We analyzed how land-use patterns and changes in urbanization influence positive raccoon rabies cases in an established enzootic area. County resolution was used and the study area included all 159 counties in Georgia. We obtained data on raccoons submitted from 2006 through 2010 for testing at the state public health labs due to exposure incidents with people or domesticated animals. The land-use patterns were extracted from the US Geological Survey’s National Land Cover Database from both 2001 and 2006. Odds ratios were calculated on 16 land-use variables that included natural topography, agricultural development, and urbanization. An additional variable, Submissions/Population density, was used to normalize counties and to account for population bias associated with rabies surveillance. The use of this demographic variable was substantiated by GIS clustering analysis. The outcome variable was heavily right skewed and over dispersed and therefore a negative binomial regression was used in this count statistics technique. The final analysis showed that low intensity residential development is associated with raccoon rabies cases while evergreen forest offers protection. This study supports the hypothesis that the raccoon rabies enzootic is maintained in those edge ecosystems of urbanization. It is advocated here that the public health animal rabies database to include GPS coordinates when reporting wildlife rabies submissions for testing to improve the resolution when studying the disease ecology of enzootic rabies.

ABSTRACT Title:                         Lucrative deals How service offers and its clients is forms by Optional Framing                 Level:                       Bachelor, Business Administration Author:                     Gabriel Krogius, Mikaela Sörensen Supervisor:              Jonas Kågström, department of economics Date:                         2013, August Introduction:           That the human mind may be directed by how an offer is designed is not news. However, what is new in the following thesis is whether a person is affected in the case of a service rather than, as previously research, a physical product. Does a person find it harder to separate with something rather than to add an option? Aim:                          The aim for this thesis is to examine how Optional Framing has affection on service offerings/companies, and in this case on real estate brokerage services. Is it, as earlier, when the human can form her own offer, the final price ends up higher when she is about to add options than removing them? Method:                    The thesis emanates to achieve earlier results where the difference in this case is that our thesis is targeting service offerings. It applies through a positivistic deductive method. The empirical data is collected from a quantitative sample of survey answers, where one part of the groups is faced to remove options from a deluxe-offer and the other part of the group is about to add options to a standard-offer. The survey was created with episodic support from a sample of interviews with active real estate agents. Discussion:               The thesis shows that earlier results approve within service companies and its offers, in this case real estate brokerage. We can interpret that the human mind is directed through Optional Framing and that the deluxe-offer ends with a higher price and more options to it than the standard-offer. The correlation analysis shows us connection between some of the offers services that can benefit real estate brokerage in the future. Future research:     We hope that foundations have been created for future research that can lead on to further understanding about the customers view on real estate brokerage services and how to make them more attractive. Contribution:           Real estate brokerage can benefit from the results in this thesis where they further can implement the work from comparison of theory and empirical.  Key words:              Loss Aversion, The Endowment Effect, Status Quo Bias and also Framing/Optional Framing.

De som förespråkar en ändring av det rådande läget (status quo), inom exempelvis politik, har visat sig vara mer påverkade av naiv realism än de som vill behålla status quo. Ytterligare studier visar att den politiska tillhörigheten kan vara av betydelse för hur påverkade av naiv realism dessa utmanare är. I två studier har det testats om naiv realism påverkas av positionen till status quo (utmana eller försvara) eller av den politiska tillhörigheten. I båda studier har en tydlig favorisering av den egna gruppen påträffats, samt att personer i utmanarposition gentemot status quo gjorde signifikant större skillnad mellan ingrupp och utgrupp än vad försvarare av status quo gjorde. Den politiska tillhörigheten visade sig inte vara av betydelse. En omarbetad version av enkäten väntas stärka resultaten ytterligare. Fortsatta studier inom området föreslås.

Using secondary data from Pew's Early January 2004 Political Communications Study this thesis explains political identification, the range of media sources that a person uses, perceptions of political party bias and political participation using information about media use and perceptions of the media. The survey, which was conducted during the winter of 2003/2004, includes responses from 1506 individuals. Analytic techniques include means breakdowns, crosstabulations, correlations and multiple regression. Many associations are identified; however, in general, the media related variables were weakly related to dependent variables. The thesis speculates that the weak relationships can be attributed to a homogeneous range of available media content. Connections between the recent growth in the number of media sources and diversity in media content are discussed. The analysis finds that listening to talk radio, religious radio and watching the Fox News Channel were weakly associated with conservatism while use of non-profit media, including use of National Public Radio (NPR), the Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network (C-SPAN) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) were weakly associated with liberalism. The thesis questions if the use of "sound bites" used on talk radio programs and some 24-hour television news channels is related to the conservatism of these audiences. A positive relationship between the amount of bias that a person sees in the news media and the range of news sources that a person uses was found. Sources include Internet, television and print media. The implications of these findings in the context of the agenda-setting framework and a homogenous media are discussed. Use of the Fox News Channel and talk radio were associated with perceptions of a Democratic Party bias in the news media. Ideas from Bourdieu and Passeron are used to understand how communication styles are related to the perception of talk radio as an alternative to the "liberal media". The implications of the prevalence of the perception of a "liberal media" are discussed and related to theoretical work from Gramsci and Abercrombie. Media that attempt to add diversity through new operational models are described. Associations between political participation and several types of media use were found. The finding that use of comedy television is related to some indicators of political participation is seen as demonstrating the difficulty in distinguishing information from entertainment-oriented programming. The analysis questions assumptions about the relationships between media use, electoral cynicism and political participation. The thesis argues that better tools from examining media use in general and in the Canadian context are needed.

The belief bias effect – the finding that prior beliefs influence judgments of logic and evidence – has been a topic of much empirical investigation in both deductive and causal reasoning. However, to date, no research has examined the degree to which such biases are the result of common or distinct mechanisms in these two domains. By using common scales of measurement, I examine the degree to which individuals show common biases in these two domains in two experiments. Surprisingly, although the belief bias effect was observed in both paradigms, biases in one domain were unreliably associated with biases in the other domain. Experiment 2 included 6 measures of individual differences in an attempt to uncover the observation of differential biases in these domains. Dogmatism was found to be the single most predictive measure of belief bias, but only in deductive reasoning. These data are discussed in terms of dual process theories of reasoning.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine impacts of devolution of post secondary education focusing on First Nations in Canada. I will critically examine the impacts of devolution and education policy in relation to First Nation administration of the post secondary education program. I argue that the issue of post secondary education as a First Nation treaty right is at the center of discord in relation to education policy. The nature and scope of post secondary education as a treaty right continues to be an unresolved issue between First Nations' and the Federal Government of Canada.<p> In the 1960s, the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development (DIAND) administered a successful post secondary program resulting in increased numbers of First Nation students overall in college, technical and university populations. The policy of the time was to create conditions for First Nations to increase access to higher education. In time, the direction of the policy would change as in the 1980s the government's fiduciary responsibilities devolved post secondary education to First Nations.<p> Devolution of programs and services provided the rationale for greater self-control for First Nations to train their own labour force. The process of devolution, however, has not benefited most First Nations in terms of the amount of funding available for the delivery and administration of programs and services. Rather, insufficient budget allocations resulted in some First Nation administrations inheriting a deficit budget for programs and services.<p> An examination of the Indian Act provides evidence to the state's larger project of moral regulation within its education policy. The thesis provides a view of how First Nations have internalized limitations contained within social policies of the Indian Act. First Nations are faced with challenges in educating, training and securing employment for their band membership. Due to the nature of the funding, First Nations are forced to make decisions on which band members can access programs and services. Moreover, when examining the impacts of defining who is the right kind of Indian to educate, First Nations education policy demonstrates the internalization of what is the right kind of Indian to educate and train by the nature and scope of their criteria. First Nations are in control of training their own labour force and developing criteria on who is the right kind of Indian to educate.

Reasoners who adopt the perspective of another can increase the proportion of logically valid inferences they make (Thompson, Evans, & Handley, 2005). A possible explanation is that shifting perspective promotes analytic reasoning. If this were the case, then shifting perspectives should also reduce the belief-bias effect. Furthermore, strong evidence should be preferred over weak evidence. To test this, 256 participants read twenty-four research descriptions that varied in evidence quality and degree of personal belief content. Participants indicated whether the data supported the researchers hypotheses. Belief bias was reduced when participants evaluated the data from the researchers perspective relative to their own. Evidence strength was an important determining factor in decision-making and it was sensitive to perspective and individual differences.

Living in the information-overloading age, it is difficult to find the right information and identify the resources they need on the websites. As to a user, it is time-consuming in browsing, searching, and making a decision to buy products on online stores. Therefore, many E-commerce websites have implemented recommender systems that intend to provide users with professional recommendation for various types of products and services. Although many recommendation methods have been proposed, there are still some problems like the sparsity and the cold start problems. In addition, some researchers observe there exist users who are biased and products that are controversial. We conjecture that ratings given by biased users or given to controversial products may have impact on estimation accuracy of recommendation. In this thesis, we will examine the measures for user bias and product controversy and propose trust-based-recommendation techniques that take them into account. We evaluate the proposed techniques using the web of trust and rating data collected from the Epinions.com website. It is found that properly setting some parameters, the proposed trust network-based method that incorporates user bias achieve higher recommendation accuracy.

In 2008,the financial Tsunami spreads through all of the world. In the view of behavior finance, this thesis wants to use the method which was created by Weber and Camerer(1998)to examine whether all kinds of investors will show disposition effect. The research of the time is from 19/5/2008 to 15/1/2010, and we separate the period into bull market and bear market. And we also study all kinds of investors¡¦trading volume. According to the research results, the findings are listed as below: 1. All kinds of investors showp disposition effect, and the private investors would show disposition effect. 2. All kinds of investors would show bigger disposition effect for the smaller companies than for the bigger companies. 3.The disposition effect of dealers are similar to the private investors, but our research can not find out whether the stocks of their holding and rate of return are different from private investors. Keywords: behavior finance, disposition effect, over confident, cognitive bias

In our earlier research, we found the MOKE signal incident from 45 degree would cause perpendicular signal to couple with the longitudinal one. To distinguish the signal from one to another, we arranged 45 degree and 0 degree optical setup for the measurement of longitudinal and perpendicular respectively. However, hysteresis loops are only observed in the longitudinal direction. To measure smaller signal in our experiment, we reduced the noise level by one order and thus improved the signal to noise ratio. It¡¦s ten times better then previous result. Under smaller signal or worse S/N ratio condition, we still measured the MOKE signal. In order to quantitatively analyze the current-induced field, we made a metal coil and try to measure the bias produced by the field. And we injected the reverse current-induced field, , try to counteract the bias of hysteresis loop which is induced by sample current. Besides, we also dosed oxygen on the sample and measured the MOKE signal. There was no change comparing with which is measured in gas-free condition. But we found the coercivity became larger after annealing to 300K, and the current-induced bias in oxygen become smaller.