Laboratory work is a big part of chemistry education in high school. During our student training placement we have noticed that the laboratory work is not fully utilized to develop students´ chemistry knowledge. This problem made us want to investigate how the laboratory work in chemistry could be set, to become more meaningful for students. We introduced two preparation methods, and examined the outcome of students learning experiences and their acquisition of chemistry knowledge. This was examined both through surveys and observation. Our study showed that it is not clear that students learn by experimenting. Several students expressed that an initial discussion did contribute to an instructive laboratory sessions and claimed that the preparation had helped them to articulate their knowledge and that it helped them to focus on the right things during the experiment. The students who had prepared themselves communicated in a more scientific manner during the laboratory work. / Laborationer är en stor del i kemiundervisningen i gymnasiet. Under vår VFU, verksamhetsförlagd utbildning, har vi noterat att laborationer inte utnyttjas fullt ut för att utveckla elevernas kunskaper. Denna problematik gjorde att vi ville undersöka hur laborationer i kemi kan utformas för att bli mer betydelsefulla för elever. Vi undersökte i vilken utsträckning eleverna erfar att laborationer bidrar till förståelse för kemi. Vi introducerade två förberedelsemetoder och undersökte vilket inflytande dessa hade på elevernas lärande och deras tillägnande av kemikunskaper. Detta undersöktes både genom enkäter och observationer. Vår studie visade att det inte är självklart att eleverna lär sig genom att laborera. Flera elever uttryckte att en inledande diskussion hade bidragit till en lärorik laboration och menade att förberedelsen hade hjälpt dem att sätta ord på deras kunskaper samt att den hjälpte dem att fokusera på rätt saker under laborationen. De studenter som hade förberett sig kommunicerade på ett mer vetenskapligt sätt under laborationer.

The importance of trust in Electronic Commerce (EC) has been addressed for about two decades and various theories have been applied to investigate the issue. In spite of a consensus among researchers of trust in a website being a risky decision, they have neither applied decision making theories (e.g. two systems of reasoning) in the context nor created a risky situation when examining their hypotheses about trust in EC. Instead, the decision is implicitly assumed to be deliberative although not enough evidences have been collected to support the assumption. An in-lab experiment was conducted to investigate the above shortcomings in the literature. Findings show that unlike the current belief, intuition (and not deliberation), is the dominant decision making process when trusting an unknown website in a risky situation. The level of trust is significantly different when risk is not involved. In addition, one of the well-established constructs, “situational decision making to trust”, was not confirmed by the collected data in the risky situation. The results conflict with EC and trust literature and clarify the crucial role of risk in decision making to trust. Hence, the studies that have measured and validated trust and related constructs without the actual risky situation might need to be reconsidered.

This thesis examines underpricing in Sweden using unique data on the 185 firms going public through initial public offerings (IPOs) and listing on the Stockholm Stock Exchange between 1994-2011. The average initial return in the Swedish IPO market adjusted for index movements is 11.49% but underpricing of individual IPOs was as high as 241.04%. Further, time trends in underpricing, the level of average initial returns effect on IPO supply underpricing and differences between sectors, segments and investment banks are examined. Finally, it is argued that investors must be rewarded for taking the high risk associated with IPO investing and that the average initial return of 11.49% is a reasonable compensation for that risk.

Prior studies show the evidence of non-financial variables such as marketing affects investor¡¦s response to risky asset pricing, and indicate that the distribution of risky asset returns is asymmetric and non-nomality, implying using Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) method with the assumption of normal distributions may lead to unreliable estimates. This study tries to apply quantile regression to the analysis of the sample in order to avoid estimation bias. This study examines whether a firm¡¦s pre-IPO marketing expenditures affects its¡¦ initial public offering (IPO) underpricing in Japan and examine whether market states influence the existing relation between pre-IPO marketing expenditures and IPO underpricing. The empirical results shows: (1) pre-IPO marketing expenditures significantly reduce IPO underpricing levels, (2) pre-IPO marketing expenditures can reduce IPO underpricing levels following bear markets as it cannot reduce IPO underpricing levels following bull markets. Therefore, as firms decide to use marketing strategies to make their firm remarkable, and in turns without concerning for market states to reduce the degree of IPO underpricing, their objective may not be reached.

The role of top managers in shaping the performance of the firms that employ them represents a central issue to strategic management research. Indeed, a substantial amount of research has examined potential linkages between the characteristics of top managers and firm performance. However the empirical results of research in this area have been ambiguous. This study attempts to theoretically and empirically extend research on the influence of top managers on firm performance by examining the relationship between managerial prestige and firm performance in the post-IPO context. Although upper echelons researchers have attempted to link top managers with firm performance in the past recent reviews of the upper echelons research note that little attention has been paid to top management characteristics other than those of top management team (TMT) heterogeneity, TMT size and TMT tenure. Additionally, recent reviews also suggest the need to consider potential intervening mechanisms between TMT characteristics and firm performance. This study addresses these two limitations of prior upper echelons research by examining the direct and indirect influences of managerial prestige on post-IPO firm performance.In this study I develop a model which incorporates the resource based view and resource dependence theory with insights from upper echelons research and research on the IPO context. Results for the model developed in this study suggest the following. First, executive undergraduate prestige is positively related to post-IPO firm growth. The other aspects of managerial prestige examined in this study were not found to influence post-IPO firm performance. Second, the influence of the key external resource holders identified in this study, namely prestigious alliance partners and institutional investors with stable equity portfolios, were found to enhance firm survival rates, but were negatively associated with firm growth. Third, executive undergraduate prestige was found to garner the support of prestigious alliance partners. The remaining aspects of managerial prestige were not found to influence the support of prestigious alliance partners or dedicated institutional investors. Finally, no support was found for prestigious alliance partners and dedicated institutional investors as mediators of the relationship between managerial prestige and post-IPO firm performance.

The cost of design, construction and maintenance of facilities is on continual rise. The demand is to construct facilities which have been designed by apply life cycle costing principles. These principles have already given strong decision making power to the manufacturing industry. The need to satisfy the environmental sustainability requirements, improve operational effectiveness of buildings and apply value engineering principles has increased the dependency on life cycle costing analysis. The objective is to obtain economically viable solutions by analyzing the alternatives during the design of a building. Though the LCCA process is able to give the desired results, it does have some problems which have stood as hindrances to the more widespread use of the LCCA concept and method. The literature study has highlighted that the problem areas are the lack of frameworks or mechanisms for collecting and storing data and the complexity of LCCA exercise, which involves the analysis of a thousand of building elements and a number of construction-type options and maintenance activities for each building element at detailed design stages. Building Information Modeling has been able to repeatedly answer the questions raised by the AEC industry. The aim of this study is to identify the areas where BIM can be effectively applied to the LCCA process and become a part of the workflow. In this study, initially four LCCA case studies are read and evaluated from the point of view of understanding the method in which the life cycle costing principles have been applied. The purpose, the type alternatives examined, the process of analysis, the type of software used and the results are understood. An attempt has been carried out to understand the workflow of the LCCA process. There is a confidence that Building Information Modeling is capable of handling changes during the design, construction and maintenance phases of the project. Since applying changes to any kind of information of the building during LCC analysis forms the core, it has become necessary to use computer building models for examining these changes. The building modeling softwares are enumerated. The case studies have highlighted that the evaluation of the alternatives are primarily to achieve energy efficient solutions for the buildings. Applying these solutions involves high initial costs. The return on investment is the means by which these solutions become viable to the owners of the facilities. This is where the LCCA has been applied. Two of the important cost elements of the LCC analysis are initial costs and the operating costs of the building. The collaboration of these modeling tools with other estimating software where the initial costs of the building can be generated is studied. The functions of the quantity take-off tools and estimating tools along with the interoperability between these tools are analyzed. The operating costs are generated from the software that focuses on sustainability. And the currently used tools for performing the calculations of the life cycle costing analysis are also observed. The objective is to identify if the currently available BIM tools and software can help in obtaining LCCA results and are able to offset the hindrances of the process. Therefore, the software are studied from the point of view of ease of handling data and the type of data that can be generated. Possible BIM workflows are suggested depending on the functions of the software and the relationship between them. The study has aimed at taking a snapshot the current tools available which can aid the LCCA process. The research is of significance to the construction industry as it forms a precursor to the application of Building Information Modeling to the LCCA process as it shows that it has the capacity of overcoming the obstacles for life cycle costing. This opens a window to the possibility of applying BIM to LCCA and furthering this study.

The solution of initial value problems (IVPs) provides the evolution of dynamic system state history for given initial conditions. Solving boundary value problems (BVPs) requires finding the system behavior where elements of the states are defined at different times. This dissertation presents a unified framework that applies modified Chebyshev-Picard iteration (MCPI) methods for solving both IVPs and BVPs. Existing methods for solving IVPs and BVPs have not been very successful in exploiting parallel computation architectures. One important reason is that most of the integration methods implemented on parallel machines are only modified versions of forward integration approaches, which are typically poorly suited for parallel computation. The proposed MCPI methods are inherently parallel algorithms. Using Chebyshev polynomials, it is straightforward to distribute the computation of force functions and polynomial coefficients to different processors. Combining Chebyshev polynomials with Picard iteration, MCPI methods iteratively refine estimates of the solutions until the iteration converges. The developed vector-matrix form makes MCPI methods computationally efficient. The power of MCPI methods for solving IVPs is illustrated through a small perturbation from the sinusoid motion problem and satellite motion propagation problems. Compared with a Runge-Kutta 4-5 forward integration method implemented in MATLAB, MCPI methods generate solutions with better accuracy as well as orders of magnitude speedups, prior to parallel implementation. Modifying the algorithm to do double integration for second order systems, and using orthogonal polynomials to approximate position states lead to additional speedups. Finally, introducing perturbation motions relative to a reference motion results in further speedups. The advantages of using MCPI methods to solve BVPs are demonstrated by addressing the classical Lambert’s problem and an optimal trajectory design problem. MCPI methods generate solutions that satisfy both dynamic equation constraints and boundary conditions with high accuracy. Although the convergence of MCPI methods in solving BVPs is not guaranteed, using the proposed nonlinear transformations, linearization approach, or correction control methods enlarge the convergence domain. Parallel realization of MCPI methods is implemented using a graphics card that provides a parallel computation architecture. The benefit from the parallel implementation is demonstrated using several example problems. Larger speedups are achieved when either force functions become more complicated or higher order polynomials are used to approximate the solutions.

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The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of mold temperature, initial resin temperature, and the vacuum, applied at resin exit ports, on the mechanical properties of epoxy matrix woven glasss fiber reinforced composite specimens produced by Resin Transfer Molding (RTM). For this purpose, six different mold temperatures (25&ordm / , 40&ordm / , 60&ordm / , 80&ordm / , 100&ordm / , and 120&ordm / C), two initial resin temperatures (15&ordm / and 28&ordm / C), and vacuum (0.03 bar) and without vacuum (~1 bar) conditions were used. Specimens were characterized by using ultrasonic (C-Scan) inspection, mechanical tests (Tensile, Flexural, Impact), thermal analyses (Ignition Loss, TGA) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). It was generally observed that mechanical properties of the specimens produced with a mold temperature of 60&ordm / C were the best (e.g. 16%, 43%, and 26% higher tensile strength, Charpy impact toughness and flexural strength values, respectively). When vacuum was not applied, the percentage of &ldquo / voids&rdquo / increased leading to a decrease in mechanical properties such as 26% in Charpy impact toughness and 5% in tensile and flexural strength. Lower initial resin temperature also decreased mechanical properties (e.g. 14% in tensile strenght and 18% in Charpy impact toughness).

The application of the internet technology on securities markets has been increasing over recent years, so is the influence it has caused on the way the stock market is operated. There is no doubt that internet technology is changing the access between investors and issuing firms, as well as the access between investors and exchanges. How would this affect the stock market microstructure? Little study has been done thus far in this regard, and, as far as we know, none has looked into the issue of IPOs on internet and its related impact on IPO returns. In addition to the impact on the primary market, internet tradings also have immense impact on the underlying performance of the secondary market. The purposes of this study are mainly twofold:(1) To explore the related issues in IPOs or DPOs on internet, e.g., the disclosure requirements, the restriction of investors, and the effect it has on IPO discounts,(2) To empirically test how the internet trading affects the daily and intraday performance (i.e., liquidity, volatility and efficiency) of the market.This is the first study attempting to examine the pricing issue of IPOs on the internet. We hope to compare the returns of initial public offerings on the internet with those of the traditional IPOs and analyze the differences, if any. In addition to provide useful analyses to the security authority on DPOs or IPOs on internet, the result of this study should contribute to our understanding of the market microstructure.