Hambrick and Mason¡]1984¡^, with their ¡§upper echelon¡¨ perspective, proposed that top managers had great influences on organizational performances. Then, more and more scholars paid attention to the issues of the top management teams¡]TMT¡^. Although the impact of top management teams has been widely studied, research that tests the applicability of TMT variables on MNC is zero. The top management teams of the MNC included expatriates and local managers¡]Tung, 1982; Zeira and Shenkar, 1986¡^, would show higher richness and variety. Therefore, this study will use two independent variables: ¡uthe strategic roles of MNC subsidiaries¡vand ¡uthe nationalities of the MNC¡vto study the influences of these two independent variables on the traits, heterogeneity and interaction of the top management teams of the subsidiaries in Taiwan. The traits of the top management teams included the percentages of the local managers, average age, educational level and organizational tenure of the top management teams. The heterogeneity of the top management teams included the variation of the age, educational level and organizational tenure of the top management teams. The interaction of the top management teams included the extent to the social integration, communication frequency, and informal communication of the top management teams. Using ANOVA analysis on samples of 46 manufacturing MNC subsidiaries in Taiwan, the study finds that the strategic roles of the MNC subsidiaries have significant influences on the educational level, social integration and communication frequency of top management teams. In addition, the nationalities of the MNC have significantinfluences on the age, educational level and organizational tenure.

Currently the "Pump and Dump" method employed by Exploration and Production (E&P) companies in deepwater is simply not enough to control increasingly dangerous and unpredictable shallow hazards. "Pump and Dump" requires a heavy dependence on accurate seismic data to avoid shallow gas zones; the kick detection methods are slow and unreliable, which results in a need for visual kick detection; and it does not offer dynamic well control methods of managing shallow hazards such as methane hydrates, shallow gas and shallow water flows. These negative aspects of "Pump and Dump" are in addition to the environmental impact, high drilling fluid (mud) costs and limited mud options. Dual gradient technology offers a closed system, which improves drilling simply because the mud within the system is recycled. The amount of required mud is reduced, the variety of acceptable mud types is increased and chemical additives to the mud become an option. This closed system also offers more accurate and faster kick detection methods in addition to those that are already used in the "Pump and Dump" method. This closed system has the potential to prevent the formation of hydrates by adding hydrate inhibitors to the drilling mud. And more significantly, this system successfully controls dissociating methane hydrates, over pressured shallow gas zones and shallow water flows. Dual gradient technology improves deepwater drilling operations by removing fluid constraints and offering proactive well control over dissociating hydrates, shallow water flows and over pressured shallow gas zones. There are several clear advantages for dual gradient technology: economic, technical and significantly improved safety, which is achieved through superior well control.

Ce mémoire présente une synthèse des travaux que j'ai effectués depuis 7 ans pour la préparation de l'expérience ATLAS, devant fonctionner auprès du futur grand collisionneur de hadrons du CERN, le LHC, qui entrera en service en 2008.

<p>The Turkish accession to the European Union has been the most extended one that the Union</p><p>has been dealing with so far. Turkey is now accepted as a candidate country but it is still in a</p><p>problematic situation. Most of the EU’s member states do not share the Union’s belief that</p><p>Turkey should become a full member of the Union, if they should even become a member at</p><p>all. Europeanization constitutes a ground in this essay, and the “top-down” perspective within</p><p>this process can give an explanation to why most EU member states have such a hesitance</p><p>against Turkey.</p>

Project Report (M.Pub.) - Simon Fraser University, 2005. / Project Report (Master of Publishing Program) / Simon Fraser University. Also issued in digital format and available on the World Wide Web.

The Swedish otter (Lutra lutra) population decreased markedly after the 1950’s and was considered to be seriously threatened for decades. Pollution from industries and other anthropogenic activities were suspected to be the major cause of the decline. The otter is a top-predator in aquatic systems and therefore particularly susceptible to bioaccumulative and toxic substances. For this reason, the species can be regarded as a valuable indicator of environmental health. Today, the Swedish otter population is increasing and has been reestablished in many areas. However, the otter is still missing in some regions of Sweden, especially in the southeast. The aim of this study was to investigate past and present levels, and temporal trends, of environmental contaminants in otters from Småland.The study is based on data of environmental contaminants in liver and muscle tissue from dead otters found in Småland during 1966-2014. I found that the perfluorinated compounds PFOS and PFOA have increased in otters since the 1970’s which is alarming and should be given special concern in future monitoring. Also, while mercury (Hg) is rather stable, selenium (Se) concentrations are decreasing, resulting in Hg exceeding Se on molar mass basis in several otters. This indicates that all of the available Se is bound to mercury, which may imply that the otters are vulnerable to additional Hg contamination. My conclusions are that the present concentrations of the studied environmental contaminants have probably not affected the otter population in general. However, otters may be exposed to toxic levels of some contaminants in certain areas that are more polluted from anthropogenic activities. This could be harmful to individual otters or their reproduction, and therefore, continued monitoring is highly relevant.

SANTRAUKA Potato mop-top virus, priklausantis Pomovirus genčiai ir Tobacco rattle virus, priklausantis Tobravirus genčiai – tai dirvožemiu plintantys virusai. Tai patogenai, kurie plačiai paplitę pasaulyje. Pastaruoju metu vis labiau susidomėta šiais virusais, mat jie sukelia daug žalos daugeliui augalų, tame tarpe ir labai svarbių kultūrinių augalų. Su šiais patogenais kovoti yra labai sudėtinga, taigi iškyla labai rimta problema, kurią bandoma išspręsti. Todėl šiame darbe ir buvo siekiama susipažinti su šiais virusais, jų pernešėjais bei padaryti pirmuosius žingsnius, ieškant būdus kovai su šais patogenais. PMTV – tai patogenas, kuriam nebūdingas gausus šeimininkų ratas. Jis infekuoja tik nedaugelį augalų rūšių. Tai viena iš savybių, kuria skiriasi nuo TRV. Pastarasis priešingai, pasižymi didele augalų-šeimininkų gausa. Šie virusai labai panašūs tuom, kad daugelyje augalų jie sukelia panašius simptomus bei pažeidimus. Net indikatoriniuose augaluose jų sukeltos žaizdos yra labai panašios. Taigi, susiduriama su problema, mat identifikuoti juos vizualiai yra labai sudėtinga. Tik N. benthamiana indikatorinis augalas gali padėti atskirti šiuos virusus: PMTV jame sukelia sisteminę reakciją, sisteminė mozaika išplinta po visą augalą, o TRV sukelia tik vietines žaizdas. Šiame baigiamajame darbe buvo siekiama identifikuoti PMTV bei TRV molekuliniais metodais. Identifikacijoje buvo pritaikytas imunofermentinis metodas – ELISA. Buvo nustatyta, kad šis metodas labiau tinka... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / SUMMARY Potato mop-top virus (genus Pomovirus) and Tobacco rattle virus (genus Tobravirus) – soil born viruses. These pathogenes are distributed worldwide and can significantly reduce the quality and yield of potato and other horticultural plants. So in recent years more and more people are interesting in these viruses. These viruses are responsible for economic losses in potato crops. To control the spread of viruses is vary difficult, so nowadays it is a serious problem, which everybody wants to solve it. Virus control depends on vector management, so the main purpose of this article was to know more about these viruses and thier vectors and to do first steps to finding ways of viruses’ suitable control measures. PMTV has narrow range of hosts. On the contrary TRV has a very wide natural host range. So it is one of the differences from these soil borne viruses. However diagnosis is further complicated by the fact that TRV and PMTV are very similar viruses, even they can cause similar symptoms to indicator plants. So to diagnose reliable these viruses by visual symptoms are very difficult. Just in indicator plant N. benthamiana these soil borne viruses cause different symptoms: PMTV cause sistemical reaction, sistemical mosaic spreads in whole plant and TRV cause local lessions. PMTV and TRV were identificated with different molecular methods. These viruses were detected by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay. DAS-ELISA was shown to be more sensetive and reliable method for... [to full text]

The present study investigated how knowledge of tonality is used in sight-reading by comparing sight-reading accuracy across three tonal constructs: major, minor and atonal. It was hypothesized that sight-reading performance would be the worst in instances with no tonal information, as participants would be unable to generate appropriate top-down expectancies to guide their sight-reading. To test this, twelve pianists sight-read major, minor and atonal versions of monophonic, homophonic and polyphonic excerpts. The results indicated that pianists performed the major excerpts with greater accuracy than the atonal excerpts. Furthermore, the errors made within the major excerpts were significantly biased towards diatonicism, and there was a global shift towards tonality in participants’ atonal performances, providing a clear demonstration of how pianists’ expectations might have contributed to their sight-reading performance. The diatonic bias was not found in the minor excerpts, suggesting that the minor hierarchy does exert as strong of an influence during sight-reading.

In this thesis, I examine how auditors construct their mental representations and test their hypotheses about the strength of a client’s control environment. With regard to the former, I hypothesize that management’s frame of the control system and auditor’s retrieval of control environment information from memory may influence the auditor’s control environment mental representation and impact subsequent audit judgments. Consistent with my theoretical predictions, I find that retrieval of control environment information from memory biases an auditor’s mental representation, and that this biased mental representation impacts subsequent fraud assessment. In addition, there is limited evidence to support the conjecture that auditors may be susceptible to management’s framing of the internal control system resulting in relatively positive control environment evaluations which was found to transfer to some subsequent audit judgments. With regard to the latter, prior audit literature has examined how auditors evaluate person specific characteristics, such as competence, of other auditors, however there has been no research that has examined how auditors test such characteristics of client management. I disentangle whether auditors utilize a diagnostic and/or a conservative hypothesis testing strategy when testing client management’s ethicality and competence as these are fundamental components of the client’s control environment. A diagnostic testing strategy is evidenced by the auditor searching for the most informative information, whereas a conservative testing strategy is evidenced by the auditor searching for risks. I examine how a checklist decision aid contained in the current institutional context may inhibit auditors’ utilization of a diagnostic testing strategy, and examine how a schematic decision aid is able to enhance diagnostic testing. The results indicate that auditors utilize both diagnostic and conservative testing strategies when testing client management ethicality; however, the auditor’s testing strategy is only diagnostic when testing client management competence. In regard to decision aids, I found that when testing client management ethicality and competence, a schematic decision aid was able to increase the auditor’s extent of diagnostic testing. The checklist decision aid decreased the auditor’s extent of diagnostic testing only when testing client management ethicality, and was not different from unaided judgments when testing client management competence. / Thesis (Ph.D, Management) -- Queen's University, 2011-02-22 13:43:07.232

The most common and natural human behaviours are often the most computationally difficult to understand. This is especially true of spoken language comprehension considering the acoustic ambiguities inherent in a speech stream, and that these ambiguities are exacerbated by the noisy and distracting listening conditions of everyday life. Nonetheless, the human brain is capable of rapidly and reliably processing speech in these situations with deceptive ease – a feat that remains unrivaled by state-of-the-art speech recognition technologies. It has long been known that supportive context facilitates robust speech perception, but it remains unclear how the brain integrates contextual information with an acoustically degraded speech signal. The four studies in this dissertation utilize behavioural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) methods to examine how the normally functioning human brain uses context to support the perception of degraded speech. First, I have observed that text presented simultaneously with distorted sentences results in an illusory experience of perceptually clearer speech, and that this illusion depends on the amount of distortion in the bottom-up signal, and on the relative timing between the visual and auditory stimuli. Second, fMRI data indicate that activity in the earliest region of primary auditory cortex is sensitive to the perceived clarity of speech, and that this modulation of activity likely comes from left frontal cortical regions that probably support higher-order linguistic processes. Third, conscious awareness of the visual stimulus appears to be necessary to increase the intelligibility of degraded speech, and thus attention might also be required for multisensory integration. Finally, I have demonstrated that attention greatly enhances the processing of degraded speech, and this enhancement is (again) supported by the recruitment of higher-order cortical areas. The results of these studies provide converging evidence that brain uses prior knowledge to actively predict the form of a degraded auditory signal, and that these predictions are projected through feedback connections from higher- to lower-order order areas. These findings are consistent with a predictive coding model of perception, which provides an elegant mechanism in which accurate interpretations of the environment are constructed from ambiguous inputs in way that is flexible and task dependent. / Thesis (Ph.D, Neuroscience Studies) -- Queen's University, 2012-09-25 10:48:50.73