The purpose of this study was to create and examine the conceptual and psychometric properties of four components that comprise 'programme outcome' sought by distance educators, and to examine the extent to which student (socio-demographic) and programme (e.g. duration) variables related to them. This ex post facto study utilised the records of 773 correspondence students enrolled at The Chinese University of Hong Kong for the 1984 Summer session and who submitted one or more assignments. Four variables were derived from the data set - completion rate, deviation (lateness in submitting assignments), turnaround (time taken to return marked assignments) and grades. These variables were more conceptually defensible than the NUEA or other formulae typically used to measure 'outcomes'. It was hypothesized that when students had to wait longer for the return of their assignments in the first quarter of the course, completion rate would be lower, but this would not happen after the course was half over. When students were late submitting assignments, it was expected that their completion rate would be lower than those submitting on time. It was found that turnaround had a significant association with completion rate throughout the course. Deviation, that is, delays in submitting assignments, was also related to completion. Each of the four variables had significantly different associations with programme outcome. The measures employed here can be used elsewhere as the data that comprise them are found in the records of most distance education programmes. This should facilitate research in distance education and provide practitioners with a way to monitor programmes. / Education, Faculty of / Educational Studies (EDST), Department of / Graduate

An exploratory investigation of records keeping practices among villages, towns, districts and cities in British Columbia was conducted to determine how municipalities are currently managing their records. Drawing from literature on records management theory and practice, a model of a records keeping system was developed based on the premise that records pass through a series or continuum of identifiable stages from the moment of their creation to their final disposition. A questionnaire constructed around key elements of the model was distributed by mail to a nonrandom sample of one hundred and forty-four municipalities. Data was acquired on the three general fields of activity considered integral to managing records, namely: records generation and receipt, records classification, and records maintenance. Among the key findings of the survey were a lack of standardized files classification systems, records retention schedules, and records procedures manuals which are identified in records management literature as the core elements of any records keeping system. Based on a response rate of 81% (116/144), it is concluded that among those villages, towns, districts and cities surveyed, most do not have adequate records keeping systems to effectively serve their information needs. / Arts, Faculty of / Library, Archival and Information Studies (SLAIS), School of / Graduate

It is common in cross-cultural research to treat variables as if they have interval scale properties irrespective of how these scales were constructed. The purpose of this research is to explore the differences in and consequences of how respondents from different countries use the same scales over the same scale items. Previously collected data from four countries using the same 6-point verbal and 10-point numeric rating scales were used. The data was rescaled using the delta chi-square and correspondence analysis techniques (Bendixen & Yurova, 2012). The differences in means of the variables were compared in pairs for raw and rescaled data. Bootstrapping was used to estimate confidence intervals of the differences between raw and rescaled values. Furthermore, a method of partitioning the differences in means into rescaling and cultural components was devised. In 83.3% and 94.9% of the cases, the differences in raw versus rescaled means were significant at the 5% level for verbal and numeric variables respectively. The results of partitioning indicate that by not rescaling the data, the differences in raw means consistently exaggerate the true cultural differences: the extracted cultural component was underestimated by 12.8% on average for verbal variables and by 5.3% for numeric variables. Therefore, reporting the differences in raw means as a true reflection of cultural differences is in error. Finally, the effect of rescaling in pancultural research was investigated by comparing the factor structure of doubly standardized raw and rescaled data. Pancultural research attempts to identify etic, or universal, dimensions of human culture and employs double standardization to remove cultural and individual biases inherent to cross-cultural data. While no differences in latent factors extracted were found for raw and rescaled data, considerable differences in the variance explained and slight differences in factor structure were found for double standardized rescaled and double standardized raw data. The results of this research indicate that researchers and practitioners in the field of cross-cultural research should choose their scales very carefully. Furthermore, to extract true cultural differences it is probably necessary to rescale and partition differences in means. Further research on the impact of rescaling is proposed.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(理学) / 甲第21611号 / 理博第4518号 / 新制||理||1648(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院理学研究科生物科学専攻 / (主査)教授 正高 信男, 准教授 後藤 幸織, 教授 髙井 正成 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Science / Kyoto University / DFAM

This paper analyzes whether there are differences in treatment for Western-Balkan and Arabic sounding names when requesting information about the Swedish for Immigrants (SFI) program by Swedish municipalities. To answer this question, a correspondence test was conducted in which all 290 municipalities in Sweden were contacted via emails from two fictitious inquirers. We were able to gather data on six outcome variables from this correspondence test, which were chosen to measure the time and effort spent on replies to each inquirer. The results suggest that government officials provide differential treatment in favor of a Western-Balkan-sounding name, but that the outcome variables are relatively small. Moreover, we found no strong evidence for whether this differential treatment is due to taste-based or statistical discrimination. The findings in our study highlights potential consequences for immigrants with an Arabic background as limited access to the SFI program could have implications for their integration into the labor market.

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京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(理学) / 甲第19494号 / 理博第4154号 / 新制||理||1597(附属図書館) / 32530 / 京都大学大学院理学研究科物理学・宇宙物理学専攻 / (主査)教授 川合 光, 教授 畑 浩之, 教授 田中 貴浩 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Science / Kyoto University / DFAM

Thesis advisor: Kevin Bedell / Using the AdS/CFT correspondence, it has been shown that the ratio of shear viscosity to entropy density is bounded from below in strongly coupled field theories with a gravity dual. More recently, this bound has been shown to be grossly violated in novel non-Fermi liquids and the unitary Fermi gas in the presence of superfluid fluctuations above T_c. Nevertheless, a holographic approach to such systems which break the lower bound have been strongly reliant on AdS spacetimes with massive gravitons. In this work, we propose a violation of the viscosity over entropy bound in 3+1 dimensional AdS spacetimes that support stable black hole solutions with non-zero scalar field. Such a black hole is shown to be characterized by a novel phase transition at large negative mass, where the underlying thermodynamics agrees with the Larkin-Ovchinnikov-Fulde-Ferrell (LOFF)-like phase seen in the unitary Fermi gas near Tc and the bound is similarly broken. Such a work paves the way for a holographic description of strongly-entangled quantum fluids at high Reynolds number. / Thesis (BS) — Boston College, 2021. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Scholar of the College. / Discipline: Physics.

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