Abridged version of the author's thesis, Cologne. / Bibliography: p. [237]-259.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Michigan. / Bibliography: leaves 572-590.

I dagens konkurrensintensiva affärsvärld är företagets varumärke, som innefattar sin identitet, image och rykte, en central faktor för pålitliga och hållbara relationer mellan företaget och deras intressenter. Sponsring har blivit ett användbart arbetssätt som kan förbättra konsumenternas association till företag som traditionell reklam saknar. I tiden ligger också att arbeta med hållbar utveckling, därav används sponsring som ett verktyg inom CSR främst bland börsnoterade svenska företag. Syftet med studien är att öka förståelsen om vad som gör sponsring inom arbetet gällande hållbarhet framgångsrikt. Hur sponsring i företagandet blir ett verktyg i arbetet mot hållbar utveckling. Studien är baserad på fyra börsnoterade företag i Sverige som är verksamma inom olika branscher. Tillvägagångssättet var en multipel fallstudie av kvalitativ karaktär. Som teknik för insamling och bearbetning av data var sekundäranalys. En abduktiv ansats används då mer teori efter bearbetning av data behövdes.Vi anser att det idag finns begränsat med forskning som berör den svenska marknaden gällande hur arbetet med CSR-relaterad sponsring bör bedrivas. Därför var vår avsikt att bidra med mer kunskap som kan användas till framtida forskning inom ämnet sponsring. Vårt arbete skulle kunna ligga till grund till företag i Sverige som vill utveckla sitt hållbarhetsarbete via sponsring.Slutsatsen blev en modell som vi anser innehåller de viktigaste faktorerna för att lyckas med sponsring som ett verktyg inom hållbarhetsarbete. Modellen kan både fungera som en vägvisare för verksamheter som vill tillämpa CSR-relaterad sponsring eller som en analysmall när arbetet skall utvärderas. / In today's highly competitive business society, the company brand, which stands for its identity, image and reputation, function as a key factor for reliable and durable relationships between the company and its stakeholders. Sponsorship has become a useful approach that can improve the consumers association to companies that conventional advertising can´t. Working with sustainable development is very much in style at the moment. Sponsorship is therefore commonly used as a tool for CSR among listed Swedish companies. The purpose of this study is to increase the understanding to what makes CSR-related sponsorship successful. How sponsorship can be used as a tool while working towards sustainable development. The study is based on four listed companies in Sweden that operates in different industries. The approach we have chosen to take is a multiple-case study design using a qualitative perspective. We have also chosen to collect and process data using the technique of secondary analysis. An abductive reasoning was applied since more theory was needed to process the data collected.We feel that the studies available on the Swedish market today was very limited on the subject regarding how CSR-related sponsorship should be conducted. Therefore our main purpose was to provide more knowledge to be used in future research regarding the area of sponsorship. Our study could function as a guide to companies that want to develop their sustainability efforts through sponsorship.Our conclusion resulted in a model that we believe contain the most important factors to succeed in sponsorship as a tool of sustainability. The model can both act as a guide for companies that want to apply CSR-related sponsorship as well as an analysis template for evaluating existing work.

One of the main biological goals of recent years is to determine the genes in the human genome that cause disease. Recent technological advances have realised genome-wide association studies, which have uncovered numerous genetic regions implicated with human diseases. The current approach to analysing data from these studies is based on testing association at single SNPs but this is widely accepted as underpowered to detect rare and poorly tagged variants. In this thesis we propose several novel approaches to analysing large-scale association data, which aim to improve upon the power offered by traditional approaches. We combine an established imputation framework with a sophisticated disease model that allows for multiple disease causing mutations at a single locus. To evaluate our methods, we have developed a fast and realistic method to simulate association data conditional on population genetic data. The simulation results show that our methods remain powerful even if the causal variant is not well tagged, there are haplotypic effects or there is allelic heterogeneity. Our methods are further validated by the analysis of the recent WTCCC genome-wide association data, where we have detected confirmed disease loci, known regions of allelic heterogeneity and new signals of association. One of our methods also has the facility to identify the high risk haplotype backgrounds that harbour the disease alleles, and therefore can be used for fine-mapping. We believe that the incorporation of our methods into future association studies will help progress the understanding genetic diseases.

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

No description available.

Cancer is the leading cause of deaths globally. Although liver cancer ranks only fourth in incidence worldwide among all types of cancer, its survivability rate is the lowest. Liver cancer is often diagnosed at an advanced stage, because in the early stages of the disease patients usually do not have signs or symptoms. After initial diagnosis, therapeutic options are limited and tend to be effective only for small size tumors with limited spread and minimal vascular invasion. As a result, long-term patient survival remains minimal, and has not improved in the past three decades. In order to reduce morbidity and mortality from liver cancer, improvement in early diagnosis and the evaluation of current treatments are essential. This study tested the applicability of the Apriori and FP-Growth association data mining algorithms to liver cancer patient data, obtained from the British Columbia Cancer Agency. The data was used to develop association rules which indicate what combinations of factors are most commonly observed with liver cancer incidence as well as with increased or decreased rates of mortality. Ideally, these association rules will be applied in future studies using liver cancer data extracted from other Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems. The main objective of making these rules available is to facilitate early detection guidelines for liver cancer and to evaluate current treatment options. / Graduate / 0566 / 0984 / fabiola@uvic.ca

Variations in gene expression have long been hypothesised to be the major cause of individual differences. An initial focus of this research thesis is to elucidate the genetic regulatory architecture of gene expression. Expression quantitative trait locus (eQTL) mapping analyses have been performed on expression levels of over 22,000 mRNAs from three tissues of a panel of recombinant inbred mice. These analyses are "single-locus" where "linkage" (i.e. significant correlation) between an expression trait and a putative eQTL is considered independently of other loci. Major conclusions from these analyses are: 1. Gene expression is mainly influenced by genetic (sequence) variations that act in trans rather than in cis; 2. Subsets of genes are controlled by master regulators that influence multiple genes; 3. Gene expression is a polygenic trait with multiple regulators. Single-locus mapping analyses are not designed for detecting multiple regulators of gene expression, and so observation of multiple-linkages (i.e. one expression trait mapped to multiple eQTLs) formed the basis of the second objective of this research project: to investigate the relationship between multiple-linkages and genotype pattern-association. A locus-pair is said to have associated genotype patterns if they have similar inheritance pattern across a panel of individuals, and these are attributed to one of fours sources: 1. linkage disequilibrium between loci located on the same chromosome; 2. non-syntenic association; 3. random association; 4. un-associated. To understand the validity of multiple-linkages observed in single-locus mapping studies, a newly developed method, bqtl.twolocus, is applied to confirm two-locus effects for a total of 898 out of 1,233 multiple-linkages identified from the three studies mentioned above as well as from seven publicly available eQTL-mapping studies. Combining these results with information of genotype pattern-association, a subset of 478 multiple-linkages has been deduced for which there is high confidence to be real.

Thesis (M. Env. St.)--University of Adelaide, Mawson Graduate Centre for Environmental Studies, 1993. / Bibliography :leaves 84-86.

Thesis (D. Min.)--Temple Baptist Seminary, 2003. / Abstract. Includes bibliography (leaves 97-99).