Library: Best sellers

One of the pastoral problems of religiosity in Slovakia today is that contemporary Christianity is pervaded by nihil-inclinations. Such inclinations manifest themselves in the loss of orientation and meaning, and a disinterest in Christianity, which has by and large remained on a doctrinal, moralistic, and ritual level without offering a constructive faith response to the 'signs of the times'. This dissertation argues that nihilism is not an entirely negative or morose concept that leaves behind a void or abyss without values, rendering this world meaningless. Nihilism as such is not an absolu...

The purpose of this thesis is to develop new hybrid admission decision prediction models by using different machine learning methods including Support Vector Machines (SVM), Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Radial Basis Function (RBF) Network, TreeBoost (TB) and K-Means Clustering (KMC) combined with feature selection algorithms to investigate the effect of the predictor variables on the admission decision of a candidate to the School of Physical Education and Sports at Cukurova University. Three feature selection algorithms including Relief-F, F-Score and Correlation-based Feature Selection (CFS...

Due to recent climate change, the character of environmental regional planning has shifted to address the anticipated extreme increases in sea level rise. As such, this project, based on existing scientific research/data, proposes a spatial, habitable landscape architectural solution as a model for flood mitigation for the East coastal edge. This proposal tests the potential for resilient coastal landscapes through a particular site located on Revere Beach, along with the New England coast in Massachusetts. The study demonstrates how through new public spaces designed to renew and protect the ...

The purpose of this thesis is to forecast the amount of network traffic in Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) -based networks by using different time lags and various machine learning methods including Support Vector Machines (SVM), Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Radial Basis Function (RBF) Neural Network, M5P (a decision tree with linear regression functions at the nodes), Random Forest (RF), Random Tree (RT), and Reduced Error Prunning Error (REPTree), and statistical regression methods including Multiple Linear Regression (MLR) and Holt-Winters and compare the performanc...

Upper body power (UBP) is one of the most important factors affecting the performance of cross-country skiers during races. Although some initial studies have already attempted to predict UBP, until now, no study has attempted to apply machine learning methods combined with various feature selection algorithms to identify the discriminative features for prediction of UBP. The purpose of this study is to develop new prediction models for predicting the 10-second UBP (UBP10) and 60-second UBP (UBP60) of cross-country skiers by using General Regression Neural Networks (GRNN), Radial-Basis Functio...

Many school districts across this great nation are facing serious patterns of underachievement of students who do not fit well in a mainstream educational environment. The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological research study was to explore the perceptions and experiences of graduates from a credit-recovery nontraditional alternative high school that influenced his or her graduation. Nationally, many high school students are not earning sufficient credits to remain on grade level with their freshman level cohort. These at-risk students need options with stronger incentives to obtain high...

Debris disks are optically thin circumstellar disks around mainsequence stars, comprised of micron-sized grains. The dust is generated from destructive collisions of planetesimals, induced from gravitational perturbations by large planets. Debris disks can as signposts for planetary systems, through which, a universal picture can be obtained that encompasses the evolution and architecture of the Solar System’s own dust disk and planetary system. The dust in these disks can be detected by their thermal infrared flux, measured as an excess above the photospheric emission. Dust at different circu...

This book explores the challenges of cross-cultural translation of American literary works into Arabic which, I argue, have prevented many nineteenth-century literary works from being translated into Arabic. I have used the Arabic translations of Harriet Beecher Stowe‘s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and an abridged English text accompanying one of the translations as a case study. Since most of the Arabic translations of English and especially American literary works are merely linguistic oriented ones, I reinforce the importance of adopting a period-specific cultural-oriented approach that maintains the ...

Most feminists agree that successful prostitution reform requires that prostitutes be respected by their clients, peers, and the community. Although respect is not the only criterion necessary for acceptable reform, many feminists believe that the absence of stigma would be a sufficiently fundamental improvement to merit the reconsideration of policies that severely restrict prostitution. The aim of this study is to show that certain online prostitution venues contribute to acceptable prostitution reform by fostering trust and respect between the participants. My hypothesis is that when commer...

A field experiment was conducted at farmer’s field of Anandapur, Mangalpur VDC-3, Chitwan, Nepal during winter season from September 2006 to February 2007 to study the effects of nitrogen and plant population on maize. Fifteen treatment combinations consisting of five levels of nitrogen: 0, 50, 100, 150 and 200 kg N/ha and three levels of plant population; 55555 plants/ha (60 cm × 30 cm spacing), 66666 plants/ha (60 cm × 25 cm spacing) and 83333 plants/ha (60 cm × 20 cm spacing) were tested in factorial randomized complete block design (RCBD) with 3 replications. “Rampur Composite” variety of ...