published_or_final_version / Chinese Historical Studies / Master / Master of Arts

The previous research on the relationship between demographic similarity and organizational outcomes has been based on the similarity-attraction arguments. In this dissertation, I argue that demographic similarity (or presence of people with similar attributes in a group) is associated not only with social integration but also with competition. The discussion leads to a new model for the effect of demographic similarity on turnover. More specifically, the model posits that structural characteristics such as the absence of a strong Internal Labor Market (ILM), and individual characteristics such as age and tenure moderate the relationship between demographic similarity and turnover. Using a sample of fifty-one top management groups, I attempted to validate the proposed model in the empirical analysis. I found that, among other things, in groups without a strong ILM, or when the individuals are young or brief in tenure, age similarity was positively associated with likelihood of turnover, confirming the presence of competition effects. Tenure similarity, and main effects of tenure, however, were not found to affect the turnover process in any significant way. Implications for future research are discussed.

This paper consists of the study of three of the most successful and widely known authors of Chicano Literature: Miguel Mendez, Rolando Hinojosa-Smith and Rudolfo Anaya. The theoretical principles on which this analysis is based correspond to the fields of linguistics and narratology. The first part of the study deals with the language choice process related to each of the three writers. The second part of the analysis was carried out by transferring results obtained from the study of live speech to the literary texts. These two different levels of language were confronted in order to verify if any correspondence among them exists.

A Thesis submitted to The University of Arizona College of Medicine - Phoenix in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Medicine. / Case based instruction (CBI) in medical education is a well established alternative to lecture format in the training of first and second year medical students. There have been previous documented attempts to include technology in CBI that have received positive feedback from students. Electronic health records are now being mandated by 2014 and historically there have been many barriers to adoption including lack of EHR technical skills by physicians. As a result, biomedical informatics education is being integrated into medical school curriculum with hope that better understanding of medical applications will prepare future physicians to utilize them. There has been no documented evidence of successful utilization of a commercial grade EHR within CBI despite many potential benefits in doing so. Previous attempts at accomplishing this task have been discovered but multiple challenges were encountered in developing a suitable educational EHR and as a result the attempt was unsuccessful. The following is a design project with the aim of highlighting specific design requirements, as well as, a theoretical usage scenario of a commercial grade EHR in CBI. Outlined as well is experimental design for future evaluation of such a system. There will be many 4 technological challenges that will need to be overcome and numerous resource requirements to get such a project functional. Despite this, all aspects of such a system are technologically feasible. Completion of such a system could result in potential commercial benefit and provide a platform for further investigation of early EHR training effect on physician-EHR acclimation.

Inter-organisational knowledge transfer is of central interest both as an academic topic and in business practice. However, despite the attention given to the importance of this subject from different perspectives in various contexts, little is known about how knowledge is transferred from vendors to clients in information systems (IS) outsourcing. This research attempts to address this apparent theoretical and empirical deficiency by providing a deeper understanding and more holistic analysis of the key factors which facilitate or inhibit knowledge transfer success in IS outsourcing. This study employed a qualitative, multiple case study approach in the interpretive paradigm. Data was collected mainly from the IS departments of three public sector organisations in Oman. Oman was chosen as the context for the study due to its rapid growth in recent years and the opportunity to consider the many major IS outsourcing projects which have been undertaken by its public sector. Through semi-structured interviews, this study explored the perspectives of the internal IS staff on their experience of knowledge transfer and learning from vendors through various IS outsourcing projects. Written and electronic documentations as well as non-participant observations also served as important triangulation and complementary sources in understanding the phenomenon being studied and as means of gaining additional perspectives and further insights on key issues. The empirical evidence demonstrated that there are five sets of factors which facilitate or inhibit knowledge transfer success in IS outsourcing. These are: knowledge (knowledge tacitness and knowledge complexity), client (learning intent, absorptive capacity and motivation), vendor (vendor capability, vendor credibility and vendor openness), relationship (relationship quality, relationship duration, relationship governance and organisational distance) and knowledge transfer mechanisms (formal and informal). The findings of this study contributed and extended the growing body of research on IS outsourcing by developing a novel, holistic conceptual framework which examined five sets of factors that impact knowledge transfer success. Additionally, it provided prescriptive value for practitioners seeking to realise efficient and effective knowledge transfer in IS outsourcing.

The aim of this thesis is to show that standard approaches to grammatical case fail to provide an explanatory account of such cases in Estonian. In Estonian, grammatical cases form a complex system of semantic contrasts, with the case-marking on nouns alternating with each other in certain constructions, even though the apparent grammatical functions of the noun phrases themselves are not changed. This thesis demonstrates that such alternations, and the differences in interpretation which they induce, are context dependent. This means that the semantic contrasts which the alternating grammatical cases express are available in some linguistic contexts and not in others, being dependent, among other factors, on the semantics of the casemarked noun and the semantics of the verb it occurs with. Hence, traditional approaches which treat grammatical case as markers of syntactic dependencies and account for associated semantic interpretations by matching cases directly to semantics not only fall short in predicting the distribution of cases in Estonian but also result in over-analysis due to the static nature of the theories which the standard approach to case marking comprises. On the basis of extensive data, it is argued that grammatical cases in Estonian have underspecified semantic content that is not truth-conditional, but inferential, i.e. it interacts with linguistic context and discourse. Inspired by the assumptions of Relevance Theory (Wilson & Sperber 1993, 2002, 2004) and Dynamic Syntax (Cann et al 2005), it is proposed that grammatical cases in Estonian provide procedural information: instead of taking cases to encode grammatical relations directly, and matching them to truth-conditional semantics, it is argued that it is more useful and explanatory to construe case marking in Estonian as providing information on how to process the case-marked expression and interpret it within an immediate discourse (or sentence). This means that grammatical cases in Estonian are seen to encode a heavily underspecified semantics which is enriched by pragmatic processes in context. In this way, certain problematic constructions in Estonian, such as transitive clauses in which the object is marked by either genitive or nominative, depending on number (often referred to as the accusative in the relevant literature, e.g. Ackerman & Moore 1999, 2001; Hiietam 2003, 2004) and constructions in which the nominative occurs on the object both with singular and plural nouns, are shown to have a unitary explanation.

The time and process used to write a case study depends on several factors. There are different things to consider to save time and to make the process easier. First of all the author might need a certain skillset and experience. Second is to understand the importance of being prepared. It takes much time to write a case study and if the preparations are not taken in seriously consideration it may jeopardize the whole study. A deadline and timeline for the process is necessary to control the outcome. Normally the process involves a case study release form and a success letter where the last approval is made before the publication of the case study is done.

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Case-based reasoning solves new problems by re-using the solutions of previously solved similar problems and is popular because many of the knowledge engineering demands of conventional knowledge-based systems are removed. The content of the case knowledge container is critical to the performance of case-based classification systems. However, the knowledge engineer is given little support in the selection of suitable techniques to maintain and monitor the case base. This research investigates the coverage, competence and problem-solving capacity of case knowledge with the aim of developing techniques to model and maintain the case base. We present a novel technique that creates a model of the case base by measuring the uncertainty in local areas of the problem space based on the local mix of solutions present. The model provides an insight into the structure of a case base by means of a complexity profile that can assist maintenance decision-making and provide a benchmark to assess future changes to the case base. The distribution of cases in the case base is critical to the performance of a case-based reasoning system. We argue that classification boundaries represent important regions of the problem space and develop two complexity-guided algorithms which use boundary identification techniques to actively discover cases close to boundaries. We introduce a complexity-guided redundancy reduction algorithm which uses a case complexity threshold to retain cases close to boundaries and delete cases that form single class clusters. The algorithm offers control over the balance between maintaining competence and reducing case base size. The performance of a case-based reasoning system relies on the integrity of its case base but in real life applications the available data invariably contains erroneous, noisy cases. Automated removal of these noisy cases can improve system accuracy. In addition, error rates can often be reduced by removing cases to give smoother decision boundaries between classes. We show that the optimal level of boundary smoothing is domain dependent and, therefore, our approach to error reduction reacts to the characteristics of the domain by setting an appropriate level of smoothing. We introduce a novel algorithm which identifies and removes both noisy and boundary cases with the aid of a local distance ratio. A prototype interface has been developed that shows how the modelling and maintenance approaches can be used in practice in an interactive manner. The interface allows the knowledge engineer to make informed maintenance choices without the need for extensive evaluation effort while, at the same time, retaining control over the process. One of the strengths of our approach is in applying a consistent, integrated method to case base maintenance to provide a transparent process that gives a degree of explanation.

Thesis (M.Fam. Med.)--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Health Sciences, 2013.