Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Normality'
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Pu, Wenji. "Tests of bivariate normality." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1998. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/tape15/PQDD_0025/MQ38403.pdf.
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Boavida, João Pedro do Carmo. "Excess returns and normality." Master's thesis, Instituto Superior de Economia e Gestão, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10400.5/3416.
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Mestrado em Economia Monetária e FinanceiraIn this dissertation, I assess under which circumstances normality can be a good descriptive model for the U.S. excess returns. I explore two possible sources of deviations from normal¬ity: structural breaks and regime switching in long term aggregate time series. In addition, I study temporal aggregation (i.e., considering the frequency of data as a variable) for ex¬cess returns in short term time series. My main findings are summarized as follows. First, using long spanning monthly time series data from 1871 to 2010, I find that (1) there are structural breaks in monthly excess returns between pre-WWII and post-WWII data; and, (2) while pre-WWII data is consistent with normality, post-WWII data is not. Second, I provide evidence of two market regimes for excess returns in post-WWII data. These regimes may be seen as bull and bear market conditions. Third, using high frequency post-WWII data, I check for aggregational Gaussianity, from daily to annual data. I find that Gaus-sianity depends on the frequency of data: it may hold for highly aggregate data (starting from semi-annual to annual data) but it does not hold for high frequency data (less than semi-annual). My main contribution is to demonstrate the "normality survival" when fre¬quency is taken as a variable. After a careful look at the available literature on aggregational Gaussianity, I found no previous applications and results for excess returns.
Nesta dissertação, eu avalio sob que condições a normalidade pode ser um bom modelo descritivo para os excess returns nos E.U.A.. Para tal, exploro duas fontes potenciais de desvio da normalidade: quebras de estrutura e mistura de regimes para series temporais longas agregadas. Adicionalmente, estudo a agregaçao temporal (i.e., tomando a frequencia dos dados como variável) para os excess returns em series temporais. Os principais resultados obtidos sao os seguintes. Primeiro, utilizando dados mensais para um longo perodo temporal de 1871 ate 2010, conclui-se que: (1) existem quebras de estrutura nos excess returns mensais entre o período antes e depois da Segunda Guerra Mundial (SGM) e, (2) enquanto os dados do período antes da SGM sao consistentes com a normalidade, os dados do pós-guerra nao são. Segundo, apresenta-se evidencia de dois regimes de mercado para o período pos-SGM. Estes regimes podem ser vistos como descrevendo condições de mercado buli e bear. Terceiro, usando dados com frequencias mais altas para o período pos-SGM, testa-se a aggregational Gaussianity para dados de diários ate dados anuais. Conclui-se que a Gaussianity depende da frequencia dos dados: pode ser valida para dados mais agregados (comecando em dados semestrais ate dados anuais) mas não e valida para dados com frequencias mais altas (menores que semestrais). O principal contributo desta dissertacão e demonstrar a sobrevivência da normalidade quando se toma a frequncia dos dados como variavel. Apás uma revisãao aprofundada da literatura sobre aggregational Gaussianity, n ao encontrei resultados anteriores para os excess returns.
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Celi, Maria Alejandra. "Normality, values and affiliation." Bachelor's thesis, Universidad Nacional de Cuyo. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, 2016. http://bdigital.uncu.edu.ar/8961.
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La selección de libros de texto para el aula de la escuela EFL a nivel local sigue siendo muy dependiente de cuestiones tales como las demandas del plan de estudios, los factores de motivación para los estudiantes, el tratamiento de la gramática y lexis, y la promoción de ciertas series de libros por las editoriales que ayuda a establecer una tendencia Para su adopción. Este trabajo abordó la necesidad de considerar críticamente los libros de texto de EFL para las aulas de las escuelas locales y, más específicamente, la necesidad de analizar los valores ideológicos que los autores de los libros de texto parecen respaldar e intentar afiliar a sus usuarios intencionados, material.
Este estudio específicamente intentó explorar: i) cómo la normalidad y la tipicidad se interpretan en los libros de texto de EFL; Ii) ¿cuáles son los sistemas de creencias y valores que subyacen a tales representaciones de lo normal o típico que Se espera que los estudiantes se afilien con; Iii) qué comunidad de lectores los libros de texto en inglés buscan alinear y, dadas las conclusiones relativas a las tres preguntas anteriores, iv) cómo son apropiados los libros de texto EFL para los diferentes contextos educativos dentro de la comunidad local. El estudio se basó en el sistema de transitividad desarrollado por M. K. Halliday y colegas. Como modelo de los procesos y de las configuraciones semánticas asociadas de los participantes y las circunstancias, el sistema de transitividad ofrece un gran potencial para descubrir la base ideológica de tales representaciones, ya que las configuraciones de transitividad pueden evocar la normalidad entre Muchos otros tipos de juicios y actitudes en general (Martin y White 2005). Sin embargo, los recursos de evaluación no fueron explorados en este estudio, que se basó en el análisis de treinta (30) textos tomados de cuatro (4) diferentes libros de texto de EFL, clasificados en 6 grupos diferentes en términos de campo y luego analizados a la luz del Transitividad. Los textos seleccionados fueron incluidos como modelos para la escritura en los libros de texto, con el participante principal en ellos representando vicariamente al usuario del libro de texto. Los resultados mostraron que ciertas acciones, hábitos y atributos relacionados con temas tales como las relaciones entre padres e hijos, el matrimonio, la familia y el papel de las mujeres fueron predominantemente descritos como normales en la mayoría de los grupos de campo. Además, hubo ciertas secuencias de actividad (Martin y Rose 2003) instanciadas frecuentemente entre grupos de campo que sirvieron para naturalizar ciertos comportamientos como normales, reflejando un sistema de valores de creencias que los autores recurrieron a afiliar a sus lectores.The selection of textbooks for the EFL school classroom locally is still very much dependent on issues such as syllabus demands, motivational factors for students, the treatment of grammar and lexis, and the promotion of certain book series by publishing houses that helps set up a trend for the adoption of them. This paper addressed the need to consider EFL textbooks for the local school classrooms critically and, more specifically, the need to analyze the ideological values the textbook authors seem to endorse and to try to affiliate their intended users with, an aspect often disregarded when selecting classroom material. This study specifically attempted to explore: i) how normality and typicality are construed in EFL textbooks; ii) what are the belief and value systems underlying such representations of the normal or typical that students are expected to affiliate with; iii) what community of readers English textbooks seek to align with, and, given the findings relating to the previous three questions, iv) how appropriate EFL textbooks are for the different educational contexts within the local community. The study drew on the transitivity system developed by M. K. Halliday and colleagues. As a model of the processes and associated semantic configurations of participants and circumstances (Halliday 1985; Martin, Matthiessen & Painter 1997; Matthiesssen 1995), the transitivity system offers great potential for uncovering the ideological basis of such representations since transitivity configurations can evoke normality among many other kinds of judgments and attitudes in general (Martin and White 2005). Yet, appraisal resources were not explored in this study, which was based on the analysis of thirty (30) texts taken from four (4) different EFL textbooks, classified into 6 different groups in terms of field and then analyzed in the light of the transitivity system. The texts selected were all included as models for writing in the textbooks, with the main participant in them vicariously representing the textbook-user. Results showed that certain actions, habits and attributes relating to issues such as parent-children relations, marriage, family, and women’s roles were prevailingly depicted as normal across most field groups. In addition, there were certain activity sequences (Martin and Rose 2003) instantiated frequently across field groups that served to naturalize certain behaviors as normal, reflecting a belief value system the authors resorted to affiliate their readers.
Fil: Celi, Maria Alejandra. Universidad Nacional de Cuyo. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras.
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Davies, A. E. "Neurological normality in old age." Thesis, Queen's University Belfast, 2008. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.479275.
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Wang, Yishi. "Some new tests for normality." Diss., Online access via UMI:, 2006.
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Whelan, Emma Louise. "The normality of suicidal cognitions." Thesis, University of Southampton, 2000. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.364720.
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Lee, Yew-Haur Jr. "Fisher Information Test of Normality." Diss., Virginia Tech, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/30725.
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An extremal property of normal distributions is that they have the smallest Fisher Information for location among all distributions with the same variance. A new test of normality proposed by Terrell (1995) utilizes the above property by finding that density of maximum likelihood constrained on having the expected Fisher Information under normality based on the sample variance. The test statistic is then constructed as a ratio of the resulting likelihood against that of normality.
Since the asymptotic distribution of this test statistic is not available, the critical values for n = 3 to 200 have been obtained by simulation and smoothed using polynomials. An extensive power study shows that the test has superior power against distributions that are symmetric and leptokurtic (long-tailed). Another advantage of the test over existing ones is the direct depiction of any deviation from normality in the form of a density estimate. This is evident when the test is applied to several real data sets.
Testing of normality in residuals is also investigated. Various approaches in dealing with residuals being possibly heteroscedastic and correlated suffer from a loss of power. The approach with the fewest undesirable features is to use the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) residuals in place of independent observations. From simulations, it is shown that one has to be careful about the levels of the normality tests and also in generalizing the results.Ph. D.
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Andersson, Johan, and Mats Burberg. "Testing For Normality of Censored Data." Thesis, Uppsala universitet, Statistiska institutionen, 2015. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-253889.
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In order to make statistical inference, that is drawing conclusions from a sample to describe a population, it is crucial to know the correct distribution of the data. This paper focused on censored data from the normal distribution. The purpose of this paper was to answer whether we can test if data comes from a censored normal distribution. This by using normality tests and tests designed for censored data and investigate if we got correct size of these tests. This has been carried out with simulations in the program R for left censored data. The results indicated that with increasing censoring normality tests failed to accept normality in a sample. On the other hand the censoring tests met the requirements with increasing censoring level, which was the most important conclusion in this paper.
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Adekola, Olatunde Adetoyese. "Asymptomatic posterior normality for stochastic processes." Thesis, University of Surrey, 1987. http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/847129/.
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The problem of demonstrating the limiting normality of posterior distributions arising from stochastic processes and allied results are reconsidered. We present a fairly general set of conditions for asymptotic posterior normality which covers a wide class of problems. The single and multiparameter cases are both treated. One important difference between the conditions presented here and those of other authors (for example, Heyde and Johnstone (1979), hereafter referred to as H-J) is the use of a shrinking neighbourhood for asymptotic continuity of information, whereas in H-J (1979) a fixed neighbourhood is taken. Some examples to illustrate the importance of this study are considered in detail and this embraces diverse areas of application. Apart from a sequence of constants that is used to measure the order of Fisher's observed information, the uniformity requirement (which may be dropped for some ergodic models) allows us to dispense with further conditions regarding moments of the first and second derivatives of log-likelihood. We obtain the fundamental Bernstein Von Mises theorem in the asymptotic theory of Bayesian inference for stochastic processes. As an application of the theorem, we obtain asymptotic properties of Bayes' estimators for a suitable class of loss functions and show that the maximum likelihood estimator and Bayes estimator are asymptoticaly equivalent. Apart from obtaining some sufficient conditions under which one canobtain asymptotic posterior normality for evolutive processes, such as non-homogeneous Poisson processes and non-homogeneous birth processess, we also present and discuss some sufficient conditions for generalised linear models and other ergodic processes. We also discuss some relationships between our conditions and those imposed by earlier authors. Finally, we discuss the rate of convergence of posterior distributions to the normal distribution, some open problems and scope for further research.
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Wong, Hoi-lam. "On two tests for multivariate normality." HKBU Institutional Repository, 1993. https://repository.hkbu.edu.hk/etd_ra/12.
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Jaeger, Mitchell Smith Michel. "A study of regularity and normality." Auburn, Ala, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10415/1638.
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Merinder, Josefin. "Sjukhusundervisning för barn med cancerdiagnosen hjärntumör : om normalitet och utanförskap." Thesis, Södertörns högskola, Lärarutbildningen, 2012. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:sh:diva-17827.
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Background: Studies have shown that 66 children and teenagers in Sweden suffers from brain tumor every year. Children and teenagers who can´t participate in the regular school for a longer time for whatever reason, have by the school law the right to education in hospitals or institutions. Education that take place in other places than school most try to follow the same guidelines as his/hers usual school. This applies to students in elementary school, compulsory school, special school, Sami school, secondary school and upper secondary school. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to find out how three teachers at a hospital school plans their work with children in grade from 1 to 3, who suffer from cancer, especially brain tumor. How can the teachers at the hospital school plan and organize their teaching so that it´s possible for the children whit brain tumor to feel as normal as possible. How does the common work between the consultant nurse, teachers at the hospitals and their ordinary school prevent the children to feel like an outsider? Method: I have chosen to do a qualitative study followed by three interviews whit three informants who works at a hospital school. One interview with the head of the unit, one interview with the special education teacher and one interview with the consultant nurse who works as a contact for the affected students. Conclusions: The result of my thesis is primarily that it`s important to have a good contact, communication and attitude to the students, so that their time at the hospitalschool will be as normal as possible. And in that way minimize the risk to feel and bee seen as a outsider. Result: Hospitalschool is a very god communal operation for those students who needs it.
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Calder, Christopher William. "Weakened versions of normality in topological spaces." Thesis, Queen's University Belfast, 2002. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.486046.
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The thesis first examines conditions on topological spaces - especially dense normality and kappa normality - that are known to be similar to but weaker than classical normality, and it extends the range of examples thaUllustrate them. Arising from this study, general methodologies are then developed and applied that permit the determination of whether a range of topological spaces - generated in specific ways - satisfy such conditions. Identification and axiomatising of a central concept, closely related to the classical notion of proximity and here called a 'separator', leads on to the study of topologies defined through separators and to the transfer of techniques from the initial specific examples to the general setting. It is established that these techniques are particularly effective when the underlying set carries a vector space structure; in particular, in this casea proof or disproof of dense normality - which is traditionally a relatively difficult problem - is easily obtained. Amore general view is derived of how to determine near-normality conditions for a wide variety of topological spaces. Amongst the by-products of the investigation is an iterative procedure of some independent interest (here termed 'echo sequence') that seeks to determine whether, in a given pair of disjoint closed sets, there are subsets on whkh the difficulty of separating them by neighbourhoods, as reqiJired by normality conditions, focuses. Results are obtained on the circumstances in which this focus of difficulty is empty: in which case, the determination of normality is simplified.
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Sze, Chuen-kan, and 施泉根. "S-normality and polygonal s-numerical ranges." Thesis, The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong), 1997. http://hub.hku.hk/bib/B29815630.
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Lauprête, Geoffrey J. (Geoffrey Jean) 1972. "Portfolio risk minimization under departures from normality." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2001. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/8303.
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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, Operations Research Center, 2001.Includes bibliographical references (p. 206-210).
This thesis revisits the portfolio selection problem in cases where returns cannot be modeled as Gaussian. The emphasis is on the development of financially intuitive and statistically sound approaches to portfolio risk minimization. When returns exhibit asymmetry, we propose using a quantile-based measure of risk which we call shortfall. Shortfall is related to Value-at-Risk and Conditional Value-at-Risk, and can be tuned to capture tail risk. We formulate the sample shortfall minimization problem as a linear program. Using results from empirical process theory, we derive a central limit theorem for the shortfall portfolio estimator. We warn about the statistical pitfalls of portfolio selection based on the minimization of rare events, which happens to be the case when shortfall is tuned to focus on extreme tail risk. In the presence of heavy tails and tail dependence, we show that portfolios based on the minimization of alternative robust measures of risk may in fact have lower variance than those based on the minimization of sample variance. We show that minimizing the sample mean absolute deviation yields portfolios that are asymptotically more efficient than those based on the minimization of the sample variance, when returns have a multivariate Student-t distribution with degrees of freedom less than or equal to 6. This motivates our consideration of other robust measures of risk, for which we present linear and quadratic programming formulations.
(cont.) We carry out experiments on simulated and historical data, illustrating the fact that the efficiency gained by considering robust measures of risk may be substantial. Finally, when the number of return observations is of the same order of magnitude as, or smaller than, the dimension of the portfolio being estimated, we investigate the applicability of regularization to sample risk minimization. We examine both L1- and L2-regularization. We interpret regularization from a Bayesian perspective, and provide an algorithm for choosing the regularization parameter. We validate the use of regularization in portfolio selection on simulated and historical data, and conclude that regularization can yield portfolios with smaller risk, and in particular smaller variance.
by Geoffrey J. Lauprête.
Ph.D.
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Hobbis, Shirley. "Adjusting to retirement : changing views of normality." Thesis, Cardiff Metropolitan University, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10369/6413.
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An increasingly ageing population in the U.K. has generated interest in fostering healthy and active ageing, both at a societal level and from the point of view of government economic strategies for the future (Jacobzone, 2000; Welsh Assembly Government, 2007a, 2007c). Due to a rise in life-expectancy an increasing amount of time is being spent by older adults in retirement and adapting healthily to moving from working life to non-working life is crucial for successful ageing. There is evidence of two distinct retirement subgroups. The first comprises the majority of people, those who are well adjusted to life in retirement, while the second includes people who do not adjust well to this change in lifestyle (Wang, 2007). The second, though a minority group, may consist of up to thirty percent of the population (Petkoska & Earl, 2009). However, very little is known about how to positively prepare for retirement, and there are relatively few studies to date that explore individuals' perceptions of a lifestyle in retirement. Hence, there is a need to build up a body of evidence regarding the determinants of successful ageing for policy makers, for society as a whole and for the individuals themselves (Welsh Assembly Government, 2007b). As increasing recognition is accorded to the impact of retirement on the ability age healthily and successfully, it is proposed that an understanding of the changing views of normality when adapting to retirement can play an important role in contributing toward building up a robust evidence base. The aim of this project was to investigate the impact of retirement on lifestyle choices and explore the determinants of behaviour change at this time of transition in the lifespan with people living in South Wales. Utilising a mixed methods approach to investigate self-perceptions of changes, transitions and transformations into retirement; two studies ran concurrently: a survey completed by participants on two separate occasions, and an innovative series of three time-interval interviews. Inferences were made between the survey results and the cross-sectional and longitudinal findings of the interview analyses. The survey results revealed that preretirement levels of stress were reduced post-retirement, and the intention to take more exercise in the future was reported as having been achieved in the interviews. Adapting to a post-retirement lifestyle involved a shift in the perspective of normality with regard to deteriorating health, a change in the pace of life, a rethinking (in some cases reinventing) forms of social engagement and an acceptance of a changing financial status. The implications of these results are that retirement is not marked by a single date but is a process which begins pre-retirement and continues post-retirement, as suggested by Pinquart & Schindler (2007). Theories of both health and ageing support the proposition that successful ageing involves a positive view leading to a time of growth and development which can be achieved by the setting of meaningful goals. For this cohort, the transition into retirement involved the setting up, and following through, of goals for behaviour change which when implemented, resulted in a successful retirement. The participants had been recruited via preparation for retirement workshops. Access to retirement preparation courses is not consistent across the U.K. and currently there is a dearth of evidence regarding their impact on successful ageing in participants. Given the current focus on fostering healthy and active ageing determining the efficacy of participation in preparation for retirement courses would make a positive contribution to our understanding of the transition into retirement so that as many people as possible can age successfully.
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Mulira, Ham-Mukasa. "Computational methods for transformations to multivariate normality." Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), 1992. http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/1352/.
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The classical multivariate theory has been largely based on the multivariate normal distribution (MVN): the scarcity of alternative models for the meaningful and consistent analysis of multiresponse data is a well recognised problem. Further, the complexity of generalising many non-normal univariate distributions makes it undesirable or impossible to use their multivariate versions. Hence, it seems reasonable to inquire about ways of transforming the data so as to enable the use of more familiar statistical techniques that are based implicitly or explicitly on the normal distribution. Techniques for developing data-based transformations of univariate observations have been proposed by several authors. However, there is only one major technique in the multivariate (p-variable) case by Andrews et. al. [1971]. Their approach extended the power transformations proposed by Box & Cox [1964] to the problem of estimating power transformations of multiresponse data so as to enhance joint normality. The approach estimates the vector of transformation parameters by numerically maximising the log-likelihood function. However, since there are several parameters to be estimated, p(p+5)/2 for multivariate data without regression, the resulting maximisation is of high dimension, even with modest values of p and sample size n. The purpose of the thesis is to develop computationally simpler and more informative statistical procedures which are incorporated in a package. The thesis is in three main parts: - A proposed complementary procedure to the log-likelihood approach which attempts to reduce the size of the computational requirements for obtaining the estimates. Though computational simplicity is the main factor, the statistical qualities of the estimates are not compromised, indeed the estimated values are numerically identical to those of the log-likelihood. Further, the procedure implicitly produces diagnostic statistics and some useful statistical quantities describing the structure of the data. The technique is a generalisation of the constructed variables method of obtaining quick estimates for transformation parameters [Atkinson 1985]. To take into account the multiresponse nature of the data and, hence, joint estimates, a seemingly unrelated regression is carried out. The algorithm is iterative. However, there is considerable savings in the number of iterations required to converge to the maximum likelihood (MLE) estimates compared to those using the log-likelihood function. The technique is refered to as the Seemingly Unrelated Regressions/Constructed Variable (SURCON) analysis, and the estimates obtained are the Surcon estimates. - The influence of individual observations on the need for transformations is quite crucial and, hence, it is necessary to investigate the data for any spurious or suspicious observations, outliers. The thesis also proposes an iterative technique for detecting and identifying outliers based on Mahalanobis distances computed from sub-samples of the observations. The results of the analysis are displayed in a graphical summary called the Stalactite Chart, hence, the analysis is refered to as the Stalactite Analysis. - The development of a userfriendly microcomputer-based statistical package which incorporates the above techniques. The package is written in the C programming language.
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Min, Min. "Asymptotic normality in generalized linear mixed models." College Park, Md.: University of Maryland, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/1903/7758.
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Thesis (Ph. D.) -- University of Maryland, College Park, 2007.Thesis research directed by: Dept. of Mathematics. Title from t.p. of PDF. Includes bibliographical references. Published by UMI Dissertation Services, Ann Arbor, Mich. Also available in paper.
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Sze, Chuen-kan. "S-normality and polygonal s-numerical ranges /." Hong Kong : University of Hong Kong, 1997. http://sunzi.lib.hku.hk/hkuto/record.jsp?B19616223.
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Böhme, Stefan. "Normality in videogames and the ‘Avalanche of Numbers’." Universität Potsdam, 2009. http://opus.kobv.de/ubp/volltexte/2009/3323/.
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Normality is one of the defining categories of our society. Statistics of all kinds play a crucial part in establishing the normal. Computers, on the other hand, have a very close connection to statistics as the digital world is a statistical one in itself. In a multitude of games statistics are used as an element of gameplay. In this perspective, games can be regarded as a training in self-normalization. However, it is still questionable whether this leads to a genuine production of normality.
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Rødner, Sznitman Sharon. "Socially Integrated Drug Users : Between Deviance and Normality." Doctoral thesis, Stockholm : Centre for Social Research on Alcohol and Drugs (SoRAD), Stockholm University, 2007. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-6871.
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Heholt, Ruth Marie. "Melting into the margins : the disappearance of normality." Thesis, University of Plymouth, 2004. http://hdl.handle.net/10026.1/2115.
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Melting into the Margins intervenes in the academic and media debate about normality: the white nuclear family and white middle class men. This thesis traces the emergence of the contemporary discourse which suggests that the normal is being displaced into the margins, away from the centre, 'disproved' as a lived condition and shown to be ‘untrue’ as an ideological concept and examines the implications and effects of this discourse. A new discourse of the normal is deemed necessary by the academic disciplines of masculinity and family studies because they argue that we live in a new age of tolerance, equality, meritocracy and plurality. The disciplines of masculinity and family studies that this thesis critiques argue that in this new age and new society the ‘old’ idea of a white, middle class, gendered, heterosexual normality is becoming unworkable and obsolete. This thesis examines the new discourse itself and its archive (Foucault, 1972), in the form of contemporary representations of white men and the white, middle class, heterosexual nuclear family. Beginning with the idea that white men were traditionally and historically invisible this thesis argues that this was never so and that the centre of our society has always been visible. This thesis offers a critique of the current project from the academy and from the media that proposes to ‘make-the-centre-visible’ in order to 'prove' that normality does not exist. I argue that this project, which exposes failure, doubt and abnormality beneath the surface appearance of the normal is a project set up by white middle class people for white middle class people. The new project, its discourse and archive attempt to demonstrate that no-one has any extra-ordinary power in our society because of race, gender or class. This thesis argues that this demonstration evidenced in the academy and the media takes an extreme anti-essentialist view point that eventually denies that there are any limits to choice or opportunity. The denial of an excluding and exclusionary normal predicated on concepts of difference suggests a pure meritocracy, which helps to justify the continuing domination of white men. The aim of Melting into the Margins is to offer a critique of the current discourse of normality and an examination of its archive and to offer ways forward that can truly fulfil the stated objectives of masculinity and family studies: the deconstruction of the exclusive, excluding white, middle class centre of British society - the normal.
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Niemi, Isabelle. "Reverse stress testing approaches based on multivariate normality." Thesis, Umeå universitet, Institutionen för fysik, 2018. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-149486.
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Reverse stress testing is a way of finding a combination of market risk factors, called a scenario, that leads to a specific loss for e.g. a portfolio. A market risk factor can for example be a stock return. In this project, we use reverse stress tests to find a scenario that would make a clearing house insolvent in case of a clearing house member default. When a member defaults, the clearing house must cover for the member's positions. If the clearing house's resource pool is not enough for this purpose, the clearing house defaults as well. To find out when this happens is of interest for regulatory purposes, as the default of a clearing house might lead to severe negative effects on the financial market. Cinnober's currently used method, SPS, uses a bisection-like iterative algorithm to find the scenario which makes the clearing house insolvent. The scenario found by SPS is restricted to be a multiple of a predefined scenario, which is clearly a limitation in the consideration of possible scenarios. To investigate the possibility of finding scenarios without this restriction, two other reverse stress tests were implemented and compared to SPS. The first test, PCA/G-S, assumes multivariate normal distribution of the profits and losses of the assets in the defaulting member's portfolio. PCA/G-S yields scenarios of asset profits and losses, for which the portfolio return is the specified loss - the clearing house resource pool. The second test, called RF, assumes multivariate normal distribution of the risk factors affecting the prices of the assets in the portfolio. RF outputs a scenario of market risk factors causing the portfolio loss to be the specified loss. The assets in the portfolio were restricted to stocks, European stock options and stock futures. PCA/G-S was shown to imply negative asset prices, as the assumption of multinormality does not consider that the loss can never be greater than the asset price itself. Negative prices appeared more frequently for options than for futures and stocks. Furthermore, the scenarios found by PCA/G-S were in terms of profits and losses, and were generally only convertible to risk factors if the portfolio only consisted of stocks. The advantage compared to SPS, however, was that PCA/G-S was numerically faster. As the results of the RF method are risk factor scenarios, no conversion problems appear. Moreover, it cannot yield negative asset prices, which is advantageous compared to PCA/G-S. However, the RF method was slower than SPS, and especially slow for options. All the multivariate normal distribution assumptions, for the profits and losses as well as the risk factors, were rejected by multinormality tests. Thus, the assumptions for PCA/G-S and RF were not consistent with reality. Nonetheless, the tests indeed provide scenarios where the resource pool is depleted.
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Petrolini, Valentina M. A. "From Normality to Pathology: In Defense of Continuity." University of Cincinnati / OhioLINK, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1512039329916506.
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Tran, Ngoc Khue. "Propriété LAN pour des processus de diffusion avec sauts avec observations discrètes via le calcul de Malliavin." Thesis, Paris 13, 2014. http://www.theses.fr/2014PA132008/document.
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Dans cette thèse nous appliquons le calcul de Malliavin afin d’obtenir la propriété de normalité asymptotique locale (LAN) à partir d’observations discrètes de certains processus de diffusion uniformément elliptique avec sauts. Dans le Chapitre 2 nous révisons la preuve de la propriété de normalité mixte asymptotique locale (LAMN) pour des processus de diffusion avec sauts à partir d’observations continues, et comme conséquence nous obtenons la propriété LAN en supposant l’ergodicité du processus. Dans le Chapitre 3 nous établissons la propriété LAN pour un processus de Lévy simple dont les paramètres de dérive et de diffusion ainsi que l’intensité sont inconnus. Dans le Chapitre 4, à l’aide du calcul de Malliavin et des estimées de densité de transition, nous démontrons que la propriété LAN est vérifiée pour un processus de diffusion à sauts dont le coefficient de dérive dépends d’un paramètre inconnu. Finalement, dans la même direction nous obtenons dans le Chapitre 5 la propriété LAN pour un processus de diffusion à sauts où les deux paramètres inconnus interviennent dans les coefficients de dérive et de diffusionIn this thesis we apply the Malliavin calculus in order to obtain the local asymptotic normality (LAN) property from discrete observations for certain uniformly elliptic diffusion processes with jumps. In Chapter 2 we review the proof of the local asymptotic mixed normality (LAMN) property for diffusion processes with jumps from continuous observations, and as a consequence, we derive the LAN property when supposing the ergodicity of the process. In Chapter 3 we establish the LAN property for a simple Lévy process whose drift and diffusion parameters as well as its intensity are unknown. In Chapter 4, using techniques of the Malliavin calculus and the estimates of the transition density, we prove that the LAN property is satisfied for a jump-diffusion process whose drift coefficient depends on an unknown parameter. Finally, in the same direction we obtain in Chapter 5 the LAN property for a jump-diffusion process where two unknown parameters determine the drift and diffusion coefficients of the jump-diffusion process
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Leander, Nils-Gregor. "Normality of bent functions monomial and binomial bent functions." [S.l.] : [s.n.], 2004. http://deposit.ddb.de/cgi-bin/dokserv?idn=973440996.
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Vides, Rafael. "Program realization of statistical test for normality in Java." Thesis, Mälardalen University, Department of Mathematics and Physics, 2005. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:mdh:diva-221.
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Gordon, Carol J. (Carol Jean). "The Robustness of O'Brien's r Transformation to Non-Normality." Thesis, North Texas State University, 1985. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc332002/.
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A Monte Carlo simulation technique was employed in this study to determine if the r transformation, a test of homogeneity of variance, affords adequate protection against Type I error over a range of equal sample sizes and number of groups when samples are obtained from normal and non-normal distributions. Additionally, this study sought to determine if the r transformation is more robust than Bartlett's chi-square to deviations from normality. Four populations were generated representing normal, uniform, symmetric leptokurtic, and skewed leptokurtic distributions. For each sample size (6, 12, 24, 48), number of groups (3, 4, 5, 7), and population distribution condition, the r transformation and Bartlett's chi-square were calculated. This procedure was replicated 1,000 times; the actual significance level was determined and compared to the nominal significance level of .05. On the basis of the analysis of the generated data, the following conclusions are drawn. First, the r transformation is generally robust to violations of normality when the size of the samples tested is twelve or larger. Second, in the instances where a significant difference occurred between the actual and nominal significance levels, the r transformation produced (a) conservative Type I error rates if the kurtosis of the parent population were 1.414 or less and (b) an inflated Type I error rate when the index of kurtosis was three. Third, the r transformation should not be used if sample size is smaller than twelve. Fourth, the r transformation is more robust in all instances to non-normality, but the Bartlett test is superior in controlling Type I error when samples are from a population with a normal distribution. In light of these conclusions, the r transformation may be used as a general utility test of homogeneity of variances when either the distribution of the parent population is unknown or is known to have a non-normal distribution, and the size of the equal samples is at least twelve.
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Bowles, Peter. "Applications of local asymptotic normality in quantum information theory." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.598050.
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Quantum mechanics is the fundamental theory of the microscopic world. It is now over a century since Planck's first insights led to it eventually replacing the classical worldview consisting of Newtonian mechanics, Maxwell's electromagnetism and statistical mechanics. In contrast to the determinism of classical mechanics, quantum mechanics is intrinsically probabilistic, showing that randomness is an innate feature of reality. Until the 1960s this randomness was not directly observable. Experiments were performed on huge ensembles of particles and the probabilities one would observe were the frequencies of different outcomes. But thanks to technological advances. individual quantum systems can now be prepared, manipulated and measured with a high degree of control. The fundamental motivation for manipulating individual systems is that quantum mechanics offers the promise of completely new technologies which utilise quantum effects to achieve superior performance in comparison to classical methods. Such advances have led to the birth of a new field of study known as Quantum Information Science, a synthesis of quantum mechanics and the classical disciplines of information theory, computation, control theory, probability and statistics.
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Leaf, Patricia L. "Authorizing the self : negotiating normality in contemporary American memoir." CardinalScholar 1.0, 2010. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1560839.
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This study examines the contemporary American memoirs Goat (2004) by Brad Land, Prozac Diary (1998) by Lauren Slater, and The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976) by Maxine Hong Kingston to reveal how these texts push traditional thematic and genre boundaries as well as conceptions of minority identity. Their inclusion of fictional aspects, episodic structure, narrative excesses, and non-teleological endings work to enhance their status as sociocultural critique and protest.
This dissertation utilizes a social oppression angle within disability studies to demonstrate the overlapping processes and experiences of marginalization faced by these disparate protagonists who are dis-abled due to their undesired bodily variations and their failure to meet sociocultural standards of appropriate embodied behavior. Society is ideologically unwilling to accommodate or accept the differences the protagonists possess. Such a frame expands the artificial and culturally constructed notion of disability by illustrating the ways that discourse and ideologies of embodied normalcy intersect to constitute various minority identities as incompetent and
unworthy. The texts bear witness to each protagonists’ struggle to cultivate meaningful subjectivity and reject passive victim status; however, their resulting survivor subjectivities are both resistant to and complicit with hegemonic tenets.
This literary project augments ongoing work in minority, identity, autobiography, cultural, and disability studies that deconstructs essentialist paradigms while reinforcing the important cultural and literary work of contemporary memoir. Moreover, it fills a critical gap with respect to Goat and Prozac Diary, bringing these two texts into the critical discussion of autobiography. Finally, this dissertation illustrates that memoir is uniquely positioned within literary genres to navigate the interconnectedness of identity, subjectivity, and ideology, thus challenging readers to confront the injustice of a sociocultural structure that sanctions these inequities in the first placeWriting a better story : authorizing a vivid and valid self -- Lauren Slater's Prozac diary : the medical model and the suppression of the patient -- Maxine Hong Kingston's The woman warrior : the spectacular subjugation of the dually oppressed and dis-abled body -- The three memoirs : no prosthesis needed.
Writing a better story : authorizing a vivid and valid self -- Lauren Slater's Prozac diary : the medical model and the suppression of the patient -- Maxine Hong Kingston's The woman warrior : the spectacular subjugation of the dually oppressed and dis-abled body -- The three memoirs : no prosthesis needed.
Department of English
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Hayes, M. W. "An investigation into the use of power transformations to normality." Thesis, University of Exeter, 1986. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.374155.
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Rosenblueth, Laguette Javier Fernando. "Optimal control systems with time delay and conditions for normality." Thesis, Imperial College London, 1987. http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/46371.
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Lehmann, Rüdiger. "Observation error model selection by information criteria vs. normality testing." Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Dresden, 2016. http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bsz:520-qucosa-211721.
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To extract the best possible information from geodetic and geophysical observations, it is necessary to select a model of the observation errors, mostly the family of Gaussian normal distributions. However, there are alternatives, typically chosen in the framework of robust M-estimation. We give a synopsis of well-known and less well-known models for observation errors and propose to select a model based on information criteria. In this contribution we compare the Akaike information criterion (AIC) and the Anderson Darling (AD) test and apply them to the test problem of fitting a straight line. The comparison is facilitated by a Monte Carlo approach. It turns out that the model selection by AIC has some advantages over the AD test.
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Le, Tran Bach. "On k-normality and regularity of normal projective toric varieties." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/31531.
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We study the relationship between geometric properties of toric varieties and combinatorial properties of the corresponding lattice polytopes. In particular, we give a bound for a very ample lattice polytope to be k-normal. Equivalently, we give a new combinatorial bound for the Castelnuovo-Mumford regularity of normal projective toric varieties. We also give a new combinatorial proof for a special case of Reider's Theorem for smooth toric surfaces.
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Lehmann, Rüdiger. "Observation error model selection by information criteria vs. normality testing." Hochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft Dresden, 2015. https://htw-dresden.qucosa.de/id/qucosa%3A23301.
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To extract the best possible information from geodetic and geophysical observations, it is necessary to select a model of the observation errors, mostly the family of Gaussian normal distributions. However, there are alternatives, typically chosen in the framework of robust M-estimation. We give a synopsis of well-known and less well-known models for observation errors and propose to select a model based on information criteria. In this contribution we compare the Akaike information criterion (AIC) and the Anderson Darling (AD) test and apply them to the test problem of fitting a straight line. The comparison is facilitated by a Monte Carlo approach. It turns out that the model selection by AIC has some advantages over the AD test.
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Pospíšil, Tomáš. "STOCHASTIC MODELING OF COMPOSITE MATERIALS." Doctoral thesis, Vysoké učení technické v Brně. Fakulta strojního inženýrství, 2010. http://www.nusl.cz/ntk/nusl-233889.
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Práce je věnována generování náhodných struktur dvousložkových vláknových kompozitních materiálů a statistickým metodám analýzy náhodnosti těchto struktur. Byly vyvinuty čtyři algoritmy a vygenerované struktury byly statisticky porovnány s reálnými daty.
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Toro, Marques Alejandra. "ADHD- diagnosen i skolan : En kvalitativ undersökning om fem pedagogers förhållningssätt till diagnosen ADHD i Åk 6-9." Thesis, Södertörns högskola, Lärarutbildningen, 2010. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:sh:diva-5340.
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ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) is a phenomena that is much talked about in both schools and in communities. Today, there is a conflict surrounding the diagnosis ADHD. A part of the conflict takes part between the sociologist Eva Kärfve and Christopher Gillberg, professor in child- and teenage psychology. The roots of this conflict surrounds the much debated line of what is seen as normal and “too” different, basically how many children that actually should have the diagnosis. The purpose with this study is to show five different views of the diagnosis ADHD, using five teachers. To make this study possible, five informants have participated and shared their view on the diagnosis ADHD as well as their experience with the diagnosis. The informants work at a school in the municipality of Huddinge. The school has students from the 6th to the 9th grade, one preparation class, on special school class and one study group for students with concentration difficulties. The study is based on a method of study which focuses on interpretation of the empirical material. The result of this study is that the informants were of the opinion that medication was a big advantage with the diagnosis, so that the students could work in a school environment. Though there were separate opinions on whether or not the medication should be used and to what degree. The result was that certain informants thought that there were many tricks in the physical environment that could be useful, before adding medication to the equation. The informants thought that one big disadvantage with the diagnosis were that the students were very careful with not sharing the information about the diagnosis to other students. The informants believe that students with the diagnosis ADHD could get some form of “label” on them from their classmates and the teachers. Keywords: ADHD, medication, diagnosis, normality, stigma, individualization Nyckelord: ADHD, medicinering, diagnos, normalitet, stigmatisering, individualisering
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Lönnlöv, Sebastian. "Rätten att benämna : Maktutövning i Amalie Skrams psykiatriromaner." Thesis, Stockholms universitet, Avdelningen för litteraturvetenskap, 2014. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-110519.
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Amalie Skram (1846-1905) was born in Norway but lived in Denmark. She published several books about gender relations and built up a reputation as a naturalistic writer. In 1894, a nervous breakdown made her seek help from the famous psychiatrist Knud Pontoppidan. He sent her to an asylum, but she returned home after spending two months in psychiatric care. In 1895, Skram published two novels about the painter Else Kant, based on her own experiences but not written as autobiographies. The books, Professor Hieronimus and På Sct. Jørgen, came to be part of an ongoing debate about the rights of psychiatric patients. My purpose is to analyze the exercise of power in Skram's portrayal of psychiatry, especially the way it is gendered. The power relations are examined with concepts established by Foucault in his power analysis and with relevant medical history as a context. I treat the books as fictive narratives, that should not be seen as describing Skram's own experiences. My result actualizes several of Foucault's main concepts. Psychiatry works through the power to define – the right to give a name. Psychiatry define what madness is, and thus what normality is. The patient is, when defined as mad, also defined as unable to tell the truth about herself and the world. The treatment is a project of normalization and moral upbringing, where the patient is required to learn the norms she is thought to lack, and also to control her feelings instead of expressing them. Hysteria is the diagnosis for expressing strong feelings and can be read as an opposition to the male society, as well as the medical system. Gazes play a big part in these two books. Else is looked at by the medical, defining, gaze. She is herself observing the psychiatry and uses her gaze to look at the other patients in a way that raises questions about both abnormality and normality. In my reading, the gaze exercises power and the so called "male gaze" can also be used by women. The text is ambivalent concerning Else's possible madness. She is described as troubled and almost psychotic in the beginning, but later as sane. My conclusion is that Else gains her own form of sanity, not because of the treatment, but as a way of opposing it. Else is never made an object by the objectifying medical gaze. Instead, she creates herself as an agent and a subject. She is defined as mad, but is determined to in turn define and describe the psychiatry as a form of counter-power.
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Källström, Cater Åsa. "Negotiating normality and deviation - father's violence against mother from children's perspectives." Doctoral thesis, Örebro University, Department of Behavioural, Social and Legal Sciences, 2004. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:oru:diva-88.
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The aim of this study is to contribute to understanding of how children try to understand and interpret their own father and his (possibly) violent actions against their mother in relation to their general conceptualizations concerning fathers and violence. A general social psychological and interactionist approach is related to the children’s selves as the organizing and experiencing structures, the family as the arena for experiences and communicative interaction, and society as a structure of norms and general ideas.
The study is based on interviews with ten children, who were eight to twelve years old at the time of the interview and whose mothers had escaped from their fathers’ violence to a Women’s House. Qualitative interpretation of each child’s complex abstracted and generalized conceptualizations of fathers and violence enabled the understanding of individual themes as crucial parts of each child’s logically unified and conciliated symbolic meaning through the theoretical construct of negotiation.
The study results in the identification of three alternative theoretical approaches to meaning-conciliation. One can be described as ‘conceptual fission’ in the general conception of fathers, one as ‘conceptual fission’ in the conception of the own father and one as negotiating the extension of the opposite of violence, described as ‘goodness’. These negotiations can be understood as parts of distancing violence from either one subgroup of fathers, from the overall, essential or principle understanding of the own father within the child’s relationship with him, or from fathers altogether, including the child’s own. The children’s attempts to combine normalization of their father as an individual with resistance to his violent acts are interpreted as indicating the difficulty that the combination of the social deviancy of violence and the family context constitutes for many children.
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Adefisoye, James Olusegun. "An Assessment of the Performances of Several Univariate Tests of Normality." FIU Digital Commons, 2015. http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/1858.
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The importance of checking the normality assumption in most statistical procedures especially parametric tests cannot be over emphasized as the validity of the inferences drawn from such procedures usually depend on the validity of this assumption. Numerous methods have been proposed by different authors over the years, some popular and frequently used, others, not so much. This study addresses the performance of eighteen of the available tests for different sample sizes, significance levels, and for a number of symmetric and asymmetric distributions by conducting a Monte-Carlo simulation. The results showed that considerable power is not achieved for symmetric distributions when sample size is less than one hundred and for such distributions, the kurtosis test is most powerful provided the distribution is leptokurtic or platykurtic. The Shapiro-Wilk test remains the most powerful test for asymmetric distributions. We conclude that different tests are suitable under different characteristics of alternative distributions.
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Shi, Weiling. "An Alternative Goodness-of-fit Test for Normality with Unknown Parameters." FIU Digital Commons, 2014. http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/1623.
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Goodness-of-fit tests have been studied by many researchers. Among them, an alternative statistical test for uniformity was proposed by Chen and Ye (2009). The test was used by Xiong (2010) to test normality for the case that both location parameter and scale parameter of the normal distribution are known. The purpose of the present thesis is to extend the result to the case that the parameters are unknown. A table for the critical values of the test statistic is obtained using Monte Carlo simulation. The performance of the proposed test is compared with the Shapiro-Wilk test and the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. Monte-Carlo simulation results show that proposed test performs better than the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test in many cases. The Shapiro Wilk test is still the most powerful test although in some cases the test proposed in the present research performs better.
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Hristova-Bojinova, Daniela. "Non-normality and non-linearity in univariate standard models of inflation." Thesis, University of Leicester, 2002. http://hdl.handle.net/2381/30141.
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The empirical evidences presented in a vast number of recent publications gave rise to debates in the literature regarding the problem of stationarity of inflation. Sometimes considered as a unit root process and sometimes as a stationary process, in most of the studies inflationary time series are modelled assuming normality and linearity. The present thesis relaxes the frequently used assumptions of linearity in price processes and normality in distribution of inflation, and suggests two ways of modelling inflationary data. Firstly, it is assumed that distribution of inflation is a stable Paretian distribution and, under this assumption, stationarity of inflation is examined applying an appropriate test. Secondly, price time series are modelled by treating them as a unit root bilinear process, which further leads to non-normality in distribution of inflation. A recently proposed test for presence of no-bilinearity is then applied. If bilinearity is detected, the bilinear coefficient is estimated by the Kalman filter method. Subsequently, the finite sample properties of this estimator are evaluated using Monte Carlo simulation experiments. A series of Monte Carlo simulations leads to calculating the r-statistic critical values for testing whether the estimated bilinear coefficients significantly differ from zero. The methodologies explained above are then applied to a large set of worldwide price and inflationary data for 107 different countries. Assuming that the distribution of inflation is a stable Paretian distribution 75% of the inflationary time series are classified as integrated of order zero. Under the assumption of normality of distribution of inflation this can be inferred for 11.11% of the inflationary time series. It has been also shown that 71.03% of the price time series exhibit unit root bilinearity. Analysis of the inflationary time series reveals the presence of bilinearity in 9.35% of them.
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Constantinou, Costas S. "Transplanted selves : kidney transplantation in Cyprus and the reconstruction of normality." Thesis, University of Bristol, 2009. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.501544.
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This study constitutes an exploration of the illness experience of end-stage kidney disease in the socio-cultural context of the island of Cyprus. End-stage kidney disease or kidney failure is a health condition requiring two types of medical treatment - dialysis and kidney transplantation - and from these treatments four main groups of people derive who are subjected to different experiences: people who are undergoing dialysis treatment but are included on a waiting list for transplantation; people who received a kidney transplant either from a living or a cadaver donor; people who suffered immuno-rejection and subsequently returned to the treatment of dialysis and the waiting list; and people who are undergoing dialysis treatment but cannot have a kidney transplantation for medical reasons.
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Beau, Thabiso. "Normality of JSE Returns: Macro-outliers, Micro-outliers: an Empirical Evaluation." Master's thesis, Faculty of Commerce, 2019. https://hdl.handle.net/11427/31721.
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Previous work on the empirical distribution of security returns has found that equity returns are not normally distributed. These findings have brought the applicability of certain asset allocation and pricing frameworks into question. This study examines whether the removal of a priori macro-outliers and micro-outliers leads to improved fits to the Gaussian distribution for single-listed equities on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE). Single-listed equities refer to stocks (i) listed on the JSE Main Board over the period covered in this study, (ii) that comprise of the exchange’s largest 100 stocks by market capitalisation, and (iii) have been determined, by comparing American Depository Receipt (ADR) trading volume to JSE trading volume, to be mainly exposed to the South African market. Regarding the predetermined outliers, the study categorises macro-outliers as days related to predictable market announcements which are US nonfarm payrolls announcement days. Similarly, micro-outliers are classified as days linked to predictable sector-specific and firm-specific news, which are sectoral announcement, and company earnings announcement days, respectively. The study aims to contribute to the empirical and theoretical literature on the distributional properties of South African equity returns. This study makes use of a filter to narrow the sample of stocks for empirical investigation over the period from 1 January 2016 to 31 December 2017, and analyses daily stock returns on a 65-day rolling basis. Using only those equities, an evaluation of the goodness-of-fit methodology is conducted using graphical methods, and statistical goodness-of-fit tests sorted into (i) empirical distribution function, (ii) regression and correlation, and (iii) moment tests. It is found that the majority of the data exhibits significant departures from normality in empirical distribution function, and regression and correlation tests. The results were statistically significant at three confidence levels. However, in the case of moment tests, the results show a clear divergence between the methods. It is further demonstrated that while the daily stock returns have improved fits to the normal distribution, they remain predominantly positively-skewed and thick-tailed even after the removal of the a priori outliers. On this basis, it is argued that some downside risk measures, and asset allocation frameworks may not be applicable in the South African context.
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Wu, Yinkai. "Non-normality, uncertainty and inflation forecasting : an analysis of China's inflation." Thesis, University of Leicester, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/2381/37175.
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Economic forecasting is important because it can affect the decision making processes of individuals, firms and governments so as to affect their behaviours. In this thesis, I discuss different methodologies for forecasting and forecast evaluation. I also discuss the role of assumption of normality and the role of uncertainty in economic forecasting. The first chapter is the introduction of the thesis. In second chapter, I conduct a Monte Carlo simulation to investigate the performances of forecast combination and the forecast encompassing test under the forecast errors non-normality. In third chapter, I examines the relationship between inflation forecast uncertainties and macroeconomic uncertainty for China by using different measures of uncertainties. I also investigate the relationship between inflation forecast uncertainties and inflation itself. In fourth chapter, I compute the probabilities of deflation for China by applying density forecast based on the theories and methodologies from previous two chapters. Particularly, I construct density forecasts for different forecast horizons by a joint distribution using Student-t copula. The fifth chapter is conclusion.
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Smith, Jean M. "Towards hope, normality and achievement : how parents cope with childhood cancer." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/22641.
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This is a qualitative case study on how parents cope when their child has cancer, which is still a life-threatening illness despite the considerable medical advances made in recent years. 19 parents were interviewed in depth during the course of their child's treatment. Their perceptions of their experiences are reported in detail and analysed in terms of themes, which illustrate the activities, the stresses and the conflicts that coping involves. The findings indicate that coping involves parents in redefining a normality in their lives, remaining hopeful throughout the illness, negotiating social support for themselves and meeting their care responsibilities to the child. These findings support many observations from practice and research, confirming that the child's illness has a traumatic and disruptive effect on the whole family. Support for the findings also came from a survey of the views of 120 oncology social workers in the UK and USA about coping, which was conducted separately. The findings are examined in relation to different theoretical perspectives, notably Lazarus and Folkman's model of "coping theory", which envisages coping as an interactional process. Their model, together with psychoanalytically based theory, was used to understand the personal changes that parents reported as having experienced during their child's illness. Some characteristics of coping are discussed, and the implications for policy, practice and for the direction of future research are proposed.
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Koskinen, Erik. "Unga vuxnas upplevelse av institutionell miljöterapi." Thesis, Stockholm University, Department of Social Work, 2009. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-26396.
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THE AIM OF THIS STUDY WAS TO INVESTIGATE YOUNG ADULTS EXPERIENCE´ OF RESIDENTIAL TREATMENT. THE STUDY WAS QUALITATIVE, BASED ON INTERVIEWS WITH FIVE RESPONDENTS WHO HAD STAYED AT A TREATMENT HOME FOR A LONG PERIOD OF TIME. THE FOCUS WAS ON THE RESPONDENTS´ EXPERIENCES OF MILIEU THERAPY AND THEIR VIEW ON NORMALITY. THE RESULTS WERE ANALYZED FROM EARLIER RESEARCH, THEORIES FROM SYMBOLIC-INTERACTIONISM AND ANTONOVSKYS´ THEORY ABOUT SENSE OF COHERENCE. THE RESULTS SHOWED THAT THE RESPONDENTS HAD TO EXAGGERATE THEIR DYSFUNCTIONAL BEHAVIOUR IN ORDER TO FIT AMONG THE OTHER RESIDENTS. THE GROUP OF RESIDENTS HAD A MAJOR IMPACT ON THE RESPONDENTS´ EXPERIENCE OF THE STAY. THEY ALSO EXPERIENCED THAT SOCIO-PSYCHOLOGICAL PROBLEMS WERE CONTAGIOUS WITHIN THE GROUP. AFTER THE TREATMENT THE RESPONDENTS FELT MORE SECURE IN THEMSELVES AND HAD A BETTER CONNECTION WITH THEIR FAMILIES. NORMALIZATION THROUGH EDUCATION SEEMS TO HAVE TAKEN PLACE SINCE ALL THE RESPONDENTS EXCEPT ONE ARE INVOLVED IN AN EDUCATION-PROGRAM NOW.
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Svartling, Catrine, and Christel Åkesson. "Bedömning för att forma och styra? : En kritisk analys av formativ bedömning." Thesis, Högskolan i Halmstad, Sektionen för lärarutbildning (LUT), 2011. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hh:diva-14486.
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Syftet med föreliggande studie är att undersöka vilket synsätt som råder bland lärare i de lägre årskurserna gällande begreppet bedömning. Studiens metodologiska - och teoretiska utgångspunkter grundar sig i Foucaultiansk teoribildning. Empirin har samlats in genom två stycken fokusgruppintervjuer och materialet har analyserats med utgångspunkt i begrepp som governmentality och disciplinär makt. Resultatet visar att lärarna använder sig av flera styrtekniker som inryms av en dold maktutövning, vars primära mål är att forma och styra subjektet.The purpose of this study is to describe and discuss the function of assessment in primary school. The methodological and the theoretical foundation take its point of departure in theories formulated by Michel Foucault. The empirical data is collected through two focus group interviews and the material is analyzed through the concepts of governmentality and power formations. The results show that teachers use multiple control techniques which are governed by a hidden exercise of power, with the primary aim to shape and control the subject.
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Axgrim, Zarah, and Jonna Andersson. "De bortglömda barnen i beredandet av tvångsvård : Om bristande rättssäkerhet och föräldrars normalitet i tillämpningen av LVU." Thesis, Karlstads universitet, Institutionen för sociala och psykologiska studier, 2016. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kau:diva-45525.
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Vi har i denna studie använt oss av ett kvalitativt angreppssätt för att undersöka 19 domar gällande ”barn som far illa” enligt 2§ lagen med särskilda bestämmelser om vård av unga (LVU). Studiens syfte var att undersöka hur Socialnämnden i sina yttranden till Förvaltningsrätten argumenterar för tvångsvården. Studien har inspirerat av diskursanalys som metod och teori samt applicerat det teoretiska begreppet normalitet som ett analytiskt verktyg. Resultatet visar att socialnämnden argumenterar utifrån föräldrars tillkortakommanden och det onormala föräldraskapet i förhållande till barns odefinierade behov. Vidare framkommer att argumentationer förs utifrån lagstiftningen rekvisit för att uppnå rättslig relevans.We have used a qualitative approach to analyze 19 verdicts according to 2§ The Young Persons Act (LVU) about maltreated children. The purpose with this study was to investigate how the Social Welfare argues to the administrative court. This study was inspired by discourse analyze as method and theory with a theoretical concept of normality as an analytical tool. The result show that the Social Welfare argues about parents shortcoming and the abnormal parenthood in relations to childrens undefined needs. The result also show that the Social Welfare argues for compulsory care in terms of legal requirements to achieve legal relevance.
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Barratt, J. R. "Assessment of normality transformations in water resources time series analysis and generation /." Title page, abstract and contents only, 1990. http://web4.library.adelaide.edu.au/theses/09ENS/09ensb269.pdf.
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