Title: Different countries – different cultures Level: Thesis for Bachelor Degree in Business Administration Authors: Cecilia Jensen and Changiz Saadat Behesthi Supervisor: Lars Ekstrand Date: 2011 – 12  Our study is based on two countries, Sweden and Germany, and is aiming to find out if the cultural differences between the two countries have a major impact when doing business together or not.Cross-cultural management is a modern topic and can help transnational companies deal with problems that occur due to different cultures in the organization, but is it really necessary to spend huge amount on intercultural training? We used a qualitative method and did a survey through a convenience sampling among six managers in the two countries. We analyzed the answers sorted by country and then compared them to each other. The result of the survey was that Swedish managers inform and include their staff in decisions to a bigger extend than German managers. Other than the preferences of a more democratic leadership the differences were, according to us, insignificant to perform any cultural training between the two countries. For further studies we suggest a deeper research method with a field study at every workplace, to conclude that the manager’s answers concurred to the actual outcome. We also think that interviewing more managers, and within the same branch, would increase the creditability of the study. The result indicates that the money spent on intercultural training between Sweden and Germany is quite unnecessary and that the differences are smoothing out.

After the 1990s, the activities of acquisition among firms have become an international trend. Associated with the situation of global economic slump, both the domestic and international enterprises are eager to establish more powerful and effective business groups, and strengthen their competitiveness in order to create firms with higher commercial value. The rapid acquisition by firms usually results in the situation of promptly laying off employees, decreasing employees¡¦ salary, etc, and therefore generates many risks to the entire groups. The employees of those enterprises being acquired feel unsafe about their future, so their working pressure keeps growing. Similarly, the employees of the firms that conduct acquisition also worry about their working rights being threatened by the increasing number of competitors brought by the organizational reformation. These negative impacts usually have several effects: e.g. reluctance of working, uncomfortable working atmosphere, loss of human resources, and decrease of firm¡¦s overall productivity. It is found that comparative less literature focuses on exploring the influences of acquisition, and investigate the correlation between its impact and the promise given by firms and employees¡¦ working effectiveness. This study distributed 120 questionnaires in total: 90 returned and 80 effective. First, the construct validity of factor analysis and evaluation and the reliability of Cronbach alpha value were used as the tool of analysis. Then Regression Analysis was also adopted and the conclusions listed below were made: A. After acquisition, the employees¡¦ (those of enterprises being acquired) expected distance has significant negative influence toward organizational promise. 1. After acquisition, the employees¡¦ expected distance has negative influence upon firm¡¦s emotional promise. 2. After acquisition, the employees¡¦ expected distance has negative influence upon firm¡¦s sustained promise. 3. After acquisition, the employees¡¦ expected distance has negative influence upon firm¡¦s moral promise. B. After acquisition, the influence of employees¡¦ (those of enterprises being acquired) expected distance toward their working effectiveness is uncertain. 1. Evaluation of working effectiveness from subjective perspectives: 1.1. After acquisition, the employees¡¦ expected distance has no significant influence upon missionary effectiveness. 1.2. After acquisition, the employees¡¦ expected distance has positive influence upon contextual effectiveness. 2. Evaluation of working effectiveness from both subjective and objective perspectives (only limited to those who have records of subjective working effectiveness): 2.1. After acquisition, the employees¡¦ expected distance has no significant influence upon objective working effectiveness. 2.2. After acquisition, the employees¡¦ expected distance has no significant influence upon subjective missionary effectiveness. 2.3. After acquisition, the employees¡¦ expected distance has no significant influence upon subjective contextual effectiveness.

Combined coding with modulation is an important topic. It is verified in this thesis that a combined decoder and demodulation Viterbi receiver has a better error probability than a cascade of two separate Viterbi decoder and demodulator. Conventionally, the free distance is taken as the principle criterion for computing the error probability for coding or modulation. In many cases, distance spectrum needs to be provided for analyze the Maximum likelihood decoding. However, it is difficult for computing the distance spectrum for a combined coding with modulation because of a nonlinear structure inside. In this thesis, we first build an augmented trellis for the combined coding with modulation. Applying the concept of difference by exclusive OR and regular subtraction to the augmented trellis, we build an improved virtual trellis. As a consequence the distance spectrum for our problem can be computed because of the linear structure of the virtual trellis. The distance spectrum for different convolutional codes and CPM systems are investigated by us. Experiments results have demonstrate that a better distance spectrum implies a better error ability.

Combined coding with modulation is an important topic. Conventionally, the free distance is taken as the principle criterion for computing the error probability for coding or modulation. In many cases, distance spectrum needs to be provided for analyze the Maximum likelihood decoding. However, it is difficult for computing the distance spectrum for a combined coding with modulation because of a nonlinear structure inside. In this thesis, we study the order of distance spectrum members to find some limited number of members to present the whole distance spectrum. In our previous work, we have built an augmented trellis for the combined coding with modulation. Applying the concept of difference by exclusive OR and regular subtraction to the augmented trellis, we build an improved virtual trellis. In this thesis, we expend the concept of subtraction to a pair relation. Thus, this augmented trellis is first composed of paired states and transition lines. Then, we use a partition principle to group the states and lines. Finally, the complex trellis is reduced to a reasonable structure. We therefore can apply distance spectrum computing algorithm to find the distance spectrum. The distance spectrum for different convolution codes and CPM systems are investigated by us. Experiments results have demonstrate this distance spectrum is more accurate than before.

In this paper, we cite two weighted rank distances (Wilcoxon rank and Log rank) to analyze how many times must a deck of 52 cards be shuffled to become sufficiently randomized. Bayer and Diaconis (1992) used the variation distance as a measure of randomness to analyze the card-shuffling. Lin (2006) used the deviation distance to analyze card-shuffling without complicated mathematics formulas. We provide two new ideas to measure the distance for card-shuffling analysis.

In the recent years, the banks pay more attention to the importance of the Credit Risk. Thus, more research institutions start to focus on the problem of the Credit Risk. And the KMV company is one of the most famous institutions. The paper uses Expected Default Frequency Model developed by KMV to value the expected default probability of Taiwan listed company, and compared two ways, Financial Statement Analysis and KMV Option Model, to value EDF, and try to understand the distribution of the EDF of Taiwan listed company.

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Traditional morphometric method measures the linear distance between two points on the body surface. Statistical techniques, mainly covariance analysis and principle component analysis, are respectively used in single- and multi- variable statistical inferences. Their purpose is to overcome the bias due to allometric growth. Geomorphometric methods (mainly superimposition method) studied the size and shape of organisms was developed at recent decade. These methods not only measure and analyze body shape and size directly, but are immune to the disturbance of allometric growth. They also enable scientists to study organic structure on a three dimensional space. In this study, coordinates of landmarks on beaks surface were recorded to give information of shape as well as caliper distances. Superimposition method (Procrustes residuals) was applied to examine the difference between sexes, local populations and among different species of octopus. And the phenograms based on caliper distance and superimposition method were compared with the hypothesis of Norman and Sweeney on Octopus phylogeny. Samples of all 11 species of octopus, belonging to genus Cistopus and three species-group of genus Octopus were collected around the water of Taiwan. No significant differences on landmark shape between sexes of O. aegina and of O. marginatus were found through principal component analysis. Samples of O. marginatus from Tungkang and Dahsi could be discriminated through the first principal component. The result does not match with that from DNA sequence analysis already reported. Such conflicts were considered the result of environmental effects. Canonical discrimination method was used for two types of data, namely Procrustes residuals and caliper distances. All species were significantly different from each other. A discriminate function based on Procrustes residuals data reclassified 92.7% of the specimens correctly, incomparing to the 86.1% based on caliper distances. Phenogram constructed from a matrix of Mahalanobis distance (D2) also showed different result. It was concluded that: 1) Result of geomorphometric analysis based on landmark data is not compatible with the hypothesis of Norman and Sweeny. 2) Beak characters based on caliper distance are suitable for discrimination between genera or species-groups, and support the separation of O. luteus from O. minor and O. sp. TW35. Our study suggests that, either traditional morphometric method or the new geomorphometric method is a better tool for showing environmental effects than for phylognetic studies.

Our research focusses on the problem of finding nearby peers in the Internet. We focus on one particular approach, Beacon Triangulation that is widely used to solve the peer-finding problem. Beacon Triangulation is based on relative distances of nodes to some special nodes called beacons. The scheme gives an error when a new node that wishes to join the network has the same relative distance to two or more nodes. One of the reasons for the error is that two or more nodes have the same distance vectors. As a part of our research work, we derive the conditions to ensure the uniqueness of distance vectors in any network given the shortest path distribution of nodes in that network. We verify our analytical results for G(n, p) graphs and the Internet. We also derive other conditions under which the error in the Beacon Triangulation scheme reduces to zero. We compare the Beacon Triangulation scheme to another well-known distance estimation scheme known as Global Network Positioning (GNP).

Telecommunication networks form an integral part of life. Avoiding failures on these networks is always not possible. Designing network structures that survive these failures have become important in ensuring the reliability of these network structures. With the introduction of SONET (Synchronous Optical Network) technology, rings have become the preferred survivable network structure. This network configuration has a set of disjoint rings (each node being a part of single ring), and these disjoint rings are connected via another main ring. In this research, we present a mathematical model for the design of such disjoint rings with node number balance criterion among the rings. When, given a set of nodes and distances between them, the Balanced Disjoint Rings (BDR) problem is the minimum total link length clustering of nodes into a given number of disjoint rings in such a way that there is almost the same number of nodes in each ring. The BDR problem is a class of the standard Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). It is clear from this observation that the BDR problem becomes a TSP when the number of rings required is set to one. Hence BDR is NP-Hard, and we do not expect to obtain a polynomial time algorithm for its solution. To overcome this problem, we developed a set of construction heuristics (Break-MST, Distance Method, Hybrid Method, GRASP-Based Distance Method) and improvement heuristics (Multi-Exchange, Single Move). Different combinations of construction and improvement heuristics were implemented and the quality of solution thus obtained was compared to the standard Branch and Cut Technique. It was found that the algorithm with GRASP-Based Distance Method as the construction heuristic and multi-exchange - single-move combination as the improvement heuristic performed better than other combinations. All combinations performed better in general than the standard Branch and Cut technique in terms of solution time.