Following the sharp rise in oil prices in late 1973 and early 1974, most oil exporting countries adopted highly expansionary fiscal and monetary policies aimed at rapid development of their economies. In Nigeria the role of the public sector since then has been significantly increased as most of the oil revenue accrues directly to the Federal government rather than to individuals. Given the host of economic problems faced by the country in the 1970s the debate over the role of the public sector in a mixed capitalist economy in the process of economic growth gains more relevance. / The essence of this study is to analyze the consequence of alternative patterns of government policy on economic growth in Nigeria. The study provides a general framework that is useful in studying the effects of alternative government policies on the domestic economy and also in analyzing alternative patterns of allocating the sudden increase in domestic resources. Using policy simulation experiments, an alternative policy package is suggested and the relative effectiveness of various policy instruments used by the government are examined.

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The majority of children in the UK live in households with two parents, yet most of the academic research on parenting focuses on the relationship between one parent and one child. More often than not, this one parent has been the mother. There is an expectation of father involvement in contemporary parenting, but the literature still tends to emphasise parenting as a one parent-one child interaction, measuring involvement of the father in terms of time spent with his child. The idea of collaboration, or collaborative parenting, drawing on research into coparenting in the US, considers the involvement of both parents with each other, with respect to the child, as an alternative way of conceptualising parental involvement. Collaboration is considered a useful concept, as it goes beyond the idea of parenting as being about time spent directly with the child. Unlike many factors which may predict child outcomes, a lack of collaboration could be addressed at the family level, through counselling or education. The aims of the research were to develop an understanding of the way in which parents work together, looking in particular at how this is affected by social support; whether there are associations between parental collaboration and the availability of time for family and leisure activities, and feelings about the balance between work and home life; whether parents who collaborate are more likely to adhere to expert advice on parenting matters; and whether there are associations with a child’s social, emotional and behavioural development. Emphasis was also placed on the methodology, as it entailed the development of a method for measuring the concept of collaboration, using data that was not designed for the purpose. The research was conducted through a combination of methods, comprising secondary analysis of data from the first four sweeps of the Growing Up in Scotland (GUS) study, and the conduct and analysis of 20 pairs of semi-structured interviews with parents who had previously taken part in this study. A condition of the funding received from the Scottish Government was to make use of the GUS data. The research found social support affected the process of collaboration in a number of ways: by enabling collaboration to take place; by removing the need for collaboration; by increasing the time available to collaborative couples; and by removing the need to plan ahead. Of particular note were the problems that were more likely to occur when couples neither collaborated, nor had support from outside the home. These are the couples who find that work impacts on their family the most. They are also the ones who are least likely to have time away from their children to do something for their own interest, and are the ones who are most likely to find it difficult to access advice. Collaborative couples tended to find more time available for activities with their children, as well as time for themselves. Positive associations were demonstrated between collaboration and a child’s social, emotional and behavioural development, but the strength of the association was not equal in all situations. When the mother was employed full-time, relatively strong associations were evident. When she was not in employment, and a number of other risk factors were present, relatively strong associations could again be seen. However, when the mother worked part-time, there did not appear to be any association between child behavioural development and collaboration. Associations were also demonstrated with the work-life balance of parents. Collaborative fathers professed less of an impact of the family on their work than non-collaborative ones. Similarly, collaborative fathers were less likely to say that long hours impacted on the time they had with their children than non-collaborative fathers, but there was no equivalent association for mothers. The impact of work on family was more likely to be lower for both parents when they acted collaboratively.

Beobachtungen der vergangenen Jahre zeigen, dass sich Unternehmen für die Entwicklung von Produkten zunehmend global verteilt aufstellen (Lindemann und Kern 2016). So bieten verteilt arbeitende Teams neben potenziellen Kostensenkungen und kürzeren Entwicklungszeiten auch die Möglichkeit, Synergieeffekte effektiv nutzen zu können. Insbesondere für die Entwicklung immer komplexer werdender Produkte, die an der Schnittstelle von Maschinenbau, Elektrotechnik oder Informatik entstehen, ist die überregionale Zusammenarbeit von Experten aus den verschiedenen Bereichen notwendig (Bavendiek et al. 2018a). Erst die Kooperation in verteilten Teams erlaubt es, das weltweit verteilte Know-How zu bündeln. Um den Produktentwicklungsprozess bedarfsgerecht zu unterstützen existiert eine Vielzahl von Methoden, die in den vergangenen Jahren einen immer größer werdenden Stellenwert in der Industrie erlangt haben. Trotz ihrer empirisch nachgewiesenen Vorteile für die Produktentwicklung (Graner & Behr 2012) lässt sich in der Praxis oftmals nur ein zögerlicher Methodeneinsatz beobachten (Gericke et al. 2016). Gerade in verteilten Entwicklungsprojekten stellt sich der Methodeneinsatz als Herausforderung dar, da viele Methoden für den Einsatz an einem Standort konzipiert und daher nur eingeschränkt für die spezifischen Anforderungen der verteilten Anwendung ausgelegt sind (Walter et al. 2016). Methoden können allerdings erst dann ihr volles Potential entfalten, wenn sie an die vorherrschende Entwicklungssituation angepasst werden. Allerdings fehlt zurzeit das Wissens um die entscheidenden Faktoren zur Beschreibung des Entwicklungskontextes in der standortverteilten Produktgenerationsentwicklung, was letztendlich dazu führt, dass Methoden zurzeit nicht bedarfs- und situationsgerecht an die entsprechende standortverteilte Entwicklungssituation angepasst werden können. Grundlegend hierfür ist zusätzlich ein allgemeingültiges Verständnis des Begriffs standortverteilte Produktgenerationsentwicklung. [... aus der Einleitung]

This diploma thesis deals with the educational and development system of the employees who work as operators in the company Informační linky, s. r. o. The aim of the thesis is to analyse and evaluate the current educational and development system of the call centre employees and to formulate improving recommendations. First parts deal with the theoretical background of the topic, following chapters contain the analysis of the educational and development system in the company -- the system is described and on the basis of the research, fields to be improved are discovered and proposals and recommendations to improve the educational activities are suggested.

Sverige är sedan decennier tillbaka ett flerspråkigt land och flerspråkighet är en naturlig del av dagens samhälle. Minst en femtedel av alla elever i skolan har ett annat modersmål än svenska. För lärare blir det mer aktuellt att bedriva språkutvecklande undervisning som ger eleverna förutsättningar att utveckla både språk och ämneskunskaper. Syftet med studien är att undersöka hur lärare i åk 4–6 beskriver hur de arbetar språkutvecklande inom ämnet svenska med flerspråkiga elever. Studien utgår från det sociokulturella perspektivet och grundar sig i semistrukturerade intervjuer. Resultatet visar att lärarna arbetar språkutvecklande hela skoldagen och de poängterar hur viktigt det är att arbeta språkutvecklande för elevernas språk- och kunskapsutveckling. Modellering och EPA- modellen är två konkreta och effektiva arbetssätt som lärarna använder i undervisningen. Dock framkom det att lärarna oftast inte reflekterar över sitt arbetssätt då det sker per automatik och att elevernas modersmål inte används som en resurs i klassrummet. / For decades, Sweden has been a multilingual country and multiligualism is a natural part of today’s society. At least one fifth of all pupils in the school have a different mother tongue than Swedish. For teachers, it will be more relevant to conduct language development teaching which gives students the conditions to develop both language and subject knowledge. The purpose of this study is to investigate how teachers in elementary school describe their language development methods with multilingual pupils in the Swedish subject. The study is based on the sociocultural perspective as well as semistructured interviews. The result shows that the teachers work on language development throughout the school day and they point out how important it is to work on language development for students’ language and knowledge development. Modelling and the EPA- model are two concrete and effective working methods that are used by the teachers. However, it emerges that the teachers usually do not reflect on their way of working as it happens automatically and that the students mother tongue is not used as a resource in the classroom.

Safety in human in the loop systems, systems that change behavior with human input, is difficult to achieve. This difficulty can cost lives. As desired system capability grows, so too does the requisite complexity of the system. This complexity can result in designers not accounting for every use case of the system and unintentionally designing in unsafe behavior. Furthermore, complexity of operation and control can result in operators becoming confused during use or receiving insufficient training in the first place. All these cases can result in unsafe operations. One method of improving safety is implementing the use of formal models during the design process. These formal models can be analyzed mathematically to detect dangerous conditions, but can be difficult to produce without time, money, and expertise.<br> This document details the study of potential methods for constructing formal models autonomously from recorded observations of system use, minimizing the need for system expertise, saving time, money, and personnel in this safety critical process. I first discuss how different system characteristics affect system modeling, isolating specific traits that most clearly affect the modeling process Then, I develop a technique for modeling a simple, digital, menu-based system based on a record of user inputs. This technique attempts to measure the availability of different inputs for the user, and then distinguishes states by comparing input availabilities. From there, I compare paths between states and check for shared behaviors. I then expand the general procedure to capture the behavior of a flight simulator. This system more closely resembles real-world safety critical systems and can therefore be used to approximate a real use case of the method outlined. I use machine learning tools for statistical analysis, comparing patterns in system behavior and user behaviors. Last, I discuss general conclusions on how the modeling approaches outlined in this document can be improved and expanded upon.<br> For simple systems, we find that inputs alone can produce state machines, but without corresponding system information, they are less helpful for determining relative safety of different use cases than is needed. Through machine learning, we find that records of complex system use can be decomposed into sets of nominal and anomalous states but determining the causal link between user inputs and transitions between these conditions is not simple and requires further research.

Today's society is multicultural which means that also our classrooms are multicultural. The teaching must then be designed so that all pupils can develop as far as possible, which is expressed in the curriculum. The purpose of this study is therefore to investigate how Swedish teachers work with language development in the mathematics subject, to support these multilingual students’ knowledge development to the maximum.This study has a qualitative approach as it is based on semi-structured interviews. A total of four teachers participated and were thus able to give their picture of how they work with language development in mathematics. The results of the study indicate a large divergence between the teachers' ways of working, relating to multilingual classrooms, and language development work. In addition, some aspects are more crucial to the development of languages and knowledge for multilingual students. This includes collaborative work where language has a central role in which students get to talk, reason, and communicate mathematics with others. Other key strategies that emerge are reality anchoring, customized tasks, and multilingualism as a resource. The work is analyzed in relation to theories of socio-cultural learning and pragmatism.

Detta examensarbete dokumenterar arbetet med utveckling, införande och dokumentation av en nymetod för identitetsbestämning av farmaceutiska råvaror med röntgenfluorescens. Metoden ärutvecklad för att användas på laboratorier för kvalitetskontroll på AstraZeneca i Södertälje. Syftetmed arbetet var att utveckla en robust och effektiv metod samt att utbilda användarna i dethanteringssätt som krävs för att utföra snabba och korrekta analyser. Rapporten presenterarteknologin bakom röntgenfluorescensinstrument och vilka felkällor som kan påverka resultaten samtde pedagogiska teorier som använts för att beskriva det praktiska arbete som äger rum pålaboratoriet. Metoden och de försök som föregick metoden presenteras, och resultat och beslutdiskuteras. Hur utbildningen planerades, genomfördes och utvärderades presenteras också. / This master thesis is the documented work of the development, implementation and documentationof a new method for identification of pharmaceuticals excipients using X-ray fluorescence. Themethod is supposed to be used at the laboratory for quality control at AstraZeneca, Södertälje. Thepurpose of the thesis was to develop a stout and effective method and to educate the users in theskills needed to perform fast and correct analyses. This thesis presents the technology behind XRFinstruments and which sources of errors that could affect the results as well as the pedagogicaltheories used to describe the practical work that takes place at the laboratory. The method and theexperiment that preceded the method are presented, and the results and decisions are discussed.How the education was planned, performed and evaluated is also presented.

This thesis addresses software design within the field of Information and Communications Technology for Development (ICTD). Specifically, it makes a case for the design and development of software which is custom-made for the context of marginalised rural areas (MRAs). One of the main aims of any ICTD project is sustainability and such sustainability is particularly difficult in MRAs because of the high costs of projects located there. Most literature on ICTD projects focuses on other factors, such as management, regulations, social and community issues when discussing this issue. Technical matters are often down-played or ignored entirely. This thesis argues that MRAs exhibit unique technical characteristics and that by understanding these characteristics, one can possibly design more cost-effective software. One specific characteristic is described and addressed in this thesis – a characteristic we describe here for the first time and call a network island. Further analysis of the literature generates a picture of a distributed network of access nodes (DANs) within such network islands, which are connected by high speed networks and are able to share resources and stimulate usage of technology by offering a wide range of services. This thesis attempts to design a fitting middleware platform for such a context, which would achieve the following aims: i) allow software developers to create solutions for the context more efficiently (correctly, rapidly); ii) stimulate product managers and business owners to create innovative software products more easily (cost-effectively). A given in the context of this thesis is that the software should use free/libre open source software (FLOSS) – good arguments do also exist for the use of FLOSS. A review of useful FLOSS frameworks is undertaken and several of these are examined in an applied part of the thesis, to see how useful they may be. They form the basis for a walking skeleton implementation of the proposed middleware. The Spring framework is the basis for experiments, along with Spring-Webservices, JMX and PHP 5’s web service capabilities. This thesis builds on three years of work at the Siyakhula Living Lab (SLL), an experimental testbed in a MRA in the Mbashe district of the Eastern Cape of South Africa. Several existing products are deployed at the SLL in the fields of eCommerce, eGovernment and eLearning. Requirements specifications are engineered from a variety of sources, including interviews, mailing lists, the author’s experience as a supervisor at the SLL, and a review of the existing SLL products. Future products are also investigated, as the thesis considers current trends in ICTD. Use cases are also derived and listed. Most of the use cases are concerned with management functions of DANs that can be automated, so that operators of DANs can focus on their core business and not on technology. Using the UML Components methodology, the thesis then proceeds to design a middleware component architecture that is derived from the requirements specification. The process proceeds step-by-step, so that the reader can follow how business rules, operations and interfaces are derived from the use cases. Ultimately, the business rules, interfaces and operations are related to business logic, system interfaces and operations that are situated in specific components. The components in turn are derived from the business information model, that is derived from the business concepts that were initially used to describe the context for the requirements engineering. In this way, a logical method for software design is applied to the problem domain to methodically derive a software design for a middleware solution. The thesis tests the design by considering possible weaknesses in the design. The network aspect is tested by interpolating from formal assumptions about the nature of the context. The data access layer is also identified as a possible bottleneck. We suggest the use of fast indexing methods instead of relational databases to maintain flexibility and efficiency of the data layer. Lessons learned from the exercise are discussed, within the context of the author’s experience in software development teams, as well as in ICTD projects. This synthesis of information leads to warnings about the psychology of middleware development. We note that the ICTD domain is a particularly difficult one with regards to software development as business requirements are not usually clearly formulated and developers do not have the requisite domain knowledge. In conclusion, the core arguments of the thesis are recounted in a bullet form, to lay bare the reasoning behind this work. Novel aspects of the work are also highlighted. They include the description of a network island, and aspects of the DAN middleware requirements engineering and design. Future steps for work based on this thesis are mapped out and open problems relating to this research are touched upon.