Brand crisis could threaten a company with declining public trust and decreased brand reputation (Greyser, 2009). When confronting with a crisis, the organization should respond immediately and properly so that the crisis can be stopped from escalate into a catastrophe (Davies and Walters, 1998). Crisis type can be divided into the victim, the accident or the intentional clusters according to perceived responsibilities the company should shoulder. Based on these factors, the company should select the most appropriate response strategy or a combination of different response strategies to address the crisis situation. In other words, a match between crisis type and response strategy is effective for companies to survive crisis situations (Cheong and Morrison, 2008). Food-related crisis tend to become rampant in recent years and require more in-depth studies. In the face of a food-related crisis, the affected company are compelled to communicate with both internal and external stakeholders, including employees, stockholders, retailers, suppliers and consumers to manage and survive the crisis (Massey, 2001). There are four options for companies in a product-harm crisis to choose from: denying the defect, involuntary recall, voluntary recall and improvement campaign (Souiden and Pons, 2009). This study took the issue of Blue Bell ice cream recalls as an example of product-harm crisis for case analysis and proposed three different kinds of strategies or hypotheses based on the Image Repair Theory (Benoit and Pang, 2008) covering the denial, evasion of responsibility, reducing offensiveness of events, corrective action and mortification aspects.

Ziel der vorliegenden Arbeit waren pharmakologische Untersuchungen zum antiproliferativen Effekt der beiden Laktatdehydrogenase (LDH)-Inhibitoren Natriumoxamat und Galloflavin sowie des MRP1-Inhibitors Reversan einzeln und in Kombination bei verschiedenen Sauerstoffkonzentrationen in vitro zu untersuchen. Zusätzlich wurde der antiproliferative Effekt der drei Inhibitoren mit dem antiproliferativen Effekt von 5-FU verglichen. Das Konzept zu dieser Arbeit basiert auf Gemeinsamkeiten zwischen LDH und MRP1 in malignen Zellen. Eine ist, dass beide Moleküle von zahlreichen Tumoren überexprimiert werden. Weiter sind beide an der Ausbildung von Chemoresistenz beteiligt und beide werden auch in Hypoxie exprimiert. Zudem wird das für die Funktion von MRP1 notwendige ATP in malignen Zellen hauptsächlich mit der hyperaktiven Glykoloyse gebildet, deren Stoffumsatz auch von der LDH-Aktivität abhängig ist. Eine kombinierte Inhibition beider Zielstrukturen scheint somit geeignet zu sein, um die Proliferation maligner Zellen gezielt zu hemmen. Da in großen Teilen solider Tumoren hypoxische bzw. anoxische Bedingungen vorherrschen, wurde die Wirksamkeit der drei Inhibitoren auch bei 5 % und 1 % Sauerstoff, die als tumorphysiologisch gelten, untersucht. Die wichtigsten Ergebnisse aus dieser Arbeit sind, dass die beiden LDH-Inhibitoren Natriumoxamat und Galloflavin und der MRP1-Inhibitor Reversan einen antiproliferativen Effekt bei kolorektalen Karzinomzellen auslösen, der auch für tumorphysiologische Sauerstoffkonzentrationen nachzuweisen war. So verringerte sich durch Natriumoxamat bzw. Galloflavin der Anteil vitaler Zellen um bis zu 45 % und durch Reversan um bis zu 60 % bei 5 % und 1 % Sauerstoff im Vergleich zur unbehandelten Kontrolle. Auch unterschiedliche Kombination aus Natriumoxamat, Galloflavin und Reversan führten zu einer Steigerung des antiproliferativen Effektes, der auch immer bei tumorphysiologischen Konzentrationen nachzuweisen war. Den stärksten antiproli-ferativen Effekt wies die Dreifachkombination aus Galloflavin, Natriumoxamat und Reversan auf. So verringerte sich der Anteil vitaler Zellen bei 1 % Sauerstoff durch diese Kombination auf bis zu 28 % bei vier der fünf kolorektalen Karzinomzelllinien. Die Dreifachkombination wies einen gleichstarken bzw. stärkeren antiproliferativen Effekt auf als das Chemotherapeutikum 5-FU und zwar ebenfalls bei 5 % und 1 % Sauerstoff. Die Ergebnisse der vorliegenden Arbeit zum antiproliferativen Effekt von Natriumoxamat, Galloflavin (beides LDH-Inhibitoren) und Reversan (MRP1-Inhibitor) in vitro lassen den Schluss zu, dass das Konzept der Arbeit, einen antiproliferativen Effekt auch bei tumorphysiologischen Sauerstoffkonzentrationen zu induzieren, grundsätzlich bestätigt wurde. Auch löste die gemeinsame Hemmung von LDH und MRP1 einen teilweise stärkeren antiproliferativen Effekt aus als 5-FU. Weitere Untersuchungen sind aber ohne Frage nötig, um die molekularen Interaktion zwischen LDH und MRP1 sowie ihrer Inhibition im Detail zu verstehen. / The aim of the present study was to investigate the antiproliferative effect of the two lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) inhibitors sodium oxamate and galloflavin and the MRP1 inhibitor reversan at different oxygen concentrations in vitro. The inhibitors were used individually and in combination. In addition, the antiproliferative effect of the three inhibitors was compared with the antiproliferative effect of 5-FU. The concept of this study is based on similarities between LDH and MRP1 in malignant cells: their overexpression by numerous tumors; their contribution to chemoresistance and their expression in hypoxia. In addition, the ATP necessary for the function of MRP1 is mainly formed in malignant cells by an increased turnover of the hyperactive glycolysis, which also depends on the LDH activity. Thus, a combined inhibition of both targets appears to inhibit tumor cell proliferation effectively. Since hypoxic or anoxic conditions prevail in large parts of solid tumors, the efficacy of the three inhibitors was also investigated at 5% and 1% oxygen, which are considered to be physiological for solid tumors. The most important results of the study are that both sodium oxamate and galloflavin, as well as reversan trigger an antiproliferative effect in colorectal carcinoma cells, even in the presence of tumor physiological oxygen concentrations. For example, the pro-portion of viable cells decreased up to 45% with sodium oxamate or galloflavin and up to 60% with reversan, even at 5% and 1% oxygen compared to untreated control cells. Different combinations of sodium oxamate, galloflavin and reversan resulted in en-hanced antiproliferative effects, which were also demonstrated at tumor physiological oxygen concentrations. The strongest antiproliferative effects were observed with the triple combination of galloflavin, sodium oxamate and reversan. In this combination, the proportion of viable cells decreased to 28% at 1% oxygenation in four of the five colorectal carcinoma cell lines. The triple combination caused an antiproliferative effect that was equal to or even more potent than the antiproliferative effect of the chemotherapeutic agent 5-FU also at 5% and 1% oxygen. The results of this study on the antiproliferative effect of sodium oxamate, galloflavin (both LDH inhibitors) and reversan (MRP1 inhibitor) in vitro seems to confirm the aim of the study, which was to induce an antiproliferative effect even in tumor physiologi-cal oxygen concentrations. In part, the combined inhibition of LDH and MRP1 caused a stronger antiproliferative effect than 5-FU. However, further investigations are neces-sary to comprehend the molecular interaction between LDH and MRP1 as well as its inhibition in detail.

PhD in Performance / Performance related musculoskeletal disorders (PRMDs) are a frequent reality for practicing musicians. Many aspects of the bassoon make bassoon players particularly susceptible to PRMDs. This thesis explored the prevalence of PRMDs among bassoon players and assessed the frequency, types, and locations of PRMDs. Also identified were treatments used for PRMDs, contributing factors to PRMD development, and the perceptions of the bassoon community regarding PRMDs. The International Bassoonist Questionnaire was distributed via the World Wide Web (n = 166, 58% male, 42% female). Eighty-six percent of bassoon players reported PRMDs. Pain was the most common PRMD symptom reported (78%). Females reported PRMDs (96%) more frequently than males (78%). Younger bassoon players reported more PRMDs. Most bassoon players (88%) were attempting to treat their PRMDs. The most common self-administered treatments were rest (60%) and reducing playing time (53%). Bassoonists attributed the cause of PRMDs to “long hours of practice” and “sudden increase in playing time.” Bassoon players felt strongly that the medical profession did not know how to treat a bassoon related injury. They believed that a knowledgeable teacher was the best resource against the onset of PRMDs even though technical aspects of playing were not identified as significant contributors to PRMDs. The bassoon playing population needs more information about PRMDs in order to develop treatment and prevention strategies.

This thesis contributes to a growing body of research examining the relationship between sociocultural influences and disordered eating behaviour. The aim of the current research was to extend on previously developed theoretical models to more closely examine agerelated differences in an integrated sociocultural model of disordered eating behaviour. The proposed model was informed by components of the dual-pathway model and the tripartite influence model. Nine-hundred and ninety-five women, from four different age groups (i.e., preadolescent, early adolescent, late adolescent and young adult), completed self-report measures of perceived pressure to be thin, modelling of disordered eating behaviour, media exposure, internalisation of the thin-ideal, social comparison, body dissatisfaction, body mass index, and disordered eating behaviour. Using structural equation modelling (SEM) techniques, a sociocultural model of disordered eating was tested and found to have good fit to the data. A number of age-related differences in the strength of the relationship between variables were found. Interestingly, modelling of disordered eating behaviour was a direct predictor of disordered eating behaviour regardless of age group. As expected internalisation of the thin-ideal mediated between perceived pressure to be thin and body dissatisfaction for all age groups. Surprisingly, media exposure had few effects on internalisation, but was more strongly related to social comparison for the late adolescent and young adult age groups. Social comparison played a less significant role in predicting body dissatisfaction in preadolescent girls. However, for all other participants, social comparison predicted internalisation of the thin-ideal, body dissatisfaction and disordered eating behaviour. As expected, BMI predicted body dissatisfaction, and body dissatisfaction predicted disordered eating behaviour. The models accounted for between 60-64% of the variance in disordered eating behaviour. Implications for prevention programs are discussed in light of these findings.

Cause-related marketing is an emerging area within the marketing discipline, originating in the United States in the 1980s. This thesis defines the term cause-related marketing as a marketing strategy whereby the firm makes a contribution, financial or otherwise, to a nonprofit organisation(s) contingent upon the customer engaging in a revenue providing exchange that satisfies business and individual objectives. This strategy may include additional elements such as sponsorship, sales promotion, co-branding and employee involvement. -- In examining the literature relating to cause-related marketing, a need for further research was identified for a number of reasons. First, there is considerable investment and growth in this strategy both in Australia and overseas. Second, academic and practitioner research have indicated strong consumer support for the concept of cause-related marketing, yet there has been limited evidence to date regarding the effectiveness of this strategy, especially in comparison to other marketing strategies. Finally, in an increasingly challenging business environment, marketing practitioners are seeking to explore new strategies and the efficacy of traditional forms of marketing communications is subject to debate. As such, this thesis explored the following research questions: What is the impact of cause-related marketing on the consumer's response in terms of attitude to the strategy, attitude toward the brand and purchase intention? Do consumers respond more positively toward cause-related marketing than toward sponsorship or sales promotion? To address these questions, an experimental research design incorporating self-administered questionnaires was used. The major finding of this research is that consumers may have a more favourable attitude to cause-related marketing than to either sponsorship or sales promotion, however the brand must be perceived to have a natural association or fit with the cause. Further, cause-related marketing has the ability to engender a more favourable change in attitude to the brand than does sales promotion. This change in attitude is affected by the consumer's attitude to the strategy itself. This study did not, however, demonstrate that exposure to cause-related marketing, sponsorship or sales promotion had a significant effect on purchase intention. Finally, neither gender nor personal values have been shown to influence the above outcomes. The findings of this research have a number of practical implications for the effective use of cause-related marketing.

The aim of the current series of experiments was to further explore the boundary conditions of the recognition memory old/new effect in the context of the recognition/associative recall task (Rugg, Schloerscheidt, Doyle, Cox, & Patching, 1996). The study by Rugg et al. was replicated and extended by manipulating both the semantic relatedness between study items and the timing of recall. Eventrelated potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 17 scalp electrode sites during performance of a recognition/associative recall task. Forty participants were visually presented with four blocks of 50 word pairs which were either unrelated (Experiments 1 and 2) or weakly semantically related (Experiments 3 and 4). Participants were instructed to form an association between the members of each word pair. At test, the first members of each pair were visually presented intermixed with a similar number of unstudied items. Participants were required to discriminate (i.e., recognise) previously studied items (old) from new items. Participants were also required to recall the study associate for words judged old, and to provide confidence levels for each recognition decision on a 3-point scale. Recall was either immediate (Experiments 1 and 3) or delayed (Experiments 2 and 4). Relative to ERPs to new items, the ERPs elicited by words correctly recognised and for which the associate was correctly recalled exhibited a positive-going shift between 500-800 ms poststimulus onset. The effect was maximal at posterior temporal-parietal electrode sites (the parietal old/new effect). Although the effect was not lateralised to the left hemisphere, this result may be due to the variability in encoding strategies employed by the participants. Behavioural data consistently indicated that response confidence is confounded with response category. The ERP results also revealed that the old/new effect is not evident following the experimental control of response confidence, and that immediate recall is associated with a negative-going shift at posterior electrode sites between 800-1100 ms poststimulus onset. Manipulating the semantic relatedness between the word pairs did not influence the distribution of the old/new effect. The results are discussed in terms of the view that the parietal old/new effect reflects neural activity associated with the recollection of specific previous experiences, and may reflect retrieval processes supported by the medial temporal lobe memory system (Moscovitch, 1992, 1994; Squire, 1992; Squire, Knowlton, & Musen, 1993). It is suggested that future research extend the current findings by examining the influence of response confidence in alternative recognition memory paradigms.

No description available.

Since its first use in human in 1929, the electroencephalogram (EEG) has become one of the most important diagnostic tool in clinical neurophysiology. However, their use in clinical studies is limited because the huge quantity of collected information is complicated to treat. Indeed, it is very difficult to have an overall picture of this multivariate problem. In addition to the impressive quantity of data to be treated, an intrinsic problem with electroencephalograms is that the signals are "contaminated" by body signals not directly related to cerebral activity. However, these signals do not interest us directly to evaluate treatment effect on the brain. Removing these signals known as "parasitic noise" from electroencephalograms is a difficult task. We use clinical data kindly made available by the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly (Lilly Clinical Operations S.A., Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium). Particular types of analyses were already carried out on these data, most based on frequency bands. They mainly confirmed the enormous potential of EEG in clinical studies without much insight in the understanding of treatment effect on the brain. The aim of this thesis is to propose and evaluate a panel of statistical techniques to clean and to analyze electroencephalograms. The first presented tool enables to align curves such as selected parts of EEGs before any further statistical treatment. Indeed, when monitoring some continuous process on similar units (like patients in a clinical study), one often notices a typical pattern common to all curves but with variation both in amplitude and dynamics across curves. In particular, typical peaks could be shifted from unit to unit. This complicates the statistical analysis of sample of curves. For example, the cross-sectional average usually does not reflect a typical curve pattern: due to shifts, the signal structure is smeared or might even disappear. Another of the presented tools is based on the preliminary linear decomposition of EEGs into statistically independent signals. This decomposition provides on the one hand an effective cleaning method and on the other hand a considerable reduction of the quantity of data to be analyzed. The technique of decomposition of our signals in statistically independent signals is a well-known technique in physics primarily used to unmix sound signals. This technique is named Independent Component Analysis or ICA. The last studied tool is functional ANOVA. The analysis of longitudinal curve data is a methodological and computational challenge for statisticians. Such data are often generated in biomedical studies. Most of the time, the statistical analysis focuses on simple summary measures, thereby discarding potentially important information. We propose to model these curves using non parametric regression techniques based on splines.

From opportunistic protist Cryptosporidium parvum we identified and functionally assayed a fatty acyl-CoA-binding protein (ACBP) gene. The CpACBP1 gene encodes a protein of 268 aa that is three times larger than typical ~10 KD ACBPs of humans and animals. Sequence analysis indicated that the CpACBP1 protein consists of an N-terminal ACBP domain (approximately 90 aa) and a C-terminal ankyrin repeat sequence (approximately 170 aa). The entire CpACBP1 open reading fragment (ORF) was engineered into a maltose-binding protein fusion system and expressed as a recombinant protein for functional analysis. Acyl-CoA-binding assays clearly revealed that the preferred binding substrate for CpACBP1 is palmitoyl-CoA. RT-PCR, Western blotting and immunolabelling analyses clearly showed that the CpACBP1 gene is mainly expressed during the intracellular developmental stages and that the level increases during parasite development. Immunofluorescence microscopy showed that CpACBP1 is associated with the parasitophorous vacuole membrane (PVM), which implies that this protein may be involved in lipid remodelling in the PVM, or in the transport of fatty acids across the membrane. We also identified two distinct oxysterol binding protein (OSBP)-related proteins (ORPs) from this parasite (CpORP1 and CpORP2). The short-type CpOPR1 contains only a ligand binding (LB) domain, while the long-type CpORP2 contains Pleckstrin homology (PH) and LB domains. Lipid-protein overlay assays using recombinant proteins revealed that CpORP1 and CpORP2 could specifically bind to phosphatidic acid (PA), various phosphatidylinositol phosphates (PIPs), and sulfatide, but not to other types of lipids with simple heads. Cholesterol was not a ligand for these two proteins. CpOPR1 was found mainly on the parasitophorous vacuole membrane (PVM), suggesting that CpORP1 is probably involved in the lipid transport across this unique membrane barrier between parasites and host intestinal lumen. Although Cryptosporidium has two ORPs, other apicomplexans, including Plasmodium, Toxoplasma, and Eimeria, possess only a single long-type ORP, suggesting that this family of proteins may play different roles among apicomplexans.

In this thesis the situation concerning women's musculoskeletal disorders in three different types of workplaces is studied, and differences in women's and men's working conditions which affect this situation are identified. How diffe-rences in working conditions are constructed and reconstructed in and by gen-dered processes is analysed, and this analysis also shows how the work organiza-tions are gendered and gendering. The empirical material consists of studies of one electronics plant, two grocery stores, and five mail delivering offices. A qua-litative method is used. The study shows how horizontal and vertical sex segregation at the electronics plant and in the grocery stores resulted in women continually performing mo-notonous tasks, thus being exposed to high risks of developing musculoskeletal disorders. At the mail delivery offices where women and men performed the same work tasks the working conditions nevertheless were different. Recent changes of the organization of work had led to sex-specific consequences, such as the workload becoming heavier especially for women. The psychosocial work environments also varied. At the studied workplaces construction of gender and construction of diffe-rences in working conditions were intertwined in processes that also led to the reconstruction of men's dominance and women's subordination. Gendered processes were results of management policies, affected by the strategies of the local unions, and tied to the extended social relations. Gendered processes were also present in, and re-created by, the day-by-day interaction between fellow workers. Both women and men at the workplaces were faced with expectations of appropriate gender behaviour, and both women and men often, but not al-ways, conformed to these expectations. In the thesis an analysis of sexuality and heteronormativity at the studied workplaces is integrated in the analysis of the construction of gender and diffe-rent working conditions, in order to reach an increased understanding of gende-red processes in the work organizations.