This thesis report describes an attempt to build a recommender system for recommending sporting goods in an e-commerce setting, using the customer purchase history as the input dataset. Two input datasets were considered, the item purchases dataset and the item-category dataset. Both the datasets are implicit, that is not explicitly rated by the customer. The data is also very sparse that very few users have purchased more than a handful of the items featured in the dataset. The report describes a method for dealing with both the implicit datasets as well as addressing the problem of sparsity. The report introduces SVD (Single Value Decomposition) with matrix factorization as a implementation for recommendation systems. Specifically implementations in the Apache Mahout machine learning framework. / Denna rapport beskriver ett tillvägagångssätt för att med kundernas köphistorik bygga ett rekommendationssystem för rekommendation av sportprodukter på en e-handelsplats. Två olika datamängder behandlas, köphistorik per produkt och kund, samt köpfrekvensen per produktkategori per kund i köphistoriken. Båda är implicita datamängder, vilket betyder att kunderna inte har explicit uttryckt en åsikt för eller emot produkten, utan implicit uttrycker preferens genom sitt köp. Datan är även mycket gles, vilket betyder att den enskilda kunden generellt bara köpt en liten del av den totala mängden av sålda varor. Rapporten behandlar en metod som behandlar både den implicita karaktären av data och gleshets problemet. Rapporten introducerar SVD (Single Value Decomposition) med matrisfaktorisering som en metod för att implementera rekommendationssystem. Specifikt implementerat med hjälp av maskininlärningsbiblioteket Apache Mahout.

Kommunen är en stor arbetsgivare och verksamheten inom kommunal hemtjänst berördessutom många människor som kommer i kontakt med anställda inom hemtjänsten i rollensom vårdtagare. För att uppfylla organisationens mål om att en god omvårdnad ska bedrivashar forskningen tidigare mest fokuserat på betydelsen av en framgångsrik ledare. På senare tidhar även följarnas betydelse för både organisation och ledarskapet lyfts fram. Teorin om Leader-Member Exchange handlar om relationen mellan ledare och följare och detutbyte som sker där. Ledaren värderar följarens bidrag till utbytet i relationen baserat på sinagenerella föreställningar om följare, även kallat Implicit Followership Theories. Tidigareforskning har visat att om dessa generella föreställningar hos ledaren är av positiv karaktär ökardet ledarens förväntningar på följaren och kan förbättra relationen. Syftet med vårundersökning är att undersöka hur ledare inom kommunal hemtjänst ser på följarskap och omde upplever att följarskapet påverkar deras möjlighet att leda. Semistrukturerade intervjuer och tematisk analys ligger till grund för denna undersökning somutförts i en chefsgrupp inom kommunal hemtjänst. Resultaten beskriver inledningsvisdeltagarnas uppfattning om begreppet följarskap och vilka egenskaper och beteenden som ingåri deras generella uppfattning om följare. Vidare beskriver resultatet av undersökningen hurdeltagarna uppfattar sina faktiska följare och att deras generella förväntningar på följare intehelt stämmer överens med det faktiska följarskapet. Slutligen visar undersökningen tydligt attföljarskapet har påverkan på förutsättningarna för att leda. / The municipality is a large employer and the activities within the municipal home care servicealso affect many people who encounter employees within the home care service in the role ofcare recipient. To fulfill the organization's goal that good nursing should be conducted; researchhas previously mostly focused on the importance of a successful leader. In recent times, theimportance of followers for both organization and leadership has also been highlighted. The theory of Leader-Member Exchange is about the relationship between leader and followerand the exchange that takes place there. The leader values the follower's contribution to theexchange in the relationship based on his general notions of followers, also called ImplicitFollowership Theories. Previous research has shown that if these general perceptions of theleader are of a positive nature, it increases the leader's expectations of the follower and canimprove the relationship. The purpose of our survey is to investigate how leaders in themunicipal home care service view followers and whether they feel that the followers affecttheir ability to lead. Semi-structured interviews and thematic analysis form the basis for this study, which wasconducted in a management group within municipal home care. The results initially describethe participants' perception of the concept of following and what characteristics and behaviorsare included in their general perception of followers. Furthermore, the results of the surveydescribe how the participants perceive their actual followers and that their general expectationsof followers do not fully correspond to the actual followership. Finally, the survey clearlyshows that following has an impact on the conditions for leading.

Cheri Huber is a contemporary American Zen Buddhist interested in the relation between self-hate and suffering. Her style is aphoristic, loosely organized, and in her own words, "a swirling mass of notions." My paper organizes her scattered ideas on suffering and self-hate into a coherent system. Her views on self-hate and suffering sometimes make us uncomfortable. In one of her early works, she points out that, after presenting her thoughts to people, "they tend to not want to talk to us anymore." After explaining her views on self-hate and suffering, I will explain why we occasionally react with uneasiness to her observations. That explanation is based on recent research on hidden and implicit bias.

This dissertation in practice was a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of Model School Policy 506, Student Discipline (MSBA, 2019), as it relates to the school-to-prison pipeline across the nation as well as in Minnesota. Model Policy 506, co-authored by the Minnesota School Board Association and the Minnesota Association of School Administrators, is offered to school districts that subscribe to MSBA’s policy services. The homogeneity in school discipline policy across Minnesota provided an opportunity for this study. The purpose of this CDA was two-fold: to assess the discourses instantiated in Model School Policy 506, and to determine, through the figured world tool of inquiry, what the seven building tasks are accomplishing in Model Policy 506 for the reader to assume as social truth regarding student behavior and schooling. Data was collected through an iterative process and examined for themes. The CDA included multiple reviews of Model Policy 506 through the figured world tool of inquiry (Gee 2014), discerning and charting of the activities of the seven building tasks (Gee, 2014), assessing text complexity of policy discourse through a Lexile review, and capturing word repetition via computerized software as well as noting infrequent use of terms or absence of ideas. Major findings include that Model Policy 506, Student Discipline, acted to reinscribe teacher implicit bias, and that policy language was invested and embedded in racial structures. A Call to Action was written to be shared with the executive directors of the Minnesota School Board Association and the Minnesota Association of School administrators as an actionable response to the complex issue of social justice in discipline policy.

Idag existerar spridda och motstridiga uppfattningar om grammatik ska inkluderas eller exkluderas ur den tidiga engelskundervisningen, däremot är det brist på forskning som undersöker detta i relation till elever i lågstadieåldern. Ur detta forskningsgap uppkom idén till studien. Studiens syfte var att undersöka grammatikens roll i engelskundervisningen i årskurserna 1-3. Det gjordes genom att undersöka vilka uppfattningar om finns hos lågstadielärare om grammatik i den tidiga engelskundervisningen och hur de arbetar med grammatik på lågstadiet, om de gör det. För att samla in empiri kombinerades en enkätundersökning med uppföljande intervjuer. Tjugoåtta lågstadielärare svarade på enkäten och tre av dem deltog i uppföljande intervjuer. I resultatet uppkom uppfattningar som både speglade att grammatik ska inkluderas- och exkluderas ur engelskundervisningen i årskurserna 1-3 varav majoriteten av lärarna ansåg att grammatik ska uppmärksammas vid vissa tillfällen. Undersökningen visade även att alla lärare, på olika sätt, uppmärksammande- eller undervisade grammatik i den tidiga engelskundervisningen. Studiens huvudsakliga slutsats är att en implicit grammatikundervisning dominerar i lågstadiets engelskundervisning.

The present dissertation set out to investigate the predictors and consequences of sexist behavior. Specifically, this dissertation aimed at contributing to the existing sexism literature and research, by expanding the scope of research on sexist beliefs to the investigation of the relation between implicit and explicit hostile and benevolent sexist attitudes, and hostile and benevolent sexist behaviors (Manuscript #1). A second goal was to deliver novel insight into the consequences of benevolent sexism for men, or in other words, to identify possible costs and perils that engaging in benevolent sexist behavior has for men (Manuscript #2). Finally, the present dissertation focused on the examination of individual and collective strategies to respond when being confronted with sexism (Manuscript #3).

Past research has shown that accessing a memory allows faster subsequent access to the memory activated as well as to related information (priming). There has been much research devoted to implicit category priming (unintentional priming of a category of information), but this research has not determined the number of categories that can be implicitly primed simultaneously. The goal of the present quantitative study was to address that gap. Twenty participants (ages 27-54 years, M=44 years), who volunteered through an online participant pool, were presented with 2 tasks over the Internet. A scrambled phrase task implicitly primed 5 unrelated categories and a lexical decision (LD) task measured the priming (mean time between tasks = 42 seconds). Resulting primed and unprimed LD response latency distributions were strongly, positively skewed, which obscured individual priming effects. Gaussian parameters were extracted to overcome this skew, and the distributions were created for analysis. Dunnett's multiple comparisons post-hoc test following a 1-way ANOVA showed that 2 of the 5 categories remained significantly primed. Follow-up research should determine the reliability of this value. This value, and its range (to be identified in follow-up studies) would provide a means for comparing lesson efficacy and teacher performance. The results of this research also replicate previous research demonstrating long-term implicit category priming.

In the past century, grammar instruction has aroused debate among scholars and instructors in the field of second language teaching and acquisition without absolute consensus. However, for the acquisition of Chinese grammar by adult L2 learners, there is wider acceptance that grammar should be taught due to the unique Chinese grammatical features. The issue in question is merely on how to teach Chinese grammar effectively. Hence, inspired by many other comparative studies on explicit and implicit instruction methods for teaching Western languages such as English, French, Spanish and so forth, the researcher conducted an empirical study to investigate the effectiveness of the two instruction methods on Chinese grammar acquisition. The current study consisted of two experiments, involving two target forms: Affirmative-Negative Questions (A-Not-A Questions) and the perfective aspect particle LE (了). The participants were beginning level Chinese language learners who studied Chinese as a second language in two class sections of the Elementary Non-intensive Chinese Class at a large public university. They formed two comparative groups naturally. During the two experiments, the explicit group was provided with explicit knowledge of grammar patterns, examples carrying the patterns and opportunities to practice with the teacher’s explicit corrective feedback, while implicit group received input without any grammatical knowledge or explanation. The teacher would give recast feedback (implicit) if students made mistakes in their practice. Importantly, the explicit and implicit teaching groups were reversed in the second experiment, in order to enable each group to be exposed to both the explicit and the implicit teaching conditions. Analysis of the results obtained from immediate-tests and delayed post-tests yielded three main findings: first, learners who had received explicit grammar instruction treatment overall gained greater improvement in their knowledge of, and their ability to use the target forms in the short term; second, when it comes to longer-term effects, both groups in the two experiments showed loss, in varying degrees, in the knowledge of and the ability to use the target forms; third, explicit instruction was of more advantage for L2 Chinese learners when they are learning more complex rules.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Performance management is not a new area within IO psychology research, however recently there has been growing interest with how to increase its effectiveness. Scholars are calling for more research to examine the antecedents of actual performance management behaviors that managers enact on a daily basis. The current study addresses this gap by utilizing Implicit Person Theory to understand the effect of supervisor perceptions on their behaviors that contribute towards the goal(s) of performance management. Previous research has suggested that Implicit Person Theory leads to more coaching behaviors, however, has failed to identify an explanatory mechanism. The current study relies on the three-component model of commitment to offer a mediating variable between Implicit Person Theory and differing degrees of performance management behaviors due to its more proximal relationship to the target behaviors compared to the broad antecedent of perception of others. The researchers tested this mediation using survey data from a broad sample of supervisors across the United States. Managers’ Incrementalism was positively and significantly related to discretionary performance management behaviors via affective commitment to performance management, however the relationship between Incrementalism and focal performance management behaviors via continuance commitment was non-significant. This research extends previous performance management research by providing evidence for the influence of key supervisor attitudes and implicit beliefs on varying levels of performance management behaviors. Theoretical contributions, limitations and future research directions are discussed.

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