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This thesis examines the extent to which benchmark beating by Australian firms around the earnings level and earnings changes thresholds can be reliably interpreted as evidence of earnings management. A number of recent academic papers challenge the earnings management explanation for the observed kinks in the distribution of net Income. In response to this criticisms, this thesis is motivated to conduct tests of earnings management with a refined methodology of selecting a subset of firms immediately above the threshold that have a priori incentives to achieve the benchmark. This approach allows for investigations to focus on benchmark beating observations where earnings manipulations would be more prevalent and thereby provide a powerful test for the existence of opportunistic reporting. The paper uses a number of unexpected accruals measures including the Kothari et al. (2005) performance matched models. In testing the hypotheses, this thesis utilises two approaches which were; the regression approach and the test of difference of means approach. Based on a broad sample drawn from all listed Australian firms for the years 1995-2007, small profit firms and small increase firms with high price-to-sales ratio were found to have evidence consistent with opportunistic benchmark beating behaviour. Similar results are also documented for benchmark beating firms with low book-to-market (high market-to-book) ratio. This thesis also finds that firms with equity offering incentives who reported improvement in earnings display unexpected accruals consistent with earnings management. In addition, the accounting behaviour of firms which previously incurred a loss is consistent with earnings management explanation. Firms with long strings of earnings increases also appear to use accounting discretion in order to avoid earnings deterioration. Similarly, evidence of earnings management are also displayed by small profit firms which have consistently reported negative earnings. Finally, this thesis provides evidence that resolves the apparent paradox that benchmark beating is evidence of earnings management which is devoid of the statistical artefact argument posited by Durtschi and Easton (2005) and Durtschi and Easton (2008).

The purpose of this study was to expand on research by evaluating the effects of response interruption redirection and response cost alone to reduce vocal stereotypy and to evaluate whether response cost increases the effectiveness of response interruption redirection. Treatment phases included response interruption redirection, response cost, and response interruption redirection plus response cost. We saw high rates of vocal stereotypy during baseline, toy baseline, and pre-intervention phases. During all treatment phases, we saw substantial decreases in stereotypy. For two of the three participants response interruption redirection and response cost was a slightly more effective treatment suggesting that using response interruption redirection with an additive of response cost may further suppress stereotypy. These results were replicated across phases. For one participant response interruption redirection was the most effective treatment. All three treatments reduced vocal stereotypy to clinically acceptable levels for two participants. For one participant, there was only a slight decrease in stereotypy when RC was implemented. We discuss limitations and areas for future research.

Bruxism, the gnashing or grinding of one’s teeth, is a significant dental concern that can lead to severe damage of the tooth and gum structures and has been suggested to occur at higher rates in the developmentally disabled population. Very little research has been conducted in this area and of those articles, none of which utilized function based treatments nor conducted functional analyses. The purpose of this investigation was to examine the effects of a function based stimulation intervention on audible diurnal bruxism with two adolescent boys diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. Functional analyses were conducted for both participants and revealed that bruxism was exhibited across all conditions and occurred highest in the alone condition, suggesting that the behavior was maintained by automatic reinforcement. Based on these findings, a function based stimulation treatment was developed to examine the effects of auditory and tactile stimuli on bruxism relative to conditions in which no stimuli were available. Results indicated that the function based stimulation intervention produced substantial decreases in bruxism for both participants. A post stimulation evaluation further supported these findings, showing the occurrence of bruxism remained at low levels following the removal of the stimulus, suggesting the application of the stimulation acted as an abolishing operation for bruxism.

This thesis focuses on implementation of an algorithm for retinal vessel segmentation in high resolution retinal images.A neural network with two hidden layers was used as the method. A total of 7 features were obtained from matched filtering based on vessel thickness, texture analysis and individual pixels brightness. Within the thesis, the whole database was manually annotated for the implementation of the algorithm and the results. The achieved mean sensitivity reached 80%, specificity 70% and Dice coefficient is 59%.

Abstract available in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology.

Research has shown that Utah English is a distinct variety of English, particularly as spoken in the Wasatch front region (Lillie 1998). It is characterized by particular linguistic features, including tense/lax vowel mergers before tautosyllabic /l/ (Di Paolo and Farber 1990) and the oral release of glottal stops in certain environments (Eddington and Savage 2012). The features of this variety have been studied; however, not much research has been done about the positive or negative attitudes people hold toward it. Casual observation indicates that Utahans themselves may judge speakers of this variety more harshly than do people from other regions. The present study was conducted to determine if this is true, and to determine what other factors have an influence on a person's perception of Utah English. A language attitude study was performed using the matched-guise method. Participants were asked to react to recorded speakers, judging how intelligent and friendly they sounded. When multiple Utah English features were combined in a passage, the majority of participants judged the speaker to be unintelligent and unfriendly; also, participants' judgments of the speakers' intelligence deviated significantly based on the participants' location of origin, with significant interactions between location of origin and age group. When Utah English features were looked at separately, participants' judgments of both the speakers' intelligence and the speakers' friendliness deviated significantly based on which feature was being heard and the gender of the participant, with interactions between feature and gender, feature and age group, and feature and location of origin. Overall, Utahan participants judged speech with Utah English features to be worse than did participants from other locations.

Ultra-wideband (UWB) communications is expected to revolutionize high data-rate, short-distance wireless communications, providing data-rates in excess of 100 Mbps. However, the wireless channel distorts the transmitted signal by dispersing the signal energy over time. This degrades the output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of a correlation based matched-filter receiver, limiting the achievable data-rate and user capacity. Most wideband channel models do not account for all the identified dispersion mechanisms namely the frequency dispersion, the resonant dispersion and the multipath dispersion. The objective of this research is to model resonant dispersion based on the Singularity Expansion Method (SEM) and provide guidelines for UWB receiver design to meet the data capacity. The original contribution of this research is a novel pole dispersion channel model that includes resonant dispersion characterization. An empirical investigation supports our claim that a correlation type matched-filter receiver using a template signal based on the pole dispersion channel model overcomes distortion related losses. Various physical mechanisms responsible for dispersion in UWB communication systems are described in detail. The applicability of the proposed dispersive channel model is evaluated using the optimal matched filter (OMF) receiver. The SEM approach, which was originally proposed for target identification using short pulse radars, offers limited benefits of due to its susceptibility to noise. A combined fuzzy-statistical approach is proposed to improve the robustness of resonant dispersion channel modeling in presence of noise. A natural extension of this doctoral research is to improve buried landmine detection as well as breast tumor detection by applying statistical and fuzzy analysis to the backscatter response. Moreover, radar target identification using UWB short pulses stands to gain tremendously from this research. / Ph. D.

Orientador: Linda Gentry El-Dash / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-16T03:01:24Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Thompson-Oliveira_Andrea_M.pdf: 873828 bytes, checksum: 1cdb4369b3204279ad9f4371b632e172 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2008 / Resumo: Buscou-se neste estudo analisar quantitativamente, por meio de um instrumento de investigação indireto, o Matched Guise, as atitudes de alunos adolescentes de 1as, 2as e 3as séries do ensino médio frente à língua inglesa, utilizando-se fábulas de Esopo. Verificou-se por meio de modelos lineares gerais (GLM) a influência de variáveis como o idioma do texto e a idade do sujeito na atribuição de status e solidariedade. Observou-se que interações entre algumas variáveis, tais como as interações entre o sexo do aluno e o do falante, também exerceram influência nas variáveis dependentes. Investigou-se a correlação entre as atribuições de status e solidariedade ao falante e o desempenho dos sujeitos por meio da análise das notas finais na disciplina inglês. Por fim, questiona-se se é possível atingir a neutralidade preconizada pela Técnica de Matched Guise. / Abstract: The purpose of this study was to analyze quantitatively, by means of an indirect investigation instrument, the Matched Guise, the attitudes of teenager students in High School grades 09, 10 and 11 towards the English language, using Aesop's fables. It was found, through the use of general linear models that such variables as language and subject age influenced the rating of status and solidarity. It was observed that interaction among some variables, such as that between student's sex and speaker's sex also exerted a certain influence on the dependent variables. The interaction between the subject's final grade in English and the status and solidarity assigned to the speaker was also investigated. Finally, the doubt remains as to the possibility of reaching the neutrality prescribed by the Matched Guise Technique. / Mestrado / Ensino-Aprendizagem de Segunda Lingua e Lingua Estrangeira / Mestre em Linguística Aplicada

In this thesis we study Boolean functions from three different perspectives. First, we study the complex- ity of Boolean minimization for several classes of formulas with polynomially solvable SAT, and formulate sufficient conditions for a class which cause the minimization problem to drop at least one level in the polyno- mial hierarchy. Second, we study a class of matched CNFs for which SAT is trivial but minimization remains Σp 2 complete. We prove that every matched CNF has at least one equivalent prime and irredundant CNF that is also matched. We use this fact to prove the main result of this part, namely that for every matched CNF all clause minimal equivalent CNFs are also matched. Third, we look at propagation completeness - the property of a CNF that says that for every partial assignment all entailed literals can be discovered by unit propagation. We can extend every CNF to be propagation complete by adding empowering impli- cates to it. The main result of this section is a the proof of coNP completeness of the recognition problem for propagation complete CNFs. We also show that there exist CNFs to which an exponential number of empowering implicates have to be added to make them propagation complete.