Thesis (M.Com. (Industrial Psychology))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2007.

Thesis (M.A. (English))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2006.

Thesis (M.Comm. (Industrial Psychology))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2008.

Vocal communication allows animals to express distress, territoriality, and most important, to attract mates. In the African Clawed frog, Xenopus laevis, vocal communication is unique, because not only do males advertise for mates using elaborate click vocalizations, but also females are able to advertise their reproductive readiness by eliciting a "rapping" call. Sex differences in vocal repertoire match sex differences in vocal circuitry. During development, the vocal circuitry in the male grows increasingly sensitive to circulating androgens. Androgens induce tremendous growth in the cartilage and musculature of the peripheral vocal organ, the larynx. Net addition of synapses and motor fibers soon follow providing communication from the motor nucleus in the hindbrain to the vocal organ. The laryngeal motor nucleus, n. IX-X, accumulates androgens that serve to protect n. IX-X neurons from programmed apoptosis. Females, who have low levels of circulating androgens, experience a profound net loss on n. IX-X neurons during this developmental critical period. Once the frogs reach sexual maturity males possess larger and more numerous n. IX-X neurons than females, as well as sizable sex differences in laryngeal robustness and physiology. These measurable sex differences yield vastly different vocal programs. Androgens continue to maintain a critical role in governing breeding season trophic effects and mediating call production. Because male X. laevis are so susceptible to the effects of androgens, they may also be sensitive to the actions of endocrine disrupting chemical agents. The vocal system of X. laevis and its androgen sensitivity thus provide an ideal model for studying changes imposed to the anatomy and physiology of the system by the brominated flame retardant, PBDE-209, a putative anti-androgen and common pollutant. The present studies investigate how PBDE-209 affects the male vocal system when animals are exposed during the androgen-sensitive critical period of vocal system development and during adulthood when the tissues are utilizing androgens to vocalize. PBDE-209 effectively reduces male n. IX-X number and size at higher concentrations after exposure during the organizational critical period. Similar dose-dependent effects were observed in adult n. IX-X neurons. Moreover, PBDE-209 inhibited male-typical vocalization by reducing the number of calls elicited as well as the average call amplitude. These data strongly suggest that PBDE-209 has cytotoxic effects that alter n. IX-X anatomy and function, and may be mediated through pathways that include blocking the androgens necessary for proper vocal system development.

Call centers are an important function of most companies’ day to day business activities. They are often the link between a company and its customers and hugely impact the customer’s perspective or point of view (POV) of a company. A call center in the most general sense is a place, representing a business, which receives inbound calls from customers and/or makes outbound calls to customers, the latter being most commonly referred to as telemarketing. There was a time when a typical call center strictly consisted of agents who handled inbound/outbound calls; these agents are considered specialized agents. Generally speaking, a specialized agent is one trained, in-depth, in a particular area of knowledge. Most businesses have transgressed from your typical call center into contact centers. Contact centers operate essentially the same as a call center but interact with the customer in a variety of ways including, but not limited to: Phone, Mail, Fax, Email, and Internet (via online chat and instant messaging applications). The dynamics of these kinds of call centers has caused an increase in the need for agents to become more diverse in their talents and abilities to handle different types of calls. This has lead to specialized agents becoming general or “cross-trained” agents in which they are trained, broadly, over several areas of knowledge. The purpose of this thesis is to compare specialized agents to cross-trained agents and through the use of simulation, determine which of the two are more efficient and reliable in their ability to service the customer. This thesis has three major components: Simulation, Reliability Analysis, and Comparison. The results indicate that a cross-trained model is more reliable and efficient than a specialized model. Performance metrics common to call center literature, simulation, and Lean reliability systems were used to determine the effectiveness and reliability of the two models.

A continuing debate within Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research is how to elucidate, improve, and optimize the relationship between social context and technology use. Social context is conventionally understood as immediate use context while an understanding informed by social science suggests a wider scope, involving actors and structures. The focus of this thesis is the use of a communication environment using audio and video, established to span and connect three geographically distant call-centre workplaces in the Stockholm archipelago, Sweden. The research was carried out as intermittent fieldwork, spanning unevenly over a period of three years. The fieldwork was carried out at two sites: the premises of the Swedish Police Contact Centre in the archipelago and within the research project Community at a Distance. Methods included participant observation, interviews, and the analysis of documents, everyday talk, and images. This thesis offers a broad analysis of the socio-cultural context of technology use investigating the question how a sense of togetherness is promoted and negotiated at the Swedish Police Contact Centre and around and across the communication environment. The technology served as a means of overcoming the distance between the sites and making everyday encounters between the dispersed staff members possible. The sense of togetherness—fellowship and belonging, caring for each other, fostering a sense of solidarity, and achieving consensus in everyday practices—had an impact on the uses (and non-uses) of the technology. The use of the communication environment reflects the values and arrangements of the workplace and reproduces its conventions. The discussion is explorative, outlining an analytical approach to the socio-cultural context of technology use informed by interpretive social science, and provides a partial analysis of the organizational culture of the Contact Centre and its technology use. The argument is that analysis should aim at exploring the relationship between individual actors and social structures. Rewriting context allows us to understand the socio-cultural embeddedness of technology. While the analytic framework is not comprehensive for the purpose of detailed design implications in HCI research, it does provide a reconsidered terminology that links individual practices to socio-cultural context. / QC 20100629

Optioner är ett instrument som investerare kan använda för att spekulera i framtida upp-eller nedgångar på olika tillgångar. Om dessa optioner är felprissatta finns det möjlighet att göra riskfria vinster med hjälp av Stolls köp-säljparitet. Tidigare studier visar att marknaden inte alltid är effektiv i sin prissättning av aktieindexoptioner och att det därigenom finns möjlighet till arbitrage. Denna studie undersöker huruvida marknaden är effektiv i sin prissättning av VINX30 aktieindexoptioner, d.v.s. finns det möjlighet till arbitrag på VINX30 aktieindexoptioner? / Options are an instrument which investors can use to speculate in future pricemovements on different assets. If these options are misspriced there are an opportunity to get riskfree profit by using Stolls put-call parity. Earlier research shows that the market sometimes is inefficient when pricing stock index options allowing arbitrage. This study investigate whether the market is efficient in the pricing of VINX30 stock index options, i.e. are there arbitrage opportunities on VINX30 stock index options?

Den psykiska ohälsans utbredning är omfattande och är idag ett folkhälsoproblem i Sverige. Många människor söker vård för psykisk ohälsa genom telefonrådgivning. Syftet med denna studie har varit att undersöka och beskriva sjuksköterskors erfarenheter av att bemöta patienter med psykisk ohälsa i arbetet med sjukvårdsrådgivning. För att genomföra denna studie valdes en kvalitativ metod. Sju sjuksköterskor som arbetar med telefonrådgivning intervjuades. I resultatet framkom fem olika teman som benämndes: ”att känna att man betyder något för en annan människa”, ”att känna obehag inför samtal”, ”att inte kunna göra något och att känna sig otillräcklig”, ”att inte ha tid och resurser” samt ”att inte kunna se varandra”. Studien visar att det är viktigt för sjuksköterskan att betyda något för patienten. Den visar också att samtal om psykisk ohälsa kan innebära känslor som stress och obehag hos sjuksköterskorna. I studien framkommer för- och nackdelar med att inte ha en visuell kontakt mellan sjuksköterskan och patienten. / Mental illness is today an extensive problem, which affect the public health in Sweden. Many people with mental illness, try to get help through healthcare call centres. The aim of the study was to examine in what way nurses in healthcare call centres experience receiving patients, suffering from mental illness. To implement this study, a qualitative method was chosen. Seven nurses who work with counselling by phone were interviewed. Five themes appeared in the result: “to feel that you mean something to another human being”, “to feel discomfort with some calls”, “feeling insufficient and feelings of dejection”, “lack of time and resources” and “being unable see each other”. This study emphasizes that it is important for the nurses to mean something to the person who calls the healthcare call centre. Its also shows that calls about mental illness could create stress and discomfort feelings among the nurses. This study also shows advantages and disadvantages about the disability of not seeing the patient.

In spite of increasingly sophisticated workforce management tools, a significant gap remains between the goal of effective staffing and the present difficulty predicting the stochastic demand of inbound calls. We have investigated the hypothesized nonhomogeneous Poisson process model of modem pool callers of the University community. In our case, we tested if the arrivals could be approximated by a piecewise constant rate over short intervals. For each of 1 and 10-minute intervals, based on the close relationship between the Poisson process and the exponential distribution, the test results did not show any sign of homogeneous Poisson process. We have examined the hypothesis of a nonhomogeneous Poisson process by a transformed statistic. Quantitative and graphical goodness-of-fit tests have confirmed nonhomogeneous Poisson process. <p>Further analysis on the intensity function revealed that linear rate intensity was woefully inadequate in predicting time varying arrivals. For sinusoidal rate model, difficulty arose in setting the period parameter. Spline models, as an alternative to parametric modelling, had more control of balance between data fitting and smoothness, which was appealing to our analysis on call arrival process.

This study examines dynamic hedge policy of a company in a multi-period framework. The company begins to operate a project for a customer and it also has a subcontractor which completes an important part of the project by using an economic commodity. The customer will pay a fixed price to the company at the end of the project. Meanwhile, the company needs to pay the debt to the subcontractor and the amount of the debt depends on the spot price of the commodity at that time. The company is allowed to hedge for the commodity price fluctuations via future and option contracts. Since the company has a limited cash reserve as well as previously planned payments, it may face financial distress when the net cash balance decreases below zero. Consequently, the company maximizes the expected value of itself by minimizing the expected financial distress cost.