This research analyzes the operating performance of two commercially available passive infrared counters (PICs) of pedestrians as a function of site, summer, fall and winter seasons in terms of counter sensitivity. Three sites were selected for field analysis in Winnipeg, Canada. Based on a sample of 24,690 people counted by the two PICs from July 2014 to February 2015, this research found that with a 95 percent confidence, Eco-Counter’s sensitivity ranged from 73 to 97 percent while TRAFCO’s ranged from 57 to 97 percent related to people occlusion. On weekdays, Eco-Counter’s absolute error was 16 percent and TRAFCO’s was 18 percent. On weekends, Eco-Counter’s absolute error was 18 percent and TRAFCO’s was 21 percent. In addition to people occlusion, site, seasons, and time of week (weekday and weekend) were found to affect the operating performance of the PICs. Correction factors were also calculated per counter, site, and seasons. / May 2016

M.Com. / The auditor has the objective to express an opinion on the financial statements on which he is reporting. It is important for the auditor to know that the data which he is auditing has not been changed without the necessary authority or been lost and that the data meets the three Information Security Objectives (IS0s) ...

Ten years after the Internet revolution are we standing on the brink of another revolution: networked embedded systems that connect the physical world with the computers, enabling new applications ranging from environmental monitoring and wildlife tracking to improvements in health care and medicine. 98% of all microprocessors sold today are used in embedded systems. Those systems have much smaller amounts of memory than PC computers. An embedded system may have as little has a few hundred bytes of memory, which makes programming them a challenge. This thesis focus on three topics regarding programming memory-constrained networked embedded systems: the TCP/IP for memory-constrained networked embedded systems, simplifying event-driven programming of memory-constrained systems, and dynamic loading of program modules in my Contiki operating system for memory-constrained systems. I show that the TCP/IP protocol stack can, contrary to previous belief, be used in memory-constrained embedded systems by implementing two small TCP/IP protocol stacks, lwIP and uIP. I present a novel programming mechanism called protothreads that I show significantly reduce the complexity of event-driven programming for memory-constrained systems. Protothreads provide a conditional blocked wait mechanism on top of event-driven systems with a much smaller memory overhead than full multithreading; each protothread requires only two bytes of memory. I show that dynamic linking of native code in standard ELF object code format is doable and feasible for wireless sensor networks by implementing a dynamic linker in the Contiki operating system. The results show that the energy overhead of dynamic linking of ELF files mainly is due to the ELF file format and not due to the dynamic linking mechanism as such. The impact of the research in this thesis has been and continues to be large. The software I have developed as part of this thesis is currently used by hundreds of companies in embedded devices in such diverse systems as car engines and satellites. The papers in this thesis are included as required reading in advanced courses on networked embedded systems and wireless sensor networks. / Contiki / uIP / Protothreads

This project is structured into three parts. The first one describes fundamental information about EU which serve as the base for the further analysis. It is focused on institutional framework of the Union and also freedom of movement for goods, services, persons and capital in the unique market. Except of the description of prime principles, there are as well outlined current failures and reforms which could solve them. Strategy of cohesion policy, its goals, tools and financial scope are explained in the text. The second chapter shows impacts of structural policy of EU on the Czech Republic economy. This article will be engaged in questions of structural funds redistribution through Operating programmes, net balance on financial transfers between the Czech Republic and the EU budget and the impact of this transfers on the Czech economic growth. The last theoretical part researches in addition to effects of cohesion policy also further important aspect of the european integration - participation in the unique market. General economic models as Solow model or 2x2 model are exploited and extended by aspects of integration. Subsequently there are researched impacts on allocation effectiveness and welfare of member countries. The purpose of the project is to map the process of sources redistribution in EU, show its uselessly huge administrative severity, consider about its effects and benefits and describe wider contexts of cohesion policy.

<div><p>Modern mobile devices have numerous ephemeral tasks. These tasks are driven by background activities, such as push notifications and sensor readings. In order to execute these tasks, the whole platform has to periodically wake up beforehand, and go to sleep afterwards. During this process, the OS kernel operates on power state of various IO devices, which has been identified as the bottleneck for energy efficiency. To this end, we want to offload this kernel phase to a more energy efficient, microcontroller level core, named peripheral core.</p></div><div><p> </p></div><div><p>To execute commodity OS on a peripheral core, existing approaches either require much engineering effort or incur high execution cost. Therefore, we proposed a new OS model called transkernel. By utilizing cross-ISA dynamic binary translation (DBT) technique, transkernel creates a virtualized environment on the peripheral core. It relies on a small set of stable interfaces. It is specialized for frequently executed kernel path. It exploits ISA similarities to reduce DBT overhead.</p></div><div><p> </p></div><div><p>We implement a transkernel model on ARM platform. With novel design and optimization, we demonstrate that a transkernel can gain energy efficiency. Moreover, it provides a new OS design to harness heterogeneous SoCs.</p></div>

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Commerce / The debt reduction provisions contained in s 19 and para 12A of the Eighth Schedule to the Income Tax Act 58 of 1962 seek to reverse the tax benefits claimed or enjoyed by debtors in relation to debt which has been forgiven, wholly or in part. In most cases, the application of these provisions should not lead to any difficulty. Nevertheless, some scenarios are not adequately provided for by the legislation, including debt reduction in favour of debtors carrying on mining operations, as well as partial debt reductions. Furthermore, the applicability of some of the exemptions to these provisions is unclear. Despite recent amendments to these provisions, which will apply to years of assessment commencing on or after 1 January 2013, the legislature has not addressed these issues. Key words: allowance assets; base cost; capital assets; capital gains tax; debt forgiveness; debt reduction; debt waiver; deemed donation; donation; donations tax; exemption; group of companies; operating expenditure; mining capital expenditure; tracing of expenditure; trading stock.

The purpose of this study is to examine how the change in disclosure of operating leases due to the mandated IFRS 16 standard will influence entities cost of debt. Therefore, this paper investigate whether an increase in operating leases has an equal effect on the cost of debt as a corresponding increase in debt. The data consist of observations on 213 Swedish public companies during the time-period 2006-2017, resulting in a total sample of 1549 observations. This paper concludes that operating leases is a complement rather than a substitute to debt and that the increased harmonization effect caused by the alignment of interest bearing liabilities and operating leases, could be beneficial in terms of decreasing entities cost of debt.

Technological development has significantly reduced the distance between the performance of systems designed using reconfigurable computing and dedicated hardware. The main sources of performance are the high density level of the FPGAs and the resources? improvement offered by manufacturers, who make more its use more attractive in a variety of applications, emphatically in systems that demand a high degree of flexibility. In this context, the objective of this work consists on the exploration of the resources offered by FPGAs for the development of a multiprocessed platform with the purpose of parallel execution of tasks. In this way, the eCos operating system was modified, with the addition of new characteristics to support of the Symmetric Multiprocessing model, using three soft-Core Altera Nios II processors. On this operating system, all parallelism is directly related to execution of the threads. This platform was analyzed and validated through the execution of parallel algorithms, emphasizing aspects of performance and flexibility compared to other architectures. This work contributes for reaching better results in the execution of tasks in robotics area, which belongs to a domain that demand great competition of tasks, mainly in modules that involve interaction with the external environment / Technological development has significantly reduced the distance between the performance of systems designed using reconfigurable computing and dedicated hardware. The main sources of performance are the high density level of the FPGAs and the resources? improvement offered by manufacturers, who make more its use more attractive in a variety of applications, emphatically in systems that demand a high degree of flexibility. In this context, the objective of this work consists on the exploration of the resources offered by FPGAs for the development of a multiprocessed platform with the purpose of parallel execution of tasks. In this way, the eCos operating system was modified, with the addition of new characteristics to support of the Symmetric Multiprocessing model, using three soft-Core Altera Nios II processors. On this operating system, all parallelism is directly related to execution of the threads. This platform was analyzed and validated through the execution of parallel algorithms, emphasizing aspects of performance and flexibility compared to other architectures. This work contributes for reaching better results in the execution of tasks in robotics area, which belongs to a domain that demand great competition of tasks, mainly in modules that involve interaction with the external environment

As Máquinas Virtuais ganharam grande importância com o advento de processadores multi-core (na plataforma x86) e com o barateamento de componentes de hardware, como a memória. Por conta desse substancial aumento do poder computacional, surgiu o desafio de tirar proveito dos recursos ociosos encontrados nos ambientes corporativos, cada vez mais populados por equipamentos multi-core e com vários Gigabytes de memória. A virtualização, mesmo sendo um conceito já antigo, tornou-se novamente popular neste cenário, pois com ela foi possível utilizar melhor os recursos computacionais, agora abundantes. Este trabalho tem como principal foco estudar algumas das principais técnicas de gerência de recursos computacionais em ambientes virtualizados. Apesar de muitos dos conceitos aplicados nos projetos de Monitores de Máquinas Virtuais terem sido portados de Sistemas Operacionais convencionais com pouca, ou nenhuma, alteração; alguns dos recursos ainda são difíceis de virtualizar com eficiência devido a paradigmas herdados desses mesmos Sistemas Operacionais. Por fim, é apresentado o Memory Dispatcher (MD), um mecanismo de gerenciamento de memória, com o objetivo principal de distribuir a memória entre as Máquinas Virtuais de modo mais eficaz. Este mecanismo, implementado em C, foi testado no Monitor de Máquinas Virtuais Xen e apresentou ganhos de memória de até 70%. / Virtual Machines have gained great importance with advent of multi-core processors (on platform x86) and with low cost of hardware parts, like physical memory. Due to this computational power improvement a new challenge to take advantage of idle resources has been created. The virtualization technology, even being an old concept became popular in research centers and corporations. With this technology idle resources now can be exploited. This work has the objective to show the main techniques to manage computational resources in virtual environments. Although many of current concepts used in Virtual Machine Monitors project has been ported, with minimal changes, from conventional Operating Systems there are some resources that are difficult to virtualize with efficiency due to old paradigms still present in Operating Systems projects. Finally, the Memory Dispatcher (MD) is presented, a mechanism used to memory management. The main objective of MD is to improve the memory share among Virtual Machines. This mechanism was developed in C and it was tested in Xen Virtual Machine Monitor. The MD showed memory gains up to 70%.

Busca-se a minimização da emissão de material particulado em incinerador industrial de resíduos perigosos através do controle operacional de algumas variáveis de processo. Essas variáveis, que afetam diretamente a qualidade da queima, são: intervalo de tempo de alimentação, modo de introdução de pequena quantidade de resíduo líquido no forno rotativo e excesso de oxigênio na saída dos gases de combustão. Todos os testes têm a mesma taxa de resíduos incinerados (kg/h). Na faixa estudada, o controle operacional mostrou resultados expressivos: em todos os casos, para cada variável estudada, a emissão de material particulado na melhor condição foi aproximadamente 2,5 vezes menor o valor da emissão de material particulado, se comparado com a pior condição de operação. / The minimization of particulate matter emissions in hazardous industrial waste incinerator was sought through operational control of some specific variables of the process. These variables, which have direct interference in the combustion quality, are: mean time between semi-batch feedings, mode of fedding of small amounts of liquid waste, and oxygen excess in the off-gas. All tests have been performed with the same feeding rate (kg/h). In the range studied, operational control showed expressive results: for each variable tested, the particulate matter emission in the worst operational point was around 2,5 times that obtained within the best condition.