The operating principles of complex regulatory networks are more easily understood with mathematical modelling than by intuitive reasoning. In this thesis, I study the dynamics of the mitotic exit control system in budding yeast. I present a comprehensive mathematical model, which provides a system’s-level understanding of the mitotic exit process. This model captures the dynamics of classic experimental situations reported in the literature, and overcomes a number of limitations present in previous models. Analysis of the model led to a number of breakthroughs in the understanding of mitotic exit control. Firstly, numerical analysis of the model quantified the dependence of mitotic exit on the proteolytic and non-proteolytic functions of separase. It was shown that the requirement for the non-proteolytic function of separase depends on cyclin-dependent kinase activity. Secondly, APC/Cdc20 is a critical node that controls the phosphatase (Cdc14) branch and both cyclin (Clb2 and Clb5) branches of the cell cycle regulatory network. Thirdly, the model proved to be a useful tool for the systematic analysis of the recently discovered phenomenon of Cdc14 endocycles. Most proteins belonging to the cell cycle control network are regulated at the level of synthesis, degradation and activity. Presumably, these multiple layers of regulation facilitate robust cell cycle behaviour in the face of genetic and environmental perturbations. To falsify this hypothesis, I subjected the model to global parameter perturbations and tested viability against pre-defined criteria. According to these analyses, the regulated transcription and degradation of proteins make different contributions to cell cycle control. Regulated degradation confers cell cycle oscillations with robustness against perturbations, while regulated transcription plays a major role in controlling the period of these oscillations. Both regulated transcription and degradation are part of important feedback loops, that combined promote robust behaviour in the face of parametric variations.

The study was conducted at an organization that experienced a change of corporate ownership. The organization that underwent the change was part of an international company. After the buy-out, the organization became a part of another company, which also is established on the international market. This study aims to explain what composes the socialization process of employees during an organizational change of this kind. During organizational change employees undergo a process of socialization to create an understanding of the new structure that the change brings. The study aims to identify the key elements that compose employee’s socialization process. To identify the key elements a method based on interviews with nine employees was applied. The theoretical perspectives applied on the study were Internalization, Objectification & Externalization (Berger & Luckmann 1966), Sensemaking (Omar, Davis-Sramek, Fugate och Mentzer 2012, & Van Maanen, 1978 & Whelan- Berry, Gordon & Hinings, 2003) and two of the theoretical findings, Hangover and Group Exit (Ebaugh, 1988). The findings reveal five key elements, which make up the socialization process. The key elements are: Information, Expectation, Encouragement, Method of work and Conversation. Employees need explicit and accurate information about what the change entails. They also need to know what is expected of them and the kind of behavior that the organization promotes. Employees are also in need of knowing the specific method of work the organization advocates. The last key element employee’s need is various forms of interaction with colleagues.

Most social assistance programmes have exit strategies in place which require beneficiaries to end their participation in the programme either on an involuntary or voluntary basis. This can occur when the socioeconomic circumstances of the recipients have improved so they accomplish programme objectives and no longer need programme benefits (World Bank, 2000). Despite this ideal of being able to exit the grant system it seems that the withdrawal of the foster care grant can erode quality of life, particularly in circumstances where the foster parents do not have exit plans put in place. The aim of the study was to explore the exit plans of the recipients of the foster care grant in Soweto and the challenges they face in coming up with these plans. The study adopted a qualitative approach and it was exploratory in nature. Ten foster parents and four key informants from the Department of Social Development were selected using purposive sampling. Data were collected using two separate semi-structured interview schedules for participants and key informants. The data gathered was then analysed using thematic content analysis. The results of the study revealed that there was little knowledge and understanding about the foster care grant and what it seeks to do. The study also revealed that there were no exit plans put in place by foster parents. These results of the study found that the participants had very little knowledge of what an exit strategy was and they did not have set exit plans to exit the grant. Other findings indicated that there was no support for participants from their social workers in terms of the sharing of information and the development of exit plans. This study will thus contribute to the discourse on social assistance in general and foster care grants in particular. Furthermore, it will help to sensitise social workers on the need for exit plans for the recipients of foster grants.

The objective of this thesis is to develop tools for the analysis and optimization of an iterative receiver. These tools can be applied to most soft-in soft-out (SISO) receiver components. For illustration purposes we consider a multi-user DS-CDMA system with forward error correction that employs iterative multi-user detection based on soft interference cancellation and single user decoding. Optimized power levels combined with adaptive scheduling allows for efficient utilization of receiver resources for heavily loaded systems.¶ Metric transfer analysis has been shown to be an accurate method of predicting the convergence behavior of iterative receivers. EXtrinsic Information (EXIT), fidelity (FT) and variance (VT) transfer analysis are well-known methods, however the relationship between the different approaches has not been explored in detail. We compare the metrics numerically and analytically and derive functions to closely approximate the relationship between them. The result allows for easy translation between EXIT, FT and VT methods. Furthermore, we extend the $J$ function, which describes mutual information as a function of variance, to fidelity and symbol error variance, the Rayleigh fading channel model and a channel estimate. These $J$ functions allow the \textit{a priori} inputs to the channel estimator, interference canceller and decoder to be accurately modeled. We also derive the effective EXIT charts which can be used for the convergence analysis and performance predictions of unequal power CDMA systems.¶ The optimization of the coded DS-CDMA system is done in two parts; firstly the received power levels are optimized to minimize the power used in the terminal transmitters, then the decoder activation schedule is optimized such that the multi-user receiver complexity is minimized. The uplink received power levels are optimized for the system load using a constrained nonlinear optimization approach. EXIT charts are used to optimize the power allocation in a multi-user turbo-coded DS-CDMA system. We show through simulation that the optimized power levels allow for successful decoding of heavily loaded systems with a large reduction in the convergence SNR.¶ We utilize EXIT chart analysis and a Viterbi search algorithm to derive the optimal decoding schedule for a multi component receiver/decoder. We show through simulations that decoding delay and complexity can be significantly reduced while maintaining BER performance through optimization of the decoding schedule.

<p>The two swedish unions, Akademikerförbundet SSR and Kommunal, have a majority of female participations who mainly work in the public services. The difference between the unions is that one of them only represents members with academic educations and the other has members with lower educations. The aim of this study was to compare the two unions according to the terms exit, voice and loyalty, but also participation and influence. There were 142 participants in this study and 8 participants were interviewed in a pre-study. The result of the study shows that voice is a strong predictor to wellbeing in work life. Influence has the same effect in wellbeing and it is clear that individuals with academic education has a higher degree of influence in the workplace. Although there was a tendency for participants with higher education to have a lower degree of wellbeing. Exit was found to have negative correlation with wellbeing.</p>

<p>This article examines how former street children experienced going from street life to life within an organization. Through semi-structured interviews with six children and one field worker, the aim has been to identify key points that made these children going all the way while other left, but also to highlight challenges and difficulties along the way. Reports from Ghana and other parts of the world about a low rate of success in working with these children made the subject interesting. Findings suggest that the process of leaving the street is more than just a physical move. The ability of the organizations to motivate and assist the children to change character has shown to be very critical for making the children stay within the program. Also the influence and assistance between the boys themselves has been of uttermost importance.</p>

<p>EU and China are important trade partners to each other; trade relationship is one of their crucial bilateral relationships. Within EU-China trade relationship, the dumping and anti-dumping issues play an important role. When EU commission initiates anti-dumping investigation, Chinese producers always have different responses. This study mainly focuses on the reasons behind Chinese producers’ various responses facing EU anti-dumping investigations. By digging out the real reasons behind Chinese producers’ various responses, this study is expected to make some contribution to the dumping and anti-dumping discussion between China and EU in academic level and to make some contribution to the policy adjusting of both sides in political lever.</p><p>Some hypotheses drawing from a Chinese lawyer Tao Jingzhou’s claim in an interview are tested in this study. These hypotheses listed some possible factors affecting Chinese producers’ responses. There are many anti-dumping cases between China and EU, CFL-i (Integrated electronic compact fluorescent lamps) case initiated in April 2000 was chosen as a research object for case study in this research. When it comes to theory, Hirschman’s theory of exit and voice is used as the basic theory structure of this study. His followers especially Barry and Birch refined Hirschman’s model into exit-voice-silence. This model is implemented in this study as a theory approach.</p><p>By interviewing some key people in the Chinese producers involving in CFL-i case and comparing the interview results with hypotheses, come conclusions are coming out:</p><p>First, in the case study level, Chinese producers’ choice of options is in a dynamic process. With the change of situation, a certain producer can choose different option in different period of time. While this study verified the variables influencing the choice of Chinese producers mentioned by Tao Jingzhou in the hypotheses such as degree of depending on EU market, sufficient of funds, supports from local government, financial system, ownership of the company and the diversity of products, it found several other variables which also affect the decision making of Chinese producers such as nationalism, previous success experience.</p><p>Second, when it comes to political level, for Chinese side, Chinese government especially local government should be more supportive when their enterprises are facing anti-dumping investigation from EU. In EU’s part, according to what has been discussed in the case study, currently it is not the time for EU to take China as a market economy treatment. However, its harsh criteria for applying for MET and individual treatment would get continuous severe critical from Chinese producers and government, which will negatively affect its trade relationship with China. For both sides, bilateral negotiations on anti-dumping duty or undertakings would be good for the long-run interests of both sides.</p>

<p><p>Idag ägs mer än tusen företag i Sverige av riskkapitalbolag. Vissa anser att riskkapitalbolagen är ute efter att göra snabba pengar, medan andra anser att de arbetar både strategiskt och långsiktigt med de ägda företagen. Ett företags finansiering kan ske på diverse sätt och de vanligaste sätten att anskaffa kapital är genom självfinansiering, krediter och tillskott från aktieägare. Thule och Kärhs är exempel på två riskkapitalbolagsägda företag som använt sig av främmande kapital på ett missgynnande sätt. Att använda sig av främmande kapital kan alltså innebära risker men även möjligheter om det används på rätt sätt. Vi tycker därför att det är intressant att undersöka dessa risker och möjligheter utifrån tre perspektiv; företag, ägande riskkapitalbolag och bank. Vi ville också ta reda på hur dessa tre perspektiv påverkas av varandra.</p><p>Den kvalitativa metoden och en abduktiv ansats har använts vid utförandet av studien. Detta på grund av att vi utgått från en problemformulering och sedan pendlat mellan referensram och empiri när vi gjort våra tolkningar. Primärdata samlades in genom intervjuer, både via personliga möten och via telefon.</p><p>Vi inleder referensramen med att definiera riskkapitalbolag och förklara hur de fungerar. Direkt efter får läsaren ta del av vad intervjupersonerna sagt och vår tolkning av det berörda ämnet, vilken är en struktur som resten av uppsatsen följer. Vidare tas kreditgivarna, kreditbeviljning samt kreditformer i beaktning. Därefter diskuteras hur ägarna och banken påverkar och styr företagen. I de två sista kapitlen är företagsperspektivet i fokus med dess finansiering och kapitalstruktur. Detta följs av vilka effekter skuldsättning kan innebära och i detta kapitel är hävstångseffekten en central del.</p><p>Slutligen besvaras vår frågeställning och vi har bland annat kommit fram till att de tre perspektiven påverkas av varandra på många olika sätt. Exempelvis innebär det att företag får tillgång till ett kontaktnät när de ägs av ett riskkapitalbolag samt att företagen påverkas av båda ägarna och banken genom rapportkrav av nyckeltal. Vi har dessutom dragit slutsatsen att alla tre perspektiven står inför både risker och möjligheter vid användandet av främmande kapital. Tillexempel kan belåning innebära en risk för företaget då det kan förlora makten till långivaren, medan det för ägarna är en möjlighet att ta lån då det ökar det totala kapitalet vilket i sin tur ger en högre avkastning på det egna kapitalet.</p></p>

Recent advancements in iterative processing have allowed communication systems to perform close to capacity limits withmanageable complexity.For manychannels such as the AWGN and flat fading channels, codes that perform only a fraction of a dB from the capacity have been designed in the literature. In this dissertation, we will focus on the design and analysis of near-capacity achieving codes for another important class of channels, namely inter-symbol interference (ISI)channels. We propose various coding schemes such as low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes, parallel and serial concatenations for ISI channels when there is no spectral shaping used at the transmitter. The design and analysis techniques use the idea of extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) function matching and provide insights into the performance of different codes and receiver structures. We then present a coding scheme which is the concatenation of an LDPC code with a spectral shaping block code designed to be matched to the channel??s spectrum. We will discuss how to design the shaping code and the outer LDPC code. We will show that spectral shaping matched codes can be used for the parallel concatenation to achieve near capacity performance. We will also discuss the capacity of multiple antenna ISI channels. We study the effects of transmitter and receiver diversities and noisy channel state information on channel capacity.

This article examines how former street children experienced going from street life to life within an organization. Through semi-structured interviews with six children and one field worker, the aim has been to identify key points that made these children going all the way while other left, but also to highlight challenges and difficulties along the way. Reports from Ghana and other parts of the world about a low rate of success in working with these children made the subject interesting. Findings suggest that the process of leaving the street is more than just a physical move. The ability of the organizations to motivate and assist the children to change character has shown to be very critical for making the children stay within the program. Also the influence and assistance between the boys themselves has been of uttermost importance.