In an era of rapid charter school growth, this study sought to examine rational decision making for special populations in Texas urban charter schools. To investigate differences among charters, I categorized the schools into three groups: network corporate charters, community corporate charters, and intergovernmental charters. Quantitative analysis, including the use of ANOVAs and Tukeys, helped identify differences in expenditures among the three charter groups. Intergovernmental charters focused their spending on teachers and student programs, including programs for students with disabilities and ESL and bilingual programs. Community corporate charters spent less in most categories, except, in the majority of years, for social work, food services, cocurricular activities, and data processing. Network charters channeled their funding into areas such as school leadership, facilities, security and monitoring, and accelerated education. I then used qualitative analysis to understand how charter school administrators decide to spend their money in a way that is most cost-effective for their operations relative to their student populations. I completed 20 interviews with charter school administrators in four Texas cities. Administrators in charters were aware of the competitive accountability and fiscal environment in which they were running their schools. This resulted in cost-effective rational decision making. Charter administrators were also under significant financial stress and did not believe that their schools were adequately funded, though some charters still sought to make a profit or increase their net assets. To make up the difference in funding, some charters have relied on grants and donations from other corporations. Administrators also discussed special populations of students, such as ESL/bilingual students and students with disabilities. / text

As sport teams with strong brands can enjoy a loyal fan base as well as increased gate revenue, brand studies in sport have paid close attention to sport teams' brand attributes (e.g., success, star player, stadium) as key drivers to create strong brands. However, sport consumers do not only rely on the brand attributes' utility in their team consumption, but claim and anticipate positive and personally meaningful emotional experiences. Nevertheless, a number of studies on sport branding have not identified what kinds of emotions are associated with sport teams and what their impact is. As a result, the affective nature of sport team brands remains largely unexplored. This study sought to identify how emotions associated with sport team brands are structured, from the sport consumers' perspective, and to examine the relative effectiveness of the associated emotions over brand attributes on consumer behavior in the sport advertising setting. The study identified seven key dimensions of emotions associated with sport team brands: connectedness (passion, nostalgia, supportive, and connected), elation (happy, excited, pleased, proud, optimistic, and entertained), competitiveness (competitive and aggressive), surprise (amazed, surprised, and astonished), anger (annoyed, frustrated, and rage), unhappiness (suffering, sad, regret, and dejected), and worry (fearful and anxious). Connectedness, elation, and competitiveness each was positively related to sport consumer behavior while surprise, unhappiness, and worry each was negatively related to it. Interestingly, anger had a dual (positive and negative) relationship with sport consumer behavior. The study tested the relative effectiveness of emotions over cognitive brand attributes on sport consumer behavior in a sport advertising setting using a 2 (emotion: high vs. low) x 2 (cognition: high vs. low) incomplete block design. The study found that emotional advertising works better for sport teams than rational advertising whereas combination advertising works at least equally or better than rational advertising. These results suggest the primacy of emotions over cognitive brand attributes in the context of sport advertising. Given the findings and discussions, implications for sport marketing practice and future research are discussed. / text

Government / This report aims to broaden the horizon of research questions in international relations by encouraging a greater appreciation for the complexity of individual and collective motivations. More specifically, the report focuses on why the honor motive is ignored in the discipline and why it deserves more attention. / text

Syfte: Syftet med denna uppsats är att hitta samband mellan de demografiska faktorerna och en förändring i det privata pensionssparandet år 2015. Teoretisk och empirisk metod: Forskningsstrategin för denna studie har varit av kvantitaiv form, med en hypotetisk deduktiv ansats. En enkätundersökning låg till grund för insamling av empirin i denna forskning. Målgruppen för respondenterna var mellan 20-65 år, då det anses till största del vara dessa som pensionssparar. Enkäten bestod till största del utav frågor med alternativ som respondenterna fick fylla i. Resultat och Slutsats: Resultatet av denna forskning visar hur vissa av demografiska faktorer påverkar personers privata pensionssparande och även hur de agerat efter förändringen av avdragsrätt. De demografiska faktorer som kan påvisas påverka är en persons ålder och inkomst. Det fanns ett positivt samband mellan stigande ålder och summa pensionssparande och stigande inkomst och summa pensionssparande. Åldern och inkomsten sågs även påverka hur individer valde att ändra pensionssparandet efter borttagandet av avdragsrätt. / Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to find connections between demographic factors and a changing of the reduced deductibility year 2015. Theoretical och empirical method: The strategy for this empirical study has been in a quantitative shape with a deductive approach. A survey has been formed to collect the empirical material. The target group for this study has been individuals between 20-65 years old, because these are the people that should be saving for their retirement. The questionnaire was for the most part filled with beforehand given answers that the individual chose the answer that they felt represented themselves. Conclusion: The results of this paper shows how some of the demographic factors has an impact on how an individual acts when they are saving for their retirement and that there is some differences on how they have act after the reduced deductibility. The two factors that have an impact is a person’s age and their level of income. Where people in a higher age and with a higher income will save more for their retirement then others. People with a higher income and a higher age will have change their retirement plan after 2015.

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The aim of this study is to quantify the extent to which political correctness, understood as an implicit social convention of restraint on public expression, operates within a community. Due to a scarcity of prior experimental research in the area, a new method was developed for the purpose of the study. Using random selection, the treatment consists of exposing groups averaging 10 individuals to a survey on diversity and immigration matters. The effect is measured as the discrepancy in attitudes that is revealed between anonymous and non-anonymous responses to the treatment survey. Control groups are similarly exposed to a survey on traditional left-right matters. The discrepancies are then compared. The results are controlled for possible influence by factors including group size, sex ratio, and length of study. The general effect of the treatment is not statistically significant, possibly as a result of small sample size. Further analysis shows a significant positive correlation between the proportion of women and the extent of attitude discrepancy. On one interpretation, this means that women in the population are on average more responsive to political correctness than men. Due to the population’s skewed characteristics, the results are not generalised. Future researchers in the area are advised to draw their sample from a more representative population, to investigate additional subject matters and to collect more sophisticated data, in particular on the level of the individual.

The goal of this thesis is to apply an approach due to Elkies to study the distribution of rational point counts for certain families of curves and surfaces over finite fields. A vector space of polynomials over a fixed finite field gives rise to a linear code, and the weight enumerator of this code gives information about point count distributions. The MacWilliams theorem gives a relation between the weight enumerator of a linear code and the weight enumerator of its dual code. For certain codes C coming from families of varieties where it is not known how to determine the distribution of point counts directly, we analyze low-weight codewords of the dual code and apply the MacWilliams theorem and its generalizations to gain information about the weight enumerator of C. These low-weight dual codes can be described in terms of point sets that fail to impose independent conditions on this family of varieties. Our main results concern rational point count distributions for del Pezzo surfaces of degree 2, and for certain families of genus 1 curves. These weight enumerators have interesting geometric and coding theoretic applications for small q. / Mathematics

With advancements in computer technology and processing power, the ability to examine chemical systems using theory continues to be more practicable. Using ab initio methods, such as density functional theory, we are now able to routinely simulate hundreds of atoms. This system size allows us to directly simulate surfaces and nano-materials that are industrially relevant. With the expansion of accessible systems comes the opportunity to develop new computational methods to extract their chemical properties. Of particular interest is bridging the time scale gap between simulation and experiment. The evolution of a system chemical in time can be directly simulated using classical dynamics, however, molecules vibrate on the order of femtoseconds and interesting transitions tend to happen on much longer time scales: milliseconds to seconds. In condensed phase chemical systems these interesting transitions are hindered by energy barriers so state to state dynamics are dominated by rare evens. Luckily, rare event transitions tend to happen through mountain passes in the potential energy landscape. Within harmonic transition state theory, the transition states between minima can be characterized by saddle points. Finding saddle points is a challenging problem which has not been satisfactorily solved; nevertheless, there are algorithms currently being used despite their deficiency. In particular, my work strives to improve the efficiency and stability of the nudged elastic band method and compare its performance to similar algorithms on a variety of test systems. In addition, I present a method to predict how energy-based chemical properties change with respect to the chemical composition of the system. This is achieved by taking a derivative of the property with respect to the atomic numbers of the atoms present in the system. The accuracy and predictive quality of these derivatives are assessed for both model and industrially relevant systems. With this information, we can follow these derivatives to optimize a desired property in the space of chemical composition. This method is a step toward using theory to rationally design compounds with desirable properties. / text

"Audience costs" models of international relations suggest a purely informational role for domestic politics in conflict settings. Here, domestic politics serve as a rich signal of belligerents' true intentions, allowing them to more quickly resolve disagreements, decreasing the likelihood and duration of war. But if belligerents can have different beliefs about publicly available information, then domestic politics might confuse rather than clarify conflict situations, increasing the likelihood and duration of war. I present empirical evidence of conventional "audience costs" models' shortcomings in explaining the dynamics of the US counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq and the response of Iraqi insurgents to those efforts. I then develop a formal model to show how differences in beliefs between insurgents and counterinsurgents about domestic political audiences in Iraq may have contributed to the prolonged nature of the conflict. I argue that the underlying cause of the conflict's duration is disagreement between belligerents about whether and how Iraqi civilians contribute to a successful counterinsurgency, leading belligerents to disagree not only before fighting about who is likely to win, but during fighting about who is actually winning. / text

We provide a unifying projection-based framework for structure-preserving interpolatory model reduction of parameterized linear dynamical systems, i.e., systems having a structured dependence on parameters that we wish to retain in the reduced-order model. The parameter dependence may be linear or nonlinear and is retained in the reduced-order model. Moreover, we are able to give conditions under which the gradient and Hessian of the system response with respect to the system parameters is matched in the reduced-order model. We provide a systematic approach built on established interpolatory $\mathcal{H}_2$ optimal model reduction methods that will produce parameterized reduced-order models having high fidelity throughout a parameter range of interest. For single input/single output systems with parameters in the input/output maps, we provide reduced-order models that are \emph{optimal} with respect to an $\mathcal{H}_2\otimes\mathcal{L}_2$ joint error measure. The capabilities of these approaches are illustrated by several numerical examples from technical applications.