Library: Best sellers

This study seeks to explain the types of strategies party elites use to attract voters. How do party elites decide which kinds of incentives to offer, at what period, in what way, and to which groups? This study investigates the efficacy of competing and overlapping class and ethnic cleavages. Incentive theory suggests that organizations will offer three types of appeals: material (tangible rewards), solidary (enjoyment through participation), and purposive (policies and programs). First, using U.S. Census data, this study examines the social context of Hawaii in terms of eth...

This study was designed to examine the career development and advancement patterns of Aboriginal executives in Canada's Federal Public Service to determine whether developmental opportunities; job assignments; education levels; training; mentoring; leadership experience; and networking increase the advancement of Aboriginal People to the executive category within the Canadian Federal Public Service. To obtain this data, multiple strategies were employed, including a mailed survey questionnaire to 55 self-identified Aboriginal executives in the Canadian Federal Public Service; in-depth inter...

This study was designed to determine if sixth-grade students' problem solving skills were improved by means of their experience with a computer-based logical puzzle game designed to increase reasoning skills, and, in turn, problem solving ability. Students worked on this game either in cooperative learning pairs or alone. Baseline and post-experimental problem-solving ability was measured through the administration of a Problem Solving Test; Form A was utilized as a pretest for this purpose, Form B was used as a post-test. Comparisons of problem-solving ability based upon post-test s...

In November 1998, the author arrived in Mascarilla, a small village in Ecuador's predominantly-black Chota Valley, to begin a six-month teaching assignment at the Escuela "Hernando Tquez" (the local primary school). Based both on his own observations and on the assessments offered by various former students, parents, community leaders, and Ecuadorean scholars, the author judges the educational performance of the Escuela "Hernando Tquez" to be grossly inadequate. Indeed, the various shortcomings attributed to the school (and documented as a case study in chapters three and four of this bo...

There is a genre of literature in which the work is purposely written within the diary format; this type of writings known as diary fiction. Diary novels traditionally reflect what the authors think real diaries are or are written as a parody of the diary as a negative model. The authors of diary novels choose the diary form because its artistic quality expresses a greater sense of immediacy to the reader than other forms of literature. The diary novel emphasizes the time of writing rather than the time that it is written about, so the diarist usually writes about events of the immediate past...

Les relations gënomiques dëgagëes dans ce travail font apparaÓtre que l'anctre commun des graminëes a subi une transition de la composition en bases qui se traduit par l'augmentation en GC dans tous les consitutants gëniques et gënomiques. Par opposition, cette transition n'a pas eu lieu dans la plupart des autres Monocots et Dicots. La transition compositionnelle renforce l'ëvidence de l'existence de deux classes de gnes chez les Angiospermes : les gnes pauvres et riches en GC. Les premiers sont caractërisës par la prësence d'introns en plus grand nombre et de plus grande longueur que les ...

Se analiza el uso de redes neuro-difusas para solucionar problemas de clasificación y modelización. El objetivo es intentar combinar las cualidades de las redes neuronales y de la descripción de sistemas mediante Lógica Difusa. Las redes neuronales son conocidas por su alta capacidad de aprendizaje, lo que permite una adecuada generalización en el tipo de problemas comentado anteriormente. Su aplicación a problemas reales no ha dejado de crecer durante los últimos años. Por otro lado, la Lógica Difusa es una herramienta más novedosa, cuya propiedad más atractiva es la capacidad que pose...

AIDS has become a ubiquitous disease of catastrophic proportions. In this 'sex study' included as part of the Advocate magazine in 1994, attitudes and sexual activities of 13,000 gay men nationwide were surveyed. A set of research hypotheses were made, these were: that there would be a relationship between various sociodemographic, intepersonal and relational, substance use, sexual, experiential, and health care variables and high-risk sexual behavior. Some of these hypotheses were confirmed, while others were not. The particular value of this study is that it was nationwide, contained large ...

That neuropsychological performance is impaired in patients with affective disorders is now widely accepted, and there is growing evidence that attentional dysfunction (effortful attention in particular) is one of the major impairments normally observed. The present study aimed at defining the nature of attentional dysfunction in depression by means of tests designed to measure specific aspects of attention, such as sustained, selective, focused, divided attention, etc. We also tested the effect of increasing effortful attentional demands on subjects' performance. To that end, effort level was...

Little is known about student success in online learning environments, especially how the predisposing characteristics that the learner brings to the learning environment may differentially affect student outcomes. This study explored the question of whether a student's "readiness" to be a self-directed learner is a predictor of student success in an online community college curriculum. The specific goal of this investigation was to determine whether there was a significant relationship between self-directed learning readiness-as measured by Guglielmino's (1977) Self-Directed Learning Readin...