This thesis aims to consider the debates in the field of corporate governance in the fact that there have been and will be dramatic changes in the structure of corporate activities, such as the nature of work and the organization of corporations, as well as the influences of reforms in the financial reforms. Moreover, the emergence of institutional investment in the financial markets, the process of globalization and the development of electronic commerce have the influences on the corporate governance both in Canada and in China. There is an immense magnitude of discussion on various aspects of corporate governance in the academic field. This thesis will focus on comparing two rather distinctive systems of corporate governance, with respect to three specific aspects of the corporate governance. Those are: the board of directors, the role of shareholders, the roles of banks and investors in the two countries, also the reforms in China. Moreover, the convergence of the two corporate governance systems is introduced. / Le présent mémoire vise à faire enquête sur de tels débats dans le domaine de gouvernance des sociétés pour le fait qu'il y a ou aura de changements dramatiques dans la structure des activités des sociétés, par exemple, la nature de travail et l'organisation des corporations, ainsi que les influences des réformes financières. De plus, l'émergence de l'investissement institutionnel dans Ie marché financier, la progression de globalisation et le developpement du commerce électronique ont d'influence sur gouvernance des sociétés tant au Canada qu'en Chine. II y a une magnitude immense de discussion sur les aspects variés de gouvernance des sociétés dans le domaine académique. Ce mémoire présente une étude de comparaison détaillée sur les deux systèmes différents de gouvernance des sociétés concernant trois aspects spéciaux de gouvernance des sociétés, y compris le conseil d'administration, les rôles des banques et les investisseurs dans les deux États, ainsi que les réformes en Chine, de plus, la convergence des deux systèmes de gouvernance des sociétés est introduite. / "Mémoire présenté à la Faculté des études supérieures En vue de l'obtention du grade de Maître en droit (LL.M.)"

Denna studie avser att undersöka hur arbetsförhållanden för sportjournalister i Sverige ser ut. Den avser även att se huruvida det skett några förändringar över tid, i takt med ett förändrat medieklimat med teknisk utveckling och en hägrande "tidningsdöd". Uppsatsen bygger på frågeställningen "Hur ser yrkesverksamma sportjournalister på sina arbetsförhållanden i relation till det föränderliga medieklimatet?" och "Hur ser sportjournalister på nya digitala verktyg såsom sociala medier och ökad profilering i samband med den digitala utvecklingen? Arbetet baseras på sju stycken kvalitativa intervjuer som konstruerats efter teori kring sportjounalistik, mediekonvergens, samt en tidigare studie av David Hesmondhalgh & Sarah Baker om arbetsförhållanden i de kreativa näringarna i Storbritannien. Intervjurespondenterna bestod avav sju stycken sportjournalister, med minst tio års erfarenhet av yrket. Studiens huvudsakliga resultat visar att sportjournalister idag ofta har väldigt späckade arbetsdagar, med många timmar och fler arbetsuppgifter än tidigare. Detta är speciellt tydligt under stora evenemang, såsom fotbolls-VM och OS, då arbetsdagarna blir extremt hektiska och långa. Journalisterna känner också en, i olika grad, oro och osäkerhet kring deras arbete, i takt med en ökande konkurrens och tidninsbranschens kris. Tidningars steg till webben har gjort att journalisterna upplever en ökad stress att leverera snabbt och det finns tankar om en försämrad kvalité. Uppkomsten av social media har gjort att journalisterna har funnit nya sätt att hämta information på, men det har även betytt att det blivit lättare för läsare att bedöma och kritisera deras arbete, vilket kan drabba dem hårt. / Title: “Are we live now?” - A study about the role of the sports journalist and the working conditions in the changing media landscape Author: Joakim Almén & Joacim Clarin Tutor: Lowe Hedman Purpose: The purpose of this thesis was to study how the working conditions for sports journalists in Sweden appear and whether there have been changes in relation to the changing media landscape, with the upcoming of new technologies and the emerging crisis within the media business. The key question to answer is how the sports journalist feel about their working situations? In which way have the movement towards the web and the newspaper crisis affected them? Method/Material: The material in this paper consists of seven interviews with prominent sports journalists, all with ten or more years experience in the business. The interviews were all based on theory regarding sports journalism and media convergence, and a former study by David Hesmondhalgh & Sarah Baker, regarding the working conditions in the "creative business" in Great Britain. Main Results: The main results shows that the sports journalists often have long working days, especially during big events such as the World Cup in football and the Olympic Games, with little time for rest. The journalists have also been assigned more tasks than before, which makes their work very hectic. The journalists feel an uncertainty, in various degrees, regarding their job and the crisis within the business, with economic cuts and the increasing competition. The movement towards the web has made their work more stressful in regards to needs to write and publish faster, which in turn has created a concern for poor quality in what they create. The upcoming of social media works in two ways, either as a journalistic tool or a way in wich the public can share their critizism or abuse the journalists.

This thesis deals with the numerical solution of ordinary differential equations (ODEs) using finite difference (FD) methods. In particular, boundary summation equation (BSE) preconditioning for FD approximations for ODEs with constant coefficients on locally refined meshes is studied. Firstly, the BSE for FD approximations of ODEs with constant coefficients is derived on a locally refined mesh. Secondly, the obtained linear system of equations are solved by the iterative method GMRES. Then, the arithmetic complexity and convergence rate of the iterative solution of the BSE formulation are discussed. Finally, numerical experiments are performed to compare the new approach with the FD approach. The results show that the BSE formulation has low arithmetic complexity and the convergence rate of the iterative solvers is fast and independent of the number of grid points.

<p>Since Bayes' Theorem was first published in 1762, many have argued for the Bayesian paradigm on purely philosophical grounds. For much of this time, however, practical implementation of Bayesian methods was limited to a relatively small class of "conjugate" or otherwise computationally tractable problems. With the development of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and improvements in computers over the last few decades, the number of problems amenable to Bayesian analysis has increased dramatically. The ensuing spread of Bayesian modeling has led to new computational challenges as models become more complex and higher-dimensional, and both parameter sets and data sets become orders of magnitude larger. This dissertation introduces methodological improvements to deal with these challenges. These include methods for enhanced convergence assessment, for parallelization of MCMC, for estimation of the convergence rate, and for estimation of normalizing constants. A recurring theme across these methods is the utilization of one or more chain-dependent partitions of the state space.</p> / Dissertation

Beneath Still Waters is an original transmedia mystery narrative that explores the possibilities of an interconnected media landscape as a unique platform for creative use and audience engagement. Transmedia storytelling refers to the building of a fictional world comprised of multiple parts across different platforms, where each component makes a valuable contribution to the whole. This project uses the tools and strategies of social media to tell a complex and interactive multi-platform story.

We have from our research, conducted in Guardamar del Segura, Spain, discovered that most of the communication between native Spaniards and immigrant Bulgarians is negative non-verbal communication which leads to a division between the two groups. The result of high unemployment and social stress, which the current situation in Spain provides, tend to create stronger ties inside the groups and at the same time enlarge the distance towards other groups. Also, the large amount of nonverbal communication such as observing each other’s behavior leads in this case to negative stereotyping and prejudices that creates and maintain the different group’s relations in the society.

Several recent engineering applications in multi-agent systems, communication networks, and machine learning deal with decision problems that can be formulated as optimization problems. For many of these problems, new constraints limit the usefulness of traditional optimization algorithms. In some cases, the problem size is much larger than what can be conveniently dealt with using standard solvers. In other cases, the problems have to be solved in a distributed manner by several decision-makers with limited computational and communication resources. By exploiting problem structure, however, it is possible to design computationally efficient algorithms that satisfy the implementation requirements of these emerging applications. In this thesis, we study a variety of techniques for improving the convergence times of optimization algorithms for large-scale systems. In the first part of the thesis, we focus on multi-step first-order methods. These methods add memory to the classical gradient method and account for past iterates when computing the next one. The result is a computationally lightweight acceleration technique that can yield significant improvements over gradient descent. In particular, we focus on the Heavy-ball method introduced by Polyak. Previous studies have quantified the performance improvements over the gradient through a local convergence analysis of twice continuously differentiable objective functions. However, the convergence properties of the method on more general convex cost functions has not been known. The first contribution of this thesis is a global convergence analysis of the Heavy- ball method for a variety of convex problems whose objective functions are strongly convex and have Lipschitz continuous gradient. The second contribution is to tailor the Heavy- ball method to network optimization problems. In such problems, a collection of decision- makers collaborate to find the decision vector that minimizes the total system cost. We derive the optimal step-sizes for the Heavy-ball method in this scenario, and show how the optimal convergence times depend on the individual cost functions and the structure of the underlying interaction graph. We present three engineering applications where our algorithm significantly outperform the tailor-made state-of-the-art algorithms. In the second part of the thesis, we consider the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM), an alternative powerful method for solving structured optimization problems. The method has recently attracted a large interest from several engineering communities. Despite its popularity, its optimal parameters have been unknown. The third contribution of this thesis is to derive optimal parameters for the ADMM algorithm when applied to quadratic programming problems. Our derivations quantify how the Hessian of the cost functions and constraint matrices affect the convergence times. By exploiting this information, we develop a preconditioning technique that allows to accelerate the performance even further. Numerical studies of model-predictive control problems illustrate significant performance benefits of a well-tuned ADMM algorithm. The fourth and final contribution of the thesis is to extend our results on optimal scaling and parameter tuning of the ADMM method to a distributed setting. We derive optimal algorithm parameters and suggest heuristic methods that can be executed by individual agents using local information. The resulting algorithm is applied to distributed averaging problem and shown to yield substantial performance improvements over the state-of-the-art algorithms. / <p>QC 20150327</p>

The purpose of this study was to examine changing news practices especially at the moment of going live in a convergent broadcasting newsroom. The study chose Al Jazeera English, a leading international news network, as a case and adopted content analysis and ethnographic research methods to examine both the content and process of breaking news and live reporting. The professional practices in making breaking, live news were changed as a result of the implementation of convergent journalism in AJE’s newsroom. These changes in both news products and news production were accounted for by the interrelated influences of a set of external and internal factors at the levels of newsroom and organization.

Over the past few years, the rate of elective interventions in pregnancy in the United States, including elective inductions of labor and elective cesarean deliveries, has increased dramatically. While scholars attribute some of the increase in elective interventions to the female patients who request elective procedures from obstetricians, some literature contradicts that notion and suggests physicians are actually the primary perpetuators of the growth in elective procedures. Although pregnant women may seek elective interventions because of desired convenience, physicians can also claim the benefit of convenience in scheduling deliveries. In addition, elective procedures provide physicians greater monetary compensation than labor and deliveries which evolve without intervention. The current dissertation investigates the communicative role of obstetricians in women’s delivery decisions through in-depth interviews with obstetricians practicing in the state of Kentucky (N=28). Guided by the framework of Message Convergence, the study assesses how obstetricians manage uncertainty surrounding patient care and make clinical decisions in the midst of either unclear evidence or competing messages. The study also reveals the ways that physicians utilize their medical expertise to engage in decision-making with patients. In addition, specific scenarios of decision-making regarding delivery are discussed, including patients’ requests and physicians’ provisions of requests; patients’ requests and physicians’ refusals of requests; and physicians’ recommendations for treatment and patients’ refusals of recommendations for treatment. Finally, the internal tensions and conflicts experienced by physicians in the decision-making process with patients are also examined.

This thesis of 15 hp has been implemented at Halmstad University, in collaboration with Saab Dynamics in Linköping. Saab Dynamics is a company operating in the defence industry where competition is tough. This necessitates new ways to increase efficiency in the company, which is the basis for this thesis. Saab Dynamics wants to introduce simulation driven design. Since Saab Dynamics engineers have little experience of simulation, required a user methodology with clear guidelines. Due to lack of time, they chose to assign the task to students, which resulted in this thesis. The aim of the thesis is to develop a methodology in mechanical design, where the designer uses the FE analysis early in the design process to develop the structures' mechanical properties. The methodology should be seen as a guide and a source of information to enable an iterative approach with FE-analysis, which is the basis of simulation-driven design. The iterative process of simulation driven design, which can lead to reduced lead times and cost savings in the design process. The work was carried out by three students from the mechanical engineering program between December 2014 and May 2015. Because of the scale of the project, it has been carried out by a total of three students with individual focus areas. The work has followed a self-developed method and the project began with theoretical studies of the topic to get an understanding of what has been done and what research in simulation driven design. Then conducted an empirical study on the Saab Dynamics in Linköping, in order to increase understanding of how the design process looks like. Meanwhile, sustainable development and ethical aspects has been taken into account. Much time has been devoted to investigate the possibilities and limitations of 3D Experience, which is Dassault Systèmes latest platform for 3D modelling- and simulation software. 3D Experience is the software, the methodology is based on. This thesis has resulted in a methodology for simulating at the designer level that the project team in consultation with the supervisor at Saab Dynamics managed to adapt to the company's requirements.