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In 2008 and 2009, the world was shaken by the deepest recession since the Great Depression. This event has forced changes on many industries and professions - including Facility Management. This paper provides a "snapshot view" of how Facility Managers and Facility Management departments are navigating the financial meltdown. Preliminary research focused on previous recessionary periods, and the impact that they had on the development of Facility Management. In the recessions of the eighties, nineties and two thousands, Facility Managers started professional associations and developed professional certifications for themselves. At the same time, more businesses began utilizing the Facility Management function in order to orchestrate an increasingly complicated (and potentially expensive) built environment. At the same time, the same economic pressures led both to an increase in the use of outsourcing, and a backlog of deferred maintenance. Facility Managers had to be both innovative and flexible to survive in the industry - which has seen little growth in the 2000s. The main focus of this paper was a survey answered by 119 Facility Managers. In it, they reported on both how their departments were responding to the recession, and also how they were personally managing their careers during this time. Follow-up questions were also asked of some Facility Managers, to get a more detailed understanding of their answers. The main strategy that the survey found Facility Management departments turning to during the current recession was deferred maintenance, followed by staffing cuts and contract renegotiations. Facility Managers also reported that they are continuing to shift work to outsourcers - although some FMs reported that they have either outsourced all the work they can, or that there is no way to outsource some of the tasks that they do. In those cases, they focused on doing more work in-house. Individual Facility Managers tended to have relatively long careers, with about seventy percent being in their positions for longer than three years. Also, of those FMs who reported being unemployed, the majority had only been out of work for less than six months. Many of the Facility Managers questioned in this survey stated that they believed networking was a key component of their jobs. There were some who disagreed with this, however, believing that technical knowledge has become much more important than a strong social network. About equal numbers of people who had been in their jobs for about a year reported finding those jobs through job-boards as through networking Most of the Facility Managers who responded to the survey are not aware of any initiatives devoted specifically to helping out-of-work FMs. These groups do exist, however, and some were discovered in the course of researching this paper. It's notable that many Facility Managers appeared to have much more negative view of social networking sites than they do of in-person networking. The paper concludes by speculating on what the various results mean. While Facility Management departments appear to be laying professionals off, the long tenures and short periods of unemployment may signal that Facility managers are still in demand - even in times of recession. They may actually be more in demand now than in normal times, because of the need to balance multiple needs during a time of constrained spending on both capital and operating budgets. One red flag on the horizon is the perception of new technologies by respondents to this survey. Facility Managers were originally hired to manage costly new technologies in the workplace - this is something that they must continue to do in the future, and if they are not comfortable with changes that are coming, the profession may be bypassed or become marginalized. This may be a generational issue, which will be solved as younger people enter the industry.

<p>Då scenkomplexitet och ett högre antal ljuskällor blir vanligare inom spel har ett behov av algortimer för att hantera dessa scener, med bra prestanda, uppståt. En allt vanligare algoritm för detta är Deferred Shading. Rapporten utvärderar två olika metoder för <em>Deferred Shading</em> (traditionell <em>Deferred Shading</em> och <em>Light pre-pass rendering</em>).</p>

<p>Deferred shading är en renderingsteknik som har blivit allt mer populär i och med att hårdvaraukraven för tekniken inte längre är ett hinder. Ett problem med deferred shading är fortfarande hur transparenta objekt ska hanteras. Rapporten utvärderar två olika deferred pipelines som hanterar transparent geometri på olika sätt, de två renderingsmetoderna är <em>Inferred Lighting</em> samt <em>Light Pre Pass </em>med framåtrendering för hantering av transparent geometri.</p>

Thesis (D. Min.)--Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2007. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 177-184)

In this thesis, high order accurate discretization schemes for partial differential equations are investigated. In the first paper, the linearized two-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations are considered. A special formulation of the boundary conditions is used and estimates for the solution to the continuous problem in terms of the boundary conditions are derived using a normal mode analysis. Similar estimates are achieved for the discretized equations. For the discretization, a second order finite difference scheme on a staggered mesh is used. In Paper II, the analysis for the second order scheme is used to develop a fourth order scheme for the fully nonlinear Navier-Stokes equations. The fully nonlinear incompressible Navier-Stokes equations in two space dimensions are considered on an orthogonal curvilinear grid. Numerical tests are performed with a fourth order accurate Padé type spatial finite difference scheme and a semi-implicit BDF2 scheme in time. In Papers III-V, a class of high order accurate time-discretization schemes based on the deferred correction principle is investigated. The deferred correction principle is based on iteratively eliminating lower order terms in the local truncation error, using previously calculated solutions, in each iteration obtaining more accurate solutions. It is proven that the schemes are unconditionally stable and stability estimates are given using the energy method. Error estimates and smoothness requirements are derived. Special attention is given to the implementation of the boundary conditions for PDE. The scheme is applied to a series of numerical problems, confirming the theoretical results. In the sixth paper, a time-compact fourth order accurate time discretization for the one- and two-dimensional wave equation is considered. Unconditional stability is established and fourth order accuracy is numerically verified. The scheme is applied to a two-dimensional wave propagation problem with discontinuous coefficients.

Thesis (D. Min.)--Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2007. / Abstract. Description based on Microfiche version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 177-184)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Economics, December 2002. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

x, 65 p. : ill. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / I examine the relation between book-tax differences (BTDs) and earnings growth. Because financial accounting rules afford managers more flexibility and discretion in reporting than tax accounting rules, prior studies suggest that large differences between book and taxable income indicate lower quality (or less persistent) earnings. Lev and Nissim and Hanlon provide evidence that BTDs contain information about future firm performance, but the nature of the causality in this relation is not clear. While BTDs could proxy for earnings quality, they may also reveal underlying economic events or management's private information about future performance or simply predict future reversals in effective tax rates. I divide total BTDs into their measurable components: temporary (deferred taxes) and non-temporary (permanent differences and tax accruals), and test their relation with the components of net income changes: pretax earnings changes and tax expense changes. I hypothesize that the non-temporary component of BTDs is negatively related to future changes in tax expense, whereas the temporary component of BTDs is negatively related to changes in future pretax earnings. I also examine the maintained hypothesis that the lower earnings growth for large BTD firms is due to earnings management. I use various proxies from prior literature to identify firms potentially managing earnings and test whether the presence or absence of suspected earnings management activity alters the relation between BTDs and earnings changes. My results provide compelling evidence that permanent BTDs are related only to future changes in tax expense, and temporary BTDs are related to changes in pretax earnings. These results are robust to multiple sensitivity analyses, including a replication of the sample and methodology of Lev and Nissim. The results also hold in the case of firms not suspected of earnings management. In fact, 1 find only limited evidence that the results are stronger in the presence of earnings management. Overall, my study suggests that it is only the temporary component of BTDs that is related to future firm performance, with non-temporary differences being related to future tax expense changes, and that these results are primarily due to underlying economic factors, not earnings management. / Committee in charge: David Guenther, Chairperson, Accounting; Steven Matsunaga, Member, Accounting; Linda Krull, Member, Accounting; Glen Waddell, Outside Member, Economics