Endorser is common in advertising for marketing strategies. The firms spend hundreds of million dollars to hire celebrities to endorse their products and brands. Appropriate endorsers are beneficial in brand differentiation and help competitive advantage building. Previous researches in match-up between endorser and product image have two diverse points of view (congruity vs. incongruity). The latest research reveals that in moderate incongruity would accommodate the two different views. Based on the three inconsistent findings, this study explores the effects of gender-based trait through different match-up levels of endorser and service type. The present study uses experimental design to investigate the advertising effects of endorser¡¦s gender (male vs. female), endorser¡¦s gendered traits (male vs. female), and service type (masculine vs. neutral vs. feminine). Thus, a 2x2x3 factorial design is conducted. The ad effects are measured by perceived quality, attitudes toward the brand, and purchase intention to observe the responses under twelve different and fictitious scenarios. The results indicate that a male endorser with female traits is more effective than a male endorser with male traits, especially promoting feminine-based service marketing. Besides, consumers¡¦ perceived quality is different when evaluating match-up combinations based on endorser¡¦s gender. Moreover, when promoting a masculine-based service, a female endorser with female trait is more effective than a male endorser with male traits in perceived quality and purchase intentions. According to these findings, the research provides implications for researchers and marketers on match-up between endorser and service type.

Language teachers, including educators from all levels &ndash / from primary to college level &ndash / and teacher trainers have all agreed with the idea that it is impossible to consider language skills as independent from each other since each of them has a great contribution to the language itself as a whole system. However / it cannot be ignored that all language teachers have also agreed with the idea that reading is a skill that has its own significance, especially in foreign language education. What makes reading so unique is that it can be considered to be the door that is about to be opening to a new world in which the target language is spoken. In that sense, as an essential skill, reading, throughout the centuries, has also had its own keys that have been difficult to be unlocked even by the native speakers of English. This matter of fact brings the question to the light that what guardians are waiting in front of this castle door especially for foreign language students. Although many scholars claim that formal aspect of language, including syntactical and lexical features, stand as great challenge, they ignore the cultural significance of a language. The relationship between language, thought and culture shows that even formal aspects are affected by culture. This fact brings the importance of &lsquo / content schema&rsquo / as well as &lsquo / formal schema&rsquo / in reading to surface. However, now the question is that how it is possible to provide students with sufficient cultural background. As foreign language students are less likely to experience exposure to foreign culture when compared to second language learners, there is an urgent need to create a &lsquo / social context&rsquo / or &lsquo / second hand reality&rsquo / in Kovalik&rsquo / s terms in classroom settings. At this point, literature is believed to give her helping hand to FL students with her wide range of texts carrying a variety of formal aspect of language, but at the same time, a range of cultural components, and thus, constructing &lsquo / schema&rsquo / for them. Apart from this, what literature offers is examined in detail within the framework of brain-based learning principles. This paper tends to contribute to this controversial issue with a case study, which aims to illustrate that the use of literature in FL settings enhance language/cultural awareness. The result of the study showed that 1) literature is a useful source to teach the formal aspects of language such as grammar and vocabulary (language awareness) 2) literature contributes to students&rsquo / cultural awareness which is essential to have language awareness 3) literature is a brain-compatible source with various advantages over the other written materials. In accordance with what is mentioned above, this study has a direct aim to show how ELT and Literature can intrude the ancient walls of this castle when work interdisciplinary.

The purpose of this thesis is to give an account of the significance of time in Kant&rsquo / s Critique of Pure Reason by discussing its role in the unification of sensibility and understanding. I primarily investigate the role that time plays in the constitution of objective knowledge. I discuss that since time is the necessary condition for objects to be given to our sensibility, without it any representation would be without a temporal order and perhaps would not make any sense at all. Kant claims that it is imagination that enables the connection between sensibility and understanding possible. After investigating the relation between imagination and time, I argue for the following thesis: what lies at the very heart of the possibility of the connection between sensibility and understanding must be time itself. Finally, I focus on the kinship between time and the self. I argue that when it comes to knowledge of the phenomenal world, time together with transcendental self stands as the condition of all human knowledge.

Traditional relational database model does not have enough capability to cope with a great deal of data in finite time. To address these requirements, data warehouses and online analytical processing (OLAP) have emerged. Data warehouses improve the productivity of corporate decision makers through consolidation, conversion, transformation, and integration of operational data, and supports online analytical processing (OLAP). The data warehouse design is a complex and knowledge intensive process. It needs to consider not only the structure of the underlying operational databases (source-driven), but also the information requirements of decision makers (user-driven). Past research focused predominately on supporting the source-driven data warehouse design process, but paid less attention to supporting the user-driven data warehouse design process. Thus, the goal of this research is to propose a user-driven data warehouse design support system based on the knowledge discovery approach. Specifically, a Data Warehouse Design Support System was proposed and the generalization hierarchy and generalized star schemas were used as the data warehouse design knowledge. The technique for learning these design knowledge and reasoning upon them were developed. An empirical evaluation study was conducted to validate the effectiveness on the proposed techniques in supporting data warehouse design process. The result of empirical evaluation showed that this technique was useful to support data warehouse design especially on reducing the missing design and enhancing the potentially useful design.

In the thesis, we provide a solution to solve a schema change problem. In a data warehouse system, if schema changes occur in a data source, the overall system will lose the consistency between the data sources and the data warehouse. These schema changes will render the data warehouse obsolete. We have developed three stages to handle schema changes occurring in databases. They are change detection, diagnosis, and handling. Recommendations are generated by DB-agent to information DW-agent to notify the DBA what and where a schema change affects the star schema. In the study, we mainly handle seven schema changes in a relational database. All of them, we not only handle non-adding schema changes but also handling adding schema changes. A non-adding schema change in our experiment has high correct mapping rate as using a traditional mappings between a data warehouse and a database. For an adding schema change, it has many uncertainties to diagnosis and handle. For this reason, we compare similarity between an adding relation or attribute and the ontology concept or concept attribute to generate a good recommendation. The evaluation results show that the proposed approach is capable to detect these schema changes correctly and to recommend the DBA about the changes appropriately.

ABSTRACT While in the developed countries, flowers are living necessity and enjoy a sizable market, the Council of Agriculture Executive Yuan R.O.C points out that cultivation and sales of flowers are important items in the prospecting dedicated agriculture industries of Taiwan. Besides the enjoyment and appreciation the beauty of blooming by oneself , in social life flowers can perform the instrumental function of expressing wishes in the occasion of marriage, birthday, promotion, house moving, and consolation in the sickness or sadness. The study of flower preference schemata is one of the importance concepts for flower product design and development. The current research figured out different patterns of flower preference among people¡¦s mind ,through pictures of moth orchid and rose designed by the three factors of flower beauty: color, volume, and package. The distinctive flower buying behaviors of the different groups were studied consequently. In our valid sample are 696 teachers from senior high and junior high schools and elementary schools in the Kaohsiung area in Taiwan. In addition to the description and analysis on people¡¦s flower buying behavior about flower type preference, shop choice, purchase frequency, and flower-as-present purchase behavior, the major findings of the current research are as the following: (1) Confirming that there exist distinctive flower preference schemata in people mind; (2) Flower preference affect the purchase behavior; (3) Demographic variables moderate the effect of flower preference on the purchase behavior; (4) Flower attitude and demographic variables affect flower consumption behavior.

<p>Grail is an open source graph library, which is developed at the MSI of Växjö University, tools like the VizzAnalyzer and vizz3d use Grail for representing their internal structures.</p><p>In this thesis, an adapter serializing and deserializing Grail graphs to and from XMI is introduced. XMI is short for XML Metadata Interchange; it is developed by the Object Management Group (OMG).</p>

<p>GRAIL is a Java library for capturing and manipulating graphs. It is used in the VizzAnalyzer reengineering tool developed at Växjö University that allows quality analysis of software systems.</p><p>GXL is a standard exchange format for software data in graph structure, mainly used within the field of software reengineering that is widely supported in other tools within the same field. It is important for VizzAnalyzer to support GXL as an exchange format to allow collaboration with other tools on this basis.</p><p>As the goal of this thesis, a GXL graph serializer/deserialize architecture for GRAIL has been developed that allows data exchange between VizzAnalyzer and other tools that support the GXL format.</p><p>VizzAnalyzer is capable of analyzing large software systems and therefore the task required special attention on high performance and low memory footprint even with large GXL graph structures.</p>

Syftet med föreliggande avhandling är att studera användning och förekomst av lektionsbeteckningar på scheman i skolor utan en nationellt fastställd timplan, samt belysa hur elever upplever de lokala val som görs vad gäller vissa av dessa lektionsbeteckningar. Den teoretiska referensramen har sin grund i didaktikens selektionsfråga och kommunikationsfråga, och Bernsteins båda begrepp klassifikation och inramning. Avhandlingen består av två delstudier. I delstudie I analyseras, såväl kvalitativt som kvantitativt, 326 scheman från 33 skolor som på försök arbetar utan timplan. 163 scheman från skolor med timplan har analyserats i jämförande syfte. I delstudie II genomförs tio gruppintervjuer med totalt 41 elever kring tre typer av icke ämnesrelaterade lektionsbeteckningar (lagtid, verkstad och mentorstid), som är vanligt förekommande på elevers scheman. I avhandlingen visas att en mängd schemabeteckningar (170 stycken) används för att beskriva vad elever och lärare ämnar ägna sig åt. Utöver traditionella ämnen, schemaläggs arbetsmetoder, gruppbaserad tid, skriv- och lästid, social samspelstid, rekreationstid samt lektioner där eleverna involveras i val, planering och utvärdering. Den här typen av alternativa schemabeteckningar används i signifikant större utsträckning i skolorna utan timplan och i de tidigare årskurserna. När skolorna utan timplan använder alternativa beteckningar leder det huvudsakligen till schemapositioner med svagare inramning och svagare klassifikation, samt en förskjutning från innehåll mot metod/form. Eleverna upplever att lektionerna med svagare inramning och klassifikation har ett värdefullt och verklighetsanknutet innehåll, men att de inte är lika viktiga som ämnena. De upplevs ibland vara slöseri med lektionstid. Resultaten diskuteras i ljuset av annan forskning om skolor utan timplan och avhandlingens didaktiska perspektiv. / The aim of the present thesis is to study the existence and use of lesson designations on the schedules in schools that do not work according to a nationally set timetable, and to elucidate how pupils experience the local choices as regards some of these designations. The theoretical frame of reference is based on the didactical questions of selection and communication together with Bernstein’s concepts of classification and framing. The thesis includes two studies. Study I is a qualitative as well as quantitative analysis of 326 schedules from 33 schools that take part in an experiment where they work without the nationally set timetable. For the purpose of comparison 163 schedules from schools following the set timetable have also been analysed. In study II ten group interviews with a total of 41 pupils are carried out concerning three types of non-subject related lesson designations (team time, workshop, and mentor time), which frequently appear on the pupils’ schedules. In the thesis it is demonstrated that a large number of lesson designations (170 in all) are used to describe what the pupils and the teachers are doing at school. Apart from traditional subjects, working methods, group-based time, time for reading and writing as well as social interaction and recreation, and lessons, where pupils are involved in selecting, planning and evaluating activities, are included on the agenda. These types of alternative lesson designations are used to a significantly higher degree in schools without a timetable and in the lower grades. The use of alternative designations at the schools without timetable primarily leads to lessons with weak framing and weak classification and, in addition, to a change of focus from content to method or form. The pupils think that lessons with weak framing and classification have a meaningful content related to their everyday life but they are not as important as the ‘real’ subjects. They are sometimes experienced as a waste of valuable lesson time. The thesis has an overall didactic perspective, and the results of the two studies are discussed in the light of previous research about schools using no set timetable.

In this work analyses the transition from UML class diagrams to XML schema. The main problems, such as - UML does not include all the features required to describe a XML schema - are explored. Also, the principles of XML schema normalization, resemblances and differences between applying normal forms to XML documents and relational data bases are presented.