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The objective of this work was to evaluate the economic viability and develop a multivariate analysis for banana crop data in the semi-arid region of Brazilian Northeastern. The study adopted a methodology widely disseminated in scientific research and income evaluations for the economic analysis. Through the economic indexes, we could evaluate the efficiency of the administrator and his workforce. Hierarchical clustering and Principal component analysis were used as multivariate analysis. The result of the economic analysis revealed that, on average, the total gross revenue from conventional management exceeded by 2.24 times the total gross income from agroecological management. However, the production costs of the conventional management exceeded by 2.15 times agroecological management. The multivariate analysis revealed that the variables are divided into three distinct groups formed between the equilibrium price and the profitability index, which do not correlate with each other or with the others, and by the subgroup formed by the return rate index, total operating profit and gross income, which are correlated with each other and not correlated with the others. We conclude that the multivariate analysis confirmed that the methodology used in the composition of all the economic indexes studied was correct.

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the diagnosis and treatment procedure of synovial chondromatosis (SC) of the temporomandibular joint (TMJ). METHODS: Clinical features, imaging features, surgical methods, and prognosis of 7 patients with SC of the TMJ were analyzed. We also reviewed and analyzed surgery-relevant literature included in the Pubmed database in the past decade using the search terms "synovial chondromatosis" and "temporomandibular joint", and found 181 cases. RESULTS: There was no specific difference in the symptoms of SC in the TMJ in different Milgram's stages in our cases and the cases mentioned in the literature. The main symptoms of SC in the TMJ were pain (100%, 7/7; 64.64%, 117/181), limited mouth opening (57.14%, 4/7; 53.59%, 97/181), swelling (14.29%, 1/7; 28.18%, 51/181), crepitus (28.57%, 2/7; 19.34%, 35/181), and clicking (14.29%, 1/7; 9.94%, 18/181) in our cases and cases from literature separately. The imaging features of SC were occupying lesions (including loose bodies or masses) (71.42%, 5/7; 37.57%, 68/181), bone change in condyle or glenoid fossa (1/7, 14.29%; 34.81%, 63/181), effusion (42.86%, 3/7; 20.99%, 38/181), joint space changes (42.86%, 3/7; 11.05%, 20/181) in our cases and cases from literature separately. The surgical procedures seem to depend mainly on the involved structures and the extension of the lesion rather than the Milgram's stage. CONCLUSIONS: The clinical features of SC in the TMJ are nonspecific and easy to be misdiagnosed. MRI is helpful in the diagnosis of SC in the TMJ. The surgical procedures mainly depend on the involved structures and the extension of the lesion.

Purpose – The thesis “A dark side of pivoting? – The effect on employee motivation and commitment” of Frederick Meiners aims to examine how pivoting, changes to the course of action - as a concept and part of the lean startup methodology influences employees’ motivation and commitment, and as such shining light on the current criticism about pivoting. Methodology/approach – Targeting startups that went through the process of pivoting, this thesis uses an online survey to ask employees and startup’s founders how they evaluate job related aspects of pivoting such as their motivation and commitment totaling in a sample of 50 respondents. Findings – The findings suggest that pivoting has an overall positive effect on motivation. In fact, since pivoting is usually triggered by a negative business situation and offers the possibility to do a turnaround, this increases motivation. However, when startups experience high number of pivots a darker side emerges. High numbers of pivots experienced by employees along with the effect of pivots on salaries and job security however, indicate there possibly is an inherently darks side of pivoting. Originality/value – This thesis contributes to our understanding of the methodology of the lean startup and in particular the under-studied concept of pivoting. The popularity of the lean startup methodology along with the concept of pivoting, and the lack of understanding of its impact on employees’ motivation demonstrate the need for studies addressing this issue. Objetivo - A tese “A dark side of pivoting? – The effect on employee motivation and commitment” de Frederick Meiners pretende examinar como o “pivot”, mudanças no curso de ação- como conceito e parte da metodologia lean startup influencia a motivação e o comprometimento dos funcionários, iluminando a crítica resultante contra o “pivot”. Metodologia / abordagem - Esta tese emprega uma pesquisa on-line voltada para funcionários e fundadores de startups projetados para analisar os efeitos do “pivot” sobre a motivação, totalizando uma amostra de 50 entrevistados. Resultados - Os achados sugerem que o “pivot” tem um efeito geral positivo sobre a motivação. De fato, uma vez que o “pivot” geralmente é desencadeado por uma situação comercial negativa e oferece a possibilidade de fazer um turnaround, isso aumenta a motivação. No entanto, quando os startups experimentam alto número de “pivots”, um lado mais escuro emerge. Um número elevado de “pivots” experimentados pelos funcionários e o efeito de “pivots” sobre os salários e a segurança do emprego, no entanto, indicam que possivelmente existe um lado inerentemente obscuro do “pivot”. Originalidade / valor – Esta tese contribui para a nossa compreensão da metodologia pouco estudada da inicialização lean e, em particular, do conceito de “pivot”. A falta de compreensão do impacto do “pivot” na motivação dos funcionários demonstram a necessidade de estudos que abordem esta questão.

Coastal cities are grappling with how to shift their approach in designing the built environment to respond to global warming and sea level rise. With the potential increase of sea level rise by 1 metre by the year 2100, and climate change projecting more intense and frequent storms to British Columbia’s coasts, Vancouver will need to consider more resilient approaches to address flood risk along its shores. One area that will be exposed to flood risks includes the False Creek Flats, a historic tidal flat converted to rail and industrial hub in the core of the city, and on the cusp of transforming into the city’s next employment hub. At present, it is indiscernible that the False Creek Flats at one time was a historic tidal flat with a rich ecology supporting a variety of plants and wildlife, providing food and sustenance to the Indigenous people whose traditional territory included this land. The emergence of the rail and industry erased this history, the connection to the water, and the dynamic coastal processes that shaped the landscape. With the False Creek Flats undergoing a significant transformation over the next number of years, there is a window of opportunity to reconnect False Creek Flats to the coastal landscape, while also making room for flood waters and shifting perspectives on how we live with and build with water. This practicum seeks to develop a resilient design approach for False Creek Flats through three lenses: robustness, ensuring people are safe; adaptive, making room for the water; and transformative, shifting perspectives through design interventions. Leveraging the opportunity to make False Creek Flats resilient to climate change and flooding will benefit Vancouver by creating opportunities to shift public perspectives on how the city should adapt to sea level rise and climate change, while also bolstering public policy that will make the city and its residents more adaptive and resilient to change.

Organizations commonly use teams to rapidly and appropriately respond to crises. These teams must face a multidimensional challenge because crises not only present sets of ill-defined, complex problems, but also exert high emotional demands on the team. As a result, effective team functioning in crisis events involves handling each dimension of the crisis through distinct, yet concurrent, types of responses, namely team cognitive processes and collective emotions. Research on groups also suggests that cognitive processes and collective emotions are dynamically intertwined and can influence one another. Studies of crisis events to date, however, have largely examined cognition and emotion in isolation from one another. As a result, we know little about how team cognitive processes and collective emotions go hand in hand over the course a crisis event to shape team performance. This study seeks to address this research gap. Focusing on 20 teams of MBA students dealing with a simulated organizational crisis, I used a longitudinal research design and behavioural observation methods to examine the dynamics of the interplay between team cognitive processes and collective emotions at two different temporal scales. At the micro-temporal scale, I examined the co-occurrence (also called coupling) of team cognitive processes and collective emotions to determine which observed couplings were statistically meaningful in higher- versus lower-performing teams facing a crisis event. Lag sequential analyses revealed that compared with lower-performing teams, higher-performing teams were less likely to engage in explicit situation processing in an emotionally-midaroused team atmosphere. Higher-performing teams were also less likely than lower-performing teams to exhibit implicit situation processing in an emotionally-neutral team atmosphere. Lower-performing teams, on the other hand, had more tendency to engage in implicit situation processing in an emotionally-homogeneous team atmosphere. Finally, lower-performing teams were more likely than higher-performing teams to exhibit implicit action processing in an emotionally-midaroused team atmosphere. At the macro-temporal scale, I tracked the evolution of couplings over the course of the crisis event by means of an exploratory visualization tool called GridWare. GridWare enabled me to characterize and compare the structure and the content of the coupling trajectory of higher- and lower-performing teams. The coupling trajectory of higher performers was not found to be any more or less variable than that of lower performers. However, according to my analyses, the coupling trajectory of higher-performing teams was significantly more likely to become absorbed in a single, strong, attracting coupling, as opposed to the coupling trajectory of lower-performing teams which tended to get drawn toward multiple, weaker, attracting couplings. The single, strong attracting coupling that pulled the trajectory of higher-performing teams was the coupling of explicit action processing and midaroused-neutral collective emotions. This indicates that higher performers had more tendency to keep returning to discussing and updating their decisions/actions in a midaroused-neutral emotional atmosphere. Theoretical contributions of this study and implications of these findings for practice and for future research are discussed.

In the popular edge problem, the input is a bipartite graph G = (A ? B,E) where A and B denote a set of men and a set of women respectively, and each vertex in A? B has a strict preference ordering over its neighbours. A matching M in G is said to be popular if there is no other matching M' such that the number of vertices that prefer M' to M is more than the number of vertices that prefer M to M'. The goal is to determine, whether a given edge e belongs to some popular matching in G. A polynomial-time algorithm for this problem appears in [Cseh and Kavitha, 2018]. We consider the popular edge problem when some men or women are prioritized or critical. A matching that matches all the critical nodes is termed as a feasible matching. It follows from [Telikepalli Kavitha, 2014; Kavitha, 2021; Nasre et al., 2021; Meghana Nasre and Prajakta Nimbhorkar, 2017] that, when G admits a feasible matching, there always exists a matching that is popular among all feasible matchings. We give a polynomial-time algorithm for the popular edge problem in the presence of critical men or women. We also show that an analogous result does not hold in the many-to-one setting, which is known as the Hospital-Residents Problem in literature, even when there are no critical nodes.

As our understanding of host-associated microbial communities (microbiomes) deepens, there is a simultaneous revelation of key gaps in our understanding of these systems. Among these is knowledge of the forces underlying the assembly of, selection within, and dynamics among microbiota. These questions relate to broad principles that are shared across host species, and synthesis across these systems will identify conserved principles in the larger field of microbiome research. The work presented here seeks to identify and explore the relative importance of multiple forces simultaneously shaping the microbiome, specifically, that of the phyllosphere (above-ground surfaces of plants). This research begins by investigating the importance of vertically transmitted (parent to offspring) microbes in seedling health. Currently, there is little understanding of the ecological importance of commensal or mutualistic bacteria that are transmitted on or within the seeds. Using a tomato study system and combination of classic microbiological techniques and next generation sequencing, we found that the vertically transmitted seed microbiome is capable of protecting seedlings against a common plant pathogen. This work provides evidence that the seed microbiome plays an important ecological role in early seedling life, and very likely shapes the development of the microbiome both directly through priority effects and indirectly through interactions with the plant host. This work then explores the importance of host genotype and environmental selection in shaping the phyllosphere microbiome in tomato plants. A successive passaging experiment was used to address this question by selecting upon the phyllosphere microbiome. Beginning with a diverse microbial community generated from field-grown tomato plants, replicate plants across five plant genotypes were inoculated for four eight-week long passages, and the microbial community was sequenced at each passage. We observed consistent shifts in both the bacterial (16S amplicon sequencing) and fungal (ITS amplicon sequencing) communities across replicate lines over time, as well as a general loss of diversity over the course of the experiment suggesting that much of the naturally observed microbial community in the phyllosphere in an open environment in outdoor setting is likely transient or poorly adapted. We found that both host genotype and environment shape microbial composition, but the relative importance of genotype declines through time. Furthermore, using a community coalescence experiment, we found that the bacterial community from the end of the experiment was robust to invasion by the starting community. These results highlight that selecting for a stable microbiome that is well adapted to a particular host environment is indeed possible, emphasizing the great potential of this approach in agriculture and other systems. In the final chapters of this work, the importance of bacteriophages (viruses that infect bacteria) in the phyllosphere is examined. This question was addressed by transferring microbial communities from field-grown tomato plants to juvenile plants grown under mostly sterile conditions in either the presence or absence of their associated bacteriophage (phage) community. In three separate experiments, we found that the presence of phages affects overall bacterial abundance during colonization of new host plants. Furthermore, bacterial community analysis (16S amplicon sequencing) shows that phages significantly alter the relative abundance of dominant community members and can influence both within- and among-host diversity. This is then extended through the measuring of the impact of phages on bacterial communities weeks after initial inoculation. This work describes the impact of disrupting bacteria-phage temporal dynamics on bacterial communities. Together, these results underscore the importance of both lytic and lysogenic phages in host-associated microbiomes but how they can have fluctuating impacts over relatively short timescales. Together, these results contribute to fundamental knowledge gaps by demonstrating the ecological importance of vertically transmitted microbes, determining that microbiomes can be adapted to their host and environment, and uncovering the temporal variability of key driving forces underlying microbiome structure.