Library: Best sellers

The purpose of this study was to investigate the general job satisfaction, intrinsic job satisfaction, and extrinsic job satisfaction levels of Directors of Classified Personnel in the 97 Merit (Civil Service ) Systems school districts in California that employ approximately 60 percent of classified employees. Also examined was the influence or relationship of job satisfaction to variables such as the Director's gender, age, highest degree (or equivalent) earned, years of Director experience, size of organization (district), responsibility for certificated only or both certificated (teaching)...

The thesis starts with a short description of the credit derivatives' place in the credit risk management. Then it proceeds by outlining the basic forms of credit derivatives, their applications, and their contract elements. A short description of the two common pricing frameworks for credit derivatives, the Firm's Value Models and the Credit Rating Transition Models is given. The major approach reviewed in this thesis is the one of Duffie-Singleton for valuing credit derivatives with term structure models. This framework is also applied in a simulation and examines the importance of the di...

Adrienne von Speyr in her book "Confession" and throughout her writings speaks of the "confession" of Jesus Christ. This is a startling use of the term because Christ never sinned. The author examines all the writings of von Speyr in the light of Roman Catholic soteriology and sacramental theology and in view of the influences that existed between her and Hans Urs von Balthasar. The author then shows how the theme of confession is central to von Speyr's writing, aids in illuminating her theology of Holy Saturday and the Paschal Mystery, and serves as the basis for the renewal of th...

Karl Mannheim, and Karl Marx suggested that there is a relationship between economic and political institutions and that behaviors and attitudes are influenced by this. Viewing this postulate as a conception which posits the economic mode of production as the locus of causality for culture, this examination of capitalism as culture, investigates how education and its pedagogical techniques, as a means of "enculturation," reflects the capitalist economic mode of production. Building on the theoretical notions in the Sociology of knowledge and Structuralism, this hermeneutical analysis discus...

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...

The purpose of this research paper is to try to clarify and evaluate the major issues and arguments in the debate on Import Substitution Industrialization Strategy (ISI) between the neoclassical economists and the development economists. In particular, it will focus on some basic underlying models employed by the two schools of thought, rather than on specific policy recommendations given by either school. It will conclude that the critiques against ISI from the neoclassical economists are based on a static equilibrium model, which can not fully comprehend the dynamic relationship between grow...

Shape classification is a challenging image processing problem because shapes can occur in any position, at any orientation, and at any scale in an image. Shapes can also be obscured by gaps in their boundaries, occlusions, and noise. General shape classifiers often suffer from low precision, and specialized shape classifiers rely on specific features, like vertices or connected boundaries, making them difficult to generalize. The objective of this research is to design, implement, and test a general, high-precision two-dimensional shape classifier that is invariant to translation, scale, and ...

The Fuller School is one of the six elementary schools in Gloucester, Massachusetts, a small urban community known for shipbuilding and fishing. Fuller students come from a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds (from public housing facilities to affluent families) and a variety of ethnic groups (including Italian, Hispanic and Vietnamese). With its diverse population, the Fuller School represented an excellent environment to test the use of Multiple Intelligences (MI) as a foundation for its curriculum. This study aimed to examine one of the ten objectives of the FIRST Schools and Teache...

The Federal Writers' Project, part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration of the 1930s, collected interviews from over 3500 ex-slaves throughout the United States, including 365 former South Carolina slaves. These narratives are an invaluable resource to those interested in resistance by the last generation of South Carolinians held in bondage. This thesis tells us about the separate worlds inhabited by the Palmetto State's slaves and their owners, and describes, often in the slaves' own words, the resistance precipitated by the friction between these worlds.

This study examined the relationship between the education heterogeneity of top management teams and organizational performance measured as long-term total shareholder returns. The subjects were 46 publicly traded North American insurance companies that had been traded for at least five years. I employed two metrics to measure education heterogeneity. One metric assessed the education heterogeneity of top management teams based on the highest education certification and the other metric assessed education heterogeneity of the teams based on all education certifications, and therefore the under...