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The Effects of the New Deal on the social status of Afro-Americans in selected sectors of the US economy
Schwammenhöfer, Tomáš ; Tajovský, Ladislav (advisor) ; Johnson, Zdenka (referee)
This bachelor thesis deals with the effects of the New Deal legislation on Afro-Americans in the 1930s. Specifically, the thesis analytically focuses on the influence of various politician of this program on their social environment within the US economy. For the ease of understanding of whole issue is needed to know the situation of Afro-Americans in the previous decade as well as in the Great Depression. That is the content of the first two chapters. Subsequently there is the outline of the situation leading to the election of F. D. Roosevelt, US President. The last and as well the most important chapter of the whole thesis is devoted to analysis of individual programs and their impact on Afro-Americans. It concludes that the New Deal had both positive and negative influence on this minority, depending on the economic sector and the relevant administration. New Deal generally meant a huge progress in their economic and political affairs.
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The effect of investment in tertiary education on gross wages in the region Prague
Diessner, Daniel ; Chytil, Zdeněk (advisor) ; Babin, Jan (referee)
The aim of this work is to determine whether and how higher education affects gross wages. The theoretical part focuses on the theory of human capital, especially investment in education. The theory posits that a higher investment in human capital leads to higher yield, higher wages. The validity of this concept will be tested on the group of respondents who entered the labour market at the turn of millennium. Concentration of candidates with tertiary education in this period has risen considerably, which could cause an imbalance in the labour market. The practical part is based on the work of Mincer (1974). I used Mincer Earnings Function as a basis to build regression model. Partial aim is to prove the declining rate of return on investment in tertiary education using Mincer Equation.
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Use of Interest Rate Models for Interest Rate Risk Management in the Czech Financial Market Environment
Cíchová Králová, Dana ; Arlt, Josef (advisor) ; Cipra, Tomáš (referee) ; Witzany, Jiří (referee)
The main goal of this thesis is to suggest an appropriate approach to interest rate risk modeling in the Czech financial market environment in various situations. Three distinct periods are analyzed. These periods, which are the period before the global financial crisis, period during the financial crisis and in the aftermath of the global financial crisis and calming subsequent debt crisis in the eurozone, are characterized by different evaluation of liquidity and credit risk, different relationship between financial variables and market participants and different degree of market regulations. Within this goal, an application of the BGM model in the Czech financial market environment is crucial. Use of the BGM model for the purpose of predicting a dynamics of a yield curve is not very common. This is firstly due to the fact that primary use of this model is a valuation of interest rate derivatives while ensuring the absence of arbitrage and secondly its application is relatively difficult. Nevertheless, I apply the BGM model to obtain predictions of the probability distributions of interest rates in the Czech and eurozone market environment, because its complexity, direct modeling of a yield curve based on market rates and especially a possibility of parameter estimation based on current swaptions volatilities quotations may lead to a significant improvement of predictions. This improvement was also confirmed in this thesis. Use of swaptions volatilities market quotations is especially useful in the period of unprecedented mone- tary easing and increased number of central banks and other regulators interventions into financial markets that occur after the financial crisis, because it reflects current market expectations which also include future interventions. As a consequence of underdevelopment of the Czech financial market there are no market quotations of Czech koruna denominated swaptions volatilities. I suggest their approximations based on quotations of euro denominated swaptions volatilities and also using volatilities of koruna and euro forward rates. Use of this approach ensures that predictions of the Czech yield curve dynamics contain current market expectations. To my knowledge, any other author has not presented similar application of the BGM model in the Czech financial market environment. In this thesis I further predict a Czech and Euro area money market yield curve dynamics using the CIR and the GP models as representatives of various types of interest rates models to compare these predictions with BGM predictions. I suggest a comprehensive system of three criteria, based on comparison of predicti- ons with reality, to describe a predictive power of selected models and an appropria- teness of their use in the Czech market environment during different situations in the market. This analysis shows that predictions of the Czech money market yield curve dynamics based on the BGM model demonstrate high predictive power and the best 8 quality in comparison with other models. GP model also produces relatively good qua- lity predictions. Conversely, predictions based on the CIR model as a representative of short rate model family completely failed when describing reality. In a situation when the economy allows negative rates and there is simultaneously a significant likelihood of their implementation, I recommend to obtain predictions of Czech money market yield curve dynamics using GP model which allows existence of negative interest rates. This analysis also contains a statistical test for validating the predictive power of each model and information on other tests. Berkowitz test rejects a hypothesis of accurate predictions for each model. However, this fact is common in real data testing even when using relatively good model. This fact is especially caused by difficult fulfilment of test conditions in real world. To my knowledge, such an analysis of the predictive power of selected interest rate models moreover in the Czech financial market environment has not been published yet. The last goal of this thesis is to suggest an appropriate approach to obtaining pre- dictions of Czech government bonds risk premium dynamics. I define this risk premium as a difference between government bond yields and fixed rate of CZK IRS with the same length. I apply the GP model to describe the dynamics of this indicator of the Czech Republic credit risk. In order to obtain a time series of the risk premium which are necessary for estimation of GP model parameters I firstly estimate yield curves of Czech government bonds using Svensson model for each trading day since 2005. Resulting si- mulations of risk premium show that the GP model predicts the real development of risk premiums of all maturities relatively well. Hence, the proposed approach is suitable for modeling of Czech Republic credit risk based on the use of information extracted from financial markets. I have not registered proposed approach to risk premium modeling moreover in the Czech financial market environment in other publications.
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Výběr a implementace open source nástroje pro řízení portfolia projektů
Marek, Jan ; Chlapek, Dušan (advisor) ; Kučera, Jan (referee)
Methods and ways of implementation of changes and innovations in companies through project management are in today's society very well established. There exists methodologies, techniques and tools for the management of individual projects. However in a role of project manager, I very often faced the fact that companies are performing the project portfolio management in very intuitive way. This in itself leads to failed and prematurely terminated projects, initiation of the wrong projects or realisation of correct projects, but at the wrong time. Very often I have also recognized, that there is lack of awareness of fact, that there are also Open Source applications that can help with the organization's portfolio. This thesis deals with the definition of requirements, search and selection of proper OSS application and subsequent implementation. In the first part of this thesis I prepare a theoretical framework about PPM, and on that basis then identify and verify a set of requirements for selection of right OSS PPM application. The next section of thesis describes searching for suitable applications from a variety of sources, assessment against the requirements and the final selection. In the last part the implementation project is drafted, which aims to serve other colleagues in project management as one of the possible implementation paths. The outputs are then continuously confronted with experts in matter of projects and project management in the field of IT in order to maximize symbiosis between theory and real life experiences. Virtually every project management methodology defines the collection of already-proven techniques, best practices or lessons learned from the previous similar implementations. The main contribution of this thesis I see in fact that it contains not only the design of the project implementation, but also describes a logical path, what leads to the result. Therefore this thesis could be used as a base or discussed best practice, when a project of implementation of PPM application in place.
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ELECTRON BEAM REMELTING OF PLASMA SPRAYED ALUMINA COATINGS
Matějíček, Jiří ; Veverka, J. ; Čížek, J. ; Kouřil, J.
Plasma sprayed alumina coatings find numerous applications in various fields, where they enhance the properties of the base material. Examples include thermal barriers, wear resistance, electrical insulation, and diffusion and corrosion barriers. A typical structure of plasma sprayed coatings, containing a multitude of voids and imperfectly bonded interfaces, gives them unique properties - particularly low thermal conductivity, high strain tolerance, etc. However, for certain applications such as permeation barriers or wear resistance, these voids may be detrimental.\nThis paper reports on the first experiments with remelting of plasma sprayed alumina coatings by electron beam technology, with the purpose of densifying the coatings and thereby eliminating the voids. Throughout the study, several parameters of the e-beam device were varied - beam current, traverse velocity and number of passes. The treated coatings were observed by light and electron microscopy and the thickness, structure and surface morphology of the remelted layer were determined and correlated with the process parameters. Based on the first series of experiments, the e-beam settings leading to dense and smooth remelted layer of sufficient thickness were obtained. In this layer, a change of phase composition and a marked increase in hardness were observed.\n
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Modelling, parameter estimation, optimisation and control of transport and reaction processes in bioreactors.
ŠTUMBAUER, Václav
With the significant potential of microalgae as a major biofuel source of the future, a considerable scientific attention is attracted towards the field of biotechnology and bioprocess engineering. Nevertheless the current photobioreactor (PBR) design methods are still too empirical. With this work I would like to promote the idea of designing a production system, such as a PBR, completely \emph{in silico}, thus allowing for the in silico optimization and optimal control determination. The thesis deals with the PBR modeling and simulation. It addresses two crucial issues in the current state-of-the-art PBR modeling. The first issue relevant to the deficiency of the currently available models - the incorrect or insufficient treatment of either the transport process modeling, the reaction modeling or the coupling between these two models. A correct treatment of both the transport and the reaction phenomena is proposed in the thesis - in the form of a unified modeling framework consisting of three interconnected parts - (i) the state system, (ii) the fluid-dynamic model and (iii) optimal control determination. The proposed model structure allows prediction of the PBR performance with respect to the modelled PBR size, geometry, operating conditions or a particular microalgae strain. The proposed unified modeling approach is applied to the case of the Couette-Taylor photobioreactor (CTBR) where it is used for the optimal control solution. The PBR represents a complex multiscale problem and especially in the case of the production scale systems, the associated computational costs are paramount. This is the second crucial issue addressed in the thesis. With respect to the computational complexity, the fluid dynamics simulation is the most costly part of the PBR simulation. To model the fluid flow with the classical CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) methods inside a production scale PBR leads to an enormous grid size. This usually requires a parallel implementation of the solver but in the parallelization of the classical methods lies another relevant issue - that of the amount of data the individual nodes must interchange with each other. The thesis addresses the performance relevant issues by proposing and evaluation alternative approaches to the fluid flow simulation. These approaches are more suitable to the parallel implementation than the classical methods because of their rather local character in comparison to the classical methods - namely the Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM) for fluid flow, which is the primary focus of the thesis in this regard and alternatively also the discrete random walk based method (DRW). As the outcome of the thesis I have developed and validated a new Lagrangian general modeling approach to the transport and reaction processes in PBR - a framework based on the Lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) and the model of the Photosynthetic Factory (PSF) that models correctly the transport and reaction processes and their coupling. Further I have implemented a software prototype based on the proposed modeling approach and validated this prototype on the case of the Coutte-Taylor PBR. I have also demonstrated that the modeling approach has a significant potential from the computational costs point of view by implementing and validating the software prototype on the parallel architecture of CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture). The current parallel implementation is approximately 20 times faster than the unparallized one and decreases thus significantly the iteration cycle of the PBR design process.
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Comparison of Atmospheric Aerosol Volatility at a Suburban and Rural Measurement Site.
Kubelová, Lucie ; Vodička, Petr ; Schwarz, Jaroslav ; Makeš, Otakar ; Ždímal, Vladimír
One of the most important characteristics of atmospheric aerosols is their volatility. Volatility affects the formation, life time, and removal of aerosol particles (Huffman et al., 2009). Accurate description of volatility of atmospheric aerosols can lead to a better identification of their sources and it is also crucial for models incorporating condensation and aging of aerosols. However, there is still a lack of knowledge regarding aerosol properties such as volatility especially in case of organic aerosols. To increase our understanding of aerosols volatility, we have performed summer (21.8.-2.10.2012; 17.6.-18.8.2014) and winter (19.2.-28.5.2013; 9.1.-13.3.2014) measurement campaigns with a thermodenuder at a suburban site in Prague Suchdol and at a rural site Košetice, respectively.
Fulltext: content.csg -  PDF
Plný tet: SKMBT_C22016102412230 - PDF
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Freezing technology of bull sperm in relation to its survivability and fertilization ability
Doležalová, Martina ; Stádník, Luděk (advisor) ; Jiří, Jiří (referee)
The aim of optimalization the insemination doses production is to provide the highest fertilization ability of spermatozoa during the demanding proces of processing fresh semen and its subsequent cryopreservation. Temperature changes causes spermatozoa damage during the cooling and freezing. Spermatozoa is exposed to cold shock and many others limiting factors, which leads to cell death and therefore to decline of fertilization ability of thawed insemination doses. For increasing spermatozoa resistance, exactly the plasma membrane resistance against cold shock was fraction of egg yolk LDL cholesterol (low density lipoprotein) at various concentrations into the comercially produced diluents added. It is believed that LDL acts possitively to plasma membrane and helps to maintain the fertilization ability of spermatozoa after thawing. Following step in the proces of insemination doses production is slow cooling of diluted semen and equilibration, when the straws are store at cooling box for 30 minutes to 240 hours. This period is necessary to penetrate of certain diluent components into the spermatazoa also maintain the balance between their intracellular and extracellular concentration. Also important is subsequent freezing temperature gradient of insemination doses. The most suitable freezing method is based on computer controlled temperature decline in freezing chamber which allows the precise control of ice crystals formation that could tear and kill the cell.
During 2012 to 2016 was repeatedly collected semen from the group of breeding bulls (n = 27, Holstein and Czech Fleckvieh breed) at AI centre. Semen which fulfill the standard entrance conditions in first step was evenly into several parts divided. For dilution the three types of comercially diluents AndroMed, Bioxcell and Triladyl with and without LDL addition were used. Into the diluents AndroMed and Bioxcell the concentration of LDL 4 %, 6 % and 8% into the dilent Triladyl 6 %, 8 % and 10 % was added. Diluted semen was filled into the glass capillares with volume 0,1 ml and temperature +4 °C. Subsequently the sample was placed to cold bath (0°C) for 10 minutes. Then the volume of capillare with physiological solution (37 °C) was mixed and for next 120 minutes was incubate. The effect of cold shock to proportion of live spermatozoa was evaluated by using Eosin and Nigrosine staining technique during heat test of spermatozoa survivability after spermatozoa heating and after 120 minutes of incubation.
The more suitable semen diluents which provide the higher spermatozoa resistance against cold shock were AndroMed and Bioxcell. Together the possitive effect of LDL addition into the diluents to lower decrease of proportion of live spermatozoa during heat test was found (P<0.05). The most suitable LDL concentration which had a favorable influence at spermatozoa resistance against cold shock was 6 % in diluent Bioxcell. Values of the proportion of live sperm were higher at the beginning of the heat test (+1.31% to + 3.2%) and after 120 minute incubation (+5.82% to +8.41%) compared to other diluents with and without addition of LDL.
In the next step the process of equilibration was optimized, is an important part of insemination doses production. The effect of the length of equilibration for subsequent fertilization ability of spermatozoa was evaluated using spermatozoa motility based of CASA and proportion of live spermatozoa after thawing and during heat survival test lasting 120 minutes (37 ° C). Suitable semen was diluted by comercially used diluent AndroMed based on soya lecithin, filled into the straws (0.25 ml), cooled and equilibrated in cooling box for 30, 120 and 240 minutes and freezed in programmable freezing box applying four types of freezing curves differing in temperature rate decline. There was used standard and by producer recommended 3. phase freezing curve, then 2. phase freezing curve, and 3. phase freezing curve with slower as well as rapid decline of temperature rate in freezing chamber, compared with standard freezing curve. The highest spermatozoa motility was found using 240 minutes of equilibration by +2.72% and +4.58% compared to other lengths of equilibration (P <0.05 to 0.01). The highest proportion of live spermatozoa was found using 120 minutes of equilibration (+6.87 % and +8.68 %). The highest average spermatozoa motility during heat test after thawing was achieved by using 2. phase freezing curve (from +2.97% to +10.37%, P <0.05), also in the proportion of live spermatozoa (from + 4.37% to +8.82%, P <0.01). When evaluating interaction between the length of equilibration and freezing curve (standard 3. phase and 2 . phase freezing curve), the highest average spermatozoa motility and proportion of live spermatozoa using 240 minutes of equilibration by both freezing curves was reached, there was no statistically significant differences. As well as, in all evaluated parts of this study the individual differences between ejaculate of bulls and within semen from one bull (P <0.05) as secondary effect were found.
To maintain good fertilization ability of semen during cryopreservation is necessary to increase the spermatozoa resistance against cold shock using addition of correct concentration of LDL into the commercially used diluents AndroMed and Bioxcell. Subsequently the fertilization ability of insemination dose is influenced by cooling, the length of equilibration and freezing. The length of equilibration 120 minutes and more as well as gentle way of freezing according to freezing curve, which ensures a gradual decrease of temperature in freezing chamber provided the higher average spermatozoa motility and proportion of live spermatozoa.
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Total contents and speciation of arsenic and selenium in plants growing in soils with different physico-chemical properties
Tremlová, Jana ; Száková, Jiřina (advisor) ; Vymazal, Jan (referee)
This dissertation thesis deals with uptake, accumulation and transformation of arsenic and selenium in plants growing on soils with different chemico-physical soil properties. The contents of arsenic were investigated in 99 wild plant species, coming from 27 different families and 6 different vegetables growing in arsenic contaminated soils. The results suggest that there are species-specific mechanisms which protects certain plants from the excessive uptake of arsenic from the soil. On the other hand, there are plants using a strategy of accumulation, which theoretically may increase the risk of arsenic entry into the food chain, whether through grazing cattle and wildlife or through consumption of vegetables growing on arsenic contaminated soils. The most prevalent arsenic compounds are AsV and AsIII. Other arsenic compounds occure as minor species. An important finding was detection of arsenobetaine in Plantago lanceolata L. and Carex praecox Schreb ..
The contents of selenium were examined in 73 species of wild plants, coming from 29 different families. The results suggest that naturally low levels of selenium in the soil of selected locations along with a low capability of selenium uptake via collected plant species lead to the low content of selenium in plant biomass which may contribute to selenium deficient throughout the food chain. Foliar application of selenate on wild plant communities and on some types of vegetables in our case Brassica oleracea var. italica can have a positive impact on increasing the selenium content in the aboveground biomass of these plants and by extension, increase the selenium content in the human diet. Dominant selenium compounds in the aboveground biomass of the analyzed plants were SeVI and selenomethionine, with variable proportion of other commonly occurring organic selenium compounds, which is mainly affected by plant species.
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