The plays of Oscar Wilde hold more than just sharp wit and likable characters; they also contain examinations of aspects of the playwright's own personality and explorations of possible life choices. Through the use of Performance Studies theory, this thesis seeks to shed light on how Wilde saw himself versus how he presented himself at different points in his life. The texts analyzed within are Wilde's 1891 dramatic religious retelling, Salomé, and his 1894 domestic comedy, The Importance of Being Ernest. Within each are clues to the interior desires of their author: Salomé offers an investigation of a strong female personality in a repressive male society, while The Importance of Being Earnest expands on the feminine taking control over destiny.

The purpose of this doctoral thesis research study was first to investigate the needs for a faculty development program in Middle East Technical University (METU). Later, in the second phase, models that explained the linear structural relationships among factors that might be influential on faculty&amp / #146 / s perceived competencies about the skills necessary for the instructional practices, personal, professional and organizational developments were proposed and compared. In this study, a questionnaire considering different aspects of faculty developments were sent to all of the academicians in METU. After collecting data from faculty members and research assistants, they were analyzed both descriptively and using principal component factor analysis. Based on the results of factor analysis, linear structural relations models fitting the data were generated through LISREL-SIMPLIS computer program runs. The descriptive results indicated that there was a feeling for need to improve the faculty&#039 / s self-proficiency in different instructional issues. On the other hand, both descriptive results and LISREL modeling results indicated that faculty members and research assistants show different characteristics based on their needs and factors affecting their self-proficiencies. These aspects will lead us to prepare different faculty development programs based on their needs and priorities. The result for both faculty members and research assistants showed that in a faculty, instructional self-proficiency cannot be considered as a single absolute parameter. Rather, it should be considered as several interrelated parameters connected to different aspects of faculty&#039 / s proficiencies.

The potential of the Chinese outbound tourism market is substantial; however, research on this market to Canada is limited. This may be due, in part, to the lack of Approved Destination Status (ADS). This study examined the possible perceived image of Canada obtained by potential Chinese tourists, and to compare to the marketing position of Canada by CTC China Division-in effect, to conduct a product-market match between two concepts. Content analysis and an importance and performance analysis were used in the study. A questionnaire distributed at the Beijing Capital International Airport solicited perceptions of tourism in Canada, importance of selected attributes in travel decision making, performance of selected attributes on Canada, and trip preferences. The marketing position of Canada was examined through a content analysis of the promotional materials circulated from CTC China Division in Beijing, China. The coherences and gaps between perceived image of Canada and marketing position of Canada provide some marketing implications. This study concludes that the general tourism image of Canada is vague but positive, which is probably derived from the historically favorable image of Canada in china. Potential Chinese tourists had little knowledge on specific tourism sights; however, they recognized star attractions of Vancouver, Niagara Falls, and Toronto. Potential Chinese tourists prefer slow-paced trips; group tours; two weeks in length; in fall season; featuring mid-budget accommodation, preferably bed-and-breakfasts; on motor coach; visiting nature based sights at majority; and providing foods of various cultures. The current marketing position of Canada reflected through promotional materials by CTC and its partners has coherences in promoting tourism attractions in Canada to the image of Canada. Gaps exist on the promotion of travel issues and unconventional attractions, which inspires the marketing implications. Promotional resources should be allocate to unconventional tourism attractions with consideration rather than the presence of Chinese and mandarin speaking environment in Canada because of Chinese tourists’ demand for culture diversity. Promotion should include more information about travel expense and visas to establish reasonable consumer expectations.

Brands are well recognized to create trust and develop both cognitive and emotional ties with customers, but primarily in business-to-consumer (B2C) markets. Recent research acknowledges the fact that brands, despite the differences between B2C and business-to-business (B2B) contexts, may carry valuable features in B2B contexts as well. B2B purchasing is a combination of decisions made by individuals and their decision could many times be influenced by personal- as well as affective- and cognitive factors, although in an organizational setting. This study intended to examine the influence of brands in a B2B purchasing context and is delimitated to the definitions made by the European Union (2013) for micro and small-sized enterprises (MSEs). The study was restricted to investigate products that were used for certain organizational purposes, e.g. products that are consumed in the daily activities of organizational functions. A distinction was made between highand low involvement purchases. For this study, a research model was based on recognized brand concepts and organizational buying behavior models. The model illustrates the underlying hypothesis that organizational buying behavior is differently affected by brands depending on product involvement. This research used a qualitative approach, using in-depth interviews to retrieve a deeper understanding of human behavior and the underlying reasons behind such behavior. The result implies that substantial organizational buying behavior had ties to purchasers’ individual buying behavior and further implies emotions being a strong factor when the buyer lacks knowledge, motivation or interest in the product. Brand was initially stated to have limited influence on organizational decisions, which at further elaboration turned out to contradict the actual purchasing behavior.

The potential of the Chinese outbound tourism market is substantial; however, research on this market to Canada is limited. This may be due, in part, to the lack of Approved Destination Status (ADS). This study examined the possible perceived image of Canada obtained by potential Chinese tourists, and to compare to the marketing position of Canada by CTC China Division-in effect, to conduct a product-market match between two concepts. Content analysis and an importance and performance analysis were used in the study. A questionnaire distributed at the Beijing Capital International Airport solicited perceptions of tourism in Canada, importance of selected attributes in travel decision making, performance of selected attributes on Canada, and trip preferences. The marketing position of Canada was examined through a content analysis of the promotional materials circulated from CTC China Division in Beijing, China. The coherences and gaps between perceived image of Canada and marketing position of Canada provide some marketing implications. This study concludes that the general tourism image of Canada is vague but positive, which is probably derived from the historically favorable image of Canada in china. Potential Chinese tourists had little knowledge on specific tourism sights; however, they recognized star attractions of Vancouver, Niagara Falls, and Toronto. Potential Chinese tourists prefer slow-paced trips; group tours; two weeks in length; in fall season; featuring mid-budget accommodation, preferably bed-and-breakfasts; on motor coach; visiting nature based sights at majority; and providing foods of various cultures. The current marketing position of Canada reflected through promotional materials by CTC and its partners has coherences in promoting tourism attractions in Canada to the image of Canada. Gaps exist on the promotion of travel issues and unconventional attractions, which inspires the marketing implications. Promotional resources should be allocate to unconventional tourism attractions with consideration rather than the presence of Chinese and mandarin speaking environment in Canada because of Chinese tourists’ demand for culture diversity. Promotion should include more information about travel expense and visas to establish reasonable consumer expectations.

There arise two problems when the expectation of some function with respect to a nonuniform multivariate distribution has to be computed by (quasi-) Monte Carlo integration: the integrand can have singularities when the domain of the distribution is unbounded and it can be very expensive or even impossible to sample points from a general multivariate distribution. We show that importance sampling is a simple method to overcome both problems. (author's abstract) / Series: Preprint Series / Department of Applied Statistics and Data Processing

This study firstly aims to identify facility features of the convention centers and then propose a method in order to identify users&rsquo / priorities and evaluate what extent these were provided by the convention centre. Data has been collected using self-administered questionnaires from three group of users / attendees, employees and meeting planners. The study has been conducted in istanbul L&uuml / tfi Kirdar Convention and Exhibition Center as a case, because of being the most remarkable convention center of Turkey. Each participant will be required to assess this convention center in terms of their priorities of expectations and features provided. The results have been evaluated statistically, and significant differences between the level of importance and performance of the facility features have been presented. This research is expected to be useful for constitution of design criteria of convention centers and effective management of the facilities, in terms of both identifying the features of convention centers and providing a method evaluating the performance of the facilities from the users&rsquo / perspective.

The aim of this research study was to investigate the early childhood teachers&rsquo / perceptions about their roles in the development of self-discipline in children. In order to specify this aim, the research question which asked &ldquo / How do early childhood teachers perceive their role in the development of self-discipline?&rdquo / was investigated. Current study was conducted based on qualitative research methodology. In order to investigate the aim, a case including seven early childhood teachers working at the same institution was reached. The main data collection instrument was an interview protocol consisting of two parts: vignettes and interview questions. The instrument included questions related to the meaning and importance of self-discipline, and how to support it in classroom environment, and was developed according to observations and related literature. Additionally this instrument was pilot tested with six early childhood teachers. The interviews for the main study were conducted between December 2009 and January 2010. According to the findings, early childhood teachers were aware of self-discipline, its importance, and its development. However, some strategies which were being used by the teachers should be discussed with them in terms of relatedness of those strategies with self-discipline.

The Indian IT industry has grown at an impressive rate during the last decade. India's own competitive advantage in the software business is well known: cost-effectiveness, world-class quality, high reliability, and rapid delivery, all of it powered by state-of-the-art technologies. Software has penetrated different spheres of the Indian economy, namely Indian corporate sector, government and public sector units. Over the last decade, one of the sectors, which have felt the "heat" of software intrusion, has been the financial service. Indian banking industry, today is in the midst of an IT revolution. A combination of regulatory and competitive reasons have led to increasing importance of total banking automation in the Indian Banking Industry. The present level of computerization in Public Sector Banks is a result of these initiatives. RBI has also gone ahead in creating of nation wide and localized networks for integration of the entire financial system. The Software Packages for Banking Applications in India had their beginnings in the middle of 80s, when the Banks spurred on by RBI and the Rangarajan Committee Report, started computerizing the branches in a limited manner. A few software companies in the country have developed banking software products and most of the banks have adopted them. These products enable all the banks to automate their operations at the branches and corporate offices. The software companies develop 60% of the software in the company itself, which involves the development of modules, and the remaining 40% is done in the customer's site. This 40% is customization of the software. The success of these banking software products in the banks can be measured by studying the market share of the individual products, revenues earned by these products by the respective companies. The success of these products depends on the satisfaction of the users, using the software. To measure their satisfaction and arrive at those products that are performing well in terms of User satisfaction, the following objectives were designed in the present study. The objectives are: 1. To understand the attributes of the banking software products that are relevant to user/customer satisfaction. 2. To understand the user's perception of the above attributes. 3. To derive the key factors of user/customer satisfaction. 4. To develop an Importance-Performance map for the attributes of the software. Based on the literature review and the discussions held with the software professionals and bank employees, we identified few relevant variables like Implementation, Maintainability, Reliability, Security, User's Performance and Output which fall under the software related variables and variables like Vendor's meeting User's needs, Vendor's mktg skill, User involvement, Training and support, and Service falling under the vendor related variables. A structured questionnaire was developed based on these variables using a 5-pt likert scale and this instrument was checked for its construct and content validity and also Reliability by conducting Factor analysis and Computing Cronbach's alpha respectively on a small sample in the Pilot study. The questionnaire was modified and the final instrument was used for the main study. This questionnaire was administered on a sample of 141 in the main study. The collected data were subjected to Factor Analysis to arrive at the key factors of User satisfaction for banking software products. We obtained seven factors User's Performance, Output, and Vendor's Marketing skill, Implementation, Ease of Use, Security and Maintainability. The second part of the study plot an Importance -Performance Map for all the products on all variables which gives us the best performer. Since this was subjective analysis, we conducted ONE-WAY ANOVA on the data to arrive at the best performer. However, ANOVA could give only the top performer, but we were not able to identify the second best product. We computed the weighted scores for each of these products by giving weights to the variables and multiplying with the performance scores. The comparison of the total weighted scores of all the four products considered in the study helped us in ranking the products based on their performance. We obtained that Product 3 was on top followed by Product 4 and Product 1 and last was product 2. Based on these analyses we suggested the following to the software vendors: 1. The key factors identified in the study should be given the highest priority while developing and testing the software for conformance with the specifications. 2. Product 2 must be improved on variables like output by making the report generation more flexible and maintainability should be made easier by making additions more flexible without any errors. 3. Vendors of Product 1 and 2 should provide better user manuals using simple language and also train the bank employees in using the software, by involving employees during customization in a more informal way. 4. Vendor's of Product 3 and 4 should maintain the quality of their existing products respectively and try to improve them.

Cownose rays are benthic, suction feeders whose foraging activities have been implicated in severe damage to commercial shellfish industries and seagrass habitat. With jaws highly modified for durophagy, it has been assumed that they are crushing specialists, feeding primarily upon hard molluscan prey. In addition, R. bonasus are believed to be highly migratory, transient residents of coastal inshore waters. However, minimal quantitative data exist regarding R. bonasus feeding or movement patterns in the Gulf of Mexico. Stomach contents from 50 cownose rays caught within the Charlotte Harbor estuary between July 2003 and July 2004 were analyzed using the index of relative importance (IRI). Crustaceans, polychaetes, and bivalves were the dominant groups present, with bivalves representing the smallest proportion of the three dominant groups. High dietary overlap was observed between sexes, size groups and seasons. Shoalmates exhibited significantly more similar diets to each other than to members of other shoals. Although currently believed to be a hard prey specialist, these results suggest the cownose ray may behave as an opportunistic generalist, consuming any readily available prey. Between July 2003 and November 2004, 21 cownose rays were tagged and tracked within Charlotte Harbor using passive acoustic telemetry. Residence time ranged between 1-102 days. No significant relationship was detected between activity patterns and tidal stage or time of day. Minimum convex polygons (MCP) and kernel utilization distributions (KUD) were calculated to demonstrate the extent of an animals home range and core areas of use. Daily MCPs ranged between 0.01 and 25.8 km2, and total MCPs ranged between 0.81 and 71.78 km2. Total 95% KUDs ranged between 0.18 and 62.44 km2, while total 50% KUDs were significantly smaller, ranging from 0.09 to 9.68 km2.