Audit report on the Northeast Iowa Schools Insurance Trust for the year ended June 30, 2015

Audit report on the Northeast Iowa Schools Insurance Trust for the year ended June 30, 2015

Theoretical Performance Model and Initial Experimentation of a Baffled-Tube Ram Accelerator

Thesis (Master's)--University of Washington, 2016-08

The art of building trust via e-communication channels: Post-acquisition integration as a special context

This study discusses the importance of establishing trust in post-acquisition integration context and how the use of e-channels facilitates or inhibits this process. The objective of this study is to analyze how the use of electronic communication channels influences the post-acquisition integration process in terms of trust establishment and overall integration efficiency, developing a framework as a result. Three sub-objectives are introduced: to find out the building blocks of trust in M&A’s, to analyse how the use of e-channels influence the process of trust establishment in post-acquisition integration context, and to define the consequences trust and use of e-channels have for the process. The theoretical background of the study includes literature and theories relating to trust establishment in post-acquisition integration context and how the use of e-channels influences the process of trust development on a general level. The empirical research is conducted as a single case study, based on key informant interviews. The interview data was collected between October 2015 and January 2016. Altogether nine interviews were realised; six with representatives from the acquiring firm and three with target firm members. Thematic analysis was selected as the main method for analysing and processing the qualitative data. This study finds that trust has an essential role in post-acquisition integration context, facilitating the integration process in various different ways. Hence, identifying the different building blocks of trust is important in order for members of the organisations to be better able establish and maintain trust. In today’s international business, the role of electronic communication channels has also increased in importance significantly and it was confirmed that these pose both challenges and possibilities for the development of interpersonal trust. One of the most important underlying factors influencing the trust levels via e-communication channels is the level of user’s comfort in using the different e-channels. Without sufficient and meaningful training, the communication conducted via these channels in inhibited in a number of ways. Hence, understanding the defining characteristics of e-communication together with the risks and opportunities related to the use of these can have far-reaching consequences for the post-acquisition integration process as a whole. The framework based on the findings and existing theory introduces the most central factors influencing the trust establishment together with the positive and negative consequences these have for the integration process. Moreover, organizational level consistency and the existence of shared guidelines on appropriate selection of communication channels according to the nature of the task at hand are seen as important

Partnering for bioregionalism in England: a case study of the Westcountry Rivers Trust

The adoption of bioregionalism by institutions that are instrumental in river basin management has significant potential to resolve complex water resource management problems. The Westcountry Rivers Trust (WRT) in England provides an example of how localized bioregional institutionalization of adaptive comanagement, consensus decision making, local participation, indigenous technical and social knowledge, and “win-win” outcomes can potentially lead to resilient partnership working. Our analysis of the WRT’s effectiveness in confronting nonpoint source water pollution, previously impervious to centralized agency responses, provides scope for lesson-drawing on institutional design, public engagement, and effective operation, although some evident issues remain.

Trust, confidence, and equity affect the legitimacy of natural resource governance

Social-ecological systems are often highly complex, making effective governance a considerable challenge. In large, heterogeneous systems, hierarchical institutional regimes may be efficient, but effective management outcomes are dependent on stakeholder support. This support is shaped by perceptions of legitimacy, which risks being undermined where resource users are not engaged in decision-making. Although legitimacy is demonstrably critical for effective governance, less is known about the factors contributing to stakeholders’ perceptions of legitimacy or how these perceptions are socially differentiated. We quantitatively assessed stakeholder perceptions of legitimacy (indicated by support for rules) and their contributory factors among 307 commercial fishers and tourism operators in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. Legitimacy was most strongly associated with trust in information from governing bodies, followed by confidence in institutional performance and the equity of management outcomes. Legitimacy differed both within and among resource user groups, which emphasizes the heterogeneous nature of commonly defined stakeholder groups. Overall, tourism operators perceived higher legitimacy than did commercial fishers, which was associated with higher trust in information from management agencies. For fishers, higher levels of trust were associated with: (1) engagement in fisheries that had high subsector cohesion and positive previous experiences of interactions with governing bodies; (2) location in areas with greater proximity to sources of knowledge, resources, and decision-making; and (3) engagement in a Reef Guardian program. These findings highlight the necessity of strategies and processes to build trust among all user groups in large social-ecological systems such as the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. Furthermore, the social differentiation of perceptions that were observed within user groups underscores the importance of targeted strategies to engage groups that may not be heard through traditional governance channels.

Networking for conservation: social capital and perceptions of organizational success among land trust boards

As an important component in collaborative natural resource management and nonprofit governance, social capital is expected to be related to variations in the performance of land trusts. Land trusts are charitable organizations that work to conserve private land locally, regionally, or nationally. The purpose of this paper is to identify the level of structural and cognitive social capital among local land trusts, and how these two types of social capital relate to the perceived success of land trusts. The analysis integrates data for land trusts operating in the U.S. south-central Appalachian region, which includes western North Carolina, southwest Virginia, and east Tennessee. We use factor analysis to elicit different dimensions of cognitive social capital, including cooperation among board members, shared values, common norms, and communication effectiveness. Measures of structural social capital include the size and diversity of organizational networks of both land trusts and their board members. Finally, a hierarchical linear regression model is employed to estimate how cognitive and structural social capital measures, along with other organizational and individual-level attributes, relate to perceptions of land trust success, defined here as achievement of the land trusts’ mission, conservation, and financial goals. Results show that the diversity of organizational partnerships, cooperation, and shared values among land trust board members are associated with higher levels of perceived success. Organizational capacity, land trust accreditation, volunteerism, and financial support are also important factors influencing perceptions of success among local, nonprofit land trusts.

Audit report on the Office of Treasurer of State, Iowa ABLE (Achieving a Better Life Experience) Saving Plan Trust for the year ended June 30, 2016

Audit report on the Office of Treasurer of State, Iowa ABLE (Achieving a Better Life Experience) Saving Plan Trust for the year ended June 30, 2016

Citizenship education, national identity and political trust: The case of Sweden

The challenging effects of globalization upon the nation-state have been a recurrent theme in the social science discourse since the 1990’s. Nationally organized education is also seen as challenged by new demands originating from globalization. In this article it is argued that ‘nation-state’ and ‘national identity’ are highly relevant concepts when discussing a citizenship education that seeks to develop a civic ethos with, potentially, a global reach. It is further argued that the understanding of such an ethos would benefit significantly from incorporating the role of political trust since trust has been identified as a main feature of the social capital that makes democracy work. Three themes are brought together: national identity and identification, the importance for democracy of political trust and the challenges citizenship education face when carried out in a national context but intended to manage issues that go far beyond the reach of the nation-state. The importance of citizenship education is discussed using recent research on the Swedish citizenship education classroom.

Audit report on the Office of Treasurer of State, Iowa Educational Savings Plan Trust (Trust) for the year ended June 30, 2016

Audit report on the Office of Treasurer of State, Iowa Educational Savings Plan Trust (Trust) for the year ended June 30, 2016

Security and Trust in Distributed Computation

We propose three research problems to explore the relations between trust and security in the setting of distributed computation. In the first problem, we study trust-based adversary detection in distributed consensus computation. The adversaries we consider behave arbitrarily disobeying the consensus protocol. We propose a trust-based consensus algorithm with local and global trust evaluations. The algorithm can be abstracted using a two-layer structure with the top layer running a trust-based consensus algorithm and the bottom layer as a subroutine executing a global trust update scheme. We utilize a set of pre-trusted nodes, headers, to propagate local trust opinions throughout the network. This two-layer framework is flexible in that it can be easily extensible to contain more complicated decision rules, and global trust schemes. The first problem assumes that normal nodes are homogeneous, i.e. it is guaranteed that a normal node always behaves as it is programmed. In the second and third problems however, we assume that nodes are heterogeneous, i.e, given a task, the probability that a node generates a correct answer varies from node to node. The adversaries considered in these two problems are workers from the open crowd who are either investing little efforts in the tasks assigned to them or intentionally give wrong answers to questions. In the second part of the thesis, we consider a typical crowdsourcing task that aggregates input from multiple workers as a problem in information fusion. To cope with the issue of noisy and sometimes malicious input from workers, trust is used to model workers' expertise. In a multi-domain knowledge learning task, however, using scalar-valued trust to model a worker's performance is not sufficient to reflect the worker's trustworthiness in each of the domains. To address this issue, we propose a probabilistic model to jointly infer multi-dimensional trust of workers, multi-domain properties of questions, and true labels of questions. Our model is very flexible and extensible to incorporate metadata associated with questions. To show that, we further propose two extended models, one of which handles input tasks with real-valued features and the other handles tasks with text features by incorporating topic models. Our models can effectively recover trust vectors of workers, which can be very useful in task assignment adaptive to workers' trust in the future. These results can be applied for fusion of information from multiple data sources like sensors, human input, machine learning results, or a hybrid of them. In the second subproblem, we address crowdsourcing with adversaries under logical constraints. We observe that questions are often not independent in real life applications. Instead, there are logical relations between them. Similarly, workers that provide answers are not independent of each other either. Answers given by workers with similar attributes tend to be correlated. Therefore, we propose a novel unified graphical model consisting of two layers. The top layer encodes domain knowledge which allows users to express logical relations using first-order logic rules and the bottom layer encodes a traditional crowdsourcing graphical model. Our model can be seen as a generalized probabilistic soft logic framework that encodes both logical relations and probabilistic dependencies. To solve the collective inference problem efficiently, we have devised a scalable joint inference algorithm based on the alternating direction method of multipliers. The third part of the thesis considers the problem of optimal assignment under budget constraints when workers are unreliable and sometimes malicious. In a real crowdsourcing market, each answer obtained from a worker incurs cost. The cost is associated with both the level of trustworthiness of workers and the difficulty of tasks. Typically, access to expert-level (more trustworthy) workers is more expensive than to average crowd and completion of a challenging task is more costly than a click-away question. In this problem, we address the problem of optimal assignment of heterogeneous tasks to workers of varying trust levels with budget constraints. Specifically, we design a trust-aware task allocation algorithm that takes as inputs the estimated trust of workers and pre-set budget, and outputs the optimal assignment of tasks to workers. We derive the bound of total error probability that relates to budget, trustworthiness of crowds, and costs of obtaining labels from crowds naturally. Higher budget, more trustworthy crowds, and less costly jobs result in a lower theoretical bound. Our allocation scheme does not depend on the specific design of the trust evaluation component. Therefore, it can be combined with generic trust evaluation algorithms.

Social contact and trust: a study of a super diverse neighbourhood

This thesis presents an in-depth case study of a superdiverse neighbourhood in Glasgow where long-term white and ethnic minority communities reside alongside Roma migrants, asylum seekers and refugees, young professionals and other recent arrivals in traditional tenement housing. It focuses on the nature and extent of social contact and trust and on the role of context in shaping social relations. Employing the concepts of social milieu and intersectionality to identify social differences the research examines the relationships between five broad groupings of residents in the neighbourhood: Nostalgic Working Class, Scottish Asian, Liberal Homeowners, Kinship-sited Roma and Global Migrants. Ethnographic fieldwork was carried out in contexts within the neighbourhood, theorised as being potential sites for intergroup contact. Three types of interactions were examined: Group-based Interactions, Neighbour Interactions and Street Interactions. The data comprised documentary evidence, participant and direct observations, in-depth qualitative and walk-along interviews with residents and local organisations. Findings show that rather than individualising and isolating residents, superdiversity can stimulate community activism, yet there remains a preference for interaction within one’s own social milieu. The research has found that the concentration of poverty and material conditions has a more profound effect on social relations than historical diversity and the extent to which diversity is normalised within local discourses. Trust judgements in a superdiverse context may rely more on shared interests, moral outlook and assessments of the context rather than the extent of social contact. The quasi-private spaces of shared residential spaces and community activities can facilitate encounters with the potential to build trust, yet for this to occur cooperation through shared activities may not be sufficient. Interactions may need to move beyond co-presence and conviviality to increased understanding and empathy through dialogue. At an aggregate level, the extent to which superdiversity contributes to social contact and trust within the neighbourhood is strongly influenced by contextual factors and wider economic processes influencing housing tenure mix, private renting, property maintenance, residential churn and environmental conditions. Through examining different types of social contacts, the dynamics of trust as well as contextual influences, this thesis offers insights into the causal processes and factors that influence social relations at a local level.

An explanation of consumer trust recovery in a food retailer

An organization trusted by consumers enjoys a number of benefits. Unfortunately, instances of trust-damaging events involving organizations happen often. Damaged consumer trust in an organization has numerous negative consequences for the organization and for consumers. Currently, there is a paucity of theory about consumer trust recovery. So, understanding why and how consumer trust recovery occurs is timely, and theoretically and practically relevant. However, the findings from this study suggest that we need to distinguish between two kinds of consumer trust recovery. The first (I call it unconscious consumer trust recovery) refers to trust recovery that occurs without the consumer being fully conscious of it. In other words, a consumer is aware of their damaged trust during the scandal, but is not aware that their trust in the organization has improved. The consumer does not think about his or her recovered trust, just as they did not think about their level of trust before the scandal. The consumer trust is habitual. The second (I call it conscious consumer trust recovery) refers to an improvement in damaged trust where the consumer is fully conscious of their trust recovery. In other words, in conscious trust recovery the consumer is aware that the scandal damaged their trust in the organization. Also, after the scandal, in contrast to unconscious trust recovery, in conscious trust recovery the consumer is also fully aware that he trusts the organization as much or more than during the scandal. My aim is to inductively develop a theory explaining each type of consumer trust recovery. To do so, I use Charmazian grounded theory methodology, because this methodology is developed for theory-building from data and is aligned with the philosophical underpinnings of this study. The empirical context for this study is the meat adulteration scandal (“the horse meat scandal”) in 2013 in the UK. I collect and analyse empirical data about both types of trust recovery in an organization from 31 consumers that experienced both types. My analysis shows that when consumers perceive the scandal as less important, they experience unconscious trust recovery. This happens because the reduced importance of the scandal leads to a shift in consumers’ attention, which in turn leads to their inattentiveness to the scandal. Consumer inattentiveness is an immediate antecedent of unconscious trust recovery. Conscious consumer trust recovery occurs because consumers see cues indicating to them that the food retailer has improved product control systems, which in turn leads to consumer perceptions of the organization’s renewed ability. Consumer perception of renewed ability is an immediate antecedent of their conscious trust recovery. My findings lead me to make three main theoretical contributions to the theory of trust recovery in general and to consumer trust recovery in particular. The first contribution lies in showing that there are two types of consumer trust recovery in an organization, not one, as previously conceptualised, and that the same consumers can experience both types. The second contribution is a theory of unconscious consumer trust recovery in an organization that involves three concepts: consumers’ perceived importance of the scandal, consumers’ shift of attention, and consumer inattentiveness. The third contribution is the finding that conscious recovery of consumer trust occurs even when existing theory of trust recovery would predict that it would not. This study can help managers aiming to repair consumer trust in an organization by identifying a set of antecedents and underlying mechanisms that can guide such trust repair.

Value creation through trust in technological-mediated social participation

In this article, we advocate for the use of a social-technical model of trust to support interaction designers in further reflecting on trust-enabling interaction design values that foster participation. Our rationale is built upon the believe that technological-mediated social participation needs trust, and it is with trust-enabling interactions that we foster the will for collaborate and share—the two key elements of participation. This article starts by briefly presenting a social-technical model of trust and then moves on with establishing authors rational that interconnects trust with technological-mediated social participation. It continues by linking the trust value to the context of design critique and critical design, and ends by illustrating how to incorporate the trust value into design. This is achieved by proposing an analytical tool that can serve to inform interaction designers to better understand the potential design options and reasons for choosing them.

Impact of PL 94-566 on agricultural employers and UI trust funds in selected states.

"Prepared by G. Joachim [i.e. Joachim G.] Elterich and Linda Graham"--Prelim. p.

Relatório de Estágio

Este Relatório de Estágio, relativo à Unidade Curricular de Integração Curricular: Prática Educativa e Relatório de Estágio, é parte integrante do plano de estudos do Mestrado em Ensino do 1.º e 2.º Ciclos do Ensino Básico. Assim, retrata o processo formativo da mestranda, sendo que dá relevo à articulação de saberes teóricos e práticos que instigaram a construção de conhecimentos científicos e didáticos, próprios da profissionalidade docente. Destaca, ainda, momentos de desenvolvimento concetual e de experimentação que permitiram o desenvolvimento pessoal e profissional, sustentados numa metodologia que se aproxima da investigação-ação e cuja importância se salienta na orientação das práticas educativas e no melhoramento das mesmas pela observação, planificação, ação, reflexão, avaliação. Neste processo, evidenciam-se também momentos de colaboração entre o par pedagógico, destacando atitudes de apoio e de confiança, momentos de corresponsabilidade educativa com o professor cooperante e momentos de reflexão e de transformação com o supervisor institucional. Deste modo, apresenta a construção de saberes da prática e a sua mobilização, a análise crítica fundamentada no âmbito do 1.º e 2.º Ciclos do Ensino Básico. Todos os instantes vivenciados possibilitaram também que a mestranda evoluísse e se sentisse numa profissional de educação. Neste sentido, este mestrado proporcionou o desenvolvimento de diversas competências relevantes para a melhoria das práticas educativas e ofereceu, também, uma oportunidade de autoconsciência e de reflexão relativamente ao processo de construção da identidade profissional e pessoal da futura docente