COO is a construct that refers to the country which a consumer associates a certain product or brand as being its source, regardless of where the product is actually produced. Scholars like Magnusson et al. (2011) argue that COO is a salient cue in consumers’ product evaluation and purchase intention. In contrast, Usunier (2006; 2011) and Samiee (2010) criticize the COO effect, by explaining that due to multinational production, integrated worldwide supply chains and global branding there are other cues that have become more salient in consumers’ decision- making process. The purpose of this thesis is to extend the understanding about the relationship of COO in consumers buying process. The research questions followed: To what extent does country of origin influence consumers’ product evaluations and purchase intention? To what extent does the level of involvement affect the relationship between country of origin and consumers’ product evaluation? To what extent does the level of involvement affect the relationship between country of origin and consumers’ purchase intentions. Applying a deductive approach, a quantitative research has been chosen for this thesis involving survey as the source for data collection in order to test this research four main concepts: COO, product evaluation, purchase intention and product involvement. The findings indicated that COO has a significant direct effect in consumers’ product evaluations and purchase intention. The results also indicated on that when consumers’ perceive products to be low involvement, the COO effect is greater in consumers’ decision-making process.

Syftet med studien är att synliggöra hur barn tänker om liv och död och deras uppfattning om livets uppkomst. Genom att utgå från ett biologiskt- och ett filosofiskt perspektiv så är mitt syfte att synliggöra barns oliktänkande i ämnet. Min valda metod till studien är semistrukturerad intervju integrerat med bildskapande med barn mellan 5-7 år. I resultatet av min studie så synliggörs barns olika sätt att förstå och uttrycka livsnära fenomen på. Resultatet visade också på barns oliktänkande genom en naturalistisk-, evolutionär- eller en skapelsekopplad beskrivning av livets och människans uppkomst. De medverkande barnen visade en nyfikenhet, engagemang och en tydlig vilja till att reflektera i givna ämnen. Den insamlade data utgjorde en tydlig bild av barns oliktänkande runt begreppen levande, liv och död och livets uppkomst. / The main purpose of this study is to make children’s thoughts about life, death and their concept of origin of life visible. Through a combined biological- and philosophical perspective my aim is to make children’s diversity of thoughts visual. My chosen method for my study is semi-structured interviews integrated with drawings with children between 5-7 years old. In the result of the study children´s different way of understanding and expressing their thoughts about life become visible. The result also shows children’s different concept about origin of life connected to a naturalistic-, an evolutionary -and a creationist theory. I noticed a great curiosity and engagement from the participating children and a distinct commitment to reflect over given topics. The collected data gave a clear illustration of children’s different kind of thoughts of being alive, life and death and their understanding of origin of life.

Målet med denna undersökning har varit att finna metoder för rening av struvitpåväxt i rör på Skövde biogasanläggning samt metoder för att undvika uppkomst av struvit. Detta för att man på anläggningen ska kunna öka verkningsgraden och fungera mer resursoptimerat för att på så sätt komma närmare en hållbar samhällsutveckling. Struvit (magnesiumammoniumfosfat hexahydrat) är ett vitt hårt mineral som vanligtvis förekommer i rör, värmeväxlare, pumpar och centrifuger på vattenreningsanläggningar och efter rötningsprocess på biogasanläggningar. Struvit fäller ut som en följd av bland annat pH, temperatur, koncentration och övermättnad. Även rörmaterial kan ha en påverkan på struvitfällning. Undersökningen har genomförts med hjälp av studiebesök samt analys av biogödsel och struvit på Skövde biogasanläggning. Detta för att ta fram den mängd struvit som kan fälla och vart på anläggningen detta sker. En enklare benchmarking har genomförts som har visat att struvitfällning på biogasanläggningar främst uppstår i värmeväxlare och att påväxten där är temperaturberoende. Material och kemikalier har undersökts för att ta fram metoder för rening och hindrande av uppkomst av struvit. Undersökningen har visat på att struvit främst uppkommer i värmeväxlaren och i rörkrökar på anläggningen och att detta är beroende av de pH, övermättnad, temperaturer och höga koncentrationer av fosfor, magnesium och ammonium som finns. Utifrån studien har en teori skapats om att mineralet först uppkommer i kammaren mellan rötkammare och mellantank. Undersökningen visar vidare på att de metoder som är mest effektiva för borttagning av påväxt struvit är att hacka loss mineralen alternativt byta ut rören. För att hindra att påväxt på rör sker rekommenderas att en kombination av metoder genomförs, vilka minskar energianvändningen på anläggningen och hindrar stopp i biogasproduktionen. Kemikalier bör användas om kristallbildning helt ska hindras. Dessa bör tillsättas i nämnda kammare. Till detta bör planerade underhåll ske för att minimera redan påväxt struvit. De rör som byts på anläggningen bör i främsta hand bytas mot plastmaterial. På så sätt kan anläggningen fungera mer resurseffektivt och onödig miljöpåverkan undviks. I studien har endast en grov kostnadsanalys kunnat genomföras. För att vidare understödja ovanstående metod rekommenderas därför en djupare ekonomisk analys genomföras. Denna bör även innefatta studier av kemikaliedos samt undersökning av kontrollplatser för planerade underhåll. / The goal with the study has been to find methods for cleaning and prevention of struvite at Skövde biogasanläggning (biogas plant). This to increase the efficiency and resource optimize the biogas plant and in that way get closer to a sustainable development of the society. Struvite (magnesiumammoniumphosphate hexahydrate) is a white, harsh mineral that commonly occurs in pipes, heat exchangers, pumps, and centrifuges at wastewater plants and after digestion processes at biogas plants. Struvite precipitates as a result of pH, temperatures, concentrations and supersaturation. Pipe material can also contribute. The study has been conducted through study visits and analyses of digestate and struvite at Skövde biogasanläggning to find the amount of struvite that can precipitate and where at the plant this happens. A simple benchmarking has been conducted, which shows that struvite precipitation at biogas plants mainly occurs in heat exchangers and that the fouling is temperature dependent. Materials and chemicals have been studied to find methods for cleaning and prevention of struvite. The study has shown that struvite mainly occurs in the heat exchanger and in pipe bends at the biogas plant and that it is dependent of the pH, supersaturation, temperature and high concentrations of phosphorous, magnesium and ammonium. A theory has been made from the study that the mineral first appears in the chamber between the digesters and heat storage tank. The study further shows that the most effective methods to clean fouling of struvite is to by hand chip the mineral alternatively replace the pipes. To prevent fouling of pipes a combination of methods is recommended, which minimizes the energy usage at the plant and prevent stops in the biogas production. Chemicals should be used if crystallization is to be completely stopped. The chemicals should be added in the above- mentioned chamber. Also planned maintenance should be conducted to minimize fouling. The pipes that are to be replaced should be replaced with pipes made of plastic materials. By doing this the resource efficiency increases and unnecessary environmental impact of the plant is avoided. The study has only included a rough cost analysis. To further support the above- mentioned methods a deeper economic analysis is recommended, which should include a study of chemical dosage and inspection sites for planned maintenance.

Researchers in multiple areas have shown that characterizing and accounting for the uncertainty inherent in decision support models is critical for developing more efficient planning and operational strategies. This is particularly applicable for the transportation engineering domain as most strategic decisions involve a significant investment of money and resources across multiple stakeholders and has a considerable impact on the society. Moreover, most inputs to transportation models such as travel demand depend on a number of social, economic and political factors and cannot be predicted with certainty. Therefore, in recent times there has been an increasing emphasis being placed on identifying and quantifying this uncertainty and developing models which account for the same. This dissertation contributes to the growing body of literature in tackling uncertainty in transportation models by developing methodologies which address the uncertainty in input parameters in traffic assignment models. One of the primary sources of uncertainty in traffic assignment models is uncertainty in origin destination demand. This uncertainty can be classified into long term and short term demand uncertainty. Accounting for long term demand uncertainty is vital when traffic assignment models are used to make planning decisions like where to add capacity. This dissertation quantifies the impact of long term demand uncertainty by assigning multi-variate probability distributions to the demand. In order to arrive at accurate estimates of the expected future system performance, several statistical sampling techniques are then compared through extensive numerical testing to determine the most "efficient" sampling techniques for network assignment models. Two applications of assignment models, network design and network pricing are studied to illustrate the importance of considering long term demand uncertainty in transportation networks. Short term demand uncertainty such as the day-to-day variation in demand affect traffic assignment models when used to make operational decisions like tolling. This dissertation presents a novel new definition of equilibrium when the short term demand is assumed to follow a probability distribution. Various properties of the equilibrium such as existence, uniqueness and presence of a mathematical programming formulation are investigated. Apart from demand uncertainty, operating capacity in real world networks can also vary from day to day depending on various factors like weather conditions and incidents. With increasing deployment of Intelligent Transportation Systems, users get information about the impact of capacity or the state of the roads through various dissemination devices like dynamic message signs. This dissertation presents a new equilibrium formulation termed user equilibrium with recourse to model information provision and capacity uncertainty, where users learn the state or capacity of the link when they arrive at the upstream node of that link. Depending on the information received about the state of the upstream links, users make different route choice decisions. In this work, the capacity of the links in the network is assumed to follow a discrete probability distribution. A mathematical programming formulation of the user equilibrium with recourse model is presented along with solution algorithm. This model can be extended to analytically model network flows under information provision where the arcs have different cost functional form depending on the state of the arc. The corresponding system optimal with recourse model is also presented where the objective is minimize the total system cost. The network design problem where users are routed according to the user equilibrium with recourse principle is studied. The focus of this study is to show that planning decisions for networks users have access to information is significantly different from the no-information scenario. / text

One chemoautotrophic origin of life theory posits the abiotic formation of alkyl thiols as an initial step to forming biomolecules and eventually a simple chemoautotrophic cell. The premise of this theory is that a recurring reaction on the charged surfaces of pyrite served as a primordial metabolism analogous to the reductive acetyl-CoA pathway (Wächtershäuser 1988) that was later enveloped by a primitive cellular membrane. Alkyl thiols have not previously been identified in terrestrial hot springs as unequivocally abiogenic, but they have been produced in the laboratory under hydrothermal conditions in the presence of a catalyst. I analyzed the dissolved gas content of several hot springs and conducted sterile laboratory experiments in order to evaluate the abiogenic formation of methanethiol (CH3SH), the simplest of the alkyl thiols. Specifically of interest was Cinder Pool, an acid-sulfate-chloride hot spring in Yellowstone National Park. This spring is unusual in that it contains a subaqueous molten sulfur layer (~18 m depth) and thousands of iron- vii sulfur-spherules floating on the surface, which are created by gas bubbling through the molten floor of the spring. This material could potentially serve as a reactive and catalytic surface for abiogenic CH3SH formation in Cinder Pool. Gas samples were collected from Cinder Pool and an adjacent hydrothermal feature in fall of 2011 using the bubble strip method. Two samples contained measurable quantities of CH3SH and other organic sulfur gases, with concentrations of all gases generally higher at the bottom of the pool. Laboratory microcosm experiments were conducted to replicate these findings in a sterile environment. Analog Cinder Pool water was injected into serum bottles containing different iron-sulfur compounds, including cinders collected from the pool itself, as catalytic surfaces for the CH3SH generating reaction. The bottles were then charged with hydrogen (H2), carbon dioxide (CO2), and carbon disulfide (CS2) as reaction gases and incubated for a week at temperatures between 60 and 100oC. Bottles used either powdered FeS, FeS2 (pyrite) or cinder material as a catalytic surface, and all of these surfaces were capable of catalyzing CH3SH formation. In bottles without imposed CS2, however, cinder material was the only surface that produced any detectable CH3SH. While CH3SH is central to the autotroph-first theory and has been synthesized in the laboratory (e.g. Heinen and Lauwers 1996), it has not previously been observed to form abiotically in natural systems. I have identified CH3SH in a natural hydrothermal feature where it is unlikely to have formed secondary to microbial activity, and I have duplicated these field findings in sterile laboratory experiments using the cinders as a reactive surface for formation. / text

Populations and land development have the potential to shift as economies change at a rate that is faster than currently employed for updating a transportation plan for a region. This thesis uses the Foursquare location-based social networking check-in data to analyze the origin-destination travel demand for Austin, Texas. A doubly-constrained gravity model has been employed to create an origin-destination model. This model was analyzed in comparison to a singly-constrained gravity model as well as the Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization's 2010 Urban Transportation Study's origin-destination matrices through trip length distributions, the zonal origin-destination flow patterns, and the zonal trip generation and attraction heat maps in an effort to validate the methodology. / text

Herein is described our synthetic studies towards the synthesis of secu'amamine A, a member of the Securinega alkaloids. The first chapter describes the isolation, biological significance and previous synthesis of secu'amamine A. Chapter 2 discusses our proposed biogenetic origin of secu'amamine A from allosecurinine and the model studies to support the intermediacy of the putative aziridinium ion. Chapter 3 discusses our synthetic approach to the formation of rings A and C, as well as investigations on the regioselective functionalization of 1,2-dihydropyridines. Chapter 4 discusses the synthesis of ring D from ring D' and the transformations of our advanced intermediates with different carbamate protective groups. Chapter 5 consists of experimental details and characterization data for all new compounds. / text

Cells use lipid membranes to organize and define their chemical environments. All cell membranes are based on a common structure: bilayers composed of phospholipids with two hydrocarbon chains. How did biology converge on this particular solution for cellular encapsulation? The first cell membranes are proposed to have assembled from simple, single-chain lipids, such as fatty acids and their derivatives, which would have been available in the prebiotic environment. Here we argue that the physical properties of fatty acid membranes would have made them well suited for a role as primitive cell membranes and predisposed their evolution to modern, phospholipid-based membranes. We first considered models for primitive membrane self-assembly, which faces significant concentration barriers due to the entropic cost of aggregation and the solubility of single-chain lipids. We therefore identified two physical mechanisms by which fatty acid membrane assembly can proceed from dilute solutions. Thermal diffusion columns, a proposed prebiotic concentration method, drive the formation of fatty acid vesicles by concentrating an initially isotropic solution past the critical concentration necessary for aggregation. Alternatively, mixtures of fatty acids with varying chain lengths, the expected products of abiotic lipid synthesis, intrinsically reduce the concentration barrier to aggregation through their polydispersity. These results motivated us to better understand the phase behavior of fatty acids in solutions. We found that the composition of fatty acid aggregates, whether vesicles or micelles, is also determined by concentration. Fatty acid vesicles feature significant amounts of coexisting micelles, whose abundance is enriched in low concentration solutions. We utilized this micelle-vesicle equilibrium to drive the growth of pre-existing fatty acid vesicles by changing amphiphile concentration. We next considered the evolution of phospholipid membranes, which was a critical and necessary step for the early evolution of cells. We found that the incorporation of even small amounts of phospholipids drives the growth of fatty acid vesicles by competition for monomers with neighboring vesicles lacking phospholipids. This competitive growth would have provided a strong selective advantage for primitive cells to evolve the catalytic machinery needed to synthesize phospholipids from their single-chain precursors. Growth is caused by any relative difference in phospholipid content, suggesting an evolutionary arms race among primitive cells for increasingly phospholipid membranes. What would have been the consequences for early cells of such a transition in membrane composition? We found that increasing phospholipid content inhibits the permeability of fatty acid membranes through changes in bilayer fluidity. For early heterotrophic cells, the emergence of increasingly phospholipid membranes would have therefore imposed new selective pressures for the evolution of membrane transport machinery and metabolism. Our model for early membrane evolution led us to develop prebiotic models for phospholipid chemistry. The assembly of phospholipids from single-chain substrates requires a single reaction: the acyltransfer of an activated fatty acid onto a glycerol monoester or lysophospholipid. We developed a synthetic model for this reaction that incorporates a copper-catalyzed azide-alkyne cycloaddition and showed that it drives de novo vesicle assembly.

This dissertation consists of three essays in international corporate finance. It studies the impact of aggregate conditions and the institutional environment on the behavior of publicly traded firms from a broad sample of countries. In the first essay I argue that when credit constraints are widespread, as may be the case in countries with poor investor protection, we should not necessarily expect small firms´ investment to be more sensitive to monetary contractions or negative aggregate shocks. A simple model of investment with credit constraints shows that for this pattern to occur we need a high enough level of investor protection. The empirical evidence is broadly consistent with the hypothesis. In periods of tight credit conditions, small firms from countries with high creditor protection contract their investment rate more than large firms, while there is no significant difference in the investment contraction of small and large firms in from low creditor protection countries. In the second essay I explore to what extent the effect of legal origin on payout policy, ownership concentration, and valuation has been stable through time. The results suggest that previously established results should be taken with caution, and cast doubts on their strength. In particular, it appears that corporate characteristics are converging across countries, and legal origin is not longer an important determinant of them. In the final essay I study to what extent capital raising in international markets is related to firms´ ability to react to financial shocks. I provide a complete descriptive picture of the main patterns in the use of international financing between 1990 and 2009,study how issuers and non-issuers grow during financial crises, and how their growth is related to the aggregate conditions in the economy and their past financing behavior. Firms that raise capital internationally have a lower correlation with the local GDP growth, and grow more during local financial crises; however this relationship depends on the overall degree of development of the country and is highly dependent on the determinants of the issuance decision. The descriptive analysis show that international capital raising is pervasive in most countries, but the firms doing so differ depending on the development of their country of origin. / text

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