Psychological closure is the feeling that a life experience is complete and a part of the past (Beike, Adams, and Wirth-Beaumont 2007). While research on psychological closure primarily deals with traumatic or highly aversive life experiences, psychological closure is frequently experienced and sought after in more typical consumption settings. My dissertation extends our current knowledge about the role of psychological closure by exploring emotional, cognitive, perceptual, and behavioral implications of psychological closure across a broad range of consumer experiences. The first essay aims to demonstrate that closure makes events seem distant in time and probability through emotion. It also explores resulting consumer decisions such as warranty purchase intentions. The second essay proposes and tests how psychological closure of a consumer learning experience can lead to an abstract representation of that learning experience, and consequently a heightened sense of subjective knowledge. / text

This paper examines how many and the most common type of side stops a traveler or travel party makes during long-distance travel of over 100 miles or more. The research uses the 1995 American Travel Survey (ATS) because it is one of the few data sources that collects information on stops and side trips for long-distance trips. The paper utilizes two models to estimate side stop behavior: 1) an ordered probit formulation for modeling the number of side trips during long distance travel, and 2) a mixed multinomial logit formulation for modeling the most common side stop purpose during long-distance travel. A variety of variables, including trip and household characteristics, are considered in the model specification. The factors that play the largest role in determining side stop behavior are the primary purpose of the long-distance trip, whether the trip is a planned vacation or not, and the ethnicity of the travelers.

Social studies of accounting have drawn attention to the dubious role of accounting as a representational link between organizational realities and action. Based on five years immersion with performance management and board work in a theatre company, this thesis inquires into the ontological significance of accounting practices. The study takes a praxiographic approach, which emphasizes action and relocates questions of representation towards the practices in which representations are mobilized. The research questions refer specifically to ontological work related to commensurability and distance in accounting practices. Four papers attend to the manners in which the organizational performance of the theatre company is represented in different situations of managing, governing and reporting. The papers demonstrate and analyse different examples of ontological work involved in achieving (or retracting) representational links. In conclusion, the thesis places the organizing of ontological tensions – especially the tension between singular accounting representations and multiple organizational realities – at the core of accounting representation practices. The thesis thus contributes to practical, theoretical and philosophical discussions on the links between accounting practices, accounts and reality. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 2: Manuscript. Paper 3: Manuscript. Paper 4: Manuscript.</p>

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Since China entered WTO, the multinational corporations (MNC) increased the foreign direct investment (FDI) in Chinese market because China is famous for its huge market volume and low labor cost. However, the knowledge of Chinese market is still limited. This paper analyses the determinants of automotive MNC's FDI choice made in Chinese market based on the study of Chinese FDI environment and the investment behavior of Swedish firms. The determinants are tested through three variables: industry development, cultural distance and the government policy. In this thesis, data related to FDI in automotive industry is collected mainly from 13 provinces or municipalities. The results show that: (1) The regions with larger market size will attract more FDI; (2) The larger cultural distance will create more obstacles when MNCs invest, thus has the negative impacts on FDI choices; (3) MNCs will give priority to those areas with lower tax burden. Besides, this thesis also describes the detailed cultural distance at firm level between China and Sweden based on the interview with a Swedish firm. The results suggest Swedish firms need to focus more on the partner selection and management adaption when investing in Chinese market.

These days WebCT, Learning Space, FirstClass and other learning spaces are used very wide. There is controllable content: storing, renewable, additional. Content in every learning space is released in different formats. There are widely defined tools of computer learning. Every virtual class runs in virtual learning space and only some of them have video conference mode. Hypertext creation tools are used widely. Apply to world wide web all study material is storing in study center server. All learning enviroment courses are administrated by network administrators or tutors. All virtual learning enviroments are relative directly with computer network. The most important condition of virtual learning – right selection of virtual learning enviroment.

L'objectif de ce projet de maîtrise est de développer un nouvel algorithme permettant de retrouver les relations phylogénétiques entre un arbre de référence (par exemple, l'arbre de la distribution géographique des espèces ou des paramètres climatiques) et un arbre caractérisant un fragment de l'alignement de séquences multiples (ASM). Pour ce faire, nous récupérerons d'abord les différents fragments d'un ASM donné. Nous les soumettrons par la suite aux différents programmes du paquet PHYLIP (Seqboot, ProtDist ou DnaDist, Neighbor et Consense) et le programme PhyML afin d'obtenir un arbre consensus avec les valeurs de bootstrap sur ses branches. À partir de chaque arbre consensus, nous calculerons son bootstrap moyen. De plus, nous comparerons topologiquement l'arbre consensus obtenu à l'arbre de référence pour connaître la distance de Robinson et Foulds (RF) normalisée entre eux. Pour chaque fragment d'un ASM, nous conserverons uniquement les données relatives à des fragments correspondant à la distance RF normalisée la plus petite (i.e., celle qui représente la plus grande similitude entre les deux arbres). Dans le cas où plusieurs fragments correspondront à la même valeur de la distance RF normalisée, l'estimation se poursuivra sur l'arbre consensus ayant le score de bootstrap le plus élevé (i.e., meilleur support de l'arbre). Pour connaître la performance de notre algorithme, nous utiliserons un jeu de données de 52 espèces appartenant au groupe des Carnivores se localisant en Amérique du Nord. Nous récupérons aussi 21 protéines issues de la base de données GenBank. La construction des arbres de référence se fera à partir de données climatiques de l'habitat de ces espèces (i.e., température, précipitation et altitude). Notre algorithme permettra de trouver des sous-séquences des gènes donnant une similarité topologique accrue entre l'arbre de référence et l'arbre phylogénétique obtenu à partir des séquences. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : arbre phylogénétique, phylogéographie, distance de Robinson et Foulds, bootstrap, alignement de séquences multiples, paquet PHYLIP, GenBank.

Informacijos amžiuje įvairūs tyrimo metodai generuoja milžiniškus kiekius duomenų, tačiau naudojant tik neapdorotus duomenis sunku atskleisti tiriamų objektų prigimtį, išsiaiškinti pagrindinę, kartais paslėptą struktūrą. Naudingai informacijai, o vėliau ir žinioms iš duomenų išgauti paprastai naudojami informacijos suformavimo (Information Retrieval) ir duomenų išgavimo (Data Mining) būdai. Panašumo tarp įvairių esybių nustatymas čia vaidina bene svarbiausią vaidmenį. Egzistuoja daugybė objektų tarpusavio panašumo nustatymo modelių ir teorijų, bet dauguma jų vienaip ar kitaip remiasi tam tikru objektų požymių tarpusavio palyginimu. Jau kurį laiką kalbama apie tai, kad dviejų esybių tarpusavio panašumas yra įtakojamas ne tik tų esybių požymių, bet ir konteksto, kuriame jie pasireiškia. Vadinasi dviejų esybių tarpusavio panašumas priklausomai nuo konteksto gali skirtis. Darbe aptariama kontekstinio panašumo svarba, esami konteksto apibrėžimai ir keli kontekstinį panašumą vertinantys matai. Išnagrinėjus literatūros šaltinius bus pristatytas kontekstinio panašumo formavimo būdas, kurio veikimas tiriamas naudojant dirbtinius ir realius duomenis. / Similarity is one of the most important aspects in the area of information retrieval and data mining. A new trend in similarity judgment assumes that similarity between two objects can not be expressed as a fixed value and depends on the context in which the similarity is measured. However no formal definition of context has yet been specified. In this thesis a new formal context definition is proposed and a method to measure contextual similarity is developed. The main idea behind this method is to extract context information from distinct groups of data. This method is tested with synthetic and real-world data sets comparing context similarity measure with distance based similarity. Results indicate that taking the similarity into account may cause significant changes in object similarity. This work shows the importance of context when measuring similarity.