A Thesis submitted to The University of Arizona College of Medicine - Phoenix in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Medicine. / BACKGROUND: In order to improve the quality and efficacy of healthcare while reducing the overall cost to deliver that healthcare, it has become increasingly important to manage utilization of services for populations of patients. Healthcare systems are aggressively working to identify patients at risk for hospital readmissions. Although readmission rates have been studied before, parameters for identifying patients at risk for readmission appear to vary depending the patient population. We will examine existing Electronic Health Record (EHR) data at Banner Health to establish what parameters are clinical indicators for readmission risk. Three conditions were identified by the CMS to have high and costly readmissions rates; heart failure (HF), acute myocardial infarction (AMI), and pneumonia. This study will focus on attempting to determine the primary predictive variables for these three conditions in order to have maximum impact on cost savings. METHODS: A literature review was done and 68 possible risk variables were identified. Of these, 30 of the variables were identifiable within the EHR system. Inclusion criteria for individual patient records are that they had an index admission secondary to AMI, heart failure, or pneumonia and that they had a subsequent readmission within 30 days of the index admission. Pediatric populations were not studied since they have unique factors for readmission that are not generalizable. Logistics regression was applied to all data including data with missing data rows. This allowed all coefficients to be interpreted for significance. This model was termed the full model. Variables that were determined to be insignificant were subsequently removed to create a new reduced model. Chi square testing was then done to compare the reduced model to the full model to determine if any significant differences existed between the two. RESULTS: Several variables were determined to be the significant predictors of readmission. The final reduced model had 19 predictors. When analyzed using ROC analysis, the area under the curve (AUC) was 0.64. CONCLUSION: Several variables were identified that could be significant contributors to readmission risk. The final model had an AUC on it ROC of 0.64 suggesting that it would only have poor to moderate clinical value for predicting readmission.

The empirical data indicates that Generation Y generally has a very high average financial literacy. The rationality they exhibit in the mastery of financial information and tools does not affect their savings and investments. Instead, the investment behavior is given in expression by their character, but also demographic basis.

Throughout the course of this thesis, we give an introduction to optimal control theory and its necessary conditions, prove Pontryagin's Maximum Principle, and present the life-cycle saving under uncertain lifetime optimal control problem. We present a very involved sensitivity analysis that determines how a change in the initial wealth, discount factor, or relative risk aversion coefficient may affect the model the terminal depletion of wealth time, optimal consumption path, and optimal accumulation of wealth path. Through simulation of the life-cycle saving under uncertain lifetime model, we are not only able to present the model dynamics through time, but also to demonstrate the feasibility of the model.

The subject of this diploma thesis is the characteristic of banks and its role in the economy of the Czech Republic, the introduction of core bank activities and products as well as analysis of significant bank products, such as building savings. The first part presents the functioning of bank system, the central bank and commercial banks. The second part deals with the principles of building savings, development and evaluation of the most important changes in building savings in the Czech Republic. In this thesis is also comparison of the building saving in Germany, Austria and the Slovak Republic, and there is outlined potential future development of building savings in the Czech Republic. The conclusion summarizes the most important findings about the role of banks with special focus on the analysis of building savings.

An efficient design dedicated for iterative-multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) receiver systems is now imperative in our world since data demands are increasing tremendously in wireless networks. This puts a massive burden on the signal processing power especially in small receiver systems where power sources are often shared or limited. This thesis proposes an attractive solution to both the wireless signal processing and the architectural implementation design sides of the problem. A novel algorithm, dubbed the Adaptive Switching Algorithm, is proven to not only save more than a third of the energy consumption in the algorithmic design, but is also able to achieve an energy reduction of more than 50% in terms of processing power when the design is mapped onto state-of-the-art programmable hardware. Simulations are based in MatlabTM using the Monte Carlo approach, where multiple additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and Rayleigh fading channels for both fast and slow fading environments were investigated. The software selects the appropriate detection algorithm depending on the current channel conditions. The design for the hardware is based on the latest field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) hardware from Xilinx R , specifically the Virtex-5 and Virtex-7 chipsets. They were chosen during the experimental phase to verify the results in order to examine trends for energy consumption in the proposed algorithm design. Savings come from dynamic allocation of the hardware resources by implementing power minimization techniques depending on the processing requirements of the system. Having demonstrated the feasibility of the algorithm in controlled environments, realistic channel conditions were simulated using spatially correlated MIMO channels to test the algorithm’s readiness for real-world deployment. The proposed algorithm is placed in both the MIMO detector and the iterative-decoder blocks of the receiver. When the final full receiver design setup is implemented, it shows that the key to energy saving lies in the fact that both software and hardware components of the Adaptive Switching Algorithm adopt adaptivity in the respective designs. The detector saves energy by selecting suitable detection schemes while the decoder provides adaptivity by limiting the number of decoding iterations, both of which are updated in real-time. The overall receiver can achieve more than 70% energy savings in comparison to state-of-the-art iterative-MIMO receivers and thus it can be concluded that this level of ‘intelligence’ is an important direction towards a more efficient iterative-MIMO receiver designs in the future.

Master of Science / Department of Chemical Engineering / Mary E. Rezac / Mary E. Rezac / Energy consumption due to heating, ventilation, and air conditioning amounts to 10-20% of global electrical energy usage. Air conditioning alone uses one trillion kilowatt hours globally. This energy is required for the dehumidification of air in addition to its cooling. New membrane technologies have the potential to decrease air conditioning energy requirements by significant amounts. A membrane acts as a partial heat and mass exchanger in conjunction with a traditional air conditioning system to remove water content and reduce the cooling load. Membranes vary according to their properties and method of mass transport. Liquid membranes have high permeability and selectivity, dense membranes have high selectivity and low permeability, and porous membranes have low selectivity and high permeability. A theoretical model was created to observe how membrane properties affected the potential energy savings of such systems. The most influential properties were flow rate, water permeability and selectivity, membrane area and thickness, and the purge flow temperature. Other properties were determined to be minimally important such as outdoor temperature and humidity. The effect on energy savings in many cases was not a linear relationship but suggested an optimal value beyond which energy savings did not significantly increase. The best simulations showed electrical energy savings of 86-95%.

Stigande förväntade livslängder har tillsammans med sjunkande födelsetal bidragit till en omvandling av pensionssystemet i ett antal länder. I sin tur har det medfört en större individhantering och därmed större krav på den enskilda individens kompetens. Tidigare studier visar att finansiell förmåga tenderar att vara låg i välutvecklade länder, ett positivt samband mellan individens finansiella förmåga och pensionsplanering har också urskilts. Ur detta perspektiv kan den ökade individhanteringen ses oroväckande och skapa ogynnsamma förutsättningar för goda ekonomiska utfall både för samhället och den enskilda individen. De tidigare studierna behandlar främst nivåerna av finansiell förmåga och pensionsplanering samt hur de samvarierar i tvärsnitt. För att skapa en bättre förståelse för sambandet mellan finansiell förmåga och pensionsplanering ämnar denna uppsats att studera sambandet över tid. Uppsatsen baseras på ett datamaterial från Norge, där en förändring i pensionssystemet implementerats 2011. Sambandet mellan individens finansiella förmåga och pensionsplanering studeras med regressionsanalyser. Resultatet från regressionsanalyserna tyder på att en förändring i den finansiella förmågan inte kommer leda till en förändring av individens pensionsplanering. Uppsatsens resultat ger inte stöd för ett kausalt samband mellan finansiell förmåga och pensionsplanering i Norge. De tidigare studierna i andra länder har fått stöd för ett kausalt samband. Om sambandet mellan finansiell förmåga och pensionsplanering är detsamma eller liknande i ett internationellt perspektiv väcker uppsatsens resultat ytterligare frågor kring hur sambandet och mekanismen bakom finansiell förmåga och pensionsplanering verkligen ser ut. Om en önskan att öka individers pensionsplanering finns ges inga tydliga svar på vilka åtgärder som är lämpliga och genererar resultat. / Rising life expectancies together with declining birth rates have contributed to a transformation of the pension system in several countries. In turn, the transformation has resulted in a greater individual management of the pensions and thus greater demands on the individual’s skills. Previous researches have shown that financial literacy tends to be low in well-developed countries, they have also distinguished a positive relationship between an individual’s financial literacy and retirement planning. From this point of view, the increased individual management could cause concerns and create unfavorable conditions for positive economic outcomes for the society as well as the individual. The previous researches have mainly dealt with the levels of financial literacy and retirement planning and how they co-vary in cross section. The thesis intends to study the relationship between financial literacy and retirement planning over time, to achieve a better understanding of the relationship. The thesis is based on a dataset from Norway, where a change in the pension system was implemented in 2011. The relationship between the individual's financial literacy and retirement planning is examined with regression analyzes. The results from the regression analyzes indicate that a change in the individual’s financial literacy do not have an impact on the retirement planning. The thesis results do not provide support for a causal relationship between financial literacy and retirement planning in Norway. The previous researches in other countries do provide support for a causal relationship. If the relationship between financial literacy and retirement planning is the same or similar in an international point of view, the results raises further questions about how the relationship appears and how the mechanism works. If there is a desire to enhance individuals' retirement planning the thesis result give no simple answers to what actions that are appropriate and generate results.

This thesis deals with solving a real case from one specific part of Operations Research -- Discrete Models. The case can be classified as Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) which is a subset of classical Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP). The VRP is modified TSP when requirements of customers and capacities of trucks play role. The data needed for calculations were taken from the real situation of Pivovar Svijany a.s. The problem can be defined as VRP with cars with different capacities and split delivery. Even though the mathematic model of the problem is known and described in the thesis, the size of the problem is too big to be optimized. Therefore heuristic was used to solve it. Because of the good computational results in the past the savings algorithm was chosen. Its model was set using Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). The thesis (among others) analyses the sensitivity of the output on the values of the factors that can be chosen by the analyst. At the end of the thesis the best found solution is presented and the initial and the new scheme of the circles are compared.

This thesis deals with global imbalances in the world economy. Chapter one focuses on balance of payments theory, savings and investment. It also specifies global imbalances and presents the most important periods of their development. Chapter two analyses main causes of global imbalances and discusses the relationship between imbalances and current economic crisis. Chapter three describes current development of global imbalances, anticipated development in future and analyses possible solutions at national and international level.

The thesis deals with the determination and analysis of government support for building savings in the Czech republic between 2001 and 2009. The general section describes the legal framework of building savings system and the main products offered by building societies. The application section examines the progression of government support for building savings and delas with its forecasts.