Purpose The purpose of the study is to explain what affect customers’ relationship commitment to non-profits organizations. Methodology This study employs the quantitative approach with the help of webbased survey. Findings Relationship commitment has two direct antecedents, namely trust and relationship benefits. Communication between organization and customers has an indirect effect on relationship commitment which is partially mediated by trust. The relationships between constructs are controlled by the length of the membership in the organization. Research limitations/implications The study has several managerial implications. Thus, the established associations between relationships constructs adopted from for-profit industries do not fully explain the drivers of customers’ relationship commitment in the non-profit sector. The special attention should be payed to establishing the successful two-ways communication with the customers in order to facilitate commitment. Theoretically-wise, the study re-examines the earlier established model in the new context and by doing so introduces the new model which is relevant for the context of customers of non-profit organizations. The study however has some limitation such as an application of convenience sample, a limited availability of the survey, a possible language barrier. Originality/value The study proposes the new model which explains commitment and its antecedents in the context of customers’ relationship with non-profit organizations. Keywords Commitment, non-profit organizations, relationship marketing, quantitative study

<p> The role of superior human capital in creating and maintaining competitive advantage in the global marketplace is an increasing priority. The problem for business leaders is that despite the purported benefits of superior human capital, contemporary human capital assessments prove incapable of reliably identifying the best employees to hire, promote, or retain. Research into the use of mental models as a means to differentiate expert and novice performers suggested that a simple and reliable means of eliciting and comparing mental models might address this gap. Prior studies following the Structural Dimensional Analysis of Mental Representations (SDA-M) methodology produced reliable and repeatable differentiation of expert and novice performers in professional sports, but had not been applied to the knowledge-work driving today&rsquo;s businesses. The purpose of this quantitative, quasi-experimental study was to evaluate the use of SDA-M in the identification and classification of expert knowledge workers. Specifically, this research sought to answer two specific research questions concerning the use of SDA-M: what is the similarity of expert knowledge worker mental models produced via SDA-M analysis; and, what is the similarity of novice knowledge worker mental models when compared to those of experts? Following the SDA-M methodology, customer support personnel purposefully selected to represent expert (<i>n</i> = 6) and novice (<i>n</i> = 6) performers completed a sorting task designed to elicit and record individual mental models of a critical job task. Experts were selected from senior-level positions with a minimum of five years organizational tenure; novices were selected from entry-level positions with no more than one year of organizational tenure. The individual mental models where then compared using Qsplit to determine the degree of similarity between them. SDA-M analysis proved ineffective at differentiating expert and novice performers on the study stimulus task. Although SDA-M analysis differentiated subjects into two groups, these groups did not align with the ex ante definitions of expert and novice performers. Additional analysis suggested an incompatibility between the job task selected for eliciting mental models and the criteria used in sampling; industry tenure proved a better indicator of expert performance of the study task than organizational tenure. Although the results of this study can only be considered inconclusive, SDA-M analysis demonstrated the ability to clearly differentiate participants based on the structure and consistency of their mental model constructions. Continued research into the use of SDA-M as a means to identify superior human capital is warranted.</p>

Intraductal papillary mucinous neoplasms (IPMN) are pancreatic lesions with uncertain biologic behavior. This study sought objective, accurate prediction tools, through the use of quantitative histopathological signatures of nuclear images, for classifying lesions as chronic pancreatitis (CP), IPMN, or pancreatic carcinoma (PC). Forty-four pancreatic resection patients were retrospectively identified for this study (12 CP; 16 IPMN; 16 PC). Regularized multinomial regression quantitatively classified each specimen as CP, IPMN, or PC in an automated, blinded fashion. Classification certainty was determined by subtracting the smallest classification probability from the largest probability (of the three groups). The certainty function varied from 1.0 (perfectly classified) to 0.0 (random). From each lesion, 180 +/- 22 nuclei were imaged. Overall classification accuracy was 89.6% with six unique nuclear features. No CP cases were misclassified, 1/16 IPMN cases were misclassified, and 4/16 PC cases were misclassified. Certainty function was 0.75 +/- 0.16 for correctly classified lesions and 0.47 +/- 0.10 for incorrectly classified lesions (P = 0.0005). Uncertainty was identified in four of the five misclassified lesions. Quantitative histopathology provides a robust, novel method to distinguish among CP, IPMN, and PC with a quantitative measure of uncertainty. This may be useful when there is uncertainty in diagnosis.

La scène littéraire québécoise accorde, depuis les années 2000, une attention grandissante à la relève. Critiques, chercheurs et journalistes braquent tour à tour leur projecteur sur les primo-romanciers, contribuant ainsi à les placer dans une catégorie à part des autres auteurs. Or, la publication d'un premier roman est une étape décisive dans l'établissement de la crédibilité intellectuelle d'un auteur. Pour cette raison, il est tenté d'écrire une oeuvre reflétant l'ensemble de son projet d'écriture et, par extension, l'essentiel de ses influences culturelles. Dans le but de comprendre ces influences formant la mémoire culturelle d'un écrivain, mais aussi de voir si un groupe de romanciers d'âge semblable partagent certaines d'entre elles, cette étude se penche sur vingt premiers romans québécois publiés entre 2000 et 2010. À l'aide du concept d'intertextualité et d'une analyse quantitative, elle tente plus exactement de relever et d'interroger les référents culturels observables dans ces textes et d'en faire ressortir les plus répandus. Ce mémoire vise donc, dans un premier temps, à tracer un portrait global des intertextes culturels mis en place dans les premiers romans du corpus afin de comprendre l'usage qu'en font les primo-romanciers et d'orienter la suite de la recherche. Dans un deuxième temps, elle s'intéresse à trois média desquels les écrivains tirent leurs référents, soit l'audiovisuel (comprenant le cinéma et la télévision), la musique et la littérature, et cherche à décrire de quoi est composée la mémoire culturelle des écrivains du corpus.

In this thesis I examine the placement of the dependent genitive relative to its head noun in Classical Latin prose. The corpus is drawn from the works of four first-century B.C. authors: Caesar, Cicero, Sallust and Varro. The thesis itself is split into two main sections, a qualitative analysis and a quantitative analysis. The qualitative analysis discusses a number of factors that may influence genitive position, drawn from literature on the subject as well as my pilot studies. These factors are information structure, the genitive’s grammatical function, discontinuity, lexical category, animacy, prepositions governing the head noun, reported speech, idioms, lexical items, and grammatical number of the genitive. This analysis examines individual instances of genitive position in context, providing examples and counter-examples of the ordering patterns found with each potential factor. The qualitative analysis suggests that a number of these factors have an effect on genitive position, particularly information structure. These results are tested by the quantitative analysis. By performing a multivariate statistical analysis using the programme GoldVarb, the combined effects of multiple factors are determined and the statistically significant factors ranked in order of importance and strength of effect. The statistics show that information structure is the most important of the factors. Other significant influences are the presence of prepositions, the function of the genitive and its lexical category. By combining the two types of analysis, qualitative and quantitative, this thesis shows in detail how the factors combine to influence word order, which of them are independent, which interact, which are important and which have little to no effect at all, resulting in a better understanding of the data and the way that the contextual factors work together to produce the variant orders of the dependent genitive.

In this thesis, the performance of a miniaturised field asymmetric waveform ion mobility spectrometry (FAIMS) device hyphenated with time-of-flight mass spectrometry is studied and evaluated for analysis of a variety of compounds in different sample matrices. FAIMS is a selective spectrometer which is highly orthogonal to mass spectrometry and has the potential for enhancing sensitivity and improve selectivity of rapid analyses. In Chapter 2, the performance of the miniaturised FAIMS device is tested for stability and transmission under a wide range of ion source conditions. An investigation of three different systems, including pairs of isobaric, isomeric and near-mass ions shows that miniaturised FAIMS has the ability to distinguish between analytes that are challenging to separate by mass spectrometry. Chapter 3 explores the effect of changing the composition of the carrier gas by observing the effect of adding gas modifiers on the FAIMS spectra of small molecules, peptides and proteins. Chapter 4 investigates the advantages of combining a fast FAIMS separation with mass spectrometry in the analysis of nitrogen-containing pharmaceutical impurities, where FAIMS is found to offer additional selectivity. In Chapter 5, the development of a UHPLC-FAIMS-MS method for the quantitative determination of a drug metabolite in urine is reported. UHPLC-FAIMS-MS shows improvements in signal-to noise and linear dynamic range as well as a reduction in chemical noise, demonstrating the potential of combining FAIMS with mass spectrometry.

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

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Des génotypes adaptés à des environnements contrastés ont de grandes chances de se comporter différemment lorsqu’ils sont placés dans des conditions similaires et contrôlées, notamment si leur sensibilité aux signaux environnementaux et/ou leur croissance intrinsèque sont limitées à différents niveaux. De ce fait, la variabilité observée dans les populations naturelles peut être utilisée comme une source illimitée de nouveaux allèles ou gènes pour l’étude des bases génétiques de la variation des traits quantitatifs. Mon travail de doctorat a consisté en l’analyse de la variabilité naturelle pour la croissance et la réponse à l’environnement chez Arabidopsis thaliana. Le but des approches de génétique quantitative est de comprendre comment la diversité génétique et épigénétique contrôle la variabilité phénotypique observée dans les populations à différentes échelles, au cours du développement et sous différentes contraintes environnementales. De plus, ces analyses ont pour objectif de comprendre comment les processus adaptatifs et démographiques influencent la fréquence de ces variants dans les populations en fonction de leur environnement local. Ainsi, l’étude de la variabilité naturelle peut être appréhendée en utilisant diverses approches, de la génétique et des méthodes de biologie moléculaire aux études écologiques et évolutives. Au cours de mon doctorat, j’ai eu la chance de travailler sur plusieurs de ces aspects au travers de trois projets indépendants qui exploitent tous la variabilité naturelle d’A. thaliana.Le premier projet a consisté en l’analyse du pattern de polymorphisme observé dans des populations d’A. thaliana au gène MOT1 qui code pour un transporteur de molybdate (la forme assimilable du molybdène (Mo), un micro-élément essentiel) et qui est responsable d’une partie des variations de croissance et de fitness observées à l’échelle de l’espèce en fonction de la disponibilité en Mo des sols. J’ai montré à différentes échelles géographiques que le pattern de polymorphisme à MOT1 ne reflète pas une évolution neutre mais présente plutôt des traces de sélection diversifiante. Ce travail a contribué à renforcer l’hypothèse selon laquelle des mutations au niveau du gène MOT1 pourraient avoir été sélectionnées dans certaines populations pour faire face aux niveaux élevés de Mo observés dans certains sols et potentiellement délétères malgré leur effet négatif sur des milieux pauvres en Mo.Le deuxième projet portait sur la caractérisation et l’analyse fonctionnelle de deux récepteur-kinase putatifs (RLK) identifiés de part leurs effets sur la croissance foliaire spécifiquement en réponse à un stress induit par du mannitol mais pas sous d’autres contraintes osmotiques. La fonction de ces récepteurs chez A. thaliana -qui n’est pas connu pour produire du mannitol- peut paraître intrigante. Les différentes expériences réalisées au cours de cette thèse nous ont cependant permis de construire un modèle selon lequel ces récepteurs pourraient être activés par le mannitol produit par certains pathogènes tel que les champignons et participer aux réponses de défense de la plante.Le troisième projet a été réalisé en collaboration avec l’équipe de Michel Vincentz (CBMEG, Brésil) et de Vincent Colot (IBENS, Paris) et consiste en l’analyse de l’occurrence de variants épigénétiques naturels au gène QQS dans différentes populations d’Asie Centrale et de leurs possibles conséquences phénotypique et adaptative.En conclusion, l’analyse des variants génétiques et épigénétiques naturels à l’origine des variations de biomasse en interaction avec l’environnement permet de comprendre comment l’évolution façonne la variabilité naturelle. / Genotypes adapted to contrasting environments are expected to behave differently when placed in common controlled conditions, if their sensitivity to environmental cues or intrinsic growth behaviour are set to different thresholds, or are limited at distinct levels. This allows natural variation to be exploited as an unlimited source of new alleles or genes for the study of the genetic basis of quantitative trait variation. My doctoral work focuses on analysing natural variation for shoot growth and response to the environment in A. thaliana. Natural variation analyses aim at understanding how molecular genetic or epigenetic diversity controls phenotypic variation at different scales and times of plant development and under different environmental conditions, and how selection or demographic processes influence the frequency of those molecular variants in populations for them to get adapted to their local environment. As such, the analysis of A. thaliana natural variation can be addressed using a variety of approaches, from genetics and molecular methods to ecology and evolutionary questions. During my PhD, I got the chance to tackle several of those aspects through my contributions to three independent projects which have in common to exploit A. thaliana natural variation. The first one is the analysis of the pattern of polymorphism from a set of 102 A. thaliana accessions at the MOT1 gene coding for a molybdate transporter (an essential micronutrient) and responsible for contrasted growth and fitness among accessions in response to Mo availability in the soil. I showed at different geographical scales that MOT1 pattern of polymorphisms is not consistent with neutral evolution and shows signs of diversifying selection. This work helped reinforce the hypothesis that in some populations, mutations in MOT1 have been selected to face soils rich in Mo and potentially deleterious despite their negative effect on Mo-limiting soils. The second project consists in the characterisation and functional analysis of two putative receptor-like kinases (RLKs) identified from their effect on shoot growth specifically under mannitol-supplemented media and not in response to other osmotic constraints. The function of such RLKs in A. thaliana, which is not known to synthesize mannitol was intriguing at first but, through different experiments, we built the hypothesis that those RLKs could be activated by the mannitol produced by some pathogens such as fungi and participate to plant defensive response. The third project, in collaboration with Michel Vincentz’s team from CBMEG (Brasil) and Vincent Colot (IBENS, Paris), consists in the analysis of the occurrence of natural epigenetic variants of the QQS gene in different populations from Central Asia and their possible phenotypic and adaptive consequences. Overall, these analyses of the genetic and epigenetic molecular variation leading to the biomass phenotype(s) in interaction with the environment provide clues as to how and where in the pathways adaptation is shaping natural variation.

The diploma thesis concentrates on description of qualitative research of media audience. It is divided into three parts, in first of them introducing historical and teoretical background of the attitudes towards media audience and general methodology of quantitative research as well. Stages of the quantitative research project, description of variables and sampling and most widely used ways of field work compose the core of this part. Following section is focused on history of quantitative research of the media audience worldwide and particulary in Czech Republic (or former Czechoslovakia). In detail the most important up-to-date quantitative surveys in field of radio, television, print and internet are presented. The last part can be divided into two - first of them describes the limitations of the research itself by reason of current technical or economical conditions. Second one offers the view of potential future and challenges that might come to the quantitative research of the media audience.