O objetivo do presente trabalho foi examinar o desempenho das firmas em períodos próximos à realização da colocação secundária, perfazendo uma análise das pesquisas relatadas sobre o evento. Como constatado na literatura, os agentes alienam sua participação acionária por motivos diversos e, dependendo do tipo de informação que o alienante possui, a performance das ações e operacional das firmas tendem a ser robusto em momentos próximos ao fenômeno e fraco conforme vai se distanciando do mesmo. Foi a demonstração dessa repercussão que se buscou comprovar nesse trabalho, tratando de diferenciar os efeitos no mercado quando a venda é feita por um detentor de informação privilegiada da que é realizada por um alienante que não detém esse tipo de informação. O que se depreende da literatura é que os agentes no momento da venda de suas ações tendem a se aproveitar da janela de oportunidade. Apresentando ainda as teorias levantadas sobre o tema, percebe-se que elas possuem um poder de explicação sobre o que ocorre no mercado de capitais no momento da distribuição secundária. / The objective of this study was to examine the performance of firms in periods near completion of secondary offering, executing an analysis of the research reported on the event. As noted in the literature, shareholders sell shares for various reasons and, depending on the type of information that the he carry, the stock and operational performance of the firms tend to be robust at times closest to the phenomenon and poor as will moving away from same. Was the demonstration of this effect which sought to prove in this work, trying to differentiate the effects on the market when the sale is made by an insider with respect to non-insider. What is clear from the literature is that agents at the time of sale of their shares tend to take advantage of the window of opportunity. Yet anchoring in theories raised on the topic, it is clear that they have a powerful explanation of what happens in the capital market at the time of the secondary distribution.

O dimensionamento da tecnologia trouxe consequências indesejáveis para manter a taxa de crescimento exponencial e levanta questões importantes relacionadas com a confiabilidade e robustez dos sistemas eletrônicos. Atualmente, microprocessadores modernos de superpipeline normalmente contêm milhões de dispositivos com cargas nos nós cada vez menores. Esse fator faz com que os circuitos sejam mais sensíveis a variabilidade ambiental e aumenta a probabilidade de um erro transiente acontecer. Erros transientes em circuitos sequenciais ocorrem quando uma única partícula energizada deposita carga suficiente perto de uma região sensível. Flip-Flops mestreescravo são os circuitos sequencias mais utilizados em projeto VLSI para armazenamento de dados. Se um bit-flip ocorrer dentro deles, eles perdem a informação prévia armazenada e podem causar um funcionamento incorreto do sistema. A fim de proporcionar sistemas mais confiáveis que possam lidar com os efeitos da radiação, este trabalho analisa o Fator de Vulnerabilidade Temporal (Timing Vulnerability Factor - TVF) em algumas topologias de flip-flops mestre-escravo em estágios de pipeline sob diferentes condições de operação. A janela de tempo efetivo que o bit-flip ainda pode ser capturado pelo próximo estágio é definido com janela de vulnerabilidade (WOV). O TVF corresponde ao tempo que o flip-flop é vulnerável a erros transientes induzidos pela radiação de acordo com a WOV e a frequência de operação. A primeira etapa deste trabalho determina a dependência entre o TVF com a propagação de falhas até o próximo estágio através de uma lógica combinacional com diferentes atrasos de propagação e com diferentes modelos de tecnologia, incluindo também as versões de alto desempenho e baixo consumo. Todas as simulações foram feitas sob as condições normais pré-definidas nos arquivos de tecnologia. Como a variabilidade se manifesta com o aumento ou diminuição das especificações iniciais, onde o principal problema é a incerteza sobre o valor armazenado em circuitos sequenciais, a segunda etapa deste trabalho consiste em avaliar o impacto que os efeitos da variabilidade ambiental causam no TVF. Algumas simulações foram refeitas considerando variações na tensão de alimentação e na temperatura em diferentes topologias e configurações de flip-flops mestre-escravo. Para encontrar os melhores resultados, é necessário tentar diminuir os valores de TVF, pois isso significa que eles serão menos vulneráveis a bit-flips. Atrasos de propagação entre dois circuitos sequenciais e frequências de operação mais altas ajudam a reduzir o TVF. Além disso, estas informações podem ser facilmente integradas em ferramentas de EDA para ajudar a identificar os flip-flops mestre-escravo mais vulneráveis antes de mitigar ou substituí-los por aqueles tolerantes a radiação. / Technology scaling has brought undesirable issues to maintain the exponential growth rate and it raises important topics related to reliability and robustness of electronic systems. Currently, modern super pipelined microprocessors typically contain many millions of devices with ever decreasing load capacitances. This factor makes circuits more sensitive to environmental variations and it is increased the probability to induce a soft error. Soft errors in sequential circuits occur when a single energetic particle deposits enough charge near a sensitive node. Master-slave flip-flops are the most adopted sequential elements to work as registers in pipeline and finite state machines. If a bit-flip happens inside them, they lose the previous stored information and may cause an incorrect system operation. To provide reliable systems that can cope with radiation effects, this work analysis the Timing Vulnerability Factor (TVF) of some master-slave D flip-flops topologies in pipeline stages under different operating conditions. The effective time window, which the bit-flip can still be captured by the next stage, is defined as Window of Vulnerability (WOV). TVF corresponds to the time that a flip-flop is vulnerable to radiation-induced soft errors according to WOV and clock frequency. In the first step of this work, it is determined the dependence between the TVF with the fault propagation to the next stage through a combinational logic with different propagation delays and with different nanometer technological models, including also high performance and low power versions. All these simulations were made under the pre-defined nominal conditions in technology files. The variability manifests with an increase or decreases to initial specification, where the main problem is the uncertainty about the value stored in sequential. In this way, the second step of this work evaluates the impact that environmental variability effect causes in TVF. Some simulations were redone considering supply voltage and temperature variations in different master-slave D flip-flop topologies configurations. To achieve better results, it is necessary to try to decrease the TVF values to reduce the vulnerability to bit-flips. The propagation delay between two sequential elements and higher clock frequencies collaborates to reduce TVF values. Moreover, all the information can be easily integrated into Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools to help identifying the most vulnerable master-slave flip-flops before mitigating or replacing them by radiation hardened ones.

Two identified setbacks for CIGS based devices in order to obtain higher efficiency are parasitic absorption in the window layer structure and losses in open-circuit voltage due to bad interfaces. This study investigated how the performance of the solar cell is affected by depositing intrinsic ZnO (i-ZnO) and ZnMgO with atomic layer deposition (ALD) instead of the conventional sputtering. No significant improvement in fill factor was obtained by the use of ALD compared to sputtering, leading to the conclusion that pinholes in the sputtered film are not a detrimental factor for the cell. As the thickness of the i-layer increased, an increase in FF was observed for the ALD-deposited i-layer, whereas a decrease was observed for the sputtered i-layer. The open-circuit voltage was considered constant between the two series with only small fluctuations, indicating that the defect chemistry of the i-ZnO/CdS interface was not improved with the use of ALD. In this study it is shown that a gain in short-circuit current can be obtained for CIGS solar cells in the high energy region of the spectrum by reducing the thickness of the i-ZnO, as well as alloying the ZnO with Mg. When compared with a baseline layer sample with a sputtered i-layer thickness of around 90 nm, the estimated gain in short-circuit current density without a loss in fill factor was 0.14 and 0.20 mA/cm2 for ALD and sputtering, respectively. For the series with a ZnMgO i-layer, the highest estimated gain was 0.17 mA/cm2. This was observed for the sample with a 4:1 (Zn:Mg) pulse ratio, whereas higher Mg contents yielded a too high band gap that resulted in an electron blocking barrier.

Dans les récits médiévaux, la réalité littéraire du décor est avant tout l'expérience imaginaire qu'introduit l'acte de lecture, avant d'être instrument qui permet au lecteur de réaliser l'image. Dans notre étude, il nous importe de préciser les éléments descriptifs, naturels et architecturaux, ou les visions du décor servant de cadres aux romans médiévaux. Avec une grande économie de moyens, la langue médiévale dit tout sur le sujet. En effet le stéréotype fonctionne toujours parfaitement, mais nous avons aussi de belles, brèves – mais énergiques – descriptions de châteaux et de villes. Les éléments du paysage peuvent s'ordonner en un panorama cohérent qui sait se mettre au service de l'action. Répondant aux nécessités du récit et sous forme de mentions généralement brèves, nous voyons apparaître peu à peu les éléments constitutifs des décors, naturels et urbains. Les rapides indications sont celles qui font apparaître le mieux la réalité d'un château ou d'une ville des XIIe et XIIIe siècles, telle qu'un romancier pouvait les présenter et les donner à voir à son public. / For a reader of medieval narratives the literary of the scenery, is in the first place an imaginary experience introduced by the act of reading and only subsequently it serves the role of an instrument necessary to reconstruct the image. In the present study, I discuss and reflect upon the natural and architectural elements of description and also the visions of the scenery recurrent in the medieval novel. The medieval language is extremely efficient in its descriptions of subject. The stereotypes are ever present, though punctuated by beautiful, short, yet vivid, descriptions of castles and cities. The elements of the landscape at times form a coherent panoramic setting for the action. Brief descriptions and mentions of the elements of the scenery, both natural and urban, appear as they are called for by the narrative. Such short indications appear to best show the reality of the castles or cities of XII and XIII century.

Motivated by the management of sales representatives who visit customers to develop customer relationships, we present a stochastic orienteering problem on a network of queues, in which a hard time window is associated with each customer and the representative may experience uncertain wait time resulting from a queueing process at the customer. In general, given a list of potential customers and a time horizon consisting of several periods, the sales representative needs to decide which customers to visit in each period and how to visit customers within the period, with an objective to maximize the total reward collected by the end of the horizon. We start our study with a daily orienteering problem, which is a subproblem of the general problem. We focus on developing a priori and dynamic routing strategies for the salesperson to implement during a day. In the a priori routing case, the salesperson visits customers in a pre-planned order, and we seek to construct a static sequence of customers that maximizes the expected value collected. We consider two types of recourse actions. One is to skip a customer specified by an a priori route if the representative will arrive late in the customer's time window. The other type is to leave a customer immediately after arriving if observing a sufficiently long queue (balking) or to leave after waiting in queue for a period of time without meeting with the customer (reneging). We propose customer-specific decision rules to facilitate the execution of recourse actions and derive an analytical formula to compute the expected sales from the a priori route. We tailor a variable neighborhood search (VNS) heuristic to find a priori routes. In the dynamic routing case, the salesperson decides which customer to visit and how long to wait at each customer based on realized events. To seek dynamic routing policies, we propose an approximate dynamic programming approach based on rollout algorithms. The method introduces a two-stage heuristic estimation that we refer to as compound rollout. In the first stage, the algorithm decides whether to stay at the current customer or go to another customer. If departing the current customer, it chooses the customer to whom to go in the second stage. We demonstrate the value of our modeling and solution approaches by comparing the dynamic policies to a priori solutions with recourse actions. Finally, we address the multi-period orienteering problem. We consider that each customer's likelihood of adopting the representative's product stochastically evolves over time and is not fully observed by the representative. The representative can only estimate the adoption likelihood by meeting with the customer and the estimation may not be accurate. We model the problem as a partially observed Markov decision process with an objective to maximize the expected sales at the end of the horizon. We propose a heuristic that decomposes the problem into an assignment problem to schedule customers for a period and a routing problem to decide how to visit the scheduled customers within the period.

Wildlife-vehicle collisions (WVCs) negatively impact wildlife populations and create dangerous driving situations for motorists. In Utah, USA, mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) encounter a variety of hazards as they attempt to cross highways and interstates, some of which are 8 lanes wide. Agencies have sought to mitigate the risks posed to drivers and mule deer by building crossing structures for wildlife. The objectives of this study were to evaluate the effectiveness of crossing structures in Utah to safely pass mule deer under highways and to determine the variables that best explain mule deer passage use. From 2008 - 2011 we used 26 camera traps to measure levels of mule deer use of 9 culverts and 4 bridges in Utah. We tested for relationships between mule deer structure use and a variety of structural and landscape attributes at each site, including 2 time variables: time since the structure was built and time each structure was monitored by our camera traps. We also developed and tested a new equation (window ratio) that measured culvert openness to approaching mule deer. In the single variable regression models, mule deer structure use was positively correlated with short culverts and coarse scale shrub cover, and negatively correlated with fine scale grass cover. In the multivariate model, structure use was positively correlated with days monitored and elevation and short culverts. Although the new window ratio did not emerge as the most important predictor for mule deer crossing use, it was more effective at predicting mule deer culvert use than the often referenced openness factor. Our results indicated that 12 of the 13 crossing structures studied effectively facilitate the movement of mule deer in Utah; however some were used far more than others. We suggest that older crossing structures built with the shortest dimensions possible, with attached wildlife-exclusion fencing, and in shrubby habitat will be most effective at passing a high volume of mule deer under Utah highways.

The X Window System is an industry-standard software system which facilitates programmers to develop portable graphical user interfaces. This thesis describes an image processing tool developed under the X Window System. A multiwindow image display software with image editing and improvement functions is developed. The software has four modules: environment generation, image creation, image editing and image improvement. The environment generation module creates working windows, scrollbars, dialogbox and pulldown menu buttons, and tracks mouse cursor positions. The working windows are three adjacent windows allowing display of three different images simultaneously. The dialogbox provides an interface between the user and the program, such as input new image and parameters. The pulldown menus offer various selections of image processing functions. A pair of scrollbars are also added to allow users to move the magnified image up, down, left and right so that the full picture can be viewed. The image creation module can build colormap, load image data file, convert pixel values to screen color values, create image, and display image on the screen of a workstation. The program can read either sun.rasterfile format or a plain data file. If a plain data file is detected, the software can transform it to sun.rasterfile by adding an appropriate header and a colormap. There are two kinds file saving features: screen capture and store. The screen capture allows the user to save that part of image displayed on the screen. The store function saves the entire image which may be either the screen size or bigger size image (e.g. merged or zoomed image). The image editing module is equipped with the functions for zooming (in or out) , merging, rotating and restoring images. The merge function constructs a new image based on the user selected or input image from the dialogbox. The rotation center of an image can be any point selected by user's clicking mouse button, and the rotation angle is supplied by user in the dialogbox. The image improvement module consists of some image point transformation and image enhancement functions. This software package is easier to use than existing tools for image processing. It has been used in the image processing projects and related educational purposes. The software provides a framework and can be easily extended to other potential applications.

The Will County community supports community policing efforts and wants their law enforcement agencies to be transparent, service-orientated, and committed to their diverse neighborhoods. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore current policing methods and tactics to improve community relationships within Will County, Illinois. Six different focus group studies were completed where 33 participants completed questionnaires and follow-up, in-depth interviews were conducted to gather data on personal police experiences and perceptions. The questionnaire responses were separated into three categories including Likert-scale response questions, dichotomous (yes and no answers), and ranking police tactics by levels of importance. Nine statistically data driven tables were generated into percentage totals that created comparisons of police methods, police tactics, and issues. The main policing tactics that Will County residents expected from their policing agencies were rapid response for service and police professionalism (appearance, conduct, communication skills). The participants expected that police agencies solve major crimes (high-profile murders, assaults, robberies). The lowest ranked police tactics discovered in all 4 subcategories surveyed were aggressive enforcement efforts (even for minor offenses) and traffic enforcement. The participants demonstrated support for community policing efforts that requires law enforcement agencies to work with their neighborhoods. The results of this study can be used to create a policing culture that incorporates traditional policing efforts and combines these efforts with the newer community policing methods that are positively impacting the Will County communities.

The aim of this thesis is to create a port of the Zephyr realtime operating systemfor the LEON processor platform. The LEON is a frequently used computing corefor spaceflight applications, with ample flight heritage. It is based upon the wellestablished SPARC v8 instruction set, and offers many extensions to ease softwaredevelopment and increase overall processor performance. An overview of the nec-essary steps towards a functional architecture port is given in this report. Specialemphasis is put upon the interrupt handling and context switching. One LEONspecific feature introduced with the GR716 LEON3-FT microcontroller, registerwindow partitioning, is used to increase the performance of the context switchingmechanism in the operating system. By using this feature, context switching timehas shown to decrease significantly, while easing verification of the overall softwaresystem by providing dedicated partitions for tasks with hard realtime requirements. / Det övergripande målet med examensarbetet är att porta Zephyr realtidsopera-tivsystem (OS) till LEON processorplattformen. LEON processorn är ursprungligendesignad för och förekommer ofta i datorsystem inom rymd p.g.a. sina feltolerantaegenskaper. LEON är kompatibel med den öppna SPARC v8 instruktionsuppsät-tningen vilken också tillåter utökning och anpassningar. Rapporten ger läsaren enöverblick av vilka steg som är nödvändiga för att skapa en fungerande arkitektur-port av ett OS. Vidare beskriver rapporten mer i detalj designen kring trådväxlingoch avbrottshantering, samt hur dessa anpassas för att utnyttja LEON specifikautökningar av SPARC till att nå högre prestanda. GR716 LEON3-FT introducerarpartitionering av SPARC registerfönster för att kunna minska tiden det tar opera-tivsystemet att växla trådar. Denna funktion har inte använts tidigare i något OS,och är därför av särskilt intresse att studera och karakterisera. Resultaten visar atttrådväxlingstiden minskat signifikant, samtidigt som determinismen blivit bättreoch därigenom är det nu enklare att designa system med hårda realtidskrav.

Ces dernières années le déploiement de réseaux sans fil a changé le paysage des réseaux informatiques. Grâce à l'évolution de la technologie informatique un utilisateur peut étendre son environnement de travail habituel en bénéficiant de la connectivité réseau accrue. La gestion souple de la mobilité lui permet d'accéder à différents environnements de collaboration. Cette thèse considère le problème de partage de l'affichage d'applications dans les conditions de la diversification des contextes de collaboration. Étant donné le déploiement du système de fenêtrage X et du système d'affichage à distance VNC, nous les avons choisi comme base pour notre travail. D'une part, nous avons conçu un système de partage d'applications X qui gagne en flexibilité par son interface du contrôle d'évènements d'entrée. Le système repose sur un multiplexeur de flots X conçu comme un service actif qui peut être chargé dynamiquement sur une plate-forme générique. D'autre part, nous avons transformé le système VNC en un système coopératif flexible. Le nouveau système est construit autour d'un proxy dynamiquement contrôlé à distance. Le proxy peut être programmé pour gérer différentes sessions de collaboration. Chaque session de collaboration peut utiliser des flots de données de VNC multiples. L'ouverture du système vers des politiques de contrôle d'évènements entrée permet l'adaptation au contexte de coopération. Finalement nous présentons des nouvelles perspectives concernant les possibilités de collaboration assistée par la technologie informatique dans un réseau informatique quelconque.