Background: HIV/AIDS has existed officially for more than 35 years and is now seen as a global epidemic. The disease has claimed many victims and there is no indication showing decrease of the mortality rate. The disease is currently incurable, but antiretroviral drugs have good effect at slowing down the process. The persons who live with the disease are exposed to stigma and, sometimes, negative attitudes. The negative attitudes could affect the person’s willingness carry through the test. It might also lead to an unequal care. Aim: To describe the nursing staff’s attitudes towards HIV/AIDS and the people who live with HIV/AIDS. Method: A literature review, based on two qualitative articles and eight quantitative articles. The articles were collected from the databases CINAHL complete and PubMed with the chosen keywords. Results: The result contained of three categories: Nursing staff’s attitudes, Possible causes for negative and positive attitudes and Possible consequences of negative attitudes. The first category was about the attitudes from nursing staff towards HIV/AIDS and towards people who live with the disease. The second category was about possible causes for the negative attitudes and the last category was about the consequences of the negative attitudes. Discussions: The discussions were classified into two main sections, Possible consequences of negative attitudes and How the suffering appears, which included one minor section: How the caregiver can ease the suffering.  The sections were discussed using the concept of suffering according to Katie Eriksson, especially the suffering related to health care. The first section deals with how consequences of negative attitudes among the nursing staff affect the patients. The second section describes how suffering related to the care emerges in the patient due to the negative attitudes. The final, minor section shows examples of how the caregiver can mitigate the suffering. / Bakgrund: HIV/AIDS har funnits officiellt i över 35 år och ses idag som en global epidemi. Sjukdomen har skördat många offer och det finns ingen indikation på att dödssiffrorna minskar. Sjukdomen är obotlig men bromsmedicinerna som finns ger god effekt. Personerna som lever med sjukdomen utsätts för stigma och ibland negativa attityder. De negativa attityderna kan påverka personens vilja att testa sig och kan även leda till en ojämlik vård. Syfte: Beskriva vårdpersonalens attityder till HIV/AIDS och personerna som lever med HIV/AIDS. Metod: En litteraturöversikt som baserades på två kvalitativa och åtta kvantitativa resultatartiklar. Dessa hämtades från databaserna CINAHL complete och PubMed med hjälp av valda nyckelord. Resultat: Resultatet bestod av tre kategorier: Vårdpersonalens attityder, Möjliga orsaker till negativa och positiva attityder samt Möjliga konsekvenser av negativa attityder. Den första kategorin handlar om vårdpersonalens attityder mot HIV/AIDS och dem som är drabbade av sjukdomen, den andra kategorin handlar om möjliga orsaker till de negativa attityderna och den sista kategorin handlar om vilka konsekvenser de negativa attityderna ger.  Diskussion: Resultatdiskussionen indelades i två större avsnitt, Möjliga konsekvenser av negativa attityder samt Hur lidandet uttrycks med ett mindre avsnitt, Hur vårdaren kan lindra lidandet. Avsnitten diskuterades med hjälp av Katie Erikssons lidandebegrepp där fokus låg på vårdlidande. Det första avsnittet handlar om konsekvenserna av vårdpersonalens negativa attityder som påverkar patienten. Det andra avsnittet beskriver hur vårdlidande uppstår hos patienten på grund av de negativa attityderna. I det sista avsnittet ges exempel på hur vårdaren kan lindra vårdlidandet.

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<p> This thesis examines the theory of unequal exchange - an application of the labour theory of value to international freetrade - arguing that increased trade will harm rather than improve economic and social disparities between the developed and Third World countries. The theory as put forward by Arghiri Emmanuel is first presented and criticised. Assumptions of capital mobility and labour mobility on a world scale are than examined. As a result of these analyses unequal exchange is found to be a process the magnitude of which is mediated by the historical development of technology and the increasing mobility of productive capital. Unequal exchange does not provide a monocausal explanation of uneven development in capitalism as dependency-like interpretations would suggest, though it does make a significant contribution to a multicausal explanation. </p> <p>The existence of unequal exchange is shown, and its magnitude measured'i""' empirically on the basis of Morishima's value system. Input-output accounts for Canada and the Philippines are used for 1961 to produce estimates of commodity values per dollar. It is found that exports from the Philippines sold at prices that were almost five times lower than exports from Canada of the same value. Unequal exchange therefore, is a significant counteracting influence to the tendency for the rate of profit to fall in developed sectors, reducing the rate of profit, and therefore the rate of accumulation, in less developed sectors of production. </p> <p> The results of this analysis provide for two policy suggestions. Firstly the need to extend the class struggle to an international scale. Secondly, whilst import substitution may not solve the problems of less developed countries, an increase in trade will only harm them further. </p> / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

This thesis consists of five papers related to the theory of unequal probability sampling from a finite population. Generally, it is assumed that we wish to make modelassisted inference, i.e. the inclusion probability for each unit in the population is prescribed before the sample is selected. The sample is then selected using some random mechanism, the sampling design. Mostly, the thesis is focused on three particular unequal probability sampling designs, the conditional Poisson (CP-) design, the Sampford design, and the Pareto design. They have different advantages and drawbacks: The CP design is a maximum entropy design but it is difficult to determine sampling parameters which yield prescribed inclusion probabilities, the Sampford design yields prescribed inclusion probabilities but may be hard to sample from, and the Pareto design makes sample selection very easy but it is very difficult to determine sampling parameters which yield prescribed inclusion probabilities. These three designs are compared probabilistically, and found to be close to each other under certain conditions. In particular the Sampford and Pareto designs are probabilistically close to each other. Some effort is devoted to analytically adjusting the CP and Pareto designs so that they yield inclusion probabilities close to the prescribed ones. The result of the adjustments are in general very good. Some iterative procedures are suggested to improve the results even further. Further, balanced unequal probability sampling is considered. In this kind of sampling, samples are given a positive probability of selection only if they satisfy some balancing conditions. The balancing conditions are given by information from auxiliary variables. Most of the attention is devoted to a slightly less general but practically important case. Also in this case the inclusion probabilities are prescribed in advance, making the choice of sampling parameters important. A complication which arises in the context of choosing sampling parameters is that certain probability distributions need to be calculated, and exact calculation turns out to be practically impossible, except for very small cases. It is proposed that Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods are used for obtaining approximations to the relevant probability distributions, and also for sample selection. In general, MCMC methods for sample selection does not occur very frequently in the sampling literature today, making it a fairly novel idea.

Modelos com erros de medição têm recebido a atenção de vários pesquisadores das mais diversas áreas de conhecimento. O principal objetivo desta dissertação consiste no estudo de um modelo funcional com erros de medição heteroscedásticos na presença de réplicas das observações. O modelo proposto estende resultados encontrados na literatura na medida em que as réplicas são parte do modelo, ao contrário de serem utilizadas para estimação das variâncias, doravante tratadas como conhecidas. Alguns procedimentos de estimação tais como o método de máxima verossimilhança, o método dos momentos e o método de extrapolação da simulação (SIMEX) na versão empírica são apresentados. Além disso, propõe-se o teste da razão de verossimilhanças e o teste de Wald com o objetivo de testar algumas hipóteses de interesse relacionadas aos parâmetros do modelo adotado. O comportamento dos estimadores de alguns parâmetros e das estatísticas propostas (resultados assintóticos) são analisados por meio de um estudo de simulação de Monte Carlo, utilizando-se diferentes números de réplicas. Por fim, a proposta é exemplificada com um conjunto de dados reais. Toda parte computacional foi desenvolvida em linguagem R (R Development Core Team, 2011) / Measurement error models have received the attention of many researchers of several areas of knowledge. The aim of this dissertation is to study a functional heteroscedastic measurement errors model with replicated observations. The proposed model extends results from the literature in that replicas are part of the model, as opposed to being used for estimation of the variances, now treated as known. Some estimation procedures such as maximum likelihood method, the method of moments and the empirical simulation-extrapolation method (SIMEX) are presented. Moreover, it is proposed the likelihood ratio test and Wald test in order to test hypotheses of interest related to the model parameters used. The behavior of the estimators of some parameters and statistics proposed (asymptotic results) are analyzed through Monte Carlo simulation study using different numbers of replicas. Finally, the proposal is illustrated with a real data set. The computational part was developed in R language (R Development Core Team, 2011)

With the advances in video compression and networking techniques, the last ten years have witnessed an explosive growth of video applications over the Internet. However, the service model of the current best-effort network was never engineered to handle video traffic and, as a result, video applications still suffer from varying and unpredictable network conditions, in terms of bandwidth, packet loss and delay. To address these problems, a lot of innovative techniques have been proposed and researched. Among them, scalable video coding is a promising one to cope with the dynamics of the available bandwidth and heterogeneous terminals. This work aims at improving the efficacy of scalable video transport over IP networks. In this work, we first propose an optimal interleaving scheme combined with motion-compensated fine granularity scalability video source coding and unequal loss protection schemes, under an imposed delay constraint. The network is modeled as a packet-loss channel with random delays. The motion compensation prediction, ULP allocation and the depth of the interleaver are jointly optimized based on the network status and the delay constraint. We then proceed to investigate the multiple path transport technique. A unified approach which incorporates adaptive motion compensation prediction, multiple description coding and unequal multiple path allocation, is proposed to improve both the robustness and error resilience property of the video coding and transmission system, while the delivered video quality is improved simultaneously. To analytically investigate the efficacy of error resilient transport schemes for progressively encoded sources, including unequal loss protection, best-effort and FEC transport schemes, we develop evaluation and optimization approaches for these transport schemes. In this part of the work, the network is modeled as an M/D/1/K queue, and then a comprehensive queueing analysis is provided. Armed with these results, the efficacy of these transport schemes for progressively encoded sources are investigated and compared.

The ongoing conflict between Thailand’s red shirt and yellow shirt parties is not purely political. This tension is rooted in a renewed awareness of regional economic and social inequality, a byproduct of rapid economic growth in the past. This thesis seeks to understand the overall consequences of unequal economic development in Thailand, as the rationale for asserting that a conditional cash transfer (CCT) program is an appropriate policy tool for the ongoing reconciliation efforts.

This thesis investigates a graph and information theoretic approach to design and analysis of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes and wireless networks. In this work, both LDPC codes and wireless networks are considered as random graphs. This work proposes solutions to important theoretic and practical open problems in LDPC coding, and for the first time introduces a framework for analysis of finite wireless networks. LDPC codes are considered to be one of the best classes of error-correcting codes. In this thesis, several problems in this area are studied. First, an improved decoding algorithm for LDPC codes is introduced. Compared to the standard iterative decoding, the proposed decoding algorithm can result in several orders of magnitude lower bit error rates, while having almost the same complexity. Second, this work presents a variety of bounds on the achievable performance of different LDPC coding scenarios. Third, it studies rate-compatible LDPC codes and provides fundamental properties of these codes. It also shows guidelines for optimal design of rate-compatible codes. Finally, it studies non-uniform and unequal error protection using LDPC codes and explores their applications to data storage systems and communication networks. It presents a new error-control scheme for volume holographic memory (VHM) systems and shows that the new method can increase the storage capacity by more than fifty percent compared to previous schemes. This work also investigates the application of random graphs to the design and analysis of wireless ad hoc and sensor networks. It introduces a framework for analysis of finite wireless networks. Such framework was lacking from the literature. Using the framework, different network properties such as capacity, connectivity, coverage, and routing and security algorithms are studied. Finally, connectivity properties of large-scale sensor networks are investigated. It is shown how unreliability of sensors, link failures, and non-uniform distribution of nodes affect the connectivity of sensor networks.

This thesis investigates a graph and information theoretic approach to design and analysis of low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes and wireless networks. In this work, both LDPC codes and wireless networks are considered as random graphs. This work proposes solutions to important theoretic and practical open problems in LDPC coding, and for the first time introduces a framework for analysis of finite wireless networks. LDPC codes are considered to be one of the best classes of error-correcting codes. In this thesis, several problems in this area are studied. First, an improved decoding algorithm for LDPC codes is introduced. Compared to the standard iterative decoding, the proposed decoding algorithm can result in several orders of magnitude lower bit error rates, while having almost the same complexity. Second, this work presents a variety of bounds on the achievable performance of different LDPC coding scenarios. Third, it studies rate-compatible LDPC codes and provides fundamental properties of these codes. It also shows guidelines for optimal design of rate-compatible codes. Finally, it studies non-uniform and unequal error protection using LDPC codes and explores their applications to data storage systems and communication networks. It presents a new error-control scheme for volume holographic memory (VHM) systems and shows that the new method can increase the storage capacity by more than fifty percent compared to previous schemes. This work also investigates the application of random graphs to the design and analysis of wireless ad hoc and sensor networks. It introduces a framework for analysis of finite wireless networks. Such framework was lacking from the literature. Using the framework, different network properties such as capacity, connectivity, coverage, and routing and security algorithms are studied. Finally, connectivity properties of large-scale sensor networks are investigated. It is shown how unreliability of sensors, link failures, and non-uniform distribution of nodes affect the connectivity of sensor networks.

This thesis reports the analysis of the rectangular shaped defected ground structure (RS-DGS) and the application of the structure on some microwave devices. DGS is analyzed in terms of its superior properties, which enables the designers to easily realize many kind of microwave devices which are impossible to achieve with the standard applications. Within the scope of this thesis, the focus is on the rectangular shaped DGS and its characteristic properties. The basic slow wave and high impedance characteristics are utilized in the design of some microwave devices. The design is carried on at the two different frequency bands: X-band and Ka band, centering at 10 GHz and 35 GHz, respectively. Finally, using the high impedance property and the coupling between the defects, a wide band 1 : 4 beam forming network is designed and implemented at 10 GHz.