It has long been appreciated that genetic diversity can be stably maintained in spatially structured environments depending on the method by which subdivided populations are regulated. Theory suggests diversity in spatially heterogeneous environments can be stably maintained when populations are regulated at the level of each individual subpopulation (soft selection) rather than at the level of the total mixed population (hard selection). Although mathematically established decades ago, direct empirical tests of these predictions remain scarce, and its robustness to prolonged selection on evolutionary timescales remain unclear. Here, we track the emergence and fate of diversity in replicate laboratory populations of the opportunistic human pathogen, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, evolving in spatially structured environments composed of patches with or without antibiotic selection. We manipulate the scale of population regulation by transferring either a fixed number (soft selection) or volume (hard selection) of cells. We find that, while both forms of population regulation can lead to prolonged coexistence between resistant and sensitive strains, diversity is eventually lost by the evolution of broadly adapted resistant strains that pay lower costs of resistance. Notably, coexistence on average persists longer under soft selection than hard selection, consistent with the idea that soft selection is more effective at maintaining diversity than hard selection. Our results suggest that, in line with theory, the manner of population regulation can impact the maintenance of diversity and that the ecological conditions supporting diversity in the short term can be readily undermined by evolutionary processes in the long term.

Seminario para optar al Título Profesional de Ingeniero Comercial mención Ciencias Económicas. / Posterior a la Crisis Sub-Prime, la literatura macro-financiera se ha enfocado en estudiar los efectos financieros existentes sobre las emisiones globales de bonos soberanos, especialmente aquellos provenientes de países con economías emergentes. En este trabajo, se parte de la evidencia inicial de un aumento de las emisiones en moneda “hard currency” en los años posteriores a la Crisis Sub-Prime, para luego dar paso a la construcción de una extensa base de datos que busca agrupar todas las variables necesarias para el estudio del crédito global de países de economías emergentes, junto con las múltiples aristas que el tema posee. Con la base de datos, el trabajo tiene como objeto contrastar la existencia de las emisiones globales (en moneda dura) sobre los “Cash Holdings” para una muestra de 20 economías emergentes. Los hallazgos de este trabajo sugieren que a los países que presentan economías emergentes tienen una mayor propensión a la emisión de bonos en el exterior. En particular, el origen del efectivo que mantienen proviene principalmente de fuentes de financiamiento de bonos, por sobre otras fuentes de financiamiento. Esta diferencia aumenta si las emisiones se realizan con moneda dura. Lo anterior se puede explicar por una propensión de los países en estudio a realizar Carry-Trade, junto con una presencia de control de capital de bonos en la muestra.

Master of Science / Agronomy / Allan Fritz / Fusarium head blight (FHB) is a fungal disease, mostly commonly associated with F. graminearum, which affects cereal crops such as wheat resulting in substantial yield losses and reductions in grain quality. The onset of the disease can occur rapidly when warm, wet or humid weather coincides with flowering in the spring. The pathogen also produces mycotoxins such as deoxynivalenol (DON) that accumulate in the grain and can be toxic to humans and animals. This results in additional economic losses as contaminated grain must be discarded or blended to reduce the amount of toxin in order to meet federal regulatory limits. Development and deployment of resistant cultivars has proved to be an effective method to combat the disease, and many resistant sources have been reported in the literature with the majority of major resistance coming from Chinese landraces. Transferring resistance from these sources into cultivars adapted to the U.S. has been a slow process due to linkage of FHB resistance genes with poor agronomic traits. Therefore, it is important for breeders to search for sources of resistance in native material adapted to their local conditions. In this study, we aimed to identify quantitative trait loci (QTL) for resistance to spread of FHB within the head (Type II resistance), accumulation of DON toxin in grain (Type III resistance), and resistance to kernel infection (Type IV resistance). Plant material consisted of 148 doubled haploid (DH) lines from a cross between the two moderately resistant hard red winter wheat (HRWW) cultivars Art and Everest. The study was conducted for two years using a point inoculation technique in a greenhouse in Manhattan, KS. Three QTL conferring resistance to FHB traits were detected on chromosomes 2D, 4B, and 4D. The QTL on chromosomes 4B and 4D overlapped with the major height genes Rht1 and Rht2, respectively. Plant height has shown previous associations with FHB, though the underlying cause of these associations is not well understood. The majority of results have reported increased susceptibility associated with shorter plant types; however, in this study, the haplotype analysis for the Rht-B1 and Rht-D1 loci showed an association between the dwarfing alleles and increased resistance to FHB. This suggests either pleiotropic effects of these loci or perhaps linkage with nearby genes for FHB resistance. Markers close to the peaks of the FHB resistance QTL have the potential for Kompetitive Allele Specific PCR (KASP) marker development and subsequent use in marker assisted selection (MAS) to help improve overall FHB resistance within breeding programs.

abstract: Teachers of the deaf and hard of hearing have served Arizona since 1912 when the Arizona School for the Deaf and Blind opened in Tucson, Arizona. Several decades later the Phoenix Day School for the Deaf was established in the Phoenix metropolitan area. To reach deaf and visually impaired students in the rural areas of Arizona, itinerant teachers travel from school to school, providing instruction and consultation with families and school personnel. The purpose of the study was to examine the perceptions and attitudes of itinerant teachers of the deaf and hard of hearing as to job satisfaction. Four research questions addressed the roles and responsibilities of itinerant teachers: extent of teacher participation in professional development activities; the opinions and attitudes of teachers toward their work; and additional comments and concerns. To answer these questions, 43 participants from five cooperatives established by the Arizona State School for the Deaf and Blind responded to a modified version of the 2007-2008 Schools and Staffing Survey regarding itinerant teacher job satisfaction. Two open-ended questions made this survey a mixed methods study of both quantitative and qualitative data. It was found itinerant teachers worked with students with a variety of hearing losses and educational needs; worked with regular classroom teachers and other school personnel; planned, assessed, and kept records; coordinated and conducted consultation and IEP meetings; worked with parents; provided technical support; traveled to different schools to work with students; provided accommodations and modifications; and provided direct instruction to DHH students. As to professional development, participants found language strategies and content of subjects taught to be useful and most attended. Ninety-one percent of the cooperative teachers seemed satisfied as a teacher. They felt support from administration, were satisfied with how the cooperatives were managed, and agreed that they were recognized for their efforts. Some of the concerns from teachers were their salary, the paperwork involved with itinerant teaching, and the limited amount of resources available to them. Overall, the findings of this study provided a baseline of information that suggest more work needs to be done related to job satisfaction of itinerant teachers. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Educational Administration and Supervision 2016

The ability to accurately predict an impending hard disk failure is important for reliable storage system design. The facility provided by most hard drive manufacturers, called S.M.A.R.T. (self-monitoring, analysis and reporting technology), has been shown by current research to have poor predictive value. The problem of finding alternatives to S.M.A.R.T. for predicting disk failure is an area of active research. In this work, we present a rule discovery methodology, and show that it is possible to construct decision support systems that can detect such failures using information recorded from live disks. It is desired that any such prediction methodology should have high accuracy and must have ease of interpretability. Black box models can deliver highly accurate solutions but do not provide an understanding of events which explains the decision given by it. To this end we explore rule based classifiers for predicting hard disk failures from various disk events. We show that it is possible to learn easy to understand rules from disk events. Our evaluation shows that our system can be tuned either to have a high failure detection rate (i.e., classify a bad disk as bad) or to have a low false alarm rate (i.e., not classify a good disk as bad). We also propose a modification of MLRules algorithm for classification of data with imbalanced class distributions. The existing algorithm, assuming relatively balanced class distributions and equal misclassfication costs, performs poorly in classification of such datasets. The performance can be considerably improved by introducing cost- sensitive learning to the existing framework.

The goal of this thesis is to understand perception of the Hard Rock brand in the Czech Republic among university students. Hard Rock Cafe Prague is a combination of a restaurant, bar, and rock club operated by the hospitality corporation Hard Rock International. The studied segment can be seen as a group of potential customers in long term, and this research should identify opportunities for growth of Czech guests. The thesis presents the process and results of Hard Rock brand research on the selected segment. The work is supported by theory of marketing of services, brand, and methodology of marketing research. The practical part includes two phases of research: qualitative and quantitative. Analysis of both phases and their implications on formulated hypotheses lead to conclusions regarding perception of Hard Rock brand by the studied segment. These are further analyzed to offer a number of recommendations for future marketing communication activities targeted towards the local customers.

This research focuses on project complexity with the aim to better understand it and to highlight the factors that affect/contribute to it. In addition, this research also highlights key project management practices and project critical success factors considered important to manage project complexity/complex projects. The two main motivating factors behind this research were, the lack of understanding of complex projects and the lack of relevance of project management theory to practice, which have been highlighted by many researchers. Since projects in different sectors are increasingly being characterised as complex, this entails a better project management knowledge base focusing on the dynamic, social and complex contexts of projects, so that the interrelationships, interdependencies and uncertainties between different project interfaces can be understood and managed properly. In order to understand this 'project actuality', it was necessary to obtain the views from practitioners working in these project settings and managing project dynamics and intricacies. To establish this pragmatic view, a series of interviews and questionnaire surveys was carried out and all efforts were made to select the participants working on complex projects with complex products falling under the Complex Product Systems (CoPS) category which was the case in the 2nd phase interviews and questionnaire, whereas in the 1st phase practitioners with industrial experience and also involved and/or in the process of getting academic qualification in project management were preferred. The first phase helped in establishing the theoretical and pragmatic perspective and the 2nd phase in refining and validating the findings. The questions were inline with the research focus mentioned earlier.The main findings of the research show that the perception of project complexity and its contributing factors were very much influenced by the project context, i.e. from organization level to work discipline level. No difference in the practitioners' perception of project complexity and its contributing factors was observed among the practitioners based in a similar organization and project setting. Novelty was found to be one of the key project complexity characteristics related to three project elements-people, product and process. In terms of key project management practices and skills considered important in managing project complexity, soft skills were reported useful by majority of the participants. The key processes found useful were either the ones which focused on people or others which helped to manage changes/deviations in projects. Influence and relationship, delegation, flexibility and trust were the main project critical success factors which emerged out of this research for complex projects.

The Arctic is except being one of the Worlds’ most remote regions also experiencing the heavy impacts of climate change. This means an opportunity for the Arctic nations – access to a brand new ocean. The melting region is from a military perspective of strategic importance, as well as it provides new shipping routes and holds up to 30% of the worlds undiscovered natural resources being worth billions of dollars. One nation having taken a keen notice to this is Russia, it has claimed land in the Arctic several times and in 2007 it planted its flag on the seabed of the North pole declaring the Arctic belongs to them. This lays out the purpose of this report – to investigate how the Russian use of soft and hard power in the Arctic has changed during the years of 2007 to 2017. In order to examine this, Kristensen and Sakstrup at the Centre for Military Studies at the University of Copenhage along with several others, suggest analysing Russias military and diplomatic behaviour. The results finds that the Russian use of soft power in terms of diplomacy and cooperation with the other arctic states was mainly present, and increased in the years 2007 to 2014 prior to the Ukraine crisis, while again being present after a long haul in 2017. The use of hard power in terms of military might and presence has during the same period of time steadily increased.

Background: Competition in today’s markets has made organizations focus greatly on innovative workers and managers to meet up with dynamic market demands, which forms the bedrock of human capital theory as discussed by Crăciun (2015). As part of human capital theory, managers’ skills are the subject of this thesis in relation to innovation. Objectives: To analyze the impact of hard and soft skills on manager’s innovativeness, thereby addressing a real problem facing organizations. This research therefore investigates how hard and soft skills of low-level managers’ impact their innovativeness by drawing inspiration from previous studies. The population for this study is limited to managers in engineering consultancy firms. Methodology: Quantitative analysis is used for this research. Based on the research purpose and question, this study is explanatory. This study approaches theory development in a deductive way, such that hypotheses are proposed first and then data are collected to test the hypotheses. The model contains 3 constructs: Hard skills (HS), soft skills (SS) and managers’ innovativeness (MI). Each of these constructs contain variables that are operationalized in the questionnaire. Cronbach’s alpha and Exploratory Factor Analysis is used to check the reliability of each factor and validity of the constructs. Results: Six models are analyzed with IBM SPSS Statistics 26. Quantitative tools such as Multiple regression and Spearman Rank Order Correlation was used for the analysis. The results show that there is significant and positive relationship between managers’ hard and soft skills and their innovativeness. Conclusions: The empirical analysis shows that managers’ hard and soft skills are positively and significantly related to their innovativeness. This confirms the proposed hypothesis H1, H2 and H4 to be true. The result also shows that soft skills are more positively related to managers’ innovativeness than hard skills. The result of this thesis show that the more hard and soft skills managers have, the more innovative they will be. One of the implications of this study is that firms should ensure that their managers possess both hard and soft skills competencies. Recommendations for future research: Further research on this subject should ensure that larger number of responses are collected. The inability to develop a model to test for hypothesis H3 was a challenge due to the existence of multicollinearity when forming the interaction variable between hard and soft skills. This will be an interesting area for further research. In addition, using other quantitative tools other than multiple linear regression may give more significant result.

The main aim of diploma thesis "China - real threat for American hegemony?" is to answer the question whether China is trying to threaten American position of world hegemon. After the dissolution of USSR and the fall of Iron Curtain USA became the only world superpower. Balance of power theory assumes that the occurrence of leading actor in the system will invoke attempts of others to balance the power of the leader, or to weaken him. In current world political system there are powers whose power potential is growing. One of them is China, mainly because its fast growing and prospering economy. Author of the thesis works with the concept of hegemony based on hard and soft power and three types of exercising of power - three faces of power - as means of achieving its goals. Author analyses Chinese use of hard and soft power resources, that can be classified under three types of use of power. All policies are then examined from "balance of power" theory view. Author tries to find out which one of behavior "balancing" attempts to balance, weaken USA or "bandwagoning" - support of USA is prevailing in Chinese policies. According to the prevailing tendency of Chinese behavior towards USA the author is capable to state whether China can be considered as a threat for US hegemony.