Syftet var att undersöka hur implicit erfarenhetsbaserad kunskap kan tillvaratas samt huruvida det är möjligt för organisationer att hjälpa medarbetare att tydliggöra denna. Rapporten ger exempel på verktyg som tydliggör implicit erfarenhetsbaserad kunskap samt undersöker medarbetarnas känslor inför detta. Respondenterna valdes på grund av deras långa verkstadserfarenhet. Slutsatserna blev att implicit erfarenhetsbaserad kunskap gör medarbetaren trygg på arbetsplatsen och i sig själv. Respondenterna kunde inte sätta ord på sina kunskaper då de värderade teoretisk kunskap över praktisk, detta försvårade deras möjligheter att diskutera studiens föreslagna metoder. Råd till organisationen är att fortsätta arbetet med att synliggöra implicit kunskap samt kompetensöverföring men med individanpassade metoder. Detta för att minimera de problem som kan uppstå samt för att tillgodose respondenternas uttryckta behov.

This essay is about the European union freetrade treaty negations with Mercosur. I have in this essay used a qualitative content analysis, to study from the EU perspective the reasons to why, the EU and Mercosur suspended the free trade treaty negations 2004, and after several years resumed the negotiations again in 2010. The purpose of this study is to gain a deeper understanding from the EU perspective of why free trade negotiations were suspended and then resumed. In order to achieve a deeper understanding of this event, I have applied neorealism and neoliberalism on the explicit statements and the implied actions, as these theories may provide different explanatory power of implied causes of negotiations. I have come to the conclusion that the theoretical perspectives can indeed explain explicit statements and implicit actions for suspended and resumed negotiations with Mercosur. The implicit reasons for suspended negotiations are among others that the EU has an egoist thinking concerning a free trade treaty. The EU wish to gain more benefits then Mecosur with a free trade treaty, which lead to Mercosur wanted to suspend the negotiations. Another implicit reason is that the EU was thinking entirely on how much that were going to gain in relation mercosur, because of this kind of thinking, the EU probably realized that they were going to loose on a treaty. The implicit reasons for resumed negotiations are among others are that the EU genuinely wants to collaborate with Mercosur as much as they can with the purpose to gain together as much as possible. Other implicit reason is mutual dependence, which means that the EU needs Mercosur and vice versa to strengthen the global economy, and to give job opportunities and growth on both sides. Another implicit reason to resume the negotiations again is that the EU has grown stronger as an economic block, because of this, the EU has greater advantage of their demands with Mercosur. Further more, this essay surely point out that the EU has a lot of difficulties to come up with an agreement with Mercosur. But hopefully the EU can in the nearest future reach a free trade treaty with Mercosur.

Grammar is one of the most problematic areas when it comes to teaching a language; to know if or when, and how grammar should be taught, are relevant questions to all language teachers. The aim of the study was to investigate teachers’ attitudes towards teaching grammar, and how much, how and why they use the methods that they do. Therefore semi-structured interviews were undertaken with six 9th grade English teachers. The main results showed that all six teachers were positive to formal instruction, and they considered implicit knowledge of grammar superior to explicit knowledge. The teachers found it problematic to estimate the time spent working on grammar, mainly because half of them saw working on grammar in a wider perspective. All the teachers used the deductive method of teaching, but only half of them also used the inductive method. All but one teacher mentioned the students as being the most important factor that influences their teaching, and also time is mentioned and considered by two of the teachers as a reason for using a text book. The results of this study may be of help to foreign language teachers, or student teachers when considering how to teach grammar.

Denna fallstudie beskriver hur kunskap tar sig i uttryck och sprids mellan medarbetare på Nordeas telefonbank för privatkunder i Uppsala. För att analysera hur kunskap sprids har Nonakas SEKI modell för kunskapsöverföring använts som beskriver hur kunskap kan spridas genom fyra olika kanaler: socialisering, externalisering, internalisering och kombinering. Resultatet bygger på en kvantitativ enkätundersökning där 32 medarbetare deltog samt en kvalitativ intervju med Nordea Uppsalas personalchef och utbildningssamordnare. Innan undersökningen genomfördes formulerades tre hypoteser i avsikt att utreda 1) Om majoriteten av kunskapen som sprids mellan respondenterna i urvalet är implicit 2) Om det finns en skillnad mellan hur män och kvinnor tar till sig och sprider kunskap och 3) Om medarbetare med längre erfarenhet besitter mer implicit kunskap. Resultatet visar att majoriteten av den kunskap som sprids är explicit, att det finns en skillnad mellan hur män och kvinnor tar till sig och sprider kunskap och att medarbetare med längre erfarenhet besitter mer implicit kunskap. Den slutsats som fallstudien kommer fram till är att kunskap sprids vid sidan om utbildning och manualer genom att medarbetarna i urvalet frågar varandra och att de hanterar kunskap på olika sätt.

<p>Two studies examined whether stereotypes can be created using different learning paradigms and whether the resulting stereotypes will have different properties that affect their activation, suppression, and explicit knowledge. In the Pilot Study, participants were able to learn to use clothing cues to predict membership using both an explicit paradigm that made declarative statements of group membership and an implicit paradigm based on feedback learning. In Study 1, implicit learners performed worse after a depletion task and better following a control task. Explicit learners did not change based on the depletion task. High trait self-control as measured by the Brief Self-Control Scale was shown to predict better performance in depleted implicit learners and worse performance in depleted explicit learners. In Study 2, participants in both the implicit and explicit learning conditions saw decreases in performance when trying to inhibit a previously learned cue. Trait self-control did not predict the ability to suppress the use of a specific cue. In both studies implicit learners made more accurate estimations of the cue probabilities, suggesting a stronger explicit knowledge of the relationship between the cues and group membership. These results provide initial evidence that the method of stereotype learning can have an impact on later stereotype usage although the mechanisms that lead to these differences require additional research.</p> / Dissertation

Nowadays, bottled water is a common product, which can be easily found everywhere in developed and underdeveloped countries, and that usually has the main goal of reducing health risk. In Taiwan, tap water if often recognized as non-potable water, so, most of the people buy bottled water or filter their tap water. In France bottled water is popular for its convenience that consumers derive from it. However, bottled water became an important topic of discussion due to its importance and its negative aspects such as plastic waste, and its high price while having a similar composition with tap water. The aim of this study is to decompose the price of bottled water in France and Taiwan while using the hedonic price function in order to estimate the implicit price and the utility maximization that consumers estimate about it. A semi-log model has been used in order to obtain results. The findings show that the two markets have different preferences about bottled water attributes, but also have similarities which led to the conclusion that the that cultural and environmental differences play a large role in the preferences of bottled water attributes.

Although recent studies have begun to examine potential factors that might affect sexual appeals effectiveness, many questions remain unexplored. Based on previous studies relevant to sexual appeals, this study firstly distinguishes and explores two types of sexual appeals: implicit and explicit. Furthermore, this study compares the effects of two types of sexual appeals when product types are considered. In addition, sensation seeking is also incorporated into this research to examine how it may sway the effectiveness of the sexual appeals. The present study uses experimental design to investigate the advertising effects of different types of sexual appeals (non-sexual appeal vs. explicit appeal vs. implicit appeal) and product type (sex-related vs.non sex-related). A 3X3 factorial design is conducted. The ad effects are measured by purchase intention and attitude toward the brand to observe the response under different scenarios. The results indicate that when a sex-related product is promoted, sexual appeals are more effective than non-sexual appeals. There is an interaction effect between sexual appeal and product type. To be specific, the explicit sexual appeal is more effective than the implicit sexual appeal when a sex-related product is promoted. However, such superior effects disappear as it turns to non sex-related product promotion. Additionally, for individuals with higher sensation seeking, the explicit sexual appeal is more effective than the implicit sexual appeal when the product is related to sex. On the opposite, for those with median degree of sensation seeking, the implicit appeal is more effective than the explicit appeal to promote the product which is not sex-related. Finally, for those with low degree of sensation seeking, there is no difference in advertising effectiveness between explicit and implicit appeal. According to these findings, this study suggests that marketers should consider not only the product they promote but also the sensation seeking of the target consumers before choosing an appropriate sexual appeal to maximize the advertising effects.

Implicit surface modeling is attracting attention, because a complex object can be constructed easily and intuitively from some simple primitive objects, defined by primitive defining functions, using successive compositions of blending operations. Blending operations play a major role in implicit surfaces, because they can join intersecting primitive objects (operands) smoothly with transitions generated automatically by blending operators. Hence, this dissertation proposes three new methods: (1) the scale method, (2) field functions with adjustable inner and outer radii, and (3) the translation method, for developing blending operations that have blending range controls. That is, the proposed blending operations provide blending range parameters to adjust the size and shape of the transition of the blending surface freely, without deforming the shapes of blended primitives totally. The first and the third methods offer blending range controls by developing new blending operators, whereas the second method does the similar things by developing new primitive defining functions. The scale method is a generalized method. It provides a framework to transform any existing blending operators or arc-shaped curves into the blending operator that has the following properties: (1) Provides blending range and curvature parameters to adjust the size and shape of the transition of the blending surface, without deforming the shapes of blended primitives totally. (2) Behaves like Max/Min(x1,¡K,xk) operators in non-blending regions in the entire domain. As a result, it gives a more intuitive shape control on modeling its subsequent blends. (3) Possesses C1 continuity in the entire domain except the origin. As a result, it can prevent from generating non-smooth surfaces on sequential blends with overlapped blending regions. (4) Works to blend both non-zero and zero implicit surfaces. (5) Can be a new primitive in other blends, especially in Soft blending. (6) Applies for bulge elimination. Field functions with adjustable inner and outer radii provide parameters to adjust the inner and the outer radii of influence, respectively. This dissertation proposes four different transforms to develop this kind of field functions. Thus, using the proposed field functions as the new primitive defining functions of soft object modeling, Soft blending, R-functions, Ricci¡¦s super-ellipsoid blends and Perlin¡¦s set operations: (1) Can retain their low computing complexity. (2) Can perform the blending range controls, by adjusting the inner and the outer radii of influence of the proposed field functions. The translation method is also a generalized method. It offers a framework to transform any existing blending operators or arc-shaped curves into controllable blending operators for blending zero implicit surfaces. A controllable blending operator has the following properties: (1) Offers blending range and curvature parameters to adjust the size and shape of transition of the blending surface, without deforming the shapes of blended primitives completely. (2) Provides parameters mi, i=1,2,¡K,k, to behave like Max/Min(x1/m1,¡K,xk/mk) operators on non-blending regions in the entire domain, and its zero level blending surface remains unchanged, whatever mi, i=1,2,¡K,k, are set. As a result, by adjusting mi, i=1,2,¡K,k, a controllable blending operator has the following abilities to control its primitives¡¦ subsequent blends:

The implicit function model is nowadays generally applied to a lot of fields that need 3D, such as computer game, cartoon or for specially effect film. So far, most hardware are still to support the polygon-mesh model but not implicit function model, so polygon-mesh model is still the mainstream of computer graphics. However, translation between the two representation models becomes a new research topic. This paper presents a new method to translate the triangles mesh model into the implicit functions model. The main concept is to use the binary space-partitioning tree to divide the points and patches in the triangle mesh model to create a hierarchical structure. For each leaf node in this hierarchical structure, we would generate a corresponding implicit function. These implicit functions are generated by the genetic algorithm. And the internal nodes in this hierarchical structure are blended by the blending operators. The blending operators make the surface become smooth and continual. The method we proposed reduces the data in a large amount because we only save the coefficients of the implicit surface. And the genetic algorithm can avoid the high computing complexity.

In recent years, the demand for portable radio communication has been increasing which requires low profile, light weight and small size antennas. Therefore, the size of the antenna is required to be as small as possible. In this thesis, some of the compact antennas will be analyzed and simulated. The early-stage PIFA antenna will be investigated first, and then the shorting pin characteristics to design compact and dual band antenna was utilized. Because the shorting pin will lead to the decrease of bandwidth, replacement of the shorting pin by using chip-resistor could improve this characteristic. The compactness of antennas will lead to the decrease of the gain. In order to improve the gain of antennas, the combination of substrate and superstrate configuration with very high permittivity material is used. For the consideration of Bluetooth system, we use the ACPS (Asymmetrical Co-planar Striplines) structure to design the antenna. Using this structure in the design will obtain a promotion in bandwidth compared with the conventional rectangular microstrip antenna. Because the size of the antenna is small, the time to simulate this structure by the FDTD (Finite Difference Time Domain) method is too long. In order to solve this problem, this thesis mainly study a new FDTD algorithm based on the Alternating-Direction Implicit method, and use this algorithm to simulate some simple structures.