<p>Genetic variation within and among populations is a result of past and ongoing processes. Among the most important of such processes are dispersal, habitat fragmentation and selection. This thesis use neutral genetic variation as a tool to investigate these processes in three bird species.</p><p>In the Siberian jay, the timing of dispersal is dependent on social dominance among siblings. Mark-recapture data, radio-tracking and genetic variation was used to investigate whether timing of dispersal had an effect on dispersal distance. The results show that early dispersing individuals also disperse longer. In the same species, genetic correlation between neighbours was used to find areas with high production of philopatric individuals, which could be indicative of high habitat quality.</p><p>Great snipe populations in northern Europe have a breeding range divided into two regions. A Q_ST-F_STapproach was applied to study variation in selection between regions. Differentiation between the regions in neutral molecular markers was low, indicating high gene flow, or short time available for neutral divergence. Morphological divergence between the regions was high, and Q_ST > F_ST, which indicates divergent selection. Thus, neutral genetic markers can be misleading in identifying evolutionary significant units, and the Q_ST-F_ST approach might be valuable to identify targets for conservation.</p><p>Rock ptarmigan, or its ancestors, originated in Beringia, and spread throughout the Holarctic region. Their distribution has subsequently been affected by glaciations, most likely leading to withdrawals and re-colonisations. Neutral genetic variation among five populations around the northern Atlantic was investigated. There was strong genetic structure among the populations, and evidence that Scandinavian rock ptarmigan has been isolated from other populations for considerable time. Rock ptarmigan in Svalbard showed slightly lower genetic variation than others, and comparisons with other studies suggested an eastern colonisation route to Svalbard.</p>

Studies of the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA in loggerhead sea turtles (Caretta caretta) demonstrate that females are philopatric, returning to nest in the region where they hatched. Eleven genetic stocks of maternal lineages have been identified in the Atlantic Ocean. An analysis of the conventionally-used 380 bp of the mitochondrial control region of a sample of individuals from the genetic stock of loggerheads in Mexico (N = 175) revealed 13 haplotypes. When a longer sequence read of 815 bp was analyzed, 17 haplotypes were uncovered. In the genetic stock of loggerheads in northwestern Florida (N = 25), three haplotypes were identified with both control region sequence lengths. Based on the currently known distributions of the three long CC-A1 and CC-A2 haplotypes, two of each are unique to Mexico. This makes the longer sequence reads useful for stock identification. Within Mexico, there was evidence of significant population structuring between Cozumel and the northern region of the sampling area on mainland Mexico (pairwise ϕST = 0.1003, p = 0.0197), but not after Bonferroni correction. A direct comparison of female and male nuclear microsatellite genotypes indicated male-biased dispersal between Mexico and northwestern Florida. Within Mexico, microsatellite analysis indicated significant structuring of females between sampling years and between the northern and the southern region of the sampling area on the mainland. Consequently, this genetic stock, while perhaps not in equilibrium, shows signs of female natal homing. An analysis of clutches indicated that significantly more clutches in Mexico had multiple paternity compared to the northwestern Florida (66% and 23%, respectively). The frequency of multiple paternity was not correlated with female abundance, nest density or sex ratio of reproductively successful individuals. There was no evidence of females benefiting through increased reproductive success from multiple paternity. This is consistent with other studies of sea turtles.

Genetic variation within and among populations is a result of past and ongoing processes. Among the most important of such processes are dispersal, habitat fragmentation and selection. This thesis use neutral genetic variation as a tool to investigate these processes in three bird species. In the Siberian jay, the timing of dispersal is dependent on social dominance among siblings. Mark-recapture data, radio-tracking and genetic variation was used to investigate whether timing of dispersal had an effect on dispersal distance. The results show that early dispersing individuals also disperse longer. In the same species, genetic correlation between neighbours was used to find areas with high production of philopatric individuals, which could be indicative of high habitat quality. Great snipe populations in northern Europe have a breeding range divided into two regions. A QST-FST approach was applied to study variation in selection between regions. Differentiation between the regions in neutral molecular markers was low, indicating high gene flow, or short time available for neutral divergence. Morphological divergence between the regions was high, and QST &gt; FST, which indicates divergent selection. Thus, neutral genetic markers can be misleading in identifying evolutionary significant units, and the QST-FST approach might be valuable to identify targets for conservation. Rock ptarmigan, or its ancestors, originated in Beringia, and spread throughout the Holarctic region. Their distribution has subsequently been affected by glaciations, most likely leading to withdrawals and re-colonisations. Neutral genetic variation among five populations around the northern Atlantic was investigated. There was strong genetic structure among the populations, and evidence that Scandinavian rock ptarmigan has been isolated from other populations for considerable time. Rock ptarmigan in Svalbard showed slightly lower genetic variation than others, and comparisons with other studies suggested an eastern colonisation route to Svalbard.

In this thesis I present and discuss the phenomenon of ethical fading, and its association with biased assessment of a fair action. Ethical fading is an intuitive, self-deceptive, unconscious mechanism by which even morally competent agents are lead to disregard the ethical consequences of a particular choice. In engaging in this psychological mechanism, I argue, agents are also presupposing a biased assessment of entitlement. This biased assessment of fairness is intentionally dubious, and to be found in decision frames and reinforced by contexts. In the final part of the work I present an applied ethics case to show how ethical fading may be a quite prevalent pattern of behavior.

The before-after study is still the most popular method used by traffic engineers and transportation safety analysts for evaluating the effects of an intervention. However, this kind of study may be plagued by important methodological limitations, which could significantly alter the study outcome. They include the regression-to-the-mean (RTM) and site-selection effects. So far, most of the research on these biases has focused on the RTM. Hence, the primary objective of this study consists of presenting a method that can reduce the site-selection bias when an entry criterion is used in before-after studies for continuous (e.g. speed, reaction times, etc.) and count data (e.g. number of crashes, number of fatalities, etc.). The proposed method documented in this research provides a way to adjust the Naive estimator by using the sample data and without relying on the data collected from the control group, since finding enough appropriate sites for the control group is much harder in traffic-safety analyses. In this study, the proposed method, a.k.a. Adjusted method, was compared to commonly used methods in before-after studies. The study results showed that among all methods evaluated, the Naive is the most significantly affected by the selection bias. Using the CG, the ANCOVA, or the EB method based on a control group (EBCG) method can eliminate the site-selection bias, as long as the characteristics of the control group are exactly the same as those for the treatment group. However, control group data that have same characteristics based on a truncated distribution or sample may not be available in practice. Moreover, site-selection bias generated by using a dissimilar control group might be even higher than with using the Naive method. The Adjusted method can partially eliminate site-selection bias even when biased estimators of the mean, variance, and correlation coefficient of a truncated normal distribution are used or are not known with certainty. In addition, three actual datasets were used to evaluate the accuracy of the Adjusted method for estimating site-selection biases for various types of data that have different mean and sample-size values.

This study aims to gain greater knowledge about the phenomenon cheerleading journalism and its existence in the Swedish sports journalism. We did this by making an impact in the media debate, to thereby identify key aspects of cheerleading journalism. These elements are then used to reach a preliminary definition of the phenomenon. This was followed by qualitative interviews with six Swedish sports journalists from newspapers Aftonbladet and Dagens Nyheter, with the aim to find out how they behaved the phenomenon. The results of the earlier debate and the answers from the respondents show that cheerleading journalism is nationalistic, biased and seeks an inclusive effect on its audience. This phenomenon is considered to be an inferior form of journalism and progress especially in reporting on the Swedish national teams and / or individual representatives of Sweden. The results have also been related to selected theories, agenda-setting, gatekeeping and framing.

The contemporary society reflects with countless of non-functional, i.e. luxurious, products which, with their redundant property, have a wasteful or negative impact on customers’ survival value and their living environment. Customers have a tendency to make biased judgments in the choice of the products they purchase, causing them to confuse many of such non-functional product features with the functional ones and constantly encourage their market production. This may reflect a variety of impacts on the market: decreasing the pace and course of development products’ actual, functional quality while increasing the pace and course of development for products’ non-functional, luxurious quality; constant increments of prices disproportionate to the product’s actual quality; discard of functional investments; utilization of wasteful resources; etc. This study will suggest a link between products’ price-quality disproportions in the development of new models and the customers’ biased emotional purchasing-decisions before buying a product. With that, it will indicate how customer’s emotions play a role in products’ future industrial quality developments and how biased emotional perceptions contribute to non-functional or luxurious quality developments. Consequently, implications are also found for the psychological and economical causalities behind our ubiquitously polluted environments.

Standardized tests are generally based on the norms of the majority population who share the same culture, language and above all, similar prior learning experiences. Because of this, it is problematic for clinicians to use standardized tests when assessing children from culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) backgrounds. Dynamic assessment (DA) is an alternative assessment method that can circumvent the dilemma of biased testing of children from CLD populations. By looking at the child‟s modifiability instead of static performance DA aims to target the child‟s true language ability. In this study the researchers investigated the difference between narratives produced before and after a dynamic assessment procedure called a test-teach-retest method. 16 South African preschool children were assessed in one session with a wordless picture sequence and then the test-teach-retest format was implemented. Each child was asked to tell the story in the pictures, followed by a dynamic assessment phase (focused questions), and finally a second elicitation of the narrative. No time elapsed between the tests and the teaching phase. Significant differences were found between the narratives elicited before and after the focused questions, but not for all measures. The use of mental state terms (what characters feel and think) increased from the first to the second narrative as well as some of the microstructural elements (linguistic structures) and macrostructural elements (global organization of the story). These results indicate that the use of narrative language in the field of DA has the potential of reducing bias when assessing children‟s narrative ability in culturally and linguistically diverse populations. / Standardiserade test är främst baserade på normer som hämtats från studier av majoritetsbe-folkningen i ett land. En befolkning delar ofta samma kultur och de är ofta enspråkiga, men framförallt delar de liknande upplevelser. På grund av detta är det mycket svårt för kliniker att använda standardiserade test på barn med flerspråkig bakgrund. Dynamic assessment (DA) är en alternativ och dynamisk bedömningsmetod som kan förhindra att språklig testning av mångkulturella barn blir partisk. DA är ett tillvägagångssätt som fokuserar på barns sätt att ta sig an språk medan traditionella mått främst används för att statiskt kvantifiera prestation. Den här uppsatsen syftar till att undersöka om det finns en skillnad i barns sätt att berätta en saga före och efter intervention med dynamisk bedömningsmetod. 16 sydafrikanska förskole-barn testades, varje barn fick vid ett tillfälle berätta två historier till samma bildsekvens. Mel-lan de två berättelserna ställde forskarna riktade frågor om innehållet, dessa riktade frågor motsvarar det dynamiska inslaget i bedömningen. Signifikanta resultat hittades, men inte för alla mätvärden. Signifikant var den ökade användningen av mental state terms (vad karaktä-rerna i en berättelse känner och tänker), samt ökningen av vissa mått på mikro- (lingvistisk struktur) och makrostruktur (övergripande organisering av berättelsen). Detta resultat tyder på att användningen av en dynamisk bedömningsmetod kan ge kliniker ett instrument som är opartiskt vid bedömning av mångkulturella barns berättarförmåga.

The Electron Energy Corporation (EEC) along with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is researching magnetic bearings. The purpose of this research was to design and develop a high-temperature (1000�F) magnetic bearing system using High Temperature Permanent Magnets (HTPM), developed by the EEC. The entire system consisted of two radial bearings, one thrust bearing, one motor and 2 sets of catcher bearings. This high temperature magnetic bearing system will be used in high performance, high speed and high temperature applications like space vehicles, jet engines and deep sea equipment. The bearing system had a target design to carry a load equal to 500 lb-f (2225N). Another objective was to design and build a test rig fixture to measure the load capacity of the designed high temperature radial magnetic bearing (HTRMB) called Radial Bearing Force Test Rig (RBFTR). A novel feature of this high temperature magnetic bearing is its homopolar construction which incorporates state of the art high temperature, 1000 �F, permanent magnets. A second feature is its fault tolerance capability which provides the desired control forces even if half the coils have failed. The permanent magnet bias of the radial magnetic bearing reduces the amount of current required for magnetic bearing operation. This reduces the power loss due to the coil current resistance and also increases the system efficiency because magnetic field of the HTPM is used to take up the major portion of the static load on the bearing. The bias flux of the homopolar radial bearing is produced by the EEC HTPM to reduce the related ohmic losses of an electromagnetic circuit significantly. An experimental procedure was developed using the Radial Bearing Force Test Rig (RBTFR) to measure actual load capacity of the designed bearing at the test rig. All the results obtained from the experiment were compiled and analyzed to determine the relation between bearing force, applied current and temperature.

When multiple objects are present in a visual scene, salient and behaviorally relevant objects are selectively processed at the expense of less salient or irrelevant objects. Here I used three lateralized components of the event-related potential â " the N2pc, Ptc, and SPCN â " to examine how objects compete for representation in our limited capacity visual system, and how task-relevant objects are selectively processed. Participants responded to the orientation of a color singleton target while ignoring a color singleton distractor. Competition between the objects was manipulated by presenting visual search arrays that contained only a target, only a distractor, or both objects together. In Experiment 1, observers did not know the color of the target in advance, whereas in Experiment 2 this information was provided. Experiment 3 was a control experiment to rule out low-level sensory explanations of the effects. The results suggest that the N2pc component indexes capture of attention by salient objects which is modulated both by competition between the objects and top-down knowledge. The Ptc component may index inhibition of return so that once an object is processed it is not selected again. The SPCN component may index enhancement of goal-relevant objects once task-irrelevant objects have been suppressed. Together these lateralized event-related potentials reveal the temporal dynamics of competition and selectivity in the human visual system.