Investors should seriously assess and consider investment objects when they are proceeding domestically newly-issued equity funds investment. According to this study, the returns of domestically newly-issued equity funds are negative whether they are invested locally or overseas. If we take excess returns into account, the returns rate will be lower. General excess returns¡]systematic risk BETA¡^¡Bnet flow rate ¡]Flow¡^¡Bequity funds turnover rate¡]Turn¡^¡Baverage investment amount per person¡]AVG¡^etc. four factors are listed in this study. The past ten-year excess returns of domestically newly-issued equity funds are researched the correlationship of these variables. The empirical results show:there is a positively significant relationship risk, the higher the systematic risk is, the better the funds¡¦ performance is. Funds excess returns are positively significantly related with equity funds turnover rate; the situation represents: the more active this month investment objects are the better this month performance is. The relationship between equity funds excess returns and net flow rate is statistically insignificant; no matter what the net buying amount of this month is higher or lower than last month funds assets scale, the performance of the funds is not affected. The relationship between funds excess returns and investment amount is statistically insignificant. As far as domestically newly-issued international equity funds are concerned, funds excess returns are statistically insignificant with systematic risk, net flow rate and funds turnover rate, that is, the performance of international equity funds is not affected by domestical systematic risk, net flow rate and fund turnover rate. Funds excess return rate is negatively significantly related with the investment amount per person, that is, the bigger the net funds assets scale or the smaller the beneficiaries of the funds is, the worse the performance of the funds is. In other words, when topical news¡]for example BDI index fluctuations¡B the rise of BRICs¡B the large scale epidmic¡^ferment,the international equity funds commodity which is enjoying busy trading will result in loss in the first year-end after investing, it verifies the proverb¡XDon¡¦t go to the place where many persons gatter.

As demand for energy is skyrocketing around the globe, environmental challenges are becoming more severe than ever before. Carbon dioxide, methane gas and other greenhouse gases are rapidly contributing to global warming and ozone depletion phenomenon. Buildings are among major contributors of greenhouse gases. They are consuming more than 40% of total energy and three quarter of the total electricity in the United States. It is to some distance the responsibility of building design professionals to address the impacts of their practice on the environment by reducing the energy consumption and carbon emission of their projects. This thesis aims to create a practical design guideline to help architects design energy-neutral homes in North America. The study's primary emphasis is on reducing building energy demand by implementing core principles of building physics into the design process throughout a case study project. What makes this process unique compared to other existing green design programs is its focus on architect's knowledge to implement core energy saving design strategies into design and evaluate their performance with a normative simulation tool. Selection and analysis of building systems, financial evaluation of cost effective systems and materials, uncertainty analysis of building systems, construction cost estimating and marketing analysis of the case study project, demonstrate simple strategies for designers to use in projects with higher sensitivity. In conclusion, the idea behind this methodology is building marketable energy-neutral homes in the current market with existing materials and none-complex technologies. The success of this design method is depends on the knowledge and skills of architects in building science, architectural design, and building construction. Despite barriers and many uncertainties embedded in this process, moving toward energy-neutral homes will have positive impacts on environment even if it could not reach the Net-Zero balance.

<p>Every year more than 6000 thefts, to a value of 1.5 billion SEK, are reported</p><p>within the Swedish building trade. Plus all the indirect costs of having the</p><p>construction site standing still.</p><p>SafeTool is a newly started company that will try to prevent this problem with</p><p>a modern technology solution.</p><p>The key to SafeTool’s solution is RFID – Radio Frequency Identification – and</p><p>the solution looks like this;</p><p>All tools are stored in a container on the construction site. Every tool is</p><p>equipped with a RFID-tag that uniquely identifies the tool. With antennas in the</p><p>container it is possible to detect when a tool is leaving the container and when</p><p>it comes back. Every worker must wear a RFID-tag so it will be possible to see</p><p>who was taking the tool out of the container. The container has no external</p><p>locks on it, but the RFID-tag works as a key. An antenna on the roof of the</p><p>container identifies the worker and automatically unlocks the door.</p><p>All the tool and personnel traffic through the door of the container are reported</p><p>to a central server via GPRS. The server stores all info in a database. The</p><p>administration of the system will be done through a website.</p><p>This paper will show how we made this solution work in practice. How we</p><p>created and programmed the client and server and the protocol that makes them</p><p>understand each other.</p>

Stated simply, this thesis focuses on the relationship between energy and the economy. Using the foundation of King 2010, this analysis expands the scholarship from a U.S. focus to perform Energy Intensity Ratio analysis on forty-four countries for the time period 1978-2010. There are four fuels examined: coal, natural gas, crude oil and electricity. Using both the price and expenditures based Energy Intensity Ratio methods, outputs for each fuel in any applicable sector was determined. In addition, this work compiles an estimate of the total energy expenditures for the majority of the world. By examining the overall expenditures of gross domestic product spent on energy, the data showed two points in time where energy appears to become a constraint on growth. Though this thesis does not answer the question directly as to whether an increase in energy expenditures “causes” an increase in economic growth, or whether an increase in economic growth “causes” an increase in energy expenditures, the research shows that vi there may be a “threshold” effect whereby as energy expenditures become a greater share of output, the ability of economic growth to take place is affected. / text

A unique business opportunity has been presented to me. I have been invited to create a small business that would initially offer mechanical design services to two main customer segments: automotive and biomedical device companies. My main responsibility is to help frame the small business and act as an investor partner. I will act as a silent partner once the day to day operations begin. My main focus of this paper is to provide practical information to answer many specific questions about starting this small business. A Net Present Value (NPV) and Profitability Index (PI) analysis will help me determine whether the required initial investment capital will be a good investment for all the parties involved. The legal aspect of managing people in a small business with less than 15 employees will be also reviewed. The conclusions from the Human Capital Framework and the main components of a business plan will be used in the future development of an operating procedure. A business structure will be selected as part of this analysis. Finally, the business values and strategic goals that are most important to all participating parties will be mentioned. / text

I investigate mutual fund flows at the individual fund and at the fund family level. At the individual, I use SEC filings to decompose fund flows into inflows and outflows. This decomposition of net flows into its component parts provides a way to examine differences in how search costs and investor learning affect investors who are entering a fund (or adding to their investments) versus those investors who are leaving a fund (or decreasing their investments). I then examine the effect of the existence of an advertisement for the fund on these investors. At the mutual fund family level, I examine how the characteristics and performance of mutual fund families affect the flows to the family as a whole. I then examine the effects of advertising expenditures on flows to the fund family. / text

Metagenomics holds unyielding potential in uncovering relationships within microbial communities that have yet to be discovered, particularly because the field circumvents the need to isolate and culture microbes from their natural environmental settings. A common research objective is to detect biomarkers, microbes are associated with changes in a status. For instance, determining such microbes across conditions such as healthy and diseased groups for instance allows researchers to identify pathogens and probiotics. This is often achieved via analysis of differential abundance of microbes. The problem is that differential abundance analysis looks at each microbe individually without considering the possible associations the microbes may have with each other. This is not favorable, since microbes rarely act individually but within intricate communities involving other microbes. An alternative would be variable selection techniques such as Lasso or Elastic Net which considers all the microbes simultaneously and conducts selection. However, Lasso often selects only a representative feature of a correlated cluster of features and the Elastic Net may incorrectly select unimportant features too frequently and erratically due to high levels of sparsity and variation in the data.\par In this research paper, the proposed method AdaLassop is an augmented variable selection technique that overcomes the misgivings of Lasso and Elastic Net. It provides researchers with a holistic model that takes into account the effects of selected biomarkers in presence of other important biomarkers. For AdaLassop, variable selection on sparse ultra-high dimensional data is implemented using the Adaptive Lasso with p-values extracted from Zero Inflated Negative Binomial Regressions as augmented weights. Comprehensive simulations involving varying correlation structures indicate that AdaLassop has optimal performance in the presence multicollinearity. This is especially apparent as sample size grows. Application of Adalassop on a Metagenome-wide study of diabetic patients reveals both pathogens and probiotics that have been researched in the medical field.

Education methodology of people with disabilities is not very well developed and it is the reason why disabled people are facing problems in using of unadapted educational materials. More and more disabled people are choosing distance learning due to its convenience and possibility to learn from home. In most cases materials are presented in hypertext format. There are no sufficient tools for adaptation of hypertext documents for disabled people usage and it makes work with those documents very hard or even impossible. Due to the fact, that preparation of teachers and professors for work with hypertext may be very time consuming and difficult, this thesis’s where trying to use different approach - find a solution for non HTML literate person to adapt HTML documents for disabled people. Set of rules was created and flexible tool lets effectively adapt hypertext materials for disabled.

Making electronic business systems, products of information technologies or solving real time tasks more and more IT specialists their designing work connect to UML language. The usage of this language provides opportunities to arrange documentation more simply, allows to communicate different position employees more easily, guarantee IT systems compatibility with business needs and requirements. One of the diagrams types used is activity diagram, which could be used to describe business processes, firms or its unit, compose official, activity or users instructions, show systems behaviour. Any investigative, designed or management activity at some cases is connected to modelling. Commonly designing systems, where parallel events could take place or, if necessary, to give an opportunity gradually, taking in account the reality, show events or state proceeding with the help of Petri nets. It is both graphical and mathematical design method. Designing activity diagrams of IT systems UML editors are used. To research and show events proceeding Petri nets are used. So the problem area is to compose a design system, which could transfer the elements of activity diagrams into Petri nets and model the functionality of the project. The major purpose of this study paper is to compose UML language activity diagrams modelling system, examine the functionality and design opportunities of system’s activity diagrams into Petri nets.

Šiame darbe nagrinėjamos išskirstytos sistemos ir jų kūrimui naudojamos technologijos. Kadangi technologijų yra daug, o visas jas ištirti ir palyginti būtų labai sunku, todėl didžiausias dėmesys skiriamas Java RMI ir .Net Remoting – tai dvi populiarios išskirstytų objektų paradigmos šiuo metu naudojamos programų sistemų kūrimui Pagrindinis darbo tikslas yra išanalizuoti ir visapusiškai palyginti pasirinktas technologijas, didelį dėmesį skiriant jų veikimo greičiui. Darbas sudarytas iš keturių dalių. Pirmoje dalyje pateikiama bendra informacija apie išskirstytas sistemas, jų vystymąsi, architektūras, technologijų raidą ir t.t.. Antroje dalyje nagrinėjama Java RMI ir .Net Remoting veikimo principai, kuriais remiasi šios technologijos. Trečioje dalyje pateikiami šių dviejų technologijų veikimo principų panašumai ir skirtumai. Ir galiausiai siekiant išsiaiškinti Java RMI ar .Net Remoting realiomis sąlygomis veikia greičiau, ketvirtoje dalyje pateikiamas atlikto vykdymo greičio tyrimo aprašymas. Atlikti darbai leidžia teigti, kad Java RMI ir .Net Remoting idėjiškai yra panašios technologijos, bet skirtumų, įtakojančių veikimą, tarp jų irgi yra. Greičio tyrimo metu gauti rezultatai parodė, kad .Net Remoting beveik visais atvejais yra lėtesnė nei Java RMI. / Distributed systems and technologies used for this type of software are analyzed in this paper. Since there are a lot of technologies and it would be very difficult to explore and compare all of them, therefore this paper mainly focuses on Java and RMI. Net Remoting - two popular distributed objects paradigms currently used in distributed systems development. The first part provides general information about distributed systems, their development, architectures, technologies, and so on. The second part of the paper analyses the operating principles of Java RMI and. Net Remoting. The third section determines technological similarities and differencies. And finally, in order to clarify the fact Java RMI or. Net Remoting works faster in real terms, the fourth part provides the results of the implemented speed test. Although Java RMI and. Net Remoting are similar technologies, but the analysis showed that the there are quite a lot differences between them. The speed survey showed that. Net Remoting is slower than Java RMI in almost all cases.