Thesis (M.A.)--University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2006. / Title from PDF title page screen. Advisor: Maya Chhetri; submitted to the Dept. of Mathematical Sciences. Includes bibliographical references (p. 39-40).

Electronic health – this is the object of study work. The focus of research is European countries, which use Information and Communication Technologies improving their Health care system and it is not excepted is the country advanced in developing e-Health or it just started to create or improve this system. As it is a new Developing research area, there are not so many direct relevant researches about it previously found. Therefore it encourages the investigation of this topic, which according to European Commission and Enterprise Directorate General (2003) could reach greatest economy on saving costs in whole service sector. Thus the guidelines for efficient e-Health development should be given as soon as possible. The study work is exactly aimed on this.

The construction industry is in the midst of a progressive change in the way projects unfold from design and development to closeout and maintenance. There is a greater demand on contractors to build projects faster, with higher quality and an increased level of detail, while keeping costs lower than ever. Therefore, to meet such demands contractors must turn to an alternative approach of improving product and process with target costing. However, the adoption of target costing by the construction industry has been slow due to limitations in user understanding of the system. The objective of this paper is to identify an effective approach for teaching target costing to construction-focused individuals, by establishing improved user understanding with visual aids, and by determining if user comprehension is influenced by the complexity of the visual supports provided in the lessons. The study challenged the long-implied assumption that the construction community is composed of visual learners, while also differentiating between the levels of success for supporting figures based upon their degree of detail. Results of this study will provide the basis for the development of target costing material that is designed specifically for use in the education of construction industry professionals in Target Cost Estimating.

The paper is devoted to the modern methods of Value-at-Risk calculation using different cases of Generalized Hyperbolic distribution and models for predicting volatility. In our research we use GARCH-M and Non-parametric volatility models and compare Value-at-Risk calculation depending on the distribution that is used. In the case of Non-parametric model corresponding windows are proved by the Cross Validation method. Furthermore in our work we consider adaption of the method to intraday data using ACD and UHF-GARCH models. The project involves also application of the developed methods to real financial data and comparable analysis of the obtained results.

When the first Starbucks opened in 1971, not even the founders expected that just two decades later, it would become one of the strongest international corporations. Starbucks has experienced unprecedented growth and unfathomable success. The company grew from 17 stores in the company’s founding years to approximately 17,000 stores across 55 countries just 40 years later.1 According to the corporate website, the Starbucks mission is “to inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup, and one neighborhood at a time”.2 In order to fulfill their mission statement, Starbucks has to mold their company to align with the ever-changing consumer interests. Starbucks has continued to use its logo as the symbol of change in the company’s product base. Over the years, Starbucks’s brand name has consistently strengthened and was a determinant factor in the company’s unparalleled success. The corporation’s first major logo change in 1987 reflected the move away from a main-street coffee shop and into a more modern espresso bar that offered a broader array of products. The company’s second major logo change occurred in 1992 when Starbucks had their initial public offering on the NASDAQ stock exchange.3 Finally, this thesis will examine the impacts of Starbucks most recent logo change in 2011, and will conclude that better accounting methods must be created to quantify the value of a strong brand like Starbucks. 1 "Year in Review: Fiscal 2011." Starbucks Global Responsibility Report – Goals and Progress 2011. Starbucks Corporation. Web. 2 Feb. 2012. . 2 Starbucks Corporation. "Our Mission". Starbucks Home Page. 28 Feb 2012. Web. . 3 Schultz, Howard, and Joanne Gordon. Onward: How Starbucks fought for its life without losing its soul. New York, NY: Rodale, 2011. 1-11.

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Abstract: This thesis examines the foundations of individual human rights. The general thought that informs the discussion is that rights and values are two different kinds of moral discourse. Hence, any attempt to simply state rights in value terms will be problematic because the agent-relative character of values does not lend itself to grounding/ explaining interpersonal rules, like rights. The thesis outlines agent-relative values, showing their plausibility, and then proceeds to show how rights perform a different function. The attempt to move from talk about what is right to what rights we have is termed the ‘moralist fallacy’. Rights are kinds of restrictions that others face on their actions when they are promoting their own good. Axiology is about how best to achieve one’s objective agent-relative good; so values involve trade offs and calculations agents can perform about what is in their best interest, while rights are not open to trade offs and calculations because they are restrictions that agents face when they are pursuing their own good. The main problem the thesis discerns is how rights can be concerned with protecting the concerns of others when what people legitimately care about are their own concerns. Two different views of the motivational legitimacy of rights are examined—the agent well being view and the agent-recipient view. On the former, rights are motivationally appealing and justified because abiding by them can be shown to be part of what constitutes an agent’s (who is subject to abiding by rights) well being; on the latter view, abiding by rights constitutes part of the recipient’s (who has the rights) well being. Taken separately these two views are problematic. Rights legitimacy would seem to require something from both views. But since these views are contraries they do not seem open to combination either. The thesis will attempt to provide a solution to reconciling the agent well being and agent recipient views while trying to retain the nature of rights as restrictions not open to trade offs or reducible to value talk. Rights function as restrictions, but why do they function this way and how are they justified when what people are mostly concerned with is their own agent-relative good? Rights must be a separate kind of moral claim, not reducible to talk about what values we have in order for rights to have the motivational and justificatory strength they need for interpersonal validity and to resist paternalist interferences. Rights will have this strength if they are based on something that all value pursuers require—such as recognition of one’s legitimate claim to possess oneself. First possession based on first come, first serve will provide legitimacy for a system of rights because it will appeal to and motivate agents by relating rights-respect to their well being. I will argue that abiding by others’ rights is in one’s best interest because doing so is a wise choice—while one might believe that not abiding by others’ rights might give one the best outcome, one cannot be sure about this and so ought to choose to abide by rights as a general policy. Also, agents ought to make sure that they voice their concerns over rights violations of others. Even though this may not be to their immediate benefit, it is rational for agents to speak out on this issue and reinforce rights–respecting behaviour because making the system effective will ultimately be in their own long-term self-interest. The thesis also tries to make sense of how rights are compossible and when rights might face thresholds beyond which they no longer hold.

Spherical Harmonics (SPHARM) and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) utilize the orthogonal relations of its parameters to represent and process images. The process involve mapping of the image from its original parameter domain to a new domain where the processing is performed. This process induces distortion and smoothing is required. The image now mapped to the new parameter domain is descripted using SPHARM and SVD using one at a time. The least significant values for the SPHARM coefficients and singular values of SVD are truncated which induces compression in the reconstructed image keeping the memory allocation in view. In this thesis, we have applied SPHARM and SVD tools to represent and reconstruct an image. The image is first mapped to the unit sphere (a sphere with unit radius). The image gets distorted that is maximum at the north and south poles, for which smoothing is approached by leaving 0.15*π space blank at each pole where no mapping is done. Sampling is performed for the θ and φ parameters and the image is represented using spherical harmonics and its coefficients are calculated. The same is then repeated for the SVD and singular values are computed. Reconstruction is performed using the calculated parameters, but defined over some finite domain, which is done by truncating the SPHARM coefficients and the singular values inducing image compression. Results are formulated for the various truncation choices and analyzed and finally it is concluded that SPHARM is better as compared with SVD as compression tool as there is not much difference in the quality of the reconstructed image with both tools, though SVD seem better quality wise, but with much higher memory allocation than SPHARM.

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Master thesis in Business Administration, Swedish Business School at Örebro University, spring semester 2012 Authors: Anders Oskarsson & Christian Uhlander Title: I’m going to make you rich! -With a little help from Piotroski Research objective: This paper examines whether a simple account-based analysis strategy, F_SCORE, can improve returns earned by an investor. The results show that F_SCORE generated a 69,7 % annual return between 2001-2010 at the Swedish market, which was better than the further developed model A_SCORE. Overall, the evidence suggests that the market does not incorporate historical information into prices in a timely manner. Methodology: The foundation for this thesis is based on a quantitative approach and empirical material is gathered from Thomson Reuters Datastream for the Swedish market.