My research examines how different organizational phenomena function under psychological and cognitive constraints. My first study examines how audiences evaluate an established or taken-for-granted category in negative moods. Categories facilitate exchange by serving as mental models or schemas that substitute for an organization’s attributes to help audiences make sense of what they see. Established categories are further postulated to be legitimized and taken for granted by audiences. Both organizations and audiences are thought to place a high value on category membership, preferring the schema-based category to the individual attributes underlying the category. Considering the preferences of a broad audience segment about an established category, I examine the boundary conditions that can cause the schemas of a legitimized category to fail. I propose that negative mood or affect will blur the category boundary causing it to no longer be preferred to the individual attributes. I further hypothesize that negative affect will induce a reversal of preferences, and offer a unified theory as to why negative affect can cause audiences to prefer the attributes underlying the category over the category itself in their evaluations. Results from data on a representative sample of individuals support these hypotheses. In my second study, I examine how social capital accrues to individuals who were part of a group from which a member achieved prominence only after the dismantlement of the group. I employ a difference-in-differences estimation strategy to identify endogenous social effects in the context of the Hollywood film industry and find significant positive results for egos who worked with ex-post Oscar winning alters within four to six years prior to the alters’ Oscar win. Social capital effects break down, however, for length of prior years in either the too recent or too distant past. I attribute these findings to individuals’ incorrect recall of past events.

My research examines how different organizational phenomena function under psychological and cognitive constraints. My first study examines how audiences evaluate an established or taken-for-granted category in negative moods. Categories facilitate exchange by serving as mental models or schemas that substitute for an organization’s attributes to help audiences make sense of what they see. Established categories are further postulated to be legitimized and taken for granted by audiences. Both organizations and audiences are thought to place a high value on category membership, preferring the schema-based category to the individual attributes underlying the category. Considering the preferences of a broad audience segment about an established category, I examine the boundary conditions that can cause the schemas of a legitimized category to fail. I propose that negative mood or affect will blur the category boundary causing it to no longer be preferred to the individual attributes. I further hypothesize that negative affect will induce a reversal of preferences, and offer a unified theory as to why negative affect can cause audiences to prefer the attributes underlying the category over the category itself in their evaluations. Results from data on a representative sample of individuals support these hypotheses. In my second study, I examine how social capital accrues to individuals who were part of a group from which a member achieved prominence only after the dismantlement of the group. I employ a difference-in-differences estimation strategy to identify endogenous social effects in the context of the Hollywood film industry and find significant positive results for egos who worked with ex-post Oscar winning alters within four to six years prior to the alters’ Oscar win. Social capital effects break down, however, for length of prior years in either the too recent or too distant past. I attribute these findings to individuals’ incorrect recall of past events.

Background: Nowadays, projects become the common way of working in manycompanies. Knowledge management is important for efficient project management.Knowledge transfer in project-based environments became an attractive and importanttopic for study. Various barriers and challenges will appear during the process ofknowledge transfer in projects. Lots of authors thought the barriers of knowledgetransfer in project are negative, while others mentioned that some barriers may havepositive aspects. We called these two kinds of barriers “positive barriers” and“negative barriers” in this thesis. Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to understand knowledge transfer inproject-based environments. Specifically, we aim to explain that barriers ofknowledge transfer in projects can be both negative and positive. Method: Due to the special time period and activity limitation, we chose case studyto gain the empirical data. When choosing the sample, we used the conveniencesampling. The sample chosen is a project team in Ericsson of Linköping. The projectmanager we interviewed has worked in Ericsson since 2004 and with his presentproject team for four years. He has already done more than fifteen projects, so he hasenough experience in projects for our study. We combined both inductive anddeductive approach strategies to analyze our thesis. Result: This thesis has answered the questions in the part of specified questions andreached the thesis purpose. It has explained the notion of knowledge transfer inprojects and its related barriers. It interprets how both negative and positive barriersaffect knowledge transfer. Furthermore, this thesis points out some suggestions forimproving positive barriers and reducing negative barriers.

In the thesis, we designed a metamaterial radome to increase the antenna gain. Owing to the need of high-directivity radiation in fix-point communications, antenna array and reflective antenna had been used to increase the directivity of antenna traditionally. Complicated feed and huge antenna size are the disadvantages of these techniques. We proposed a simpler metamaterial radome to increase the antenna gain. We find the subwavelength-hole structure formed by four Jerusalem cross structures can collimate electromagnetic wave originally spreading out from the holes. With the same size, multiple subwavelength holes in metamaterial radome can further enhance the antenna gain. We showed that metamaterial radome with 9 subwavelength holes can improve the gain by about 3.5 dB. In addition, we applied the concept of Fabry-Perot Cavity (FPC) to find the suitable distance between the radome and the antenna. When the resulting electromagnetic waves are in-phase, the radome can increase the antenna gain effectively. Recently, high-directivity radiation in fix-point communications is required and in the meantime multi-mode communication systems have become more and more popular. For practical purposes, we designed a coplanar dual-band metamaterial radome to be operated at 2.5 GHz and 3.5 GHz for WiMAX. This structure allows adjustment of its characteristics independently at each band. This coplanar dual-band radome can enhance the antenna gain by about 1.74 dB and 2.08 dB at 2.5 GHz and 3.5 GHz, respectively.

The objective of this dissertation is to develop a suitable statistical methodology for functional data analysis. Modern advanced technology allows researchers to collect samples as functional which means the ideal unit of samples is a curve. We consider each functional observation as the resulting of a digitized recoding or a realization from a stochastic process. Traditional statistical methodologies often fail to be applied to this functional data set due to the high dimensionality. Functional hypothesis testing is the main focus of my dissertation. We suggested a testing procedure to determine the significance of two curves with order restriction. This work was motivated by a case study involving high-dimensional and high-frequency tidal volume traces from the New York State Psychiatric Institute at Columbia University. The overall goal of the study was to create a model of the clinical panic attack, as it occurs in panic disorder (PD), in normal human subjects. We proposed a new dimension reduction technique by non-negative basis matrix factorization (NBMF) and adapted a one-degree of freedom test in the context of multivariate analysis. This is important because other dimension techniques, such as principle component analysis (PCA), cannot be applied in this context due to the order restriction. Another area that we investigated was the estimation of functions with constrained restrictions such as convexification and/or monotonicity, together with the development of computationally efficient algorithms to solve the constrained least square problem. This study, too, has potential for applications in various fields. For example, in economics the cost function of a perfectly competitive firm must be increasing and convex, and the utility function of an economic agent must be increasing and concave. We propose an estimation method for a monotone convex function that consists of two sequential shape modification stages: (i) monotone regression via solving a constrained least square problem and (ii) convexification of the monotone regression estimate via solving an associated constrained uniform approximation problem.

Protein oligomerization provides a way for cells to modulate function in vivo. In this study, self-assembling protein fragments from ParC, DnaX, and proteins of unknown function were used to generate phenotypes in a dominant negative manner. These fragments were expressed as Thioredoxin (TRX) fusions under the control of the inducible araBAD promoter. Fragments chosen contain only the oligomerization domain of the protein, lacking the regions necessary for catalytic function. Fragments of ParC, a subunit of Topoisomerase (Topo) IV, generated fragment-specific phenotypes. Regions that expressed both the oligomerization domain and CTD of ParC (ParC206-752 and ParC332-752) yielded filamentous cells with several different nucleoid segregation phenotypes. Another ParC fragment containing only the oligomerization domain of ParC (ranging from 333-485) yields a recA-dependent septation defect in a subset of the population. This phenotype suggests that Topo IV may be inhibiting chromosome dimer resolution. The overexpression of DnaX247-455, a fragment containing regions of both the tau and gamma subunits of the DNA Polymerase III holoenzyme, led to a severe plating defect. Upon further investigation, this fragment caused filamentation, a nucleoid defect, and induction of sulA, similar to the effects seen with the dnaX temperature-sensitive alleles. The overexpression of the various y-protein fragments yielded a variety of mediaspecific plating defects on over 50% of the proteins tested. The overexpression of the protein fragments yielded effects that were not seen by other overexpression or deletion experiments, even under similar growth conditions. The results presented here show that the overexpression of self-assembling fragments yield a variety of dominant negative phenotypes. Reducing the activity of protein complexes allows for new aspects of the physiological process to be investigated.

After Freeman and Tse (1992), and Hayn (1995) indicated that positive-and negative-earning companies have different responses toward earning compositions based on the negative-earning companies¡¦ information content, Chamber (1996), Subramanyam and Wild (1996), Lipe, Bryant and Widner (1998) proposed the relationship between negative and future earning. In addition, Sloan (1996) suggested that accruals in the market have been over-valued. Xie (2001), however, pointed out that over-valued situation comes from manipulable earning compositions. Recently, Dopuch (2005), and Joos and Plesko (2002) reexamined the properties of negative-earning samples and found that investors¡¦ attitude on negative earnings will depend on predicted reversal possibility for valuation of a company. However, Taiwan has no studies on accrual evaluations after differentiating positive and negative earning for companies. This study adopts Mishkin (1983) evaluation model on abnormal accruals to analyze Taiwan 1391 listed company for the sample period from 1986 to 2005. The empirical results suggest that ERCs¡¦ of negative-earning companies are not significant; if the companies are differentiated by persist negative earning and transitory negative earning, investors tend to overprice transitory negative earning. In addition, investors tend to overprice the (discretionary) accruals positive-earning companies, but make accurate evaluation toward persistent earning companies with low reversal possibility. This study also found that persistency of positive-earning companies is longer than negative-earnings. Finally, by using logistic regression to differentiate the possibility of negative-earning accruals, there is no significant difference between the logistic regression model and cash flow classification from the empirical test. Based on the findings, how Taiwan security market response and evaluate discretionary accruals can be further understood.

In this thesis, two separate research topics are undertaken both in the general area of compact RF/microwave circuit design. The first topic involves characterizing the parasitic effects and error due to unused post-production tuning bars. Such tuning bars are used in microwave circuit designs to allow the impedance or length of a microstrip line to be adjusted after fabrication. In general, the tuning bars are simply patterns of small, isolated sections of conductor adjacent to the thru line. Changing the impedance or length of the thru line involves bonding the appropriate tuning bars to the line. Unneeded tuning bars are simply not removed and left isolated. Ideally, there should be no coupling between these unused tuning bars and the thru line. Therefore, the unused tuning bars should have a negligible effect on the circuit??s overall performance. To nullify the parasitic effects of the tuning bars, conventional wisdom suggests placing the bars 1.0 to 1.5 substrate heights away from the main line. While successful in the past, this practice may not result in the most efficient and cost-effective placement of tuning bars in today??s compact microwave circuits. This thesis facilitates the design of compact tuning bar configurations with minimum parasitic effects by analyzing the error attributable to various common tuning bar configurations with a range of parameters and offset distances. The error is primarily determined through electromagnetic simulations, and the accuracy of these simulations is verified by experimental results. The second topic in this thesis involves the design of compact microwave resonators using the transmission line approach to create negative refractive index metamaterials. A survey of the major developments and fundamental concepts related to negative refractive index technology (with focus on the transmission line approach) is given. Following is the design and measurement of the compact resonators. The resonators are also compared to their conventional counterparts to demonstrate both compactness and harmonic suppression.

Recently, Iwamoto[1] has proposed a passive-matrix LCD called VA-STN-LCD (Verically Aligned Super Twist Nemetic LCD), in which excellent electro-optic (EO) performance under high-multiplexing conditions has been demonstrated. It was pointed out that such a high EO performance was realized by achieving a pretilt angle of about 80 degree. In this study, we want to learn the different EO characteristic of separate pretilt angle and separate chiral-doped concentration of Negative Dielectric Anisotropy nemetic liquid crystal in vertically aligned cell.

Uniqueness and complexity of military news usually enrich and enhance the significance of the news. Sometimes simple issues are even further elaborated to become negative turmoil and multiple matters. The navy, being in a rapidly changing and multiple-form society, has been expressed in different forms by media of different natures. Sometimes, the navy is even perceived with different ideologies according to descriptions of different media. Ways that the officers and men of the navy as well as the general public view the negative news of the military and the impacts are worth further attention. Hence, this research, based on applications and perspectives of the relevant mass communication theory, is performed by quantifying the questionnaires, and investigates the impact of negative news on officers and men of the navy as well as the third-person effect. In addition, the relationship between the third-person effect and supports of media control. This research has managed to derive four conclusions: The first finding is the verification of existence of ¡§the third-person effect¡¨, i.e. people generally think that the impact of negative naval news on others is greater than that of oneself. The second finding is that the greater the perception of the third-person effect by the interviewed officers and men of the navy, the greater is the willingness to be inclined to controlling the mass media so as to mitigate the negative effects of the negative news about the navy on the general public. The third important finding is that the variable, population, presents a certain degree of relevancy to the third-person effect. This result is the same as the results of other researches. With regard to the perception of the third-person effect by oneself, other officers and men and the general public, the rank, seniority, and education of the population variable present respective obvious relevancy. In particular, age level appears in the third-person effect on ¡§other officers and men¡¨ and ¡§the general public¡¨, showing that the age level has greater impact on the perception of the third-person effect by the navy officers and men. The last important finding is about the information source. Television is the main source of information for most of the navy officers and men. Internet has surpassed newspaper as the second source of information, which is slightly different when compared to the past researches. This finding is thus worth further investigation in future work.