Library: Best sellers

The overall aim of this thesis is to alert journalists and journalism educators to a serious lacuna in current news coverage, one which threatens the well-being of society. Simply stating that a gap in coverage exists, without giving examples, would be unlikely to convince members of such a notoriously skeptical profession. Newsmen and women, it seems, are all "from Missouri." They want to be shown. Part I. The importance of agriculture to society and of farm news to the general public Part II. The importance assigned to agriculture by the major news media and journalism educators.

This work is concerned with the evaluation of rhetoric as an essential aspect of Renaissance sensibility. It is an analysis of the Renaissance world viewed in terms of literary style and aesthetic. Eight plays are analysed in some detail: four by George Peele: The Battle of Alcazar, Edward I, David and Bethsabe, and The Arraignment of Paris; and four by Christopher Marlowe: Dido Queen of Carthage, Tamburlaine Part One, Dr Faustus and Edward II. The work is thus partly a comparative study of two important Renaissance playwrights; it seeks to establish Peele in particular as an important fig...

The problem of controlling sensory perception for use in discrete event feedback control systems is addressed in this thesis. The sensory perception controller (SPC) is formulated as a sequential Markov decision problem. The SPC has two main objectives; 1) to collect perceptual information to identify discrete events with high levels of confidence and 2) to keep the sensing costs low. Several event recognition techniques are available where each of the event recognisers produces confidence levels of recognised events. For a discrete event control system running in normal operation, the confid...

This study is designed to show how personality dispositions and cognitive variables may combine with social norms to influence wife abuse. Prior research examining the role of individual differences in wife abuse has been sparse, unsystematic, and appear questionable for two reasons. First, these studies have not considered that contextual norms and cognitive variables are likely to interact with dispositional variables to either facilitate or discourage abuse. Second, the theoretical relationship between dispositional variables and macrolevel approaches (i.e. feminist and sociological) has...

This is a revisionist study of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century satires on science with an emphasis on the writings of Jonathan Swift and, to a lesser degree, Samuel Butler and other satirists. To say, as some literary commentators do, that the satirists attacked only pseudo-scientists who failed to employ the empirical method properly is to beg a crucial question: how could the satirists possibly have distinguished the genuine scientist from the crank? By a failsafe set of Baconian principles perhaps? No, the matter is more complicated. I read the satiric literature on early modern science...

This thesis argues that with the advance of scientific knowledge, particularly in cosmology, Natural Theology can now provide an answer to the question as to the reason for the existence of man and the world. Aristotle had reasoned from the contingency of the world to the necessity of a God. He had also concluded that the world was unworthy of God's concern, as God could not be concerned with a world which was significantly different from God himself. Aristotle's reasoning from the world up to God, together with his inability to reason down from God to the world, established an antinomy. ...

Scope of Study: This dissertation summarizes the current use of concurrent software engineering (CSE) by information technology (IT) organizations in the United States and its effectiveness in improving software delivery time, quality, and cost. From a total population of 7,173 IT organizations, a one-third sample of 2,391 were surveyed. A net valid response of 142 organizations was received, which represents a valid return rate of 6.2 percent. The responses were then analyzed against software development time, quality, and cost metrics according to the software development methodologies us...

A new type of highly customized job enrichment was studied for its impact on job performance, by comparing its impact on job performance to those resulting from classical job enrichment. The study was conducted on participants comprised of employees of a financial institution and a small section of a residential population. Participants (n=38) were Human Resources staff in the financial institution and of mixed professional occupations in the other group. The Job Diagnostic Survey was used to measure job enrichment, and performance ratings were used to measure job performance. Correlations...

In this dissertation, a new spare capacity planning methodology is proposed utilizing path restoration. The approach is based on forcing working flows/traffic which are on paths that are disjoint to share spare backup capacity. The algorithm for determining the spare capacity assignment is based on genetic algorithms and is capable of incorporating non-linear variables such as non-linear cost function and QoS variables into the objective and constraints. The proposed methodology applies to a wider range of fault scenarios than most of the current literature. It can tolerate link-failures, n...

This study is focused on the effects of photoinduced intramolecular charge transfer (CT) in three differently twisted donor-acceptor (D-A) biphenyls. Taking into account a further pair of differently twisted D-A biaryls new universal insights into the photoinduced electronic and conformation dynamics of D-A biaryls are obtained. Furthermore, possible applications in fields of solar energy conversion and fluorescence sensing of microenvironments are demonstrated. Experimental means of stationary and time-resolved (ps to s) luminescence, transient absorption (sub-ps), polarization spectroscopy,...