The Effect of Different Types of Directors on the Performance of the Company.

The role of the board of directors and their composition is a matter that revolves around different contradictory views for the determination of the performance of the firms. There are several contrasting views that have emerged related to the size of the board and its effect on performance. One set of researchers’ state that larger board size will have diverse skill and knowledge which in turn will have a positive impact on the performance of the firm. The other group of researchers state that a larger board size will have a negative effect on performance due to reasons like lack of coordination, slow decision making process and free rider issues. The third group states that the relationship between the size of the board and the performance of the firm is in form of an inverted U shaped curve. While some other researchers find low significance or no link between the board size and the performance of the firm. The researcher has thus formed the first and the third hypothesis based on these contradictory views. Based on the contradictory opinions regarding the number of non-executive directors and their effect on performance of the firm the researcher has set the second hypothesis for this dissertation. There are three groups of researchers that study the effect of non-executive directors and their impact on the performance of the firm. One of them state that there is a positive impact on performance, the other state that there is a negative influence due to the outside directors and the third find no relation between the non-executive directors and the performance of the firms. This dissertation studies these issues, uses quantitative method to study the effect between variables, explains the vagueness in data obtained, discusses the findings and mentions the inferences and the implications formed out of this dissertation

Book Festival And Other Stories

A collection of short stories produced while a student in the Master of the Fine Arts program in Creative Writing at the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. These stories were submitted to the graduate workshop and revised in accordance with feedback received. This thesis was guided by Brad Leithauser and Greg Williamson

The Effect of Different Types of Directors on the Performance of the Company.

The role of the board of directors and their composition is a matter that revolves around different contradictory views for the determination of the performance of the firms. There are several contrasting views that have emerged related to the size of the board and its effect on performance. One set of researchers’ state that larger board size will have diverse skill and knowledge which in turn will have a positive impact on the performance of the firm. The other group of researchers state that a larger board size will have a negative effect on performance due to reasons like lack of coordination, slow decision making process and free rider issues. The third group states that the relationship between the size of the board and the performance of the firm is in form of an inverted U shaped curve. While some other researchers find low significance or no link between the board size and the performance of the firm. The researcher has thus formed the first and the third hypothesis based on these contradictory views. Based on the contradictory opinions regarding the number of non-executive directors and their effect on performance of the firm the researcher has set the second hypothesis for this dissertation. There are three groups of researchers that study the effect of non-executive directors and their impact on the performance of the firm. One of them state that there is a positive impact on performance, the other state that there is a negative influence due to the outside directors and the third find no relation between the non-executive directors and the performance of the firms. This dissertation studies these issues, uses quantitative method to study the effect between variables, explains the vagueness in data obtained, discusses the findings and mentions the inferences and the implications formed out of this dissertation

Physicochemical Characterization, and Relaxometry Studies of Micro-Graphite Oxide, Graphene Nanoplatelets, and Nanoribbons

The chemistry of high-performance magnetic resonance imaging contrast agents remains an active area of research. In this work, we demonstrate that the potassium permanganate-based oxidative chemical procedures used to synthesize graphite oxide or graphene nanoparticles leads to the confinement (intercalation) of trace amounts of Mn2+ ions between the graphene sheets, and that these manganese intercalated graphitic and graphene structures show disparate structural, chemical and magnetic properties, and high relaxivity (up to 2 order) and distinctly different nuclear magnetic resonance dispersion profiles compared to paramagnetic chelate compounds. The results taken together with other published reports on confinement of paramagnetic metal ions within single-walled carbon nanotubes (a rolled up graphene sheet) show that confinement (encapsulation or intercalation) of paramagnetic metal ions within graphene sheets, and not the size, shape or architecture of the graphitic carbon particles is the key determinant for increasing relaxivity, and thus, identifies nano confinement of paramagnetic ions as novel general strategy to develop paramagnetic metal-ion graphitic-carbon complexes as high relaxivity MRI contrast agents

Recovery of heavy and conventional oils from pressure-depleted reservoirs using horizontal wells

Bibliography: p. 118-120

Response Threshold Based Task Allocation in Multi-Agent Systems Performing Concurrent Benefit Tasks with Limited Information

One of the most elusive but important goals of swarm robotics is to reproduce the emergent collaborative behavior observed in natural swarming systems through the use of simple decision rules. Examples of collaborative processes in insect colonies such as foraging, scouting (finding shortest paths) for food, and colony defense involve some form of task allocation among individual agents. The robustness of task completion even after major environmental changes is also observed in natural swarm systems. Ants and bees are often unphased by the fact that the magnitude of a task --- such as carrying a heavy piece of food --- is unknown to every individual and manage to complete the task elegantly even without such critical knowledge. This robustness property is of paramount importance when recreating natural behavior in artificial systems and I believe the use of decentralized agent based task allocation rules is closely related to this property. I therefore present a novel response threshold based strategy for task allocation in multi-agent systems in this dissertation. I prove, using a well known result from the theory of global games, that under the constraints of imperfect knowledge of the environment and imperfect communication response threshold based task allocation leads to an equilibrium inducing strategy for the swarm system. The importance of this result is to provide a formal mathematical basis for the phenomenological justification currently provided in the field of swarm robotics to mimic biological systems. This result therefore provides both, a hypothesis about the inner workings of a wide range of existing approaches with limited communication between agents in artificial swarm systems and also a formal explanation for threshold based task allocation in social insects. These game theory results lead to a novel continuous response threshold algorithm for multi-agent task allocation that generalizes fixed-group task allocation (stick-pulling experiment) and stochastic team size task allocation. This allows variable team sizes to form at task sites within tolerance limits thereby providing a trade-off between exploration and exploitation. The claims made by theoretical proofs for response threshold based task allocation are backed up by physical experiments using the Droplet swarm robot platform. Further simulation experiments provide a basis of comparison between optimal centralized approaches and hybrid approaches for task allocation where each robot decides whether to participate in a task based on its own noisy sensory input and imperfect knowledge from the system controller. I show that in many real world situations it is often impractical to rely on the assumption of perfect system information for controlling a swarm and that centralized task allocation becomes comparable to a response threshold based policy under the influence of noise

Book Festival And Other Stories

A collection of short stories produced while a student in the Master of the Fine Arts program in Creative Writing at the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. These stories were submitted to the graduate workshop and revised in accordance with feedback received. This thesis was guided by Brad Leithauser and Greg Williamson