M.Comm. / Franchising is growing in stature as one of the most powerful business methods. Fifty percent of retail sales in the USA are generated through franchised chains. Franchising happens when an entrepreneur seizes a viable business opportunity. A system is developed to extract the maximum value and the rights to use the business system are sold to a franchisee to operate a business along the same principles and systems as the original opportunity. The franchisee and franchisor work together as a team or alliance to build and maintain the brand. In order to exploit the business opportunity in a meaningful manner, it is important for the franchisor and the franchisee to understand and to analyse the different relationships in the franchising model. The franchise relationship model developed by Spinelli et al is very useful and provides a sensible approach in analysing and identifying the different relationships in a franchised business. The most important aspect of the franchise relationship model is the relationship with the customer. The service delivery system is created by the franchisor and franchisee to provide the best service or to deliver the product in the most effective way to the customer. The service delivery system is the blue print of the franchise operation and outlines the flow of tasks and transactions in the franchise model. In order for franchisors and franchisees to ensure that uniformity and standards are maintained across the franchised business, it is important for them to have a system through which franchisees can be monitored. The main focus of the monitoring system is to prevent shirking, free riding or to avoid that franchisees erode the brand of the business. An important tool in the monitoring process is the franchise agreement. The franchise agreement is a specialised agreement that outlines the relationship between the franchisor and the franchisee. Other important tools used in the monitoring function are field visits, external service audits, peer review, analytical tools, customer feedback and mystery shopping. Transactional analysis is used to determine which tasks are to be carried out by whom in the franchise relationship. The service delivery system tasks are defined and different tasks awarded to either the franchisee or the franchisor. As an example of this method, the real estate function is analysed indicating what the essential tasks are when executing this function and who is responsible for it.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the correlation between creativity and the six ego states of Transactional Analysis. The research sample consisted of 42 adolescents (age 17-18) from a grade 11 high school psychology class. Creativity was measured by the fluency sub-score of the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (Torrance, 1966). Ego states were measured by the Personal Response Questionnaire (Kealy, 1975). Six Pearson product-moment correlation coefficients were calculated between the creativity scores and each of the ego state scores. On the basis of the creativity scores, two sub-groups were established. One group was comprised of the 10 highest scoring subjects and one group was comprised of the 10 lowest scoring subjects. A t-test was used to calculate the difference between the means of each of the 6 ego state scores of the two sub-groups. The results of the statistical testing of the correlation coefficients and of the t-value indicated that there were no statistically significant (.05) relationships between creativity and any of the 6 ego states. Descirptive data was presented to illustrate any differences within or among groups. Reasons for the lack of statistically significant results were discussed and recommendations for future research were suggested. / Education, Faculty of / Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education (ECPS), Department of / Graduate

Arguably, one of the biggest deterrants for software developers who might otherwise choose to write parallel code is that parallelism makes their lives more complicated. Perhaps the most basic problem inherent in the coordination of concurrent tasks is the enforcing of atomicity so that the partial results of one task do not inadvertently corrupt another task. Atomicity is typically enforced through locking protocols, but these protocols can introduce other complications, such as deadlock, unless restrictive methodologies in their use are adopted. We have recently begun a research project focusing on transactional memory [18] as an alternative mechanism for enforcing atomicity, since it allows the user to avoid many of the complications inherent in locking protocols. Rather than viewing transactions as infrequent occurrences in a program, as has generally been done in the past, we have adopted the point of view that all user code should execute in the context of some transaction. To make this viewpoint viable requires the development of two key technologies: effective hardware support for scalable transactional memory, and linguistic and compiler support. This paper describes our preliminary research results on making “transactions everywhere” a practical reality. / Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA)

The recent shift toward multi-core chips has pushed the burden of extracting performance to the programmer. In fact, programmers now have to be able to uncover more coarse-grain parallelism with every new generation of processors, or the performance of their applications will remain roughly the same or even degrade. Unfortunately, parallel programming is still hard and error prone. This has driven the development of many new parallel programming models that aim to make this process efficient. This thesis first combines the skeleton-based and transactional memory programming models in a new framework, called OpenSkel, in order to improve performance and programmability of parallel applications. This framework provides a single skeleton that allows the implementation of transactional worklist applications. Skeleton or pattern-based programming allows parallel programs to be expressed as specialized instances of generic communication and computation patterns. This leaves the programmer with only the implementation of the particular operations required to solve the problem at hand. Thus, this programming approach simplifies parallel programming by eliminating some of the major challenges of parallel programming, namely thread communication, scheduling and orchestration. However, the application programmer has still to correctly synchronize threads on data races. This commonly requires the use of locks to guarantee atomic access to shared data. In particular, lock programming is vulnerable to deadlocks and also limits coarse grain parallelism by blocking threads that could be potentially executed in parallel. Transactional Memory (TM) thus emerges as an attractive alternative model to simplify parallel programming by removing this burden of handling data races explicitly. This model allows programmers to write parallel code as transactions, which are then guaranteed by the runtime system to execute atomically and in isolation regardless of eventual data races. TM programming thus frees the application from deadlocks and enables the exploitation of coarse grain parallelism when transactions do not conflict very often. Nevertheless, thread management and orchestration are left for the application programmer. Fortunately, this can be naturally handled by a skeleton framework. This fact makes the combination of skeleton-based and transactional programming a natural step to improve programmability since these models complement each other. In fact, this combination releases the application programmer from dealing with thread management and data races, and also inherits the performance improvements of both models. In addition to it, a skeleton framework is also amenable to skeleton-driven performance optimizations that exploits the application pattern and system information. This thesis thus also presents a set of pattern-oriented optimizations that are automatically selected and applied in a significant subset of transactional memory applications that shares a common pattern called worklist. These optimizations exploit the knowledge about the worklist pattern and the TM nature of the applications to avoid transaction conflicts, to prefetch data, to reduce contention etc. Using a novel autotuning mechanism, OpenSkel dynamically selects the most suitable set of these pattern-oriented performance optimizations for each application and adjusts them accordingly. Experimental results on a subset of five applications from the STAMP benchmark suite show that the proposed autotuning mechanism can achieve performance improvements within 2%, on average, of a static oracle for a 16-core UMA (Uniform Memory Access) platform and surpasses it by 7% on average for a 32-core NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) platform. Finally, this thesis also investigates skeleton-driven system-oriented performance optimizations such as thread mapping and memory page allocation. In order to do it, the OpenSkel system and also the autotuning mechanism are extended to accommodate these optimizations. The conducted experimental results on a subset of five applications from the STAMP benchmark show that the OpenSkel framework with the extended autotuning mechanism driving both pattern and system-oriented optimizations can achieve performance improvements of up to 88%, with an average of 46%, over a baseline version for a 16-core UMA platform and up to 162%, with an average of 91%, for a 32-core NUMA platform.

Abstract To develop optimal leadership effectiveness under complicated circumstances is the priority of a leader . A higher result can be created if the leader master his or her leadership style. Since the 1980s, the research about leadership has emphasized on recent theories such as transformational leadership, transactional leadership, and charm leadership. In this research , the former two types are applied to investigate the relationship between them. Aim at salespeople, the questionnaires are delivered by e-mails, mails and personally. Among the 400 questionnaires, 266 copies have been took back and 218 copies are available. The conclusions are: (1) There is no obvious relationship among transformational leadership, transactional leadership and personal completion. (2) There is positive and obvious relationship among transformational leadership, transactional leadership and group completion. Generally speaking, the former is superior to the later. (3) There is positive and obvious relationship among transformational leadership,transactional leadership and organization promise. Generally speaking, the former is superior to the later. (4) There is positive and obvious relationship among transformational leadership, transactional leadership and leadership. Generally speaking, the former is inferior to the later. (5) Part of the effectiveness that transformational leadership causes is superior to that of transactional leadership.

Transactional Memory (TM) has been proposed as a simpler parallel programming model compared to the traditional locking model. However, uptake from the programming community has been slow, primarily because performance issues of software-based TM strategies are not well understood. In this thesis we conduct a systematic analysis of conflict scenarios that may emerge when enforcing correctness between conflicting transactions. We find that some combinations of conflict detection and resolution strategies perform better than others depending on the conflict patterns in the application. We validate our findings by implementing several concurrency control strategies, and by measuring their relative performance. Based on these observations, we introduce partial rollbacks as a mechanism for effectively compensating the variability in the TM algorithm performance. We show that using this mechanism we can obtain close to the overall best performance for a range of conflict patterns in a synthetically generated workload and a realistic game application.

Transactional Memory (TM) has been proposed as a simpler parallel programming model compared to the traditional locking model. However, uptake from the programming community has been slow, primarily because performance issues of software-based TM strategies are not well understood. In this thesis we conduct a systematic analysis of conflict scenarios that may emerge when enforcing correctness between conflicting transactions. We find that some combinations of conflict detection and resolution strategies perform better than others depending on the conflict patterns in the application. We validate our findings by implementing several concurrency control strategies, and by measuring their relative performance. Based on these observations, we introduce partial rollbacks as a mechanism for effectively compensating the variability in the TM algorithm performance. We show that using this mechanism we can obtain close to the overall best performance for a range of conflict patterns in a synthetically generated workload and a realistic game application.

Under the context of rapidly-changing industrial paradigm, leaders face the critical issue of how to maximize the leadership efficacy to adaptto the new competition and market demand. Different leadership will contribute to different leadership efficacy, so leaders have to master and modify individual leadership style to create higher leadership efficacy. Since after 1980, the interest of academic world on leadership has been the new style of leadership, which covers transactional leadership, transformational leadership, charismatic leadership. Therefore, in this study, we adopted transactional leadership and transformational leadership to explore the interplay between employee work performance ad organization commitments. We personally distributed questionnaires to the shop managers and management trainees. 200 questionnaires were distributed and 195 pieces were returned, within which there were 188 valid responded questionnaires. The research finding was following: (1) Transformational leadership and transactional leadership both have positive effect over employee work performance. (2) Transformational leadership and transactional leadership both have positive effect over employee work performance. (3) Transformational leadership and transactional leadership both have positive effect over organization commitment.

The purpose of this study was to describe how assessing interactions in a distance course impact the quality of instruction, student leaning, and satisfaction with the course. This study, further describes how interactions can be enhanced with certain technologies. The population for this research was both undergraduate and graduate students of the college of Agriculture and Natural Resources in National Chung-Hsing University (NCHU), in Taiwan. There are twelve departments under the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources including eleven departments and one graduate institute. Data was collected from students at NCHU (Taiwan) by using Qualtrics (an online survey platform) through the Internet. All data of this research collected via Internet and used SPSS 20.0 to analysis data results. It is an anonymous survey that participants just receive the survey web address from email or academic platforms of each department. There is no any identification information for each participant. According to the findings, there are some relationships between transactional distance theory, technology, and online education. The results of the regression model point out that the learner to the course content interaction is a significant predictor for satisfaction toward online classes. Learner to the course content interaction and learner to the instructor interaction are significant predictors for quality toward online classes. Learner to the course technology interaction and learner to the instructor interaction are significant predictors for learning toward online classes. Learner to the course content interaction and learner to the instructor interaction are significant predictors of enhanced interactions in online classes. However, there is no interaction effect in learner to leaner interaction to enhance the satisfaction, quality, and learning. From the above data, the learner to the instructor interaction and the learner to the course content interaction are two important factors that influence learners’ satisfaction, quality, and learning of online courses. More participants involving in this research recommended increasing the reliability and the diversity of opinions. Besides, using the same instrument for diverse populations such as differences of culture, background, and majors may find more relationships in interactions and technologies in online education. Also, do more researches for enhancing the interaction between learner to learner and learner to the course technology. It is important to find more effective technologies and media for instructors to enhance learners’ satisfaction, quality, and learning of online education.

Syftet med denna studie var att undersöka vilka effekter två olika läsförståelsemodeller, Reciprocal Teaching och Transactional Strategies Instruction, har på elevers läsförståelse. Den metod som användes i studien var kvalitativ textanalys som applicerades på 7 forskningsartiklar. Resultatet visar att modellerna gett effekt, i olika åldrar, länder och grupper. Detta resultat visar att Reciprocal Teaching och Transactional Strategies Instruction är effektiva modeller att arbeta med för läsförståelseutveckling.