The aim of the present study is to describe and analyse how an inter-cultural perspective presents itself in the didactic considerations and in the practice of preschool teachers on a multiethnic preschool. The theoretical perspective upon which the study is founded is social constructivism, but in addition to this Ingegerd Municio’s idea of two existing discourses present within the institutions in the Swedish educational system, as well as René León’s concept of a diversified normality, has been used as theoretical tools and points of departure. The empirical investigation consists of a qualitative field study at a multi-ethnic preschool, where participating observation and group interviews have been used to collect data. In these teachers from the preschool have participated. The results and the analysis of the data show that an inter-cultural perspective surfaces in the didactic considerations and in the practice of the preschool teachers in their construction of a diversified normality. The diversified normality thus constructed is constituted through different social processes. I have here identified the following ones: the preschool teachers emphasize differences among the children in general, they allow that the children behave differently and they allow them to be different; they recognize “cultural” differences, differences in origin, and frames of reference, and they recognize that the children at the preschool are bilingual.

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Bank has always played an important role as capital saving and supply and demand of expenditure since long time ago in the whole financial,and it has become an essential part of our financial system.However,because of the 1997 Asia financial crisis and 2008 financial storm all over the world,the structure of domestic banks has shown bad operation quality situation under the over-competitive environment,also,the profitability and asset quality are decreasing year by year. Along with the similarity of financial products,the segment among financial practices is blurring,it can has the multiple operation effect to meet the diversified demands of customers only by the merge of industry and cross-industry integration to operate in different industry.At this time,to encourage local banks to operate in different industry and encourage financial industry to cooperate via strategic alliance,it can help to enhance competency and improve the dilemma of financial institution. 1991 is the important divide for the financial industry.The ministry of finance gave green light to the erection of sixteen banks,the lack of new practices and finance creativity,plus the effects of financial institution are confined to traditional industry,stock market,the depression of house market,the capital outflow,and the evil competitive of finance industry let the finance market decreasing,lead to the non-performing loan of banks is increasing and return on equity is decreasing.Over the past ten years,bank's interest rate spread decreased from 3% to 1% recently.The local banks,franchising guaranteed industry,1046 branches in 1991 increased to 2411 branches in 2000 and 3155 branches in 2009,if includes foreign banks' branches in Taiwan,medium and small size business banks,credit union of farmer's and fisherman's associate,Chunghwa Post Co.,the branches can up to 5973,on average,one bank can only has 3850 customers out of 23 million people in Taiwan,let the industry become red sea.After the financial storm,governments all over the world emphasize on suppressing market rate, plus the defrost of the relationship between Taiwan and China,the conclusion and sign of MOU,negotiation of ECFA,all let the difference among financial institutions decreasing,and more and more financial institutions operate in different industry,for those local financial institution not belonged to financial holding companies,it's critical for them to figure out how to create their own operating advantage. In terms of this, under the never-end competitive environment, this study got the following conclusion, economic of scale has effects on bank industry, but after the on-site interview on local banks' operating effects, do research on the main factors of banks, not only the external environment effects the profitability of branches, but manager's operation of individual project and the copy of success model, to erect cross-region local bank's optimal operating model. It has benefits on bank's overall effects¡Fthe comparative advantages can create higher value for it under the depression.

The purpose of this thesis is to discuss the behavior of news jobholders managing the blog. There have been lots of researches for the motivation of writing blogs. Based upon past researches, this thesis adds the partial traditional dissemination theory idea to discuss the relation between criticalness of blog presentation and diversified blog topics from the gatekeeper pressure, challenging the point of view of the organization, communication, requirement from the company, and self-presents. The research is conducted by Questionnaire Survey and it is found that the communication, criticalness, and the subject multiplication in the blogs are significantly correlated. In the other hand, the requirement from the company and self-present are only related to diversified blog topics. As a result, the motivation and habit of news jobholders using blogs alter unceasingly. The future study can focus more on addressing this difference of evolving to realize how news jobholders in the traditional media work use new technical blogs.

<p>Background: Diversified companies, for example audit firms, sometimes offer different kinds of products and services. Different key success factors can in the same company thereby evolve. Goal congruence has to be achieved in the business divisions as well as in the company as a whole even though each business segment might have to focus on different factors. </p><p>Purpose: The purpose is to analyze if differences in technology and culture between the business divisions in diversified companies motivate a differentiated reward system. Method: The study has a case study approach. The data has been collected through 18 interviews carried out at one of "the big four" audit firms with personnel holding different positions in terms of experience and management levels. The reason for choosing an audit firm is based on the fact that it is a distinct diversified company which utilizes reward systems. </p><p>Result: If differences in culture and technology within a firm are considerable the company tend to exhibit heterogeneous key success factors which implies that different kinds of achievements needs to be rewarded in order to create an effective control system. The study shows that a differentiated reward system is preferable if this is the case.</p>

The purpose of this study was to examine how the racial composition of a mentoring relationship influences three types of judgments made by individuals external to the relationship: (1) causal attributions formed to explain successful protégé performance; (2) evaluations of protégé career advancement potential; and (3) reward recommendations for the mentor and protégé. Additionally, the associations among causal attributions, evaluations of potential, and reward recommendations were investigated. A 2 (protégé race: white vs. black) x 2 (mentor race: white vs. black) factorial between-subjects design was used. Mentor and protégé races were manipulated within a written vignette. After reading the vignette, participants responded to items measuring their judgments about the mentor and protégé depicted in the vignette. The final sample consisted of 194 white, employed individuals. Overall, results did not support the hypothesized racial effects on the three types of judgments. However, support was found for the predicted associations among the different judgment types. Implications of these findings, as well as directions for future research, are discussed.

In this dissertation, the problem of learning from highly imbalanced data is studied. Imbalance data learning is of great importance and challenge in many real applications. Dealing with a minority class normally needs new concepts, observations and solutions in order to fully understand the underlying complicated models. We try to systematically review and solve this special learning task in this dissertation.We propose a new ensemble learning framework—Diversified Ensemble Classifiers for Imbal-anced Data Learning (DECIDL), based on the advantages of existing ensemble imbalanced learning strategies. Our framework combines three learning techniques: a) ensemble learning, b) artificial example generation, and c) diversity construction by reversely data re-labeling. As a meta-learner, DECIDL utilizes general supervised learning algorithms as base learners to build an ensemble committee. We create a standard benchmark data pool, which contains 30 highly skewed sets with diverse characteristics from different domains, in order to facilitate future research on imbalance data learning. We use this benchmark pool to evaluate and compare our DECIDL framework with several ensemble learning methods, namely under-bagging, over-bagging, SMOTE-bagging, and AdaBoost. Extensive experiments suggest that our DECIDL framework is comparable with other methods. The data sets, experiments and results provide a valuable knowledge base for future research on imbalance learning. We develop a simple but effective artificial example generation method for data balancing. Two new methods DBEG-ensemble and DECIDL-DBEG are then designed to improve the power of imbalance learning. Experiments show that these two methods are comparable to the state-of-the-art methods, e.g., GSVM-RU and SMOTE-bagging. Furthermore, we investigate learning on imbalanced data from a new angle—active learning. By combining active learning with the DECIDL framework, we show that the newly designed Active-DECIDL method is very effective for imbalance learning, suggesting the DECIDL framework is very robust and flexible.Lastly, we apply the proposed learning methods to a real-world bioinformatics problem—protein methylation prediction. Extensive computational results show that the DECIDL method does perform very well for the imbalanced data mining task. Importantly, the experimental results have confirmed our new contributions on this particular data learning problem.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / In this thesis, I examine household strategies in response to water level fluctuations of Lake Chilwa. I also analyse the frequency and patterns of migration of fishers, conflicts due to migration of fishers and comanagement. The following are the key results:First, the seasonal and periodic lake level changes affect livelihoods of the households. As a coping strategy, the households depend on fishing in pools of water located in influent rivers and hunt birds for income and food while others migrate to find work as casual labourers. When the lake rises during the rain season, inundated areas become suitable for production of maize and rice. However, when the floods recede in the dry season, farming of winter maize and vegetables is common.Second, migration of fishers is common around Lake Chilwa. The pattern of migration varies according to the season and gear type. The northern marshes and floodplain where fishers land the highest catches composed mainly of Barbus paludinosus, attract more fishers operating different fishing gear types. Conflicts emerge due to the Nkacha seine operations,which require removal of aquatic vegetation. The local fishers believe that the aquatic vegetation is a source of food for fish. The conflicts are in various forms including access to fishing grounds, authority to grant access to fishing areas and fish price competition between the local fishers and migrants.Third, the household strategies towards recovery of the fishery after recessions are inherent within the households’ traditional system.However, the introduction of co-management does not recognise key actors that include fishers and river-based fishing households that participated in the formulation of conservation strategies for remnant fish stocks in lagoon and rivers during the 1995 recession. Co-management is characterised by limited participation of the fishers especially those operating seines, district assemblies and non-governmental organisations. Similarly, there is low transparency especially with respect to how the key stakeholders, Department of Fisheries and traditional leaders, take decisions. In stark contrast, accountability among Beach Village Sub- Committees is growing; hence more fishing households now perceive these as representing the interests of Department of Fisheries.Based on the above results, a diversified occupational change involving fishing, farming and trading is necessary. The co-management arrangement should be adaptive with consideration of the traditional customs and values of the participating households. Since these households are dependent on the availability of fisheries, it is thus imperative to promote maximum resource exploitation in between recessions and encourage a complete stop to fishing during recessions.September 2009

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Within the real estate asset class, most companies own and operate properties. How the companies construct their property portfolio, in respect of property type and geographical focus, differ. Some companies have chosen to be focused while the holdings of some companies are well diversified. Depending on which strategy is chosen, the underlying assets of the companies will be different and affected by different factors. This paper investigates if, in Sweden, the composition of the publicly traded real estate companies’ property portfolios affects how their stocks behave on the stock market. Four hypotheses about the behavior is stated, each hypothesis is linked to certain key financial figures that is calculated and analyzed over time. The financial figures that are investigated are the correlation between the companies as well as the correlation with the stock market portfolio, the risk and the risk-adjusted return of the companies. All figures are tested over either a 36 month or a 12 month rolling time period. The results show that the diversified companies display a higher correlation with each other as well as the market since the beginning of the 21st century. Companies that are diversified across property types but focused geographically also display higher correlation. Hence, if a company is focused or diversified geographically doesn’t seem to affect the level of correlation between the companies. Another result is that the smaller, often more focused, companies have a low correlation with each other as well as with the market. However, there are exceptions among the diversified as well as the focused companies. The risk is measured with the help of two variables, the beta coefficient and standard deviation. The results of the rolling beta coefficients show that the companies that are diversified over property type have a higher market risk compared to those that are focused. Whether a company is diversified or focused geographically doesn’t seem to matter. The results of the standard deviation measurements do not show this result as all companies moved in similar fashion. Risk-adjusted return is measured with the help of the Sharpe ratio. The results show that the risk-adjusted return is independent of the composition of the companies’ portfolios. However, in the crisis, the risk-adjusted return of all companies are compressed regardless of how well they performed prior to the crisis.