Leadership development has become a focal area for most organisations today in an attempt to ensure that leaders are able to take them into the future and achieve a competitive advantage. Literature reveals that, among others, one of the most popular initiatives in leadership development includes the use 360-degree feedback. Due to the sensitivity and challenge of giving and receiving 360 degree feedback, it is essential to understand the subjective experience of manager's who have recently undergone the process as well as the factors which influence and are influenced by the process. To achieve this, a grounded theory study was conducted in a large manufacturing organisation. The data was collected through focus group interviews with a voluntary sample of senior managers who had participated in a 360 degree feedback process. The outcomes of the study include a definition of "subjective experience" as well as a substantive theory on the subjective experience of 360-degree feedback as a tool in leadership development. Findings indicate that individual's reactions coupled with the perception of both the accuracy and utility of the process are key contributors which form the essence of "subjective experience". Past experience, present information and context were further identified to be key intervening variables of a manager's subjective experience of 360-degree feedback as a tool in leadership development. A number of limitations within this study are explained and recommendations for future research and organisations are provided. / Industrial and Organisational Psychology / M. Comm. (Industrial Psychology)

Aus Einleitung und Motivation "Die gegenwärtigen Entwicklungen von Head-Mounted Displays (HMD, hier synonym auch als Brille bezeichnet) für Virtual Reality (VR) und Augmented Reality (AR) schaffen ein nie da gewesenes Potential dieser Technologien als Werkzeuge in der Produktentwicklung. Wenngleich VR- und ARAnwendungen keineswegs neu in der Industrie sind, bringt der Fortschritt der Verbraucher-HMDs völlig neue Möglichkeiten. Immersive VR-Systeme bedeuten künftig keine hunderttausend Euro Anschaffung mehr – AR-Brillen dienen zukünftig nicht nur der Erweiterung der Realität mit zweidimensionalen Informationen. Cave Automatic Virtual Environments (CAVE), 360-Grad-Projektoren und interaktive Planungstische sind in der Fabrikplanung teilweise etabliert (Runde et al. 2015). Im Unterschied zu diesen Techniken können HMDs jedoch eine deutlich höhere Immersion ermöglichen, was auch für die Interaktion mit der virtuellen Umgebung von Vorteil sein kann. Das Gefühl der Immersion ist wichtig, um in bestimmten Entwicklungsphasen entsprechende Kriterien besser beurteilen zu können. Primär ist der VR-Einsatz für Bewertungsmerkmale sinnvoll, welche nur qualitativ und nicht quantitativ bewertbar sind (Pawellek 2014). Des Weiteren spielt auch die Eingabetechnologie eine essenzielle Rolle. Um mit virtuellen Elementen interagieren zu können, sollte das Eingabegerät echtzeitfähig und intuitiv sein. ..."

The problem with which this study is concerned is that of comparing the results of teaching community college students enrolled in a transferable mathematics sequence for business and economics majors by a computer-aided instructional program and by the traditional lecture method. In order to effectively resolve this problem, an A Programming Language System 360 (APL/360)-aided instructional program was developed and an experimental study was conducted. The APL/360-aided instructional program consisted of three sets of materials.: a manuscript on APL/360, a list of APL programs defining operators relevant to a computer-aided study of calculus, and a collection of problems based on these programs and calculus concepts. The subjects for the experiment were forty-four students enrolled in three sections of Mathematics 112 at Mountain View College of the Dallas County Community College District. The control group, students taught by the traditional lecture method, consisted of twenty-one students. The experimental group, students taught by the APL/360-aided instructional program, consisted of twenty-three students. The same instructor taught all students. The essential difference in the two teaching methods was the use of the computer as a teaching-learning aid in the computer-aided instructional program. The computer was a course supplement to classroom instruction and aided students in obtaining insight into the nature of mathematical concepts as well as serving as a computational aid.

Thesis advisor: John Baldovin / Thesis (STL) — Boston College, 2012. / Submitted to: Boston College. School of Theology and Ministry. / Discipline: Sacred Theology.

Les vidéos omnidirectionnelles, également appelées vidéos sphériques ou vidéos360°, sont des vidéos avec des pixels enregistrés dans toutes les directions de l’espace. Un utilisateur qui regarde un tel contenu avec un Casques de Réalité Virtuelle (CRV) peut sélectionner la partie de la vidéo à afficher, usuellement nommée viewport, en bougeant la tête. Pour se sentir totalement immergé à l’intérieur du contenu, l’utilisateur a besoin de voir au moins 90 viewports par seconde en 4K. Avec les technologies de streaming traditionnelles, fournir une telle qualité nécessiterait un débit de plus de100 Mbit s−1, ce qui est bien trop élevé. Dans cette thèse, je présente mes contributions pour rendre possible le streaming de vidéos omnidirectionnelles hautement immersives sur l’Internet. On peut distinguer six contributions : une proposition d’architecture de streaming viewport adaptatif réutilisant une partie des technologies existantes ; une extension de cette architecture pour des vidéos à six degrés de liberté ; deux études théoriques des vidéos à qualité spatiale non-homogène; un logiciel open source de manipulation des vidéos 360°; et un jeu d’enregistrements de déplacements d’utilisateurs regardant des vidéos 360°. / Omnidirectional videos, also denoted as spherical videos or 360° videos, are videos with pixels recorded from a given viewpoint in every direction of space. A user watching such an omnidirectional content with a Head Mounted Display (HMD) can select the portion of the videoto display, usually denoted as viewport, by moving her head. To feel high immersion inside the content a user needs to see viewport with 4K resolutionand 90 Hz frame rate. With traditional streaming technologies, providing such quality would require a data rate of more than 100 Mbit s−1, which is far too high compared to the median Internet access band width. In this dissertation, I present my contributions to enable the streaming of highly immersive omnidirectional videos on the Internet. We can distinguish six contributions : a viewport-adaptive streaming architecture proposal reusing a part of existing technologies ; an extension of this architecture for videos with six degrees of freedom ; two theoretical studies of videos with non homogeneous spatial quality ; an open-source software for handling 360° videos ; and a dataset of recorded users’ trajectories while watching 360° videos.

The thesis is focused on the evaluation system of employees in a chosen organization. The objective of this thesis is to assess the current system of the employee rating system and suggest some changes to improve this system. The evaluation of workers should interfere with the regular organizational planning and generally become a part of the whole organization management. The work elements of the 360 ° feedback method are used in the form of self-assessment forms. The summary of my findings is provided in the conclusion of this thesis.

Leadership development has become a focal area for most organisations today in an attempt to ensure that leaders are able to take them into the future and achieve a competitive advantage. Literature reveals that, among others, one of the most popular initiatives in leadership development includes the use 360-degree feedback. Due to the sensitivity and challenge of giving and receiving 360 degree feedback, it is essential to understand the subjective experience of manager's who have recently undergone the process as well as the factors which influence and are influenced by the process. To achieve this, a grounded theory study was conducted in a large manufacturing organisation. The data was collected through focus group interviews with a voluntary sample of senior managers who had participated in a 360 degree feedback process. The outcomes of the study include a definition of "subjective experience" as well as a substantive theory on the subjective experience of 360-degree feedback as a tool in leadership development. Findings indicate that individual's reactions coupled with the perception of both the accuracy and utility of the process are key contributors which form the essence of "subjective experience". Past experience, present information and context were further identified to be key intervening variables of a manager's subjective experience of 360-degree feedback as a tool in leadership development. A number of limitations within this study are explained and recommendations for future research and organisations are provided. / Industrial and Organisational Psychology / M. Comm. (Industrial Psychology)

Made available in DSpace on 2015-05-14T13:00:11Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 arquivototal.pdf: 2980883 bytes, checksum: e6092be6bd9fa9d55968adcdfe8407d2 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2010-03-11 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / Cancer is a disease of the genome of our cells and experimental oncology is valuable to study the various aspects related to neoplastic processes. Many drugs currently used in chemotherapy have been isolated from species of plants or derived from natural prototype. Nevertheless, medicinal plants have aggressive substances, and for this reason, their toxicity should be assessed. Xylopia langsdorffiana is a tree popularly known as pimenteira-da-terra . Their phytochemical study characterized mainly diterpenes, with important biological activities. Diterpenes of the trachylobane type are rare in the plant kingdom, and, therefore, still have few studies of biological activities. In previous studies, the ent-7-acetoxytrachylobane-18-óic acid (trachylobane-360), obtained from Xylopia langsdorffiana, showed activity in vitro, which aroused the interest to investigate their possible antitumor activity in vivo. Thus, this study aimed to evaluate the antitumor activity and toxicity of trachylobane-360 through in vitro and in vivo assays. Initially, a pharmacological screening of twenty-one natural products, was performed against sarcoma 180 cell line, where the most cytotoxic were trachylobane-360, the ent-7-hidroxytrachylobane-18-óic acid (trachylobane-318) and the essential oil from leaves of X. langsdorffiana (O.E.X). IC50 values obtained from the tests of trypan blue exclusion and MTT reduction were, respectively, 54,28 and 53,28 μg/mL for trachylobane-360, 100,8 and 104,0 μg/mL for trachylobane-318 and 206,4 and 209,3 μg/mL for O.E.X. The trachylobane-318 was isolated in small quantities, being execution impossible of later cytotoxicity assays (Artemia salina and hemolysis). LC50 values obtained in bioassays with A. saline for trachylobane-360 and O.E.X. were, respectively, 245.3 and 10.05 μg/mL. CH50 values obtained in the experiment of cytotoxicity in erythrocytes (hemolysis), for trachylobane-360 and OEX were, respectively, 98.50 and 742.4 μg/mL. To evaluate the in vivo antitumor activity against sarcoma 180 was used trachylobane-360, because it was the most active in preliminary tests. The rates of inhibition of tumor growth were 45.60 and 71.99 % for treatment with trachylobane-360, 12.5 and 25 mg/kg, respectively, with no significant difference between the inhibition caused by the higher dose of this when compared to treatment with 5-FU (positive control). The toxicological analysis of the animals showed that the use of trachyloban-360 did not change spleen and thymus index, or the hematological parameters compared with mice-bearing, these changes occur with chemotherapeutic drugs used in clinical practice. Moreover, the trachylobane-360 did not modify liver index, nor it cause extensive microscopic changes in the heart, liver and kidneys of animals, corroborating with the biochemical parameters, wich remain unchanged. Necrosis area extensive, on tumors of different groups was observed, accompanied by a reduction in the number of mitoses, being these effects more pronounced after treatment with 25 mg/kg of trachyloban-360. Therefore, it is possible to infer that the trachyloban-360 has significant antitumor activity and low toxicity, this essential balance to its applicability as a pharmacological drug. / O câncer é uma doença do material genético de nossas células e a cancerologia experimental é de grande valia para se estudar os diversos aspectos relacionados aos processos neoplásicos. Muitas drogas usadas atualmente na quimioterapia foram isoladas de espécies de plantas ou derivadas de um protótipo natural. Porém, plantas medicinais possuem substâncias agressivas e, assim, sua toxicidade deve ser avaliada. Xylopia langsdorffiana é uma árvore conhecida popularmente como pimenteira-da-terra . Seu estudo fitoquímico caracterizou especialmente diterpenos, com atividades biológicas importantes. Diterpenos do tipo trachylobano são raros no reino vegetal, e, por isso, ainda apresentam poucos estudos de atividades biológicas. Em estudos anteriores, o ácido ent-7-acetoxitrachylobano-18-óico (trachylobano-360), obtido de X. langsdorffiana, mostrou atividade antitumoral in vitro, o que despertou o interesse para investigação de sua possível atividade in vivo. Diante disto, este trabalho teve como objetivo avaliar a atividade antitumoral e toxicidade do trachylobano-360, através de ensaios in vitro e in vivo. Inicialmente, uma triagem farmacológica, de 21 produtos naturais, foi realizada frente células da linhagem sarcoma 180, onde os mais citotóxicos foram o trachylobano-360, o ácido ent-7-hidroxitrachylobano-18-óico (trachylobano-318) e o óleo essencial das folhas de X. langsdorffiana (O.E.X.). Os valores de CI50 obtidos através dos ensaios de exclusão do azul de tripan e de redução do MTT foram, respectivamente, 54,28 e 53,28 μg/mL para o trachylobano-360, 100,8 e 104,0 μg/mL para o trachylobano-318, e 206,4 e 209,3 μg/mL para o O.E.X. O trachylobano-318 foi isolado em pequena quantidade, impossibilitando a realização dos ensaios de citotoxicidade (A. salina e hemólise) posteriores. Os valores de CL50 obtidos no bioensaio com A. salina para o trachylobano-360 e O.E.X. foram, respectivamente, 245,3 e 10,05 μg/mL. Os valores de CH50 obtidos no experimento de citotoxicidade em eritrócitos (hemólise), para o trachylobano-360 e O.E.X. foram, respectivamente, 98,50 e 742,4 μg/mL. Para a avaliação da atividade antitumoral in vivo frente sarcoma 180, foi utilizado o trachylobano-360, pois foi o mais ativo nos ensaios preliminares. As taxas de inibição do crescimento tumoral foram 45,60 e 71,99 % para o tratamento com o trachylobano-360, 12,5 e 25 mg/kg respectivamente, não havendo diferença significante entre a inibição causada pela maior dose deste diterpeno, quando comparado ao tratamento com 5-FU (controle positivo). As análises toxicológicas dos animais mostraram que o uso do trachylobano-360 não alterou índice de baço e timo, nem parâmetros hematológicos em comparação com o controle transplantado-S180, alterações estas que ocorrem com quimioterápicos utilizados na prática clínica. Ainda, o trachylobano-360 não modificou índice de fígado e rins, nem causou alterações extensas microscópicas no coração, fígado e rins dos animais, corroborando com os parâmetros bioquímicos, que permaneceram inalterados. Observou-se, ainda, extensa área de necrose nos tumores dos diferentes grupos, acompanhada de uma redução no número de mitoses, sendo estes efeitos mais pronunciados após o tratamento com 25 mg/kg do trachylobano-360. Portanto, é possível inferir que o trachylobano-360 possui significante atividade antitumoral e baixa toxicidade, balanço este essencial para sua aplicabilidade como droga farmacológica.

The main goal of this diploma thesis is to analyze the employee appraisal system in a particular company by comparing its practical application with a theoretical knowledge and consequently to assess the findings and propose the possible changes, which might improve the effectiveness of the company's appraisal system. This diploma thesis is divided into two parts -- theoretical and practical. The theoretical part includes the information about the meaning and purpose of the employee appraisal system, about the employee performance management and its connection to the employee appraisal system, the relation between the appraisal system and the employee reward and development system. Furthermore, it discusses the areas of the employee assessment, its methods and processes. The practical part of this thesis describes the observed company and the analysis of the appraisal system applied in the company. The analysis is conducted in the three steps -- the first step is the analysis of the current assessment system and its comparison with the general theoretical principles. The second step is the interview with the company's managing and operational employees to identify their level of satisfaction with the current appraisal system used in the company. In the last step results of the analysis are listed including identified strengths and weaknesses of the current system and the recommendations are proposed for future actions.

Multi-rater tools also referred to as 360-degree feedback tools, are frequently used in addition to traditional supervisory appraisals due to sources (i.e., supervisor, peer, direct report) unique perspectives and opportunities to view different aspects of job performance. Research has found that the differences among sources are most prevalent between self and other ratings, and the direction of agreement is related to overall job performance. Research has typically focused on one form of agreement, the direction of an individual's self-ratings compared to others' ratings. The current study expanded on past research on rater agreement using a data set (n = 215) consisting of multi-rater data for professionals participating in a leadership development process. The study examined the ability to predict job performance with three different measures of self-other agreement (i.e., difference between overall mean scores (difference), mean absolute difference across items (difference), and mean correlation across items (similarity)). The study also examined how the relationships may differ across performance dimensions. The final purpose was to explore how the importance of the performance dimensions, as rated by the participant, may moderate the relationship between self-other agreement and job performance. Partial support for study's hypotheses was found. The direction and difference measures of agreement on the overall multi-rater tool and performance dimensions accounted for a significant amount of the variance in job performance. The relationship between the similarity measure of agreement and job performance, and the moderating effect of importance were not supported in the current study.