Abstract Smaller companies have less manpower then larger companies to manage administrative tasks. EU has made it possible for member states to reduce the accounting and audit requirements for small companies and Sweden introduced the option of voluntary audit from the fiscal year of 2011 for micro-entities that do not exceed the threshold values of 3 employees, 3 MSEK turnover and 1.5 MSEK balance sheet total. The values are lower than in other countries with voluntary audit. Due to this, previous research on voluntary audit was conducted on larger companies than Swedish micro-entities. The determinant factors for voluntary audit are therefore different in these micro-entities than in SMEs. The purpose of our study is to find what the decision-makers in micro-entities perceive as their reason to retain or dismiss their auditor as it became voluntary.As a starting point, we theorize that some of the relevant factors in previous studies on voluntary audit in SMEs can also have significance for micro-entities. Furthermore, that the relationships between the auditor and client can affect the decision whether to keep the auditor or not, especially as the companies are small enough for the decision-maker to have regular contact with the auditor and the small size of Skellefteå where we conduct the interview study. Our sample is eleven micro-entities in Skellefteå, out of which three have retained their auditor and intend to keep them in the company, four who are registered with an auditor but will not have an auditor next year, three who dismissed their auditor as soon as possible and one who was started after the law came into action and had never had auditor nor accountant. The determining factor for voluntary audit is in all but one case the advice of the auditor or accountant. No other factor was found to have any effect of magnitude.Previous research in the area have found connections between factors such as debt level, firm size, separation of ownership and management, non-audit services, external demand for audited financial statements and net benefits of audit. As the micro-entities in our sample have little or no debt and no separation of ownership and management we found that these factors are irrelevant to the choice of voluntary audit in our sample. Most of the companies perceive these as factors that would be relevant in a larger company, however. It is the largest firms (by turnover) that have kept their auditor, but do not mention this as a determining factor. Almost all companies have non-audit services from the audit firm, which do not seem to affect the voluntary audit decision. Those who had or will dismiss their auditor see no additional benefits by having an auditor than by having an accountant, which is also supported by the fact that only two companies could mention any benefit with audit aside from external demands from the government or tax authority. All companies believe that there are external demands for audited financial statements, but this was not found to be a determining factor.Relationship factors such as trust, interdependence and service quality do not determine the choice for voluntary audit, but do determine if the companies asked the auditor or accountant for advice on retaining or dismissing their auditor. We found that the decision-makers in the micro-entities all asked the professional they have the best and closest relationship with if they should have voluntary audits, and as all auditors replied to continue with the audit whereas all accountants did not consider it as necessary, relationships can definitely be seen as a contributing, but not determining, factor for voluntary audit.

The disciplinary liability of legal entities, which the regulation normally accepts, is not an exception to the principles of existing guilty and of personalizing the sanction: it is a liability for action and fault of the legal entity. In particular, it analyzes the liability of legal entities by the actions of their administrators. And, also, it studies the cases in which the Law provides certain complements or qualifications to that liability. Above all, the cases in which the disciplinary liability of the administrators is evident. It also addresses the liability of entities without personality and it highlights the advantages and difficulties that their application entails. / La responsabilidad sancionadora de las personas jurídicas, que acepta con normalidad el ordenamiento, no es una excepción a los principios de culpabilidad y de personalidad de las sanciones: se trata de una responsabilidad por acción y culpa propias de la persona jurídica. En especial, se analiza la responsabilidad de las personas jurídicas por la actuación de sus administradores. Y, asimismo, se estudian los supuestos en que el Derecho prevé ciertos complementos o matizaciones a esa responsabilidad. Sobre todo, los casos en los que se consagra laresponsabilidad sancionadora de los propios administradores. Se aborda también la responsabilidad de entes sin personalidad y se ponen de relieve las ventajas y dificultades que su aplicación entraña.

As biomedical research and advances in biotechnology generate expansive datasets, the need to process this data into information has grown simultaneously. Specifically, recognizing and extracting these “key” phrases comprising the named entities from this information databank promises a plethora of applications for scientists. The ability to construct interaction maps,identify proteins as drug targets are two important applications. Since we have the choice of defining what is “useful”, we can potentially utilize text mining for our purpose. In a novel attempt to beat the challenge, we have put information theory and text compression through this task. Prediction by partial matching is an adaptive text encoding scheme that blends together a set of finite context Markov models to predict the probability of the next token in a given symbol stream. We observe, named entities such as gene names, protein names, gene functions, protein-protein interactions – all follow symbol statistics uniquely different from normal scientific text. By using well defined training sets that allow us to selectively differentiate between named entities and the rest of the symbols; we were able to extract them with a good accuracy. We have implemented our tests, using the Text Mining Toolkit, on identification of gene functions and protein-protein interactions with f-scores (based on precision & recall) of 0.9737 and 0.6865 respectively. With our results, we foresee the application of such an approach in automated information retrieval in the realm of biology.

The concept of emergent behavior is difficult to define, but can be considered as higher-level activity created by the individual actions of a population of simple agents. A potential means to model such behavior has been previously developed using Alfred North Whitehead's concept of Actual Entities. In computational form, actual entities are agents which evolve over time in response to interactions with their environment via the process of prehension. This occurs within the context of a Colony of Prehending Entities, a framework for implementation of AE concepts. This thesis explores the practical application of this framework in analysis of medical images, with specific focus on Computed Tomography (CT) and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans. Specialized Slice COPEs are developed for analysis of individual image slices from these scans, focusing on the detection and segmentation of structures of interest (such as bone matter, ventricular tissue, and tumors). These structures exist in 3D and can be extracted across multiple consecutive scan slices. Therefore, a specialized Scan COPE is also proposed which aims to render the structure's volume via interpolation between previously analyzed slice images. The software developed for the specified application also provides visualization of a COPE's evolution toward its goal. This has additional value in general study of the COPE framework and the emergent behavior it generates.

This Master's Thesis prepares Evaluation Set for Problems of Recognition and Disambiguation of Named Entities. Evaluation Set is created using Automatization and Crowdsourcing. Evaluation Set can be used in testing Edge Cases in Recognition and Disambiguation of Named Entities.

According to the Constitution of South Africa, the government is required to make all the infor-mation in the ten indigenous languages of South Africa (excluding English), available to the public. For this reason, the government made the information, that already existed for these ten languages, available to the public and an effort is also been made to increase the amount of resources available in these languages (Groenewald & Du Plooy, 2010). This release of infor-mation further helps to implement Krauwer‟s (2003) idea that there is an inventory for the mini-mal number of language-related resources required for a language to be competitive at the level of research and teaching. This inventory is known as the "Basic Language Resource Kit" (BLARK). Since most of the languages in South Africa are resource scarce, it is of the best in-terest for the cultural growth of the country, that each of the indigenous South African languages develops their own BLARK. In Chapter 1, the need for the development of an implementable named entity recogniser (NER) for Afrikaans is discussed by first referring to the Constitution of South Africa’s (Republic of South Africa, 2003) language policy. Secondly, the guidelines of BLARK (Krauwer, 2003) are discussed, which is followed by a discussion of an audit that focuses on the number of re-sources and the distribution of human language technology for all eleven South African languages (Sharma Grover, Van Huyssteen & Pretorius, 2010). In respect of an audit conducted by Sharma Grover et al. (2010), it was established that there is a shortage of text-based tools for Afrikaans. This study focuses on this need for text-based tools, by focusing on the develop-ment of a NER for Afrikaans. In Chapter 2 a description is given on what an entity and a named entity is. Later in the chapter the process of technology recycling is explained, by referring to other studies where the idea of technology recycling has been applied successfully (Rayner et al., 1997). Lastly, an analysis is done on the differences that may occur between Afrikaans and Dutch named entities. These differences are divided into three categories, namely: identical cognates, non-identical cognates and unrelated entities. Chapter 3 begins with a description of Frog (van den Bosch et al, 2007), the Dutch NER used in this study, and the functions and operation of its NER-component. This is followed by a description of the Afrikaans-to-Dutch-converter (A2DC) (Van Huyssteen & Pilon, 2009) and finally the various experiments that were completed, are explained. The study consists of six experiments, the first of which was to determine the results of Frog on Dutch data. The second experiment evaluated the effectiveness of Frog on unchanged (raw) Afrikaans data. The following two experiments evaluated the results of Frog on “Dutched” Afrikaans data. The last two experiments evaluated the effectiveness of Frog on raw and “Dutched” Afrikaans data with the addition of gazetteers as part of the pre-processing step. In conclusion, a summary is given with regards to the comparisons between the NER for Afri-kaans that was developed in this study, and the NER-component that Puttkammer (2006) used in his tokeniser. Finally a few suggestions for future research are proposed. / MA (Applied Language and Literary Studies), North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2013

This paper outlines the details of seven case studies involving the pilot usage of the new standard ISO/IEC 29110standard ‘Lifecycle Profiles for Very Small Entities’, which was specifically designed by Working Group 24 of ISO/IEC JTC1/SC7 to address the standardization needs of Very Small Entities (VSEs). The purpose of this paper is to add substantially to the body of knowledge and the literature on the rollout and implementation of this new and evolving standard and to act as guidance for other researchers in the design and implementation of ISO/IEC 29110 case studies. Furthermore it is hoped that that the lessons learnt from these case studies will help promote the adoption of this new standard in an industrial setting.

Diploma Thesis: Criminal Liability of Legal Entities Abstract: This graduation thesis deals with problems of potential introduction of criminal liability of corporations into the legal order of the Czech Republic Its main purpose is to analyze selected legal aspects of criminal liability of corporation, compare foreign approaches with the Czech Draft Act and to suggest possible amendments for the future introduction of the Draft Act.

This master's thesis is concerned with an issue of criminal liability of legal entities. Emphasis is put on the czech legislation, more precisely on the act no. 418/2011 Sb., on Criminal Liability of Legal Entities and their Prosecution, that came into force on 1. 1. 2012. This act was adopted in response to the obligations under international law that are binding on the Czech Republic. The main aim of this thesis is to make its readers possible to get acquainted with the regulations of the establishment and termination of criminal liability of legal entities in the Czech Republic and to point out some problematic parts of the law. The thesis is divided into three parts. The first part deals with the general questions of criminal liability of legal entities, in particular with the historical development of such a conception, its possible models, definition of the legal entity and with the reasons for and against criminal liability. The second and the most extensive part of this thesis is dedicated to the analysis of the current Czech legislation. It focuses attention on the issues concerning the scope of the Act, extent of the criminalization of corporations, requirements of the imputability of the criminal act to the corporation and concerning the issue of transferring criminal liability to the...

Thesis advisor: Julie Mortimer / Non-practicing entities (NPEs) – firms that do not produce goods or services but license to and sue other companies with portfolios of patents – have drastically increased patent infringement litigation since 2006. Over the same period, the USPTO has granted an increasing amount of patents, indicating that American innovation has strengthened by one measure. This paper finds fault with equating patents granted to innovation and develops a new metric of innovation – the ratio of a firm’s intangible to total assets. Through empirical analysis this study concludes that lawsuits initiated by NPEs between 2006 and 2011 do not affect the rate of American innovation. However, this study also finds that NPEs inflict at least a $567 million innovation cost to the top twenty-five most litigated against firms in the United States. This cost represents money that could be allocated towards research and development or investment, but it is not a dead-weight loss – it is the cost associated with firms’ growth measured in inflation-adjusted total assets. Ultimately, this study highlights the need for continued research into the impact of NPEs on the American economy but provides empirical evidence that the patent troll classification is unwarranted. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2012. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: International Studies Honors Program. / Discipline: Economics Honors Program. / Discipline: International Studies.