This study aims to add a new dimension to research in Australia on the use of accounting ratios to predict corporate failure. Previous studies have used the statistical technique of discriminant analysis to derive models for predicting whether a firm will or will not fail. This study will use the same statistical technique but with three differences: / (a) The ratios to be used in the discriminant analysis are selected by a method which ensured that no arbitrary limit is placed on their number. / (b) Because the significance of accounting ratios can vary from industry to industry, four industries are separately analysed: manufacturing, retail, property, and finance. / (c) The statistical probabilities yielded by the analysis are used to measure a firm’s current level of insolvency risk. / The extra dimension is added by interpreting the characteristic patterns of insolvency risk which emerge: an analysis of the factors causing the differences in these patterns throws new light on the causes, symptoms, and remedies of financial distress.

In 2001, I began the field work in an empirical study of the laws of defamation in New Zealand. This study involved a comprehensive mail-out survey of the New Zealand media, and an adapted survey of defamation lawyers, which were designed to discover how the laws of defamation affected both groups, and what the respondents thought about those laws. The survey was augmented by an extensive search of defamation court files in the most important New Zealand High Court registries. The question behind the survey was essentially whether New Zealand’s defamation laws have a chilling effect on the media, to the extent that stories which should be told do not see the light of day. In this thesis, I contextualise and report on the results of the survey. I first describe and analyse the sources and trends in current defamation law, the other forms of regulation of the media in New Zealand, and the patterns of media ownership. I go on to utilise background data from the survey to present a character and business profile of the media who responded to the survey and find the data confirms the representative nature of those respondents. I then complete contextualisation of the survey by analysing the nature of the chilling effect doctrine itself, a canon which began as a predictive theory importing sociological concepts into legal analysis, but which is now a doctrine applied somewhat inconsistently, but with substantive effects, by the courts. In the following chapters I present the results of the media survey, the court file search and the survey of defamation lawyers, both in narrative and graph or tabular form. My tentative initial finding, that New Zealand’s defamation laws do not have an excessive chilling effect on our media, although they do have some, is progressively confirmed, with each set of data appearing to mirror and corroborate that which went before. In the final chapters, I take this somewhat surprising finding and augment it by theorising about future developments in defamation law. I suggest that increased constitutionalisation of this area of private law, in the form of full incorporation of a Bill of Rights methodology, is both desirable and necessary to protect against any chilling effects, such as they are. I conclude by posing a question about a possible joint future for defamation and privacy claims.

Debugging is a very time-consuming activity for programmers. Although the number of proposed debugging tools is large, the number of tools that are actually adopted by practitioners and used during development of software is less than one may expect. Many believe that one reason for the situation is that it is hard to estimate whether the implementation efforts of proposed debugging tools or approaches are worth the gain. The first goal of this thesis is to propose a methodology for the evaluation of usefulness of debugging tools. To provide an exemplary usage of the methodology, a study of usefulness of typical debugging tools for development of operating systems is conducted. Secondly, the thesis also explores and documents further aspects of how programmers debug software. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

This study investigates the brand of shareholder activism hedge funds deploy by reference to a unique hand-collected dataset of 11 years’ activist hedge funds’ campaigns across 25 countries. The analysis has two core elements, one of which is to chart the emergence of hedge fund activism outside the United States and the other being to account why hedge fund activism has developed differently across the sample countries. Both issues have been to date only tangentially explored. This study is the first one to seek to determine the extent to which corporate law is a determinant of the hedge fund activism phenomenon using a fresh approach which combines theoretical and comparative legal analysis with empirical methods. While a single variable is unlikely to account for the emergence of hedge fund activism, the study describes hedge fund activism as a game of three sequential stages as a heuristic device and identifies market and legal parameters for each stage. To test the hypotheses advanced for the emergence of hedge fund the study draws upon the law and finance literature. For instance, to account to what extent the rights bestowed on shareholders by corporate law influence hedge fund activism the study uses the CBR shareholder rights index. The results indicate that the extent to which law matters depends on the stage which activism has reached. The study also puts hedge fund activism in its corporate governance context. Activist hedge funds’ interventions have been envisioned as a mechanism for ensuring effective control of managerial discretion. Opponents of hedge fund activism contend, however, that this new breed of activists has a dark side that raises various concerns. Activist hedge funds have been considered: as exacerbating short-termism; as being mainly aggressive to the incumbents; as bearing similarities to the 1980s-raiders; and as engaging in distorting equity decoupling techniques. The study presents new empirical data that shows that the perceived negative side-effects of hedge funds activism are greatly exaggerated: they are myths. Cumulatively, these findings question whether hedge fund activism warrants any type of legislative response so far as the goal of shareholder value maximization is succeeded.

This study empirically examines the impact of quality effort orientation on the financial performance of certified Portuguese firms. The results of factor analysis revealed four quality efforts orientation factors. The results of cluster analysis revealed the existence of three distinct groups of firms with regard to quality efforts orientation and performance. The analysis of variance results revealed that firms with a quality efforts orientation focusing on the customer tends to outperform firms utilising other quality efforts orientation with regard to net profit after taxes.

Background: In a sustaining, durable project, an effective code review process is key to ensuring the long-term quality of the code base. As the size of the software continues to increase, although the code inspections have many benefits, the time it takes, the manpower makes it not a good method in some larger projects.  Nowadays more and more industry performs modern code reviews for their project in order to increase the quality of the program. Only a few papers have studied the relationship between code reviewers and code review quality. We need to explore the relationships among code review, code complexity, and reviewers. Finding out which part of the code the reviewers pay more attention to in the code review and how much effort it takes to review. This way we can conduct code reviews more effectively. Objectives: The objective of our study is to investigate if code complexity relates to how software developers to review code in terms of code review length, review frequency, review text quality, reviewer’s sentiment. What’s more, we want to research if the reviewer’s experience will have an impact on code review quality. In order to find a suitable way to conduct a code review for different complexity codes.  Methods: We conduct an exploratory case study. The case and unit of analysis is the open-source project, Cassandra. We extract data from Cassandra Jira (a proprietary issue tracking product), the data are the reviewer’s name, review content, review time, reviewer’s comments, reviewer’s sentiment, comment length, and the review file(java file). Then we use CodeMR to calculate the complexity of the file, it uses some coupling and code complexity metrics. The reviewer’s sentiment is analyzed by a text analysis API. After we collect all these data we use SPSS to do a statistic analysis, to find whether there are relationships between code complexity and these factors. What’s more, we have a workshop and send out questionnaires to collect more input from Cassandra developers. Results: The results show that code review frequency is related to code complexity, complex code requires more review. Reviewer’s sentiment is related to code complexity, reviewer’s sentiment towards complex code is more positive or negative rather than neutral. Code review text quality is related to the reviewer’s experience, experienced reviewers leave a comment with higher quality than novice reviewers. On the other hand, the code review length and review text quality are not related to code complexity. Conclusions: According to the results, the code with higher code complexity related to the more frequent review, and the reviewer's emotions are more clear when reviewing more complex code. Training experienced reviewers are also very necessary because the results show that experienced reviewers review the code with higher quality. From the questionnaire, we know developers believe that more complex code needs more iterations of code review and experienced reviewers do have a positive effect on code review, which gives us a guide on how to do code review based on a different level of code complexity.

Designing software components for future reuse has been an important area in software engineering. A software system developed with reusable components follows a "with" reuse process while a component designed to be reused in other systems follows a "for" reuse process. This dissertation explores the factors affecting design for reuse and design with reusable components through empirical studies. The studies involve Java components implementing a particular algorithm, a stemming algorithm that is widely used in the conflation domain. The method and empirical approach are general and independent of the programming language. Such studies may be extended to other types of components, for example, components implementing data structures such as stacks, queues etc. Design for reuse: In this thesis, the first study was conducted analyzing one-use and equivalent reusable components for the overhead in terms of component size, effort required, number of parameters, and productivity. Reusable components were significantly larger than their equivalent one-use components and had significantly more parameters. The effort required for the reusable components was higher than for one-use components. The productivity of the developers was significantly lower for the reusable components compared to the one-use components. Also, during the development of reusable components, the subjects spent more time on writing code than designing the components, but not significantly so.  A ranking of the design principles by frequency of use is also reported. A content analysis performed on the feedback is also reported and the reasons for using and not using the reuse design principles are identified. A correlation analysis showed that the reuse design principles were, in general, used independently of each other. Design with reuse: Through another empirical study, the effect of the size of a component and the reuse design principles used in building the component on the ease of reuse were analyzed. It was observed that the higher the complexity the lower the ease of reuse, but the correlation is not significant. When considered independently, four of the reuse design principles: well-defined interface, clarity and understandability, generality, and separate concepts from content significantly increased the ease of reuse while commonality and variability analysis significantly decreased the ease of reuse, and documentation did not have a significant impact on the ease of reuse. Experience in the programming language had no significant relationship with the reusability of components. Experience in software engineering and software reuse showed a relationship with reusability but the effect size was small. Testing components before integrating them into a system was found to have no relationship with the reusability of components. A content analysis of the feedback is presented identifying the challenges of components that were not easy to reuse. Features that make a component easily reusable were also identified. The Mahalanobis-Taguchi Strategy (MTS) was employed to develop a model based on Mahalanobis Distance  to identify the factors that can detect if a component is easy to reuse or not. The identified factors within the model are: size of a component, a set of reuse design principles (well-defined interface, clarity and understandability, commonality and variability analysis, and generality), and component testing. / Ph. D.

Syftet med denna empiriska studie var att granska hur sjuksköterskan dokumente-rar smärta på en postoperativ avdelning och hur åtgärder i samband med smärt-lindring följs upp. Studien genomfördes på Universitetssjukhuset i Malmö genom granskning av journaler för 14 patienter som givit sitt samtycke att delta i studien. Analysen resulterade i tre kategorier: god/tillfredsställande, delvis tillfredsställan-de och bristfällig/obefintlig dokumentation. Resultatet av studien visade brister gällande dokumentation av smärta. Avsaknad av användning av visuell analog skala, smärtans karaktär och uppföljning av smärtlindring kunde noteras i ett fler-tal journaler. Bristerna var särskilt uttalade i fråga om dokumentation av uppföljning. Vidare forskning på området är angelägen för att kunna ta itu med problemet och i framtiden bör sjuksköterskan få fördjupa sina kunskaper i utbildningen eller på sin arbetsplats. / The aim of this empirical study was to examine how nurses document pain in a postoperative unit and the follow up of the alleviation of pain. The study was car-ried out in Malmö University Hospital, Sweden, through examining journals from 14 patients whom agreed to participate. The analyse identified three categories: good/satisfying, partly satisfying and deficient/non-existing documentation. Fur-thermore the study showed qualitative shortages concerning documentation of pain e.g. Lack of using a pain scale, pain character and follow up of alleviation of pain could be seen in many journals. Further research in this area is needed to be able to handle the problem and in service training as well as increased focus on the documentation problems in basic nurse training is recommended.

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Utilizing immutability is considered to have many desired benefits when it comes to software development and reasoning about programs. It is also one of the core principles of functional programming, and many programming languages have support for specifying immutability. Developers can by specifying immutability write code that, for example, prevent program state from being unintentionally mutated. The Scala programming language is a functional and object-oriented language where developers can specify immutability with reassignable and non-reassignable variables. The type system in Scala has no built-in support for developers to express the fact that a type is immutable, immutability is instead by convention and considered best practice. However, knowledge about the immutability usage and how prevalent it is in real-world Scala code are until this point non-existent.            This project presents an immutability analysis and evaluation of six small-to-large open source projects written in Scala providing empirical data on immutability usage. The analysis investigates the immutability property of templates, where a template refers to one of Scala's different class types, on three distinct properties: shallow, conditionally deep and deep immutability, where deep is the strongest immutability property. The analysis works as a plug-in for the Scala compiler that statically analyzes the source code of projects. We report immutability statistics for each evaluated project, including three widely used projects, Scala's standard library, Akka's actor framework and ScalaTest. Explanations to why stronger immutability properties do not hold are also provided. The analysis show that the majority of templates for each project satisfied an immutability property and were not classified as mutable. Because each analyzed project had templates that were assumed to be mutable, as they were unreachable by our analysis, there could potentially be more templates that satisfy an immutability property. Inheritance is shown to be an important factor when it comes to a template's immutability and mutability was found to be lower for the template types case class and singleton object. This can be seen as intended by the designers of Scala, indicating that these type of class abstractions help programmers utilize immutability. Our results show that immutability is frequently used in Scala and the high degree of immutability usage could be due to the functional nature of the language. / Att använda immuterbar (oföränderlig) data anses ha många önskvärda fördelar när det kommer till utveckling av program och att kunna resonera om dess funktionalitet. Immuterbar data är också en viktig princip inom funktionell programmering och många språk har idag stöd för att ange immuterbarhet. Utvecklare kan i kod ange ifall data ska vara immuterbar för att till exempel förhindra ett programtillstånd från att oavsiktligt förändras. Programmeringsspråket Scala är ett funktionellt och objektorienterat språk där utvecklare kan ange immuterbarhet med två typer av variabler, en som är tilldelningsbar och en som är icke-tilldelningsbar. Typsystemet i Scala har inget inbyggt stöd för utvecklare att uttrycka det faktum att en typ är immuterbar, att använda immuterbarhet är i stället konvention och anses vara den bästa metoden. Men uppgifter om hur immuterbarhet egentligen används i riktiga Scala projekt har fram tills nu inte varit tillgängligt. Detta projekt presenterar en immuterbarhetsanalys och en utvärdering av sex små till stora projekt med öppen källkod skrivna i programmeringsspråket Scala. Analysen undersöker immuterbarhetsegenskaper hos Scalas olika typer av klasser med avseende på tre olika egenskaper: ytlig, villkorligt djup och djup immuterbar, där djup är den starkaste immuterbarhetsegenskapen. Analysen fungerar som ett tillägg för Scalas kompilator och utfärdar en statisk analys av källkoden för ett projekt. Statistik om immuterbarhet för varje projekt redovisas och utvärderas, bland annat tre välkända och populära kodbaser, Scalas standard bibliotek, Akka’s actor ramverk och ScalaTest. Förklaringar till varför klasser inte uppfyller en immuterbarhetsegenskap visas också. Analysen visar att majoriteten av alla klasser i projekten har en immuterbarhetsegenskap och var inte klassificerade som muterbara. Eftersom varje projekt hade klasser som antogs vara muterbara för att dessa inte var nåbara för våran analys så kan det potentiellt finnas fler klasser som har en immuterbarhetsegenskap. Vad en klass ärver visar sig vara en viktig faktor när det kommer till vilken typ av immuterbarhetsegenskap den har. Muterbarhet visade sig vara lägre för klasser som är av typen case class and singleton object vilket kan anses vara avsett av Scalas skapare, då dessa klass abstraktioner hjälper programmerare att använda immuterbarhet. Resultaten visar att immuterbarhet används flitigt i Scala och den höga användningsgraden kan vara på grund av att det är ett funktionellt språk.