Mercury Exposure Assessment of South River Floodplain Birds

The studies involved in this thesis expanded the current project being conducted in Dr. Newman’s laboratory that aimed to define and quantify the impacts of mercury movement in contaminated aquatic and terrestrial food webs in the South River watershed (Virginia, USA). This expansion involved a two phase study, which fulfilled the requirement of a master thesis. Previous research in our lab documented mercury biomagnification in the river itself and two floodplain locations on the South River watershed. Predictive models were built for mercury concentration in members of these food webs. These studies reached a preliminary conclusion that mercury biomagnification in members of floodplain food webs was faster than that of the aquatic food web. To substantiate this finding and further understand the factors that might produce the differences observed among floodplain locations, two additional floodplain locations were sampled and modeled in 2010. Overall, the models constructed in this study for predicting methylmercury were superior to models for total mercury or the percentage of the mercury present as methylmercury. Including previous models for other sites, four of five attempted methylmercury models based on δ15N met the criterion for useful prediction. For the floodplain models, thermoregulatory strategy was found to have substantial influence on mercury concentrations of food web members. The food web biomagnification factors for the four floodplain locations were consistently higher than that of the contiguous aquatic food web. The second phase of this research focused on description and determination of current mercury exposure to adults of three avian species during nesting on the South River floodplain and judgment of the risk of harmful mercury exposure to these species by comparing the mercury exposure distributions to published toxicity test results. This study incorporated a formal expert elicitation involving a modified Delphi framework and a Monte Carlo simulation to accomplish a probabilistic risk assessment. Simulations from this study predicted the probability that an adult bird during breeding season would ingest harmful amounts of mercury during daily foraging and also the probability that the average mercury ingestion rate for the breeding season of an adult bird would exceed published rates found to cause harm to other birds (\u3e100 ng total Hg/g body weight per day).The probabilities that these species’ averaged ingestion rates exceeded the threshold value were all less than 0.01

Knowledge transfer from european multinational corporations to their subsidiaries in China: contextual perspectives and expatriate's roles

JEL classification: F2, M1This study aims to explore the factors impeding the knowledge transfer from European multinational corporations’ (MNC) headquarters to their subsidiaries in China. And the roles that the expatriates play in the process of knowledge transfer are also examined. A quantitative research method is adopted in this study. We collected 67 questionnaires in total responded by the European expatriates in China. The results indicate that the expatriates actively participate in a wide range of knowledge transfer areas and that seven factors related to various contexts are identified by the expatriates as the primary causes of the difficulties in the process of knowledge transfer. The analysis of the results, which is related to the overall contexts in China, is also presented. We conclude the study with the limitations and suggestions for future research.Esta tese investiga os fatores que impedem a transferência de conhecimento das sedes das Empresas Multinacionais Europeias (EME) para as suas subsidiárias chinesas. Investiga também o papel que os expatriados desempenham no processo de transferência de conhecimento. Esta investigação utilizou um método de pesquisa quantitativo. Foram recolhidos 67 questionários preenchidos por expatriados europeus. Os resultados indicam que os expatriados participam ativamente em várias áreas de transferência do conhecimento. Os expatriados identificaram sete fatores relacionados com vários contextos como causas primárias das dificuldades do processo de transferência de conhecimento. A tese apresenta a análise de resultados relacionando com o contexto geral da China. Concluímos com as limitações e sugestões para investigação futura