In my PhD thesis I investigate the relationship between corporates' financial and environmental performances. The concept of quantitative environmental performance measures was introduced to enable to compare and analyse environmental impacts of different socio­economic units e.g. companies, countries, regions. In my dissertation, I use environmental performance measures to examine their effect on the financial performance of different companies. In the first chapter, I apply a meta­analysis to examine the results of the previous studies which investigate the impact of firms' environmental performance on their financial performance. The outcomes propose that it is important to account for the omitted variable bias such as unobserved firm heterogeneity. The results suggest that it takes time for the environmental regulation to materialize into the financial performance, too. In the subsequent two chapters I study Czech firms over 2004­2008. First I study the intertemporal effects of corporates' environmental performance on financial ...

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / Research has shown that collaborative eLearning can provide educational opportunities to groups of learners; both distance learners as well as traditional campus-based learners. It provides innovative educational methods in which learning can be constructed. The way collaborative eLearning is administered, managed, used and adopted can assist in providing information for future design and improvement of collaborative software. The objective of this research is to provide an insight into adoption and use of collaborative eLearning environments and to discover new determinants of usage. To examine the usage of an eLearning environment at the University of the Western Cape, a cross-sectional survey was conducted with Computer Science students. While this study is specific to this university, the underlying principles can be generalised to other organisational types. This study is quantitative and qualitative in nature as well as deductive and inductive. Three hundred and six valid questionnaires were analysed using quantitative methods. Soft Systems Methodology was used to manage the research process and to create conceptual models to explain the research problem and identify solutions. It was a cyclical process. Findings show that although the university’s eLearning platform is utilised, students seem to prefer free and open source platforms. They use social and collaborative applications such as WhatsApp, Telegram, Dropbox, Google Drive, Google Docs as well as email messages. Four types of technology affordances: communicative-affordance, document share-affordance, course resource-affordance, and integrity-affordance were identified as being relevant in their choice of application. Furthermore, culture—masculinity/femininity, individualism/collectivism, Uncertainty Avoidance, and Power Distance—also have an effect on the adoption of collaborative eLearning applications and software the students used for learning. Chi-Square analysis found that individualism/collectivism and Power Distance were both significant and related to the adoption and usage of collaborative eLearning. Gender was found not to be a determinant of how students view the use of collaborative eLearning software applications. Finally, it was also found that understanding use and user behaviour, could provide the theoretical guidance to inform collaborative eLearning design. The analysis and findings show that culture influences the adoption of collaborative eLearning while technology affordance plays a major role in the use of collaborative eLearning.

Preventive maintenance has the potential to improve network condition by retarding future pavement deterioration. The Virginia Department of Transportation uses its pavement management system to determine maintenance targets for each district. The districts then use these recommendations to select pavements that will receive maintenance and the types of treatments that will be applied. Each district has a different approach to preventive maintenance. There was a need for more consistent preventive maintenance practices across the state. This thesis outlines guidelines for the implementation of a preventive maintenance policy. Preventive maintenance treatments currently being used within Virginia include chip seal, slurry seal, microsurfacing, and thin hot mix asphalt overlays. Historical pavement condition data was obtained from the VDOT PMS for these treatments and treatment performance models were developed. A district level treatment selection tool was developed to assist the district level decision making process. A prioritized list of pavement sections was generated, maximizing the cost-effectiveness of the selected treatments subject to budgetary constraints set by the central office. The treatment selection tool was then run for each pavement classification in each district. The results of this analysis were presented. Although the recommended budget for each district was very close to the targets set by the central office, the recommended lane miles for each district were about half the targets set by the central office.  It is believed that the unit costs used in this analysis were higher than those used in the VDOT PMS analysis. This selection tool has the potential to be a very powerful decision support tool if the unit costs are representative of what the expected treatment costs are for each district. / Master of Science

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Over the past decade, universities had a significant improvement in using online learning tools. A standard learning management system provides fundamental functionalities to satisfy the basic needs of its users. The new generation of learning management systems have introduced a novel system that provides social networking features. An unprecedented number of users use the social aspects of such platforms to create their profile, collaborate with other users, and find their desired career path. Nowadays there are many learning systems which provide learning materials, certificates, and course management systems. This allows us to utilize such information to help the students and the instructors in their academic life. The presented research work's primary goal is to focus on creating an intelligent personal assistant within the social learning systems. The proposed personal assistant has a human-like persona, learns about the users, and recommends useful and meaningful materials for them. The designed system offers a set of features for both institutions and members to achieve their goal within the learning system. It recommends jobs and friends for the users based on their profile. The proposed agent also prioritizes the messages and shows the most important message to the user. The developed software supports model-controller-view architecture and provides a set of RESTful APIs which allows the institutions to integrate the proposed intelligent agent with their learning system.

No description available.

During the past several years an increase in use of Course Management Systems (CMS) in higher education’s instructional infrastructure had been witnessed (Morgan, 2003). As a result, increased online education placed an emphasis on CMS because CMS were able to provide information 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Faculty, staff, and students were increasingly dependent on information and learning services provided by the colleges and universities (Carey & Gleason, 2006). The flexibility provided by the CMS had led campus faculty, staff, and students to expect continuous availability in campus systems (Carey & Gleason, 2006). This study examined faculty perceptions of a course management system used to enhance teaching and learning. Faculty members’ perceived motivation reasons and barriers were analyzed in this study using descriptive statistics. The important motivation reasons for using a course management system were to provide course information, augment student learning, and provide diverse teaching methods. In addition, the study revealed that faculty members were satisfied with institutional support in terms of training and technical support but not rewards received. Demographic variables (gender, age, faculty tenure status, faculty rank, college of teaching, location of course delivery, and time spent per week preparing materials) were examined to see if there were differences in faculty members’ perceived satisfaction of pedagogical effectiveness. An online survey was sent to 300 faculty members who used CMS in their academic courses at Mississippi State University. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the survey data. The results revealed that the majority of faculty used CMS primarily to: (a) distribute information to students, (b) augment student learning and (c) provide diverse teaching methods. In terms of strengths and weaknesses of a CMS some faculty members thought the tools were complicated to use while others thought it was easy to use. Overall, the majority of faculty thought that CMS was a great way to communicate with students. Faculty also thought that lack of time played a role in their ability to use CMS effectively.

In my PhD thesis I investigate the relationship between corporates' financial and environmental performances. The concept of quantitative environmental performance measures was introduced to enable to compare and analyse environmental impacts of different socio­economic units e.g. companies, countries, regions. In my dissertation, I use environmental performance measures to examine their effect on the financial performance of different companies. In the first chapter, I apply a meta­analysis to examine the results of the previous studies which investigate the impact of firms' environmental performance on their financial performance. The outcomes propose that it is important to account for the omitted variable bias such as unobserved firm heterogeneity. The results suggest that it takes time for the environmental regulation to materialize into the financial performance, too. In the subsequent two chapters I study Czech firms over 2004­2008. First I study the intertemporal effects of corporates' environmental performance on financial ...

Since it's release in Dec 2000, there has been a slow movement towards the new version of ISO 9001:2000 by ISO 9000:1994 certified organizations. Of the 561,747 ISO 9000 certified businesses, 167,210 are certified under the new ISO 9001:2000, which is less than 30 % of the total ISO 9000 certified companies. Although many studies have been conducted to understand and assess the practices of ISO 9000:1994 standards, no research has been done to investigate the practices of ISO 9001:2000 in Saudi Arabia. This study is designed to investigate the implementation practices of the new ISO 9001:2000 standard in Saudi business organizations. The main objectives of this study are to identify the critical factors that lead to successful implementation of the new standard, to determine what barriers have been encountered during implementation, and to identify the most difficult parts of the standard to comply with. It investigates the perceived benefits that Saudi firms have gained from implementing the system and examines the level of knowledge about ISO 9001:2000 and the perceptions of the new standard among the management teams and staff of ISO registered firms. It determines the level of integration between ISO 9001:2000 and other implemented systems. Furthermore, this study aims to investigate the factors that may explain the Saudi organizations' decisions to implement ISO 9001:2000 in their businesses. To accomplish these research objectives, a questionnaire was developed based on an extensive review of related literature and tested for validity and reliability. The target sample for the study was made up of all ISO 9001:2000 registered sites in Saudi Arabia up to 31 Dec. 2002, which comprised 131 organizations. A total of 89 completed surveys were received, for a response rate of 72%. Descriptive statistics, measurement of variation, and association, and factor analysis were used in the interpretation of collected data. The major findings are as follows: 86.5% of the total respondents had implemented ISO 9001:2000 as a transition process from previous ISO 9000 standards. 68.5% of the certified sites took less than one year to implement the standard. Most of them were previously certified in one of the ISO 9000:1994 standards. This high percentage indicates that ISO 9001:2000 can be easily implemented in a short time frame. Most of the companies in the study reported the use of external consultants (70.8%), but overall there was a low level of reliance on them, with 64.0% of registered organizations having documented less than 10% participation of external consultants in implementing the ISO 9001:2000 system. The top five critical success factors in implementing the ISO 9001:2000 quality management system, in descending order, are as follows: commitment of management, effective internal auditing, commitment of middle management, employee motivation and involvement, resource allocation, and existence of appropriate communication routes. The major hindrances during the implementation of ISO 9001:2000, in descending order, were as follows: lack of employee involvement, difficulties in co-operation among middle managers over quality problems, lack of training programs related to quality, insufficient project time, and lack of customer co-operation. The most significant reasons for Saudi organizations to implement the system, in descending order, are as follows: top management initiative, quality improvement of internal operations and processes, customers requirements, part of the overall quality policy of the organization. The highest perceived benefits, in descending order, were as follows: development of quality culture, improved customer satisfaction, better communication with customers, increased management commitment, and use of data as a business management tool. Most respondents are highly satisfied with the standard, believe that it is cost effective and would strongly recommend the standard to other firms. Top managers were the most knowledgeable about the ISO 9001:2000 standard, followed by middle managers, then employees. Findings reveal that level of knowledge about ISO 9001:2000 among organization's people is positively correlated with most of the attainable benefits from implementing the standard. Based on the findings of this study, many conclusions and recommendations were drawn. In summary, for a successful implementation of ISO 9001:2000 standard, organizations must give great consideration to the people involvement factor, particularly top and middle management s involvement and commitment to quality, employees motivation and involvement, quality awareness, and ISO 9001:2000 training.

The demand for Internet-based visual content delivery has increased significantly in recent years, triggered mainly by the widespread use of Internet enabled smartphones and portable devices, and by the availability of super HD content.As a consequence, live and on-demand video content has become the most important source of network traffic in mobile and fixed networks alike.In order to be able to efficiently deliver the increasing amount of video traffic, network operators have started to deploy caches and operator-owned CDNs. These solutions do not only reduce the amount of transit traffic of the operators but they may also improve the customers' quality of experience, through bringing the video content closer to customers. Nevertheless, their efficiency is determined by the algorithms and protocols used to allocate resources, both in terms of storage and bandwidth. The work in this thesis addresses the allocation of these two resources for operator-owned content management systems. In the first part of the thesis we consider a cache maintained by a single network operator. We investigate how caching at a network operator affects the content distribution system as a whole, and consequently, the efficiency of content delivery. We propose a model of the decision process undertaken by a network operator that aims at optimizing the efficiency of a cache by actively managing its bandwidth. We design different algorithms that aim at approximating the optimal cache bandwidth allocation and we evaluate them through extensive simulations and experiments. We show that active cache bandwidth allocation can significantly increase traffic savings. We then consider the potential interaction among caches maintained by different network operators.We consider the problem of selfish replication on a graph as a modelof network operators that individually deploy replication systems, and try to leverage their peering agreements so as to minimize the traffic through their transit providers. We use game-theoretical tools to investigate the existence of stable and efficient allocations of content at the network operators. We show that selfish myopic updates of content allocations at different network operators lead the system to a stable state, and that the convergence speed depends on the underlying network topology. In addition, we show that interacting operator-owned caches can reach a stable content allocation without coordination, but coordination leads to more cost efficient content allocations. / <p>QC 20140401</p>

This study is divided into two main parts. The first section deals with mathematical properties of distance functions. The fp norm is analyzed as a function of its parameter p, leading to useful insights for fitting this distance measure to a transportation network. Properties of round norms are derived, which allow us later to generalize some well-known results. The properties of a norm raised to a power are also investigated, and these prove useful in our subsequent analysis of location problems with economies or diseconomies of scale. A positive linear combination of the Euclidean and rectangular distance measures, which we term the weighted one-two norm, is introduced. This distance function provides a linear regression model with interesting implications on the characterization of transportation networks. A directional bias function is defined, and examined in detail for the Pp and weighted one-two norms. In the second part of this study, several properties are derived for various forms of the continuous minisum location model. The Weiszfeld iterative solution procedure for the standard Weber problem with fp distances is also examined, and global and local convergence results obtained. These results are extended to the mixed-norm problem. In addition, optimality criteria are derived at non-differentiable points of the objective function. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)