PURPOSE: To describe 1) smoking cessation (SC) interventions by Family Practice Nurses (FPN) during prenatal visits, and 2) the predictors and barriers of FPN-provided SC counselling for pregnant women. DESIGN: Non-experimental, descriptive, correlational design. Onetime, cross-sectional questionnaire using a previously validated questionnaire, modified and converted to electronic format. METHODS: Descriptive and multivariable analysis. Predictors investigated included nurses’ age, beliefs about their role in SC, self-efficacy to provide effective counselling, SC training, and interest in updating SC knowledge. PARTICIPANTS: Eighty-nine members of the Ontario Family Practice Nurses’ interest group (18% response rate) working in primary care settings across Ontario. RESULTS: Nearly one quarter (21.5%) of respondents never offer SC counselling to pregnant women. Nurses with higher levels of self-efficacy were more likely to provide SC counselling. Nurses are less likely to provide concrete assistance in the quitting process or arrange follow-up. The most commonly cited barriers included lack of time and cost of medication. CONCLUSIONS: FPNs are not consistently providing evidence-based SC interventions for pregnant women. Training to enhance self-efficacy may increase the frequency, efficiency and quality of FPN-provided SC interventions.

This thesis explores the constitutional right to receive basic education in the language of choice. This fundamental human right imposes a duty on the state to provide children with education in the language of their choice whenever reasonably practicable. It is not a matter of whether the state has to fulfil section 29(2) of the Constitution, but rather how to give effect to this provision. The right to receive basic education in the language of your choice is however, qualified by the specific internal limitation that provides that the right is subject to the condition that provision of education in the preferred language has to be reasonably practicable. Section 36, the limitation clause, is also a measure that can be used to limit this right. The aim of this paper is to contextually interpret the fundamental right to receive education in the language of one’s choice and to weigh up the intent of the provision to the provision’s actual result. All relevant factors will be taken into consideration to examine the possibility of limiting the right to receive instruction in the language of choice to comply with the purpose of education and the best interests of the child. / Thesis (LL.M. (Comparative Child Law))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2010.

Supply chain management is one of the newest and most fashionable managerial concepts to be sponsored by those organisations responsible for setting the change agenda in the construction sector. Its success elsewhere, its promise of productivity improvement and 'best practice' pedigree form the basis of arguments for its adoption in the construction sector. There are a number of assumptions that underpin this argument that are largely ignored by the promoters of such change and the construction management research community. Most notably, the transferability and utility of supply chain management in the context of organisations competing in the construction sector. However, it is argued in this thesis that these arguments fail to engage with the recursive relationship between context and practice. Managerial practice does not exist in a vacuum. The research therefore sets out to test the theory of supply chain management in the construction sector. In doing so, the research approach is informed by and draws on contextual approaches that are highly sensitive to the recursive relationship between context and practice. A multiple case study research strategy was chosen that sought to provide explanations for how practitioners make sense of supply chain management in the context of their organisations and forms the basis of theory testing. These explanations also provided a wealth of empirical evidence to test the assumptions that underpin calls for change in the construction sector. It is concluded that supply chain management does not make sense in the construction sector and that calls for its adoption lacked intellectual rigour and were indeed acontextual.

Population growth, urbanization and climate change threaten urban water systems. The rise of demands caused by growing urban areas and the potential decrease of water availability caused by the increase of frequency and severity of droughts challenge the continued well-being of society. Due to increasing environmental and financial constraints, water management paradigms have shifted from supply augmentation to demand management, and water conservation initiatives may efficiently decrease water demands to more sustainable levels. To provide reliable assessment of the efficiencies of different demand management strategies, new modeling techniques are needed that can simulate decentralized decisions of consumers and their interactions with the water system. An integrated simulation-optimization framework, based on the paradigm of Complex Adaptive Systems, is developed here to model dynamic interactions and adaptations within social, built, and natural components of urban water systems. The framework goes beyond tradition engineering simulations by incorporating decentralized, heterogeneous and autonomous agents, and by simulating dynamic feedback loops among modeling components. The framework uses modeling techniques including System Dynamics, Cellular Automata, and Agent-based Modeling to simulate housing and population growth, a land use change, residential water consumption, the hydrologic cycle, reservoir operation, and a policy/decision maker. This research demonstrates the applicability of the proposed framework through a series of studies applied to a water supply system of a large metropolitan region that is located in a semi-arid region and suffers recurrently from severe droughts. A set of adaptive demand management strategies, that apply contingency restrictions, land use planning, and water conservation technologies, such as rainwater harvesting systems, are evaluated. A multi-objective Evolutionary Algorithm is coupled with the CAS simulation framework to identify optimal strategies and explore conflicting objectives within a water system. The results demonstrate the benefits of adaptive management by updating management decisions to changing conditions. This research develops a new hydrologic sustainability metric, developed to quantify the stormwater impacts of urbanization. The Hydrologic Footprint Residence captures temporal and spatial hydrologic characteristics of a flood wave passing through a stream segment and is used to assess stormwater management scenarios, including Best Management Practices and Low Impact Development.

The review of the literature and the results gained from this research suggest an important link between the effectiveness of a board, including its corporate governance practices, and organisational effectiveness. This link attests to the importance of a greater focus upon the governance approach used by organisations. There is extensive literature about corporate governance in the business sector and there is emerging research into corporate governance in the Third Sector. However there is very little literature about the community service component on the Third Sector in Australia and none in relation to community service organisations that are incorporated under the Tasmanian Associations Incorporation Act 1964. This thesis aims to discover what is defined as best practice in the area of corporate governance for Tasmanian community service organisations and if selected organisations have adopted that best practice. For this purpose a research problem and three research sub-problems are identified. The research adopts a case study approach as the main research methodology using interviews, document reviews and a short self assessment questionnaire as data collection tools. The researcher approached six incorporated community service organisations funded by the Tasmanian Department of Health and Human Services and they agreed to participate in the research. Following data collection and data analysis the following major findings emerge. Firstly, that case organisations have adopted a range of governance practices. There are significant gaps in some organisations and there is room for improvement in all of the case organisations. Secondly, that some case organisation boards are approaching corporate governance by managing compliance to a minimum standard although others are offering strategic leadership with a commitment to quality and best practice. Thirdly, the research identifies a number of factors that impact upon corporate governance in case organisations. Those factors include the role of the Chief Executive Officer; the quest for competitive advantage; implementation of governance maintenance strategies and the impact of religion for religious-based organisations. Finally, the research also identifies three factors that were not determinative upon case organisations. They are the size of the organisation, the governance model being used, and the influence of the regulator (the Business Affairs Office) and the funding provider (the Department of Health and Human Services). Consequently it is concluded that the principle based approach to corporate governance can be extended to Tasmania. Furthermore the implication of this research for community sector organisations is that they need to implement governance maintenance practices including board training, board performance review and governance review. There is also a call to both the Business Affairs Office and the Department of Health and Human Services to be more proactive in requiring community service organisations to adopt additional corporate governance practices. Hence, based on the literature review and the analysis of the research data, a list of “Best practice features and practices guiding community service organisation governance” has been developed. This list can be used by organisations to provide direction for their approach to corporate governance. Finally, the conclusions provide a solid foundation for further study. This will be useful in order to obtain a broader understanding of the issues involved.

This thesis focuses on two under-researched areas of consumer behaviour: conflict handling styles and consumer bargaining. As illustrated in this thesis, consumer bargaining is a substantial and important behaviour that has rarely been studied from a consumer perspective. Further, conflict handling, which is considered an important and wellresearched phenomenon in an organisational context, has been rarely applied to consumer behaviour, despite the potential for conflict in many areas. The aims of this thesis were to a) examine consumer bargaining behaviour across a variety of culturally diverse nations; b) develop and validate a new instrument to measure conflict handling styles; and c) examine the relationships between the likelihood of consumer bargaining, preferred conflict handling styles, and personal values. Consumer bargaining was found to be common in both developed and developing nations. Respondents from Australia and Germany reported bargaining for a broad range of products that vary in their prices, including cars, electronics, appliances, clothing, and computers. Bargaining in South Korea was even more common, including everyday purchases like clothing, and food and drink. Finally, bargaining in Brazil was almost as common as in South Korea, and also included expensive consumer durable purchases, such as electronic products and cars, in addition to everyday purchases, such as clothing, and food and drink. The conflict handling style instrument developed in this project had convergent validity with existing ratings scales, reproduced the theorised structure of the dual-concerns model of conflict handling, and had predictive validity in a service recovery context. The benefits iii of the new scale over existing ratings scales include: a) capturing relative preference for the conflict handling styles; b) reduction of sources of common method variance; c) reduction of ratings scale response biases; and d) reduction of numerical effect biases, such as different perceived distances between response categories. The newly developed scale was also used to assess the hypothesised relationships between personal values, conflict handling styles, and consumer bargaining intensity in a developed Western country (Germany). As expected, the dominate conflict handling style was positively related, while the avoid conflict handling style was negatively related to consumer bargaining intensity. Although no relationship was found between personal values and consumer bargaining intensity, personal values were found to be an antecedent of conflict handling styles. Specifically, the power value type was found to be a positive predictor of the dominate conflict handling style, while benevolence and social universalism were found to be positive predictors of the integrate conflict handling style.

The review of the literature and the results gained from this research suggest an important link between the effectiveness of a board, including its corporate governance practices, and organisational effectiveness. This link attests to the importance of a greater focus upon the governance approach used by organisations. There is extensive literature about corporate governance in the business sector and there is emerging research into corporate governance in the Third Sector. However there is very little literature about the community service component on the Third Sector in Australia and none in relation to community service organisations that are incorporated under the Tasmanian Associations Incorporation Act 1964. This thesis aims to discover what is defined as best practice in the area of corporate governance for Tasmanian community service organisations and if selected organisations have adopted that best practice. For this purpose a research problem and three research sub-problems are identified. The research adopts a case study approach as the main research methodology using interviews, document reviews and a short self assessment questionnaire as data collection tools. The researcher approached six incorporated community service organisations funded by the Tasmanian Department of Health and Human Services and they agreed to participate in the research. Following data collection and data analysis the following major findings emerge. Firstly, that case organisations have adopted a range of governance practices. There are significant gaps in some organisations and there is room for improvement in all of the case organisations. Secondly, that some case organisation boards are approaching corporate governance by managing compliance to a minimum standard although others are offering strategic leadership with a commitment to quality and best practice. Thirdly, the research identifies a number of factors that impact upon corporate governance in case organisations. Those factors include the role of the Chief Executive Officer; the quest for competitive advantage; implementation of governance maintenance strategies and the impact of religion for religious-based organisations. Finally, the research also identifies three factors that were not determinative upon case organisations. They are the size of the organisation, the governance model being used, and the influence of the regulator (the Business Affairs Office) and the funding provider (the Department of Health and Human Services). Consequently it is concluded that the principle based approach to corporate governance can be extended to Tasmania. Furthermore the implication of this research for community sector organisations is that they need to implement governance maintenance practices including board training, board performance review and governance review. There is also a call to both the Business Affairs Office and the Department of Health and Human Services to be more proactive in requiring community service organisations to adopt additional corporate governance practices. Hence, based on the literature review and the analysis of the research data, a list of “Best practice features and practices guiding community service organisation governance” has been developed. This list can be used by organisations to provide direction for their approach to corporate governance. Finally, the conclusions provide a solid foundation for further study. This will be useful in order to obtain a broader understanding of the issues involved.

abstract: ABSTRACT Research literature relating to the use of humor as a teaching method or curricula specifically designed to include humor was reviewed to investigate the effects of humor on student learning in various environments from elementary schools to post-secondary classrooms. In this multi-method study, four instruments and a humor treatment were selected to test the hypothesis that students who receive humor-embedded instruction would perform better on assessments than students who did not receive humor instruction. These assessments were analyzed to show student growth in achievement and memory retention as a result of humor-embedded instruction. Gain scores between a pre- test and two post-tests determined student growth in achievement and memory retention. Gain scores were triangulated with student responses to open-ended interview questions about their experiences with humor in the classroom. The gain score data were not statistically significant between the humor and non- humor groups. For the short-term memory gain scores, the non-humor group received slightly higher gain scores. For long-term memory gain scores, the humor group received higher gain scores. However, the interview data was consistent with the findings of humor research from the last 20 years that humor improves learning directly and indirectly. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ed.D. Educational Administration and Supervision 2011

Les opérateurs de l’adoption internationale en France, c’est-à- dire les Organismes Autorisés pour l’Adoption (OAA) et l’AFA (Agence Française de l’adoption), occupent une place majeure dans le processus de l’adoption internationale. Ils détiennent le pouvoir de donner à un enfant une famille, ils sont des « faiseurs de parentés ». Les mutations de l’adoption internationale confortent l’importance de leur rôle tant dans leur responsabilité à choisir les postulants que dans leur légitimité à les accompagner tout au long de la procédure. Dans un contexte de déclin l’espace dans lequel évoluent les opérateurs, en interaction avec les différents acteurs de l’adoption internationale, devient de plus en plus concurrentiel alors que l’intérêt de l’enfant demeure le but affirmé par tous. À l’interface entre pays d’accueil et pays d’origine, entre postulants à l’adoption et enfants adoptés, les opérateurs sont pris de fait entre les logiques propres à chaque catégorie d’acteurs en présence dans un champ politique et social en constante mutation. Leur système de fonctionnement fait donc l’objet de questionnements notamment sur leurs capacités à s’adapter. Ces réflexions conduisent à s’interroger sur l’efficience des opérateurs, à redéfinir leur rôle et leur place dans leur mission d’accompagnement des adoptants et des adoptés, à réaffirmer leur responsabilité. / The accredited bodies of international adoption in France, that means Authorized Organizations for Adoption (AOA) and FAA (French Agency for Adoption) occupy a prominent place in the international adoption process. They hold the power to give to a child a family. To this end, they are “relationsmakers”. The mutations of the international adoption emphasize their place concerning their responsibility to choose applicants and their legitimate to accompany them throughout the procedure.In the context of international adoption’s decline, the space in which accredited bodies, in interaction with the different actors of the international adoption, becomes more competitive even if the stated purpose and defended by all is the best interest. Between host countries and countries of origin and between applicants and adopted children, the accredited bodies are confronted to appropriate logics for each actor who are in political field and social field which are inconstant change. Their operating system is subjected to questioning including their ability to adapt. These thoughts led to wonder about the accredited bodies’ effectiveness to redefine their role and place in thei rmonitoring mission for adopters and adopted and more specifically their responsibility.

Submitted by TIAGO BINSFELD (tiago.binsfeld@gmail.com) on 2018-01-15T02:04:49Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Best Ideas_Tiago Binsfeld.pdf: 1338294 bytes, checksum: 499cc248b8a560a1935a28e70edd06ce (MD5) / Rejected by Thais Oliveira (thais.oliveira@fgv.br), reason: Prezado Tiago, boa tarde! Para que possamos aprovar a sua Dissertação, é necessário que faça as seguintes alterações: - Retirar o "acento" do "Getulio"; - O "Resumo" deve estar antes do "Abstract". Qualquer dúvida, entre em contato. Att, Thais Oliveira. on 2018-01-15T15:38:11Z (GMT) / Submitted by TIAGO BINSFELD (tiago.binsfeld@gmail.com) on 2018-01-15T17:04:19Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Best Ideas_Tiago Binsfeld.pdf: 1288457 bytes, checksum: fd0b906738c3688529e702b594717853 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Thais Oliveira (thais.oliveira@fgv.br) on 2018-01-15T21:02:19Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 Best Ideas_Tiago Binsfeld.pdf: 1288457 bytes, checksum: fd0b906738c3688529e702b594717853 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-01-16T12:56:35Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Best Ideas_Tiago Binsfeld.pdf: 1288457 bytes, checksum: fd0b906738c3688529e702b594717853 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-12-18 / This paper searches for evidences that equity portfolio managers hold in their portfolios a finite number of stocks able to generate alpha. Theoretical portfolios are built from the best ideas identified in 2.201 Brazilian equity funds in the period from 2009 to 2016. In order to explain the return determinants, we use the five-factor Fama and French model (2015), as well as an alternate six-factor model, with the inclusion of herding. Results indicate that best ideas portfolios presented returns over the IBX 100 portfolio ranging from 0.69% to 2.33% per quarter, while the aggregate of managers’ ideas yielded a return inferior to the benchmark by 0.20% per quarter. By controlling different specifications of the model, alpha was found to be positive and significant at 5% of level of significance. / O trabalho procura evidências de que gestores de fundos de ações possuem um número finito de ações capazes de gerar alfa em suas carteiras. São construídos portfólios teóricos formados pelas best ideas identificadas nos 2.201 fundos de ações brasileiros que compõem a amostra do período de 2009 a 2016. Para explicar o desempenho desses portfólios, utiliza-se o modelo de cinco fatores de Fama e French (2015) e um modelo alternativo com a inclusão do fator herding. Os resultados mostram que os portfólios de best ideas brasileiras apresentaram desempenho superior ao benchmark teórico IBX 100 em no mínimo 0,69% e no máximo 2,33% por trimestre, enquanto o agregado das ideias dos gestores apresenta um retorno inferior ao benchmark em 0,20% por trimestre. Controlando por diferentes fatores, identificou-se alfa positivo e significativo a no mínimo 5% de significância.