This thesis uses innovative approaches to analyse energy policy interventions aimed at enhancing the environmental sustainability of energy use as well as its consequential welfare implications. First, we examine the relationship between energy efficiency improvement and CO2 emissions at the macro level. We use the Index Decomposition Analysis to derive energy efficiency by separating out the impact of shifts in economic activity on energy intensity. We then employ econometric models to relate energy efficiency and CO2 emissions accounting for non-economic factors such as consumers lifestyle and attitudes. The applications for 13 OPEC and 30 OECD countries show that at the country-group and individual country level, increase in energy intensity for OPEC is associated with both deteriorations in energy efficiency and shifts towards energy-intensive activities. The model results suggest that the reduction in energy efficiency in general go in tandem with substantial increases in CO2 emissions. The decline in energy intensity for OECD can be attributed mainly to improvements in energy efficiency which is found to compensate for the impact on CO2 emissions of income changes. The results confirm the empirical relevance of energy efficiency improvements for the mitigation of CO2 emissions. The method developed in this chapter further enables the separate assessment of non-economic behavioural factors which according to the results exert a non-trivial influence on CO2 emissions. Secondly, having empirically confirmed the relationship between energy efficiency improvements and CO2 emission at the macro level in Chapter 2, we investigate potential underlying drivers of energy efficiency improvements taking into account potential asymmetric effects of energy price change in Chapter 3. This is crucial for designing effective and efficient policy measures that can promote energy efficiency. In addition to the Index Decomposition Analysis used to estimate the economy-wide energy efficiency in Chapter 2, we also use Stochastic Frontier Analysis and Data Envelop Analysis as alternative methods. The driving factors are examined using static and dynamic panel model methods that account for both observed and unobserved country heterogeneity. The application for 32 OECD countries shows that none of the three methods leads to correspondence in term of ranking between energy efficiency estimates and energy intensity at the country level corroborating the criticism that energy intensity is a poor proxy for energy efficiency. The panel-data regression results using the results of the three methods show similarities in the impacts of the determinants on the energy efficiency levels. Also, we find insignificant evidence of asymmetric effects of total energy price but there is proof of asymmetry using energy specific prices. Thirdly, in Chapter 4 we offer an improved understanding of the impacts to expect of abolishing fuel price subsidy on fuel consumption, and also of the welfare and distributional impacts at the household level. We develop a two-step approach for this purpose. Key aspect of the first step is a two-stage budgeting model to estimate various fuel types elasticities using micro-data. Relying on these estimates and the information on households expenditure shares for different commodities, the second step estimates the welfare (direct and indirect) and distributional impacts. The application for Nigeria emphasises the relevance of this approach. We find heterogeneous elasticities of fuel demand among household groups. The distributional impact of abolishing the kerosene subsidy shows a regressive welfare loss. Although we find a progressive loss for petrol, the loss gap between the low- and high-income groups is small relative to the loss gap from stopping kerosene subsidy, making the low-income groups to suffer a higher total welfare loss. Finally, from the highlighted results, we draw the following concluding remarks in chapter 5. Energy efficiency appears a key option to mitigate CO2 emissions but there is also a need for additional policies aiming for behavioural change; energy specific prices and allowing for asymmetry in analysing the changes in energy efficiency is more appropriate and informative in formulating reliable energy policies; the hypothesis that only the rich would be worse-off from fuel subsidy removal is rejected and the results further suggest that timing of the fuel subsidy removal would be crucial as a higher international oil price will lead to higher deregulated fuel price and consequently, larger welfare loss.

從2015年統計數據來看，中國大陸涉農金融機構地方滲透性比重較高。03年中國大陸國務院下發《深化農村信用社改革試點方案》到現在為止雖然14年了，但是農村信用社還是存在很多問題。 所以研究農村信用社經營效率，對提高涉農金融機構質量和促進中國大陸農村金融市場的發展具有重大的意義。 本研究以數據包絡分析法為主，由於dea方法沒有考慮到誤差項的分配，因此加入了隨機前沿分析法。 本研究發現雖有個別農村信用社效率不足的情況存在，但福建地區整體農村信用社各項指標都很穩定。只是要針對個別經濟環境不景氣的地區重點研究，造成其效率低下的主要原因，改善其經營效率，也能提高整體指標。 從本研究對福建省地區農村信用社效率的比較影射到全國農村信用社。在國務院對農村金融改革後，雖農信社還存在部分問題，但也慢慢趨向穩定發展。可看出國務院的金融改革日漸成效。 / The statistical data of 2015 indicates that most of the Chinese local financial institutions are served as agriculture-related financial institutions.Although state council promulgated<The reform of rural credit cooperatives >in 2003, there are still lots of problems to be solved today. Therefore, the researches about the operating efficiency of rural credit cooperatives can help not only the improvement in the quality of agriculture-related financial institutions but also the development of rural financial market in China. This paper is mainly based on the data envelop analysis (DEA). Because the DEA doesn't consider the distribution of residuals, we also use the stochastic frontier analysis. In this paper, we find that the inefficiency problem still exists in some rural credit cooperatives, but all indexes of overall rural credit cooperatives in Fujian area are still stable. Moreover, we think that the improvement in the operating efficiency of individual rural credit cooperatives can also improve the overall indexes. Applying our analysis into whole districts of China, we find that the development becomes stable gradually, meaning the reform by state council works.

We consider real zero-crossing analysis of the real/imaginary parts of the spectrum, namely, spectral zero-crossings (SZCs). The two major contributions are to show that: (i) SZCs provide enable temporal localization of transients; and (b) SZCs are suitable for modeling transient signals. We develop a spectral dual of Kedem’s result linking temporal zero-crossing rate (ZCR) to the spectral centroid. The key requirement is stationarity, which we achieve through random-phase modulations of the time-domain signal. Transient signals are not amenable to modelling in the time domain since they are bursts of energy localized in time and lack structure. We show that the spectrum of transient signals have a rich modulation structure, which leads to an amplitude-modulation – frequency-modulation (AM-FM) model of the spectrum. We generalize Kedem’s arc-cosine formula for lags greater than one. For the specific case of a sinusoid in white Gaussian noise, He and Kedem devised an iterative filtering algorithm, which leads to a contraction mapping. An autoregressive filter of order one is employed and the location of the pole is the parameter that is updated based on the filtered output. We use the higher-order property, which relates the autocorrelation to the expected ZCR of the filtered process, between lagged ZCR and higher-lag autocorrelation to develop an iterative higher-order autoregressive-filtering scheme, which stabilizes the ZCR and consequently provides robust estimates of the autocorrelation at higher lags. Next, we investigate ZC properties of critically sampled outputs of a maximally decimated M-channel power complementary analysis filterbank (PCAF) and derive the relationship between the ZCR of the input Gaussian process at lags that are integer multiples of M in terms of the subband ZCRs. Based on this result, we propose a robust autocorrelation estimator for a signal consisting of a sum of sinusoids of fixed amplitudes and uniformly distributed random phases. Robust subband ZCRs are obtained through iterative filtering and the subband variances are estimated using the method-of-moments estimator. We compare the performance of the proposed estimator with the sample auto-correlation estimate in terms of bias, variance, and mean-squared error, and show through simulations that the performance of the proposed estimator is better than the sample auto- correlation for medium to low SNR. We then consider the ZC statistics of the real/imaginary parts of the discrete Fourier spectrum. We introduce the notion of the spectral zero-crossing rate (SZCR) and show that, for transients, it gives information regarding the location of the transient. We also demonstrate the utility of SZCR to estimate interaural time delay between the left and right head-related impulse responses. The accuracy of interaural time delay plays a vital role in binaural synthesis and a comparison of the performance of the SZCR estimates with that of the cross-correlation estimates illustrate that spectral zeros alone contain enough information for accurately estimating interaural time delay. We provide a mathematical formalism for establishing the dual of the link between zero-crossing rate and spectral centroid. Specifically, we show that the expected SZCR of a stationary spectrum is a temporal centroid. For a deterministic sequence, we obtain the stationary spectrum by modulating the sequence with a random phase unit amplitude sequence and then computing the spectrum. The notion of a stationary spectrum is necessary for deriving counterparts of the results available in temporal zero-crossings literature. The robustness of location information embedded in SZCR is analyzed in presence of a second transient within the observation window, and also in the presence of additive white Gaussian noise. A spectral-domain iterative filtering scheme based on autoregressive filters is presented and improvement in the robustness of the location estimates is demonstrated. As an application, we consider epoch estimation in voiced speech signals and show that the location information is accurately estimated using spectral zeros than other techniques. The relationship between temporal centroid and SZCR also finds applications in frequency-domain linear prediction (FDLP), which is used in audio compression. The prediction coefficients are estimated by solving the Yule-Walker equations constructed from the spectral autocorrelation. We use the relationship between the spectral autocorrelation and temporal centroid to obtain the spectral autocorrelation directly by time-domain windowing without explicitly computing the spectrum. The proposed method leads to identical results as the standard FDLP method but with reduced computational load. We then develop a SZCs-based spectral-envelope and group-delay (SEGD) model, which finds applications in modelling of non-stationary signals such as Castanets. Taking into account the modulation structure and spectral continuity, local polynomial regression is performed to estimate the GD from the real spectral zeros. The SE is estimated based on the phase function computed from the estimated GD. Since the GD estimate is parametric, the degree of smoothness can be controlled directly. Simulation results based on synthetic transient signals are presented to analyze the noise-robustness of the SE-GD model. Applications to castanet modeling, transient compression, and estimation of the glottal closure instants in speech are shown.

Employing an error control code is one of the techniques to reduce the Peak-to-Average Power Ratio (PAPR) in an Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing system; a well known class of such codes being the cosets of Reed-Muller codes. In this thesis, classes of such coset-codes of arbitrary linear codes are considered. It has been proved that the size of such a code can be doubled with marginal/no increase in the PAPR. Conditions for employing this method iteratively have been enunciated. In fact this method has enabled to get the optimal coset-codes. The PAPR of the coset-codes of the extended codes is obtained from the PAPR of the corresponding coset-codes of the parent code. Utility of a special type of lengthening is established in PAPR studies

Cette thèse propose d’interroger un dispositif de groupe thérapeutique à médiation sensorielle olfactive. Il a été créé comme une modalité d’accueil et d’écoute de sujets criminels, rencontrés dans le cadre d’une pratique en service psychiatrique en milieu carcéral. Ce dispositif innovant se fonde sur le besoin de créativité suscité par la confrontation avec une forme de clinique de l’extrême. Le choix de l’olfaction, comme modalité de contact, ouvre un champ de réflexion original, au carrefour de la philosophie, de la psychologie développementale, des neurosciences et de la psychanalyse. La notion « d’acte-sentir » est une proposition de modélisation des processus en jeu au contact du médium sensoriel olfactif. Proposé dans des pratiques groupales ou individuelles, le médium sensoriel olfactif favorise l’émergence de formes primaires de symbolisation, considérées comme des traces d’une subjectivité en déroute. Cette écoute du langage sensori-moteur et de ses formes particulières, suscitées par la mobilisation de l’odorat, est une proposition d’un abord psychothérapeutique de sujets aux prises avec des souffrances inexprimables voire insoutenables, engageant le clinicien « corps et âme ». / This thesis questions an innovative group setting, using an olfactive medium. It was started to meet and to listen to criminal patients in a psychiatric ward in prison. This new practice relys on the need to invent a way to react to the extreme seriousness of the mental illnesses in this ward. The choice of smell, as mean to get in touch, opens a wide field of reflections at the cross roads of philosophy, developmental psychology, neurosciences and psychoanalytical theory. “L’acte-sentir” the sensing-act is a proposal to pattern the different processes linked to smell as a medium. This work fits in groups or individual set-ups. Primary forms of symbolization appear with this medium, and illustrate a lost subjectivity. Listening to these words and helping associative work, is therapeutic with these suffering patients, who cannot speak easily. This work request a full body and mind implication. Use of the sens of smell to attempt to make sens to nonsense.

The theme of the diploma thesis is the solution of the pre-plant zone of the Dukovany nuclear power station. Creating a vision of how this space could develop further in the next 50 years and how it could work in a transitional phase during the construction of a new nuclear power plant unit. The subject of the thesis is the elaboration of an architectural study, which is based on an urban study. Urban study was processed within the framework of the pre-diploma thesis and solved mainly the overall problems of this area, the new transport connection, and the functional division of the whole area. The area was divided into three functional units, namely the transport zone, the administrative zone and the sports and education zone. At present, there are a lot of small structurally and functionally unsuitable buildings in this area. The diploma thesis deals with the design of new buildings with a clear functional use in the administrative zone, in the area in front of the main gatehouse. A new representative square was created, and three buildings are designed around it. The dominant feature of the whole area was a high-rise office building near the gatehouse. In front of the office building, towards the main road, the service building I was designed, which contains business and healthcare services. On the other side of the square was located the service building II, where there are technical services, such as workshops, warehouses and metrology. The last building solved within the diploma thesis is the building of sports and locker rooms of suppliers, which is designed behind the square near the greenery. New building copies mass of the only preserved building in this area, namely the building of the information centre. The designed building has a fitness centre and locker rooms of external workers of the power plant.