South Asian men living in the (UK) have higher rates of Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM) compared with their white British counterparts. Diet, physical activity (PA) and sedentary time (ST) are important risk factors for the development of T2DM. The aim of this thesis was to use a mixed-method approach to assess diet, PA and ST, as well as to explore the factors influencing these behaviours in overweight and obese South Asian men living in the UK. Study 1 revealed there is currently insufficient evidence to recommend that any specific diet is superior in improving glycaemic control, but did display the crucial role weight loss plays in the management of T2DM. Study 2 indicated that 54% of overweight and obese UK South Asian men had a ‘healthy’ diet. Results from study 3 indicated that only 24.1% of the men met the minimum PA recommendations. Qualitative findings from study 2 and 3 revealed the unique sociocultural factors influencing diet and PA behaviours in South Asian men. The findings from this thesis can be used to advise the development of culturally tailored programmes and interventions to help reduce T2DM rates in this high-risk population.

This thesis uses Byzantine coins in south India to re-examine pre-Islamic maritime trade between the Mediterranean and south India. Analysis of historiographical trends, key textual sources (the Periplous of the Erythreian Sea and the Christian Topography, Book Eleven), and archaeological evidence from the Red Sea, Aksum, the Persian Gulf and India, alongside the numismatic evidence yields two main methodological and three historical conclusions. Methodologically, the multi-disciplinary tradition of Indo-Roman studies needs to incorporate greater sensitivity to the complexities of different evidence types and engage with wider scholarship on the economic and state structures of the Mediterranean and India. Furthermore, pre-Islamic Indo-Mediterranean trade offers an ideal locus for experimenting with a practical global history, particularly using new technologies to enhance data sharing and access to scholarship. Historically, this thesis concludes: first, that the significance of pre-Islamic trade between the Mediterranean and India was minimal for any of the participating states; second, that this trade should be understood in the context of wider Indian Ocean networks, connecting India, Sri Lanka and southeast Asia; third, that the Persian Gulf rather than the Red Sea probably formed the major meeting point of trade from east and west, but this is not yet demonstrable archaeologically, numismatically or textually.

This thesis includes three independent empirical studies that examine the relationship between trade and wages for Chinese manufacturing industries for the period 2002-2006. Chapter 2 uses highly detailed firm-level industrial production data merged with product-level trade transaction data to make a direct test of Amiti and Davis (2011) model. The potential endogeneity issue of tariffs is addressed in several ways although our results support the premise that post-WTO period tariff reductions were exogenous. In Chapters 3 and 4 we pay close attention to processing trade. Chapter 3 reexamines the relationship between tariff reductions and firm wages taking into account the special tariff treatment given to processing firms. We find that processing firms pay higher wages following a fall in firm output tariffs. However, non-processing firms pay higher wages after a fall in firm input tariffs. Finally, Chapter 4 examines the impact of tariff reductions on the decision of firms to switch between different modes of exporting and explores how export switching affects firm wages through trade liberalization. The results highlight that input tariff reductions at the firm level determine a firm’s decision and direction of export switching. The future research ideas are also concluded.

One of the fundamental problems related to the development of direct sequence code division multiple access (DS CDMA) wireless data networks is design of spreading sequences possessing semi-optimal characteristics. In this thesis, we introduce three new methods to design spreading sequences, which can be optimised to achieve the desired characteristics.We show that the level of MAI for the DS CDMA systems utilising the example sets of sequences designed by the use of these techniques can be relatively low, compare to the case when the well known Gold-like sequences [29] are used. In addition, we show that by using one of the methods introduced in the thesis, we can construct sets of orthogonal sequences possessing acceptable correlation properties, even for an asynchronous operation, while another of the introduced methods can be used if design of sequences of an arbitrary length is required.Our new methods to design complex polyphase sequences are orientated towards the short length sequences, as a target application for them are high data rate wireless networks. Those methods are based on using discretised chirp pulses, pulses consisting of discretised multiple chirps, or linear combinations of them. In order to achieve orthogonality among the designed polyphase sequences, we combined the sequences based on superimposed chirps and double chirps with the sequences derived from the orthogonal Walsh functions.Finally, we utilise the three most promising sequence sets designed by the use of die introduced methods to simulate the multiuser DS CDMA systems. We compare performance of those simulated systems with the performance of the simulated system utilising 15-chip Gold- like sequences. The comparison results indicate that by using our design methods, we can produce useful sequence sets for applications where short spreading sequences are required. The presented ++ / results also demonstrate that the performance of systems utilising those sequences can be significantly better in terms of the number of simultaneously active users or bit error rate (BER) that the performance of the system employing Gold or Gold-like sequences of the similar length.

<p>The purpose of this study is to provide a simple user interface with which everyone can</p><p>design his/her own game, and play it on Game Boy Advance console. This project helps</p><p>people develop games without having programming knowledge. Everything is done by means of a user interface and without any programming knowledge. It is magic, isn’t it?</p><p>Game Boy Advance is a game console developed by Nintendo. In order to market their</p><p>products, they must also develop games running on their products. Every time they develop a game for the Game Boy Advance console, they have to implement a low level C++ application over and over again. This makes things more complicated. However, if this software is used, everything becomes easier.</p><p>This project can be seen as an interpreter that interprets the designed game, which is</p><p>very high level, and converts it to a Game Boy Advance game. If this project is finished</p><p>successfully, game design for Game Boy Advance will experience a revolution in its history.</p><p>In brief, it is required to develop a visual, GUI‐based system that allows people to develop games for the Game Boy Advance console. This GUI system is required to</p><p>implement and use the API (Game Engine) developed by Lypson.</p>

<p>Den här studiens syfte är att analysera den svenska marknaden för centralstyrda digitala skärmar. Studien görs mot bakgrund av en liknande studie som genomfördes vid Handelshögskolan i Stockholm 2007, som bland annat visade att marknaden inte var mogen för det här mediet. Den här studien ämnar således utreda om man kan dra andra slutsatser om marknaden 2010 och ge förslag på implikationer utifrån nuvarande marknadssituation.</p><p>Studien är av kvalitativ karaktär och bygger till stor del på intervjuer med ett antal utvalda leverantörer och köpare av digitala skyltar, som samtliga besitter stor kunskap om produkten och branschen.</p><p>Marknaden för digital skyltning har haft en mycket intressant utveckling de senaste åren och växt kraftigt i rådande finanskris. Man kan se en ökad förståelse och kunskap för produkten hos köparna, vilket har lett till att de skillnader som fanns mellan köpare och säljare gällande kunskap om digital skyltning mer eller mindre har försvunnit. Idag bidrar istället köparna i stor omfattning till att skapa framtidens digitala skyltning.</p><p>Man kan se hur produkten sträcker sig till allt fler användningsområden och integreras med andra tekniska produkter. Dåtidens teknikfokuserade företag har upplevt en förskjutning från teknikfokusering till marknadsfokusering. Medie- och reklambyråerna börjar få upp ögonen för produkterna på allvar och den mer professionella marknaden har lett till att fler företag väljer att nischa sig och fokusera på sin kärnkompetens för att klara de ökade kraven och konkurrensen.</p><p>Studien avslutas med implikationer till såväl teoretiker som praktiker.</p>

Over the past decades, many industries have heavily spent on computerizing their work environments with the intention to simplify and expedite access to information and its processing. Typical of real-world data are various types of imperfections, uncertainties, ambiguities, that have complicated attempts at automated knowledge discovery. Indeed, it soon became obvious that adequate methods to deal with these problems were critically needed. Simple methods such as "interpolating" or just ignoring data imperfections being found often to lead to inferences of dubious practical value, the search for appropriate modification of knowledge-induction techniques began. Sometimes, rather non-standard approaches turned out to be necessary. For instance, the probabilistic approaches by earlier works are not sufficiently capable of handling the wider range of data imperfections that appear in many new applications (e.g., medical data). Dempster-Shafer theory provides a much stronger framework, and this is why it has been chosen as the fundamental paradigm exploited in this dissertation. The task of association rule mining is to detect frequently co-occurring groups of items in transactional databases. The majority of the papers in this field concentrate on how to expedite the search. Less attention has been devoted to how to employ the identified frequent itemsets for prediction purposes; worse still, methods to tailor association-mining techniques so that they can handle data imperfections are virtually nonexistent. This dissertation proposes a technique referred to by the acronym DS-ARM (Dempster-Shafer based Association Rule Mining) where the DS-theoretic framework is used to enhance a more traditional association-mining mechanism. Of particular interest is here a method to employ the knowledge of partial contents of a "shopping cart" for the prediction of what else the customer is likely to add to it. This formalized problem has many applications in the analysis of medical databases. A recently-proposed data structure, an itemset tree (IT-tree), is used to extract association rules in a computationally efficient manner, thus addressing the scalability problem that has disqualified more traditional techniques from real-world applications. The proposed algorithm is based on the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence combination. Extensive experiments explore the algorithm's behavior; some of them use synthetically generated data, others relied on data obtained from a machine-learning repository, yet others use a movie ratings dataset or a HIV/AIDS patient dataset.

Carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC) is produced commercially in a two-stage process consisting of a mercerization stage, where the pulp is treated with alkali in a water alcohol solution, followed by an etherification stage in which monochloroacetic acid is added to the pulp slurry. In this thesis an extended mercerization stage of a spruce ether pulp was investigated where the parameters studied were the ratio of cellulose I and II, concentration of alkali, temperature and retention time. The influence of the mercerization stage conditions on the etherification stage, were evaluated as the degree of substitution (DS) of the resulting CMC and the filterability of CMC dissolved in water at a concentration of 1%. The DS results suggested that the NaOH concentration in the mercerization stage was the most important of the parameters studied. When the NaOH concentration in the mercerization step was low (9%), a high cellulose II content in the pulp used was found to have no negative impact on the DS of the resulting CMC compared with pulps with only cellulose I. However, when the NaOH concentration was high (27.5%), pulps with high content of cellulose II showed a lower reactivity than those with only cellulose I with respect to the DS of the CMC obtained after a given charge of NaMCA. The results obtained from the filtration ability study of CMC water solutions suggested that both the amount of cellulose II in the original pulp and the temperature had a negative influence on the filtration ability whereas the NaOH concentration in the mercerization stage had a positive influence. The filtration ability was assumed to be influenced highly by the presence of poorly reacted cellulose segments. A retention time between 1-48 h in the mercerization stage had no effect on either the DS or the filtration ability of the CMC. Using NIR FT Raman spectroscopy molecular structures of CMC and its gel fraction were analyzed with respect to the conditions used in the extended mercerization stage. Here it was found that the alkaline concentration had a very strong influence on the following etherification reaction. FT Raman spectra of CMC samples and their gel fractions prepared with low NaOH concentrations (9%) in the mercerization stage indicated an incomplete transformation of cellulose to Na-cellulose before carboxymethylation to CMC. Low average DS values of the CMC, i.e. between 0.42 and 0.50, were yielded. Such CMC dissolved in water caused very thick and semi solid gum-like gels, probably due to an uneven distribution of substituting groups along the cellulose backbone. FT Raman spectra of CMC mercerized with alkaline concentrations at 18.25 and 27.5% in the mercerization stage indicated, however, that all of the cellulose molecules were totally transferred to CMC of high DS, i.e. between 0.88 and 1.05. When dissolved in water such CMC caused gels when they were prepared from ether pulp with a high fraction of cellulose II.

For current status data, the failure time of interest may not be observed exactly. The type of this data consists only of a monitoring time and knowledge of whether the failure time occurred before or after the monitoring time. In order to be able to obtain more information from this data, so the monitoring time is very important. In this work, the optimal designs for determining the monitoring times such that maximum information may be obtained in bivariate copula model (Clayton) are investigated. Here, the D- optimal criterion is used to decide the best monitoring time Ci (i = 1; &#x00A2; &#x00A2; &#x00A2; ; n), then use these monitoring times Ci to estimate the unknown parameters simultaneously by maximizing the corresponding likelihood function. Ds-optimal designs for estimation of association parameter in the copula model are also discussed. Simulation studies are presented to compare the performance of using monitoring time C&#x00A4;D and C&#x00A4;Ds to do the estimation.

This thesis analyzes the inherent significance of trade wars in a practical as well as in a theoretical sense. The preliminary intention of the present research is to provide three different understandings of the trade war concept. Firstly, a general understanding of trade wars is introduced, primarily focusing on the technical aspects of the issue and its political and economic dimensions. Secondly, trade wars are viewed in a specific case study context: the Japanese-American commercial relations and their bilateral trade disputes that escalated into trade wars are investigated, focusing on semiconductor and biotechnology industries. Thirdly, the trade wars concept is correlated to Raymond Vernon&amp / #8217 / s Product Cycle theory, introducing the theoretical understanding of trade wars. The combination of these research themes endeavors to establish whether trade wars are primarily fought between successful industrial states over leading strategic core industries, those that are knowledge-intensive, and produce high-value-added products.