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Sexual attraction (SA), as well as sexual (SBVs) and nonsexual boundary violations (NSBVs), have been identified as matters of ethical concern, being viewed as harmful within mental health or counseling relationships. Much of the literature in the area of SA and SBVs has focused on the counselor-client relationship, but it has been investigated only minimally in the field of sport psychology and specifically with regard to sport psychology professionals (SPPs). Because SA, SBVs, and NSBVs between SPPs and their client-athletes seem to be potentially problematic concerns in need of empirical investigation and practical scrutiny, the aim of this study was to examine: (a) the incidence of SBV and NSBV beliefs and behaviors among SPPs; (b) SPPs' feelings regarding SA for and from client-athletes; and (c) SPPs' willingness to seek supervision to manage their SA beliefs and behaviors towards client-athletes. SPPs (n = 365) completed the Survey of Applied Sport Psychologists (SASP) via e-mail or regular mail. As expected, SPPs experienced SA (40.6%) and generally did not experience strong feelings as a result of the SA. However, of the SPPs experiencing SA, 13.5% of males and 13.8% of females engaged in a SBV with a client-athlete. NSBV behaviors and beliefs are also reported. Chi-squared analyses revealed male SPPs engaged in nonsexual touching with their client-athletes more frequently than female SPPs. T-tests suggested ethically trained SPPs were more likely to seek supervision as a result of SA and view certain NSBVs as good professional behavior in comparison to non-ethically trained SPPs. Appropriate supervision and ethical training for SPPs experiencing SA could be helpful in the management of potential future SBV or NSBV behaviors. Implications for SPPs working with athletes, limitations of the present study, and recommendations for future research are discussed.

Thesis advisor: Mary Ann Glynn / Organizational research on individuals' identity focuses primarily on social identity, i.e., the self-concept they derive from their membership in a group, paying limited attention to relational identity or their self-definition in their role-relationships and its consequent implications for how individuals in these relationships get their work done. In this study, I address this gap by examining the nature of consultants' relational identity, i.e., their sense of self in their role-relationships with their clients and its implications for their conduct of work. Analysis of 50 in-depth interviews with consultants reveal that their relational identity can be understood by two dimensions: perceived sense of involvement with the relational other and perceived sense of influence over the relational other. Taken together, they explain four distinct ways in which consultants manifest their relational identity, namely: comprehensive, defined, associative, and impoverished relational identity. Further, I found that relational identity is associated with the degree of informality in the conduct of work between the two individuals in the role-relationship. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2011. / Submitted to: Boston College. Carroll School of Management. / Discipline: Organization Studies.

Chan Pak Hang. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 62-63). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Acknowledgement --- p.II / Abstract --- p.III / 摘要 --- p.IV / Chapter Part I. --- An Efficient Disk-Array-Based Server Design for a Multicast Video Streaming System --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.2 / Chapter Chapter 2 --- Related Works --- p.5 / Chapter Chapter 3 --- The Super-Scalar Architecture --- p.8 / Chapter Chapter 4 --- A GSS-Based Server Design --- p.11 / Chapter Chapter 5 --- An Efficient Server Design --- p.15 / Chapter 5.1 --- The Weighted Segment Group Pairing (WSGP) Scheme --- p.16 / Chapter 5.2 --- Interleaving of Data Blocks --- p.17 / Chapter 5.3 --- First TR Seconds Replication --- p.18 / Chapter 5.4 --- An Integrated Scheduler --- p.19 / Chapter Chapter 6 --- Performance Evaluation --- p.23 / Chapter 6.1 --- Server Capacity --- p.24 / Chapter 6.2 --- Utilization of disk capacity --- p.25 / Chapter Chapter 7 --- Conclusions --- p.26 / Chapter Part II. --- Progressive Redundancy Transmission - A Low-Overhead Fault Tolerant Streaming Protocol for Parallel Video Servers --- p.27 / Chapter Chapter 8 --- Introduction --- p.28 / Chapter Chapter 9 --- Related Works --- p.31 / Chapter Chapter 10 --- System Model --- p.33 / Chapter Chapter 11 --- Forward Erasure Correction --- p.36 / Chapter 11.1 --- System Reliability --- p.36 / Chapter 11.2 --- Bandwidth Overhead --- p.38 / Chapter Chapter 12 --- Progressive Redundancy Transmission --- p.39 / Chapter 12.1 --- System Reliability --- p.40 / Chapter 12.2 --- Modeling the Failure Detection Time --- p.43 / Chapter Chapter 13 --- Performance Evaluation --- p.46 / Chapter 13.1 --- Effect of Detection Time Distribution --- p.46 / Chapter 13.2 --- Bandwidth Overhead Reduction --- p.48 / Chapter 13.3 --- Storage Overhead --- p.50 / Chapter 13.4 --- Scalability --- p.51 / Chapter Chapter 14 --- Conclusions --- p.53 / Appendix --- p.54 / Bibliography --- p.62

With the advancement of technology, knowledge management (KM) has become more and more important in research and practice. In the research of KM, researchers believe that organizations are abundant in knowledge, and the sharing of knowledge can utilize knowledge well. Therefore, how to share knowledge stored in organizations and individuals is the most important issue. Recently, firms take outside resources as potential sources of firm-addressable knowledge. By interacting with customers constantly, firms can get lots of valuable information and knowledge, such as market information, professional experiments and communication skills. Our research selects knowledge intensive service firms as the subject of research and tries to understand the processes of interorganizational knowledge sharing within the development of the information project. First, from literature review we found that knowledge sharing is affected by four factors: project¡¦s background, characteristics of organizations, characteristics of knowledge, and characteristics of tasks. Because the processes of knowledge sharing are dynamic and complex processes, and there is no a well-defined framework, this research is an explorative research, using qualitative research method to carry out this research. This research uses multi-case research method to collect data from individual interviews and official documents. To analyze the data, we choose grounded theory as an analysis method to induce an explanative framework from our data. This research analyzes data from two aspects: affecting factors and stages of the project, trying to understand the factors affecting cross-organization knowledge sharing method and the progress of knowledge sharing in different stages of the project. We also found that information department will change the processes of knowledge sharing and two variations are found. Finally, this research concludes that the information department plays the very important role as a mediator for knowledge sharing, and firms can adopt it when there is a knowledge gap between firms and their clients.

The thin-client/server computing model mandates applications running solely on a server and client devices connecting to the server through the Internet for carrying out works. Traditional thin-client/server computing model comprises only a single server and works only within LAN environment, which severely restrict its applicability. To meet the demand of reasonable response time over WAN, a modified thin-client/server computing model, MAS TC/S, was proposed. In MAS TC/S, multiple application servers spreading over WAN are installed, and each client device can freely connect to any application server that is close to it. However, reducing delay associated with fetching absent files, which are stored in other servers, is a challenging issue in MAS TC/S. We propose to employ data prefetching mechanisms to speed up file fetching. We use the suffix tree-like structure to store users¡¦ previous file access records and define two temporal relationships between two records: followed by or concurrent with, to decide the set of files that should be prefetched together. Each file access subsequence is associated with a set of predicted file sets, each carrying a different weight. Given a current file access session, we will first find a matching file access subsequence and then choose the predicted set that has the highest weight. Based on the chosen predicted set, suitable files are prefeteched to the connected server. We compare our method with All-Kth-Order Markov model and find our method gets higher hit ratio under various operating regions.

Texte remanié de: Th. Ph. D.--Berkeley--University of California. / Bibliogr. p. 255-268. Index.

Thèse de doctorat : Urbanisme : Paris 12 : 2006. / Titre provenant de l'écran-titre.

Abstract Title: Client Information Needs of MFIs: A Case Study of ASA Bangladesh Author: Juber Ahmed Academic Advisor: Dr. Klaus Solberg Søilen Department: School of Management, Blekinge Institute of Technology Course: Master Thesis in Business Administration Purpose: To enrich the knowledge base of client’s needs of financial services and assessing the tools MFIs used to collect clients’ information and how they utilized the information for developing new products and services or modifying existing products and services or their terms and conditions to meet the needs of financial services of their clientele. Also how MFIs organized and managed the information and how they categorized their clients using that information. Method: The investigation conducted from both a theoretical and an empirical point of view. The deductive approach used for the study and the case study method deployed. I studied ASA which is an MFI renowned in Bangladesh and beyond. At first, I had gone through a secondary research for collecting a number of successful methods and standard types of information used by successful MFIs from existing literature. In primary research, I interviewed 10 Managers (Assistant Directors) for ASA to determine which of the methods found in the literature were more effective for collecting clients’ information for them and also asked them to add their ideas to the list. At last I asked interviewees to rate the methods and results presented in this paper. Theory: This study was an exploratory one where I discussed the related aspects for the study - Microfinance, Client Assessment, Clients of Microfinance, Information needs and Management Information System. Findings: The study showed that ASA utilized client information for developing their credit products and services and based on number of loans taken by the clients they categorized their clients and modified or developed new products and services for each category of clients. Although ASA executed several tools for collecting client information but the managers think that their staffs’ collection of information from regular meeting with clients was more effective than others for modifying products’ terms and conditions and modifying or developing new products and services to their women and small enterprise clients. The conducted study also revealed that in ASA impact study was necessary to know clients’ overall level of satisfaction but management needed specific information on what aspects of ASA and its credit products and services clients preferred and did not prefer and the reasons of the preferences. Also they needed action plan to address clients’ specific concerns, so they needed the information on a continual basis and they were successful to achieve this continuous flow of information. For ASA, the best way to get this type of information would be through client satisfaction Focus Group Discussions (FGDs), although they utilized several tools but not often as discussed in part 3 in chapter 5. ASA owned an MIS (AMMS) for monitoring and managing clients’ information and they utilized this to categorize their clients based on the collected information about their number of loans. Conclusion: This study revealed that ASA served only women and small enterprise clientele that included the vulnerable non-poor and could contribute to the profitability of ASA. There was no attempt to diversify the products to include all poor that should be the goal of microfinance to alleviate poverty. Moreover client treated as individual client but the loans used to fulfill household or family needs of the clients. There were tools for collecting information on household about impact of credit programs participation but they took seldom effort for collecting information of the household money management or in other words how they utilized the loans for variety of household needs. There is lack of access to a variety of financial services for poor clients, even though MFIs are mostly serving vulnerable non-poor instead of taking consideration of all categories of poor. It revealed from the study that MFIs could gain long term success by serving specific market segment but it should not be only focus of MFIs, their initiative should be to include all poor in their clients profile with a priority to a specific market segment. This could help them to become sustainable and to minimize risks by spreading it in different market segments. The study found that ASA considered FGDs as an effective tool for collecting clients’ information as their staffs and managers were familiar with this tool, moreover it was cost effective for them. It observed that they seldom followed Tool Selection Process and it was the top management that decided over the tools, the decision might influence by internal and external interest groups and the competition. MFIs should organize client information in a way so that they could be able to manipulate the specific client information to serve client better and to take effective decision, although it is imperative to argue that they may like to serve the wealthier clients. This research paper is also presenting some important findings from existing literature of microfinance and a number of recommendations based on the study experience and scholars opinions from existing microfinance study that may help MFIs to prepare themselves to adopt client-oriented approach by utilizing client assessment tools to fulfill the needs of financial services of their clients that may hopefully include all poor irrespective of their categories.

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