Current recommendations for amino acid intake during pregnancy are for a constant amino acid intake throughout. However, the demand for amino acids changes from maternal tissue growth in early gestation to fetal, conceptus and mammary tissue development in late gestation. The availability of amino acids from feed ingredients are based on growing pig data, although recent evidence suggests that mature animals have a greater capacity to digest and absorb amino acids. Therefore, this thesis investigated the threonine requirement of sows in gestation and the availability of threonine (Thr) in common feed ingredients fed directly to sows using the indicator amino acid oxidation technique. The Thr requirement in early gestation was determined to be 5.0 to 6.0 g/d, at least 40% below current recommended Thr requirements, whereas the requirement for Thr in late gestation was determined to be 12.3 to 13.6 g/d, close to 30% above current recommendations. These results suggest that current sow feeding recommendations (i.e. constant level of AA throughout gestation) result in over- and under-feeding AA in early and late gestation, respectively. The metabolic availability of Thr in corn and barley fed to growing pigs was 82.2 and 115.3%, respectively, whereas when fed to pregnant sows, the metabolic availability of Thr in corn and barley was 88.0 and 89.3%, respectively. The > 100% availability of Thr from barley was likely due to the effect of barley on the demand for Thr for production of mucin and mucous proteins. The results indicate that the availability of amino acids from feed ingredients is greater when fed to sows than when fed to growing pigs. In conclusion, current sow amino acid requirement recommendations do not appropriately reflect actual amino acid demand during pregnancy. The deficiency in dietary amino acids during late gestation may result in maternal lean tissue catabolism to support fetal growth. The greater availability of amino acids from feed ingredients in sows may reduce the degree of amino acid deficiency in late gestation under current feeding programs. Application of phase feeding sows during pregnancy will more closely meet the demand for amino acids and may improve sow reproductive longevity. / Nutrition and Metabolism

The purpose of this thesis is to provide the Maftaki team at Tieto a proposal of a tool or improve one of the current tools that will support their processes. In order to find a suitable tool a problem analysis model, as described by Goldkuhl and Rostlinger (1988), was used. To find out what kind of problem existed, members from the Maftaki team were interviewed. Out of the problems that were brought up during the interviews, difficulties with finding telephone numbers that can be used in the testing environment at testing was chosen. In order to solve the problem, a tool that handles test data was to be developed. Firstly, a requirement elicitation was performed by interviewing potential users of the system. In this way, use cases and functional requirements were elicited. A framework called Struts2, an Object-relational Mapping framework, Hibernate and an Inversion of Control container, Spring was used during the development. Maven was used for building the application. During the development demos were performed in order to elicit more requirements from the users and to clarify some requirements. Also refactoring was done continuously during the development. When the development of the application was done a couple of test cases were written and some basic testing of the application were performed . / Syftet med examensarbetet är att ge Maftaki teamet vid Tieto ett förslag på ett verktyg eller förbättra ett av de nuvarande verktygen för att ge support till deras processer. För att hitta ett lämpligt verktyg gjordes först en problemanalys, den problemanalysmodell som beskrivs i Goldkuhl och Röstlinger, (1988), bok användes. För att ta reda på vilka problem som kunde finnas genomförde ett antal intervjuer med medlemmar i Maftaki. Ur de problem som hade kommit fram under intervjuerna valdes svårigheten att hitta telefonnummer som kan användas i testmiljön vid testning ut. För att lösa problemet beslutades att ett verktyg som hanterar testdata skulle utvecklas. Först genomfördes en kravfångst genom att intervjua potentiella användare och på så sätt togs användningsfall och funktionella krav fram. För att bygga applikationen användes ett ramverk som heter Struts2, ett Object/Relational Mapping ramverk, Hibernate, och en Inversion of Control container, Spring. För att bygga applikationen användes Maven. Under utvecklingens gång genomfördes demos för att få fler krav ifrån användare och för att få en klarare bild av betydelsen av vissa krav. Också omstrukturering av kod genomfördes kontinuerligt under utvecklingens gång. Sist av allt genomfördes ett antal test på applikationen.

The capital requirements for insurance companies in the Solvency I framework are based on the premium and claim expenditure. This approach does not take the individual risk of the insurer into consideration and give policy holder little assur- ance. Therefore a framework called Solvency II is under development by EU and its members. The capital requirements in Solvency II are based on risk management and is related to the specific risks of the insurer. Moreover, the insurer must make disclosures both to the supervising authority and to the market. This puts pressure on the insurance companies to use better risk and capital management, which gives the policy holders better assurance. In this thesis we present a stochastic model that describes the development of assets and liabilities. We consider the following risks: Stock market, bond market, interest rate and mortality intensity. These risks are modeled by stochastic processes that are aggregated to describe the change in the insurers Risk Bearing Capital. The capital requirement, Solvency Capital Requirement, is calculated using Conditional Value-at-Risk at a 99% confidence level and Monte Carlo simulation. The results from this model is compared to the Swiss Solvency Test model for three different types of life insurance policies. We can conclude that for large portfolios, the model presented in this thesis gives a lower solvency capital requirement than the Swiss model for all three policies. For small portfolios, the capital requirement is larger due to the stochastic mortality risk which is not included in the Swiss model.

Reserve Required System, a monetary policy manipulated by Taiwanese Government has been gradually reduced or even abandoned in global financial market, which eliminates the international competiveness of domestic banking industry. However, the government has no intention in implementing Zero Reserve Requirement. Given current domestic monetary policies as well as system of banking supervision, I propose "Risk-Based Deposit Reserves" for financial authorities implement. Current international usage sets an absolute value of reserve ratio, not in accordance with its operating risk. Therefore I designed a ¡§Five-Level Differential Deposit Reserve System¡¨ based on Capital Adequacy Ratio and Composite Risk Rating Score of the bank. Such innovation will help increase the quality of banks and eliminate unhealthy banks which will strengthen domestic banking industry in challenges of Basel ¢» and its competitiveness.

Due to the increasing global competition in today¡¦s business environment, current Transaction Processing Systems and Management Information Systems can no longer satisfy the enterprise¡¦s needs. Mangers need to analyze data from different views to recognizing business status, making decisions, and setting up the policies. To support such works, many information systems and technologies are developed including Decision Support Systems, Executive Information Systems, data warehouses, and On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP). The implementation of OLAP and data warehousing project are expensive and risky. The results of implementing OLAP and data warehousing in most of the organizations do not, however, always prove a success. The common problem occurs in the requirement analysis phase when analyzing the dimensions and hierarchical relationships for OLAP. The user requirement can not be defined completely and the developers often need to modify or reconstruct the dimensions and hierarchical relationships to meet the user¡¦s changing needs. This is an enormous burden to the system developers. Although many tools with OLAP provide the flexibility for user creating analytical reports by using predefined dimensions and hierarchical relationships. However, a methodology for designing flexible report for OLAP to support ad hoc analysis is still lacking. This study proposes a methodology that is developed for designing flexible report for OLAP, which presents the dimensions and hierarchical relationships by visualized meta-templates and templates to help users create analysis reports. The methodology provides the flexibility not only in representing dimensions and hierarchical relationships for OLAP, but also in producing flexible reports. With such flexibility, the users can create analytical reports to support ad hoc analysis by choosing appropriated meta-template and template easily.

The purpose of the present study was to quantify the optimal zinc requirements of juvenile grouper (Epinephelus malabaricus). Basal diet contained 52 % crude protein from derived egg white and mackerel¡]Scomberomorus commerson¡^muscle. This semipurified basal diet which contained 10.0 mg Zn/kg was supplemented with ZnSO4 at levels of 0, 4, 8, 12, 24, 36 or 140 mg Zn/kg, respectively. The test diets were fed to juvenile groupers with an initial weight of about 5.9 g. All treatments were triplicated, each tank had 12 fish. After 18 weeks of rearing, dietary zinc levels have significant effects on the growth of fish. Weight gain and feed efficiency were significantly lower in grouper fed the unsupplemental diet than the supplemental groups. No significant difference among fish groups was found in survival rate, condition factor, muscle composition, ash contents of vertebra and scale, as well as some hematological parameters. Zinc concentrations in serum, muscle, vertebra and scale were affected by the supplemental zinc level. There was no significant difference in nonspecific immunity parameters including phagocytosis of macrophage, alternative complement pathway (ACH50) activity, agglutination titer and lysozyme activity among dietary treatments. The activity of the copper and zinc metalloenzyme superoxide dismutas in red blood cells was also not affected by dietary zinc intake. Broken-line regression analysis of weight-gain, feed efficiency as well as serum-, vertebra- and scale zinc concentrations against dietary zinc intake indicated requirement values of 33.7, 35.6, 32.5, 28.9 and 32.6 mg Zn/kg diet, respectively. Therefore, based on the results of growth performance and tissue zinc concentrations, the dietary zinc requirement of the juvenile groupers was between 28-36 mg Zn/kg diet.

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In this work some progressive object–oriented requirement definition methods were analyzed (ICONIX, Reggio, Scores). Rules and principles of these methods were generalized and comprehensive content of requirements model was presented. Requirements definition must define state and behavior of target information system independently of future design. Requirements model was proposed where use cases are presented as interfaces together with associated classes of problem domain, operations are specified with signatures, pre and post conditions wich must be written in formal language OCL. Model was described using UML class, sequence diagrams, state charts and OCL constraints and is illustrated with examples from case study.

ODRES (output driven requirements engineering)method, which is being developed in the department of information systems comprises the following stages: separating out the context, specification of function results, specification of data sources, specification of data source processing, modelling, automatic projectionof interface of information system and prototype. While creating requirement specification, there arises a need to evaluate the quality of it. In every stage of creating requirement specification an analyst does not know if he or she has got enough information in order to do produce a working prototype of the system. Therefore, in this study the problem of information system is analysed, namely, the problem of how to hallmark the quality of ISRS? How to measure this quality? What must the IS be, so that it is of good quality? While seeking to evaluate the quality of RS, it is necessary to understant and analyse what is quality on the whole, how it is defined, how it is measured and if it is possible to measure it at all. In this study methods which are used to measure the quality and the possibilities of CASE tools to evaluate specification quality are analyzed. In the research requirements to evaluate the RS quality have also been established and the experiment that realizes the RS quality evaluation has been done.

Aspect-Oriented Requirement Engineering (AORE) is an emerging software engineering paradigm with increasing attention from academic as well as industrial communities. AORE aims at the systematic identification, modularization, composition and analysis of crosscutting concerns that manifest in requirements. It is believed that systematically managing crosscutting concerns early on at the requirement engineering stage can provide valuable insight at the architecture design and implementation stages and can help identify and thus manage crosscutting concerns at these stages. Moreover, identifying crosscutting concerns in requirements can help to reveal the scope of each concern in a software system, to detect potential conflicts between concerns and to facilitate trade-off negotiation early on. Hundreds of papers regarding AORE have been published in AORE communities. However, few of them address crosscutting concerns in real world requirements. Whether the proposed AORE approaches are productive when applied to real world requirements is unknown. In this thesis, we conduct an AORE case study consisting of an experiment using a real world software requirement specification in order to examine how crosscutting concerns present in real world requirement documents, explore the difference between crosscutting concerns in requirements and crosscutting concerns in code, and reason whether identifying and thus managing crosscutting concerns from real world requirements is a productive practice. / Thesis (Master, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2009-09-21 15:09:27.262