This Thesis explores the development of word-initial s+plosive consonant clusters in the speech of Swedish children between the ages of 1;6 and 4;6. Development in the word-initial consonant clusters is viewed as being determined by 1) the children’s ability to articulate the target sequence of consonants, 2) the level of understanding of which acoustic features in the adult model production are significant for the signalling of the intended distinction, and 3) the children’s ability to apply established production patterns only to productions where the acquired feature agrees with the adult target, to achieve a contrast between rival output forms. This Thesis employs a method where output forms are contrasted with attempted productions of potential homonym target words. Thus, development is quantified as an increase in the manifestations of phonetic features where it agrees with the adult norm, coupled by a decrease in the same feature in output forms where it is inappropriate according to the specifications of the phonological system of the ambient language. Acoustic investigations of cues of voicing, aspiration, place of articulation and syllable onset complexity, and auditory investigations of place, manner and syllable onset complexity were conducted. The Thesis has four outcomes. One, a description of the perceptual quality of the productions in terms of place, manner, voicing and syllable onset complexity is presented. Two, a developmental sequence of stable acquisition of these features is proposed; manner is shown to be acquired first, followed by syllable onset complexity and place of articulation. Evidence is provided that the voiced/aspirated distinction is still being acquired at the end of the investigated age period. Three, the developmental use of acoustic cues of place and voicing are described. Voice Onset Time and Spectral Skewness are shown to be used by children in order to increase the likeness to the adult target in terms of voicing and place of articulation. Aspiration Amplitude is shown to be used as an auxiliary cue to Voice Onset Time. The place cues Spectral Tilt Change, F2, Spectral Mean and Spectral Variance were shown to be used in order to refine already produced consonants rather than approach the adult target model. Four, the Thesis provides evidence of periods of confusions in the output of children. With the reductions of these patterns of confusion, evidence is provided of children’s re-organisation of their internal representation of the consonant to be produced. / Denna avhandling undersöker utvecklingen av ordinitiala konsonantkluster av formen s+klusil i talet hos svenska barn mellan åldrarna 1;6 och 4;6. Utvecklingen av de ordinitiala klustren betraktas som bestämd av 1) barnets förmåga att artikulera den konsonantsekvens som utgör målet, 2) barnets förståelse för vilka akustiska särdrag i den vuxna målproduktionen som är signifikanta för att signalera en viss distinktion och 3) barnets förmåga att tillämpa ett etablerat produktionsmönster endast på de produktioner där det tillägnade draget överensstämmer med den vuxna målproduktionen, så att en kontrast uppnås mellan konkurrerande utformer. Avhandlingen tillämpar en metod där producerade utformer kontrasteras med produktioner av målord som utgör potentiella homonymer till dessa. Utvecklingen kan då kvantifieras som en ökning av antalet förekomster av ett fonetiskt drag som överensstämmer med den vuxna normen för den relevanta kontexten, kopplad till en minskning av antalet förekomster av samma drag i kontext där draget är inkorrekt givet det fonologiska systemet i det språk som tillägnas. De drag som undersöktes var de akustiska korrelaten till stämbandston, aspiration, artikulationsställe och komplexitet i stavelseansatsen, och vidare de auditiva korrelaten till artikulationsställe, artikulationssätt och komplexitet i stavelseansatsen. Fyra resultat redovisas. För det första presenteras en beskrivning av den perceptuella kvaliteten hos barnens produktioner i termer av artikulationsställe, artikulationssätt och komplexitet. För det andra föreslås en utvecklingssekvens för stabilt tillägnande av dessa drag: artikulationssätt tillägnas först, följt av komplexitet hos stavelseansatsen och artikulationsställe. Sist tillägnas distinktionen mellan tonande och aspirerad klusil, där data visar att draget inte tillägnats till fullo vid slutet av det undersökta åldersintervallet. För det tredje ger avhandlingen en beskrivning av hur barnen utvecklar sitt bruk av akustiska korrelat till artikulationsställe och ton. Voice Onset Time och snedhet i spektrum används för att närma sig det vuxna målet gällande aspiration och artikulationsställe. Aspirationsamplitud används som ett hjälpkorrelat till VOT vad gäller fonetisk aspiration. Andra korrelat för artikulationsställe, som förändring i spektral lutning, F2, spektralt medelvärde och spektral varians, används för att förfina de egna produktionerna snarare än för att få produktionen att närma sig det vuxna målet. För det fjärde ges i avhandlingen evidens för perioder då barnens produktion uppvisar förväxlingar vad avser distributionen hos vissa fonetiska drag. Minskade förekomster av sådana förväxlingar visar på en omstrukturering av barnens underliggande representation för den konsonant som ska produceras.

Landscape effects on species performance currently receives much attention. Habitat loss and fragmentation are considered major threats to species diversity. Deciduous forests in southern Sweden are previous wooded pastures that have become species-rich communities appearing as islands in agricultural landscapes, varying in species composition. Actaea spicata is a long-lived plant occurring in these forests. In 150 populations in a 10-km2 area, I studied pre-dispersal seed predation, seed dispersal and pollination. I investigated spatio-temporal dynamics of a tritrophic system including Actaea, a specialist seed predator, Eupithecia immundata, and its parasitoids. In addition, effects of biotic context on rodent fruit dispersal and effects of flowering time and flower number on seed set, seed predation and parasitization were studied. Insect incidences of both trophic levels were related to resource population size and small Eupithecia populations were maintained by the rescue effect. There was a unimodal relationship between seed predation and plant population size. Seed predator populations frequently went extinct in small plant populations, resulting in low average seed predation. Parasitoids were present in large plant populations but did not affect seed predator density. Seed predators aggregated at edges, relaxing seed predation in patch interiors. Flowering phenology was unrelated to seed set and insect incidence. A higher flower number did not influence seed predation but was associated with higher seed set and a tendency for a higher parasitization rate. In the study on fruit dispersal more fruits were removed inside than outside populations. Within plant populations more fruits were removed from large aggregations. Overall, this thesis underlines the importance of plant-animal interactions during different phases of the life cycle. The spatial configuration of host plants plays an important role for the outcome of plant-animal interactions and trophic cascades.

The dissertation Reading Texts or ”Reality” investigate teachers use of interpretive communities in teaching literature in secondary school. It discusses how different learning outcomes generates from three interpretory frames for reading. Teachers can be looked upon as critics when they show unexperienced readers why and how they read an interprete literary texts. In their teaching,they don´t relate only to their students but also to thier own conception of subject matter and to a broader discourse in society that deals with questions of why and how we read literature. Following voices of the discourse are included in the study: eight teachers, curriculum texts, a journal for the profession and a journal för scholors. Teachers combine several aims in their teaching of literature. They use literature to discuss life, gender and problems related to young people, text as faction. But, they also try to teach their students about narrathology and how to understand and interpretate fictional texts, text as fiction and a world of signs. The curriculum, however, means that literature is read only to gain knowledge about the world,oneself and other people. A contradiction is that one of the criterias for assement includes knowledge of texts and methodology from the academic subject. One of the other voices in the discourse, a journal for scholors, talk about the literary texts but very seldom about teaching the texts. Another voice, a journal for teachers in Swedish, follows the curriculum closely and discusses reading literature as a way to get knowledge of the world. Research in subject matter didactics can investigate teaching, relate different aims to different outcomes and show possibilities for teaching literature and reading comprehension. If we choose only one interpretive community, we get one kind of reading comprehension.If we combine two in a complex teaching strategy, we extend learning and reading comprehension of our students.

Background: A warrant is a derivative that is normally issued over stocks. During the last financial crisis, the trading of warrants reached new records. The high leverage and the complexity of the product make the warrant a risky investment. Financial products such as warrants therefore imply a significant purchase decision for an individual and the consequences of making a poorly thought-out choice can be of considerable importance. Financial products require a high degree of involvement since the decision process is characterized by uncertainty of outcome and complexity of the product. Traditional theories on consumer decision making build on the assumptions of self-interest and rationality. In the context of financial services, the rationality of the decision process has been questioned within the field of behavioral economics, a field that suggests that the consumer is unable to make rational decisions as well as comparative judgments. Purpose: With a theoretical basis in the traditional consumer decision process, the purpose of this thesis is to examine and describe the decision making of young investors that buy warrants. Methodology: The study can be described as abdicative, since the subject of this thesis is based on an empirical problem observed in reality as well as based on existing theories on the subject. The thesis is furthermore a mixed qualitative and quantitative study. The empirical information was gathered using an Internet survey that was sent out to young investors that are members or are connected to financial associations or societies at different universities. Results: The study is considered to show that the decision making of young investors can be described as neither optimal nor rational when buying warrants. The respondents seldom seem to make efficient and as rational decisions as the traditional decision process model implies. Instead, individual characteristics and attitudes of the young investors affect their decision making.

Syftet med vår uppsats är att ur ett sociologiskt samhällsteoretiskt perspektiv, ge både oss själva och läsaren en ökad förståelse för och synliggöra flickor från vissa etniska grupper och deras intim- och familjerelationer i Sverige. För att kunna förstå flickornas eventuella problem och konflikter i familjen tar vi hjälp av Niklas Luhmanns systemteori och hans analys av intima relationer och familjen i det moderna samhället. De frågeställningar som besvaras är: • Vilka skillnader mellan det förmoderna och moderna samhällets syn på intim- och familjerelationer ställs flickorna i vårt material inför? • Hur kan dessa skillnader tolkas och förstås utifrån Luhmanns systemteoretiska analys av den moderna familjen? Vår studie är ett teoretiskt arbete och grundar sig på litteraturstudier. För att kunna besvara våra frågeställningar har vi inspirerats av och löst anknutit oss till en abduktiv metod. Undersökningen tar sin utgångspunkt dels i en nyligen gjord studie av Åsa Andersson, Inte samma lika (2003), och dels i den internationellt erkände sociologen Niklas Luhmanns systemteori och hans analys av intima relationer och familjen. För att kunna få en sociologisk samhällsteoretisk förståelse för och kunna placera in familjen i det moderna samhällets kontext presenterar vi de delar av Luhmanns teori och begreppsapparat som vi ansåg relevanta för ämnet. Det gör vi för att kunna förstå hur familjen fungerar i det moderna samhället. Sammanfattningsvis kan vi konstatera att de skillnader i synen på intim- och familjerelationer som flickorna har att förhålla sig till finns i såväl den offentliga som den privata sfären. Skillnaderna är flera under respektive sfär men de mest framträdande skillnaderna handlar om moral och förnuft där familjen och den egna etniska gruppen använder mekanismer som skam och skuld för att reducera en ökad kontingens och komplexitet som råder i det moderna samhället. Utifrån flickornas beskrivningar kan vi förstå att deras förväntningar i hög grad skiljer sig från föräldrarnas såväl i valet av äktenskapspartner, hemarbete, mer frihet och ökad jämställdhet i form av utbildning och ekonomiskt oberoende. Utifrån en systemteoretisk synvinkel kan vi även se skillnader på såväl generell som specifik nivå, förändringar av intima relationer kan alltså kopplas till samhällsutvecklingen och dess semantiska koder knutna till familjen som system.

The study examines the relationship between project leadership styles and success when affected by pressures such as time, project type, complexity and cultural diversity. The research examines the two well-known leadership approaches of transformational- and transactional leadership, and argues that transactional leadership, which has less focus on the leader-follower relationship, is more suitable and successful in projects with limited time. The transformational leadership style, which has more focus on vision and relationship between the followers takes time to build, and is therefore more successful for long-term projects. In order to examine this, a questionnaire was developed and sent out to 56 project leaders around the world. Findings indicate that time in projects have a negative effect on project success, and that both transformational and transactional leadership style has a dampening effect on this negative relationship, hence increasing the success. Furthermore, the study finds strong correlation between the two leadership styles, indicating that these should not be seen as two different attitudes, as leaders can show behaviors from both the transformational and transactional leadership style, possibly explaining the similar dampening effect. No further significant moderating effects were found in the variables project type, complexity and the project’s cultural diversity.

While the challenge of improving young North Americans’ civic engagement seems to lie in the hands of schools, studying alternative ways of teaching citizenship education could benefit the current educational system. In this context, free schools (i.e., schools run democratically by students and teachers), guided by a philosophy that aims at engaging students civically through the democratic activities that they support, offer a relatively unexplored ground for research. The present inquiry is a case study using tools of ethnography and drawing upon some principles of complexity thinking. It aims at understanding students’ citizenship education experiences during democratic activities in a Canadian free school. It describes many experiences that can arise from these activities. They occurred within a school that operated democratically based on a consensus-model. More precisely, they took place during two kinds of democratic activities: class meetings, which regulated the social life of the school, and judicial committees, whose function was to solve conflicts at the school. During these activities, students mostly experienced a combination of feelings of appreciation, concernment and empowerment. While experiencing these feelings, they predominantly engaged in decision-making and conflict resolution processes. During these processes, students modified their conflict resolutions skills, various conceptions, and their participation in democratic activities and in the school. Based on these findings, the study concludes that students can develop certain skills and attitude associated to citizenship education during these activities and become active from a citizenship perspective. Hence, these democratic activities represent alternative strategies that can assist educators in teaching about citizenship.

Communication complexity is an area of complexity theory that studies an abstract model of computation called a communication protocol. In a $k$-player communication protocol, an input to a known function is partitioned into $k$ pieces of $n$ bits each, and each piece is assigned to one of the players in the protocol. The goal of the players is to evaluate the function on the distributed input by using as little communication as possible. In a Number-On-Forehead (NOF) protocol, the input piece assigned to each player is metaphorically placed on that player's forehead, so that each player sees everyone else's input but its own. In a Number-In-Hand (NIH) protocol, the piece assigned to each player is seen only by that player. Overall, the study of communication protocols has been used to obtain lower bounds and impossibility results for a wide variety of other models of computation. Two of the main contributions presented in this thesis are negative results on the NOF model of communication, identifying limitations of NOF protocols. Together, these results consitute stepping stones towards a better fundamental understanding of this model. As the first contribution, we show that randomized NOF protocols are exponentially more powerful than deterministic NOF protocols, as long as $k \le n^c$ for some constant $c$. As the second contribution, we show that nondeterministic NOF protocols are exponentially more powerful than randomized NOF protocols, as long as $k \le \delta \cdot \log n$ for some constant $\delta < 1$. For the third major contribution, we turn to the NIH model and we present a positive result. Informally, we show that a NIH communication protocol for a function $f$ can simulate a Stack Machine (a Turing Machine augmented with a stack) for a related function $F$, consisting of several instances of $f$ bundled together. Using this simulation and known communication complexity lower bounds, we obtain the first known (space vs. number of passes) trade-off lower bounds for Stack Machines.

Older patients comprise a large portion of patients in the acute care setting. Registered Nurses (RNs) are the main care providers in the hospital setting. RNs caring for older hospitalized patients are affected by many factors including workload pressures, issues related to the acute care environment and attitudes toward older patients. However, a literature review identified a limited number of studies exploring the RNs experience of caring for older patients in the acute care setting. This study explored the RNs experience of caring for older patients (age 65 and older) on an orthopedic unit in an acute care hospital. Saturation was reached with a purposive sample of nine RNs working on the orthopedic unit, including eight females and 1 male. Participants were interviewed using broad open-ended questions, followed by questions more specific to emerging themes. All interviews were audio-taped and transcribed verbatim. Data were analyzed using Glasers (1992) grounded theory approach. Participants described the basic social problem as dealing with the complexity of older patients. The basic social process identified was the concept of looking beyond. Looking beyond was described as looking at the big picture to find what lies outside the scope of the ordinary. Three sub-processes of looking beyond were identified as connecting, searching, and knowing. Connecting was described as getting to know patients as a person by taking time, respecting and understanding the individual. Searching was described as digging deeper, searching for the unknown by looking for clues and mining everywhere for information. Knowing was described as intuitively knowing what is going to happen and what the older patient needs by pulling it all together and knowing what to expect. These dynamic sub-processes provided the RN with the relationship and information required to look beyond to manage the older patients complexity. The results of this study have implications for nursing practice, education and research. These findings may provide RNs with a process to manage the complex care of a large portion of our population.

The purpose of this study was to examine the relative effectiveness of three-dimensional visualization techniques for learning about protein conformation and molecular motion in association with a ligand and receptor binding event. Increasingly complex versions of the same binding event were depicted in each of four animated treatments. Students (n = 131) were tested at three time points, and over both the short and longer term, the most complex of the four animated treatments was the most successful at fostering students’ understanding of the events depicted. A follow-up study including eight biology students was conducted to gain greater insight into the students’ underlying thought processes and better characterize their understanding of the animated representations. Analysis of verbal reports and eye tracking data suggest that students are able to attend to the same narrative elements regardless of the level of complexity depicted in each animation. Analysis of verbal protocol data revealed a positive correlation between the number of explanatory statements expressed by participants and the complexity of the animation viewed. As well, prior knowledge was positively correlated with the number of explanatory statements contained in each protocol. Overall, students demonstrated an understanding of protein conformation and molecular crowding. However results suggest that students have difficulty understanding and associating randomness with molecular events. The verbal reports contained several instances of students’ attaching agency to protein and ligand, anthropomorphizing their movements and subsequent binding. Ordinarily cellular events, owing to their sheer complexity, are depicted in a highly schematized, simplified form. The results of this study would suggest that under select circumstances this may not be the most appropriate approach to depicting dynamic events. However additional attention must be given to exploring techniques that can satisfactorily balance the random nature of molecular events with narrative explanations of these processes.