This study investigates if the proportion of women on Board of Directors (BOD) and Top Management Teams (TMT) in Swedish listed firms affect the financial performance. Using a sample of 1,432 firm-year observations for firms listed at Nasdaq Stockholm during the years 2012-2019, the study estimates multiple regressions to investigate the association between proportion of women on BODs and TMTs and firms’ financial performance, measured as ROA, ROE and Tobin’s Q. Using an interaction variable, the study also investigates if female representation in TMT affects the association between BOD gender diversity and financial performance. Furthermore, in line with critical mass theory, the study investigates whether there is a specific threshold of female representation that needs to be achieved for the performance effect to occur. The study’s results provide some evidence for a positive association between proportion of women on BOD and financial performance, but only possible indications for a negative effect of proportion of women in TMTs and financial performance. No support is found for the interaction effect. The positive impact of female representation on BOD and TMT does not seem to depend on any critical mass threshold. The study contributes with a new perspective on how gender diversity on several firm levels affects the financial performance.

This work deals with a phenomenon of party alliances, especially with the alliance of TOP 09 and STAN. This phenomenon is current in the Czech politics. This work concerns other unions of the right-wing or the center parties in the Czech Republic too, and searches an answer for the question, if it is an alliance. Primarily this work deals with the alliance of TOP 09 and STAN, which were established in 2009. It also deals with differencies of this alliance on the state, regional and local level, and searches any cleveages of this alliance on the state, regional or local level. This work also searches the answer for the question, what the perspectives of this alliance in the future are. The first agreement about the alliance was confirmed in 2009. The second agreement was confirmed in 2013. This agreement enables free relationship between TOP 09 and STAN on the regional and local levels.

This work deals with a phenomenon of party alliances, especially with the alliance of TOP 09 and STAN. This phenomenon is current in the Czech politics. This work concerns other unions of the right-wing or the center parties in the Czech Republic too, and searches an answer for the question, if it is an alliance. Primarily this work deals with the alliance of TOP 09 and STAN, which were established in 2009. It also deals with differencies of this alliance on the state, regional and local level, and searches any cleveages of this alliance on the state, regional or local level. This work also searches the answer for the question, what the perspectives of this alliance in the future are. The first agreement about the alliance was confirmed in 2009. The second agreement was confirmed in 2013. This agreement enables free relationship between TOP 09 and STAN on the regional and local levels.

Esta tesis doctoral ha provocado un cambio de actitud y mentalidad; porque la forma de realizar investigación hasta el momento había sido basada en resultados, es decir, primero se piensa cual será el resultado que se obtendrá o hacia donde se debe llegar, que es lo que se va a producir, utilizando en este caso el método de abajo hacia arriba (bottom up). Sin embargo, este informe se ha realizado bajo una metodología causal, es decir, interesa conocer primeramente cual será el modelo para luego contestar preguntas ¿qué es? y ¿para qué es?, debido a que así se decide un modelo que servirá de marco a la solución y se concretan los objetivos, ya sin ambigüedad, que se persigue alcanzar. Posteriormente se irán contestando las preguntas de ¿cómo?, ¿cuándo? y ¿quién lo hará? Porque así se establece la estructura de la solución, la tecnología que la soportará, y el contexto. Por esa razón, este trabajo aborda aspectos diferentes a las formas tradicionales de resolver un problema en particular, sobre el cual ya se conocen otras soluciones. El método bottom-up puede utilizarse cuando se conoce de antemano la solución por otros casos parecidos; y el top-down es el método general cuando no se tiene mayor conocimiento previo sobre cuál puede ser la solución. De allí que para esta investigación se ha hecho uso del método top-down. Por lo tanto, el grado de Doctora permitirá, resolver problemas haciendo uso de método científico, procurando evitar incorporar arbitrariedad o reduciendo esta a su mínima expresión y, con ello, garantizando la calidad de la solución. Se persigue producir un avance en el estado del conocimiento, en el caso particular de la educación piramidal en el que se ha trabajado bajo un enfoque colaborativo jerarquizado, para la enseñanza de los lenguajes de programación, a través de una plataforma didáctica virtual, en la cual personas con un nivel de educación superior pueden tutorar a otros de nivel educativo inferior para, de esa manera, poder mejorar el proceso de enseñanza-aprendizaje en la Universidad Tecnológica de El Salvador, aunque cabe mencionar que este proyecto podrá ser aplicado a cualquier institución educativa ya sea formal o informal. El objetivo principal es que mediante la educación piramidal y por medio del uso de una plataforma virtual, se pueda dar apoyo en el aprendizaje de cualquier área del conocimiento, que en el caso particular se abordarán los lenguajes de programación, por ser parte fundamental de las carreras de Informática y del área de competencia docente de la autora.

Functioning of the living cell is controlled by a complex network of interactions among genes, proteins, and other molecules. A major goal of systems biology is to understand and explain the mechanisms by which these interactions govern the cell's response to various conditions. Molecular interaction networks have proven to be a powerful representation for studying cellular behavior. Numerous algorithms have been developed to unravel the complexity of these networks. Our work addresses the drawbacks of existing techniques. This thesis includes three related research efforts that introduce network-based approaches to bridge current methodological gaps in systems biology. i. Functional enrichment methods provide a summary of biological functions that are overrepresented in an interesting collection of genes (e.g., highly differentially expressed genes between a diseased cell and a healthy cell). Standard functional enrichment algorithms ignore the known interactions among proteins. We propose a novel network-based approach to functional enrichment that explicitly accounts for these underlying molecular interactions. Through this work, we close the gap between set-based functional enrichment and topological analysis of molecular interaction networks. ii. Many techniques have been developed to compute the response network of a cell. A recent trend in this area is to compute response networks of small size, with the rationale that only part of a pathway is often changed by disease and that interpreting small subnetworks is easier than interpreting larger ones. However, these methods may not uncover the spectrum of pathways perturbed in a particular experiment or disease. To avoid these difficulties, we propose to use algorithms that reconcile case-control DNA microarray data with a molecular interaction network by modifying per-gene differential expression p-values such that two genes connected by an interaction show similar changes in their gene expression values. iii. Top-down analyses in systems biology can automatically find correlations among genes and proteins in large-scale datasets. However, it is often difficult to design experiments from these results. In contrast, bottom-up approaches painstakingly craft detailed models of cellular processes. However, developing the models is a manual process that can take many years. These approaches have largely been developed independently. We present Linker, an efficient and automated data-driven method that analyzes molecular interactomes. Linker combines teleporting random walks and k-shortest path computations to discover connections from a set of source proteins to a set of target proteins. We demonstrate the efficacy of Linker through two applications: proposing extensions to an existing model of cell cycle regulation in budding yeast and automated reconstruction of human signaling pathways. Linker achieves superior precision and recall compared to state-of-the-art algorithms from the literature. / Ph. D.

Since January 1, 2015, the police authority's largest organizational reform took place, and 21 county police authorities were merged into one unified police authority. The purpose of this was to increase the prerequisites for a stronger operating result with higher quality in the efforts. In connection with the reorganization, they sought to have a more distinct management where the operations would be employee driven. In this study, the official's space for action is studied, and to what extent the public works are considered regarding the expertise and knowledge of the employees at local police level. Through an interview study the officials of the local police level shared the experiences and how the reorganization's impact on the space of action has affected their ability on making decisions. The analysis of the study takes the biggest inspiration from Lisky's street-level bureaucracy theory but also shows elements of the authority's structure, i.e. top-down and bottom-up perspective. The study also takes into account the public officials’ tools of power and analyzes the exercise of power.

This thesis can be viewed as two parts. The first part focuses on performance analysis of millimeter wave (mmWave) communications. We investigate how the interference behaves in the outdoor mesh network operating at 60-GHz when block age and shadowing are present using the probability of collision as a metric, under both the protocol model and the physical model. In contrast with results reported in mmWave mesh networks at 60-GHz that advocates that interference has only a marginal effect, our results show that for a short-range link of 100 m, the collision probability gets considerably larger (beyond 0.1) at the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) of interest (for example, the reference value is chosen as 15 dB for uncoded quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK)). Compensation or compromise should be made in order to maintain a low probability of collision, either by reducing transmitter node density which is to the detriment of the network connectivity, or by switching to a compact linear antenna array with more at-top elements, which places more stringent requirements in device integration techniques. The second part of this thesis focuses on finding the optimal unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) deployment in the sense that it can maximize over specific network connectivity. We have introduced a connectivity measure based on the commonly used network connectivity metric, which is refered to as global soft connectivity. This measure can be easily extended to account for different propagation models, such as Rayleigh fading and Nakagami fading. It can also be modified to incorporate the link state probability and beam alignment errors in highly directional networks. As can be shown, under the line-of-sight (LOS) and Rayleigh fading assumptions, the optimization regarding the global soft connectivity can be expressed as a weighted sum of the square of link distances between the nodes within the network, namely the ground-to-ground links, the UAV-to-UAV links and the ground-to-UAV links. This can be shown to be a quadratically constrained quadratic program (QCQP) problem with non-convex constraints. We have also extended our global connectivity to other types of connectivity criteria: network k-section connectivity and k-connectivity. In all the three cases, we have proposed a heuristic and straightforward way of finding the suboptimal UAV locations. The simulation results have shown that all these methods can improve our network connectivity considerably, which can achieve a gain of up to 30% for a five UAV scenario.

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Rekommendationssystem är idag väsentliga för att navigera den enorma mängd produkter tillgängliga via internet. Då social media i form av Twitter vid tidigare tillfällen använts för att generera filmrekommendationer har detta främst varit för att hantera cold-start, ett vanligt drabbande problem för collaborative-filtering. I detta arbete adresseras istället hur top-k rekommendationer påverkas vid integrering av social media data i rekommendationssystemet. För att svara på denna fråga har en prototyp av nytt slag utvecklats inom processmodellen för Design Science. Systemet rankar om top-k rekommendationer baserat på resultatet av social matchning där användares Tweets matchas med nyckelord för filmer genom latent semantic indexing (LSI) similarity. Prototypen evalueras genom experiment som adresserar funktionalitet, noggrannhet, konsekvens och prestanda. Resultatet visar att mätetalen NDCG och MAP för top-k rekommendationer förbättras med social matching jämfört med att enbart använda collaborative filtering. / Recommender systems are a crucial part of navigating the vast number of products on the internet. Social media, in the form of Twitter microblogs, has been previously used to produce movie recommendations, yet this has mainly been to solve cold-start, a common problem in collaborative filtering environments. This work addresses how top-k recommendations in a collaborative filtering environment are affected when augmented with social media data. To answer this question a novel prototype is developed following a design science process model. This system re-ranks top-k recommendations based on a social matching process where Tweets are matched with movie keywords through latent semantic indexing (LSI) similarity. The prototype is evaluated through experiments regarding functionality, accuracy, consistency, and performance. The results show that NDCG and MAP metrics of the top-k recommendations improve with social matching compared to only using the collaborative filtering algorithms.

Objective: Saliency-based theories assume that stimulus features (luminance, edges, texture) shape the hierarchy of perception. Predictions about human viewing behavior point out that highly salient objects or regions of a picture will be perceived first (e.g. Itti et al. 2001). Not much attention is paid to top-down factors such as emotion, motivation and other cognitive functions. The present study analyses the influence of the emotional status on visual perception in free-viewing tasks. Following the hypotheses of the study even in artificial contexts such as viewing neutral pictures in an experiment, top-down factors, such as emotion might influence length of fixation and the number of fixations and saccades. Approaches of visual perception and perception in general should focus more on the individual cognitive aspects of this process. Method: In an eyetracking-study 91 participants viewed neutral and emotional relevant pictures without any task. Five emotional pictures (crime, murder, babies), which were taken from the IAPS (Lang, Bradley & Cuthbert, 2005) were followed by one neutral picture (forest, grass) taken from studies of Peters et al (2005) and Einhäuser et al. (2003). Altogether the subjects viewed 130 pictures. Results: There were significant differences in viewing behavior concerning the neutral pictures subject to the emotional condition. When presented in context with emotional pictures, neutral pictures were fixated longer and less frequently in comparison to the neutral condition. There is evidence to suggest that the emotional context influenced visual attention concerning the neutral pictures in that way that attention for the neutral material was reduced in the context of highly arousing emotional pictures. This leads to the conclusion, that even in experimental setups with simple neutral stimuli the process of visual perception is influenced top-down.