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The thesis examines the Catholic social teaching, as it is expressed in papal encyclicals, in wide context of contemporary political doctrines and major events of 20th century. The author proposes a method of following political messages of the Catholic Church during the last century. He challenges a standard Church's claim of immutability of its teaching. He shows, on the contrary, firm contextualisation both of Church's action and of its official message. From classical confrontational strategy face to modernity, through the attitude of "dialogue" during the Second Vatican Council, the Churc...

Based on data on publicly traded insurance firms, the first essay examines questions about the effect of large catastrophic events on insurance firms. Rather than looking at a single event, thirty catastrophic events were aggregated into quintiles and the cumulative abnormal returns around these events were found to be significantly positive over a 25 day trading window. There is no significant evidence that post-catastrophic stock returns are correlated to the magnitude of the catastrophe. The second essay analyzes the effect of a large land grant university, the University of Illinois,...

Soil degradation has made erosion control and water harvesting an important measure in most of sub-Sahelian Western Africa. The construction of stone lines, dikes and dams has been proven a sustainable measure which is widely accepted by the rural population of northern Burkina Faso. The objective of a field study which was conducted in Bam Province from 1992 to 1994 was to investigate economic profitability of erosion control measures under farmers' conditions on household level and for different household sub-groups. Main aspects concerned yield changes in small farmers' staple food gr...

Combinatorial Games are a generalization of real numbers. Each game has a recursively defined complexity (birthday). In this paper we establish some game bounds. We find some limit cases for how big and how small a game can be, based on its complexity. For each finite birthday, N, we find the smallest positive number and the greatest game born by day N, as well as the smallest and the largest positive infinitesimals. As for each particular birthday we provide the extreme values for those types of games, these results extend those in [1, page 214]. The main references in the theory of combinat...

The difference between "mass" and "mess," for example, says a lot about the distinctive capacity of phonemes and the alphabet, but very little about the many similarities in these two words. It follows that there is something not exactly alphabetical in language that is prompted by similarities like these. Even quotidian reading exhibits non-alphabetic ingredients, for instance when we skip spelling mistakes or typographical errors; i.e.: when we impose analogies over differences, hermeneutics over semiology, semasiography over the alphabet. Joyce, who once commented that ...

The influence of Swami Vivekananda on the INDIAN Nationalist Movement is well-known. Swami Vivekananda was not only a visionary, or a monk but a nationalist and a reformer par excellence. Many in our own country think that religion and mysticism and social amelioration and political and economic reconstruction cannot unite and declare that the secular and spiritual ideals are polar opposites. Such a notion has been responsible for the gross misrepresentations of the spirit of Indian philosophy, religion and culture, but the mystics, the saints and the sages of India prove standing refutation...

This thesis analyses the origins and the implications of the services sector's development, including a case study on Switzerland. In the first part, we study the definitions and classifications of service activities, as well as the post- and neo-industrial theses on the origins of the strong expansion of services in developed countries over the last decades. The second part analyses the implications for economic growth, employment and productivity growth of the services sector's development. Starting from a discussion of Baumol's unbalanced growth model, we discuss the variety of productivity...

This dissertation studied the correlation between the number of hours spent by seniors on the internet in three categories of online activities and the seniors' levels of depression. The subjects were men and women age fifty-five and older living in an active retirement community. The three categories of online activities were communications activities, information-gathering activities, and personal transactions. Number of hours spent online was measured by a self-reporting questionnaire. Level of depression was measured by administration of the Beck Depression Inventory-II. Spearman's rho was...

This thesis is divided into 4 chapters summarizing this contribution on selected topics related to chlorophyll biosynthesis and biogenesis of the photosynthetic apparatus. The first chapter deals with the state of Pchlide in nonilluminated leaves. The comparison of the photoactive Pchlide absorbance spectra throughout the development in the dark, reveals that the proportion of P638-645 and P650-657 is not much modified during this period. The Gaussian deconvolutions of 77 K fluorescence spectra of nonphotoactive and photoactive Pchlide indicated the presence of three and 5 spectral forms, res...

Facilitating the transition of elderly patients from the hospital setting to their pre-hospital environment is a major challenge for health care providers. Adequate discharge planning has been mandated by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Health Care Organization (JCAHO) and the American Hospital Association (AHA). However, reports from the literature indicate that some elderly patients on Medicare may be discharged "quicker and sicker" than in the past and that care-giving family members are often not included in the discharge planning process.The problem is that elderly patients may...