We test the NBA betting market for efficiency and find that totals lines are significantly biased early each season, yet sides lines do not show a similar bias. While market participants generally force line movements in the correct direction from open to close, they do not fully remove the identified bias in totals lines. This inefficiency enables a profitable technical trading strategy, as the resulting win rate of our proposed simple betting strategy against the closing totals line is 56.72%.

The purpose of the research is to explore the veteran¡¦s perceptions in living Taiwan, back to settle in hometown, the status quo of long stay in mainland China, and why they gave up staying there for long term living but went back Taiwan. It is expected that the research results would be references for relevant authorities when they take measures to take care of the veteran¡¦s livelihood. The study is mainly a qualitative research with in-dept interview and literature review, while the research scope is limited only to those senior veterans in long-term care at certain nursing home of Veterans Affairs Commission, Executive Yuan in certain area who have given up long-time living in mainland China but went back to settle in Kaohsiung area, which totally are 9 persons. The research results found that (1) though the unmarried and lonely veterans have taken the army as their homes since they retreated to Taiwan and missed their hometown, they all deeply disposed to Taiwan; (2) the senior veterans went back to their hometown only for the reason as ¡§falling leaves return to roots¡¨, ¡§happily reunion with family¡¨, but the connection of family feeling was based on money; (3) when back to hometown, the livelihood of those senior veterans were mostly out of question, part of them get married and built houses, or even supported their relatives and inferiors with money; (4) the main reasons they gave up living there were the cold weather, inadequate medical care and so on. There are 3 dimensions in the research¡¦s suggestions: 1. the mental health network for veterans (including case management etc.) should be built up; 2. the business of veterans¡¦ long stay in mainland China should be forwarded (so as the mechanism positively assisting veterans in long term care to go back Taiwan should be established); 3. the practice of long-term care institution for veterans (providing the second time holistic care service and so on for the senior veterans) should be developed.

Since Convention on the Rights of the Child of the United Nations are released, children's best interests becomes the highest principle for every state having legal system to deal with children's affairs. So we can say that the first serious mission of the subject of modern parent and tot's relation is protecting minor children's interests, then keeping the marriage and family peace and stable identity relations and etc. is the next. And in order to reach the above-mentioned purpose, the numerous countries have begun to examine their law of the marriage and family, even some advanced countries have abolished the differentiation between legitimate and illegitimate children too, in order to reach the demand for this two equalization. Now people of our country and mainland China ( what follows we call them two sides) contact with each other frequently, and then the extramarital sexual intercourse of people of two sides becomes numerous, and the quantity of the legitimate children also increases year by year. Base this, the announcement of the Equal Principle between legitimate and illegitimate children in mainland China marriage law has a deep meaning, but when we review our country, we find that our law about children's affairs has no response for the above-mentioned things. Even now our law about children's affairs still maintain the differentiation of legitimate and illegitimate children and also especially discriminate against the children of the mainland China in "The ordinance of people's relationship between Taiwan and mainland China ". So this thesis's aim is checking the legal system related to legitimate and illegitimate children of two sides by the standard namely with the children's best interests and look over them to find they observe the standard namely with the children's best interests or not. By the way, this thesis will try to find the reason and the cause that helping legal system about legitimate and illegitimate children stand out ,and try to find the real way to make legitimate children equal with illegitimate children in the modern status which has varied family type and varied pattern of both sexes getting along with each other. To this end, the thesis want to set up a new ¡§legitimate children presumption¡¨system to adapt to the above-mentioned purpose, and doesn't make children unequal just because their parents aren't husband and wife , and our law ¡]or mainland China's law¡^about children's affairs will juxtapose advanced countries.

Avian influenza is a contagious viral disease caused by influenza virus type A. Avian influenza can be disastrous (if it occurs), due to the short incubation period (about 1--4 days). Thus it is important to study this disease so that we are more prepared to manage it in the future. A classical system of differential equations (the half-saturated incidence model) and three Filippov models --- an avian-only model with culling of infected birds, an SIIR (Susceptible-Infected-Infected-Recovered) model with quarantine of infected humans and an avian-only model with culling both susceptible and infected birds --- that are governed by ordinary differential equations with discontinuous right-hand sides (i.e., differential inclusion) are proposed to study the transmission of avian influenza. The effect of half-saturated incidence is investigated, and the outcome of this model is compared with the bilinear incidence model. Both models remain endemic whenever their respective basic reproduction numbers are greater than one. The half-saturated incidence model generates more infected individuals than the bilinear incidence model. This may be because the bilinear incidence model is underestimating the number of infected individuals at the outbreak. For the Filippov models, the number of infected individuals is used as a reference in applying control strategies. If this number is greater than a threshold value, a control measure has to be employed immediately to avoid a more severe outbreak. Otherwise, no action is necessary. We perform dynamical system analysis for all models. The existence of sliding modes and the flow on the discontinuity surfaces are determined. In addition, numerical simulations are conducted to illustrate the dynamics of the models. Our results suggest that if appropriate tolerance thresholds are chosen such that all trajectories of the Filippov models are converging to an equilibrium point that lies in the region below the infected tolerance threshold or on the discontinuity surface, then no control strategy is necessary as we consider the outbreak is tolerable. Otherwise, we have to apply control strategies to contain the outbreak. Hence a well-defined threshold policy is crucial for us to combat avian influenza effectively.

In this study, we investigated the effect of electrolyte composition, photoanode thickness, and the additions of GuSCN (guanidinium thiocyanate), NMB (N-methylbenimidazole), and SiO2 on the photovoltaic performance of DSSCs (dye sensitized solar cells). A bifacial DSSC is realized and irradiated from front and rear sides. The devices give maximum photovoltaic efficiencies for 70% PMII (1-propyl 3-ethylimidazoliumiodide)/30%(EMIB(CN)4)(1-ethyl-3-methyl-imidazolium tetracyano borate) electrolyte composition and 10 &mu / m thick photoanode coating which is considered to be the ideal coating thickness for the diffusion length of electrolyte and dye absorption. A significant increase in the photocurrent for DSSCs with optimum molarity of 0.1 M GuSCN was observed due to decreased recombination which is believed to be surface passivation effect at photoanode electrolyte interface suppressing recombination rate. Moreover, optimum NMB molarity was found to be 0.4 for maximum efficiency. Addition of SiO2 to the electrolyte both as an overlayer and dispersed particles enhanced rear side illuminated cells where dispersed particles are found to be more efficient for the front side illuminated cells due to additional electron transport properties. Best rear side illuminated cell efficiency was 3.2% compared to front side illuminated cell efficiency of 4.2% which is a promising result for future rear side dye sensitized solar cell applications where front side illumination is not possible like tandem structures and for cells working from both front and rear side illuminations.

This thesis focuses on classification and evaluation of brownfiled sites in the South region in the Czech republic. The thesis is divided into two parts, theoretical and practical. The theoretical part is aimed at defining the issues of brownfields, particulary to the development and current status of brownfileds not only in the South region. The classification of brownfields is part of the chapter. In the second part is applied the model based on the scoring of the parameters.

Le sujet de cette thèse est le développement de méthodes itératives permettant la résolution degrands systèmes linéaires creux d'équations présentant plusieurs seconds membres simultanément. Ces méthodes seront en particulier utilisées dans le cadre d'une application géophysique : la migration sismique visant à simuler la propagation d'ondes sous la surface de la terre. Le problème prend la forme d'une équation d'Helmholtz dans le domaine fréquentiel en trois dimensions, discrétisée par des différences finies et donnant lieu à un système linéaire creux, complexe, non-symétrique, non-hermitien. De plus, lorsque de grands nombres d'onde sont considérés, cette matrice possède une taille élevée et est indéfinie. Du fait de ces propriétés, nous nous proposons d'étudier des méthodes de Krylov préconditionnées par des techniques hiérarchiques deux niveaux. Un tel pre-conditionnement s'est montré particulièrement efficace en deux dimensions et le but de cette thèse est de relever le défi de l'adapter au cas tridimensionel. Pour ce faire, des méthodes de Krylov sont utilisées à la fois comme lisseur et comme méthode de résolution du problème grossier. Ces derniers choix induisent l'emploi de méthodes de Krylov dites flexibles. / The topic of this PhD thesis is the development of iterative methods for the solution of large sparse linear systems of equations with possibly multiple right-hand sides given at once. These methods will be used for a specific application in geophysics - seismic migration - related to the simulation of wave propagation in the subsurface of the Earth. Here the three-dimensional Helmholtz equation written in the frequency domain is considered. The finite difference discretization of the Helmholtz equation with the Perfect Matched Layer formulation produces, when high frequencies are considered, a complex linear system which is large, non-symmetric, non-Hermitian, indefinite and sparse. Thus we propose to study preconditioned flexible Krylov subspace methods, especially minimum residual norm methods, to solve this class of problems. As a preconditioner we consider multi-level techniques and especially focus on a two-level method. This twolevel preconditioner has shown efficient for two-dimensional applications and the purpose of this thesis is to extend this to the challenging three-dimensional case. This leads us to propose and analyze a perturbed two-level preconditioner for a flexible Krylov subspace method, where Krylov methods are used both as smoother and as approximate coarse grid solver.

Title: The Collection of Exercises About Qaudrangles Author: Bc. Pavel Nohál Department: Department of Mathematics Education Supervisor: doc. RNDr. Jarmila Robová, CSc., Department of Mathematics Education Abstract: The master thesis is focused on exercises regarding qaudrangles. This gives a chance to pupils of primary schools and lower secondary schools to repeat and practice math curriculum with a view of further study, but also develop pupils' common sense and logical thinking. The quadrangles are being encountered by us every day and therefore the exercises in this area are largely connected with the practical life. As not many current Collections on the market are dealing exclusively with quadrangles, author would like to fill this vacancy by this thesis. Keywords: Quadrilaterals and their division Parallelograms and trapezoids Circumference and area Tops, sides and interior angles

The military leadership is a specific type of activity, presenting motivational, emotional and intellectual chellenges to the character of a military leader. The United States Army defines leadership as 'the process of influencing people by providing purpose, direction, and motivation while operating to accomplish the mission and inproving the organization' (Department of the Army 2006, pp. 1-2).The United States Air Force (USAF) has the similar definition of leadership: 'the art and science of influencing and directing people to accomplish the assigned mission' (Department of the Air Force 2006, p.1). In these two definitions we can quite clearly highlight two important elements, which are inherent to the leadership process, it is the mission to lead people and followers who should perform delivered tasks. In our opinion, the army has achieved a big success in the development of leadership unlike other organizations, because the issue of leadeship was arising in the military sphere much earlier than in civil organizations. In proof of this position, we can recall scientific works, which were written by such great people as Sun Tzu (The Art of War, about 500-600 B.C.), Maurice (The Strategikon, 6th or 7th century A.D.) and Carl von Clausewitz (On War, published in 1832).

The Method of Moments is a numerical technique for solving electromagnetic problems with integral equations. The method discretizes a surface in three dimensions, which reduces the dimension of the problem with one. A drawback of the method is that it yields a dense system of linear equations. This effectively prohibits the solution of large scale problems. Papers I-III describe the Fast Multipole Method. It reduces the cost of computing a dense matrix vector multiplication. This implies that large scale problems can be solved on personal computers. In Paper I the error introduced by the Fast Multipole Method is analyzed. Paper II and Paper III describe the implementation of the Fast Multipole Method. The problem of computing monostatic Radar Cross Section involves many right hand sides. Since the Fast Multipole Method computes a matrix times a vector, iterative techniques are used to solve the linear systems. It is important that the solution time for each system is as low as possible. Otherwise the total solution time becomes too large. Different techniques for reducing the work in the iterative solver are described in Paper IV-VI. Paper IV describes a block Quasi Minimal Residual method for several right hand sides and Sparse Approximate Inverse preconditioner that reduce the number of iterations significantly. In Paper V and Paper VI a method based on linear algebra called the Minimal Residual Interpolation method is described. It reduces the work in an iterative solver by accurately computing an initial guess for the iterative method. In Paper VII a hybrid method between Physical Optics and the Fast Multipole Method is described. It can handle large problems that are out of reach for the Fast Multipole Method.