<p>National tests have an important function in ensuring reliable grades, and grades at many schools function as a sorting instrument to upper secondary school and higher education, the purpose of this essay has been to investigate if the assessment of English national tests is fair and consistent. The purpose has also been to find out if teachers consider the national test as an important basis when determining a student’s final grade.  This particular investigation showed that national tests are assessed differently by different teachers. The investigation also showed that final grades are strongly influenced by national test grades.  It is of great importance that the assessment of the national test is fair and consistent and that the result of the assessment will be the same no matter who carries it out; however the result shows that it is open to question if the national test can be considered to contribute to comparability and fairness of grades.  The assessment differences indicate otherwise.</p>

A Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is a shared wireless network without any infrastructure, consisting of mobile nodes connected by wireless links. The nodes are free to move and organize themselves arbitrarily. The nodes in the network are therefore depending on each other in order to communicate over multiple hops. Due to the physical characteristics of wireless networks, the channel is time-varying, which makes it hard to both predict and sustain a bit rate level. The nodes’ mobility causes topology changes, and further load and capacity variations. Traditional usage areas are battlefield and disaster areas, while new areas like extended network coverage and gaming are emerging. Quality of Service (QoS) is needed in every network in order to differentiate traffic with different performance requirements, e.g. voice and e-mail applications. Providing QoS in wireless environments with varying conditions is complex, and hard guarantees can not be given. Consequently, the aim is to give differentiated treatment to traffic with different performance requirements. In addition, we can not study the MANET without considering fixed networks. Communication with fixed networks is important, for example by accessing the Internet. In this thesis the Differentiated Services (DiffServ) architecture is applied and adapted to MANETs. Using the same QoS architecture will ease the transition between the wireless and wired domain. But the special characteristics of wireless networks require modifications to the original DiffServ architecture. In investigations there was found restrictions on the number of classes to use, and this number was dependent on the type of traffic in the network. A QoS architecture based on the DiffServ framework is proposed, with an admission control based on the concept of shadow classes, and Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) to avoid congestion. New flows are tested in a shadow class before getting admission to the network and its designated class. The shadow class has the same scheduling properties as the designated class, but is differentiated by a higher drop probability in the buffers. Both the admission control and ECN are thus build on the same principle by controlling the load from probabilistic functions in the buffers, and are studied to find their individual and combined effects. In wireless environments the probability of a packet loss increases with the number of hops, which gives services an unpredictable performance for users. A predictable service, independent of number of hops, is provided by scheduling based on the path information; the packets are differentiated based on the number of hops made or left to make, increasing the predictability at the cost of performance.

Introduction: The point of departure in this thesis is that women live longer than men, while men have more power, influence and resources, and probably better health-related quality of life, than women. In order to judge and act from this situation, the classical idea that both facts and values are needed for conclusion is adopted. The diverse positions of the sexes are mainly assumed to depend on the gender system, i.e. the societal structure organising human activities and relations, ultimately privileges and burdens, by sex. Hence, abolition of gender is held to be associated with decreased differences in health. The handling of facts and values is divided into two principal questions: 1) how to compare women and men within a particular state of the world, and 2) how to choose from their positions between states. Aims: The overall aim is to propose a public health framework for judging fairness and change from the positions of women and men. The specific aims are to: illustrate how the choice of normative approach affects judgements on fairness and resource allocation (I), explor public health views regarding various ethical principles (II), study the relationship between aspects of gender equality in public/domestic and health (III), estimate costs, savings and health gains, associated with the Swedish parental insurance reform (IV). Methods: The methods used are: ethical analysis based on the normative theories of welfarism, extrawelfarism, egalitarianism, and feminism; and the notions of justice by separate spheres, equity as choice and attainment/shortfall principles (I), survey among public health workers regarding within-state and between-states ethical views (II), epidemiologic study on death and sickness leave among traditional, equal, and untraditional Swedish couples who had their first child in 1978 (III), cost-effectiveness analysis based on men who took paternity leave 1978-1979 (IV). Results: The selected normative theories are likely to claim different opinions on fairness regarding women and men, and different proposals on resource allocations (I). Most public health workers support the idea of judging fairness by separate spheres, end-points, and shortfall equity. The rejection of health maximisation, and support for equality in life span and income, are convincing; although females and males differ significantly in judging societal change (II). In comparison to being equal in the public sphere, traditional women have lower risks of death and sickness, while traditional men tend to have higher risks. Being equal in the domestic sphere seems to be associated with lower risks among both sexes (III). Men who took paternity leave run significant lower death risks than other men. Base case cost-effectiveness of the reform is 6,000 EUR, and worst case 40,000 EUR, per gained QALY (IV). Conclusions: A public health framework for judging fairness and reform by women and men could look as follows: 1) identify facts at present and from past, 2) ask whether the situation is fair by within-state rules, 3) claim or refuse change, 4) identify consequences from reform, 5) consider whether the change was satisfying by between-states rules. The gains from more ethical analyses of public health based on sex/gender should overcome the many tricky issues involved. Since there is no common understanding on how to judge fairness and change from female/male differences in health and wealth, added research and exchange of views are called for. At Swedish state of gender (in)equality, it seems public health relevant to support further similarity in child-care. Provided an effective fraction of 25 percent, the entitlement to paternity leave is probably approved of by common welfarist, egalitarian, and feminist goals.

Previous research has shown how venting one’s feelings can reduce the negative emotions of a consumption experience. This study proposes a general process of how consumers with feelings of unfairness due to a negative consumption experience can achieve emotional disclosure and reduced unfairness by posting online reviews. By using an experimental design with scenarios, this study tests how the perceived unfairness in this process is affected by the party encouraging the consumer to post an online review and the consumer’s public commitment. A student sample was divided into four groups and the perception of unfairness was compared between the groups depending on whether the party encouraging the feedback was a company perceived to be responsible for the sense of unfairness or an independent party and whether when the consumer was identifiable or anonymous to see if public commitment had an effect. Results showed that emotional disclosure was found to reduce the perceived unfairness in all groups. There was no significant difference between being encouraged by the company or independent party. Furthermore, no public commitment was in effect, even when participants’ answers were thought to become known to others. The results indicate that companies may prefer to encourage consumers to provide feedback themselves rather than using a third party and that posting online reviews will not make the consumer committed to their feeling of unfairness.

The use of 802.11-based wireless mesh networks (WMNs) as an alternative network backbone technology is growing rapidly. The primary advantages of this approach are ease of deployment and lower cost. However, such networks typically exhibit poor fairness properties, often starving nodes if they are too many hops distant from the gateway. Researchers have shown a growing interest in this problem in recent years. Many solutions proposed amount to some level of source rate control, either by policing directly at the source, or via TCP congestion control reacting to a gateway-enforced rate limit. However, there has been limited study on the effectiveness of source rate control. In this thesis we first demonstrate that source rate control can only partially solve the fairness issue in 802.11-based WMNs, with some routers experiencing an undesirable degree of unfairness, which we call structural unfairness. We then identify the four necessary factors that cause structural unfairness. If we can eliminate or reduce any one of these conditions, we can eliminate or ameliorate the unfairness problem. We first investigate two techniques to improve 802.11 MAC scheduling: fixing the contention window and packet spacing at every router node, both means achievable with commodity 802.11 hardware. We show that the combination of these mechanisms provides a significant gain in fairness. We also perform case studies using another three techniques, channel re-assignment, routing changes, and careful router placement, to remove or reduce other necessary conditions. We demonstrate that these techniques, whenever applicable, can eliminate the unfairness problem entirely at times, or at least improve the situation.

The use of 802.11-based wireless mesh networks (WMNs) as an alternative network backbone technology is growing rapidly. The primary advantages of this approach are ease of deployment and lower cost. However, such networks typically exhibit poor fairness properties, often starving nodes if they are too many hops distant from the gateway. Researchers have shown a growing interest in this problem in recent years. Many solutions proposed amount to some level of source rate control, either by policing directly at the source, or via TCP congestion control reacting to a gateway-enforced rate limit. However, there has been limited study on the effectiveness of source rate control. In this thesis we first demonstrate that source rate control can only partially solve the fairness issue in 802.11-based WMNs, with some routers experiencing an undesirable degree of unfairness, which we call structural unfairness. We then identify the four necessary factors that cause structural unfairness. If we can eliminate or reduce any one of these conditions, we can eliminate or ameliorate the unfairness problem. We first investigate two techniques to improve 802.11 MAC scheduling: fixing the contention window and packet spacing at every router node, both means achievable with commodity 802.11 hardware. We show that the combination of these mechanisms provides a significant gain in fairness. We also perform case studies using another three techniques, channel re-assignment, routing changes, and careful router placement, to remove or reduce other necessary conditions. We demonstrate that these techniques, whenever applicable, can eliminate the unfairness problem entirely at times, or at least improve the situation.

This study examines individual-level citizen participation in the notice and comment component of federal agency rulemaking. It focuses on characteristics of individual participants ascertained through a survey mailed to 400 actual commenters. Survey data is used to evaluate the representativeness of these participants to the general public. Also, the compatible of citizen participation in rulemaking with the democratic ideals of liberty, equality, and fairness is evaluated, along with potential consequences of proposed reforms.

Children’s perceptions of the fairness of their filial responsibility was examined as a moderator between witnessing domestic violence and behavioral outcomes in children. Hierarchical Multiple Regressions revealed that children’s perceptions of the fairness of their family responsibility influenced the relation between the psychological violence in the household and child reports of internalizing behavior problems. Specifically, higher levels of psychological violence predicted higher levels of internalizing only under perceptions of unfair filial responsibility. In addition, increased levels of reported psychological violence in the household significantly predicted increased levels of mother-reported externalizing problems. Descriptive analyses revealed that for 12 of the 27 families all of the children had very small levels of reported behavior problems, as compared to the rest of the sample. These resilient families had lower level of psychological violence and physical violence in the household than the other families in the sample.

Awareness systems are being designed and implemented to improve employee connections. This study examines the variables that affect the acceptance of an awareness system. The awareness system that was used for this research was a remote desktop access system. The independent variables investigated were the degree of detail that can be viewed on a desktop, whether the users can control who can access their desktops, whether the users can control when others have access to their desktops, the equality of access to others' desktops, and task-technology fit. In determining the effect of the independent variables on acceptance, the dependent variable, the mediating variables of privacy and fairness were taken into account. There was a preliminary survey conducted to determine appropriate situations to be used in the scenario descriptions for the survey for the main study. The methodology of policy-capturing surveys was utilized to conduct the survey for the main study in order to investigate the model developed in this study. The policy-capturing survey was pre-tested on University of Waterloo students. The main study was conducted in two different organizations, the subjects for the first study were employees from the Information Systems and Technology Department at the University of Waterloo and the subjects for the second study were employees from Ciber Incorporated. Results indicate that perceptions of privacy and perceptions of fairness have significant effects on acceptance. Also, perceptions of privacy and fairness are related to details in the design of the remote desktop access system. This research may be a contribution to this field since little research has been conducted in this area and implications can be drawn for future research on acceptance of awareness systems.

The success of modern networked systems has led to an increased reliance and greater demand of their services. To ensure that the next generation of networks meet these demands, it is critical that the behaviour and performance of these networks can be reliably predicted prior to deployment. Analytical modeling is an important step in the design phase to achieve both a qualitative and quantitative understanding of the system. This thesis contributes towards understanding the behaviour of such systems by providing new results for two fluid network models: The stochastic fluid network model and the flow level model. The stochastic fluid network model is a simple but powerful modeling paradigm. Unfortunately, except for simple cases, the steady state distribution which is vital for many performance calculations, can not be computed analytically. A common technique to alleviate this problem is to use the so-called Heavy Traffic Approximation (HTA) to obtain a tractable approximation of the workload process, for which the steady state distribution can be computed. Though this begs the question: Does the steady-state distribution from the HTA correspond to the steady-state distribution of the original network model? It is shown that the answer to this question is yes. Additionally, new results for this model concerning the sample-path properties of the workload are obtained. File transfers compose much of the traffic of the current Internet. They typically use the transmission control protocol (TCP) and adapt their transmission rate to the available bandwidth. When congestion occurs, users experience delays, packet losses and low transfer rates. Thus it is essential to use congestion control algorithms that minimize the probability of occurrence of such congestion periods. Flow level models hide the complex underlying packet-level mechanisms and simply represent congestion control algorithms as bandwidth sharing policies between flows. Balanced Fairness is a key bandwidth sharing policy that is efficient, tractable and insensitive. Unlike the stochastic fluid network model, an analytical formula for the steady-state distribution is known. Unfortunately, performance calculations for realistic systems are extremely time consuming. Efficient and tight approximations for performance calculations involving congestion are obtained.