Denna uppsats undersöker vad som definierar och karaktäriserar en företagsledare utifrån Agentteorin och Stewardship-teorin. Uppsatsen tar sin ansats i de båda teoriernas definitioner gällande agenten/stewarden för att försöka vidareutveckla resonemanget bakom denna definition och inkluderar därför Intressentmodellen och ansvarslitteratur. Uppsatsens syfte är att studera teoriernas dikotomi gällande agenten/stewardens karaktär genom en empirisk studie av sju olika företagsledare och därigenom testa vår uppställda hypotes om vad som karaktäriserar en företagsledare. Studiens resultat går i linje med hypotesen och vittnar om att en företagsledares karaktär främst definieras av tydliga ansvarskänslor mot företaget genom en avvägning mellan de intressen som återfinns internt och externt organisationen. Studien vittnar även om att beroendeförhållanden mellan parter är av stor betydelse vid de intresseavvägningar som företagsledare gör.

As demands on school-based administrators continue to increase, so do their responsibilities. Historically the roles and responsibilities of school principals have been clearly delineated in both the legislation governing in-school administrators and also in principals' job descriptions. Principals typically know the expectations of their leadership roles, however, the same cannot be said for all vice-principals (VPs). The pattern that emerges is one that shows the VP as being a jack-of-all-trades. Typically, Saskatchewan rural VPs do not have clearly delineated expectations formally or informally in either legislation or job description. Most often VPs positions are advertised as containing a teaching component and "other duties as assigned." The 2001 Saskatchewan Teachers' Federation (STF) recommendations for improving in-school administration positions have led to little change (p. 3). The conceptual framework focused on the relationship between geographical location (distance), gender and rural Saskatchewan VP perceptions of employee-made and employer-made workplace obligations. VPs are a critical yet often overlooked component of school effectiveness. This emphasized the need for advancing our understanding of VPs' employment relationship and connecting this to the "VP role restructured" blueprint found in the literature. The purpose of this study was to investigate, explore and describe the pattern of the psychological contract among Saskatchewan rural VP's and facilitate better utilization of their skills and leadership. Quantitative and qualitative methods were used in this study. The quantitative data was derived from Rousseau's (2000) Psychological Contract Inventory (PCI) survey questionnaire. This survey was used to determine the extent of employee-made and employer-made workplace obligations from the VP perception. The sample consisted of 42 VPs employed in rural Saskatchewan schools. The qualitative data were generated from participant responses to the open-ended questions attached to the end of the PCI. The responses to the survey and the open-ended questions were analyzed according to the research questions, emerging themes and recurring themes. After the data were analyzed, relationships were revealed between geographical location, gender, and rural VPs' perceptions of workplace obligations. The findings in this study revealed VPs were generally in agreement that relationships between distance, gender and perceptions of workplace obligations were slight at best. It was also revealed that VPs' perceptions of employee-made and employer-made workplace obligations were characterized as well-being items representative of loyalty and security features of a relational psychological contract. VPs indicated a willingness to commit to the organization regardless of distance or gender. Participants almost unanimously expressed their aspirations for the inclusion of professional growth, skill enhancement and increased leadership responsibilities in their assigned, expected and assumed role behaviors. Participant responses were generally consistent with the literature. Derived from participants' qualitative responses, VPs lead busy work lives. As revealed in the findings, VPs indicated they had aspirations for enhanced leadership opportunities. This study generated many implications for practice, policy and research.

The Singular Value Decomposition is one of the most useful matrix factorizations in applied linear algebra, the Principal Component Analysis has been called one of the most valuable results of applied linear algebra. How and why principal component analysis is intimately related to the technique of singular value decomposition is shown. Their properties and applications are described. Assumptions behind this techniques as well as possible extensions to overcome these limitations are considered. This understanding leads to the real world applications, in particular, image processing of neurons. Noise reduction, and edge detection of neuron images are investigated.

Mutual funds attracted great attention of both shareholders and academics in last few decades. Mutual funds provide benefits like diversification, professional managements and reduced costs for individual shareholders. Shareholders invest their assets into mutual funds managed by professionals. Managers may have an incentive to use those assets to satisfy their own interests. They can achieve this by charging excessive fees or spending more on the perquisites. These unmatched interests of shareholders and managers create so called principal-agent conflicts. Some researchers argue that market competition in mutual funds industry is strong enough to align interests of both shareholders and managers, thus mitigating principal-agent conflicts. Others believe there is need for internal governance to monitor managers‟ behaviors. Board of directors as an internal governance mechanism is responsible for aligning shareholders and managers interests.We collected data on board characteristics to find if they are related to funds attributes. Our sample of funds consists of 68 fund management companies with total of 603 mutual funds managed by those companies. Board characteristics include board size, age and gender of board members, and presence of CEO on the board. Fund attributes are total expense ratio, rate of return and management fees used as a measure of board effectiveness. We analyzed relationship of board characteristics and fund attributes separately on the company level and fund level.On the company level we found no relationship between board size and board age with expense ratio and rate of returns. We found significant positive relationship between board gender and presence of CEO with expense ratio. These results indicate that with the increase of male members on the board and the presence of CEO on the board there is an increase in total expense ratio. On the fund level analysis we found different relations with various types of funds. This may indicate that depending on the type of the fund the structure of the board that is effective changes.

Syftet med uppsatsen är att undersöka vilka faktorer som ligger bakom valet att outsourca kontra inte outsourca och varför inte fler företag väljer att outsourca med tanke på de fördelar som finns. Utifrån teori och tidigare forskning har fyra forskningsfrågor tagits fram som sedan testas under kapitlet resultat. I denna uppsats har kvalitativ metod använts. Sekundärdata har hämtats från lit-teratur i form av böcker och artiklar. Inspiration har även hämtats ifrån tidigare uppsatser, tidningsartiklar och olika internetsidor. Primärdata har insamlats med hjälp av semi-strukturerade intervjuer som sedan redovisas under kapitlet resultat. Primärdata har ställts mot sekundärdata för att analysera vilka likheter respektive skillnader som finns. Stäm-mer forskningsfrågorna, hämtade från teori och tidigare forskning, med svaren från intervjuerna? Genom intervjuerna har det uppmärksammats att intervjuobjekten haft både positiva och negativa erfarenheter av outsourcing. Dock framkom det att de ne-gativa erfarenheterna ofta överväger de positiva och att de som tidigare outsourcat valt att inte göra det igen.

A novel and promising method of software development is the interactive style of development, where code is written and incrementally tested simultaneously. Interpreted dynamic languages such as Ruby, Python, and Lua support this interactive development style. However, because they lack semantic analysis as part of a compilation phase, they do not provide type-checking. The programmer is only informed of type errors when they are encountered in the execution of the programfar too late and often at a less-informative location in the code. We introduce a typing system for Ruby, where types will be determined before execution by inferring principal typings. This system overcomes the obstacles that interactive and dynamic program development imposes on type checking; yielding an effective type-checking facility for dynamic programming languages. Our development is embodied as an extension to irb, the Ruby interactive mode, allowing us to evaluate principal typings for interactive development.

My study examines the relationship between principal and agent in a moral hazard setting where the principal has the ability to monitor the actions of the agent at an interim stage of the project. I show that monitoring can induce the agent to exert higher levels of effort and can result in a reallocation of project payoffs between the two parties. This reallocation is not a one-way street: Situations exist where monitoring encourages greater effort from the agent, resulting in greater project payoffs for both principal and agent. For projects that are characterized as high-risk, high-reward projects where agent involvement is costly, monitoring is often the optimal strategy; this is an explanation for why venture capital type investments are the subject of intense monitoring. When the principal can share monitoring results at an interim stage with the agent, the agent is able to modify his effort levels in certain situations for the benefit of both parties.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between leadership responsibilities of Title I principals and student achievement. This study involved the analysis of the results of a 92 item survey sent to successful Title I principals. The 92 items were grouped into 21 leadership responsibilities, first and second order change. The first research question was an examination of the relationship between the 21 leadership responsibilities of Title I principals and student achievement. The overall indication is that a substantial relationship exists between the 21 Leadership responsibilities and combination reading and math averages. Fourteen leadership responsibilities were positively correlated to the overall achievement ranging from Input with r s = .169 to Focus with r s = .018. This indicates principals of successful Title I schools are proactive with their leadership which increases student overall achievement. The second research question was an examination of the most influential 21 leadership responsibilities of Title I schools student achievement in math and reading. The indication of influence of the 21 Leadership responsibilities and math was that a strong correlation does not exist. There are seven positively correlated leadership responsibilities ranging from r s = .103 to r s = .014 indicating student achievement is more affected by the educational conduct within the classroom compared to leadership of the principal (outside the classroom). There was a strong relationship between the leadership responsibilities and reading, with all 21 Leadership responsibilities being positively correlated. This indicates student achievement is dependent on the leadership of the principal to create a school or campus wide effort. The third research question was an examination of the relationship between the 21 leadership responsibilities and student achievement based on school size and demographics. The overall indication is that a relationship exists between student achievement and size of the school (r s = .187), math and population (r s = .234) and a particularly small correlation between reading and population (r s = .045). This finding suggests that the size of the school does matter with regard to overall (math and reading combined) and math student achievement of Title I schools.

The purpose of this research is to address the problem of fault diagnosis of sensors which measure a set of direct redundant variables. This study proposes: 1. A method for linear senor fault diagnosis 2. An analysis of isolability and detectability of sensor faults 3. A stochastic method for the decision process 4. A nonlinear approach to sensor fault diagnosis. In this study, first a geometrical approach to sensor fault detection is proposed. The sensor fault is isolated based on the direction of residuals found from a residual generator. This residual generator can be constructed from an input-output model in model based methods or from a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) based model in data driven methods. Using this residual generator and the assumption of white Gaussian noise, the effect of noise on the isolability is studied, and the minimum magnitude of isolable fault in each sensor is found based on the distribution of noise in the measurement system. Next, for the decision process a probabilistic approach to sensor fault diagnosis is presented. Unlike most existing probabilistic approaches to fault diagnosis, which are based on Bayesian Belief Networks, in this approach the probabilistic model is directly extracted from a parity equation. The relevant parity equation can be found using a model of the system or through PCA analysis of data measured from the system. In addition, a sensor detectability index is introduced that specifies the level of detectability of sensor faults in a set of redundant sensors. This index depends only on the internal relationships of the variables of the system and noise level. Finally, the proposed linear sensor fault diagnosis approach has been extended to nonlinear method by separating the space of measurements into several local linear regions. This classification has been performed by application of Mixture of Probabilistic PCA (MPPCA). The proposed linear and nonlinear methods are tested on three different systems. The linear method is applied to sensor fault diagnosis in a smart structure and to the Tennessee Eastman process model, and the nonlinear method is applied to a data set collected from a fully instrumented HVAC system.

Prior to 1960, most countries over the world used traditional economic indicators to represent their social status. Economists mostly used Gross National Product, GNP, as a measurement of the social welfare standard of a country or a society. However, with the progress of the development, the traditional economic indicators were unable to follow the progress of social welfares. Therefore, it made economists hard to measure the status of social welfares. Sen (1977) thought that the development of human beings is not restricted to the increase of average disposable incomes only. He thought that people should use the indicators with more information to measure the distinctive diversity of welfares. Bauer (1966) first stated the social indicators as a measurement of social status and trends. Then, the so-called ¡§Social Indicators Movement¡¨ was aroused by Bauer¡¦s theory. As a result, to measure the development of a society entirely, people could determine the development from the medicine, health, economy, environment, and welfare aspects. In the researches about social developments, there were many discussions in building indicators of social welfare, quality of living, basic fulfillment, and development of welfare. The research is trying to establish a system of social indicators to measure the development from every aspect and selecting the social indicator index with representative indicators as a measurement of society development. Moreover, this research would analyze the systems of social indicators in Taiwan from 1982 to 2002 to see if the government made an appropriate allocation of resources in the executions of related policies. The research refers to 20 related indicator systems in Taiwan and overseas as their times of quotes and principles of selecting indicators to sum up 9 probable indicators. Then, the Principal Component Analysis method and the Varian method are adopted as research methods to abstract factors. Moreover, there are two abstracted factors. One is economic and environment factor and another one is medical welfare and unemployment factor. The research uses weighted method to find out the synthetic indicators in Taiwan from 1982 to 2002. The weighted multiple gained from factor analysis for the two factors is 0.8353 and 0.1647. Based on the data mining and analysis from second information, three scores were acquired, economic and environment factor, medical welfare and unemployment factor, and entirely performance. Each of these three scores shows the trend and the change year by year. The last, according the result from this analysis, the policy and recommendation was brought up.