Two Essays on the Impact of Institutional Structures on Entrepreneurship: Country Level Analysis

Entrepreneurship has long been viewed as an engine of innovation and economic growth; however, there is limited understanding of cross-national differences in rates and types of entrepreneurship. This dissertation mainly uses an institutional theory framework to investigate whether shared social knowledge, value systems, and regulations influence differences in rates and types of entrepreneurial activities among countries. This dissertation’s central research question is addressed in two essays. In Essay 1, I examine what factors explain the recovery of entrepreneurial activities in countries after the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC). Nearly all countries experienced a sharp drop in entrepreneurial activities during the GFC; however, entrepreneurial activities rebounded to pre-crisis level in some countries, and not others. I test my propositions using Fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analyses (FSQCA) and identify the distinct configurations of institutional arrangements that explained recovery of entrepreneurial activities after the GCF. The findings broadly indicate that there is an equifinality in countries’ recovery in which either formal institutions (regulatory) or informal institutions (normative and cognitive) are sufficient conditions for entrepreneurial recovery indicating multiple paths for countries to pursue after an entrepreneurial crisis, and thesimultaneous presence of all three institutional structures (cognitive, normative and regulative) was not necessary for the recovery. Essay 2 investigates the relationship between countries’ institutional profile (cognitive, normative and regulatory) coupled with national innovation system and individuals, entrepreneurial choice: necessity driven entrepreneurship and opportunity driven entrepreneurship. Recent research has identified that opportunity driven entrepreneurship has more significant impact on economic growth than necessity driven entrepreneurship. I examine how national innovation system factors such as entrepreneurship training and education, university–industry collaboration, technology and availability of venture capital impact the type of entrepreneurship. Using Hierarchical Linear Modeling, the findings shows that while either institutional profile or national innovation system factors cannot solely encourage people to choose OME over NME, if supportive institutional arrangements (cognitive, normative and regulatory) get coupled with national innovation system factors, it can be expected to see more potential entrepreneurs to get engaged in opportunity driven entrepreneurship rather than necessity driven entrepreneurship

Understanding the Architecture, Assembly, and Interactome of the Nucleosome Remodelling and Deacetylase (NuRD) Complex

This thesis presents data to enhance our understanding of the composition, assembly, and structure of the nucleosome remodeling and deacetylase (NuRD) complex, a transcriptional coregulator that is strongly linked to cancer. Understanding the structure and function of the gene regulating complexes will lead to a better understanding of mechanisms of gene regulation. This should ultimately both allow insight into disease processes that originate from gene regulatory network malfunction and might enable reprogramming of the gene expression for application in health, agriculture and industry. Chapter 1 represents a general introduction to gene regulation and the NuRD complex. The NuRD complex is a 1mDa multisubunit transcriptional coregulator protein complex, which is widely expressed and harbours both chromatin remodelling and histone deacetylase activities. Abnormalities in a number of its components are associated with various types of cancers and neurodegenerative diseases. Although the core components of the complex have been well established, the structural basis of the complex has poorly been studied. Chapter 2 describes the details of the materials and methods used in this research. Chapter 3 investigates NuRD complex stoichiometry and interactome using a label-free quantitative proteomics method and provides biochemical evidence for two new direct interactors of the complex. Chapter 4 and 5 investigate the recombinantly produced subcomplexes using biochemical and a mass spectrometry-based hybrid method for structural modelling of the NuRD complex. Chapter 6 discuss the findings and outlines the future directions

Quality of service aware data dissemination in vehicular Ad Hoc networks

Des systèmes de transport intelligents (STI) seront éventuellement fournis dans un proche avenir pour la sécurité et le confort des personnes lors de leurs déplacements sur les routes. Les réseaux ad-hoc véhiculaires (VANETs) représentent l'élément clé des STI. Les VANETs sont formés par des véhicules qui communiquent entre eux et avec l'infrastructure. En effet, les véhicules pourront échanger des messages qui comprennent, par exemple, des informations sur la circulation routière, les situations d'urgence et les divertissements. En particulier, les messages d'urgence sont diffusés par des véhicules en cas d'urgence (p.ex. un accident de voiture); afin de permettre aux conducteurs de réagir à temps (p.ex., ralentir), les messages d'urgence doivent être diffusés de manière fiable dans un délai très court. Dans les VANETs, il existe plusieurs facteurs, tels que le canal à pertes, les terminaux cachés, les interférences et la bande passante limitée, qui compliquent énormément la satisfaction des exigences de fiabilité et de délai des messages d'urgence. Dans cette thèse, en guise de première contribution, nous proposons un schéma de diffusion efficace à plusieurs sauts, appelé Dynamic Partitioning Scheme (DPS), pour diffuser les messages d'urgence. DPS calcule les tailles de partitions dynamiques et le calendrier de transmission pour chaque partition; à l'intérieur de la zone arrière de l'expéditeur, les partitions sont calculées de sorte qu'en moyenne chaque partition contient au moins un seul véhicule; l'objectif est de s'assurer que seul un véhicule dans la partition la plus éloignée (de l'expéditeur) est utilisé pour diffuser le message, jusqu'au saut suivant; ceci donne lieu à un délai d'un saut plus court. DPS assure une diffusion rapide des messages d'urgence. En outre, un nouveau mécanisme d'établissement de liaison, qui utilise des tonalités occupées, est proposé pour résoudre le problème du problème de terminal caché. Dans les VANETs, la Multidiffusion, c'est-à-dire la transmission d'un message d'une source à un nombre limité de véhicules connus en tant que destinations, est très importante. Par rapport à la diffusion unique, avec Multidiffusion, la source peut simultanément prendre en charge plusieurs destinations, via une arborescence de multidiffusion, ce qui permet d'économiser de la bande passante et de réduire la congestion du réseau. Cependant, puisque les VANETs ont une topologie dynamique, le maintien de la connectivité de l'arbre de multidiffusion est un problème majeur. Comme deuxième contribution, nous proposons deux approches pour modéliser l'utilisation totale de bande passante d'une arborescence de multidiffusion: (i) la première approche considère le nombre de segments de route impliqués dans l'arbre de multidiffusion et (ii) la seconde approche considère le nombre d'intersections relais dans l'arbre de multidiffusion. Une heuristique est proposée pour chaque approche. Pour assurer la qualité de service de l'arbre de multidiffusion, des procédures efficaces sont proposées pour le suivi des destinations et la surveillance de la qualité de service des segments de route. Comme troisième contribution, nous étudions le problème de la congestion causée par le routage du trafic de données dans les VANETs. Nous proposons (1) une approche de routage basée sur l’infonuagique qui, contrairement aux approches existantes, prend en compte les chemins de routage existants qui relaient déjà les données dans les VANETs. Les nouvelles demandes de routage sont traitées de sorte qu'aucun segment de route ne soit surchargé par plusieurs chemins de routage croisés. Au lieu d'acheminer les données en utilisant des chemins de routage sur un nombre limité de segments de route, notre approche équilibre la charge des données en utilisant des chemins de routage sur l'ensemble des tronçons routiers urbains, dans le but d'empêcher, dans la mesure du possible, les congestions locales dans les VANETs; et (2) une approche basée sur le réseau défini par logiciel (SDN) pour surveiller la connectivité VANET en temps réel et les délais de transmission sur chaque segment de route. Les données de surveillance sont utilisées en entrée de l'approche de routage.Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) will be eventually provided in the near future for both safety and comfort of people during their travel on the roads. Vehicular ad-hoc Networks (VANETs), represent the key component of ITS. VANETs consist of vehicles that communicate with each other and with the infrastructure. Indeed, vehicles will be able to exchange messages that include, for example, information about road traffic, emergency situations, and entertainment. Particularly, emergency messages are broadcasted by vehicles in case of an emergency (e.g., car accident); in order to allow drivers to react in time (e.g., slow down), emergency messages must be reliably disseminated with very short delay. In VANETs, there are several factors, such as lossy channel, hidden terminals, interferences and scarce bandwidth, which make satisfying reliability and delay requirements of emergency messages very challenging. In this thesis, as the first contribution, we propose a reliable time-efficient and multi-hop broadcasting scheme, called Dynamic Partitioning Scheme (DPS), to disseminate emergency messages. DPS computes dynamic partition sizes and the transmission schedule for each partition; inside the back area of the sender, the partitions are computed such that in average each partition contains at least a single vehicle; the objective is to ensure that only a vehicle in the farthest partition (from the sender) is used to disseminate the message, to next hop, resulting in shorter one hop delay. DPS ensures fast dissemination of emergency messages. Moreover, a new handshaking mechanism, that uses busy tones, is proposed to solve the problem of hidden terminal problem. In VANETs, Multicasting, i.e. delivering a message from a source to a limited known number of vehicles as destinations, is very important. Compared to Unicasting, with Multicasting, the source can simultaneously support multiple destinations, via a multicast tree, saving bandwidth and reducing overall communication congestion. However, since VANETs have a dynamic topology, maintaining the connectivity of the multicast tree is a major issue. As the second contribution, we propose two approaches to model total bandwidth usage of a multicast tree: (i) the first approach considers the number of road segments involved in the multicast tree and (ii) the second approach considers the number of relaying intersections involved in the multicast tree. A heuristic is proposed for each approach. To ensure QoS of the multicasting tree, efficient procedures are proposed for tracking destinations and monitoring QoS of road segments. As the third contribution, we study the problem of network congestion in routing data traffic in VANETs. We propose (1) a Cloud-based routing approach that, in opposition to existing approaches, takes into account existing routing paths which are already relaying data in VANETs. New routing requests are processed such that no road segment gets overloaded by multiple crossing routing paths. Instead of routing over a limited set of road segments, our approach balances the load of communication paths over the whole urban road segments, with the objective to prevent, whenever possible, local congestions in VANETs; and (2) a Software Defined Networking (SDN) based approach to monitor real-time VANETs connectivity and transmission delays on each road segment. The monitoring data is used as input to the routing approach

An optimal three-point eighth-order iterative method without memory for solving nonlinear equations with its dynamics

We present a three-point iterative method without memory for solving nonlinear equations in one variable. The proposed method provides convergence order eight with four function evaluations per iteration. Hence, it possesses a very high computational efficiency and supports Kung and Traub's conjecture. The construction, the convergence analysis, and the numerical implementation of the method will be presented. Using several test problems, the proposed method will be compared with existing methods of convergence order eight concerning accuracy and basin of attraction. Furthermore, some measures are used to judge methods with respect to their performance in finding the basin of attraction.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1508.0174

Some advancement in ionization of atoms and molecules in intermediate intensity regime using ultra-fast laser pulses

Dans cette thèse, nous présentons une étude de l'ionisation multiphotonique ou tunnel de certains atomes et molécules dans un régime intermédiaire d'intensité (~10¹³-10¹⁴ W/cm²) en utilisant des impulsions provenant d'un laser ultra rapide Ti:saphir. En étudiant l'ionisation à deux couleurs de Ar et de Xe, nous présentons un modèle pour quantifier les contributions tunnel quasi-statique et multiphotonique. La dépendance du taux d'ionisation de Ar et de Xe sur l'angle entre les vecteurs de polarisation de deux impulsions ([omega] et 2 [omega] est mesurée. L'ionisation de cinq molécules organiques, C₆H₆, C₅NH₅, C₃H₆, C₂H₄, et C₂H₂, est étudiée. Deux phénomènes sont observés. La première observation montre que la probabilité d'ionisation jusqu'à un état uniquement chargé (+1) est supprimée en comparaison avec des atomes fictifs ayant le même potentiel d'ionisation. La seconde montre que l'ionisation double de ces molécules se produit principalement par un processus non séquentiel. Ces molécules présentent une probabilité relative énorme pour l'ionisation non séquentielle, qui est attribuée à la suppression de l'ionisation multiphotonique ou tunnel d'un ion de charge +1. Finalement, pour une application de spectroscopic laser, les spectres de masse de deux isomères de butène, 1-butène et cis-2-butène ionisés par des impulsions laser femtosecondes intenses sont comparés. On montre que la différence entre ces deux spectres est beaucoup plus prononcée que celle qu'on observe sur des spectres obtenus par collisions d'électrons de 100 eV. Notre observation suggère l'application possible de l'ionisation multiphotonique dissociative par des impulsions d'un laser ultrarapide pour la spectroscopic de masse de haute performance pour distinguer des molécules similaires

A Proposed Architecture for Continuous Web Monitoring Through Online Crawling of Blogs

Getting informed of what is registered in the Web space on time, can greatly help the psychologists, marketers and political analysts to familiarize, analyse, make decision and act correctly based on the society`s different needs. The great volume of information in the Web space hinders us to continuously online investigate the whole space of the Web. Focusing on the considered blogs limits our working domain and makes the online crawling in the Web space possible. In this article, an architecture is offered which continuously online crawls the related blogs, using focused crawler, and investigates and analyses the obtained data. The online fetching is done based on the latest announcements of the ping server machines. A weighted graph is formed based on targeting the important key phrases, so that a focused crawler can do the fetching of the complete texts of the related Web pages, based on the weighted graph.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figure