Efficient and safe memory management is a hard problem. Garbage collection promises automatic memory management but comes with the cost of increased memory footprint, reduced parallelism in multi-threaded programs, unpredictable pause time, and intricate tuning parameters balancing the program's workload and designated memory usage in order for an application to perform reasonably well. Existing research mitigates the above problems to some extent, but programmer error could still cause memory leak by erroneously keeping memory references when they are no longer needed. We need a methodology for programmers to become resource aware, so that efficient, scalable, predictable and high performance programs may be written without the fear of resource leak. Linear logic has been recognized as the formalism of choice for resource tracking. It requires explicit introduction and elimination of resources and guarantees that a resource cannot be implicitly shared or abandoned, hence must be linear. Early languages based on linear logic focused on Curry-Howard correspondence. They began by limiting the expressive powers of the language and then reintroduced them by allowing controlled sharing which is necessary for recursive functions. However, only by deviating from Curry-Howard correspondence could later development actually address programming errors in resource usage. The contribution of this dissertation is a simple, safe, and efficient approach introducing linear resource ownership semantics into C++ (which is still a widely used language after 30 years since inception) through linear pointer, a smart pointer inspired by linear logic. By implementing various linear data structures and a parallel, multi-threaded memory allocator based on these data structures, this work shows that linear pointer is practical and efficient in the real world, and that it is possible to build a memory management stack that is entirely leak free. The dissertation offers some closing remarks on the difficulties a formal system would encounter when reasoning about a concurrent linear data algorithm, and what might be done to solve these problems.

Pointers in 64-bit architectures are unlikely to exhaust their vast address range, and are as such needlessly big. Reducing the amount of memory a pointer occupies leads to reduced memory demands, better usage of memory, and better locality. Pointer compression is a term that encompasses techniques that aim to make pointers occupy less memory, often to 32-bit for the sake of word alignment. Pointers that are 32-bit embody the opposite problem of having too restricted of an address range, being able to address only 4 GB. Z is a garbage collector in the HotSpot JVM which does not support pointer compression. Partly because the aforementioned address range restriction, and partly because the implementation of compressed pointers which exist in HotSpot would clash with the goals of the garbage collector. This project explores ways of implementing pointer compression for Z that isn't detrimental to the goals of the garbage collector, and aims to find where problems may occur. The outset was to explore compressing speculatively during runtime. The result is a design that relies on a custom bit layout for compressed pointers, inspecting bit layouts of the pointers on each read and write to detect the compression status. This seems to be the most promising in terms of code maintainability and ease of implementation.

The Generative Communication (GC) paradigm was introduced in the early 1980s in the form of the Linda coordination and communication language (Gelernter & Bernstein, 1982). The goal of the language was to provide an elegant, intuitive alternative to the state-of-the-art in parallel and distributed processing languages at that time, namely remote procedure calls; message passing systems; and shared memory systems (Gelernter, 1985). Despite the longevity of the Linda coordination language and the GC paradigm, in general, the literature is devoid of meaningful research into the construction and manipulation of dynamic, pointer-based data structures within the context of the GC paradigm. This document motivates the need for such data structures in GC. In addition, this document explores the reasons for the lack literature regarding dynamic pointer-based data structures in GC. Finally, we develop solutions to address the lack of support, within the GC paradigm, for such data structures. / Ph. D.

Languages such as C use pointers very heavily. Implementation of operations on dynamically linked structures is, however, quite difficult. This can cause the programmer to make more mistakes than usual. One method for dealing with this situation is to use the static analysis tools. This thesis elaborates on the extension to the Code Listener architecture which is an interface for building static analysis tools. Code Listener is able to construct a call-graph or a control flow graph for a given source code and send it to the analyzing tool. One ability of the architecture is that it can conduct the live variable analysis internally. It detects places in the control flow graph where some subset of variables may be killed. The problem was that every variable for which a pointer address was assigned could not been killed, before. This decision had been made because there was no assurance that the variable could never been used through the pointer. So the goal of this work was to design and incorporate a points-to analysis which is able to exclude some references from the set of considered pointers to improve the live variable analysis.

Apesar de se constatar no mundo de hoje ferramentas financeiras altamente desenvolvidas, ainda existe uma fronteira que impossibilita uma grande parte da população mundial de baixa renda a ter acesso a essas ferramentas e suas inovações. A importância da existência das ferramentas financeiras está ligada, nesse trabalho, à oferta de crédito, que possibilita a alavancagem de um pequeno empreendimento através da obtenção de bens de produção e capital de giro. Um dos maiores empecilhos para que a fronteira se expanda é o alto custo de transação das operações de crédito para a população de baixa renda, devido a falta de garantias reais por parte dessa população e necessidade de escala para diluição dos custos fixos. Ao longo da História surgiram tecnologias bem sucedidas que se empenharam justamente em combater o problema da não transposição da fronteira financeira. Em especial, em Bangladesh, na década de 70, um professor de economia uniu-as resultando em uma sinergia que desencadeou o que alguns autores denominaram na literatura internacional "Revolução do Microcrédito". Entretanto, apesar desses avanços, não é certo que tais custos sejam baixos nos programas de microcrédito existentes hoje em dia no Brasil. Com a opção de continuar a ofertar o microcrédito, dado a função social desse empréstimo, as instituições com altos custos de transação se tornam insustentáveis financeiramente. A médio e longo prazo, seus fundos, destinados aos microempréstimos, são corroídos pelos custos, tornando-as incapazes de expandir a fronteira financeira através do aumento na oferta de microcrédito. Ademais, políticas recentes do governo brasileiro para o microcrédito estiveram mais voltadas ao benefício dos clientes finais, o que em alguns momentos prejudicou mais do ajudou as instituições de microcrédito a se desenvolverem no país. O trabalho avaliou o desempenho econômico de uma organização de microcrédito no Brasil e analisou como os Custos de Transação e as políticas do governo exerceram influência sobre a sua Sustentabilidade Financeira, no curto prazo do Banco do Povo - Crédito Solidário na cidade de Santo André e adjacências. No período coberto pelo estudo, o Banco não foi capaz de se sustentar operacional nem financeiramente sendo expressivo o valor de subsídios que essa instituição recebeu até 2003. Expandir a carteira de crédito para gerar maior retorno dos empréstimos gera também altos custos de transação. Constata-se que no Banco do Povo - Crédito Solidário, uma parte considerável das receitas da instituição são advindas de Aplicações Financeiras, uma forma de segurança para a instituição, mas que barram o crescimento da Carteira Ativa. Se o Banco do Povo permanecer com a política de não aumentar as taxas de juros cobradas e ainda for obrigado a implementar um teto para suas taxas, como a sugestão do governo de 2% a.m, então o retorno sobre a Carteira de Crédito no Banco do Povo - Crédito Solidário não permitirá a sustentabilidade da instituição. Os Custos de Transação influenciam a Sustentabilidade Financeira da instituição de duas maneiras: por um lado os custos em relação às receitas são altos o suficiente para tornar a instituição ainda insustentável e, por outro lado, a maior parcela do custo de transação diz respeito aos recursos humanos, que apresentam baixa produtividade na expansão do crédito, o que gera um menor retorno na carteira de crédito. Isso talvez seja causado por conta da pequena história de vida do Banco do Povo - Crédito Solidário. Desse quadro, todavia, existem algumas atitudes que podem ser tomadas. A primeira é que o Banco aumente a sua Carteira Ativa reconduzindo os fundos das Aplicações Financeiras para o portifólio de empréstimos (expandindo a fronteira financeira). Ao mesmo tempo, recomenda-se uma política de diminuição de custos e aumento da produtividade dos recursos humanos. / Despite of the existence of high technologies of financial tools in the world, there is still a frontier which make the low income population incapable to access those tools and its innovations. The importance of those tools in this dissertation is connected to the supply of credit that enable small borrowers to buy inputs and capital to their small business. One of the major problems that stuck the frontier, and do not aloud it moving on, is the high transaction costs on credit supply for low-income population. It happens because the low- income population doesn’t have enough guaranties and credit organizations need scale economics to distribute fixed costs on a wild volume of credit. There have been well successful technologies to improve the access to credit for lowincome population in the world at the last three decades. In Bangladesh an Economics professor linked these technologies and developed a successful program which creates an impact that was called at international literature "Microcredit Revolution". It’s not clear, although, if these technologies are well developed and succeed in Brazil. However, the microcredit institutions continuous supplying credit because their social importance but they are still financial-self insufficiency. In such situation, at the long run, there won’t be any funds for them.. To compensate the difficulties of these institutions, the government policies for microcredit where directed to benefit the clients and the relevance of institutional self-sufficiency were taken as a secondary priority. This dissertation made an evaluation on financial performance for a microcredit organization in Brazil and also analyze how the Transaction Costs and the government policies had affected the financial self-sufficiency at the short-run in Banco do Povo - Crédito Solidário. It has concluded that Banco do Povo were not able to be financial self-sufficient and it needs a amount of subsidies yet. It is clear that part of revenue that comes from financial assets, which is a safety way to generate revenue, but forbids the institution to reach its goals. Considering that interest rates were kept high during the last years in Brazil, the strategy of guaranteeing revenue through investing part of the Banco do Povo capital on government bounds might not be sustainable at the long run. If Banco do Povo keeps interests rates in its current level, or be obligate to ceil its interest rate at a low level as the government suggestion to establish it on 2% per mount, then the return on loan portfolio won’t be enough to make the institution self-sufficient. The Transaction Costs have influence on Financial Self-Sufficiency in two ways: first the costs are bigger than the revenue and second, the largest part of the Transaction Cost are spend in human resources. The loan-officers productivity is very low when compared with the average productivity of other similar organizations in the world. It is possible that the reason for it happens to be Banco do Povo- Crédito Solidário short term of existence. Analyzing these aspects it is possible to find some suggestions to make, the first one is to improve the loan portfolio, transferring funds from financial assets to it (expanding the financial frontier). At the same time, it is necessary to diminish the costs and increase the productivity of the loan-officers.

Background: Impaired proprioception has been reported in patients with neck pain. The most common way to assess proprioception is the testing of joint position sense. Researchers usually uses advanced technical equipment. Laser pointer tests have been described for testing global joint position sense against two-dimensional targets, which can also be used clinically. One-dimensional targets can provide accurate information about deviations in the current motion plane and allow easy calculation of a number of additional output variables. Objectives: Evaluate test-retest reliability of a new clinical test using laser pointer and a one-dimensional target for assessment of cervical joint position sense. Design: Cross-sectional test-retest reliability study. Method:The study included 56 individuals, 30 healthy controls and 26 with neck pain were tested at two occasions 6-8 days apart. Calculation of the reliability was done by analysing relative, ICC, and absolute, SEM, reliability. Results: The results were relatively scattered but showed an overall moderatereliability with an ICC between 0,51-0,73, but in some cases a poor reliability under 0,5 except for two measures that showed good reliability over 0,77.The SEM for total group were between 0,72°-2,87°, indicating a relatively high level.  Conclusions: Current research demonstrates an overall moderate reliability testing JPS with a laser pointer and a one-dimensional target.

Apesar de se constatar no mundo de hoje ferramentas financeiras altamente desenvolvidas, ainda existe uma fronteira que impossibilita uma grande parte da população mundial de baixa renda a ter acesso a essas ferramentas e suas inovações. A importância da existência das ferramentas financeiras está ligada, nesse trabalho, à oferta de crédito, que possibilita a alavancagem de um pequeno empreendimento através da obtenção de bens de produção e capital de giro. Um dos maiores empecilhos para que a fronteira se expanda é o alto custo de transação das operações de crédito para a população de baixa renda, devido a falta de garantias reais por parte dessa população e necessidade de escala para diluição dos custos fixos. Ao longo da História surgiram tecnologias bem sucedidas que se empenharam justamente em combater o problema da não transposição da fronteira financeira. Em especial, em Bangladesh, na década de 70, um professor de economia uniu-as resultando em uma sinergia que desencadeou o que alguns autores denominaram na literatura internacional “Revolução do Microcrédito”. Entretanto, apesar desses avanços, não é certo que tais custos sejam baixos nos programas de microcrédito existentes hoje em dia no Brasil. Com a opção de continuar a ofertar o microcrédito, dado a função social desse empréstimo, as instituições com altos custos de transação se tornam insustentáveis financeiramente. A médio e longo prazo, seus fundos, destinados aos microempréstimos, são corroídos pelos custos, tornando-as incapazes de expandir a fronteira financeira através do aumento na oferta de microcrédito. Ademais, políticas recentes do governo brasileiro para o microcrédito estiveram mais voltadas ao benefício dos clientes finais, o que em alguns momentos prejudicou mais do ajudou as instituições de microcrédito a se desenvolverem no país. O trabalho avaliou o desempenho econômico de uma organização de microcrédito no Brasil e analisou como os Custos de Transação e as políticas do governo exerceram influência sobre a sua Sustentabilidade Financeira, no curto prazo do Banco do Povo - Crédito Solidário na cidade de Santo André e adjacências. No período coberto pelo estudo, o Banco não foi capaz de se sustentar operacional nem financeiramente sendo expressivo o valor de subsídios que essa instituição recebeu até 2003. Expandir a carteira de crédito para gerar maior retorno dos empréstimos gera também altos custos de transação. Constata-se que no Banco do Povo – Crédito Solidário, uma parte considerável das receitas da instituição são advindas de Aplicações Financeiras, uma forma de segurança para a instituição, mas que barram o crescimento da Carteira Ativa. Se o Banco do Povo permanecer com a política de não aumentar as taxas de juros cobradas e ainda for obrigado a implementar um teto para suas taxas, como a sugestão do governo de 2% a.m, então o retorno sobre a Carteira de Crédito no Banco do Povo - Crédito Solidário não permitirá a sustentabilidade da instituição. Os Custos de Transação influenciam a Sustentabilidade Financeira da instituição de duas maneiras: por um lado os custos em relação às receitas são altos o suficiente para tornar a instituição ainda insustentável e, por outro lado, a maior parcela do custo de transação diz respeito aos recursos humanos, que apresentam baixa produtividade na expansão do crédito, o que gera um menor retorno na carteira de crédito. Isso talvez seja causado por conta da pequena história de vida do Banco do Povo – Crédito Solidário. Desse quadro, todavia, existem algumas atitudes que podem ser tomadas. A primeira é que o Banco aumente a sua Carteira Ativa reconduzindo os fundos das Aplicações Financeiras para o portifólio de empréstimos (expandindo a fronteira financeira). Ao mesmo tempo, recomenda-se uma política de diminuição de custos e aumento da produtividade dos recursos humanos. / Despite of the existence of high technologies of financial tools in the world, there is still a frontier which make the low income population incapable to access those tools and its innovations. The importance of those tools in this dissertation is connected to the supply of credit that enable small borrowers to buy inputs and capital to their small business. One of the major problems that stuck the frontier, and do not aloud it moving on, is the high transaction costs on credit supply for low-income population. It happens because the low- income population doesn’t have enough guaranties and credit organizations need scale economics to distribute fixed costs on a wild volume of credit. There have been well successful technologies to improve the access to credit for lowincome population in the world at the last three decades. In Bangladesh an Economics professor linked these technologies and developed a successful program which creates an impact that was called at international literature “Microcredit Revolution”. It’s not clear, although, if these technologies are well developed and succeed in Brazil. However, the microcredit institutions continuous supplying credit because their social importance but they are still financial–self insufficiency. In such situation, at the long run, there won’t be any funds for them.. To compensate the difficulties of these institutions, the government policies for microcredit where directed to benefit the clients and the relevance of institutional self-sufficiency were taken as a secondary priority. This dissertation made an evaluation on financial performance for a microcredit organization in Brazil and also analyze how the Transaction Costs and the government policies had affected the financial self-sufficiency at the short-run in Banco do Povo – Crédito Solidário. It has concluded that Banco do Povo were not able to be financial self-sufficient and it needs a amount of subsidies yet. It is clear that part of revenue that comes from financial assets, which is a safety way to generate revenue, but forbids the institution to reach its goals. Considering that interest rates were kept high during the last years in Brazil, the strategy of guaranteeing revenue through investing part of the Banco do Povo capital on government bounds might not be sustainable at the long run. If Banco do Povo keeps interests rates in its current level, or be obligate to ceil its interest rate at a low level as the government suggestion to establish it on 2% per mount, then the return on loan portfolio won’t be enough to make the institution self-sufficient. The Transaction Costs have influence on Financial Self-Sufficiency in two ways: first the costs are bigger than the revenue and second, the largest part of the Transaction Cost are spend in human resources. The loan-officers productivity is very low when compared with the average productivity of other similar organizations in the world. It is possible that the reason for it happens to be Banco do Povo- Crédito Solidário short term of existence. Analyzing these aspects it is possible to find some suggestions to make, the first one is to improve the loan portfolio, transferring funds from financial assets to it (expanding the financial frontier). At the same time, it is necessary to diminish the costs and increase the productivity of the loan-officers.

This master thesis deals with a construction solution for traversing of laser pointer, which is used for position identification for stock removal from the storage unit SSI Logimat, including a construction solution of leading of this traversing. The first part contains a research of storage systems used in logistics, as well as systems upgraded with laser pointer. In main part are described the suggestions of leading of laser pointer traversing, together with the design of mechanical transmission and components associated with mechanical transmission. Subsequently the drive of spin of the laser and drive of mechanical transmission are designed. Selection of drives is verified by calculation. The final part contains the check of leading of traversing by strength calculation for bending, from which is suggested the design of leading reinforcement.

The presented diploma thesis studies extreme growth depressions of Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris L.) in Central Europe. Examination of significant growth anomalies (pointer year analysis) is one of the methods, which investigates the reactions of forest stands to the ongoing climate change. Dendrochronological data was obtained from Czechia (23 sites) and Slovakia (4 sites). The main hypotheses of the thesis states that the extreme growth depressions relate to climatic anomalies, hence they can be explained geographically. The objectives were to 1) create a Cropper values chronology for each site which describes growth extreme depressions; 2) explain climatic causes of negative Cropper values for each site; 3) define geographical predispositions of a spatial distribution of extreme growth depressions; 4) spatially interpolate extreme growth depressions. The calculation of Cropper values was based on a normalisation in a moving window method with a 13-year window size and the input data detrended by a 50-year cubic smoothing spline. Created chronologies were correlated with monthly climate data (temperatures, precipitation, SPEI). Geographical predispositions of the spatial distribution of growth depressions were calculated using a hierarchical cluster analysis. The cluster analysis was also applied...

The optical touch pointer (OTP), a fluorescence spectroscopy based system, assists brain surgeons during guided brain tumor resection in patients with glioblastoma multiforme (GBM). After recording and analyzing the autofluorescence spectrum of the tissue, it is possible to distinguish malignant from healthy brain tissue. A challenge during the intraoperative measurements is the interference of blood. If it gets in contact with the laser pointer, the blood blocks the light transmission to and from the tissue. The purposes of the project were to study and categorize patterns of blood interference and to present possible solutions to avoid signal blocking by blood. To measure fluorescence and reflection two devices were used respectively, the OTP which has a spectrometer and a blue laser, and the diffused reflection spectroscopy system (DRS) which has a spectrometer and a white light source. Both operate independently from each other and are connected to a fiber optical probe. A similar scenario to the one in the operation theater was simulated in the lab. Fluorescence and diffuse reflection measurements with and without blood were realized on skin and on two different plastic fluorescent standards. The results were analyzed with the aid of MatLAB, and compared with data collected in the hospital during brain tumor resection. The highest autofluorescence of brain tissue and skin is reached at approximately 506 nm. Although skin and both plastic standards have different optical properties regarding color or rather fluorescence, all of them presented very similar curves when blood on them blocked partially or completely the light transmission. A blood layer of more than 0.1 mm thickness blocks the blue laser light. Blood absorption happens at 541 and 577 nm due to oxy-hemoglobin (HbO2) in both liquid and dried blood. When the fluorescence spectrum is available but weak, the reflection spectrum contains two dips (traces of HbO2 at 541 and 577 nm). In brain there were cases in which light absorption occurred additionally at other wavelengths than the absorption peaks of deoxyhemoglobin (Hb) and HbO2. Blood interference during the OP can be prevented if the probe rests in a saline solution after every measurement. In this way the fresh blood sticking on the probe dissolves in the solution. For dried or coagulated blood, additional manual cleansing is needed.