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H.264/AVC intra prediction method is an efficient tool to reduce spatial redundancies by using multidirectional spatial prediction modes. In this paper, a novel intra prediction method is designed to improve coding efficiency. Firstly, we propose a direction-distance oriented prediction which considers the distance between the predict value and the reference samples according to the direction of the prediction modes. Secondly, we apply the concept of image restoration by using the projections onto convex sets (POCS) to intra prediction which uses adaptively filtering based on the surrounding reconstructed pixel to predict blocks. The experimental results show that the average bit-rate reduction of 0.75% and PSNR gain improved of 0.119dB are achieved.

Hydrocarbon conversion and synthesis gas production are two components of the power production process that require significant development and exploration in the advanced energy arena. To remain within our current fueling infrastructure, it is imperative that an efficient and reliable mechanism to facilitate these components of the power production process is developed for automotive applications. A honeycomb monolith rhodium based catalyst has been identified as a potential fuel reformer element for use in automotive hydrocarbon fuel conversion. Using the novel and minimally invasive SpaciMS (Spatially resolved capillary inlet Mass Spectroscopy), developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratories, and an internal temperature acquisition system, the impact of fuel inlet space velocity on the operating rhodium based catalytic fuel reformer of interest was parametrically studied. In situ temperature and species profiles of the catalyst during steady state operation were produced. The data acquired through these experiments was then used to demonstrate analytic capability by conducting thermodynamic analyses on the operating fuel reformer. Experimental and analytical results can be used in development of design considerations for fuel conversion systems.

<p>This master’s thesis has analyzed the issues multinational enterprises (MNE) have when determining the arm’s length price from intra group services rendered from a group service center (GSC). The thesis is based on the recommendations from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the legislations in Sweden, Germany, USA, and Denmark. There are several factors that could cause issues for services rendered from a GSC.</p><p>GSCs render services to the members of a MNE. These types of services are often managerial, supervisory, marketing, or other kinds of services, which are preformed more efficiently if centralized in the MNE rather than if each member of the MNE would perform the services themselves. The research has shown three specific issues that have caused problems for MNEs: When is a service chargeable? Is the applied method for charging appropriate? And, how should the remuneration be determined? The concerned countries have different rules and regulations towards dealing with these issues, which have caused problems for MNE operating in these countries.</p><p>There is no other category of transaction that has caused as much disagreement between taxpayers and tax authorities as intra group services. Countries seem to have different approaches towards when services are chargeable, which in situations create disputes between taxpayers and the countries’ tax authorities.</p><p>The appropriate method for charging is dependent of the concerned countries. Three of the countries have a negative attitude towards indirect charging, while one has no preference. Consequently, this has caused problems for MNE to price services.</p><p>Three of the countries apply the OECD’s recommendations, when determine the appropriate pricing method. OECD has a hierarchy of the methods, whereas USA applies the best method rule, which means that they have no preference over a certain pricing method. The most common methods for pricing services are the cost plus method and the transactional net margin method. However, there are situations where some of the countries do not approve a profit element in the charge. In these situations, the OECD‘s recommendations do not provide a clear and straight answer, whereas the US Regulations have very strict and clear regulations when a service should be charged without a profit element.</p><p>There could be many factors to why countries have different interpretations: ambiguous recommendations from the OECD; subjective opinions from governments, tax authorities and courts; protectionism; language barriers; accounting standards; the differences in the legal value of the OECD recommendations; and probably other factors which has not been considered. Inferentially, the OECD should be more open to a “US approach”, by giving more clear, precise and direct recommendations. A “US approach” gives more predictability to practitioners. Direct, clear and precise recommendations will give less room for interpretation, thus, less confusion in practice. Even if this has to be accepted by countries it should lead to less confusion and hopefully decrease double taxation for MNEs.</p>

Dynamic contrast enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (DCE-MRI) of the breast is a widely used non-invasive approach to gather information about the underlying physiology of breast tumors. Recent studies indicate that breast tumor heterogeneity may reflect the presence of different levels of cellular aggressiveness or habitats within the tumor. This heterogeneity has been correlated to the variations in the contrast enhancement patterns within the tumor apparent on gadolinium-enhanced DCE-MRI. Although pathological and qualitative (based on contrast enhancement patterns) studies suggest the presence of clini- cal and molecular predictive tumor sub-regions, this has not been fully investigated in the quantitative domain. The new era of cancer imaging emphasizes the use of Radiomics to provide in vivo quan- titative prognostic and predictive imaging biomarkers. Thus Radiomics focuses on apply- ing image analysis techniques to quantify tumor radiographic properties to create mineable databases from radiological images. In this research work, the Radiomics approach was ap- plied to develop a novel computer aided diagnosis (CAD) model for quantifying intratumor heterogeneity not only within the tumor as a whole, but also within tumor habitats with an intent to build predictive models in breast cancer. The process of building these predictive models started with 2-D tumor segmentation followed by habitat extraction (based on vari- ations in contrast patterns and geometry) and textural kinetic feature extraction to quantify habitat heterogeneity. A new correlation based random subspace ensemble framework was developed to evaluate the textural kinetics from the individual tumor habitats. This new CAD framework was applied to predict two clinical and prognostic factors: Axillary lymph node (ALN) metastases and Estrogen receptor (ER) status. An AUC of more than 0.8 was achieved for classifying breast tumors based on number of ALN involvement. The highest AUC of 0.91 was achieved for classifying tumors with no ALN metastases from tumors with 4 or more ALN metastases. For classifying tumors based on ER status the highest AUC of 0.87 was achieved. These results were acquired by utilizing the textural kinetic features from the tumor habitat with rapid delayed washout. The results presented in this work showed that the heterogeneity within the tumor habitats which showed rapid contrast washout in the delayed phase, correlated with aggressive cellular phenotypes. This work hypothesizes that successfully quantifying these prognostic factors will prove to be clinically significant as it can improve the diagnostic accuracy. This, in turn, will im- prove the breast cancer treatment paradigm by providing more tailored treatment regimens for aggressive tumors.

Because both validity and reliability indices are a function of the scores on a given administration of a measure, their values can often vary across samples. It is a common mistake to say that a test is reliable when in fact it is not the test that is reliable but the scores on the test that are reliable. In 1998, vacha-haase proposed a fixed-effects meta-analytic method for evaluating reliability that is similar to validity generalization studies called reliability generalization (rg). This study was conducted to evaluate alternative analysis strategies for the meta-analysis method of reliability generalization when the reliability estimates are not statistically independent. Five approaches for handling the violation of independence were implemented: ignoring the violation and treating each observation as independent, calculating one mean or median from each study, randomly selecting only one observation per study, or using a mixed effects model. This Monte Carlo study included five factors in the method. These factors were (a) the coefficient alpha, (b) sample size in the primary studies, (c) number of primary studies in the rg study, (d) number of reliability estimates from each, and (e) the degree of violation of independence where the strength of the dependence is related to the number of reliability indices (i.e. coefficient alpha) derived from a simulated set of examines and the magnitude of the correlation between the journal studies (with intra-class correlation icc = 0, .0l , .30, and .90). These factors were used to simulate samples under known and controlled population conditions. In general, the results suggested that the type of treatment does not have a noticeable impact on the accuracy of the reliability results but that researchers should be cautious when the intra-class correlation is relatively large. In addition, the simulations in this study resulted in very poor confidence band coverage. This research suggested that RG meta-analysis methods are appropriate for describing the overall average reliability of a measure or construct but the RG researcher should be careful in regards to the construction of confidence intervals.

Genom denna studie ville jag utforska den agens som uppstår i mötet mellan barnen och den pedagogiska dokumentationen samt hur posthumanistiskt inspirerade analyser av re-visittillfällen kan bidra med förståelse för de yngsta barnens möjlighet till kommunikation och meningsskapande genom den pedagogiska dokumentationen. Jag observerade och filmade re-visittillfällen där en grupp yngre barn möter dokumentation för att få syn på vad som sätts igång i detta möte. Genom att använda en posthumanistisk ansats betraktas inte bara människor, utan också ickemänniskor som agentiska, de gör och genererar förändring (Lenz Taguchi, 2012:12). Tänkande, intention och kommunikation brukar betraktas som mänskliga förehavanden men i ett posthumanistiskt perspektiv betraktas det som fenomen som uppstår i intra-agerande mellan olika agenter. Analyser av filmsekvenserna gjordes utifrån Barads (2007) diffraktionsbegrepp och Lenz Taguchis (2012) begrepp om cirkulära och horisontella rörelser vilka beskriver processerna i användandet av pedagogisk dokumentation. Uppsatsen belyser några av de möjligheter och tillblivelser som perspektivet bidrog med och att den pedagogiska dokumentationens agens kan ses som något som uppstår i agenternas möten. De mänskliga och ickemänskliga agenterna samhandlade och kommunicerade, en kommunikation som kan ses som samtidig, överlappande och utvidgande. Den pedagogiska dokumentationen och de övriga agenterna gör något, de aktiverade agerande och artikulerade förslag. Ur det uppstod nytt agerande, ny kommunikation och nytt meningsskapande

This thesis investigates coordination of the lower limb joints within the limb during walking. The researcher was motivated by her clinical experience as a paediatric physiotherapist. She observed that the pattern of lower limb coordination differed between normal children and those with cerebral palsy. Many of the currently used interventions did not appear to influence this patterning. As a precursor to evaluating the effectiveness of treatments in modifying coordination, a tool to measure coordination was required. The researcher initially investigated qualitative and then quantitative methods of measuring within limb coordination. A technique was developed that used relative angular velocity of two joints to determine when joints were in-phase, antiphasic or in stasis. The phasic parameters of hip/knee, knee/ankle and hip/ankle joints coordination were quantified. There were some significant differences between normal children and children with cerebral palsy. Asymmetry of these phasic parameters was identified, with children with cerebral palsy being more asymmetrical than normal children. The clinical utility of this technique was tested by comparing 2 groups of children before and after 2 surgical procedures. This showed some significant differences in phasic parameters between pre and post-operative data for one procedure. Low samples sizes mean that further work is required to confirm these findings. Data from this work has been used to calculate sample sizes to give an a priori power of 0.8 and further research is proposed and potential applications discussed. It is hoped that this technique will raise awareness of abnormal intra-limb coordination and allow therapists to identify key interactions between joints that need to be facilitated during walking training.

After surveying the literature on the economics of household decision-making, we employ data from the 2010 European Union Survey on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) to study the relationship between personal characteristics such as gender and decision-making power and responsibility. We find that across Europe, women more often make decisions about everyday spending and purchases for children, while it is mainly men who make the financial decisions in a household. Greater intrahousehold inequality in income and education is correlated with a lower probability of couples making decisions together, as is having a housewife in the home. Interesting patterns of household decision-making across countries emerge; in the Southern European countries, for example, educational differences do not seem to be strongly related to decision-making power and responsibility, and women in Eastern European countries are more likely to make financial decisions when the household reports facing difficult economic conditions. (authors' abstract) / Series: Department of Economics Working Paper Series

Sammanfattning Genom denna studie ville jag utforska den agens som uppstår i mötet mellan barnen och den pedagogiska dokumentationen samt hur posthumanistiskt inspirerade analyser av re-visittillfällen kan bidra med förståelse för de yngsta barnens möjlighet till kommunikation och meningsskapande genom den pedagogiska dokumentationen. Jag observerade och filmade re-visittillfällen där en grupp yngre barn möter dokumentation för att få syn på vad som sätts igång i detta möte. Genom att använda en posthumanistisk ansats betraktas inte bara människor, utan också ickemänniskor som agentiska, de gör och genererar förändring (Lenz Taguchi, 2012:12). Tänkande, intention och kommunikation brukar betraktas som mänskliga förehavanden men i ett posthumanistiskt perspektiv betraktas det som fenomen som uppstår i intra-agerande mellan olika agenter. Analyser av filmsekvenserna gjordes utifrån Barads (2007) diffraktionsbegrepp och Lenz Taguchis (2012) begrepp om cirkulära och horisontella rörelser vilka beskriver processerna i användandet av pedagogisk dokumentation. Uppsatsen belyser några av de möjligheter och tillblivelser som perspektivet bidrog med och att den pedagogiska dokumentationens agens kan ses som något som uppstår i agenternas möten. De mänskliga och ickemänskliga agenterna samhandlade och kommunicerade, en kommunikation som kan ses som samtidig, överlappande och utvidgande. Den pedagogiska dokumentationen och de övriga agenterna gör något, de aktiverade agerande och artikulerade förslag. Ur det uppstod nytt agerande, ny kommunikation och nytt meningsskapande.