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Abstract Title: External communication and brand strategies in Swedish municipalities
 Author: Philip Hagne & Einar Svensson
 Tutor: Jessica Gustafsson
 Purpose: The aim of this thesis was to study and obtain greater understanding on how Swedish municipalities use external communication and branding strategies to gain and attract more residents. The key questions to be answered in this thesis were: What does the external communication look like in the selected municipalities? Are the selected municipalities trying to establish their own brand? What does the work on creating the brand look like?
 Method/Material: This thesis is based on material collected trough interviews with people working with external communication in eleven swedish municipalities. The selected municipalities where divided into two groups based on their negative or positive population growth between 2005 and 2012. All of the selected municipalities where in the same population range between 20,000 and 40,000 citizens. The theoretical framework used in this thesis consists of David Aaker’s theories on Brand Equity along with Graham Hankinson’s, Gregory Ashworth's and Mihalis Kavaratzis theories on Place Branding.
 Main results: The main results show that the external communication is rather similar in all of the eleven municipalities regardless their population trend. The study could not show any definite correlation between the use of external communication and branding towards gaining new inhabitants. However this thesis sugests that municipal councils have changed their attitudes in prioritizing the external communication. The attitude from municipal councils today are more positive than earlier research has shown. Furthermore this thesis has shown that the financial issues and low communication budgets still are the main reason for limited work on external communication, though this is solved with collaborations with local actors in the public sphere.
 Number of pages: 64
 Course: Media and Communication studies C
 University: Division of Media and Communication, Department of Information Science, Uppsala University
 Period: Fall 2013
 Keywords: Brand, external communication, municipalities

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

This paper introduces a model framework for dynamic credit rating processes. Our framework aggregates ordinal rating information stemming from a variety of rating sources. The dynamic of the consensus rating captures systematic as well as idiosyncratic changes. In addition, our framework allows to validate the different rating sources by analyzing the mean/variance structure of the rating errors. In an empirical study for the iTraxx Europe companies rated by the big three external rating agencies we use Bayesian techniques to estimate the consensus ratings for these companies. The advantages are illustrated by comparing our dynamic rating model to a benchmark model. (author´s abstract) / Series: Research Report Series / Department of Statistics and Mathematics

Bakalauro darbe tiriami mokinių, turinčių intelekto sutrikimą ir įprastinės raidos mokinių mokymosi motyvai. Darbo tikslas – nustatyti mokinių mokymosi motyvus. Taip pat buvo siekiama nustatyti, kokie veiksniai (vidiniai ar išoriniai) yra reikšmingesni mokymosi motyvacijai šiom dviem tiriamųjų grupėm. Suformuluota hipotezė, kad mokinių, turinčių intelekto sutrikimą, mokymosi motyvacijos lygis yra žemesnis, negu įprastinės raidos mokinių. Tyrime dalyvavo 107 respondentai: 44 (6-10 kl.) mokiniai, turintys intelekto sutrikimą ir 63 (6-8 kl.) įprastinės raidos mokiniai. Apklausai naudotas klausimynas, parengtas, remiantis autorių Deci, Connell ir Ryan tyrimuose (1989), adaptuotas Titenytės – Mackonienės (2005). Tyrimu nustatyta, kad mokinių, turinčių intelekto sutrikimą, mokymosi motyvacijos lygis yra žemesnis, lyginant su įprastinės raidos mokinių mokymosi motyvacija. Nustatyta, kad mokinių, turinčių intelekto sutrikimą, mokymosi motyvams daugiau įtakos turi išoriniai veiksniai (bausmės baimė, noras įtikti mokytojui, priverstas laikytis mokinio taisyklių, gėdos jausmas, pozityvaus mokytojo įvertinimo laukimas, materialinis paskatinimas). Įprastinės raidos mokinių mokymosi motyvus daugiau įtakoja vidiniai veiksniai (žinių siekimas, žingeidumas, interesas, noras dirbti klasėje, mokymosi reikšmingumas, pomėgis spręsti sunkias užduotis, tiesos ieškojimas, savo jėgų išbandymas, mokymasis kaip maloni veikla). Hipotezė, kad mokinių, turinčių intelekto sutrikimą, mokymosi motyvacijos... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / The Bachelor thesis studies the learning motives of the students with intellectual disabilities and students with normal development. The aim of the thesis is to identify the learning motives of the students. It was also used to determine what factors (internal or external) are more meaningful for learning motivation for these two analyzed groups. The hypothesis is formulated that the learning motivation rate of the students with intellectual disabilities is lower than the students with normal development. The study involved 107 respondents: 44 (6-10 forms) students with intellectual disabilities and 63 (6-8 forms) students with normal development. The survey used a questionnaire prepared according to the researches of the authors Deci, Connell and Ryan (1989) adapted by Titenytė – Mackonienė (2005). The research found that the learning motivation level of the students with intellectual disabilities is lower as compared to the learning motivation of the students with normal development. It was found that the external factors (fear of punishment, the desire to please the teacher, student forced to follow the rules, shame, waiting of positive teacher evaluation, material advantages) have more influence on the learning motivation of the students with intellectual disabilities. The internal factors (the pursuit of knowledge, curiosity, interest, the desire to work in the classroom, learning significance, hobby to solve difficult tasks, search for truth, their strength... [to full text]

The thesis examines how the European Commission incorporated and implemented migration policy as part of the European Union’s external relations, also known as the external dimension of migration. The focus of the thesis is on the period between the coming into force of the Amsterdam Treaty in 1999, when migration largely came to fall under the Commission’s remit, and the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty in 2009. The study compares how the Commission’s Directorates-General (DGs) involved in the external dimension of migration during this period—Justice, Liberty and Security, External Relations and Development—made sense of the changes introduced to their responsibilities. The thesis proposes that the concept of organisational culture, drawn from organisational sociology, can explain how actors interact with and collectively make sense of their organisational environment. The main argument of the thesis is that each of the DGs possesses an organisational culture based on its members’ shared readings of priorities and the function of their unit. The thesis examines these divergent organisational cultures to gauge how policies are internalised and translated into output. The analysis contributes to the external governance literature, which has theorised the external dimension of migration as a continuation of European integration processes without accounting for internal organisational dynamics. It also leads to reflections on organisational sociology theorising, and the implications of the findings on studies of organisational change and implementation. This thesis is divided into five chapters. The first provides a background for how the Commission came to be involved in migration policy. The second provides a theoretical framework for the study, building on organisational sociology. The remaining chapters empirically analyse the three elements of organisational culture: DG members’ sources of organisational identity, their perceptions and prioritisations of the external dimension of migration, and their reading of the Commission’s implementation practices, focusing on relations with Morocco as a tool for illustrating the latter.

I argue that despite the fact that there can be no strong refutation of skepticism it remains that ignoring skeptical hypotheses and relying on one’s sensory experience are both sound epistemic practices. This argument comes in the form of arguing that we are justified in ignoring skeptical hypotheses on the grounds that (1) they are merely logically possible, and (2) the merely logically possible is rarely relevant in the context of everyday life. I suggest that (2) is true on the grounds that the context of everyday life is one in which our epistemic pursuit of truth is mixed with other pragmatic goals. The result of this mix is that the pursuit of truth can conflict with our goal of avoiding error in such a way that we must choose to prioritize one goal over the other. The above choice implies that skepticism comes at an epistemic cost not acknowledge in the contemporary literature on external world skepticism. This epistemic cost of skepticism means that the relative risk of error involved in relying on sensory experience is not as epistemically problematic as has often been assumed. These considerations allow an anti-skeptical position in which relying on sensory experience is prima-facie justified despite the possibility of being a brain in a vat. In this paper I explore what such a position might look like and what the implications of such a view might be for relevant alternatives positions, the closure debate, and the concept of differing epistemic perspectives in contemporary epistemology.

This research focuses on evaluating and enhancing the performance of an in-house, structured, 2D CFD code - GHOST, on modern commodity clusters. The basic philosophy of this work is to optimize the cache performance of the code by splitting up the grid into smaller blocks and carrying out the required calculations on these smaller blocks. This in turn leads to enhanced code performance on commodity clusters. Accordingly, this work presents a discussion along with a detailed description of two techniques: external and internal blocking, for data access optimization. These techniques have been tested on steady, unsteady, laminar, and turbulent test cases and the results are presented. The critical hardware parameters which influenced the code performance were identified. A detailed study investigating the effect of these parameters on the code performance was conducted and the results are presented. The modified version of the code was also ported to the current state-of-art architectures with successful results.