<p>Research Question/Purpose: Due to environmental legislation, economic influences and increasing concern about the environment among the general public, today’s businesses are becoming more committed to environmental issues. Some enterprises yet have implemented a green strategy. This thesis aims at identifying issues that determine the long-term efficiency of green marketing and how confidence and trust plays a role in order to gain competitive advantage through customer satisfaction and customer retention. The common denominator of both, CRM and green marketing is the creation of confidence, trust and value for customers. So, focus is laid on measures that lend credibility to companies’ green marketing by interviewing experts and observing their opinions about green marketing and eco-labeling.</p><p>Design/Methodology/Approach: Interviews conducted with company professionals from IKEA and Konsum Gävleborg and a member of the municipality in Gävle, as well as findings from secondary sources of the company Nestlé were used to investigate the companies’ ways to respond to environmental concern and how they deal with green issues and ecological responsibility. The interviews provide valuable insights of the success of green marketing depending on the confidence between company and customer.</p><p>Findings: By analyzing the results of the interviews with the literature review, the thesis reveals that environmental responsibility and ecological orientation needs to be based upon the entire business strategy of a company and implemented in its core principles in order to deal effectively and efficiently with this issue.</p><p>Conclusions: Companies respond in different ways to ecological issues, through eco-labeling, cooperation with NGOs and energy-saving production processes. In conclusion, it can be said that the need for customer relationship commitment, trust, confidence and loyalty as a result of satisfaction are as important in customer relationship management as in green marketing, because competitive advantage can be achieved by environment-related activities and motivates companies to go green to promote ecologically sustainable practices.</p><p>Research Limitations/Implications: There is a number of literature focusing on customer relationship management and implications of green issues for business strategy, but there are only a few on green marketing yet and the interaction between green marketing and CRM is missing attention, so far.</p><p>Originality/Value: This work seeks to make a contribution towards bridging the ends of CRM and green marketing. It indicates a relationship between eco-orientation and company performance and implicates, on the basis of the theoretical and empirical findings, that integrating ecological features and good performance in a company is not impossible. Trust and confidence are as important concepts in green marketing as in CRM.</p>

<p>Studiens övergripande syfte var att studera och jämföra hur två olika metoder för att förebygga konflikter införlivas i en svensk grundskola. För att finna svar på syftet har vi använt oss av följande frågeställningar: Hur arbetar lärarna på skolan i praktiken med metoderna Projekt Charlie och Gruppen som grogrund för att förebygga konflikter? Vilka likheter och skillnader finns i lärarnas arbete med de olika metoderna på skolan?</p><p>Studien tar sin utgångspunkt i den kvalitativa forskningstraditionen. Med avseende på studiens syfte och frågeställningar har intervjuer gjorts för att finna svar på frågeställningarna.</p><p>Fyra intervjuer gjordes med lärare på skolan, två lärare som arbetade med Projekt Charlie och två lärare som arbetar med Gruppen som grogrund. I både Projekt Charlie och Gruppen som grogrund arbetar lärarna på skolan med att införliva konfliktförebyggande arbetsmetoder. På båda gårdarna på skolan är samtliga lärare</p><p>införstådda med att en informell samstämmighet finns för vilken metod som valts att arbeta med. Arbetet med att förebygga konflikter löper som en röd tråd i undervisningen under hela skolgången på båda gårdarna. Båda metoderna utgår från färdigkonstruerade metodböcker.</p><p>Metodböckerna rymmer många övningar som bygger på att stärka elever och ge dem verktyg inför eventuella konflikter. Resultatet visar att lärarnas arbete med de två arbetsmetoderna har många likheter och få skillnader.</p><p>Vår uppfattning är att Projekt Charlie och Gruppen som grogrund är två arbetsmetoder som är i stort sätt väldigt lika i arbetet med att förebygga konflikter. Båda arbetsmetoderna har många lärorika och relevanta övningar som stärker varje elevs självförtroende. Arbetsmetoderna ger ett stort smörgårdsbord med övningar som ger eleverna de rätta verktyg som behövs i det sociala samspelet och i en eventuell konfliktsituation. Eleverna formas för att lättare förstå hur en god kamrat, aktiv lyssnare och en god kommunikatör bör vara. Den stora skillnaden som vi ser är arbetet med identitetsbildningen. Vi ser också en skillnad i gruppstorlek. Projekt Charlie vänder sig till färre elever medan Gruppen som grogrund vänder sig till större</p><p>grupper.</p> / <p>The main object of this thesis was to study in what way a Swedish school practice conflict resolution. At the school, two methods of this are practiced, one on each of the schools two</p><p>separate blocks. The two methods are, “Project Charlie” and “Gruppen som grogrund” (a Swedish method that derives from “Tribes”). The scope of the thesis is also to compare how the two methods are implemented at the school.</p><p>In order to achieve the object of the theses, a series of qualitative interviews were performed. Four teachers, two at each of the blocks, were interviewed.</p><p>Both methods cover strategies of conflict handling. On each of the two blocks the teachers have an informal agreement of which method that will be practiced. The education of conflict resolution starts at the first grade and continue throughout the school until the students graduate.</p><p>Both methods spring from written predefined instructions, which include a rich supply of workshops that aim at strengthen the students and giving them skills to handle conflicts. The result of our study shows that the way the two methods are practiced at the school have many similarities and few differences.</p><p>The two methods were also found to be quite similar in many ways when it comes to conflict resolution. Both methods include ways to strengthen the individual’s self-confidence. The wide range of workshops supplies the students with many useful skills that can be used in social interaction and conflict handling. The children come to understand the concept of good friendship, active listening and constructive communication. The difference that we found between the two methods lies in their respectively approach to identity development. Also the number of students in each group differs between the two methods.</p>

<p>In this paper I have examined how aware teachers are of their influence on pupils development. The method I´ve used are interviews with three teachers and one pupil each about</p><p>Musicality - how do the teachers and pupils look at the concept musicality generally and personally?</p><p>Influence I- do the teachers believe that their thinking about musicality influence the pupils self-confidence and development?</p><p>Influence II- do the teachers think that other pedagogues have influenced them in their teaching and thinking?</p><p>My main results show that both the teachers and the pupils have similar apprehensions as their teachers, which points towards that influence can exist. The basis is however too limited to make any extensive generalizations.</p><p>The conclusion of the paper is that we have to be aware of how we influence our pupils. They carry this ”knowledge”, whether it is positive or negative, all their life.</p>

<p>I denna studie har en jämförande studie mellan privat och offentlig sektor genomförts gällande arbetstagarens inställning till sin arbetsgivare. Studien bygger på en hypotetiskt deduktiv metod i vilken vi försöker verifiera vår hypotes. Hypotesen är att arbetstagare inom privat sektor känner större tillit och lojalitet till sin arbetsgivare. Vidare avser vi att studera hur arbetstagarnas inställning till sin arbetsgivare påverkas av de grundläggande tillits- och lojalitetsfaktorerna. De faktorer som ingår i undersökningen är ledningens hänsyn, kompetens, ärlighet och öppenhet, belöningssystem samt ledningens förmåga att inte svika sina arbetstagare. Hypotesen prövas sedan mot de analyser som görs utifrån empiriska data. I undersökningen ingick 168 respondenter från ett flertal olika arbetsplatser. Av dessa var 76 stycken anställda inom privat sektor och 92 stycken inom offentlig sektor.</p><p>Resultatet visar att arbetstagare inom den privata sektorn har en mer positiv inställning till att ställa upp för sin arbetsgivare. Att de offentligt anställda har en mer negativ inställning är en tendens som samtliga redovisade påståenden verifierar. Gällande delen av analysen som specifikt behandlar de tillits- och lojalitetsgrundande faktorerna visar resultatet att arbetstagare inom privat sektor i större utsträckning anser att deras arbetsgivare hanterar faktorerna på ett bra sätt. Ett resultat av detta är arbetstagarnas beteende, vilket skiljer sig åt i de två sektorerna. De privat anställda ställer i större grad upp för sin arbetsgivare exempelvis när det gäller övertidsarbete samt att de ger en mer positiv bild av sin arbetsgivare till personer utanför organisationen. Sammanfattningsvis konstaterar vi att vår hypotes verifieras, det vill säga arbetstagarna inom den privata sektor har en mer lojal inställning till sin arbetsgivare än vad arbetstagarna inom den offentliga sektorn har.</p>

<p><p><p>Breastfeeding has several advantages for both mother and child. A woman’s attitude to breastfeeding is a good predictor for infant feeding method and her confidence in breastfeeding has an impact on her breastfeeding duration. <strong>Aim</strong>:The aim of the study was to assess the attitude to and confidence in breastfeeding among Vietnamese women in Ho Chi Minh City. The aim was also to investigate if the type of family, nuclear and extended, influences the Vietnamese women’s attitude to and confidence in breastfeeding. <strong>Method:</strong> A descriptive and comparative cross-section study with quantitative method was used. The Self-Care Theory and The Cultural Care Diversity and Universality Theory were used as theoretical framework of this study. A questionnaire which consisted of demographic information, attitude to and confidence in breastfeeding, was distributed to 110 voluntarily participating women in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. <strong>Results</strong>: The results showed that the women had an attitude in favour of breastfeeding and rated their confidence between "sometimes confident" and "often confident". No significant differences of total score, between nuclear and extended family, in attitude to and confidence in breastfeeding were shown. <strong>Conclusion</strong>: The attitude to and confidence in breastfeeding among the women in Ho Chi Minh City were rather good but improvements can be made. When healthcare professionals counsel Vietnamese women, in Sweden and Vietnam, about breastfeeding, this result can be used as guidance, in order to give relevant and cultural congruent advice.</p></p></p>

Nonlinear multivariate statistical techniques on fast computers offer the potential to capture more of the dynamics of the high dimensional, noisy systems underlying financial markets than traditional models, while making fewer restrictive assumptions. This thesis presents a collection of practical techniques to address important estimation and confidence issues for Radial Basis Function networks arising from such a data driven approach, including efficient methods for parameter estimation and pruning, a pointwise prediction error estimator, and a methodology for controlling the "data mining'' problem. Novel applications in the finance area are described, including customized, adaptive option pricing and stock price prediction.

Some researchers suggest that quality is preserved when students are rewarded for quantity of class participation (Boniecki & Moore, 2003; Bruss, 2009; Mainkar, 2007; Zaremba & Dunn, 2004); however, few studies have targeted the systematic assessment of participation quality. The primary purpose of the study was to develop a reliable system for rating quality of student participation, investigate whether quality of participation is preserved when students are given credit for the amount of class participation, and examine the relationship between participation quality and important course variables. The researcher in the current study developed a rating system to evaluate the quality of student participation in 2 small sections of an undergraduate class at a large Southeastern university. The primary observer rated the quality of each student comment and recorded the number of comments each student contributed each discussion day. In order to assess the reliability of the coding scheme, a secondary observer rated the participation quality and quantity on the third day in each unit. As outlined in the syllabus, instructors awarded credit for the amount of participation on randomly drawn days at the conclusion of select units. The average inter-observer agreement was 90% for the number of productive comments contributed by each student and 49% for the number of non-productive comments contributed by each student. The percent of productive comments that each student contributed each day was the primary dependent variable. Visual inspection and proportion analyses of the percent of productive comments revealed that quality of participation was generally preserved during units in which credit was awarded for the frequency of participation. On average, students who participated frequently were significantly more productive than those who participated infrequently. Additionally, a student’s frequency of course participation and critical thinking at the onset of the course significantly predicted classification into high- and low-quality responders. Future research suggestions include the following: expanding the definition of the quality of student participation into 3 overall qualitative categories rather than 2, increasing the criteria for participation credit in small course sections, and providing credit for the quality of participation.

The Standard Model is a mathematical description of the very nature of elementary particles and their interactions, now seen as relativistic quantum fields. A key feature of the theory is the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism, responsible for the spontaneous symmetry breaking of the underlying gauge symmetry, and which implies the existence of a neutral Higgs particle. Searches for the Higgs boson were conducted at the Large Electron Positron collider until 2000 and are still ongoing at the Tevatron collider, but the particle has not been not observed. In order to better constrain models with an exotic electroweak symmetry breaking sector, a search for a Higgs boson decaying into a W pair is carried out with the ALEPH detector on 453 pb-1 of data collected at center-of-mass energies up to 209 GeV. The analysis is optimized for the many topologies resulting from the six-fermion final state. A lower limit at 105.8 GeV/c² on the Higgs boson mass in a fermiophobic Higgs boson scenario is obtained. The ultimate machine for the Higgs boson discovery is the Large Hadron Collider, which is being built at CERN. In order to evaluate the physics potential of the CMS detector, the WH associated production of a Higgs boson decaying into a W pair is studied. Performances of data acquisition and its sophisticated trigger system, particle identification and event reconstruction are investigated by performing a detailed analysis on simulated data. Three-lepton final states are shown to provide interesting possibilities. For an integrated luminosity of 100 fb-1, a potential signal significance of more than 5ó is obtained in the mass interval between 155 and 178 GeV/c². The corresponding precision on the Higgs boson mass and partial decay width into W pairs are evaluated. This channel also provides one of the very few possible avenues towards the discovery of a fermiophobic Higgs boson below 180 GeV/c². These studies required many original technical developments, that are also presented.

Confidence measures for the results of speech/speaker recognition make the systems more useful in the real time applications. Confidence measures provide a test statistic for accepting or rejecting the recognition hypothesis of the speech/speaker recognition system. Speech/speaker recognition systems are usually based on statistical modeling techniques. In this thesis we defined confidence measures for statistical modeling techniques used in speech/speaker recognition systems. For speech recognition we tested available confidence measures and the newly defined acoustic prior information based confidence measure in two different conditions which cause errors: the out-of-vocabulary words and presence of additive noise. We showed that the newly defined confidence measure performs better in both tests. Review of speech recognition and speaker recognition techniques and some related statistical methods is given through the thesis. We defined also a new interpretation technique for confidence measures which is based on Fisher transformation of likelihood ratios obtained in speaker verification. Transformation provided us with a linearly interpretable confidence level which can be used directly in real time applications like for dialog management. We have also tested the confidence measures for speaker verification systems and evaluated the efficiency of the confidence measures for adaptation of speaker models. We showed that use of confidence measures to select adaptation data improves the accuracy of the speaker model adaptation process. Another contribution of this thesis is the preparation of a phonetically rich continuous speech database for Turkish Language. The database is used for developing an HMM/MLP hybrid speech recognition for Turkish Language. Experiments on the test sets of the database showed that the speech recognition system has a good accuracy for long speech sequences while performance is lower for short words, as it is the case for current speech recognition systems for other languages. A new language modeling technique for the Turkish language is introduced in this thesis, which can be used for other agglutinative languages. Performance evaluations on newly defined language modeling techniques showed that it outperforms the classical n-gram language modeling technique.

To business owners and consumers electronic commerce means new conditions and possibilities. Often and specially at the Internet information between consumers and sellers is asymmetrically distributed. Among the consumers there is a shortage of confidence in electronic commerce. In order of a positive development of electronic commerce it´s important to find a solution to the shortage of confidence. Confidence may be created by legislation or by self- regulation. This master thesis investigate whether a self-regulation may establish a confidence in and promote the development of electronic commerce. Self- regulation means different kinds of marketmechanisms. Examples of self- regulation are well-known brandnames and recommendations or guidelines for marketing. Even if self-regulation may establish a confidence in electronic commerce all products won´t be sold effectively at the Internet.