits on top if it. / <p>QC 20140417</p>

A reforming trend is captured showing that countries are shifting from defined benefit pension systems towards defined contribution systems. The reforms have been justified through predictions that the defined benefit systems will not manage to provide good enough pensions to members in the future. The newer defined contribution pension plans often include individual financial accounts where individuals have the possibility to choose how a part of their pension savings should be invested. Sweden was early to introduce such a system, which at the moment provides more than 800 funds to choose from. The aim of this thesis is to capture the market risk associated with these individual investments and does so by using Monte Carlo simulations for six selected pension funds. The method produces forecasts of replacement ratios, pension as percentage of pre-retirement income, for two hypothetical individuals: one who starts to work right after elementary school and one individual who starts a five year education and after graduation starts to work. The results show a slightly lower replacement ratio for the educated individual, which also is associated with a higher probability of ending up with a low replacement ratio. The market risk also varies between the funds, which implies that the funds should be chosen with great care. The study ends with arguments for an increasing paternalism with a carefully considered fund offering, providing fewer funds to choose from than today.

Social commerce is a growing field due to the popularity of social media. Research on social commerce stresses the benefits of utilizing social media or Web 2.0 technologies for business because user contribution, participation and collaboration, which are characteristics of Web 2.0, fuel business vitalization. Nevertheless, there is a lack of academic research on social commerce, and in what little research there is, the coverage is circumscribed. One of the challenges is conceptualization of social commerce due to various definitions made from researchers’ different perspectives and different positions on social commerce. This also led to the limitation of scope of research. In addition, there is still a need for identifying technological features and business goals for social commerce. Therefore, this research primarily encompasses establishing the concept of social commerce and identifying its implementation methods. To amount to those two primary goals, the research objectives are to understand the factors that affect social commerce implementation; to identify and investigate applicable Web 2.0 technologies that enable social commerce activities; and to investigate the business goals that can be achieved by social commerce implementation. Ultimately, the research aims to address methods of implementation. Consequently, the achievement of this research is that first, the concept of social commerce has been established by refining several definitions from the literature. Second, social commerce activities and business goals were identified and categorized based on the marketing funnel concept and the new customer life cycle model. Third, applicable Web 2.0 technologies were identified from the literature and other functionalities were also seized from real cases. Finally, the concept of social commerce has been demonstrated by implementing selected various commerce applications

In the current water resources scientific literature, a wide variety of engineering design problems are solved in a simulation-optimization framework. These problems can have single or multiple objective functions and their decision variables can have discrete or continuous values. The majority of current literature in the field of water resources systems optimization report using heuristic global optimization algorithms, including evolutionary algorithms, with great success. These algorithms have multiple parameters that control their behavior both in terms of computational efficiency and the ability to find near globally optimal solutions. Values of these parameters are generally obtained by trial and error and are case study dependent. On the other hand, water resources simulation-optimization problems often have computationally intensive simulation models that can require seconds to hours for a single simulation. Furthermore, analysts may have limited computational budget to solve these problems, as such, the analyst may not be able to spend some of the computational budget to fine-tune the algorithm settings and parameter values. So, in general, algorithm parsimony in the number of parameters is an important factor in the applicability and performance of optimization algorithms for solving computationally intensive problems. A major contribution of this thesis is the development of a highly efficient, single objective, parsimonious optimization algorithm for solving problems with discrete decision variables. The algorithm is called Hybrid Discrete Dynamically Dimensioned Search, HD-DDS, and is designed based on Dynamically Dimensioned Search (DDS) that was developed by Tolson and Shoemaker (2007) for solving single objective hydrologic model calibration problems with continuous decision variables. The motivation for developing HD-DDS comes from the parsimony and high performance of original version of DDS. Similar to DDS, HD-DDS has a single parameter with a robust default value. HD-DDS is successfully applied to several benchmark water distribution system design problems where decision variables are pipe sizes among the available pipe size options. Results show that HD-DDS exhibits superior performance in specific comparisons to state-of-the-art optimization algorithms. The parsimony and efficiency of the original and discrete versions of DDS and their successful application to single objective water resources optimization problems with discrete and continuous decision variables motivated the development of a multi-objective optimization algorithm based on DDS. This algorithm is called Pareto Archived Dynamically Dimensioned Search (PA-DDS). The algorithm parsimony is a major factor in the design of PA-DDS. PA-DDS has a single parameter from its search engine DDS. In each iteration, PA-DDS selects one archived non-dominated solution and perturbs it to search for new solutions. The solution perturbation scheme of PA-DDS is similar to the original and discrete versions of DDS depending on whether the decision variable is discrete or continuous. So, PA-DDS can handle both types of decision variables. PA-DDS is applied to several benchmark mathematical problems, water distribution system design problems, and water resources model calibration problems with great success. It is shown that hypervolume contribution, HVC1, as defined in Knowles et al. (2003) is the superior selection metric for PA-DDS when solving multi-objective optimization problems with Pareto fronts that have a general (unknown) shape. However, one of the main contributions of this thesis is the development of a selection metric specifically designed for solving multi-objective optimization problems with a known or expected convex Pareto front such as water resources model calibration problems. The selection metric is called convex hull contribution (CHC) and makes the optimization algorithm sample solely from a subset of archived solutions that form the convex approximation of the Pareto front. Although CHC is generally applicable to any stochastic search optimization algorithm, it is applied to PA-DDS for solving six water resources calibration case studies with two or three objective functions. These case studies are solved by PA-DDS with CHC and HVC1 selections using 1,000 solution evaluations and by PA-DDS with CHC selection and two popular multi-objective optimization algorithms, AMALGAM and ε-NSGAII, using 10,000 solution evaluations. Results are compared based on the best case and worst case performances (out of multiple optimization trials) from each algorithm to measure the expected performance range for each algorithm. Comparing the best case performance of these algorithms shows that, PA-DDS with CHC selection using 1,000 solution evaluations perform very well in five out of six case studies. Comparing the worst case performance of the algorithms shows that with 1,000 solution evaluations, PA-DDS with CHC selection perform well in four out of six case studies. Furthermore, PA-DDS with CHC selection using 10,000 solution evaluations perform comparable to AMALGAM and ε-NSGAII. Therefore, it is concluded that PA-DDS with CHC selection is a powerful optimization algorithm for finding high quality solutions of multi-objective water resources model calibration problems with convex Pareto front especially when the computational budget is limited.

Several experimental studies show that ex post communication mitigates opportunistic behavior in social dilemmas. The source of this effect, especially in a repeated interaction, is nonetheless still obscure. This study provides a novel empirical testbed for two channels by which ex post communication may affect behavior in a repeated public goods game. One is related to strategic signaling. The other involves emotions induced by others' expressed disapproval. The presence of ex post communication strongly fosters pro-social behavior. The data do not support the signaling hypothesis, favouring the emotion-based explanation instead. (author's abstract) / Series: Department of Economics Working Paper Series

As more and more remotely sensed data becomes available it is becoming increasingly harder to analyse it with the more traditional labour intensive, manual methods. The commonly used techniques, that involve expert evaluation, are widely acknowledged as providing inconsistent results, at best. We need more general techniques that can adapt to a given situation and that incorporate the strengths of the traditional methods, human operators and new technologies. The difficulty in interpreting remotely sensed data is that often only a small amount of data is available for classification. It can be noisy, incomplete or contain irrelevant information. Given that the training data may be limited we demonstrate a variety of techniques for highlighting information in the available data and how to select the most relevant information for a given classification task. We show that more consistent results between the training data and an entire image can be obtained, and how misclassification errors can be reduced. Specifically, a new technique for attribute selection in neural networks is demonstrated. Machine learning techniques, in particular, provide us with a means of automating classification using training data from a variety of data sources, including remotely sensed data and expert knowledge. A classification framework is presented in this thesis that can be used with any classifier and any available data. While this was developed in the context of vegetation mapping from remotely sensed data using machine learning classifiers, it is a general technique that can be applied to any domain. The emphasis of the applicability for this framework being domains that have inadequate training data available.

Social work is one of the core mental health professions. With a dominance of a biological model in psychiatry, the scope of social factors has been relatively marginal. Social factors have been argued to be social work ́s area of expertise. Psychiatric social work is challenged to articulate its unique knowledge and valuable contribution to the field of mental health care since they are coexisting with other more well-established professions. This qualitative study explores how psychiatric social workers and psychiatrists in Goa, India, perceive social work's unique knowledge and its contribution to the field of mental health care. It further explores psychiatric social workers understanding of social factors in relation to mental illness. The empirical material was collected through twelve semi-structured interviews with ten psychiatric social workers and two psychiatrists working in different mental health care settings in Goa. The results show that the main psychiatric social work contributions were described as raising awareness about mental illness and their functioning as a bridge between units. The result further shows a difficulty (among psychiatric social workers) to articulate psychiatric social work's unique knowledge, but during the interviews a specific in-depth knowledge emerged as well as a focus on psychiatric knowledge. Our findings showed that psychiatric social workers understood social factors in terms of social relations. The results are analyzed with Foucault's theory of discourse, Polanyi's theory of tacit knowledge and Ingleheart’s modernization theory.

Nesse trabalho, a equação de estado PC-SAFT é combinada com um método de contribuição de grupos (GC) para estimação dos seus parâmetros. Para tanto, foram utilizados dados experimentais dos componentes puros (pressão de vapor e volume específico do líquido) e em mistura (equilíbrio líquido-vapor - VLE e coeficiente de atividade em diluição infinita - IDAC). Através de uma análise de sensibilidade, verificou-se que o parâmetro volume de associação poderia ser mantido constante, reduzindo o número de parâmetros a serem estimados. O objetivo principal foi estudar misturas que apresentassem associação cruzada ou forte interação entre os compostos. Com os parâmetros estimados, avaliou-se o desempenho do modelo GC-PC-SAFT no cálculo de propriedades de n-alcanos, 1-álcoois, aminas, clorofórmio e acetona. Os desvios médios obtidos no cálculo do equilíbrio líquido-vapor (VLE), entre as diferentes misturas estudadas, mostraram que a estratégia adotada para a estimação do parâmetro energia de associação apresentou bons resultados, com desvios relativamente baixos para a maioria dos casos estudados. Para IDAC, as predições foram muito semelhantes àquelas obtidas por outros modelos. Os resultados de VLE são importantes, pois fornecem informações sobre as concentrações intermediárias de uma mistura, enquanto que o IDAC fornece uma medida eficiente do grau de não-idealidade da mistura. Essas propriedades foram escolhidas com o objetivo de conseguir uma melhor representação das misturas, buscando eliminar a necessidade de parâmetros de interação binária. Os resultados obtidos revelam que o modelo GC-PC-SAFT proposto pode ser utilizado para predizer o equilíbrio líquido-vapor com uma precisão satisfatória para sistemas binários entre os diferentes compostos estudados, sem nenhum parâmetro de interação binária. / In this work, the PC-SAFT EoS is combined with a group contribution method (GC) for parameter estimation. To achieve this, experimental data for pure components (vapor pressure and liquid volume) and mixtures (vapor-liquid equilibria - VLE and infinite dilution activity coefficient -IDAC) has been used. Through sensitivity analysis, it has been found that the association volume parameter could be set constant, thus reducing the amount of parameters that needed to be estimated. The aim of this work was to study mixtures that presented cross association or strong component interaction. With the estimated parameters, GC-PC-SAFT performance in properties calculation of n-alkanes, 1-alcohols, amines, chloroform and ketone has been evaluated. The average deviations obtained in the calculation of vapor-liquid equilibria (VLE), in the different mixtures considered, have shown that the strategy for association energy parameter estimation has presented good results, with relatively low deviations for most of the cases. For IDAC, the predictions presented very similar results to those obtained by other models. VLE results are important because they provide information about mixtures’ intermediary concentrations, whereas IDAC offers an efficient measure of mixtures’ degree of non-ideality. These properties have been chosen with the aim of getting a better representation of the mixtures, seeking to eliminate the need for binary interaction parameters. The obtained results show that GC-PC-SAFT can be used to predict vapor-liquid equilibria for binary systems among the different studied components with satisfactory accuracy with no binary interaction parameter.

La fusion et l’apport partiel d’actif soumis au régime des scissions sont des opérations fréquentes tant en France que dans les pays membres de l’OHADA. Elles présentent des risques multiples pour les actionnaires et les créanciers et cette thèse s'attache justement à étudier la protection qui s'offre à ces catégories. Cette étude fait apparaître que leur protection est assurée par trois éléments essentiels dans les deux ordres juridiques : l'information, la consultation et le principe de la transmission universelle du patrimoine. Nos analyses révèlent cependant que ces protections sont insuffisantes car elles ne sont pas mises en œuvre de manière optimale et sont fortement limitées par la jurisprudence. Aussi pour améliorer le système actuel, des solutions législatives et contractuelles sont nécessaires pour garantir au mieux la protection des actionnaires et des créanciers. La voie législative permet de renforcer l’efficacité d’un droit, comme par exemple la reconnaissance du droit de retrait aux actionnaires. Quant à la contractualisation, elle permet de renforcer la protection de base instituée par les textes, ainsi que l’illustre la clause de survie de l’obligation de couverture ou de la garantie autonome. / The merger and the partial contribution of assets subjected to the regime of splits are frequent operations both in France and in the member countries of the OHADA. They present multiple risks for shareholders and creditors, and this thesis focuses on the protection afforded to these categories. This study shows that their protection is ensured by three essential elements in the two legal orders: information, consultation and the principle of the universal transmission of the heritage. However, our analyzes reveal that these protections are insufficient because they are not implemented optimally and are strongly limited by case law. To improve the current system, legal and contractual solutions are needed to ensure the best protection of shareholders and creditors. The legislative way makes it possible to reinforce the effectiveness of a right, as for example the recognition of the right of withdrawal to the shareholders. As for the contractualization, it makes it possible to reinforce the basic protection instituted by the texts, as the survival clause of the obligation of cover or of the autonomous guarantee illustrates it.