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Using x-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS), x-ray emission spectroscopy (XES) and x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) in combination with density functional theory (DFT) the changes in electronic and geometric structure of hydrocarbons upon adsorption are determined. The chemical bonding is analyzed and the results provide new insights in the mechanisms responsible for dehydrogenation in heterogeneous catalysis. In the case of alkanes, n-octane and methane are studied. XAS and XES show significant changes in the electronic structure upon adsorption. XES shows new adsorption induced occupied states and XAS shows quenching of CH*/Rydberg states in n-octane. In methane the symmetry forbidden gas phase lowest unoccupied molecular orbital becomes allowed due to broken symmetry. New adsorption induced unoccupied features with mainly metal character appear just above the Fermi level in XA spectra of both adsorbed methane and n-octane. These changes are not observed in DFT total energy geometry optimizations. Comparison between experimental and computed spectra for different adsorbate geometries reveals that the molecular structures are significantly changed in both molecules. The C-C bonds in n-octane are shortened upon adsorption and the C-H bonds are elongated in both n-octane and methane. In addition ethylene and acetylene are studied as model systems for unsaturated hydrocarbons. The validity of both the Dewar-Chatt-Duncanson chemisorption model and the alternative spin-uncoupling picture is confirmed, as well as C-C bond elongation and upward bending of the C-H bonds. The bonding of ethylene to Cu(110) and Ni(110) are compared and the results show that the main difference is the amount of back-donation into the molecular π* orbital, which allows the molecule to desorb molecularly from the Cu(110) surface, whereas it is dehydrogenated upon heating on the Ni(110) surface. Acetylene is found to adsorb in two different adsorption sites on the Cu(110) surface at liquid nitrogen temperature. Upon heating the molecules move into one of these sites due to attractive adsorbate-adsorbate interaction and only one adsorbed species is present at room temperature, at which point the molecules start reacting to form benzene. The bonding of the two species is very similar in both sites and the carbon atoms are rehybridized essentially to sp2.

Over the last few decades, increased flexibility and lack of stability in employment has made job insecurity a work stressor that keeps affecting more and more  employees. This study investigates to what extent core self-evaluations influence the appraisal of job insecurity in a Swedish sample of white-collar workers (N=425). By applying the Preacher & Hayes’ macro for multiple mediation the study also tests if there is a mediating effect of coping style on the relation between core self-evaluations and job insecurity. The results show that core self-evaluations have predictive validity in relation to job insecurity. Core self-evaluations are also associated with task-based coping style. However, no mediating effect of coping style was found on the relation between core self-evaluations and job insecurity. / Stockholm Stress Center / Job insecurity from a gender perspective

In order to face the dramatic changes of global economy and survive under highly competitive environment, a lot of companies put efforts to decrease production costs and improve customer service in recent years. Many organizations, which will concentrate on their core business and outsource the others, are trying to create simple and flexible organization structure to lower costs and improve working efficiency. Those show that outsourcing, which more and more organizations pay attention to, has become an important issue in these years. Based on current human resource function classification both in Taiwan and other countries, we would like to explore and discuss those HR functions which companies in Taiwan tend to outsource now. We have surveyed 219 companies in Taiwan that included 119 companies which outsourced some HR functions and 100 companies which did not outsource HR functions. The analytical methods, descriptive analyses and Chi-square test, were adopted in this study to help us understand which HR functions those companies choose to outsource. Moreover, we will also discuss what factors they have concerned during the outsourcing decision making, the relationship among company size, industrial field, year of establishment, and HR outsourcing functions, the difficulty they met while HR function outsourcing, outsourcers selection, and the reasons why those companies choose not to outsource HR functions in this study. The result indicates that most companies tend to outsource their HR functions of recruitment and training. The reasons to outsource those HR functions are mainly on cost-effective concerns and organizational core competence development as well. Besides, no significant result shows on the relationship among company size, year of establishment, industrial field and HR outsourcing functions. The main difficulties which those companies meet are that there are not enough qualified outsourcers to choose and they can not keep a good relationship with those outsourcers. While considering the qualified outsourcers, their experience and performance in the past are the major concern which implies that the transaction cost is the important issue for those companies. The dissatisfied outsourcers¡¦ service and the internal important information protection in the company are the main concerns for those who did not outsource their HR functions.

Improving core performance by reshuffling/reloading the fuel blocks within the core is one of the in-core fuel management methods with two major benefits: a possibility to improve core life and increase core safety. VHTR is a hexagonal annular core reactor with reflectors in the center and outside the fuel rings (3-rings). With the block type fuel assemblies, there is an opportunity for muti-dimensional fuel bocks movement within the core during scheduled reactor refueling operations. As the core is symmetric, by optimizing the shuffle operation of 1/6th of the core, the same process can be repeated through the remaining 5/6th of the core. VHTR has 170 fuel blocks in the core of which 50 are control rod blocks and are not movable to regular fuel block locations. The reshuffling problem now is to find the best combination of 120 fuel blocks that has a minimized power peaking and/or increased core life under safety constraints among the 120! combinations. For evaluating each LP during the shuffling, a fitness function that is developed from the parameters affecting the power peaking and core life is required. Calculating the power peaking at each step using Monte Carlo simulations on a whole core exact geometry model is a time consuming process and not feasible. A parameter is developed from the definitions of reactivity and power peaking factor called the localized reactivity potential that can be estimated for every block movement based on the reaction rates and atom densities of the initial core burnup at the time of shuffling. The algorithm (ReloPSO) is based on Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm the search process by improving towards the optimum from a set of random LPs based on the fitness function developed with the reactivity potential parameter. The algorithm works as expected and the output obtained has a flatter reactivity profile than the input. The core criticality is found to increase when shuffled closer to end of life. Detailed analysis on the burn runs after shuffling at different time of core operation is required to correlate the estimated and actual values of the reactivity parameter and to optimize the time of shuffle.

電感磁性材料為一個基礎而傳統的材料，在所有電子產品的電子線路中都包含了電感，它的形狀和材料特性非常寛廣，依使用的電路範圍和應用領域而有所不同。電感成品最重要的材料之一是鐵芯，電芯這個產業中雖然是一個技術門檻不高的產業，但它却是一個不易容取代和不可缺少的產業。 台灣電子產業外移的變遷史中，電感傳統產業最先因成本和環境因素外移，但外移之後因技術門檻不高使得不斷有競爭者進入市場，整個產業毛利下降，進入完全競爭的經濟市場，陷入一個紅海領域。 如何透過有系統的整理和分析，從價格領導到差異化和聚焦策略，將黑手產業加值--電感磁性材料產業未來經營策略之個案研究。 / Inductance is one of the most essential components in electronic circuit since all of the electronic products contain it. According to different kinds of applications and the required range of impedance in electronic circuit, they vary from their shapes and properties of materials. However, inductances are basically composed of coils and cores. Cores (magnetic material) are tremendously important because they can easily affect the properties of inductances. Admittedly, manufacturing cores is not complicated in technique since it is easy to understand the principle operation of inductances, but it is still an irreplaceable and indispensible industry. Moreover, the cost of manufacturing was rapidly rising in 80/90’s due to higher and higher price of labor and the shortage of manpower in Taiwan. Gradually, traditional industry moved out to low-cost area such as China, Indonesia and Vietnam. This industry becomes more and more competitive because products are not easy to be differentiated and technical barriers in producing are easily overcome. Therefore, how to cost down and manage the process of manufacturing are the major issues for any firms in the industry. The goal of the study is to seek the appropriate strategy for the business growth in manufacturing inductances. Based on our analysis, the considered strategies include focusing and differentiating products (maximizing the additive value of products), instead of price reducing.

Core self-evaluation (CSE) begreppet har i tidigare studier visat sig predicera prestation i arbetssammanhang. Antaganden har gjorts om att även andra personlighetsdrag borde ingå i detta begrepp för att ytterligare förstärka dess prediktionsförmåga. Det har dock ännu inte klarlagts exakt vilka personlighetsdrag detta skulle gälla. Tidigare forskning har föreslagit extraversion som en förstärkning av CSE-modellen. Hypotesen i föreliggande undersökning var att CSE är en prediktor för prestation, samt att extraversion förklarar varians i prestation utöver CSE och därmed stärker modellen. Vidare förutsätts motivation som visat sig vara en direkt prediktor för prestation, men även visat sig mediera samband mellan personlighetsdrag och prestation förklara varians i prestation utöver CSE och extraversion. En enkätundersökning med 80 deltagare genomfördes på ett privat svenskt företag i partihandelsbranschen. Resultaten visade att CSE predicerade prestation med en förklarad varians på 21 %. Denna ökade med 11 % när extraversion inkluderades, och motivation bidrog med ytterligare 10 %. Studiens resultat styrker därmed att personlighetsdraget extraversion borde ingå i CSE-modellen inom forskningen av arbetsprestation.

All major semiconductor companies are now shipping multi-cores. Phones, PCs, laptops, and mobile internet devices will all require software that can make effective use of these cores. Writing high-performance parallel software is difficult, time-consuming and error prone, increasing both time-to-market and cost. Software outlives hardware; it typically takes longer to develop new software than hardware, and legacy software tends to survive for a long time, during which the number of cores per system will increase. Development and maintenance productivity will be improved if parallelism and technical details are managed by the machine, while the programmer reasons about the application as a whole. Parallel software should be written using domain-specific high-level languages or extensions. These languages reveal implicit parallelism, which would be obscured by a sequential language such as C. When memory allocation and program control are managed by the compiler, the program's structure and data layout can be safely and reliably modified by high-level compiler transformations. One important application domain contains so-called stream programs, which are structured as independent kernels interacting only through one-way channels, called streams. Stream programming is not applicable to all programs, but it arises naturally in audio and video encode and decode, 3D graphics, and digital signal processing. This representation enables high-level transformations, including kernel unrolling and kernel fusion. This thesis develops new compiler and run-time techniques for stream programming. The first part of the thesis is concerned with a statically scheduled stream compiler. It introduces a new static partitioning algorithm, which determines which kernels should be fused, in order to balance the loads on the processors and interconnects. A good partitioning algorithm is crucial if the compiler is to produce efficient code. The algorithm also takes account of downstream compiler passes---specifically software pipelining and buffer allocation---and it models the compiler's ability to fuse kernels. The latter is important because the compiler may not be able to fuse arbitrary collections of kernels. This thesis also introduces a static queue sizing algorithm. This algorithm is important when memory is distributed, especially when local stores are small. The algorithm takes account of latencies and variations in computation time, and is constrained by the sizes of the local memories. The second part of this thesis is concerned with dynamic scheduling of stream programs. First, it investigates the performance of known online, non-preemptive, non-clairvoyant dynamic schedulers. Second, it proposes two dynamic schedulers for stream programs. The first is specifically for one-dimensional stream programs. The second is more general: it does not need to be told the stream graph, but it has slightly larger overhead. This thesis also introduces some support tools related to stream programming. StarssCheck is a debugging tool, based on Valgrind, for the StarSs task-parallel programming language. It generates a warning whenever the program's behaviour contradicts a pragma annotation. Such behaviour could otherwise lead to exceptions or race conditions. StreamIt to OmpSs is a tool to convert a streaming program in the StreamIt language into a dynamically scheduled task based program using StarSs. / Totes les empreses de semiconductors produeixen actualment multi-cores. Mòbils,PCs, portàtils, i dispositius mòbils d’Internet necessitaran programari quefaci servir eficientment aquests cores. Escriure programari paral·lel d’altrendiment és difícil, laboriós i propens a errors, incrementant tant el tempsde llançament al mercat com el cost. El programari té una vida més llarga queel maquinari; típicament pren més temps desenvolupar nou programi que noumaquinari, i el programari ja existent pot perdurar molt temps, durant el qualel nombre de cores dels sistemes incrementarà. La productivitat dedesenvolupament i manteniment millorarà si el paral·lelisme i els detallstècnics són gestionats per la màquina, mentre el programador raona sobre elconjunt de l’aplicació.El programari paral·lel hauria de ser escrit en llenguatges específics deldomini. Aquests llenguatges extrauen paral·lelisme implícit, el qual és ocultatper un llenguatge seqüencial com C. Quan l’assignació de memòria i lesestructures de control són gestionades pel compilador, l’estructura iorganització de dades del programi poden ser modificades de manera segura ifiable per les transformacions d’alt nivell del compilador.Un dels dominis de l’aplicació importants és el que consta dels programes destream; aquest programes són estructurats com a nuclis independents queinteractuen només a través de canals d’un sol sentit, anomenats streams. Laprogramació de streams no és aplicable a tots els programes, però sorgeix deforma natural en la codificació i descodificació d’àudio i vídeo, gràfics 3D, iprocessament de senyals digitals. Aquesta representació permet transformacionsd’alt nivell, fins i tot descomposició i fusió de nucli.Aquesta tesi desenvolupa noves tècniques de compilació i sistemes en tempsd’execució per a programació de streams. La primera part d’aquesta tesi esfocalitza amb un compilador de streams de planificació estàtica. Presenta unnou algorisme de partició estàtica, que determina quins nuclis han de serfusionats, per tal d’equilibrar la càrrega en els processadors i en lesinterconnexions. Un bon algorisme de particionat és fonamental per tal de queel compilador produeixi codi eficient. L’algorisme també té en compte elspassos de compilació subseqüents---específicament software pipelining il’arranjament de buffers---i modela la capacitat del compilador per fusionarnuclis. Aquesta tesi també presenta un algorisme estàtic de redimensionament de cues.Aquest algorisme és important quan la memòria és distribuïda, especialment quanles memòries locals són petites. L’algorisme té en compte latències ivariacions en els temps de càlcul, i considera el límit imposat per la mida deles memòries locals.La segona part d’aquesta tesi es centralitza en la planificació dinàmica deprogrames de streams. En primer lloc, investiga el rendiment dels planificadorsdinàmics online, non-preemptive i non-clairvoyant. En segon lloc, proposa dosplanificadors dinàmics per programes de stream. El primer és específicament pera programes de streams unidimensionals. El segon és més general: no necessitael graf de streams, però els overheads són una mica més grans.Aquesta tesi també presenta un conjunt d’eines de suport relacionades amb laprogramació de streams. StarssCheck és una eina de depuració, que és basa enValgrind, per StarSs, un llenguatge de programació paral·lela basat en tasques.Aquesta eina genera un avís cada vegada que el comportament del programa estàen contradicció amb una anotació pragma. Aquest comportament d’una altra manerapodria causar excepcions o situacions de competició. StreamIt to OmpSs és unaeina per convertir un programa de streams codificat en el llenguatge StreamIt aun programa de tasques en StarSs planificat de forma dinàmica.

Med den nya generationen processorer där vi har flera cpu-kärnor på ett chip, så ökas prestandan genom parallell exekvering. I denna rapport presenterar vi en omvärldsstudie om allmän multiprocessorteori där vi går igenom olika tekniker för både hårdvara och mjukvara. Vi har även utfört empiriska tester på ett datorkluster, där vi har testat de två olika programmen Fluent och CFX, som utför CFD beräkningar. För varje program så har tre modeller använts för simuleringar med varierande antal beräkningsnoder. Vi har undersökt vad som är mest lönsamt, att använda en eller båda CPU-kärnorna vid de olika simuleringarna. För att testa detta har vi kört simuleringar där vi har kört med en respektive två cpu-kärnor på beräkningsnoderna. Under simuleringarna har vi samlat in mätvärden som nätverk, minne och cpu-belastning för alla noder samt exekveringstider. Dessa värden har sedan sammanställts där vi ser att ju större en modell är desto mer lönar det sig att köra med en cpu-kärna. I endast ett av våra tester har det visat sig lönsamt att använda båda cpu-kärnorna. En formel har sedan utarbetats för att påvisa skillnaderna mellan olika antal processer med en respektive två cpu-kärnor per nod. Denna formel kan appliceras för att räkna ut den totala kostnaden per simulering med hjälp av årskostnaden för de noder och licenser som används.

the purpose of this paper is to find the successful elements of THE BODY SHOP in Gavle, and using that experience to study the market entry into a third world country using the case study to assess whether it is worthwhile for THE BODY SHOPto enter the Chinese market, if it is worthwhile, and how to do it.