In non-inferiority trials, the goal is to show how an experimental treatment is statistically and clinically not inferior to the active control. The three-arm clinical trial usually recommended for non-inferiority trials by the FDA. The three-arm trial consists of a placebo, reference, and an experimental treatment. The three-arm trial shows the superiority of the reference over the placebo and comparison of the reference to an experimental treatment. In this paper, I will assess a non-inferiority trial with Bayesian methods. By employing Bayesian analysis, the parameters are random and assign vague prior distributions. I will compare the models involving different prior distributions to assess the best fit model.

Points-to analysis is a static program analysis that computes reference informationfor a given input program. It serves as input to many client applicationsin optimizing compilers and software engineering tools. Unfortunately, the Gold Standard – i.e., the exact reference information for a given program– is impossible to compute automatically for all but trivial cases, and thus, little can been said about the accuracy of points-to analysis. This thesis aims at paving the way towards a Gold Standard for points-to analysis. For this, we discuss theoretical implications and practical challenges that occur when comparing results obtained by different points-to analyses. We also show ways to improve points-to analysis by different means, e.g., combining different analysis implementations, and a novel approach to path sensitivity. We support our theories with a number of experiments.

South Africa's adherence to the Gold Standard while many other countries abandoned it, placed the country in a difficult position. This was exacerbated by the worldwide economic depression that resulted in the sharp decline of primary commodity prices, a decrease in demand and unemployment. The commercial banks in South Africa were obviously also affected by the prevailing circumstances and the position of one of them, Barclays Bank (Dominion, Colonial and Overseas) will be the focus of this study. One of the most important questions that will receive attention is to what extent the bank was affected by the gold standard crisis. Linked closely to this is the question of the nature of the problems encountered by the bank and the measures, if any, it took to overcome these difficulties. In this regard it will be necessary to investigate the most important areas of the imperial banks' business and the type of customers they served. Another question or issue to be investigated is the relationship between the two British banks on the one hand and the South African Reserve Bank and the government on the other. The establishment of the Reserve Bank was not openly welcomed by the imperial banks as they feared competition from the Bank while, with their considerable balances overseas, they were not convinced that there existed a need for a central bank in South Africa. In this respect, the question of co-operation between the two banks will also receive attention. / Prof. G Verhoef

O trabalho tem por meta resgatar alguns aspectos relacionados à gestão da estrutura macroeconômica do Brasil e de Portugal entre 1850 e 1865, com especial enfoque às políticas monetária e cambial, intimamente relacionadas com a gestão do sistema de paridade internacional de moedas conhecido como o Padrão-ouro, que constitui o objeto principal desta análise. Os objetivos gerais desta tese tencionam, portanto, fornecer substratos a uma reflexão mais sistemática no que concerne a uma presumida conexão entre a dinâmica cíclica dos fluxos de capitais em escala global e os períodos de crises econômicas e pânicos financeiros observados no período, em íntima ligação com o mecanismo de integração financeira que se corporifica no Padrão-ouro, ao qual Brasil e Portugal aderiram em 1846 e 1854, respectivamente. O trabalho pretende, assim, avaliar as consequências da referida integração financeira, bem como das políticas monetárias empreendidas sobre o desenvolvimento do mercado financeiro de ambos os países ao longo do recorte temporal supracitado. / This research intends to examine some aspects related to Brazilian and Portuguese macroeconomic structures between 1850 and 1865, focusing monetary and trading policies, closely related to the management of Gold Standard, the main object of this research. Therefore, the main objectives of this research intends to provide substrates for a reflection about a connection between the cyclic dynamics of capital on global scales, and economic crisis and panics on the same period, closely related with financial integration externalized in Gold Standard, adopted by Brazilian monetary authorities in 1846, and by Portuguese in 1854. This research intends to evaluate the consequences of this financial integration and the consequences of monetary policies over the financial market from both countries along the same period.

O objetivo deste trabalho é analisar as transformações por que passou a teoria econômica no período entre-guerras, relacionando-as às mudanças econômicas e políticas que caracterizam o capitalismo da época. O ponto de partida é o contraste realizado por Karl Polanyi entre os conservadores anos 1920 e os revolucionários anos 1930. Argumenta-se que os conflitos em tomo do restabelecimento e do posterior abandono do padrão-ouro, que representaram a tentativa de restauração do liberalismo econômico e sua subseqüente frustração, foram determinantes nas disputas políticas e teóricas do período. A obra de Friedrich von Hayek é relacionada aos conservadores anos 1920, enquanto a obra de John Maynard Keynes é associada às transformações da década de 1930. São enfatizados os contrastes entre os conceitos de equilíbrio e taxa de juros adotados pelos dois autores. Além disso, argumenta-se que as transformações da teoria econômica não se restringiram a alterações de conceitos e hipóteses, mas envolveram também um deslocamento do papel desempenhado pela teoria na reprodução da sociedade, com a emergência da gestão macroeconômica do capitalismo. / The aim of this work is to analyse the transformation that economics has been through in the interwar years, relating it to the economic and political transformation of the period\'s capitalism. The point of departure is Karl Polanyi\'s contrast between the conservative 1920s and the revolutionary 1930s. It is argued that the conflicts around the reestablishment and the abandonment of the gold-standard, which represented the attempt (and its subsequent frustration) to restore economic liberalism, exercised a great influence on the political and theoretic disputes of the time. Friedrich von Hayek\'s work is related to the conservative 1920s, while John Maynard Keynes\' work is connected with the transformations of the 1930s. The contrasts between the authors\' concepts of equilibrium and interest rate are particularly emphasized. Finally, it is maintained that the transformation of economics was not restricted to changes of concepts and hypotheses, but involved also a transformation of the role fulfilled by this theory in the reproduction of society, with the emergence of the macroeconomic management of capitalism.

Points-to analysis is a static program analysis that, simply put, computes which objects created at certain points of a given program might show up at which other points of the same program. In particular, it computes possible targets of a call and possible objects referenced by a field. Such information is essential input to many client applications in optimizing compilers and software engineering tools. Comparing experimental results with respect to accuracy and performance is required in order to distinguish the promising from the less promising approaches to points-to analysis. Unfortunately, comparing the accuracy of two different points-to analysis implementations is difficult, as there are many pitfalls in the details. In particular, there are no standardized means to perform such a comparison, i.e, no benchmark suite - a set of programs with well-defined rules of how to compare different points-to analysis results - exists. Therefore, different researchers use their own means to evaluate their approaches to points-to analysis. To complicate matters, even the same researchers do not stick to the same evaluation methods, which often makes it impossible to take two research publications and reliably tell which one describes the more accurate points-to analysis. In this thesis, we define a methodology on how to benchmark points-to analysis. We create a benchmark suite, compare three different points-to analysis implementations with each other based on this methodology, and explain differences in analysis accuracy. We also argue for the need of a Gold Standard, i.e., a set of benchmark programs with exact analysis results. Such a Gold Standard is often required to compare points-to analysis results, and it also allows to assess the exact accuracy of points-to analysis results. Since such a Gold Standard cannot be computed automatically, it needs to be created semi-automatically by the research community. We propose a process for creating a Gold Standard based on under-approximating it through optimistic (dynamic) analysis and over-approximating it through conservative (static) analysis. With the help of improved static and dynamic points-to analysis and expert knowledge about benchmark programs, we present a first attempt towards a Gold Standard. We also provide a Web-based benchmarking platform, through which researchers can compare their own experimental results with those of other researchers, and can contribute towards the creation of a Gold Standard.

<p>Points-to analysis is a static program analysis that computes reference informationfor a given input program. It serves as input to many client applicationsin optimizing compilers and software engineering tools. Unfortunately, the Gold Standard – i.e., the exact reference information for a given program– is impossible to compute automatically for all but trivial cases, and thus, little can been said about the accuracy of points-to analysis.</p><p>This thesis aims at paving the way towards a Gold Standard for points-to analysis. For this, we discuss theoretical implications and practical challenges that occur when comparing results obtained by different points-to analyses. We also show ways to improve points-to analysis by different means, e.g., combining different analysis implementations, and a novel approach to path sensitivity.</p><p>We support our theories with a number of experiments.</p>

O objetivo deste trabalho é analisar as transformações por que passou a teoria econômica no período entre-guerras, relacionando-as às mudanças econômicas e políticas que caracterizam o capitalismo da época. O ponto de partida é o contraste realizado por Karl Polanyi entre os conservadores anos 1920 e os revolucionários anos 1930. Argumenta-se que os conflitos em tomo do restabelecimento e do posterior abandono do padrão-ouro, que representaram a tentativa de restauração do liberalismo econômico e sua subseqüente frustração, foram determinantes nas disputas políticas e teóricas do período. A obra de Friedrich von Hayek é relacionada aos conservadores anos 1920, enquanto a obra de John Maynard Keynes é associada às transformações da década de 1930. São enfatizados os contrastes entre os conceitos de equilíbrio e taxa de juros adotados pelos dois autores. Além disso, argumenta-se que as transformações da teoria econômica não se restringiram a alterações de conceitos e hipóteses, mas envolveram também um deslocamento do papel desempenhado pela teoria na reprodução da sociedade, com a emergência da gestão macroeconômica do capitalismo. / The aim of this work is to analyse the transformation that economics has been through in the interwar years, relating it to the economic and political transformation of the period\'s capitalism. The point of departure is Karl Polanyi\'s contrast between the conservative 1920s and the revolutionary 1930s. It is argued that the conflicts around the reestablishment and the abandonment of the gold-standard, which represented the attempt (and its subsequent frustration) to restore economic liberalism, exercised a great influence on the political and theoretic disputes of the time. Friedrich von Hayek\'s work is related to the conservative 1920s, while John Maynard Keynes\' work is connected with the transformations of the 1930s. The contrasts between the authors\' concepts of equilibrium and interest rate are particularly emphasized. Finally, it is maintained that the transformation of economics was not restricted to changes of concepts and hypotheses, but involved also a transformation of the role fulfilled by this theory in the reproduction of society, with the emergence of the macroeconomic management of capitalism.

O trabalho tem por meta resgatar alguns aspectos relacionados à gestão da estrutura macroeconômica do Brasil e de Portugal entre 1850 e 1865, com especial enfoque às políticas monetária e cambial, intimamente relacionadas com a gestão do sistema de paridade internacional de moedas conhecido como o Padrão-ouro, que constitui o objeto principal desta análise. Os objetivos gerais desta tese tencionam, portanto, fornecer substratos a uma reflexão mais sistemática no que concerne a uma presumida conexão entre a dinâmica cíclica dos fluxos de capitais em escala global e os períodos de crises econômicas e pânicos financeiros observados no período, em íntima ligação com o mecanismo de integração financeira que se corporifica no Padrão-ouro, ao qual Brasil e Portugal aderiram em 1846 e 1854, respectivamente. O trabalho pretende, assim, avaliar as consequências da referida integração financeira, bem como das políticas monetárias empreendidas sobre o desenvolvimento do mercado financeiro de ambos os países ao longo do recorte temporal supracitado. / This research intends to examine some aspects related to Brazilian and Portuguese macroeconomic structures between 1850 and 1865, focusing monetary and trading policies, closely related to the management of Gold Standard, the main object of this research. Therefore, the main objectives of this research intends to provide substrates for a reflection about a connection between the cyclic dynamics of capital on global scales, and economic crisis and panics on the same period, closely related with financial integration externalized in Gold Standard, adopted by Brazilian monetary authorities in 1846, and by Portuguese in 1854. This research intends to evaluate the consequences of this financial integration and the consequences of monetary policies over the financial market from both countries along the same period.

Social media surveillance is becoming more and more popular. However, current surveillance methods do not utilize well-respected surveys, which were established over many decades in domains outside of computer science. Also the evaluation of the previous social media surveillance is not sufficient, especially for surveillance of happiness on social media. These motivated us to develop a general computational methodology for translating a well-known survey into a social media surveillance strategy. Therefore, traditional surveys could be utilized to broaden social media surveillance. The methodology could bridge domains like psychology and social science with computer science. We use life satisfaction on social media as a case study to illustrate our survey-to-surveillance methodology. We start with a famous life satisfaction survey, expand the survey statements to generate templates. Then we use the templates to build queries in our information retrieval system to retrieve the social media posts which could be considered as valid responses to the original survey. Filters were utilized to boost the performance of the retrieval system of our surveillance method. To evaluate our surveillance method, we developed a novel method to build the gold standard dataset. Instead of evaluating all the data instances like the traditional way, we ask human workers to "find'' as many of the positives as possible in the dataset, the rest are assumed to be negatives. We used the method to build the gold standard dataset for the life satisfaction case study. We also build three more gold standard datasets to further demonstrate the value of our method. Using the life satisfaction gold standard dataset, we show that performance of our surveillance method of life satisfaction outperforms other popular methods (lexicon and machine learning based methods) used by previous researchers. Using our surveillance method of life satisfaction on social media, we did a comprehensive analysis of life satisfaction expressions on Twitter. We not only show the time series, daily and weekly cycle of life satisfaction on social media, but also found the differences in characteristics for users with different life satisfaction expressions. These include psychosocial features such as anxiety, anger and depression. In addition, we present the geographic distribution of life satisfaction, including the life satisfaction across the U.S. and places around the world. This thesis is the first to systematically explore life satisfaction expressions over Twitter. This is done using computational methods that derive from an established survey on life satisfaction.