Library: Best sellers

This thesis provides a detailed analysis of UK Aid policy over the period 1974-90. Its focus is primarily upon the extent to which official aid was concerned with poverty alleviation. This theme permitted a comparison to be made between the records of the Labour administration of 1974-79 and the Conservative administration of 1979-90. A quantitative comparison is made of the two aid programmes. The philosophical, moral and ideological aspects of the British aid programme are explored. Two themes in particular are studied in depth: aid and gender and aid and the environment. The influence o...

Personal impurity caused by childbirth, menstrual blood or death is an issue of concern prevalent in many cultures. In Japan, the generic term for these kinds of impurities is kegare and death impurity, a sub-type of kegare, is known as shi-e. The major topic of this book is death impurity. The definition and genesis of shi-e are explained. In addition, details of the influence shi-e had on ancient Japanese society as well as its continuing influence on modern Japanese society are given. Three hypotheses are stated and supported: (1) the shi-e concept began in Japan during the Yayoi perio...

Joseph Conrad's novella "Heart of Darkness" (1899) is taught and read all over the world. Everywhere, novelists and travel writers respond to it in their own creative work. I discuss 30 responses, or rewritings, from Africa, India, the Caribbean, Australia, Europe and the US. Their perspectives include those of groups who identify with Conrad's Europeans and groups who feel close to his Africans, and increasingly those of groups who situate themselves between these two extremes in various ways. I identify world-wide developments as well as themes, strategies and paradigm shifts that co...

This dissertation introduces a new design for a computer-aided algorithmic music composition system. Rather than exploring specific algorithms, this study focuses on system and component design. The design introduced here is demonstrated through its implementation in athenaCL, a modular, polyphonic, poly-paradigm algorithmic music composition system in a cross-platform interactive command-line environment. The athenaCL system offers an open-source, object-oriented composition tool written in Python. The system can be scripted and embedded, and includes integrated instrument libraries, post-ton...

In 1904-1905 Max Weber published the sociological classic The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. In this book Weber argues that religion, specifically “ascetic Protestantism” provided the essential social and cultural infrastructure that led to modern capitalism. Weber’s suggests that Protestantism has “an affinity for capitalism.” Indeed, something within Protestantism—by accident or design—creates the necessary preconditions that lead to the flowering of a just, free, and prosperous society. At the same time, Weber wonders if the economic backwardness of certain societies and...

Economic sanctions have been used as an instrument of American foreign policy ever since the Taft administration adopted the Dollar Diplomacy. This dissertation analyzes the trade Embargo the United States imposed upon Cuba after the Revolution from different perspectives: from the political, considering the main guidelines of American foreign policy toward Latin America, especially during the Cold War, and from the juridical, considering different perspectives of customary international law. Since the embargo was imposed only after American property had been expropriated with...

Groundwater represents an important supply source for municipal and irrigation uses in Far West Texas. The City of El Paso receives about 50 percent of its municipal water supply from surface water and 50 percent from local groundwater. Groundwater pumping in El Paso is from the Hueco Bolson and the Mesilla Bolson. Historic groundwater pumping in the Texas portion of the Mesilla Bolson has not resulted in significant changes in groundwater levels or groundwater quality in existing wells. Historic pumping in the Hueco Bolson has resulted in lowered groundwater levels and brackish groundwater ...

This dissertation provides a coherent, synchronic, broad-coverage, generative phonology of Russian. I test the grammar empirically in a number of ways to determine its goodness of fit to Russian. In taking this approach, I aim to avoid making untested (or even incoherent) generalizations based on only a handful of examples. In most cases, the tests show that there are exceptions to the theory, but at least we know what the exceptions are, a baseline is set against which future theories can be measured, and in most ca...

In the limits of the density functional theory there are introduced and deduced fundamental chemical descriptors as the chemical action concept, the chemical field, new electronegativity, rate reaction and chemical hardness formulations, the reduced total energy and the partial Hohenberg-Kohn functionals. For electronic density computations the quantum statistic picture of the path integral Feynman-Kleinert formalism is employed to its markovian approximation, providing the framework in which the majority of the chemical reactions and the reactivity of the electronic systems can be treated tog...

Neutron stars are invaluable tools for exploring stellar death, the physics of ultra-dense matter, and the effects of extremely strong magnetic fields. The observed population of neutron stars is dominated by the >1000 radio pulsars, but there are distinct sub-populations that, while fewer in number, can have significant impact on our understanding of the issues mentioned above. These populations are the nearby, isolated neutron stars discovered by ROSAT, and the central compact objects in supernova remnants. The studies of both of these populations have been greatly accelera...