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Students Consumer Behavior on Mobile Phone Market
Tran, Hoai Thu ; Maier, Tomáš (advisor) ; Kuzmenko, Elena (referee)
1. Introduction
In the age of technology today, mobile phone is very important in the business activities. Consumer behavior on mobile phone market in Vietnam has been studied and analyzed for the bachelor thesis entitled Students consumer behavior on mobile phone market with the main objective is student in Vietnam. Understanding mobile phone consumption behavior of the student in Vietnam is very essential.
2. Keywords
Consumer Behavior, Mobile Phone, Vietnam, Student, Mobile Phone Market, Market Research, Smartphone, Technology.
3. Objectives of Thesis
The basic objective of the thesis is to analyze consumer behavior when they decide to buy a mobile phone through identifying and analyzing factors that have influenced mainly to the decision of purchasing a smart phone of selected group that focus on students in Vietnam. The analysis and outcome of the thesis are believable to help cellphone producers in Vietnam market to understand more about their clients and to set up feasible business strategies for increasing business output.
4. Methodology
Theoretical part of the bachelor thesis mostly presents about behavior theory, factors that affects behavior and the decision-making process of customers.
The practical part focuses on the research methods by using quantitative and qualitative research methodology together. By creating an online questionnaire (via social networks) with detailed questions related to the topic of thesis will be conducted and aimed to those who are student at Thang Long University in Vietnam. The data collected from the questionnaire which is filled in by students on the internet will be analyzed and recapitulated to give out objective assessment on consumer behavior to a particular product.
5. Main Findings
The responses of students at Thang Long University to the consumer behavior on mobile phone market questionnaire reveal that:
Information of sample: The questionnaire result indicated that 100% of students had mobile phones. It means that mobile phone is very popular in any social class as well as is very essential in the student life.
Through the survey, student who are living in the city accounted for 76%, is higher than in country side with 24% and the financial condition usually flutuates from 3 million to 4 million Dong, which accounted for 52%. Almost students in Viet Nam have had a part-time jobs to be more self-sufficient and independent on their family. That is why part-time jobs accounted of highest proportion with 54% of the 50 sample studied. The other incomes students come from their family with 26% and 12% is scholarship they received from university).
Mobile phone consumer behavior: Through the study of student consumer behavior on mobile phone market in Vietnam, the main results are shown as the following:
Understanding cognitive demand: The study result indicated that most of students realized the importance of mobile phone in their life. Student uses mobile phone for many different purposes, but almost students use mobile phone to serve works as well as to contact with their friends (89%). Besides, they did make lots of researches before purchasing a mobile phone. In which, the most reliable resources of information are from family, friends, and sellers (44%).
Evaluating plans: When students decided to buy a new mobile phone, they would mostly care about the quality (90%) and the useful on selecting products. Black and white are two basis colors that selected by students (33% and 35% respectively). Student also concerned with long battery life and the good at call quality, which respectively accounted for 64% and 58%.
Decision-making: The student tends to choose of buying a new mobile phone at store with 68% and they can accept to buy them at price from 5-7 million Dong to over 7 million Dong because of high operation as well as the variety applications. It can be seen from the survey that student using the Internet as the main activity, which accounted for 52%. Iphone (Apple) and Samsung are the favorite brands of student when selecting to buy mobile phone.
Post-purchase behavior: Mobile phone markets have launched the beautiful models, diversity designs as well as an important functions have been upgraded leads to change behavior consumer on purchasing phones. The results showed that there was a remarkable amount of student felt normal with their current mobile phone (34%), it means that they might be change a new phone in next time. Students who not satisfied with their mobile phone accounted for 10% because of broken or out of order.
6. Conclusion and the limitation of the study
In conclusion: From the result of study, it could be said that student behavior in purchasing and using a mobile phone was mostly and highly influenced by the technological status of device. The results of this study also help the businesses to understand the consuming behavior of students and have more appropriate marketing strategies to increase the consumption of mobile phones.
The limitation of the study: The study of consumer behavior on purchasing a mobile phone of students in Viet Nam is a long process and requires a lot of analysis. Meanwhile, these mainly methodology of this study is to approach direct interviews by created a survey form online with some questionnaires table and sent them to students who studying in Thang Long University via Internet (Facebook, department page, created group chat) without combination with other methods to better understand all of issues on students consumer behavior. In a reality, people can choose a mobile phone based on many criteria, however, this study just focused on basic criteria which widely has known already.
7. References
Ackroy, S., & Hughes, J. (1981). Data Collection in Context. Long man.
Graves, P. (September 9, 2010). Consumerology: The Market Research Myth, the Truth About Consumers, and the Psychology of Shopping. Nicholas Brealey Publishing.
Kardes, F., Cronley, M., & Cline, T. (n.d.). Consumer Behavior. IBNS:1305161688; 9781305161689: Cengage Learning, 2014.
Kotler, P. (1999). Analyzing Consumer Markets and Buyer Behavior. In Marketing Management: Millennium Edition (10th Edition) (pp. 87-105). Prentice Hall; 10 edition.
Kotler, P. (1999, July 19). Marketing Management: Millennium Edition (10th Edition).
Wayne, D., & Deborah, J. (n.d.). Consumer Behavior. Cengage Learning, 2008.
Chand, S. (2015, November 28). Your Article Library:Consumer behaviour: Meaning/Definition and Nature of Consumer Behaviour: Available at: http://www.yourarticlelibrary.com/marketing/market-segmentation/consumer-behaviour-meaningdefinition-and-nature-of-consumer-behaviour/32301/
Perreau, F. (2015, December 25). The consumer factor: The 5 stages of Consumer Buying Decision ProcessThe Consumer Factor: Available at: http://theconsumerfactor.com/en/5-stages-consumer-buying-decision-process/
Publications, S. O. (2014, May 14). Sai Om Publications:CONSUMER BEHAVIOUR MODELS: AN OVERVIEW: Available at: http://www.saiompublications.com/journal/index.php/ISSN-2347-7563/article/viewFile/163/pdf_24
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Foreign Trade of China
Hoang, Thi Ngoc Thanh ; Maier, Tomáš (advisor) ; Kuzmenko, Elena (referee)
1 Introduction
This research divided into two parts: Literature Review and Practical Part.
The Literature Review is written based on literature on International Trade. This part introduces the main theories and a brief history of Foreign Trade and a brief history of International Trade in the world context.
To begin with, the author explained the Absolute Advantage theory from Adam Smith; the father of the Classical Trade Theory, Comparative Advantage by Ricardo and Heckscher Ohlin theory.
This research also used qualitative and quantitative method approach the practical part with the purpose to find out how important the Foreign Trade effect is to Chinas economy.
2 Keywords
China, Asia, foreign trade, economy growth, international trade
3 Objectives of this thesis
The basic objectives of this thesis is to analyze the foreign trade of China based on the impacts of imports and exports and other indicators. It can be studied via domestic products and free trade agreement made between China and its trading partners. These factors are believed to have explanatory power for China's foreign trade.
4 Methodology
For this thesis methodology, there will be data collected and after that analysed from the source information mainly from the Internet via search engine such as scholarly articles, journals, books from Vietnamese authors and others, trade documents, reports, and several other online academic sources.
This research was also based on quantitative method approach by collecting data from Bureau Statistics of China from 1978 to 2013, there are 27 observations, the unit is 100 million yuan. The main reason to analyse the China growth rate based on the relationship between GDP and Exports-Imports. The GDP and Linear Regression models were created as follow:
Y = a + b*x (1)
Where:
Y: Dependent variable as GDP
X: Independent variable as growth rate (X-M)
a: constant
b: parameter of received growth rate
The model was verified by compared the p-values with significant level alpha = 0.05 to identify the relationship between GDP and China growth rate (X-M).
5 Main Findings
My aim of this thesis is to have the overview about Foreign Trade of China. The reform process can be divided into the following main stages:
1979-1987 Period (period of exploration and trial)
1988-1990 Period (period of transition toward reform in depth)
1991-2001 Period
Over the past 38 years of reform, the Chinese nation experienced many ups and downs, changes; China's economy not only faced difficulties and challenges but also achieved a lot of achievements. That miraculous development of China was due to great efforts of the Chinese people in the cause of building the country with the target of bringing China to gradually integrate with the world economy and gradually become a strong economic power. In the coming years, China will still continue to grow, the economy will be increasingly integrated, becoming an important part of the world economy.
In the practical part, I used the Linear Regression with the help of SAS 7.1 to compute the relationship between GDP and exports-imports, after computing, I got the result as follow: if the GDP increase by 100,000,000 yuan, so that the (X-M) will increase by 2,030,000,000 yuan. For the statistical verification, we compare the p-value with significant level of 5% (alpha = 0.05). In this case, the p-value of (X-M) was 0.0001 lower than 0.05. From the result, the author rejected the hypothesis, and the GDP growth depends on (X-M). In another way the author can say it was statistically significant.
6 Conclusion
After 38 years of reform and opening up, it can be said that China has achieved great successes in economic development, especially foreign trade development. From a country with stagnant and undeveloped foreign trade, China now is a current foreign trade country with powers ranked the 5th largest in the world and, more importantly, in the future, Chinese position in international trade will be enhanced increasingly.
In past years, thanks to China had proper policies and methods were suitable for the foreign trade development so that it achieved such successes such as high achievements as follows:
It can be said that on the way to opening up and reform of foreign trade, China was not necessarily to always get success and achieve many accomplishments. Sometimes, China also faced the mistakes as results of until now it was also not necessarily to achieve as expected. It still existed with a number of problems to continue to be overcome, such as improving the quality of exported goods and foreign trade performance, issues of regional disparities etc.
Through the study of the development experience of Chinese foreign trade, can be realize the State's role in policy-making and overall macroeconomic method-making were very important for Foreign Trade. Moreover, the Chinese government was very flexible in creating and implementing policies although China is a developing country. In fact, China makes foreign trade reform with cautious and solid steps.
7 Reference
Brown Consultancy Service, Theory of International Trade, Brown Consultant
The Silkroad project, The Silkroad and related trade routes
Robert C. Feenstra, Alan M. Taylor, International Trade
Brown Consultancy Service, Theory of International Trade
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nation
Application of strategic mangement, Theory of Absolute Advantage
Charles W. L. Hill, International Business
Swedish economist who wrote his view about International Trade in 1919
Pham Thai Quoc, Chinese process of industrialization in the last 20 years of the twentieth century
Nguyen The Tang, The process of opening the foreign affairs of Republic of China
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Agrarian foreign trade of the Czech Republic
Kodatová, Martina ; Smutka, Luboš (advisor) ; Leopold, Leopold (referee)
This thesis has been developed with the intention to get acquaint with the development of agrarian foreign trade of the Czech Republic. The analytical part is based on theoretical knowledge included scientific literature and expert articles and together with the theoretical part describes the development of agrarian foreign trade of the Czech Republic from the year when Czech republic became a member of the EU to the present.
Finally, the thesis includes a description of the structure of Czech agricultural foreign trade, both territorial and commodity, with the aim of defining the most significant innovations and most promising territories and commodity items, in terms of current and future. Research is processed summary data regarding the identification of changes in the development values, competitiveness, added value and unit prices in the period. Within the statistical analysis is then processed data and the conclusion, the results of the analysis are summarized.
In the reporting period shows a majority of value development and partial characteristics of agrarian foreign trade of Czech Republic upward trend despite the fact that Europe is facing and struggling with economic or business crises. Balance of agricultural foreign trade for 2015 is 18,382 miles. CZK, which means that it is more oriented on imports. However, the degree of coverage of imports by exports is moving at 90.7%, which is 30% more than in the year of Czech Republic's entry into the EU.
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Safety and health protection during work
Brejchová, Pavla ; Hájková, Ivana (advisor) ; Pikola, Pavel (referee)
Summary Anglický překlad českého souhrnu This Bachelor thesis is focused on safety and health protection during work. In the introduction there is described the historical development and current concept of safety and health protection. A substantial part is dedicated to selected legislation in partial wording, government regulation and European Union directives, which are for the Czech Republic legally binding. Further there are analysed rights and responsibilities of employees and employers. This work is focused on how to achieve a safe workplace with the lowest accident rate. All pieces of information and knowledge are based on literature, expert articles and credible online source regarding work safety and health protection. The practical part describes the company and its internal legislation governing work safety and health protection. It is further focused on accidents at work and assessment of the riskiest professions in the company. In the end, on the basis of facts, there are proposed recommendations in terms of person eligible for risk prevention to improve the state discovered.
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The effect of environment on the behaviour of sheeps
Chválovská, Lucie ; Chaloupková, Helena (advisor) ; Valníčková, Barbora (referee)
This bachelor's thesis aims to compare the existing technologies and systems and to find a suitable stabling environment for sheep breeding in terms of their welfare and behavioural needs, and to put forward suggestions of how stabling might be enhanced. The bachelor's thesis was prepared based on research of specialist literature and articles.
At present, a good deal of emphasis is placed on animal welfare, which is governed by animal protection and welfare legislation. The research discussed points, in positive terms, towards group stabling, where sheep are more active and sleep less than those housed in individual stalls. Furthermore, in order to secure sheep welfare, the composition of the flock needs to be considered. The sheep should be of approximately the same age, weight, gender and horn size. The negative aspects include slippery floors putting the safety of the sheep at risk and result in more frequent limb injuries; however, wooden plank flooring with wide gaps also proves to be hazardous. This suggests that the floor should be dry, made of rubber or covered with bedding. The planks should be placed so as to prevent sheep from getting a limb caught in between the planks.
At present, enriching the surrounding environment not only of livestock is a suitable solution to increasing the quality of life. Research shows that, in comparison to conventional surroundings, the effects of enriched surroundings on the physiological and behavioural responses of sheep are positive. For example, the results of studies indicate that, in grazing, sheep prefer more varied pastures. These increase their motivation to graze, thereby boosting their intake of feed and positively reflecting in their production. The thesis shows that the breeding systems that do not take into account the behavioural needs of sheep cannot maximalise the efficiency of breeding in terms of performance or labour and financial intensiveness. New technologies ensure the animals' comfort while continuously increasing the performance of sheep. Selecting stabling options directed at animal welfare is an important requisite to which any breeder should pay the utmost attention.
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Recovering of Company's Website
Lang, Michal ; Lohr, Václav (advisor) ; Martin, Martin (referee)
Summary
Small business operating in villages usually face the problem of lack of customers,
especially if they offer luxury products. The budget of such companies is often limited
and therefore they cannot afford an expensive advertising. The company website is one of the few
solutions that can get customers from outside the rural areas and thus create new business
opportunities and increase revenues of such companies. The main goal of the thesis is to attract
customers to a company website and thus help small businesses seeking customers in their difficult
situation. The theoretical part starts with the basics. It describes what systems are suitable for
different kind of web pages and the main part is focused on factors that influence an overall website
performance.
The second part shows how to achieve the stated goal on an example of a small joinery
company Atyp truhlářství Lang. The company is present on the Internet since April, 2009. The
work with a real website allows to compare results before and after the changes implementation.
The practical part starts with an analysis of the original website. It determines strengths and
weaknesses of the web and it provides suggestions for improvement. After this, the academic work
deals with the implementation of suitable factors. The final chapter evaluates the original and new
version of the site and represents how the made changes are reflected in the site traffic.
Keywords
Website design, SEO, on-page factors, off-page factors, CMS, Content Management
Systems, increase site traffic
Objectives and Methodology
The main objective of diploma thesis is to increase the website traffic, its attractiveness for
customers and thus help small companies located in rural areas to get new clients. The first part
helps to achieve the stated goal by dealing with aspects influencing the overall web page
performance and also provide basic knowledge related to the website design. Consequently, the
sub-objective of this part is an identification of factors that significantly affect the site traffic. The
second part aims to apply the gained knowledge on an example web page of small company Atyp
truhlářství which faces a problem of a lack of customers. It starts with the analysis of the original
website that shows its strangeness and weaknesses. This will provide an information about possible
improvements. The part of authors own work aims to implement suitable factors from the
theoretical part into the website design. The objective of the final part is to compare the changes
made with the original design and determine if the new site solution has really improved the number
of visits and its attractiveness for customer.
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The essential information for the masters thesis elaboration were obtained from an analysis
of printed sources as professional books, journals, annual reports and online resources as well.
Statistical data reflecting the original website traffic were extracted from MySQL database. The
new data about number of visitors were already get in friendlier form of Google Analytics outputs.
In addition to that, author also discussed his academic work with website experts and used his own
knowledge acquired during the university studies of information technology.
Results and Conclusion
The website overall performance is greatly influenced by the system on which it operates.
For this reason, the literature review provides an overview about Content Management Systems
and Static Site Generators. There are explained differences between these two approaches to a website design and are given recommendations about what kind of pages are suitable for each
approach. The main part identifies 30 on-page and off-page factors that have a positive or negative
impact on the final website traffic.
The practical part consists an analysis of the examined site. It discovered the following
weaknesses. The positioning is very bad in Search Engine Result Page and it is almost impossible
to find the web without an exact knowledge of the company name or its location. Content can be
considered as extremely poor with overall 279 words only. There were also two technical issues.
The first caused a traffic data loss for the last five years due to exceeding 50MB of MySQL memory
limit. The second was related to plugins deployment that used up the whole PHP memory limit. It
resulted in WordPress strong unstability. The website speed test was disastrous. The small page
size of 762,52kB was loaded for 4,38 seconds. An acceptable result would be less than 2 seconds.
Concerning security, the site did not use secured protocol and the next risk could pose deployed
plugins that are frequent targets of hacker attacks. The used template was not mobile-friendly and
therefore it was difficult to browse the pages on mobile device. In addition to that the graphical
appearance had a low attracting power, it was not able to adequately impress the customers. The
site was visited by an average of 25 people a day in 2011. Furthermore, only 63% of visitors come
from the Czech Republic. Unfortunately, more actual data could not be obtained because of the
data loss. After considering of all mentioned issues above was proposed a complete website
recovery with an implementation of suitable factors from literature review.
The examined website is extremely static without a dynamic content and the frequency of
updates is relatively low. The web pages are managed by a technical contributor and it is the reason
why graphical user interface of CMS is not required. After evaluation of all previous technical,
speed and security issues was selected a static site generator for the website design.
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The important chapter is represented by implementation of suitable factors that should as a complex lead to an increase of a site traffic. First important factor is a content. The original word
count of 279 words was improved to 1809 words which is 7 times more than in the past. Before
writing the articles, an analysis of relevant terms were made. Those terms are included across the
web content. The new articles are meaningful and they provide product details and customer
reviews. Moreover, the content is structured, there are 9 unordered lists included and main titles
are differentiated by importance. Each page has internal links to other subpages. The text clarity
and an inclusion of relevant terms are equal to a better rank of a page. The number of images has
decreased from 112 original images to selected 42 images on the new website. This is because of
a very bad image quality of most old pictures. The high quality images can cause customer interest
for the product, higher time on site and lower bounce rate. Meta descriptions were implemented
individually for each web page with regard to the page content. The new website was accepted by
a certification authority (CA) and the unsecured Hypertext Transfer Protocol was replaced by
Secured Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTPS). It means the site is trustable and secure for
browsing. There are no plugins used and therefore an attack risk is much lower. The template was
tested on 17 screen resolutions. All tests were successful and the site is fully responsive. Almost
33% of customers use some mobile device to browse a web. The current web eliminates the loss
of visitors coming from mobile devices. Furthermore, Google officially announced that secured
and responsive websites get priority. The site speed test had two rounds. The first test can be
considered as very good. The page load time was 842ms and overall page size was 1.1.MB.
Nevertheless, after the compression of large files the site became even faster. The page size
decreased by 30% to 771,6kB and the final load time speed up by 31% to 580ms. Currently, the
website is faster than 96% of all tested domains which is a perfect score. The adjusted site speed is
7,5 times faster than the original speed. No flash, advertisement or other disruptive elements are
available on the web. The web page is newly available on Google+, Pinterest and Twitter. These
factors are able to boost direct page traffic. The design is clean and simple just to avoid leaving
customers confused. The readability is also very good. Combination of black/blue text on the white
background or white text on the black/blue background doesnt cause any readability issues. Social
buttons and a quick company contact is present on each page in header and footer section. Another
change was made in traffic measurement. The website started to use Google Analytics for tracking
visitors. The actual traffic data are more accurate and the possibility of data loss is reduced.
The main goal of diploma thesis was to improve the website traffic. The web page was
measured from 01.12.2015 to 29.02.2016. The average site traffic was 23,0 visits a day in
December 2015. This number reflects the original site traffic which was around 25 visits a day with
a decrease of 8%. The biggest change in traffic development was found between 08.01.2016 to
13.01.2016 when the average site traffic was 77,2 visits a day. Those changes are explained by an
influence of social media. Author has written a post about Atyp truhlářství on Facebook on 8th
January 2016. The post was shared by 8 people and it attracted many people to visit the website.
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From January 14th to the end of the month, the average daily traffic was 32,3 visits. The last month
was noted slightly higher traffic of 32,6 visits a day. The comparison of data from December 2015
and from February 2016 shows a visible increase in number of visits in February 2016 where the
traffic was higher by 41,7%. There is a positive increasing trend in a number of visits since the
beginning of December 2015. Moreover, majority of visitors 81,3% come from the Czech Republic
and it is a better result than by the original web pages with 62% only.
The recovery of a small joinery website atyptruhlarstvi.cz was successful. It improved the
website traffic and many other aspects as content, speed, security, responsiveness, social media etc.
The web design itself and implemented factors can be considered as crucial elements that influence
the final number of visits. For this reason, the made changes on a web page can really help small
business in rural areas to get new customers. There were also identified factors that affect an overall
website performance with an emphasis on a positive site traffic development. An overview about
different website design approaches is provided as well.
References
SEARCHMETRICS. Search Ranking Factors and Rank Correlations: Understand how the deck
is stacked [online]. San Mateo, 2015. Accessible from: http://www.searchmetrics.com/wpcontent/uploads/Ranking-Factors-2015-Whitepaper-US.pdf
COSTELLO, Vic, Susan A YOUNGBLOOD a Norman YOUNGBLOOD.Multimedia
foundations: core concepts for digital design. New York: Focal press, Taylor & Francis
group, 2013. ISBN 978-0-240-81394-3.
FIELDING, Jonathan. Beginning responsive web design with HTML5 and CSS3 / Jonathan
Fielding. New York, New York: Apress, 2014. Experts voice in Web development. ISBN
9781430266945.
MITCHELL, Melanie. Standing out with Seo: Expert advice from Melanie Mitchell (collection).
United States: FT Press, 2013. ISBN 978-0-13-344320-2.
BROWN, Bruce C. How to build your own web site with little or no money: the complete guide
for business and personal use. Ocala, Fla.: Atlantic Pub. Group, c2010. ISBN 1601383045.
ELMANSY, Rafiq. Search engine optimization. Indianapolis, IN: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2013.
Teach yourself visually. ISBN 1118470664.
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Competition policy of the European Union and climate and energy package
Vondrušková, Barbora ; Němcová, Ingeborg (advisor) ; Vošta, Milan (referee) ; Knápek, Jaroslav (referee) ; Zámyslický, Pavel (referee)
The focus of the dissertation is based on the previous research of a relatively new field of environmental governance posed by climate change policy. The implementation of the climate change policy in Europe is then a subject to the discussion over the consistency of that policy with one of the fundamental goals of European integration. That goal is building an internal market as well as ensuring fair competition in such a market. The interaction of these two areas is a key objective of this research work. Given the complexity of the topic, the dissertation, for sake of clarity, is defined more narrowly. On one hand, the thesis provides with an analysis of European climate policy and its main instruments for regulating carbon emissions in the European economy - the European Union emission trading system (EU ETS). On the other hand, the thesis also provides with a description of the European competition policy. The reason is, as mentioned above, that the competition policy is a fundamental policy that guarantees the consistency of the implementation of environmental policies with the building of the internal market. The author analysed in the thesis basic measures implemented within the framework of those with the aim to prove out whether both policies are in mutual accord and whether they do function under the real terms. Based on the results achieved, the author can make following conclusions: The EU ETS mechanism decided for the European Union proved out to be a cost-efficient choice of emission reduction, despite of some temporary weakness that it has. Also, it can be concluded, that the allocation method is the ultimate criterion that determines both the efficiency of the climate action in Europe as well as its compliance with the competition policy. Stemming from that conclusion, there has been some strong evidence given that grandfathering has not been always in line with the state aid rules existing now in the environment protection. Last but not least, the optional use of the Article 10c of the Directive 2003/87/EC seems to be, from what one can say now, fully in line with the state aid rules valid in the European Union. However, further research in this field might be of very use in the future.
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Institutions of the EU - development, transformation, difficulty
Pavlík, Jaroslav ; Jeníček, Vladimír (advisor) ; Tunkrová, Věra (referee)
This diploma thesis seeks to summarize the institutional development taken by the European Union so far (with a particular view to the changes brought about by the Treaty of Lisbon), and, based on this, to provide an assessment of the direction into which the European Union is headed at the beginning of this decade. Within this context, my thesis attempts to outline the various alternative scenarios for the future development of the EU's institutional framework; the likely candidates, to put it simply, are, on the one hand, even deeper integration in the form of a fiscal and political union, or, conversely, the abandonment of the idea of closer cooperation. Since the beginnings of the 1950s, the European Communities and, later, the European Union have been developing towards ever-increasing integration. Even today, one observes obvious tendencies towards intensifying this integration. However, this does not allow for the unambiguous conclusion that the European Union must result in the creation of a fiscal and political union. It is perfectly conceivable that the elected political representatives of individual member states may assume the opposite view, and that tendencies will prevail within the European Union towards a more informal collaboration among separate countries. The present work also attempts a comparison of the views held by politicians, political scientists, analysts, and intellectuals. One finds that even these authors do not arrive at clear-cut conclusions, nor should one expect them to be able to make such conclusions. This thesis draws attention to a number of contradictory aspects - chiefly among them the violation of the Maastricht criteria, and the obvious breach of Article 125 of the Treaty of Lisbon, which prohibits mutual financial assistance.
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Future of disk arrays in SSD era
Sládek, Petr ; Koubský, Petr (advisor) ; Vojta, Tomáš (referee)
The thesis aims at verification of using emerging Solid-State drives in disk arrays. The advent of SSD disks caused a small revolution in area of data storage, because the growth performance of hard drives has been slow compared to other PC components. But an entirely different principle of operation could mean compatibility problems between SSD and related technologies, such as RAID. This thesis aims at analyzing all the relevant technologies, mainly HDD, SSD and RAID. To achieve this objective, information from literature, articles and other appropriate sources will be used. Other objectives of this thesis are to determine how much are the SSDs suitable for use in the disk array, because low performance RAID controllers or different principles of operation could limit their efficiency. This question should be answered by submission of selected types of storage arrays to synthetic and practical tests of performance. The final goal is to use financial analysis of the test solutions as a shared file storage. Today, remote access to data is used by a wide range of job positions. Slow storage could mean inefficient use of working time and therefore unnecessary financial costs. The goal of my work is primarily to provide answers to the questions mentioned above. Currently it is very hard to find tests of more complex forms of disk arrays based on solid-state drives. This article can be also very useful for companies where fileservers are used to share user data. Based on the result of cost analysis, the company can then decide what type of storage is best for its purpose.
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Consistency Checking of Relations Extracted from Text
Stejskal, Jakub ; Otrusina, Lubomír (referee) ; Smrž, Pavel (advisor)
This bachelor thesis is dedicated to mechanical techniques that are used in the natural language processing and information extraction from particular text. It is approaching the general methods that starting to process the raw text and it continues to the relations extraction from processed language constructs, moreover it provides options for the use of obtained relational data which can be seen for example in the project DBpedia. Another milestone of the described bachelor thesis is the design and implementation of an automated system for extracting information about entities, which do not have their own article on the English version of Wikipedia. Thesis also presents algorithms developed for the extraction of entities with their own name, the verification of the articles ‘existence of the extracted entities and finally the actual extraction of information about individual entities, which can be used during the information consistency checking. In the end, it can be seen the results and suggestions for further development of the created system.
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