Companies financed through borrowed capital are allowed a tax deduction for the costs re-lated to their borrowed capital. A similar tax relief for companies financed through share-holder’s equity does not exist, why these companies are taxed higher than companies fi-nanced by borrowed capital. The result is that there is an asymmetric tax treatment of companies depending on how they are financed. The autumn of 2012, the Swedish government presents a proposal for an investor deduc-tion which seeks to equalize the above mentioned asymmetry. The proposed investor de-duction is a tax relief for investments in shares in a startup- or small company equal to 50 percent of the acquisition cost of that investment. The venture capital deduction, which in this thesis is treated as an alternative to the inves-tor deduction, is an interest-free tax credit which significate that two-thirds of the acquisi-tion cost is deductible from taxation at the time of the acquisition. Another alternative is the UK's Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS), which offers a package of tax reliefs that becomes applicable when an individual invests in a company for example a tax credit of 30 percent of the cost of acquisition. A final option is the Notional Interest Deduction (NID) which is a tax deduction for companies regarding a fictitious interest on equity. Of these models, only the NID deduction equalizes the tax asymmetry, because of that it is a relief that is comparable to the tax credit deduction for interest on borrowed capital. However entails all models, except the venture capital deduction, to make external capital more accessible by reducing the external investor's required rate of return by allowing a permanent tax relief. Aside from the NID deduction all models includes conditions that reduces the risk of the use of the models for purpose of tax avoidance which results in that that models can be perceived as complex.

This project considers the diffusion of water molecules through a cellular medium in which the cells are modeled by square compartments placed symmetrically in a square domain. We assume the diffusion process is governed by the 2D diffusion equations and the solution is provided by implementing the Crank-Nicolson scheme. These results are verified and illustrated to agree well with the finite element method using the Comsol Multiphysics package. The model is used to compute the values of the apparent diffusion coefficient, (ADC) which is a measure that is derived from diffusion weighted MRI data and can be used to identify, e.g., regions of ischemia in the brain. With our model, it is possible to examine how the value of the apparent diffusion coefficient is affected whenever the extracellular space is varied. We observe that the average distance that the water molecules travel in a definite time is highly dependent on the geometrical properties of the cellular media. / UOIT

No description available.

A digital signature scheme is the process of signing an electronic message that can be transmitted over a computer network. Digital signatures provide message authentication that can be proved to a third party. With the rise of electronic communications over the Internet, digital signatures are becoming increasingly important, especially for the exchange of messages of legal significance. In 1988, Goldwasser, Micali and Rivest (GMR) [31] defined a signature scheme as a collection of algorithms: key generation, signature generation and signature verification. They defined a signature scheme as secure if it was existentially unforgeable against a chosen-message attack. These general definitions suited most signatures at the time, however, over the last decade digital signatures have emerged for which the GMR definitions are unsuitable. These signature schemes, together with their applications and security and efficiency considerations, will be explored in this thesis. These signature scheme variations have been classified by the additional services they provide to ordinary signature schemes, namely increased efficiency, increased security, anonymity, and enhanced signing and verifying capabilities.

Currently, citation indexes used by digital libraries are very limited. They only provide raw citation counts and link scientific articles through their citations. There are more than one type of citations, but citation indexes treat all citations equally. One way to improve citation indexes is to determine the types of citations in scientific articles (background, support, perfunctory reference, etc.) This will enable researchers to query citation indexes more efficiently by locating articles grouped by citation types. For example, it can enable a researcher to locate all background material needed to understand a specific article by locating all "background" citations. Many classification schemes currently exist. However, manual annotation of all existing digital documents is infeasible because of the sheer magnitude of the digital content, which brings about the need for automating the annotating process, but not much research has been done in the area. One of the reasons preventing researchers from researching automated citation classification is the lack on annotated corpora that they can use. This thesis explores automated citation classification. We make several contributions to the field of citation classification. We present a new citation scheme that is easier to work with than most. Also, we present a document acquisition and citation annotation tool that helps with the development of annotated citation corpora. And finally, we present some experiments with automating citation classification.

In this work we formalize a new natural objective (or cost) function for bi-clustering - Monochromatic bi-clustering. Our objective function is suitable for detecting meaningful homogenous clusters based on categorical valued input matrices. Such problems have arisen recently in systems biology where researchers have inferred functional classifications of biological agents based on their pairwise interactions. We analyze the computational complexity of the resulting optimization problems. We show that finding optimal solutions is NP-hard and complement this result by introducing a polynomial time approximation algorithm for this bi-clustering task. This is the first positive approximation guarantee for bi-clustering algorithms. We also show that bi-clustering with our objective function can be viewed as a generalization of correlation clustering.

The modern medical diagnostic systems are based on the techniques using digital data formats – a natural feed for the computer based systems. With the use of modern diagnostic techniques the diagnosis process is becoming more complex as many diseases seem to have the same pre-symptoms at early stages. And of course computer based systems require more efficient and effective ways to identify such complexities. However, the existing formalisms for knowledge representation, tools and technologies, learning and reasoning strategies seem inadequate to create meaningful relationship among the entities of medical data i.e. diseases, symptoms and medicine etc. This inadequacy actually is due to the poor design of the knowledge base of the medical system and leads the medical systems towards inaccurate diagnosis. This thesis discusses the limitations and issues specific to the design factors of the knowledge base and suggests that instead of using the deficient approaches and tools for representing, learning and retrieving the accurate knowledge, use of semantic web tools and techniques should be adopted. Design by contract approach may be suitable for establishing the relationships between the diseases and symptoms. The relationship between diseases and symptoms and their invariants can be represented more meaningfully using semantic web. This can lead to more concrete diagnosis, by overcoming the deficiencies and limitations of traditional approaches and tools.

This memo discusses and problematizes the work of organizing and cataloging the archive of the Environmental Advisory Council.The archive mainly consists of records concerning meetings which the Environmental Advisory Council has participated in, but also records concerning different tasks of the council and a few records concerning the coun-cil itself.The overriding problem, which is discussed in the final part of this memo, is the lacking knowledge about the creator of the archive and the creation of the archive itself and how this effects the work of ordering and catalog-ing. An attempt is made to evaluate the archive as a source of information to the Environmental Advisory Coun-cil and its work.This is a one year master’s thesis in Archival Science

The European Union has initiated a scheme for trading with CO2 emission allowances as a measure to reduce greenhouse gas emission levels. Since January 2005 companies from certain energy demanding sectors, responsible for approximately 50 % of the total CO2 emissions in the EU, are participating in this scheme, the so called EU Emission Trading Scheme. A trading scheme covering all sectors, i.e. all emissions in the EU would lead to the most cost efficient solution to reduce emissions by a certain amount. This means that the EU Emission Trading Scheme should be enlarged to cover also the transport sector, which is not participating today, but responsible for about 21 % of the total greenhouse gas emissions in the EU. There are three ways to include the transport sector in the EU Emission Trading Scheme, i.e. to administrate the handling and trading of emission allowances in the transport sector. The first is a so called downstream approach, meaning that the actual emitter of the GHG, in this case a private person driving a car or a haulage contractor using trucks to transport goods, would be responsible for acquiring and trading emission allowances in accordance to the amount of greenhouse gases that he emits. The second way is a so called upstream approach, meaning that the owner of fuel depots would be responsible for acquiring and trading emission allowances corresponding to the amount of fossil fuel that he is selling, which is proportional to the amount of greenhouse gases that is emitted when using the fuel. The third solution is to lay the responsibility for acquiring and trading emission allowances on the companies that are ordering the transportation service, indirectly causing greenhouse gas emissions when their goods are being transported. All three solutions have their advantages and disadvantages, but the benefits of using the upstream approach are the greatest. By allocating the responsibility for keeping and trading emission allowances at the fuel depots, an extensive part of greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel use, not only in the transport sector, could be covered by the EU Emission Trading Scheme to the lowest administrational cost possible.

A digital signature scheme is the process of signing an electronic message that can be transmitted over a computer network. Digital signatures provide message authentication that can be proved to a third party. With the rise of electronic communications over the Internet, digital signatures are becoming increasingly important, especially for the exchange of messages of legal significance. In 1988, Goldwasser, Micali and Rivest (GMR) [31] defined a signature scheme as a collection of algorithms: key generation, signature generation and signature verification. They defined a signature scheme as secure if it was existentially unforgeable against a chosen-message attack. These general definitions suited most signatures at the time, however, over the last decade digital signatures have emerged for which the GMR definitions are unsuitable. These signature schemes, together with their applications and security and efficiency considerations, will be explored in this thesis. These signature scheme variations have been classified by the additional services they provide to ordinary signature schemes, namely increased efficiency, increased security, anonymity, and enhanced signing and verifying capabilities.