The audit expectation gap, generally known as the differences between what users of financialstatements expect from the auditor and what the auditor actually provides, is present andresulting to a widespread concern. This thesis aims to investigate the level and nature of the audit expectation gap betweenauditors and commercial loan officers. In addition, this thesis also asks the question ifeducation is a mean to reduce commercial loan officers’ audit expectation gap. A questionnaire containing seven-point Likert scales with bipolar adjectival statements wassent to auditors and commercial loan officers. The respondents were asked to choose anumber from the scale which identified their level of agreement to either one of thestatements. The results revealed substantial evidence of an audit expectation gap particularly on issuesconcerning auditors’ responsibilities in fraud detection and prevention. Education oncommercial loan officers could reduce the audit expectation gap.

This study is aimed to unpack the ‘black box’ that connects the grade-3 test-based retention policy with students’ academic outcomes. I theorized that the policy effects on teaching and learning may be modified by instructional capacity, but are unlikely to occur through enhancing teachers’ capability to teach. Analyzing the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study Kindergarten cohort (ECLS-K) dataset, I first explored the relationship between the test-based retention policy and instructional capacity as indicated by teacher expectations of students’ learning capability and then investigated whether and how the expectations moderated the policy effects on instructional time reallocation, student academic performance, and student self-perceived academic competence and interests. To remove the selection bias associated with the non-experimental data, I applied a novel propensity score-based causal inference method, the marginal mean weighting through stratification (MMW-S) method and extended it to a causal analysis that approximates a randomization of schools to the test-based retention policy followed by a randomization of classes to teachers with different levels of expectations. Consistent with my theory, I found that the test-based retention policy had no effects on teacher expectations. Although the policy uniformly increased the time allocated to math instruction, it produced no significant changes in students’ overall performance and overall self-perception in math. In addition, I found that students responded differently to the test-based retention policy depending on the expectations they received from the grade-3 teachers. The results suggested some benefits of positive expectations over negative and indifferent expectations in moderating the policy effects, including more access to advanced content, higher learning gains of average-ability students, and more resilient student learning over a long term. However, the results also showed that having positive expectations alone is not sufficient for academic improvement under the high-stakes policy. If implemented by a positive-expectation teacher, the policy could be detrimental to students’ learning in the nontested subject or to their learning of basic reading/math skills. It would as well place the bottom-ability students at a disadvantage. The findings have significant implications for the ongoing high-stakes testing debate, for school improvement under the current accountability reform, and for research of teacher effectiveness.

All generation facilities have to report their generator un-availabilities to their respective Independent System Operators (ISOs). The un-availability of a generator is determined in terms of its probability of failure. Generators may serve the role of two kinds, base units which operates all the time and the others are peaking units which operate only for periods of time depending on load requirement. Calculation of probability of failure for peaking units using standard formulas gives pessimistic results owing to its time spent in the reserve shut down state. Therefore the normal two state representation of a generating unit is not adequate. A four state model was proposed by an IEEE committee to calculate the forced outage rate (unavailability) of such units. This thesis examines the representation of peaking units using a four-state model and performs the analytical calculations and Monte Carlo simulations to examine whether such a model does indeed represent the peaking units properly.

University of Macau / Faculty of Science and Technology / Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering

This study is aimed to unpack the ‘black box’ that connects the grade-3 test-based retention policy with students’ academic outcomes. I theorized that the policy effects on teaching and learning may be modified by instructional capacity, but are unlikely to occur through enhancing teachers’ capability to teach. Analyzing the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study Kindergarten cohort (ECLS-K) dataset, I first explored the relationship between the test-based retention policy and instructional capacity as indicated by teacher expectations of students’ learning capability and then investigated whether and how the expectations moderated the policy effects on instructional time reallocation, student academic performance, and student self-perceived academic competence and interests. To remove the selection bias associated with the non-experimental data, I applied a novel propensity score-based causal inference method, the marginal mean weighting through stratification (MMW-S) method and extended it to a causal analysis that approximates a randomization of schools to the test-based retention policy followed by a randomization of classes to teachers with different levels of expectations. Consistent with my theory, I found that the test-based retention policy had no effects on teacher expectations. Although the policy uniformly increased the time allocated to math instruction, it produced no significant changes in students’ overall performance and overall self-perception in math. In addition, I found that students responded differently to the test-based retention policy depending on the expectations they received from the grade-3 teachers. The results suggested some benefits of positive expectations over negative and indifferent expectations in moderating the policy effects, including more access to advanced content, higher learning gains of average-ability students, and more resilient student learning over a long term. However, the results also showed that having positive expectations alone is not sufficient for academic improvement under the high-stakes policy. If implemented by a positive-expectation teacher, the policy could be detrimental to students’ learning in the nontested subject or to their learning of basic reading/math skills. It would as well place the bottom-ability students at a disadvantage. The findings have significant implications for the ongoing high-stakes testing debate, for school improvement under the current accountability reform, and for research of teacher effectiveness.

Cette étude s'est réalisée dans un programme de techniques de la région de Montréal et il est question du Programme des Techniques d'Éducation Spécialisée (T.E.S.). Suite à une demande ministérielle, au printemps 2000, le nouveau programme devait comporter 25 compétences à atteindre par les étudiants en trois années de formation. Ce nouveau programme par compétences a vu le jour en 2006, lorsque la grille de cours a été entièrement remaniée. Toutefois, lors de cette révision, un aspect n'a pas été abordé : celui qui traite des pratiques pédagogiques des enseignants. La présente recherche vise deux objectifs. Le premier est de connaître les représentations des étudiants quant aux pratiques pédagogiques utilisées dans le programme ainsi que celles qu'ils souhaiteraient trouver dans la formation actuelle. Le second est de connaître dans quelle mes ure les modèles d'enseignement préconisés dans le programme sont représentés dans les pratiques pédagogiques. C'est dans une perspective de recherche qualitative que nous avons procédé à des entretiens collectifs centrés. Les opinions recueillies des vingt participants formant un échantillon de convenance nous ont permis d'explorer les représentations des étudiants quant aux pratiques pédagogiques utilisées dans la formation ainsi que les modèles d'enseignement qui s'y rattachent. Les résultats obtenus nous permettent d'affirmer que les interventions pédagogiques et les modèles d'enseignement sous-jacents au programme correspondent en grande majorité aux représentations des étudiants. C'est d'ailleurs suite aux commentaires élogieux des étudiants sur la qualité de la relation entre eux et les enseignants qui nous permettent d'affirmer que le programme actuel dans les techniques d'éducation spécialisée correspond aux attentes des étudiants issu des modèles d'enseignement présentés dans cette étude. Cependant, les résultats obtenus concernant certaines pratiques pédagogiques des enseignants sont à revoir. Il est suggéré par les répondants, entre autres, d'utiliser davantage les outils informatiques à la disposition du personnel enseignant, de favoriser les pratiques pédagogiques concrètes, comme les conférenciers, et d'utiliser du matériel audio-visuel d'actualité. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : interventions pédagogiques, modèles d'enseignement et programme.

In drug discovery, thousands of compounds are assayed to detect activity against a biological target. The goal of drug discovery is to identify compounds that are active against the target (e.g. inhibit a virus). Statistical learning in drug discovery seeks to build a model that uses descriptors characterizing molecular structure to predict biological activity. However, the characteristics of drug discovery data can make it difficult to model the relationship between molecular descriptors and biological activity. Among these characteristics are the rarity of active compounds, the large volume of compounds tested by high-throughput screening, and the complexity of molecular structure and its relationship to activity. This thesis focuses on the design of statistical learning algorithms/models and their applications to drug discovery. The two main parts of the thesis are: an algorithm-based statistical method and a more formal model-based approach. Both approaches can facilitate and accelerate the process of developing new drugs. A unifying theme is the use of unsupervised methods as components of supervised learning algorithms/models. In the first part of the thesis, we explore a sequential screening approach, Cluster Structure-Activity Relationship Analysis (CSARA). Sequential screening integrates High Throughput Screening with mathematical modeling to sequentially select the best compounds. CSARA is a cluster-based and algorithm driven method. To gain further insight into this method, we use three carefully designed experiments to compare predictive accuracy with Recursive Partitioning, a popular structureactivity relationship analysis method. The experiments show that CSARA outperforms Recursive Partitioning. Comparisons include problems with many descriptor sets and situations in which many descriptors are not important for activity. In the second part of the thesis, we propose and develop constrained mixture discriminant analysis (CMDA), a model-based method. The main idea of CMDA is to model the distribution of the observations given the class label (e.g. active or inactive class) as a constrained mixture distribution, and then use Bayes’ rule to predict the probability of being active for each observation in the testing set. Constraints are used to deal with the otherwise explosive growth of the number of parameters with increasing dimensionality. CMDA is designed to solve several challenges in modeling drug data sets, such as multiple mechanisms, the rare target problem (i.e. imbalanced classes), and the identification of relevant subspaces of descriptors (i.e. variable selection). We focus on the CMDA1 model, in which univariate densities form the building blocks of the mixture components. Due to the unboundedness of the CMDA1 log likelihood function, it is easy for the EM algorithm to converge to degenerate solutions. A special Multi-Step EM algorithm is therefore developed and explored via several experimental comparisons. Using the multi-step EM algorithm, the CMDA1 model is compared to model-based clustering discriminant analysis (MclustDA). The CMDA1 model is either superior to or competitive with the MclustDA model, depending on which model generates the data. The CMDA1 model has better performance than the MclustDA model when the data are high-dimensional and unbalanced, an essential feature of the drug discovery problem! An alternate approach to the problem of degeneracy is penalized estimation. By introducing a group of simple penalty functions, we consider penalized maximum likelihood estimation of the CMDA1 and CMDA2 models. This strategy improves the convergence of the conventional EM algorithm, and helps avoid degenerate solutions. Extending techniques from Chen et al. (2007), we prove that the PMLE’s of the two-dimensional CMDA1 model can be asymptotically consistent.

This thesis used ACSI model as a theoretical basis, which is a cause-and-effect model, to measure the quality of goods or service that starts from “customer expectations” to “customer satisfaction”. The purpose of this thesis is to find a suitable model for developing the customer satisfaction of No.2 bus service, by examining the relationships between perceived quality, customer expectation, perceived value and customer satisfaction in ACSI model. According to the data from survey of the international students in Gävle University, who lives in Sätra of Gävle of Sweden, this thesis used the partial least squares (PLS) regression to estimates the ASCI model. As a result, the coefficients of each variable and R-square statistics indicate that the relationships between PQ, CE, CS and PV are very weak; PV should be ignored in the case. Therefore, the ACSI model in this case had been revised, and the conclusion can be drawn: the ACSI model was unsuitable for No.2 bus case, furthermore, this study presents a new model for No.2, which is “customer expectation—perceived quality—customer satisfaction”. Consequently, the X-traffic Company should know the customers expectation and provide the service which can meet customer needs. By expanding previous research and based on ACSI model, the study empirically examines the relationships between three customer satisfaction dimensions.

Med de nya implementeringarna av ISPS-koden så är det svårt att få en insikt i styrmansyrket. Hur skulle nya studenter veta vad de ansöker till när de vill bli ovan nämnda styrmän.     Syftet med den här uppsatsen är att utreda vad förväntan på styrmansyrket är inom den svenska handelsflottan. Intervjuerna utfördes på tredjeårsstudenter vid en sjöfartshögskola i Sverige angående bilden på styrmansyrket som de fått under sin fartygsförlagda styrmanspraktik. Förväntan jämfördes sedan med den bild de fått under ombordtiden.     Resultaten visade att styrmansyrket inte kan liknas vid något landjobb och att man måste uppleva styrmansyrket för att förstå sig på styrmansyrket. / With the new implementation of the ISPS regulations, it is hard to get an insight in the duties of an officer of the seas. How can new students know what they are applying for when they want to become said officers.     The purpose of this thesis was to examine the underlying expectation about the officer’s job within the Swedish merchant navy. Interviews where carried out on third year students at a maritime academy in Sweden regarding the view of the officer’s job acquired on-board a ship during internship and on-board training. The expectation was later compared to the image of that acquired onboard.     The results were those that the officer’s job is not like any job on land and that one has to work on board a ship to acquire insight in how the officer’s job truly is.

Begreppet medarbetarskap är långt ifrån ett välkänt uttryck idag. Det handlar om medarbetarens förhållningssätt till sin arbetsgivare, till sitt arbete och till sina kollegor. Syftet med denna uppsats är för det första att få mer kunskap om begreppets innebörd. För det andra är syftet att få kunskap om hur medarbetare i en kommunal verksamhet uppfattar och praktiserar medarbetarskap utefter en kommunal policy. För det tredje är syftet att ge förslag till hur medarbetarna i undersökningen fortsättningsvis kan bidra till att uppnå ett gott medarbetarskap. Detta för att synliggöra medarbetarnas möjligheter till att påverka sin arbetssituation. Undersökningen har utförts med en kvalitativ metod, där resultatet bygger på åtta intervjuer tillsammans med medarbetare från två arbetsgrupper som tillhör hierarkins lägsta nivå. Resultatet visar att det skiljer sig mellan gruppernas upplevelse och praktiserande av det rådande medarbetarskapet, trots att de tillhör samma organisation och förväntas arbeta utifrån samma kommunala policy. / The concept of employeeship is far from being a well-known expression today. It deals with how employees relate to their employers, their own work and to their fellow employees. The aim of this study is first to gather more knowledge about the concept employeeship and to illustrate similarities and differences between other close concepts. Second, the aim is to gather more knowledge about how employees in two workgroups within the public sector understand and practice employeeship in accordance with municipal policy. Third, the aim is to illuminate how public sector workers can contribute to accomplish a well-developed employeeship. This enables employees to influence their work situation. The research has been carried out with a method of high quality interviews with eight workers from two workgroups at the lowest level. The results reveal that there are differences in how the groups experience and practice the prevailing employeeship, in spite of belonging to the same public sector and are expected to work on the basis of the same municipal policy.