The overall aim of this study is to investigate the attitudes of teachers of English and Modern languages towards assessment and the grading process. The inspiration comes from the notion that grades are not set on an equivalent basis in upper secondary schools. The syllabi for the subjects are formulated in a way that enables interpretation, and they have been constructed this way in order for the goals to be re-written on a local basis to better suit the needs of the specific students. This step in the process, formulating a local work plan from the national syllabus, is however often omitted and many teachers have no local work plan to base their teaching on and instead use the generalized syllabi as a base, which in turn are interpreted subjectively. This leads to the situation where there is a lack of equivalence in both education and assessment. In anticipation of the new Education Act including new syllabi and grading criteria teachers have also been asked their opinions and expectations on these, and if they think things will change. The results and analysis conclude that the only way equivalence in grading can be reached is through extensive cooperation between teachers, which would lead to greater objectivity.

This dissertation explores the necessary and sufficient conditions to solve a variant of the dining philosophers problem. This dining variant is defined by three properties: wait-freedom, eventual weak exclusion, and eventual bounded fairness. Wait-freedom guarantees that every correct hungry process eventually enters its critical section, regardless of process crashes. Eventual weak exclusion guarantees that every execution has an infinite suffix during which no two live neighbors execute overlapping critical sections. Eventual bounded fairness guarantees that there exists a fairness bound k such that every execution has an infinite suffix during which no correct hungry process is overtaken more than k times by any neighbor. This dining variant (WF-EBF dining for short) is important for synchronization tasks where eventual safety (i.e., eventual weak exclusion) is sufficient for correctness (e.g., duty-cycle scheduling, self-stabilizing daemons, and contention managers). Unfortunately, it is known that wait-free dining is unsolvable in asynchronous message-passing systems subject to crash faults. To circumvent this impossibility result, it is necessary to assume the existence of bounds on timing properties, such as relative process speeds and message delivery time. As such, it is of interest to characterize the necessary and sufficient timing assumptions to solve WF-EBF dining. We focus on implicit timing assumptions, which can be encapsulated by failure detectors. Failure detectors can be viewed as distributed oracles that can be queried for potentially unreliable information about crash faults. The weakest detector D for WF-EBF dining means that D is both necessary and sufficient. Necessity means that every failure detector that solves WF-EBF dining is at least as strong as D. Sufficiency means that there exists at least one algorithm that solves WF-EBF dining using D. As such, our research goal is to characterize the weakest failure detector to solve WF-EBF dining. We prove that the eventually perfect failure detector 3P is the weakest failure detector for solving WF-EBF dining. 3P eventually suspects crashed processes permanently, but may make mistakes by wrongfully suspecting correct processes finitely many times during any execution. As such, 3P eventually stops suspecting correct processes.

Pricing strategies (e.g. yield management) in the tourism industry, known as non-transparent pricing, have raised fairness issues, and more recently, new pricing schemes in the airline industry have been controversial issues in terms of price fairness. Nonetheless, few tourism researchers have studied price fairness from a consumer perspective. Thus, an understanding of the cognitive processes associated with perceived price fairness could have far-reaching implications for tourist behavior research. The purpose of this study was to examine the antecedents and consequences of tourists‟ perceived price fairness of the ancillary revenue (i.e. extra fees of airlines). In particular, a conceptual model was based on Weiner's (1980) attribution theory, which was expected to complement shortcomings of the traditional dual entitlement principle (Kahneman, Knetsch, and Thaler, 1986). Following the study purpose, four objectives of the study were established: (1) to examine the dimensionality of price fairness in a price change context; (2) to examine the antecedents of price fairness; (3) to examine the consequences of price fairness; and (4) to compare differences in the price fairness model between high and low price sensitivity groups. To achieve the study objectives, this study developed a conceptual model of price fairness with three antecedents (price comparison, cognitive attribution, and emotional response) and four consequences (behavioral loyalty, willingness to pay, complaining, and revenge), and determined the model that best predicted the hypothesized model using Structural Equation Modeling. Data were collected from an online survey and the respondents (n=524) were leisure travel passengers in the United States who had taken domestic flights in the past 12 months. The initial model fit the data well from a global perspective, yet, some hypotheses were not supported. Results suggested that price comparison evaluation and cognitive attribution are antecedents to price fairness, but emotional response was found to be influenced by price fairness as opposed to what was hypothesized. It was also revealed that while price fairness directly influenced favorable behavioral intentions (e.g. behavioral loyalty and willingness to pay more), it also influenced unfavorable behavioral intentions (e.g. revenge and complaining behavior), mediated by negative emotional response. The revised model was alternatively proposed. In addition, significant differences in price fairness, emotional response, willingness to pay more, and revenge intention between high and low price sensitivity groups were found. Results of this study provide potentially important direction for the development of a theoretical framework for the conceptualization of antecedents and consequences of price fairness in a tourism context. It is further expected that findings of this study from an attributional perspective provide managerial guidance for the utilization of marketing strategy when a company encounters inevitable price increases or extra fees.

Does the specialization and division of labor lead to the unequal distribution of social resources or the power in the highest stratification decide opportunities and incomes? What roles do occupation, incomes, and social status play in this society? The phenomenon of social stratification extending from specialization of labor results in the disputes over equality and inequality. People of different social stratification hold dissimilar social resources, which differentiate the opportunities that they acquire. In order to understand how people perceive the factors of inputs and outputs of social stratification, the experiment of information integration is to understand that the model of information Integration of how different groups and individuals influence the factors of inputs and outputs of social stratification, to investigate the perception of the factors of inputs and outputs of social stratification of different groups, and to increase the related analysis of social stratification in our country. This research takes Information Integration Theory (IIT) as research method to understand the internal process of how people deal with a couple of variables with perception. Integration of function would be the main discourse of Information Integration Theory. Through study, it is found that people usually use simple rules of algebra such as adding, multiplying and averaging to integrate information. The research is designed to induce the factors of inputs of social stratification as education and family background by means of documents; the factors of outcomes of social stratification as reputation of occupation and incomes. Information Integration Theory, IIT is employed to know the subjects¡¦ cognitive algebras and there might be different models of integration for people perceive unfairness very differently. The research result is shown as below:¡G 1 Information integration of the administrative group is the differential-weight averaging model in the category of ¡§education-reputation of occupation¡¨ whereas the working group is the adding model. 2 The information integration of the administrative group and the working group are both the differential-weight averaging model in the category of ¡§education-income¡¨. 3 The information integration of the administrative group and the working group are both the model of addition in the category of ¡§family background-reputation of occupation¡¨. 4 The information integration of the administrative group and the working group are both the differential-weight averaging model in the category of ¡§family background-income¡¨.

Abstract The main idea of group buying is to recruit larger number of orders in order to cut down price. In order words, the larger the number of orders is, the more consumers will join due to the resulted lower price. This positive feedback is as the phenomenon of demand externalities found by Kauffman and Wand (2001, 2002). However, from the other viewpoint, there is a phenomenon of death spiral at the beginning of group buying. It indicates that, due to the few orders in the beginning of group buying, consumers are inclined to wait until the price is acceptable. Unfortunately, it results in that consumers will wait for each other¡¦s joining and therefore, the orders will not increase quickly. In order to solve the problem of death spiral, Lai and Zhuang (2004) proposed three incentive mechanisms, sequential-based, time-based and quantity-based models, on purpose of encouraging consumer to participate in group-buying. The experimental result demonstrated the expected performance of the three incentive mechanisms in terms of removing the phenomenon of death spiral. However, we find these incentive mechanisms didn¡¦t stimulate the phenomenon of demand externalities. Based on previous literature and practical experience, price differentiation usually causes customers¡¦ negative emotion and unfairness cognition. The incentive mechanisms designed for solving the problem of death spiral make consumers pay different price. We wonder if it causes unfairness cognition and therefore could not result in the phenomenon of demand externality. The purpose of this research is to understand whether the incentive mechanisms cause consumers unfairness cognition via experiment. The result shows consumers having opportunity to have extra discounts have higher cognition of price fairness than the consumers without chance to have extra discounts. Further, compared with other incentive mechanisms, sequential-based incentive mechanism makes consumers perceive lower cognition of procedural fairness. Finally, we also found that consumers¡¦ fairness cognition has positive effect on their price satisfaction and purchase intention as well. Keywords: Group buying, Fairness cognition, Consumer behavior, Consumer satisfaction

Abstract The throughput of a TCP connection is decided by the size of the congestion window. And cwnd increases when an acknowledgement arrives. It leads to that TCP has a bias against connections with long round-trip-time. For enhancing the fairness of TCP, we proposed a new scheme FTCP (Fair TCP). Unlike TCP, in FTCP congestion avoidance state, it compares its RTT with the standard RTT to adjust the increase amount of cwnd when an ACK arrives TCP sender. Therefore FTCP can keep the throughput increase rate of connections with different RTTs be the same. When FTCP enters timeout state, it sets appropriate slow start threshold by calculating the difference value of cwnd / 2 and the cwnd while standard connection achieves ssthresh. So that FTCP can eliminate the difference of throughput between connections with different RTT while leaving the slow start state. FTCP significantly improves the unfair bandwidth distribution between connections with different RTT. TCP connections over wireless links perform badly because of the unnecessary congestion control, inefficiency to burst packet loss, and long delay to slow down the cwnd recovery time. In proposed schemes, Snoop takes BS as a pivot point to cache the unacknowledged TCP packets. When errors occur in wireless link, Snoop retransmits the packets locally from BS instead of retransmitting these packets from sender. And Snoop shields off the duplicate ACKs caused by wireless errors to avoid sender triggering unnecessary congestion control. But Snoop adopts same retransmission style as TCP. It only retransmits one packet per continuous duplicate ACKs. Snoop recovers error packets more quickly and tolerates higher BER than TCP. But Snoop doesn¡¦t really solve the degraded performance problem of multiple errors of TCP. When the channel is the in a very bad quality, Snoop still performs badly. We proposed a new scheme, Csnoop (continuous snoop), extended from Snoop. When bursty errors happen in the wireless links, Csnoop retransmits one lost packets from the BS in first RTT and counts the number of ACKs that arrives BS to calculate the number of lost packets. And Csnoop retransmits these lost packets continuously. When local timeout happens, Csnoop infers that all packets were dropped and retransmits all packets cached in the buffer. Simulations show that Csnoop achieves better throughput compared to Snoop and TCP, especially for bad quality wireless links. Furthermore, Csnoop needs less buffer size to cache the unacknowledged packets at the base station than Snoop.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2001. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 178-189). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2001. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 178-189). Also available on the Internet.

Chip multiprocessors (CMPs) commonly share a large portion of memory system resources among different cores. Since memory requests from different threads executing on different cores significantly interfere with one another in these shared resources, the design of the shared memory subsystem is crucial for achieving high performance and fairness. Inter-thread memory system interference has different implications based on the type of workload running on a CMP. In multi-programmed workloads, different applications can experience significantly different slowdowns. If left uncontrolled, large disparities in slowdowns result in low system performance and make system software's priority-based thread scheduling policies ineffective. In a single multi-threaded application, memory system interference between threads of the same application can slow each thread down significantly. Most importantly, the critical path of execution can also be significantly slowed down, resulting in increased application execution time. This dissertation proposes three mechanisms that address different shortcomings of current shared resource management techniques targeted at multi-programmed workloads, and one mechanism which speeds up a single multi-threaded application by managing main-memory related interference between its different threads. With multi-programmed workloads, the key idea is that both demand- and prefetch-caused inter-application interference should be taken into account in shared resource management techniques across the entire shared memory system. Our evaluations demonstrate that doing so significantly improves both system performance and fairness compared to the state-of-the-art. When executing a single multi-threaded application on a CMP, the key idea is to take into account the inter-dependence of threads in memory scheduling decisions. Our evaluation shows that doing so significantly reduces the execution time of the multi-threaded application compared to using state-of-the-art memory schedulers designed for multi-programmed workloads. This dissertation concludes that the performance and fairness of CMPs can be significantly improved by better management of inter-thread interference in the shared memory resources, both for multi-programmed workloads and multi-threaded applications. / text

Several recent chapters (Gilliland & Schepers, 2003; Skarlicki & Folger, 2001) have focused on an interesting question: If certain behaviors are perceived as fair or unfair, what antecedents lead to these fair or unfair behaviors? Gilliland and Schepers identify multiple antecedents, including organizational norms. This research examines how norms promote fair or unfair procedural behavior as defined by procedural fairness rules (ref. Leventhal, 1980). Drawing on recent social psychological work on norms by Cialdini and colleagues (for a review see Cialdini & Trost, 1998), the current research distinguishes between two norm elements: descriptive norms (i.e., what others actually are doing) and injunctive norms (i.e., what others believe an individual should be doing). A computerized performance allocation decision task was created to assess individuals' actual behavior in two studies. In each study participants were given normative information and then asked to complete four blocks of the allocation task. From computer-recorded data, measures of behavioral fairness were derived and a post-task survey elicited participants' self-perceived fairness: Both sets of fairness measures were used as dependent variables.Study 1 focused on descriptive norms and tested a prediction derived from Cialdini et al.'s (1990) work on norm salience theory: This theory suggests that the more salient a norm is, the greater an impact it will have. Study 2 also included descriptive norm element conditions, but focused too on the individual who was the source of the injunctive norm. Overall, results of these studies suggest that, at least for behavioral accuracy, norms do impact individuals' fair behavior. However, analyses of behavior and self-perception measures of fairness suggest that further refinement of behavioral measures and more research on the intersection of fairness and norms are required.