The Remote Sensing Group (RSG) at the University of Arizona performs vicarious radiometric calibration of various airborne and space borne sensors. Test site characterization parameters are typically collected by RSG personnel present at the site. Previous work has described and implemented a method for an autonomous collection at the test site without RSG personnel present.This dissertation extends methodology and instrumentation used in an autonomous retrieval of test site characterization parameters for use with a high-view angle geostationary sensor to compute multiple calibration data points in a single day. Atmospheric sensitivity studies are performed determining the effect of large off-nadir view angles typical of the GOES-11 geometry. Instrumentation and collection methodology are modified for the standard and the ground viewing radiometer (GVR)-based reflectance collection of the test site. Multiple GOES-11 radiometric calibration data points in a single day are determined using the modified GVR and compared to typical manned collect with modified instrumentation and methodology.

Purpose/Aims: To explore the relationship between perceived risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and diabetes and the health-world view of Samoans with two or more components of metabolic syndrome.1. Describe participant's perceptions of risk for CVD and diabetes.2. Compare participants' actual risk of CVD and diabetes based on presence of components of metabolic syndrome to their perceived risk of CVD and diabetes.3. Describe the relationships among participants' health-world views and perceived risk for CVD and diabetes.Rationale/Background: Diabetes and CVD are leading causes of health disparities in the United States, particularly among Pacific Islanders, whose rates for CVD and diabetes are among the highest in the Nation. Metabolic syndrome significantly increases risks for CVD and diabetes and can be prevented using behavioral approaches. An important concept in behavioral models, perceived risk is influenced by both sociocultural and health-world views; yet is understudied in Pacific Islanders with regard to CVD and diabetes.Methods and Sample: Questionnaires and focus groups were used in this mixed methods study involving 43 adult Samoans at moderately high risk of CVD or diabetes. Culture brokers were used to access potential participants using a non-probabilistic sampling scheme. Qualitative and quantitative data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and content analysis respectively, and points of convergence, complementarity, and/or divergence were identified.Results/Significance: Over 80% of participants perceived themselves as high risk for CVD and diabetes. Converging and complementary data revealed predominately accurate perceptions of risk for CVD and diabetes. Underestimations of risk were influenced by current behavior. Overestimations of risk were influenced by behavior, physical health, and family and personal history. Nine codes supported the category health-world view. Five ways of knowing: personal, aesthetic, sociopolitical, empiric, and unknowing, and several values and beliefs i.e. respect, family, religion, harmony/balance, and personal responsibility, together with two cultural codes influenced perceived risk for CVD and diabetes. These important influences on perceived risk for CVD and diabetes in Samoan participants can be used to develop interventions targeting CVD and diabetes, thereby meeting Healthy People 2010, the National Institute of Nursing Research (2006) guidelines, and the National Patient Safety goals (2008) goals.

Traditionally, research investigating marketing's role and influence within the firm has focused on the marketing department and its ability to affect future firm strategies. Consequently, little is known about the antecedents of a Chief Marketing Officer's (CMO) role or influence. Yet the position of CMO is quite unique. Unlike other executive officers (e.g., CFOs), no reliable external validation or accreditation is generally recognized, required, or mandated. Similarly, firms are increasingly calling for their CMOs to justify their own existence, and many are even considering abandonment of the position entirely.The goal of this investigation is to understand how CMOs can generate influence within their respective firms given a lack of reliable external credentials. However, the current business press seems to suggest that there currently exists a great bias towards marketing in general and CMOs in particular. As a result, the current investigation uses a competing models approach to study CMO influence. Drawing upon the literature pertaining to competition, the author suggests that individuals, like firms, can generate their own competitive advantage by possessing unique bundles of resources (e.g., information). This is the common element in both models. As the uniqueness of the information provided by the CMO increases, other executive officers within the firm are more likely to confer expertise power to the CMO, which in turn leads to greater influence. The two models diverge as organizational legitimacy is introduced. In one model, the Socially Contingent model, the CMO can only garner expertise power to the extent that s/he possesses organizational legitimacy. In such a case, CMOs that lack organizational legitimacy will be unable to realize any gains in expertise power regardless of the uniqueness of their informational resources (i.e., organizational legitimacy moderates the relationship between the uniqueness of the information provided and expertise power). In the second model, the Merit-Based model, organizational legitimacy mediates the relationship between a CMO's expertise power and his/her influence. As a CMO's perceived expertise increases, other executive officers are more likely to support the CMO's initiatives, which in turn lead to greater influence during strategy design and implementation.

This thesis investigates possibilities to perform image interpolation on an FPGA instead of on a graphics card. The images will be used for 3D display on Setred AB’s screen and an implementation in firmware will hopefully give two major advantages over the existing rendering methods. First, an FPGA can handle big amounts of data and perform a lot of calculations in parallel. Secondly, the amount of data to transfer is drastically increased after the interpolation and with this, a higher bandwith is required to transfer the data at a high speed. By moving the interpolation as close to the projector as possible, the bandwidth requirements can be lowered. Both these points will hopefully be improved, giving a higher frame rate on the screen. The thesis consists of three major parts, where the first handles methods to increase the resolution of images. Especially nearest neighbour, bilinear and bicubic interpolation is investigated. Bilinear interpolation was considered to give a good trade off between image quality and calculation cost and was therefore implemented. The second part discusses how a number of perspectives can be interpolated from one or a few captured images and the corresponding depth or disparity maps. Two methods were tested and one was chosen for a final implementation. The last part of the thesis handles Multi Video, a method that can be used to slice the perspectives into a form that is needed for the Scanning Slit display to show them correctly. The quality of the images scaled with bilinear interpolation is satisfactory if the scale factor is kept reasonably low. The perspectives interpolated in the second part show good quality with lots of details but suffers from some empty areas. Further improvements of this function is not necessary but would increase the image quality further. An acceptable frame rate has been achieved but further improvements of the speed can be performed. The most important continuation of this thesis is to integrate the implemented parts with the existing firmware and with that enable a real test of the performance.

Abstract Title: What TV-glasses do you wear? A study in how party-political people decode the TVshow Scooby Doo (Vilka tv-glasögon har du? En studie i hur partipolitiskt aktiva personer tolkar tv-serien Scooby Doo) Number of pages: 47 (54 including enclosures) Author: Christopher Landstedt Tutor: Amelie Hössjer Course: Media and Communication Studies C Period: Autumn term 2007 University: Division of Media and Communication, Department of Information Science, Uppsala University. Purpose/Aim: The aim of this essay is to make a study in how party-political people, 18-25 years old, both female and male, decode the messages in the TV-show Scooby Doo from 1969. Do they decode the show differently because of their political view, their gender or, and their social background? Is there a pattern in the decoding or is it based on a more individual level? Material/Method: A qualitative method containing a total number of 16 individual interviews with young adults, 18-25 years old, half of them female, the other half male, were used. All of the participants are members of political youth parties/organizations, equally divided in left and right wing parties. Scooby Doo was chosen thanks to the lack of political meanings and messages in the show and its objective aura. The respondents got to see a preselected episode from the first season ever of Scooby Doo. After they finished watching the show, the interview took place. The interview contained questions on a deeper lever regardingthe episode. Stuart Hall’s all time classic encoding-decoding theory is used as the main theory with the support from other theories in the same field. Main results: The degree of active reading is overall equal among the young adults that participated in the study. Differences can be found in the way they decode the sender’s messages and what values they put into the message. The leftwing respondents tended to decode the show in more oppositional way than the rightwing people who tended to read the messages dominant. There is an exception to every rule, also in this case. To sum it all up in one last sentence it should be said that some people’s personal values shine through, and aremore obvious than others. Keywords: encoding-decoding, gender, television, interpretation, Scooby Doo, political view, leftwing and rightwing

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Database systems employ physical structures such as indexes and materialized views to improve query performance, potentially by orders of magnitude. It is therefore important for a database administrator to choose the appropriate configuration of these physical structures (i.e., the appropriate physical design) for a given database. Deciding on the physical design of a database is not an easy task, and a considerable amount of research exists on automatic physical design tools for relational databases. Recently, XML database systems are increasingly being used for managing highly structured XML data, and support for XML data is being added to commercial relational database systems. This raises the important question of how to choose the appropriate physical design (i.e., the appropriate set of physical structures) for an XML database. Relational automatic physical design tools are not adequate, so new research is needed in this area. In this thesis, we address the problem of automatic physical design for XML databases, which is the process of automatically selecting the best set of physical structures for a given database and a given query workload representing the client application's usage patterns of this data. We focus on recommending two types of physical structures: XML indexes and relational materialized views of XML data. For each of these structures, we study the recommendation process and present a design advisor that automatically recommends a configuration of physical structures given an XML database and a workload of XML queries. The recommendation process is divided into four main phases: (1) enumerating candidate physical structures, (2) generalizing candidate structures in order to generate more candidates that are useful to queries that are not seen in the given workload but similar to the workload queries, (3) estimating the benefit of various candidate structures, and (4) selecting the best set of candidate structures for the given database and workload. We present a design advisor for recommending XML indexes, one for recommending materialized views, and an integrated design advisor that recommends both indexes and materialized views. A key characteristic of our advisors is that they are tightly coupled with the query optimizer of the database system, and rely on the optimizer for enumerating and evaluating physical designs whenever possible. This characteristic makes our techniques suitable for any database system that complies with a set of minimum requirements listed within the thesis. We have implemented the index, materialized view, and integrated advisors in a prototype version of IBM DB2 V9, which supports both relational and XML data, and we experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of their recommendations using this implementation.

This research extends the knowledge-based view of the firm as it relates to organizational structure. In particular, this research provides evidence that fundamental classifications of knowledge are measurable, in relative terms, as factors of production. It then relates differences in relative quantities of these classifications of knowledge to the presence or absence of inter-firm boundaries. Finally, this study provides evidence that financial performance may be related to the alignment of organizational structure with knowledge-based factors of production. This study contributes to strategic management theory by offering a potential solution to the difficulties of measuring knowledge as a factor of production. The research was motivated by the belief that it is the cost and value of knowledge that determines economic efficiency (Simon, 1999). By surveying professionals in the mutual fund industry for their relative reliance on three classifications of knowledge, this study suggests a set of measures of knowledge-based factors of production. These measures in turn support the testing of hypotheses related to the vertical integration (or de-integration) of adjacent stages of production. Researchers have typically categorized organizational knowledge as either tacit or explicit. This research develops the concept of encapsulated knowledge as a fundamental classification of knowledge. Encapsulated knowledge is neither tacit nor explicit, because it is externalized and implicit. Progress in measuring knowledge is made by distinguishing between knowledge that resides in human minds (tacit), knowledge that is codified as information (codified), and knowledge that is embodied in the design and functionality of physical artefacts (encapsulated). Relative reliance on the fundamentally different knowledge-based factors of production was found to vary between adjacent stages of production, despite the essential overlap of jointly held substantive knowledge. Portfolio managers are generally less (more) reliant on tacit (encapsulated) knowledge than other investment management professionals in the mutual fund complex. In addition, portfolio managers whose firms are de-integrated from the mutual fund management firms were found to be more (less) reliant on tacit (encapsulated) knowledge than their integrated counterparts. Finally, alignment between mutual fund structure and reliance on knowledge-based factors of production was found to affect performance of mutual funds.

The purpose of my study was to explore how preschool educators in Kenya look at children's influence on teaching. Researchers have argued that the formal educational system in Kenya today is a remnant of its days as a colony when people were expected to blindly follow rules without questioning them. I have used qualitative interviews as a method in order get the most concrete understanding of educators’ views on the influence from children. The educators I interviewed were based at a school I visited in Kenya. There were three preschool teachers and one first grade teacher working at the school so the number of educators available for interviews was limited. From my interviews, I wanted to learn if educators use the UN convention on the rights of the child and the curriculum in their teaching. My results of the study showed that educators think that they give children influence in the teaching when the children are involved in the teacher led lessons and activities. Not all of the educators used the UN convention on the rights of the child in their teaching and the views on children’s influence varied among the educators. Some of the educators thought that children should obey them without questioning, while other educators stated that they do give children influence in the teaching process. The curriculum provides the educators with a lot of room to make their own interpretations of children’s influence. The educators' views on the curriculum are to use it as a guide book and follow its instructions in order for the children to reach satisfactory targets. The conclusion of my studies is that there is a need of clearer guidelines in the curriculum concerning children’s influence on teaching. / Syftet med min studie var att undersöka hur förskolepedagoger i Kenya ser på barnens inflytande i undervisningen. Forskare har menat att dagens formella undervisningssystem i Kenya är en kvarleva från kolonialtiden då individer förväntades att följa regler utan att ifrågasätta. Jag har använt mig av kvalitativa intervjuer som metod för att få en så konkret uppfattning om pedagogers syn på inflytande. Pedagogerna jag intervjuade var på en skola där jag vistades under en tid i Kenya. Det fanns tre förskolepedagoger på skolan och en lärare i årskurs ett så mitt urval av pedagoger till intervjuerna var inte så stort. I mina intervjuer ville jag veta om de använder sig av FN:s barnkonvention och läroplanen i sin undervisning. Mina resultat av studien visade att pedagogerna anser att de ger barnen inflytande i undervisning genom att barnen är delaktiga i de lärarledda lektioner och aktiviteter som pedagogen håller i. Alla pedagoger använde sig dock inte av FN:s barnkonvention och synen på barns inflytande varierade bland pedagogerna. Vissa pedagoger tyckte att barn skulle lyda utan att ifrågasätta och andra att de ger barn inflytande i undervisningen. Läroplanen ger i dagsläget stort utrymme för pedagogerna att ha sina egna tolkningar kring barns inflytande. Pedagogernas syn på läroplanen är att använda den som en handbok och att följa det som står i den för att barnen ska uppfylla målen för godkänt. Slutsatserna av min studie är att det finns ett behov av att ha tydligare riktlinjer i läroplanen om barns inflytande i undervisningen.

This research extends the knowledge-based view of the firm as it relates to organizational structure. In particular, this research provides evidence that fundamental classifications of knowledge are measurable, in relative terms, as factors of production. It then relates differences in relative quantities of these classifications of knowledge to the presence or absence of inter-firm boundaries. Finally, this study provides evidence that financial performance may be related to the alignment of organizational structure with knowledge-based factors of production. This study contributes to strategic management theory by offering a potential solution to the difficulties of measuring knowledge as a factor of production. The research was motivated by the belief that it is the cost and value of knowledge that determines economic efficiency (Simon, 1999). By surveying professionals in the mutual fund industry for their relative reliance on three classifications of knowledge, this study suggests a set of measures of knowledge-based factors of production. These measures in turn support the testing of hypotheses related to the vertical integration (or de-integration) of adjacent stages of production. Researchers have typically categorized organizational knowledge as either tacit or explicit. This research develops the concept of encapsulated knowledge as a fundamental classification of knowledge. Encapsulated knowledge is neither tacit nor explicit, because it is externalized and implicit. Progress in measuring knowledge is made by distinguishing between knowledge that resides in human minds (tacit), knowledge that is codified as information (codified), and knowledge that is embodied in the design and functionality of physical artefacts (encapsulated). Relative reliance on the fundamentally different knowledge-based factors of production was found to vary between adjacent stages of production, despite the essential overlap of jointly held substantive knowledge. Portfolio managers are generally less (more) reliant on tacit (encapsulated) knowledge than other investment management professionals in the mutual fund complex. In addition, portfolio managers whose firms are de-integrated from the mutual fund management firms were found to be more (less) reliant on tacit (encapsulated) knowledge than their integrated counterparts. Finally, alignment between mutual fund structure and reliance on knowledge-based factors of production was found to affect performance of mutual funds.