Thesis (M.A.)--Chulalongkorn University, 1986. / In Thai; abstract also in English. Added t.p.: Cooperative measures in solving economic problems related to peasants during the reigns of King Rama VI and King Rama VII. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 116-126).

Universiẗat, Diss., 1999--Saarbrücken.

Software toolkits are under development to help construct applications that support group-working. Toolkit developers adopt different approaches to group-work support in order to tackle different issues and a toolkit is commonly characterised by the approach adopted. It is difficult to compare toolkits because of this lack of apparent commonality and it is difficult to decide which toolkits meet specific application requirements.

Submitted by Suelen Reis (suziy.ellen@gmail.com) on 2013-04-30T18:29:06Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Tese Raimundo Santos.pdf: 987384 bytes, checksum: e53cc3744d9b0db7b1192ee7a382099c (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Valdinéia Ferreira(neiabf@ufba.br) on 2013-05-02T16:11:51Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 Tese Raimundo Santos.pdf: 987384 bytes, checksum: e53cc3744d9b0db7b1192ee7a382099c (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2013-05-02T16:11:51Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Tese Raimundo Santos.pdf: 987384 bytes, checksum: e53cc3744d9b0db7b1192ee7a382099c (MD5) Previous issue date: 2002 / O tema central desta tese é a Cooperativa ? Escola, a qual é aqui identificada como instituição de natureza social que, de um lado, propicia a formação ampla do indivíduo e, do outro, funciona como instrumento de geração de posto de trabalho (emprego) e renda. Contudo, a questão que desponta é qual a categoria de Cooperativa-Escola que potencializa o trabalho educativo e, simultaneamente, a geração de emprego e renda? Esta questão desloca a investigação para outro ângulo na busca de encontrar mecanismo que responda às indagações que emergiram do problema. Nesse sentido, elaborou-se um Modelo de Avaliação, partindo da concepção de que o processo de construção do conhecimento assenta-se na informação pré-existente e é nutrido pela relação teoria-empiria. Daí, foram definidos os constructos, figurados nos eixos básicos: Cooperativa e scola. No constructo Cooperativa foram identificados quatro vetores básicos: o administrativo, o econômico, o social e a participação. No constructo Escola foram istinguidos três fatores como determinantes do seu desempenho: ambiência fsica escolar, corpo docente e operacionalidade. Para efeito de validação, o modelo foi testado nas unidades escolares do Estado da Bahia. Os principais resultados foram: a maioria das unidades nasceu no modelo cooperativa de pais, posteriormente avançou para o misto; atualmente, a categoria cooperativa de docente surge com tendência de hegemonia; as melhores condições para funcionamento de Cooperativa-Escola são as cidades com população entre 41.000 e 135.000 habitantes e, inversamente do esperado, os municípios com maior contingente de população e renda não se constituem no principal mercado para operação. No constructo Cooperativa, a categoria docente foi a que apresentou maior eficiência na gestão, sobressaindo a unidade de Nazaré, na primeira colocação; no constructo Escola, a categoria cooperativa de pais foi a mais destacada, ficando a unidade de Barreiras com a melhor posição. Enfim, o Modelo de Avaliação proposto apresentou pertinência e mostrou condições de identificar as conexões dos fenômenos que integram o problema, revelando e decodificando a realidade em estudo. / Salvador

Master of Agribusiness / Department of Agricultural Economics / Brian C. Briggeman / Garden City Co-op, Inc. is a farm cooperative in Southwest Kansas. It provides marketing and storage of grain, fertilizer, crop protection products, seed, and petroleum to both member and non-member accounts. The cooperative also operates a transportation company called Western Transport. Western Transport provides transportation of anhydrous ammonia (NH3), liquid fertilizer (32-0-0 or 10-34-0), diesel, gasoline, and propane utilizing semi-tractors and trailers to Garden City Co-op, Inc. as well as to other agribusinesses in the region. The purpose of this thesis is to integrate and optimize the supply chain strategies for the cooperative’s fertilizer and petroleum products as it relates to storage and transportation of those commodities. Utilizing the framework of an aggregate production plan, a model is constructed to minimize costs associated with inventory holding, net storage asset depreciation after tax savings, net transportation asset depreciation after tax savings, labor, operations, and freight. By varying the quantities of petroleum and fertilizer the cooperative purchases, sells, and stores each month over a one-year period, an optimum mix of storage and transportation assets is determined. Two different demand scenarios are evaluated that relate to demand during a drought year versus demand during a non-drought year. Also, different model scenarios include varying beginning period inventory and ending period inventory to stress transportation assets versus storage assets. The model is optimized using a genetic algorithm solver in the software program Evolver produced by Palisade Corporation. Results of the optimization provided two feasible strategies for the cooperative. By continuing services to non-member accounts, there was a greater investment placed on transportation. Investments included additional trucks, NH3 trailers, petroleum trailers, and drivers. The strategy favored a just-in-time inventory approach versus inventory smoothing with storage. When discontinuing services to non-member accounts, investment between storage and transportation assets were relatively equal. The model favored a reduction in NH3 trailers, liquid fertilizer trailers, trucks, and drivers. However, additional storage was necessary as well as petroleum trailers. The scenario favored an inventory smoothing approach across the model year.

In cooperatively breeding societies, where individuals (termed ‘helpers’) provide care to young which are not their own, group members can vary substantially in their contributions to cooperative activities. Individuals are expected to exhibit higher levels of cooperative investment if the benefit of performing that behaviour greatly outweighs the cost of performing that behaviour. This may be achieved by directing investment towards kin (thereby maximising indirect fitness benefits) and/or attaining large direct fitness benefits. In this thesis, I explore whether direct fitness benefits shape patterns of helping behaviour in the cooperatively breeding white-browed sparrow weaver (Plocepasser mahali). White-browed sparrow weavers live in year round territorial groups with high reproductive skew, comprising a dominant pair and subordinates of both sexes. Although all group members contribute to a wide range of highly conspicuous cooperative activities, there is large inter-individual variation in investment. In chapter 2, I use simulated territorial intrusions to show that sexually-selected direct benefits shape the expression of sentinel behaviour. In chapter 4, I provide evidence that the direct benefits associated with either the pay-to-stay or social prestige hypotheses are unlikely to modulate patterns of provisioning in male white-browed sparrow weavers. Evidence of marked individual differences in contributions to offspring care in cooperative societies is also generating increased interest in the proximate causes of such variation. In chapter 5, I use within-individual measurements to demonstrate that variation in provisioning effort is not directly regulated by variation in circulating levels of prolactin (a pituitary hormone). The evidence does suggest, however, that provisioning behaviour may be induced by exceeding a threshold hormone level. Individual contributions to parental behaviours (as opposed to alloparental) may be shaped by constraints associated with life-history traits. In chapter 3, I show that parents in white-browed sparrow weaver societies perform different provisioning rates yet employ similar food allocation tactics, and that these patterns are expected in tropical living bird species. Combined, these findings provide insights into the selection pressures that may shape individual contributions to cooperative activities.

Time-sensitive applications that are also CPU intensive like video games, video playback, eye-candy desktops etc. are increasingly common. These applications run on commodity operating systems that are targeted at diverse hardware, and hence they cannot assume that sufficient CPU is always available. Increasingly, these applications are designed to be adaptive. When executing multiple such applications, the operating system must not only provide good timeliness but also (optionally) allow co-ordinating their adaptations so that applications can deliver uniform fidelity. In this work, we present a starvation-free, fair, process scheduling algorithm that provides predictable and low latency execution without the use of reservations and assists adaptive time sensitive tasks with achieving consistent quality through cooperation. We combine an event-driven application model called cooperative polling with a fair-share scheduler. Cooperative polling allows sharing of timing or priority information across applications via the kernel thus providing good timeliness, and the fair-share scheduler provides fairness and full utilization. Our experiments show that cooperative polling leverages the inherent efficiency advantages of voluntary context switching versus involuntary pre-emption. In CPU saturated conditions, we show that the scheduling responsiveness of cooperative polling is five times better than a well-tuned fair-share scheduler, and orders of magnitude better than the best-effort scheduler used in the mainstream Linux kernel. / Science, Faculty of / Computer Science, Department of / Graduate

The credit unions in British Columbia have experienced spectacular growth during the last fifteen years. Many new credit unions have come into existence and old ones have increased considerably in size. Different pieces of legislation, Federal as well as Provincial, have been passed to ensure safety of members' savings and efficient management of credit unions. This study is an attempt to evaluate the financial management of credit unions in British Columbia. The evaluation has been made from the standpoint of financial soundness, lending practices, accounting system and system of internal control. Since a credit union is an important institution of consumer credit, a general discussion of consumer credit is presented in the beginning of the study. Consumer credit is a major force in our modern economy. Mass production of goods at low costs has been greatly assisted through the advent of consumer credit financing. Modern credit theory divides the field of credit into three categories: emergency credit, convenience credit and instalment credit. Instalment credit is the most significant of these three in terms of its effect upon the economy. The level of this credit depends on the durables bought on an instalment basis, and the sale of durables depends on discretionary income, expectation of future income, the pattern of distribution of income amongst spending units and the growth of income. The consumer credit market is imperfectly competitive. Credit unions provide a significant portion of consumer lending in Canada. They have experienced a more than proportionate growth in their trend of instalment credit lending as compared with the growth trend of other lending institutions. Since savings is the source of consumer credit, the role of credit unions as saving institutions has been studied. Credit unions now act as depositories for a significant portion of total net savings in Canada. Cooperative central banking in Canada, through a recent development, is becoming increasingly popular. In 1953, a Canadian Cooperative Credit Association was formed to act as an apex organization for all the cooperative central banks in Canada. The financial soundness of a credit union depends on the adequacy of reserves, liquidity, and growth. There are various types of reserves in existence, of which the reserve for bad debts is of material importance. Under the B.C. Credit Unions Act, the provision for bad debt losses has to be kept in liquid form. This seems to be an unnecessary provision because the function of the reserve fund is to absorb losses, and because such losses do not necessitate the payment of cash. Total bad loans have been related to loans outstanding and the reserve fund. The overall position has been studied and is considered to be very satisfactory. For measurement of the growth of credit unions, the time series of savings, membership and loans have been analysed by the Gompertz curve method. The annual increase in all the three factors is at a declining rate. The projection of Gompertz curves indicates that it will be a long time before a period of stability is reached. The liquidity of credit unions is analysed by relating the total funds retained to the legal requirements. In almost all cases funds retained are higher than the legal requirements. The effect of the seasonal pattern of demand for borrowings on liquidity has been studied from the statistics obtained from the books of B.C. Central Credit Union. Since B.C. Central Credit Union is the depository of funds of most of the credit unions in British Columbia, their liquidity is directly related to B.C. Central's. B.C. Central's liquidity has been analysed from the standpoint of lending practices, the extent of exercise of the borrowing rights and its compliance with the statutory requirements. The lending practices of credit unions have been studied from the standpoint of the purposes for which loans have been granted, the nature of security taken, the rate of interest charged, and the terms of repayment of loans. Purchase of durables, and real estate constitute more than 60% of the borrowings from credit unions. The effective rates of interest charged by credit unions have been compared with the rates of other lending institutions. The lending of credit unions is kept reasonably on a short-term basis. In order to study accounting systems and the system of internal control, a number of credit unions in Vancouver were visited. The study was made from the standpoint of three management objectives: namely, managerial decision-making, protection of assets and determination of income. Though the systems in use are thought to be reasonably satisfactory, some small credit unions are not making proper use of them. Throughout the study, recommendations have been made that are thought to be helpful in improving the financial management of credit unions in British Columbia. / Business, Sauder School of / Graduate

This research study examined African American farmer participation in Virginia Cooperative Extension as a step toward fully understanding the role participation plays in supporting African American farmers as legitimate learners within the Cooperative Extension system.  This study, therefore, focused on exploring participation in African American farmer programs through the single case of Virginia Cooperative Extension\'s Small Farm Outreach and Technical Assistance Program.  This program, which is housed at Virginia State University, aims to support minority farmers who have limited access to benefits from USDA programs.  Historically, limited resource farmers have been challenged to gain full access to programs offered by Cooperative Extension. Using a qualitative case study design, individual interviews were conducted with African American farmers, extension specialists, small farm agents, and the program administrators.  Two focus groups were conducted with the Small Farm Program agents and another with African American farmers that participated in the program.  A review of the findings indicated that the Small Farm Outreach and Technical Assistance at Virginia State University provide various educational opportunities to African American farmers. The program provides one-on-one technical assistance, distribution of information, USDA loan application assistance, workshops and conferences, and networking.  Participants stated that agents being "hands on" was a great way to talk and effectively provide assistance to them.  The findings for the study characterized barriers relaying from challenges in the program to communication between program and farmers. Family motivation, technology, and the USDA were other unknown barriers that were revealed in the study. The data suggest improvements for the program; first, the involvement of more farmers in the program planning of educational opportunities at Virginia State University would increase participation. Second, the current evaluation of strategies should be continued as a method of usage.  However, a pre and post survey should be conducted to analyze and discover farmer's usage in modern to traditional communication systems. Third, providing additional technological advancement training to agents, specialists, and director to be more advance in the new age, and lastly at conferences and/or workshops, construct more engaging informative discussions on adult learning and farm family motivation factors. / Master of Science in Life Sciences

Doctor Educationis / Euclidean geometry was recently re-introduced as a compulsory topic in the Mathematics Curriculum for learners in the Further Education and Training (FET) band in 2012. The diagnostic analysis reports on the National Senior Certificate (NSC) Mathematics Paper 2 examinations since 2014 has repeatedly expressed concern of the poor performance of leaners in proof and reasoning items linked to circle geometry. Various efforts have been made to examine the composition of the curriculum to find ways of motivating learners in the study of circle geometry and enhancing their performance but not much has been realized. The use of technology or cooperative learning approaches for the teaching of geometry is beneficial for pedagogical purposes, particularly for improving learners’ performance in geometry. Hence, this study investigated the impact of using technology through cooperative learning on learners’ performance on grade circle 11 geometry. It was thus an attempt to focus on blending these two teaching methods with an emphasis on the use of technology. The research took place at a Khayelitsha school and the scope of technology was limited to using a mathematical computer programme called Heymath. This research was grounded on the cognitive level framework that is used by the Department of Basic Education (DBE) in the setting of National Senior examination mathematics papers, as well as the set of social constructivist views of mathematics teaching and learning. In the case of the latter, both social constructivism and cognitive constructivism views were considered and applied for the purposes of this study. Using a positivist paradigm, this convergent parallel mixed methods study employed a quasi-empirical design, where the control group consisted of a group 26 grade 11 learners who were comparable to the group of 27 grade learners that made up the experimental group.