This dissertation contains two essays in empirical finance. The first essay studies the mutual fund industry, and the second essay looks into the stock market. Both studies provide insights in the underlying mechanism of some asset return patterns identified from the data currently available. The first essay investigates the sources of a recently identified performance pattern in mutual funds. Specifically, actively managed mutual funds, in general, underperform a passive benchmark; however, some recent studies find they, in fact, outperform the benchmark in bad economic states. I examine whether a state dependent risk shifting behavior of mutual fund managers contributes to this performance difference across states, and find supportive evidence. As shown in prior studies, the risk shifting behavior is motivated by a non-linear flow-performance relationship. Using a piece-wise linear regression, I demonstrate that the non-linearity exists mainly in good states; whereas in bad states, the flow-performance relationship is close to linear. Thus, non-zero risk shifting incentives are only expected in good states. I empirically measure these incentives in good states, and show that managers do react to the ``gambling'' (i.e., positive) incentives. In addition, higher ``gambling'' incentives are found to be associated with lower fund performance. The second essay, based on joint work with Hai Lu and Kevin Wang, examines how stock price shocks in the absence of public announcement of firm specific news affect future stock returns. We find that both large short term price drops and hikes are followed by negative abnormal returns over the subsequent twelve months. The pattern of asymmetric drifts, the return continuation for negative shocks versus the return reversal for positive shocks, is puzzling. We explore whether investor disagreement can explain the puzzle and find that the evidence is consistent with predictions of disagreement theory. Moreover, price shocks with public news disclosures are followed by weaker drifts, suggesting that reduction of information asymmetry from public disclosures mitigates disagreement-induced overpricing.

The purpose of the thesis is to see how Turkish students understand their bilingualism. I have tried to explain bilingualism as a phenomenon and give an insight in national steering documents on the basis of different concepts used by researchers. The method consists of qualitative interviews with standardized character. Five upper-secondary school students participated and independently discussed the answers. The result from the interviews is the participators view on bilingualism. The answers were varying. I have got the answer of my question through the interviews and researches. The result is also connected to relevant theories.

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Reversible watermarking techniques extract the watermark and recover the original image from the watermarked image without any distortion. They have been applied for those sensitive fields, such as the medicine and the military. In this thesis, a novel watermarking algorithm using multi-prediction values has been proposed. It exploits the correlation between the original pixel and the neighboring pixels to obtain twelve prediction candidates, and then selects a candidate as the prediction value according to the original pixel and the temporary prediction value. Due to the algorithm use the original pixel as one of the parameters to decide the prediction value, our prediction values are obtained with great precision. The experimental results reveal that the performance of our proposed method outperforms that proposed by Sachnev. For example the variance of the prediction errors histogram obtained by the proposed method is less than that obtained by the algorithm proposed by Sachnev et al. about 44.2%; the mean PSNR greater than about 1.47 dB and 1.1 dB under the watermark capacity 0~0.04 bpp and 0.04~0.5 bpp, respectively. Therefore, the proposed method is especially appropriate for embedding watermark in low or medium capacity. Keyword¡G reversible watermarking, watermarking, prediction, histogram shifting.

A novel accurate calibration-based phase-shifting projected fringe profilometry (Calibration-based PSPFP) for finding the absolute shape of objects is proposed. In addition to a tremendous savings in time, the benefits of using Calibration-based PSPFP also include greatly reduced environmental vulnerability. Since Calibration-based PSPFP employs a sinusoidal fringe pattern to perform the phase-shifting algorithm, the quality and accuracy of the sinusoidal fringe pattern becomes critical. To evaluate the performance of this measurement scheme and reduce the phase error caused by projected fringes, fabrication of various digital sinusoidal fringe patterns is necessary. Thus, we propose a method to fabricate various digital patterns. Application of a 2-D fringe pattern for Calibration-based PSPFP is proposed as well.

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Mechanically separated turkey meat (MSTM) is one of the cheapest sources of protein; however its use for production of further-processed poultry products is limited due to undesirable composition. pH-shifting extraction was applied to overcome the problems associated with MSTM. In the first study the effect of acid pH-shifting extraction with the aid of citric acid and calcium ions on lipids and heme pigments removal from MSTM was investigated. The maximum removal of total, neutral and polar lipids was achieved with addition of 4, 6 and 2 mmol/L of citric acid, respectively. Addition of 6 or 8 mmol/L of citric acid was the most efficient for total heme pigments removal. In the second and third studies chemical, functional and rheological properties of proteins isolated from MSTM were investigated as influenced by different (2.5, 3.5, 10.5 and 11.5) extraction pH. Gel-forming ability was found the highest for pH 3.5 extracted protein. / Food Science and Technology

Thesis (M.Sc.). / Written for the Dept. of Bioresource Engineering. Title from title page of PDF (viewed 2008/05/14). Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 102-110). Also available as electronic resource via PDF.