O presente trabalho pretende estudar a disposição a pagar do consumidor brasileiro por produtos com maior eficiência energética. Entender o quanto o consumidor está disposto a pagar por um ganho de eficiência pode contribuir na elaboração de políticas públicas para o setor elétrico, e na criação de incentivos à indústria para produção e investimentos neste tipo de tecnologia. O trabalho utiliza-se de uma pesquisa de campo sobre posse de equipamentos e hábitos de uso, realizada pela Eletrobrás/Procel em 2005. A metodologia empregada segue a linha de trabalhos já realizados em outros países, a exemplo dos estudos realizados por Dubin e McFadden (1984) e Sammer e Wüstenhagen (2006). Os resultados encontrados apontam para uma subestimação dos consumidores quanto à avaliação da economia proporcionada por produtos mais eficientes. Sendo assim, abre-se espaço para campanhas de conscientização e valorização dessas tecnologias ou incentivos monetários para consumo dos mesmos. / The focus of this research is to investigate the Brazilian consumer\'s willingness to pay for products with more energy efficiency. Measuring how much the consumer is willing to pay could provide us with good insights that may help in discussing politics regarding the electric sector, plus it may guide politics in taking actions and decisions on incentives in order to promote this kind of more efficient technological products. This investigation is based on a field research regarding the possess of appliances and their uses, consisting of 4310 household questionnaires. The methodology applied follows previous work on this field and similar studies made for other countries. Examples are Dubin e McFadden (1984) for space and water heating in the USA and Sammer e Wüstenhagen (2006) for washing machines in the Switzerland. The results make clear an underestimation of the monetary economy due to the use of more efficient products. Therefore, there\'s an opportunity for the government to motivate and promote this kind of technology, either through advertising for and awareness of the general population, or through subsides to the industry to produce more efficient products or monetary incentives for the their purchases.

by Chan Man Cheong Andrew. / Thesis (M.B.A.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1987. / Bibliography: leaf 78.

This research is a qualitative, heuristic study involving in-depth interviews with eight white, professional heterosexual women in interracial relationships. The women were found through an opportunistic or snowball approach. The participant women were in the age range 25-60. Six were married and two were in long term relationships. All women had children, seven having mixed-race children between 18 months and 23 years of age. Four women had partners of African-Caribbean heritage, three had partners of African heritage and one had a partner of Nepalese heritage. The women shared their reflections on having to confront the realities of racism, coming to terms with their own ambiguous racial position, facing the notion of whiteness and considering their social position as white women. The research was conducted using a heuristic methodology to explore white women's experiences, using creative images and personal reflective and reflexive narratives integrated throughout the text. The research offers insight into how the social experiences of being in an interracial relationship impacts on white women; as individuals, partners and in their role of mother. Implications for themselves as mothers and parenting their children in a racist context are explored and discussed. The findings suggest the women can feel caught between the known (whiteness) and the unknown (blackness). Having crossed a 'socially unaccepted racialised boundary' and challenging explicit dominant social, gendered and racialised beliefs, the women stepped into the unknown involving experiences of changes in status, challenges to assumptions of their maternal competence and living in a world which involved a continuous process of deconstruction and reconstruction of a new, unforeseen racialised identity. The white women moved from being an 'insider' within their own dominant social experiences, to becoming an 'outsider' within another cultural context, sometimes experiencing uncertainty about where they belonged. The white women experienced a shift of reference group orientation, with a new experience of continuous external scrutiny unfolding. These newly encountered social and personal events challenged the white women to review how they previously saw themselves, with this all impacting on their previously taken for granted social status. These experiences impacted at emotional and cognitive levels. As a consequence, the white women often found themselves occupying a liminal or unknown space where a process occurs of attempting to come to terms with the new experiences, new learning and adopting alternative strategies to deal with these different experiences. Implications for counsellors working with white women in interracial relationships are considered and suggestions for therapeutic engagement are made.

<p>U disertaciji su istražene karakteristike mešovitih namena, kao urbanog fenomena i planerskog koncepta. Formulisan je poseban metodološki postupak, koji uključuje i redefinisanje indeksa mešovite namene, primenjen za istraživanje relacija između programske strukture grada i brojnih drugih parametara, čime je omogućeno formiranje utemeljenih stavova o savremenom gradu kao složenom sistemu. Konkretno područje izučavanja je grad Novi Sad i pet specifičnih susedstava, a na osnovu rezultata rada date su i preporuke za poboljšanje istraživanja i planiranja mešovitih namena.</p> / <p>The dissertation examines characteristics of mixed uses, as an urban phenomenon and a planning concept. А special methodological procedure, including redefinition of mixed-use index, has been formulated for exploring the relations between the program structure of the city and a number of other parameters, which enabled making of well-grounded conclusions about contemporary cities, as complex systems. The particular area of study is the city of Novi Sad and five specific neighbourhoods, and on the basis of results of the work, there were given recommendations for improving of research and planning of mixed uses.</p>

abstract: Previous research has shown functional mixed-effects models and traditional mixed-effects models perform similarly when recovering mean and individual trajectories (Fine, Suk, & Grimm, 2019). However, Fine et al. (2019) showed traditional mixed-effects models were able to more accurately recover the underlying mean curves compared to functional mixed-effects models. That project generated data following a parametric structure. This paper extended previous work and aimed to compare nonlinear mixed-effects models and functional mixed-effects models on their ability to recover underlying trajectories which were generated from an inherently nonparametric process. This paper introduces readers to nonlinear mixed-effects models and functional mixed-effects models. A simulation study is then presented where the mean and random effects structure of the simulated data were generated using B-splines. The accuracy of recovered curves was examined under various conditions including sample size, number of time points per curve, and measurement design. Results showed the functional mixed-effects models recovered the underlying mean curve more accurately than the nonlinear mixed-effects models. In general, the functional mixed-effects models recovered the underlying individual curves more accurately than the nonlinear mixed-effects models. Progesterone cycle data from Brumback and Rice (1998) were then analyzed to demonstrate the utility of both models. Both models were shown to perform similarly when analyzing the progesterone data. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Psychology 2019

Separation methods involving a mixture of metals typically include upfront processing that leads to one final product. To lower the waste and ultimately environmental burden, the potential to synthesize multiple functional products from a mixed metal precursor solution is explored. The initial precursor solutions contained varying ratios of gold and copper, gold and nickel, and finally a ternary solution of gold, copper, and nickel. The amount of gold was kept constant, while the amount of copper and/or nickel was sequentially increased. Two separate synthesis processes were tested, the traditional Turkevich method involving trisodium citrate and another chemical reduction method involving sodium borohydride. The particle size and chemical composition of the synthesized particles were characterized using TEM, DLS and ICP-OES. It was determined that gold nanoparticles still formed at a ratio of 1 to 2 gold to copper while using trisodium citrate or sodium borohydride as the reducing agent. The same limiting ratio was observed for the gold to nickel reactions in the presence of either trisodium citrate or sodium borohydride. The ternary mixture limit for gold nanoparticle formation was a molar ratio of 1 to 1 to 1 gold to copper to nickel. The repeatability and stability results for the optimized binary reaction conditions indicate that using sodium borohydride as the reducing agent consistently produces more stable particle suspensions. Quantifying the environmental impact using green chemistry metrics indicate the Turkevich reactions for the optimized reactions have the lower environmental factors.

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Mixed Reality experiences, that blend physical and virtual objects, have become commonplace on handheld computing devices. One common application of these technologies is their use in cultural heritage "walking tours." These tours provide information about the surrounding environment in a variety of contexts, to suit the needs and interests of different groups of participants. Using the familiar "campus tour" as a canonical example, this dissertation investigates the technical and cognitive processes involved in transferring this tour from its physical and analog form into Mixed Reality. Using the concept of spatial scale borrowed from cognitive geography, this work identifies the need to create and maintain continuity across different scales of spatial experience as being of paramount importance to successful Mixed Reality walking tours. The concepts of scale transitions, coordination of representations across scales, and scale-matching are shown to be essential to maintaining the continuity of experience. Specific techniques that embody these concepts are also discussed and demonstrated in a number of Mixed Reality examples, including in the context of a successful deployment of a Mixed Reality Tour of the Georgia Tech campus. The potential for a "Language of Mixed Reality" based on the concepts outlined in this work is also discussed, and a general framework, called the Mixed Reality Scale Framework is shown to meet all the necessary criteria for being a cognitive theory of Human-Centered Computing in the context of Mixed Reality.

In this thesis I focus on cutting planes for large Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) problems. More specifically, I focus on two independent cutting planes studies. The first of these deals with cutting planes for the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), and the second with cutting planes for general MIPs. In the first study I introduce a new class of cutting planes which I call the Generalized Domino Parity (GDP) inequalities. My main achievements with regard to these are: (1) I show that these are valid for the TSP and for the graphical TSP. (2) I show that they generalize most well-known TSP inequalities (including combs, domino-parity constraints, clique-trees, bipartitions, paths and stars). (3) I show that a sub-class of these (which contains all clique-tree inequalities w/ a fixed number of handles) can be separated in polynomial time, on planar graphs. My second study can be subdivided in two parts. In the first of these I study the Mixed Integer Knapsack Problem (MIKP) and develop a branch-and-bound based algorithm for solving it. The novelty of the approach is that it exploits the notion of "dominance" in order to effectively prune solutions in the branch-and-bound tree. In the second part, I develop a Mixed Integer Rounding (MIR) cut separation heuristic, and embed the MIKP solver in a column generation algorithm in order to assess the performance of said heuristic. The goal of this study is to understand why no other class of inequalities derived from single-row systems has been able to outperform the MIR. Computational results are presented.

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