<p>The government procurement legislation – i.e. the Swedish procurement law, the EC procurement directives and the WTO’s Government Procurement Agreement – applies on public procurement. Such a procurement exists when the contractor meets the conditions stated in the directives that the organ is to be considered as a contracting auhtority. The conditions are supposed to cover the bodies that objectively are thought to take other considerations than economic when purchasing services or products. The definition of contracting authorities has, however, given rise to several interpretation problems when putting the wording into practice. Since it is the contracting authorities themselves that are responsible for their compliance with the law when purchasing, an unclear definition will result in bodies getting a possibility to, to a larger extent, evade the obligation to comply with the procurement legislation. Because of this, it is of great importance that the courts create a unitary interpretation of the definition; a clear definition serves as a means of exerting pressure. </p><p>The thesis is an investigation of the definition of contracting authority where the primary source of information consists of case law from the European Court of Justice. The purpose is to visualize the underlying philisophy of the regulation with a view to suggest an instrument for determining a body’s status as a contracting authority. Regarding the definition of contracting authority, the thesis discuss three different levels. The first level consists of an examination of the wording according to both the directives and the Swedish law, and then the interpretation of the wording by the European Court of Justice. At the following level, it is set out to illustrate differences between the definition on a national level and an EC level, respectively. Finally, it will be established what legislation technique that seems to have been used when formulating the definition of contracting authority in the directives, and also how the result of this should influence the interpretation of the term.</p>

<p>Innan år 2005 kunde svenska börsnoterade koncerner välja mellan att tillämpa internationella regler eller nationella regler för sin koncernredovisning. Efter år 2005 är däremot svenska börsnoterade företag ”tvingade” att använda internationella regler för upprättandet av finansi-ella rapporter. Studien syftar till att teoretiskt redogöra för de olika sätt som minoritetsintres-set redovisas på i svenska börsnoterade koncerners finansiella rapporter, innan respektive efter övergången till IFRS. Argument för olika tillvägagångssätt att redovisa minoritetsintres-set på har kartlagts, vägts och förklarats med avseende på vilket förhållande dessa argument har till varandra.</p><p>Inom koncernredovisningen finns två olika perspektiv som kan tillämpas vid upprättandet av en koncerns konsoliderade rapporter, vilka är moderföretagsperspektivet och enhetsperspektivet. Dessa två perspektiv härstammar från två teorier, ägarteorin och enhetsteorin. Sverige har traditionellt tillämpat ett moderföretagsperspektiv i sin redovisning, medan de internationella reglerna förespråkar ett enhetsperspektiv. Minoritetsintresset redovi-sas olika beroende på vilket perspektiv som används. Enligt moderföretagsperspektivet redovisas minoritetsintresset som en skuld och enligt enhetsperspektivet som eget kapital.</p> / <p>Before 2005, Swedish groups were allowed to choose between international or national rules for their group accounting. After 2005, Swedish groups listed on the stock exchange are forced to apply international rules for their group accounting. This study aims to describe different accounting treatment of a minority interest in Swedish groups financial reports, be-fore and after implementing IFRS. Standpoints for accounting the minority interest have been identified and explained.</p><p>There are two different perspectives that can be applied in the group accounting, and these are the proprietary perspective and the entity perspective. These perspectives derive from two theories, the proprietary theory and the entity theory. Traditionally, Sweden has applied the proprietary perspective, while the international rules advocate an entity perspective. Depend-ing on which perspective the group accounting follows, the minority interest will be accounted for in different ways. Eithe</p>

<p><strong>Abstract </strong></p><p>The development towards an international accounting standard implies that Swedish groups of companies that are not quoted on the stock exchange can use a parent company perspective or an entity perspective while making their group accounting. The purpose of this study is to describe and explain the motives behind the groups of companies choice of perspective and to show how these motives agrees with the effect it has on the profit and loss account and on the balance sheet.</p><p>The study includes four fictitious groups of companies based on real groups of companies. Every group of companies includes 1-3 subsidiary companies, where at least one is owned by the parent company with 51-70 %. Some assumptions were made before the consolidation.</p><p>Relevant key numbers have been calculated according to both perspectives and then compared. A total of three semi structured interviews have been carried out two with representatives for the real groups of companies and one with a chartered accountant. The purpose was to clarify the motives that are behind the choice of perspective.</p><p>The conclusion is that the choice of perspective is not an active choice for the group of companies in the study, there are therefore no active motives. The entity perspective provides better results on two out of the three examined key numbers, but the difference is only marginal. The change of perspective is a problem in theory but not in reality.</p><p><em>Keywords: parent company perspective, entity perspective, key numbers, group accounting, group of companies </em></p>

MEDLINE, a large and constantly increasing collection of biomedical article references, has been the source of numerous investigations related to textual information retrieval and knowledge capture, including article categorization, bibliometric analysis, semantic query answering, and biological concept recognition and relationship extraction. This dissertation discusses the design and development of novel methods that contribute to the tasks of document categorization and relationship extraction. The two investigations result in a fast tool for building descriptive models capable of categorizing documents to multiple labels and a highly effective method able to extract broad range of relationships between entities embedded in text. Additionally, an application that aims at representing the extracted knowledge in a strictly defined but highly expressive structure of ontology is presented. The classification of documents is based on an idea of building association rules that consist of frequent patterns of words appearing in documents and classes these patterns are likely to be assigned to. The process of building the models is based on a tree enumeration technique and dataset projection. The resulting algorithm offers two different tree traversing strategies, breadth-first and depth-first. The classification scenario involves the use of two alternative thresholding strategies based on either the document-independent confidence of the rules or a similarity measure between a rule and a document. The presented classification tool is shown to perform faster than other methods and is the first associative-classification solution to incorporate multiple classes and the information about recurrence of words in documents. The extraction of relations between entities embedded in text involves the utilization of the output of a constituent parser and a set of manually developed tree-like patterns. Both serve as the input of a novel algorithm that solves the newly formulated problem of constrained constituent tree inclusion with regular expression matching. The proposed relation extraction method is demonstrated to be parser-independent and outperforms in terms of effectiveness dependency-parser-based and machine-learning-based solutions. The extracted knowledge is further embedded in an existing ontology, which together with the structure-driven modification of the ontology results in a comprehensible, inference-consistent knowledge base constituting a tangible representation of knowledge and a potential component of applications such as semantically enhanced query answering systems.

The government procurement legislation – i.e. the Swedish procurement law, the EC procurement directives and the WTO’s Government Procurement Agreement – applies on public procurement. Such a procurement exists when the contractor meets the conditions stated in the directives that the organ is to be considered as a contracting auhtority. The conditions are supposed to cover the bodies that objectively are thought to take other considerations than economic when purchasing services or products. The definition of contracting authorities has, however, given rise to several interpretation problems when putting the wording into practice. Since it is the contracting authorities themselves that are responsible for their compliance with the law when purchasing, an unclear definition will result in bodies getting a possibility to, to a larger extent, evade the obligation to comply with the procurement legislation. Because of this, it is of great importance that the courts create a unitary interpretation of the definition; a clear definition serves as a means of exerting pressure. The thesis is an investigation of the definition of contracting authority where the primary source of information consists of case law from the European Court of Justice. The purpose is to visualize the underlying philisophy of the regulation with a view to suggest an instrument for determining a body’s status as a contracting authority. Regarding the definition of contracting authority, the thesis discuss three different levels. The first level consists of an examination of the wording according to both the directives and the Swedish law, and then the interpretation of the wording by the European Court of Justice. At the following level, it is set out to illustrate differences between the definition on a national level and an EC level, respectively. Finally, it will be established what legislation technique that seems to have been used when formulating the definition of contracting authority in the directives, and also how the result of this should influence the interpretation of the term.

<p>This thesis describes and introduces novel methods for knowledge discovery and presents a software system that is able to extract information from biomedical literature, review interesting connections between various biomedical concepts and in so doing, generates new hypotheses. The experimental results obtained by using methods described in this thesis, are compared to currently published results obtained by other methods and a number of case studies are described. This thesis shows how the technology&nbsp / resented can be integrated with the researchers&rsquo / own knowledge, experimentation and observations for optimal progression of scientific research.</p>

<p>In South Africa today those who lead sport are facing increasing scrutiny which has inevitably resulted in questioning governance practices. The transition of many sports from<br /> predominantly volunteer administered organizations anchored in an amateur ethos, to professionally managed entities catering to a more sophisticated market place has created<br /> unique challenges for the governance of sport sponsorship. This evolution gives rise to possible conceptual linkage between sport sponsorship and corporate governance or none<br /> thereof. This study focuses on the ABSA-Premier Soccer League (PSL) sponsorship transaction as a case study to explore this linkage. The research is aimed at finding the nexus<br /> between sport sponsorship and corporate governance principles, namely accountability and transparency in the conclusion of this transaction.</p> <p><br /> The research consists of four phases / literature review which provides a detailed analysis of all primary and secondary material available on this topic. The second phase is a qualitative<br /> case study research methodology which comprises of in-depth interviews with targeted stakeholders. The third part presents the research findings and discussion section, and lastly<br /> the way forward through reflections and recommendations including highlighting potential future research areas.</p> <p><br /> This work is timely when there has been generally a heightened evolution in sport sponsorship and its focus was to explore the nexus and compliance to the founding principles<br /> of the organizations (laws of governance). Factually, good corporate governance aims at ensuring a higher degree of transparency in an organization by encouraging full disclosure of<br /> transactions in the company accounts as well as accountability. Academics have been exploring the notion of sports sponsorship and corporate governance with much of the<br /> debates grounded on understanding its commercial value.</p> <p><br /> The focus for this study is on the conceptual nexus or non-thereof, between sponsorship and corporate governance. Information was collected through in-depth and experience interviews,<br /> documented reviews and analysis (such as the review and analysis of the constitution of the South Africa football Association, PSL, financial/banking sector policy regulations, South<br /> African Sports Act, corporate governance reports, annual reports, scholarly journals, academic books, conference papers and Parliamentary Monitoring Group documents etc. to<br /> mention but a few.</p>

Innan år 2005 kunde svenska börsnoterade koncerner välja mellan att tillämpa internationella regler eller nationella regler för sin koncernredovisning. Efter år 2005 är däremot svenska börsnoterade företag ”tvingade” att använda internationella regler för upprättandet av finansi-ella rapporter. Studien syftar till att teoretiskt redogöra för de olika sätt som minoritetsintres-set redovisas på i svenska börsnoterade koncerners finansiella rapporter, innan respektive efter övergången till IFRS. Argument för olika tillvägagångssätt att redovisa minoritetsintres-set på har kartlagts, vägts och förklarats med avseende på vilket förhållande dessa argument har till varandra. Inom koncernredovisningen finns två olika perspektiv som kan tillämpas vid upprättandet av en koncerns konsoliderade rapporter, vilka är moderföretagsperspektivet och enhetsperspektivet. Dessa två perspektiv härstammar från två teorier, ägarteorin och enhetsteorin. Sverige har traditionellt tillämpat ett moderföretagsperspektiv i sin redovisning, medan de internationella reglerna förespråkar ett enhetsperspektiv. Minoritetsintresset redovi-sas olika beroende på vilket perspektiv som används. Enligt moderföretagsperspektivet redovisas minoritetsintresset som en skuld och enligt enhetsperspektivet som eget kapital. / Before 2005, Swedish groups were allowed to choose between international or national rules for their group accounting. After 2005, Swedish groups listed on the stock exchange are forced to apply international rules for their group accounting. This study aims to describe different accounting treatment of a minority interest in Swedish groups financial reports, be-fore and after implementing IFRS. Standpoints for accounting the minority interest have been identified and explained. There are two different perspectives that can be applied in the group accounting, and these are the proprietary perspective and the entity perspective. These perspectives derive from two theories, the proprietary theory and the entity theory. Traditionally, Sweden has applied the proprietary perspective, while the international rules advocate an entity perspective. Depend-ing on which perspective the group accounting follows, the minority interest will be accounted for in different ways. Eithe

Abstract The development towards an international accounting standard implies that Swedish groups of companies that are not quoted on the stock exchange can use a parent company perspective or an entity perspective while making their group accounting. The purpose of this study is to describe and explain the motives behind the groups of companies choice of perspective and to show how these motives agrees with the effect it has on the profit and loss account and on the balance sheet. The study includes four fictitious groups of companies based on real groups of companies. Every group of companies includes 1-3 subsidiary companies, where at least one is owned by the parent company with 51-70 %. Some assumptions were made before the consolidation. Relevant key numbers have been calculated according to both perspectives and then compared. A total of three semi structured interviews have been carried out two with representatives for the real groups of companies and one with a chartered accountant. The purpose was to clarify the motives that are behind the choice of perspective. The conclusion is that the choice of perspective is not an active choice for the group of companies in the study, there are therefore no active motives. The entity perspective provides better results on two out of the three examined key numbers, but the difference is only marginal. The change of perspective is a problem in theory but not in reality. Keywords: parent company perspective, entity perspective, key numbers, group accounting, group of companies

Sensor networks are innovative wireless networks consisting of a large number of low-cost, resource-constrained sensor nodes that collect, process, and transmit data in a distributed and collaborative way. There are numerous applications for wireless sensor networks, and security is vital for many of them. However, sensor nodes suffer from many constraints, including low computation capability, small memory, limited energy resources, susceptibility to physical capture, and the lack of infrastructure, all of which impose formidable security challenges and call for innovative approaches. In this thesis, we present our research results on three important aspects of securing sensor networks: lightweight entity authentication, distributed node clone detection, and secure data aggregation. As the technical core of our lightweight authentication proposals, a special type of circulant matrix named circulant-P2 matrix is introduced. We prove the linear independence of matrix vectors, present efficient algorithms on matrix operations, and explore other important properties. By combining circulant-P2 matrix with the learning parity with noise problem, we develop two one-way authentication protocols: the innovative LCMQ protocol, which is provably secure against all probabilistic polynomial-time attacks and provides remarkable performance on almost all metrics except one mild requirement for the verifier's computational capacity, and the HB$^C$ protocol, which utilizes the conventional HB-like authentication structure to preserve the bit-operation only computation requirement for both participants and consumes less key storage than previous HB-like protocols without sacrificing other performance. Moreover, two enhancement mechanisms are provided to protect the HB-like protocols from known attacks and to improve performance. For both protocols, practical parameters for different security levels are recommended. In addition, we build a framework to extend enhanced HB-like protocols to mutual authentication in a communication-efficient fashion. Node clone attack, that is, the attempt by adversaries to add one or more nodes to the network by cloning captured nodes, imposes a severe threat to wireless sensor networks. To cope with it, we propose two distributed detection protocols with difference tradeoffs on network conditions and performance. The first one is based on distributed hash table, by which a fully decentralized, key-based caching and checking system is constructed to deterministically catch cloned nodes in general sensor networks. The protocol performance of efficient storage consumption and high security level is theoretically deducted through a probability model, and the resulting equations, with necessary adjustments for real application, are supported by the simulations. The other is the randomly directed exploration protocol, which presents notable communication performance and minimal storage consumption by an elegant probabilistic directed forwarding technique along with random initial direction and border determination. The extensive experimental results uphold the protocol design and show its efficiency on communication overhead and satisfactory detection probability. Data aggregation is an inherent requirement for many sensor network applications, but designing secure mechanisms for data aggregation is very challenging because the aggregation nature that requires intermediate nodes to process and change messages, and the security objective to prevent malicious manipulation, conflict with each other to a great extent. To fulfill different challenges of secure data aggregation, we present two types of approaches. The first is to provide cryptographic integrity mechanisms for general data aggregation. Based on recent developments of homomorphic primitives, we propose three integrity schemes: a concrete homomorphic MAC construction, homomorphic hash plus aggregate MAC, and homomorphic hash with identity-based aggregate signature, which provide different tradeoffs on security assumption, communication payload, and computation cost. The other is a substantial data aggregation scheme that is suitable for a specific and popular class of aggregation applications, embedded with built-in security techniques that effectively defeat outside and inside attacks. Its foundation is a new data structure---secure Bloom filter, which combines HMAC with Bloom filter. The secure Bloom filter is naturally compatible with aggregation and has reliable security properties. We systematically analyze the scheme's performance and run extensive simulations on different network scenarios for evaluation. The simulation results demonstrate that the scheme presents good performance on security, communication cost, and balance.