Background: Investors does seldom use the information provided within the notes when making investment decisions even though it is evident that notes impact the organisations share price. The reason is unclear, though hypothetically it is possible that the unawareness of potential advantages and disadvantages might be the problem. Thus, this report will aim to increase the investors and other stakeholders’ knowledge by measuring the Attention to Detail in organisations notes. Attention to Detail is in this report a measure proclaimed to align with the conservative accounting which then will measure the degree of detail the organisations’ display. Purpose: The purpose is to develop a measurement for ‘Attention to Detail’ and thereafter try to investigate what explains the Attention to Detail within the notes. Thus, the research question is stated as follows: What organisational factors impact companies’ Attention to Detail in their notes? Method: This report applies a deductive and positivistic approach where accounting theories are used to formulate hypothesises. The theories used are PAT/Agency Theory which participated in constructing two hypothesises regarding variable compensation and financial leverage, the Upper Echelon Theory that contributed to establishing a hypothesis concerning women in top position and the Institutional Theory that sympathised in the creation of industry differences hypothesis. A qualitative approach was conducted where data from a total of 175 firms was collected from their 2019 annual reports. To be able to investigate if the hypothesises established had any significant relationships with Attention to Detail, a Pearson correlation and Regression analysis was created.  Conclusion: It was found that financial leverage and different industrial sectors had a positive relationship towards Attention to Detail. It could also be concluded that the Institutional Theory had an explanatory power over the outcome of all the hypotheses and therefore is the most prominent accounting theory to explain the application of detail, in this study.

The purpose of this thesis was to find and implement an adaptive method, based on given data and hardware, for selecting different level-of-detail whilst preserving visual quality to the best extent possible. Another important aspect of the new method was that it had to be performance effective, since the target platform was an interactive direct volume rendering application. The project was targeted towards memory restricted systems in which it has previously been impossible to render large-scale volumetric datasets. The previous state of the target platform supports two detail levels: full and half, and does not implement any kind of prioritisation when selecting the level-of-detail of bricks. Apart from failing to render parts of the datasets, the old implementation is also lacking in that the top of the dataset always has the lowest prioritisation, which can prove problematic for certain datasets. An adaptive method which determines a suitable number of detail levels at run-time has been implemented. The new implementation has also reworked the way bricks are prioritised during rendering. The proposed algorithm prioritises bricks holding surface information as well as bricks that match the transfer-function configuration well. The results show that the proposed method is able to render large-scale datasets in limited environments whilst maintaining interactive frame-rates. The new brick selection algorithm is a step in the right direction towards solving the issue with parts of the dataset not being prioritised.

Background: Recreating nature in a virtual environment comes with many aspects and challenges. Grass rendering is a part of this area, and both performance and visual results must be taken into consideration. A common optimization approach is through static level-of-detail (LOD), however, a certain visual loss comes with the use of this. Dynamic LOD is an alternative technique and exists in various forms, such as phong tessellation. The thesis will investigate the performance and visual implications of utilizing phong tessellation in grass rendering. Objectives: The main objective is to examine the implications of utilizing phong tessellation in grass rendering in terms of performance and visual results. Different scenarios will be examined, providing an overview while identifying performance and visual patterns of the technique. Methods: An experiment conducted via a DirectX 11 implementation was used to collect all data in scenarios that varied in the number of blades and how the tessellation falloff rate was described. The data collected was the average frame time during a 30-second duration as well were rendered images saved to disk from two points of view. Two reference scenes existed that only used a single LOD of either low- or high-quality grass, while no tessellation was applied. The data of each scenario and scene were compared to one another, and the visual differences were identified using the image difference evaluator FLIP. Results: The results show that different scenarios provide different benefits. Some scenarios contain smaller visual errors, while others perform efficiently. Overall a linear detail-falloff rate both performs well at various blade amounts and produces similar or smaller visual differences to the other scenarios. However, the results also show that the technique does not fit every set of hardware, at least not in demanding scenarios. Conclusions: The findings of this thesis show that the method has the potential to be a valid option in terms of performance and visual quality. It is, however, important to consider the specific use case as it is not applicable in every situation and to consider what hardware the application will run on.

Background. Rendering planets with high detail from orbit to surface level is becoming increasingly common in video games. In this thesis, two solutions to achieving this will be compared, a quadtree solution and a tessellation solution. These solutions both implement an adaptive level of detail on a spherical shape. The quadtree solution uses six quadtrees to construct the planetary terrain mesh on the CPU with higher detail closer to the viewer. The tessellation solution uses the GPU to subdivide areas of a basic low-resolution model to achieve higher levels of detail close to the viewer. Objectives. Related work that has implemented these solutions uses old hardware and there is a lack of performance data on these solutions running on modern hardware. The objective of this project is to provide performance data and a comparison between the quadtree solution and the tessellation solution on modern hardware. This comparison will include a discussion of the negative and positive performance aspects of the two solutions. Methods. The two solutions will be implemented to create two similar-looking applications with a focus on only the technical aspects of rendering a globe mesh with each of these solutions. The frame time both on the CPU and on the GPU will be measured for each solution. The measurements will be taken at four different distances from the globe, meaning four different levels of detail. Due to a limitation of tessellation, this solution has to be provided with a higher resolution base model to achieve similar detail levels at the surface level. Results. The results show the quadtree frame time increasing with measurements taken closer to the surface of the globe. The tessellation results show a larger performance impact, though this is due to the base globe mesh being swapped for a higher-resolution model. Conclusions. The result suggests that the tessellation solution performs worse, however, the tessellation solution still shows little to no performance loss when comparing frame time measured on the same base mesh, even though the detail difference between them is high. The quadtree solution has an overall better performance and provides more control over the detail levels. The lack of control over the detail levels in the tessellation solution means that the detail level can not be matched exactly, which leads to the tessellation solution giving a richer topology.

No description available.

No description available.

This is a study in which landscape architecture is theoretically related to the "textile art." It establishes a theoretical analogy of the landscape as a kind of textual manifestation, "the landscape is a textile," and aims to establish new resemblances that show how the landscape and textile arts are related, not only with regards to the elements of composition, or to similarities between the elemental relationships that exist in both these arts, but to how the study of structure and form in the production of textiles may influence our understanding of the textile nature of the landscape. The first part of the research is developing a theoretical analogy between landscape and fabric. The process of making textiles is based on weaving and knitting, operations in which knots obviously play a most important role. The context of the urban landscape can also be viewed as a woven fabric of different threads, where knots are the summit of this interwoven textile. This study shows that the goal of landscape is to knit together the clusters of meaning so that the person can experience the unity that binds up these different qualities. Based on this theoretical analogy, the second part uses the "action research" method which in the context of this study would be a scholarly practice of design, "design-research." Both parts of the research are qualitative inquiry in nature and the qualitative manner of the investigation calls for an inductive investigation rather than a deductive one; theoretical discussions and the design section rely heavily on interpretation of the researcher. / Master of Landscape Architecture

Information visualization (info vis) deals with how to increase the bandwidth of effective communication between computer and human, enabling us to see more, understand more, and accomplish more. Traditionally, it deals with interaction and display techniques of visualizing often abstract data on the two-dimensional desktop. Immersive virtual environments (VEs) offer new, exciting possibilities for information visualization. Immersion gives an enhanced realistic effect, and can improve spatial understanding and orientation. By identifying or developing useful interaction techniques (ITs), we can develop VE systems for better information visualization. This thesis has two different experiments that were related to two different sides of the study of use of immersion for VEs. One of the experiments is related to abstract data visualization in an immersive VE. The other one was motivated by the need for enhancing a realistic VE with additional data. In our first experiment, our focus is on implementing overview+detail techniques in VEs. Our hypothesis is that VE-specific ITs should borrow from, but not copy existing 2D IT technique for overview +detail. We develop ITs for use in VEs and show that they are easy to use and useful using task-based usability evaluation. We develop the "jump" technique for use in this application, which can be generalized to numerous other applications. The tangible contribution of this research is Wizard, an application for infovis in VEs. Our second hypothesis is that if the data to be visualized has inherent spatial attributes, it can be visualized well in immersive virtual environments. We investigate the trends using an experiment that tests people's understanding of spatial attributes under immersive and desktop conditions. Although not statistically significant, we observed a moderate trend indicating that immersion decreases the time needed to perform a spatial information- gathering task. We believe that this area of research can be applied immediately to the applications currently being developed. / Master of Science

In the arena of software development, implementing a software design (no matter how perfect the design) is rarely done right the first time. Consequently, debugging one's own (or someone else's) software is inevitable, and tools that assist in this often-arduous task become very important with respect to reducing the cost of debugging as well as the cost of the software life cycle as a whole. Many tools exist with this aim, but all are lacking in a key area: information visualization. Applying information visualization techniques such as zooming, focus and context, or graphical representation of numeric data may enhance the visual debugging experience. To this end, drawing data structures as graphs is potentially a step in the right direction, but more must be done to maximize the value of time spent debugging and to minimize the actual amount of time spent debugging. This thesis will address some information visualization techniques that may be helpful in debugging (specifically with respect to visual debugging) and will present the results of a small pilot study intended to illustrate the potential value of such techniques. / Master of Science

What defines the architectural character of a space? What defines the architectural character of a Detail? What defines the relationship between space and details as Architecture? These questions lead the study of space as a Whole through the investigation of its parts - shape, material, assembly and its surroundings. The investigation examined how the detail influences the space it assembles, how space conforms the structure embracing it and how a structure affects its surroundings. Observing how the Whole evolved through the process was an additional task of the study. The design intended to create among every element a vocabulary apprehensible throughout the entirety of the project. The manipulation of each material, detail and edifice to share this vocabulary developed cohesion among them. This relationship allowed the inhabitant to have a complete perception of the element and Whole's character. / Master of Architecture