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The shift from an industrial-based to a knowledge-based economy has impacted market conditions and created a demand for a talented and skilled workforce in knowledge-intensive industries. This paper investigates what the role of talent is, when firms decide for a location by carrying out two studies. Firstly, an extensive literature review was conducted where three factors of firm location decision were identified as: clustering, soft and hard factors, and personal networks. The role of talent continuously emerged in the literature in regards to the three firm location decision factors and appeared to be intertwined in these. Consequently, these factors and the role of talent were conceptualized in an analytical framework. Thereafter, the analytical framework was applied to the second study when conducting a multiple-case study of three clean-tech firms in Uppsala, Sweden. This was done in order to investigate the role of talent in the firms’ location decision. The findings of the multiple-case study revealed that the role of talent was important during the location decision of all three firms where talent was intertwined with the identified location factors. Thus, the multiple-case study confirms that the role of talent impacts firm location decision through being intertwined in the identified firm location decision factors.

The overall aim of the thesis has been to introduce Personal Mobile Grids (PMGrids) as a novel paradigm in grid computing that scales grid infrastructures to mobile devices and extends grid entities to individual personal users. In this thesis, architectural designs as well as simulation models for PM-Grids are developed. The core of any grid system is its resource scheduler. However, virtually all current conventional grid schedulers do not address the non-clairvoyant scheduling problem, where job information is not available before the end of execution. Therefore, this thesis proposes a honeybee inspired resource scheduling heuristic for PM-Grids (HoPe) incorporating a radical approach to grid resource scheduling to tackle this problem. A detailed design and implementation of HoPe with a decentralised self-management and adaptive policy are initiated. Among the other main contributions are a comprehensive taxonomy of grid systems as well as a detailed analysis of the honeybee colony and its nectar acquisition process (NAP), from the resource scheduling perspective, which have not been presented in any previous work, to the best of our knowledge. PM-Grid designs and HoPe implementation were evaluated thoroughly through a strictly controlled empirical evaluation framework with a well-established heuristic in high throughput computing, the opportunistic scheduling heuristic (OSH), as a benchmark algorithm. Comparisons with optimal values and worst bounds are conducted to gain a clear insight into HoPe behaviour, in terms of stability, throughput, turnaround time and speedup, under different running conditions of number of jobs and grid scales. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of HoPe performance where it has successfully maintained optimum stability and throughput in more than 95% of the experiments, with HoPe achieving three times better than the OSH under extremely heavy loads. Regarding the turnaround time and speedup, HoPe has effectively achieved less than 50% of the turnaround time incurred by the OSH, while doubling its speedup in more than 60% of the experiments. These results indicate the potential of both PM-Grids and HoPe in realising futuristic grid visions. Therefore considering the deployment of PM-Grids in real life scenarios and the utilisation of HoPe in other parallel processing and high throughput computing systems are recommended.

Users (or software agents) are served by multiple networked terminal devices, each of which may in turn have multiple network interfaces. This multi-homing at both ???user??? and ???device??? level presents new opportunities for mobility handling. Mobility may be handled by switching ongoing application data streams between devices, by utilising intermediary adaptation or connectivity enhancement services, or both. However this requires middleware support that is not provided by current systems. This thesis presents a set of integrated solutions to enable this kind of mobility handling, based on concept of Personal Networks (PN). Personal Networks (PN) consist of dynamic conglomerations of terminal and service devices tasked to facilitate the delivery of information to and from a single focal point, which may be a human user or software agent. This concept creates the potential to view mobility handling as a path selection problem, since there may be multiple valid terminal device and service proxy configurations that can successfully carry a given communication session from one PN to another PN. Depending on context, it may be necessary to switch between paths. To this end, this thesis proposes and evaluates a set of inter-dependent mechanisms to facilitate the discovery and use of different candidate end-to-end paths. The proposal comprises mechanisms for secure inter-device mobility using delegated cryptographic identifiers, autonomous service proxy selection and composition, and distributed resolution of cryptographic identifiers to lower layer addresses.

Users (or software agents) are served by multiple networked terminal devices, each of which may in turn have multiple network interfaces. This multi-homing at both ???user??? and ???device??? level presents new opportunities for mobility handling. Mobility may be handled by switching ongoing application data streams between devices, by utilising intermediary adaptation or connectivity enhancement services, or both. However this requires middleware support that is not provided by current systems. This thesis presents a set of integrated solutions to enable this kind of mobility handling, based on concept of Personal Networks (PN). Personal Networks (PN) consist of dynamic conglomerations of terminal and service devices tasked to facilitate the delivery of information to and from a single focal point, which may be a human user or software agent. This concept creates the potential to view mobility handling as a path selection problem, since there may be multiple valid terminal device and service proxy configurations that can successfully carry a given communication session from one PN to another PN. Depending on context, it may be necessary to switch between paths. To this end, this thesis proposes and evaluates a set of inter-dependent mechanisms to facilitate the discovery and use of different candidate end-to-end paths. The proposal comprises mechanisms for secure inter-device mobility using delegated cryptographic identifiers, autonomous service proxy selection and composition, and distributed resolution of cryptographic identifiers to lower layer addresses.

Notre préoccupation centrale dans ce travail était d’étudier le développement de la compétence sociolinguistique d’apprenants de français en lien avec la sociabilité établie lors d’un séjour d’étude à l’étranger. Ce contexte est particulièrement propice à l'étude de la relation entre environnement langagier et acquisition. Le cadre social et langagier dans lequel les apprenants évoluent durant une année offre un terrain singulier où il est possible d'observer la sociabilité des apprenants et son évolution. Néanmoins, les études cherchant à déterminer les contacts sociaux et langagiers s’établissant dans ce contexte tout en les reliant aux acquisitions sont à l’heure actuelle peu nombreuses. Lors de notre étude longitudinale sur neuf mois, nous nous sommes intéressée aux usages sociolinguistiques et aux réseaux personnels de 29 étudiants de deux nationalités différentes : des apprenants chinois et américains. Notre analyse fait émerger des modes de socialisation distincts avec des différences nettes entre les deux nationalités de notre étude. Plus particulièrement, nous avons observé cinq types de réseaux personnels : des réseaux denses, étendus, concentrés, dissociés et éclectiques. Nous avons démontré que la structure et la composition des réseaux personnels pouvaient être mises en relation avec les modifications d’usage des apprenants au cours du séjour. Nous avons observé qu’une augmentation de l’interconnexion du réseau au fil du séjour ainsi qu’une évolution vers un plus grand nombre de personnes issues du même pays que les apprenants étaient liées à une évolution vers des usages standard du français. En revanche, plus les réseaux des apprenants se tournent vers des locuteurs francophones au cours du séjour, plus leurs usages des variantes standard du français diminuent. / Our major concern in this thesis was to study social networking among American and Chinese students during a study abroad and to relate the social networking patterns of participants to their sociolinguistic competence in French.Study abroad contexts seem at first glance particularly suitable to the acquisition of a second language given the social and linguistic context in which the learners evolve during a year abroad. Nevertheless, studies that seek to observe social and language contacts in this context, while relating them to acquisitions, are currently scarce. Moreover, when other researchers attempted to analyse the relation between social contacts during study abroad and acquisition, they carried out studies on a limited scale.In this nine-month longitudinal study, we focused on the use of two sociolinguistic variables in French and on the development of personal networks of 29 students of two different nationalities: Chinese and American learners. Our analysis reveals distinct patterns of socialization with clear differences between the two nationalities of our study. More specifically, we observed five types of personal networks: dense, extensive, concentrated, dissociated and eclectic networks. We have demonstrated that the structure and composition of personal networks can be related to changes in second language use of learners during the stay. On the one hand, we observed that an increase in network interconnection and in the number of network members of the same nationality was linked to an evolution towards standard use of French. On the other hand, the more learners' networks turn to francophone speakers during their stay, the more their use of standard French variants decrease.

This Master's Thesis focuses on the role of personal networks and importance of its use in business development. It details the role of personal branding in networking. There are two main sources of research used in the work: financial and business data of 10 networking clubs based in Prague as well as the collected information from in-depth interviews with the entrepreneurs. Analysis of both qualitative and quantitative data enable the author to draw correlation between the elements of the personal brand and its effects on the results of networking.

This study analyzes the relationship between locus of control and interpersonal relations structures in Argentina. After a representative sample (n = 1500) of households in seven major urban centers (>200,000 inhabitants), it examines the relationship between the externality of locus of control and different aspects of personal networks of each respondent. The results show that people having more relations experiment lower levels of externality of locus of control. Likewise, lower levels of externality are informed when personal ties outside the neighborhood are available, as well as ties high educational level. In this regard, significant associations are verified between control and personal relations structures. / El presente estudio se propone analizar la relación entre la representación del locus de control y las estructuras de vínculos interpersonales en la Argentina. A partir de una muestra (n=1500) de hogares representativa de siete grandes centros urbanos (>200 mil habitantes) se examina la relación entre la externalidad del locus de control y diferentes aspectos de las redes personales de cada participante. Los resultados muestran que a mayor cantidad de relaciones disponibles se encuentran niveles inferiores de externalidad del locus de control, así como también menores niveles de externalidad al disponerse de lazos interpersonales fuera del barrio y con vínculos de nivel socioeducativo alto. En este sentido, se verifican asociaciones significativas entre representación de control del entorno y estructuras vinculares.

This thesis focuses on energy efficiency of particular aspects of data processing on wireless sensor nodes and deals with methods aiming to decrease energy consumption of wireless sensor network (WSN) applications requiring high processing power. The work presents comprehensive analysis of mesh protocols and available hardware platforms in terms of energy efficiency. A new energy efficient sensor node with high processing capability is presented and utilized to evaluate the proposed system for autonomous data transmission in WSN. Finally, an implementation of real-time operation system supporting mesh communication and very strict energy requirements through energy profiles is also presented. A valuable finding is that further increase of energy efficiency is only possible through a holistic approach in software and hardware architecture design, so that hardware and software/ firmware are tightly coupled. The output of this research might be applied in industry or academy field without necessity of any change or prior knowledge of WSN. The autonomous system of data transmission opens new research possibilities to decrease energy requirements of WNS.

Previous literature on the social dynamics of network creation in enterprises has drawn a sharp division between the utility of personal and professional networks. This has been particularly marked in social network analysis of born-global SMEs operating in emerging markets and seeking to internationalise. Using the case study of International Housing Solutions (Pty) Ltd (IHS) – a born global SME with both a global and a regional network – this research creates a deeper and more nuanced understanding of what such networks look like, what human factors are key to their operation, and what the relative importance is of the personal and professional drivers of networking.The study employs a mixed-method research design including network mapping and both qualitative and quantitative analysis of questionnaire responses from 35 participants in the IHS network, providing both hard data and rich qualitative insights into the ingredients and processes required for effective networking in such an enterprise.The results provide robust evidence for crossover between professional and personal networking activities; both are equally relevant in enabling the born-global SME to grow networks, increase innovation and enter otherwise impenetrable markets. Though the weighting of networking attributes is marginally different – for personal networks, the key attributes are advice, trust, friendship and communication; for professional networks, knowledge and referrals – in practice, both the personal and the professional are assimilated into a single complex of network activity and cannot be viewed in isolation.The research thus contributes innovative findings to a hitherto under-researched aspect of networking in the born-global SME. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted