Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Regulatory search'

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 2017.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references.
This dissertation is composed of four essays, each studying limits to the means that are famously known to be effective. In the first essay, I investigate the effect of using social ties on the quality of opportunities pursued in job search. Using fixed effects models, I show that when the job seeker uses contacts, she pursues jobs that pay less than the jobs she pursues through formal methods. In addition, the analysis show that networks limit the geographical and occupational diversity of jobs pursued. In the second essay, using a mixed methods approach I examine how the negative emotional toll of long-term unemployment (LTU) is shaped by the interaction of gender and marital status. The interviews reveal a pattern with more marital tensions that exacerbate the emotional toll of LTU reported by married men than married women. The analysis of survey data show that overall marriages are helpful to the wellbeing of both unemployed men and women. Yet, for married men but not for married women, the analysis revealed that the significance of the benefits derived from marriage disappears once household income is controlled. The third essay examines whether introducing choice into a mandatory training program makes any difference in Unemployment Insurance recipients' job search performance. Using a field experiment design, I compare job search outcomes of individuals who have unconstrained workshop choices to others who only have a constrained option. Analyses show that providing the option of selecting which workshop to attend does not improve outcomes for unemployed. In the fourth essay, using data from safety inspections in laboratories at a large university, I investigate whether conducting semi-annual inspections and reporting findings back to responsible constituencies decreases the number of violations. The analyses show that the Environmental, Health, and Safety Management System did not reduce the number of violations. Rather, the results show a widening gap between compliant and non-compliant scientists. Using both lab-level quantitative data and interviews with inspectors and EHS personnel, I delineate the factors that impede the success of the system.
by Gökçe Başbuğ.
1. Do Social Networks Lead to Better Opportunities to Pursue? Evidence from Job Applications -- 2. The Emotional Toll of Long-Term Unemployment: Examining the Interaction Effects of Gender and Marital Status -- 3. Activation Programs for Unemployed Insurance Recipients: Comparison of Two Training Delivery Formats -- 4. Why Is Regulatory Compliance Difficult? Variable Performance and the Insulation of Economically Resourceful Actors.
Ph. D.

The thesis represents a contribution to the debate on the regulation of inter-state fiscal competition. The study coincides with the mounting scepticism expressed towards the regulatory frameworks devised and implemented by the EU and OECD. This thesis offers a new and comprehensive approach to the regulatory dilemma. It looks at tax competition from a legal perspective and aspires at laying down the foundations of a balanced regulatory framework by sharing the burden of regulation amongst all parties involved in the process of fiscal competition. It also investigates the validity of the traditional arguments in the light of recent developments. Moreover, it tackles the one issue that is common to any regulatory framework, that is, the identification of tax incentives. The thesis contends that unless a common understanding is reached on what is meant by tax incentives, one may not seriously contemplate the regulation of inter-state fiscal competition.

Doutoramento em Engenharia Alimentar - Instituto Superior de Agronomia
While searching for roles of Saccharomyces cerevisiae regulatory pathways during the late stages of wine fermentation, a peculiar H+ homeostasis was found in an industrial wine strain, while fermenting natural grape must (NGM). Intracellular pH (pHi) of the population remained in the range 6.0 – 6.4, decreasing by the end of glucose fermentation (pHi 5.2 at 15oC), although cells remained viable. The plasma membranes of late stationary cells became almost impermeable to H+. To ensure replicability of subsequent experiments, a synthetic grape must was designed (ISA-SGM), in which we obtained similar fermentative profiles as in NGM for the wine strain and for laboratory strains. Fluorescence Ratio Imaging Microscopy (FRIM) was used to estimate pHi of individual cells of strain BY4741. Even at the end of fermentation, we found subpopulations with “healthy” cytosolic pH (i.e. pHi 6-7). Sixty-two single-deletion mutants of BY4741 were screened to identify genes required for optimal wine fermentation performance, leading to the identification of 10 determinants whose absence improved fermentation performance, while 37 were deleterious. Principal Component Analysis revealed that deletion of some genes involved in transcription, cell cycle and stress response led to improved performance, while reduced performance was associated mainly with genes involved in membrane functions.

The CsgD protein is the master regulator of a pathway leading to the formation of curli, in essence regulating the switch between a motile and a sessile lifestyle for bacteria. The 5’-UTR region of the csgD mRNA is a hotspot for multiple regulatory small RNAs (sRNA) involved in a complex regulatory network. Even though it is previously known how the interaction takes place it is unknown how sRNA binding affects the translational activity. In order to suggest a mode of regulation a mutational assay was performed by making changes in the csgD 5’-UTR and investigate what the translational effects were. Mutations in different regions are shown to affect the translation levels in various ways.

One of the great myths of contemporary U.S. culture is that America's food supply is the safest in the world. Another is that government agencies have the ability and authority to guarantee food safety and to enforce accountability standards upon food producers, processors, and distributors. But the U.S. food safety regulatory regime is as it has been for more than a century: embedded in the notions of food purity and wholesomeness that framed the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the 1906 Federal Meat Inspection Act. Although changes in food production, processing, and distribution that occurred throughout the 20th century have rendered this regulatory regime ineffective and inefficient, efforts to amend its regulatory scope and power have been largely unsuccessful. Current proposals to transform this system, including the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009 and the Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009, however, would expand the power of government agencies to require process-based food safety systems, to test for contamination, to issue recalls, and to institute traceability protocols for all food products. Yet much of the economic literature critiques this top-down approach to regulation. Beginning with an overview of U.S. food safety and its regulation, this dissertation examines the relative effectiveness and efficiency of "top-down" "command and control" versus "bottom up" "market driven" regulatory regimes designed to resolve market failures and promote accountability relative to food safety. It includes an analysis of the impact and influence of food producing, processing, and distributing firms upon the policy process, examining when, why, and how large agri-food corporations support or oppose changes to the food safety regulatory regime and accountability framework, and concludes with an investigation of food safety crises as a catalyst for political change.
Ph. D.

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This paper presents an analysis of the constitutional right to health as a social right, as well as consumer rights as provided by the private sector as supplemental to the provision of services directly by the state. The analysis is about the general and specific consumer s rules for the private health sector, as well as statistics and case studies that demonstrate the growing membership of private health insurance by the Brazilian population as well as the constant violation of the rules imposed on the sector by the plans operators. Being the health a subject of public relevance although provided by the private sector, suffers strong supervision and regulation of the state, with specific regulatory agency, established. Then we analyze the quality of the supervision of the National Health Agency, as well as the judiciary in ensuring the right to health as a social right and the right of the consumer, which should result in the reduction of the demand for the judiciary about issues related to sector.
O presente trabalho apresenta uma análise do direito constitucional da saúde, posto como direito social, bem como, como direito do consumidor, quando prestado pela iniciativa privada de forma suplementar a prestação do serviço de forma direta pelo Estado. Analisam-se as regras consumeristas gerais e específicas para o setor da saúde privada, bem como estatísticas e estudos de caso que comprovam a crescente adesão da população brasileira aos planos de saúde privados, bem como a constante violação das regras impostas ao setor pelas operadoras fornecedoras dos planos. Sendo a saúde tema de relevância pública, ainda que prestado pela iniciativa privada, sofre forte fiscalização e regulação do Estado, contando com agência reguladora específica, instituída para tanto. Analisa-se então a qualidade da atuação da Agência Nacional de Saúde Suplementar, bem como do Poder Judiciário na efetivação do direito à saúde, como direito social e direito do consumidor, o que deveria ter como consequência a redução da judicialização das questões relacionadas ao setor.

A inferência de redes gênicas (GN) a partir de dados de expressão gênica temporal é um problema crucial e desafiador em Biologia Sistêmica. Os conjuntos de dados de expressão geralmente consistem em dezenas de amostras temporais e as redes consistem em milhares de genes, tornando inúmeros métodos de inferência inviáveis na prática. Para melhorar a escalabilidade dos métodos de inferência de GNs, esta tese propõe um arcabouço chamado GeNICE, baseado no modelo de redes gênicas probabilísticas. A principal novidade é a introdução de um procedimento de agrupamento de genes, com perfis de expressão relacionados, para fornecer uma solução aproximada com complexidade computacional reduzida. Os agrupamentos definidos são usados para reduzir a dimensionalidade permitindo uma busca exaustiva mais eficiente pelos melhores subconjuntos de genes preditores para cada gene alvo de acordo com funções critério multivariadas. GeNICE reduz consideravelmente o espaço de busca porque os candidatos a preditores ficam restritos a um gene representante por agrupamento. No final, uma análise multivariada é realizada para cada subconjunto preditor definido, visando recuperar subconjuntos mínimos para simplificar a rede gênica inferida. Em experimentos com conjuntos de dados sintéticos, GeNICE obteve uma redução substancial de tempo quando comparado a uma solução anterior sem a etapa de agrupamento, preservando a precisão da predição de expressão gênica mesmo quando o número de agrupamentos é pequeno (cerca de cinquenta) e o número de genes é grande (ordem de milhares). Para um conjunto de dados reais de microarrays de Plasmodium falciparum, a precisão da predição alcançada pelo GeNICE foi de aproximadamente 97% em média. As redes inferidas para os genes alvos da glicólise e do apicoplasto refletem propriedades topológicas de redes complexas do tipo \"mundo pequeno\" e \"livre de escala\", para os quais grande parte das conexões são estabelecidas entre os genes de um mesmo módulo e algumas poucas conexões fazem o papel de estabelecer uma ponte entre os módulos (redes mundo pequeno), e o grau de distribuição das conexões entre os genes segue uma lei de potência, na qual a maioria dos genes têm poucas conexões e poucos genes (hubs) apresentam um elevado número de conexões (redes livres de escala), como esperado.
Gene network (GN) inference from temporal gene expression data is a crucial and challenging problem in Systems Biology. Expression datasets usually consist of dozens of temporal samples, while networks consist of thousands of genes, thus rendering many inference methods unfeasible in practice. To improve the scalability of GN inference methods, this work proposes a framework called GeNICE, based on Probabilistic Gene Networks; the main novelty is the introduction of a clustering procedure to group genes with related expression profiles, to provide an approximate solution with reduced computational complexity. The defined clusters were used to perform an exhaustive search to retrieve the best predictor gene subsets for each target gene, according to multivariate criterion functions. GeNICE greatly reduces the search space because predictor candidates are restricted to one representative gene per cluster. Finally, a multivariate analysis is performed for each defined predictor subset to retrieve minimal subsets and to simplify the network. In experiments with in silico generated datasets, GeNICE achieved substantial computational time reduction when compared to an existing solution without the clustering step, while preserving the gene expression prediction accuracy even when the number of clusters is small (about fifty) relative to the number of genes (order of thousands). For a Plasmodium falciparum microarray dataset, the prediction accuracy achieved by GeNICE was roughly 97% on average. The inferred networks for the apicoplast and glycolytic target genes reflects the topological properties of \"small-world\"and \"scale-free\"complex network models in which a large part of the connections is established between genes of the same functional module (smallworld networks) and the degree distribution of the connections between genes tends to form a power law, in which most genes present few connections and few genes (hubs) present a large number of connections (scale-free networks), as expected.

Responses of rice to plant growth regulators on germination and seedling growth under NaCl salinity were studied to identify possible means of increasing salinity tolerance. Gibberellic acid (GA) promoted germination processes and a-amylase activity and increased plumule but reduced radicle growth after emergence. GA partitioned more metabolites towards the plumule than the radicle. Chlormequat (CCC) showed no beneficial effects and abscisic acid (ABA) inhibited germination under saline conditions. Overall there was no large difference in the performance of three rice varieties, BR29, IR8 and Pokkali in germination. Artificially aged seeds showed increased sensitivity to salinity and GA produced similar effects on germination of artificially aged rice seeds as on unaged seeds. Seed pre-treatment with GA was as effective in promoting germination under saline conditions as applying GA in the germination media. GA with low Ca promoted germination and plumule growth as well as radicle growth. GA increased plant height and fresh weight of seedlings under saline conditions, however it did not show a large positive effect on rice seedlings. CCC had no beneficial effects on rice seedlings. ABA showed possible beneficial effects on rice seedlings as it reduced Na+ uptake and increased K+ and Ca2+ uptake. GA in combination with ABA appeared to adapt rice plants better to saline conditions. GA in combination with low Ca also promoted rice growth under saline conditions.

Capturing the mechanism of gene regulation in a living cell is essential to predict the behavior of cell in response to intercellular or extra cellular factors. Such prediction capability can potentially lead to development of improved diagnostic tests and therapeutics [21]. Amongst reverse engineering approaches that aim to model gene regulation are Dynamic Bayesian Networks (DBNs). DBNs are of particular interest as these models are capable of discovering the causal relationships between genes while dealing with noisy gene expression data. At the same time, the problem of discovering the optimum DBN model, makes structure learning of DBN a challenging topic. This is mainly due to the high dimensionality of the search space of gene expression data that makes exhaustive search strategies for identifying the best DBN structure, not practical. In this work, for the first time the application of a covariance-based evolutionary search algorithm is proposed for structure learning of DBNs. In addition, the convergence time of the proposed algorithm is improved compared to the previously reported covariance-based evolutionary search approaches. This is achieved by keeping a fixed number of good sample solutions from previous iterations. Finally, the proposed approach, M-CMA-ES, unlike gradient-based methods has a high probability to converge to a global optimum. To assess how efficient this approach works, a temporal synthetic dataset is developed. The proposed approach is then applied to this dataset as well as Brainsim dataset, a well known simulated temporal gene expression data [58]. The results indicate that the proposed method is quite efficient in reconstructing the networks in both the synthetic and Brainsim datasets. Furthermore, it outperforms other algorithms in terms of both the predicted structure accuracy and the mean square error of the reconstructed time series of gene expression data. For validation purposes, the proposed approach is also applied to a biological dataset composed of 14 cell-cycle regulated genes in yeast Saccharomyces Cerevisiae. Considering the KEGG1 pathway as the target network, the efficiency of the proposed reverse engineering approach significantly improves on the results of two previous studies of yeast cell cycle data in terms of capturing the correct interactions.
Thesis (Master, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2008-09-09 11:35:33.312

In spite of the existing literature on this topic, the role that outplacement counseling performs within job search process is still unknown, namely regarding the effect it has on the psychological processes that precede job search behaviours. This study aims to analyze the relationship between some emotion-linked variables within the process of finding a new job by offering a comparison between unemployed individuals that had formal outplacement support versus no structured support. Results suggest a partial moderating effect of outplacement, once it interacts with some relationships in the overall research model. Psychological capital was found to be an inert variable; anxiety and depression were found to be related with emotional regulation variables and, in outplacement model, cognitive reappraisal was found to positively related with anxiety that, in turn, positively act on job search behaviours. Self-efficacy was the foremost predictor of job search as well as a mediator of psychological capital and, only in non-outplacement group, of depression’s relationship with job search behaviours. The contributions of these results for human resources professionals and outplacement counselors are discussed and supported with suggestions for future research.
Apesar da literatura existente sobre este tópico, o papel que o Outplacement realiza no âmbito do processo de procura de emprego permanece desconhecido, nomeadamente no que concerne ao efeito que este tem nos processos psicológicos que precedem comportamentos de procura de emprego. Este estudo pretende analisar a relação entre certas variáveis emocionais dentro do processo de encontrar um novo trabalho, oferecendo, para tal, uma comparação entre indivíduos desempregados que tiveram apoio formal de Outplacement versus sem apoio estruturado. Resultados sugerem um efeito de moderação parcial do outplacement, uma vez que este interage com algumas relações no nosso modelo geral de investigação. O capital psicológico revelou ser uma variável inerte; ansiedade e depressão demonstraram estar relacionadas com as variáveis de regulação emocional e, no modelo de outplacement, a reavaliação cognitiva relacionou-se positivamente com ansiedade que, por seu turno, actuou positivamente nos comportamentos de procura de emprego. Autoeficácia foi o preditor mais importante da procura de emprego, bem como mediador da relação entre capital psicológico e, apenas no grupo não-outplacement, da depressão com os comportamentos de procura de emprego. Os contributos destes resultados para profissionais de recursos humanos e consultores de outplacement são discutidos e suportados com sugestões para investigação futura.

On its own, the Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) is not a solution to either inequalities or unemployment, but it is an important strategy to address access to education and training for those previously excluded (SAQA, 2003a, p. 31) This study deals with the search for valid and sustainable mechanisms for the implementation of the Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) in South Africa. Some of the elements that facilitate implementation include stringent quality criteria and common benchmarks that build trust in the process and ensures the protection of the integrity of the system. In an education and training system, which is subject to intense change, RPL has an important contribution to make to the opening up of access to education and training for individuals previously denied the privilege.
Dissertation (MEd)--University of Pretoria, 2005.
Curriculum Studies
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