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Validity And Obligation In Natural Law Theory, Seow Hon Tan

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The relation between law and morality is a point of contention amongst legal philosophers. There are several issues: first, the extent to which law should incorporate moral standards; second, the effect of moral status on legal validity (the "validity question"); third, the effect of legal validity on the obligation created by the law (the "obedience question"). Because most positivists concede that it is desirable for law to accord with notions of justice and morals and that law often incorporates morals, the first issue features less prominently in the positivism-natural law debate. This article examines John Finnis's views on the latter …

Does The Computer Helpdesk Vocational Training Course Change Attitude About Customer Service?, Anthony Wethereld

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

The purpose of this research was to determine whether The Computer Helpdesk vocational computing course, in conjunction with The Virtual Workplace simulation computer program, changed attitude about customer service. Thirty-seven adult female students at Fujairah Women's College of the Higher Colleges of Technology in the United Arab Emirates took part in the study. To assess possible attitude change, a combination of observation, interview and survey techniques were used. The Likert scale customer service attitude survey, which measured beliefs and perceptions about customer service, fanned the primary data gathering instrument. Qualitative and quantitative data were triangulated, and quantitative results were analysed …

Mother What Art Thou? : A Study Of The Depiction Of Mother Figures In Recent Australian And New Zealand Fiction For Teenagers, Jane Siddall

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This thesis is a study of the representations of mothers and mother figures as found in five contemporary (published between 1984 and 1999) novels for teenagers. The focus is on western constructions of motherhood, as both normalising and universalising discourses. Utilising a variety of critical approaches this thesis examines the socio-cultural issues present in the novels in conjunction with western models of maternity. This study argues the category of mother is interdependent upon the category of child. As children's literature often focuses on the development of the child, the mother figures are often read as the “unconscious” of the texts. …

A Study Of Subject Omission In The Spoken Language Of Indonesian Primary School Children Aged 6 To 12 In Jakarta, Endang Sutartinah Soemartono

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This study investigates the occurrence of subject omission in spoken Indonesian spoken as a first language by primary school children in grades one to six and aged between six and twelve years in Jakarta. It also investigates the developmental stages of subject omission, and the effects of age, gender and degree of formality on the occurrence of empty or null subjects. Since the acquisition of language is ongoing during the students' primary schooling, this study also considers how null subjects in Indonesian may have an impact on learning and teaching at school. The omission of subjects occurs independent or matrix …

Fame, Sex And Other Types Of Criminality, Rob Finlayson

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

This thesis consists of two parts. First, a novel manuscript titled 'Fame, Sex and Other Types of Criminality' and, second, an essay discussing ideas used in the creation of the novel.

The novel uses ironic and satiric devices to explore aspects of the culture of narcissism in contemporary Australia. The plot sees a group of characters set out to write a television show in order to achieve their individual goals. An underlying crime subplot results in the characters' desires being thwarted. The novel makes extensive use of references to philosophical, psychoanalytical and political texts to explore issues surrounding desire, the …

A Trinitarian Ontological Approach To The Congregational Revitalization Of Loudsville United Methodist Church, John Eugene Heckman

ATS Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Using Natural Language Parsers For Authorship Attribution, Westerly A D Magnera

Theses

The goal of authorship attribution is to find a set of unconscious writing characteristics or style features that distinguish text written by one person from text written by another. Once these features are found, they can be used to pair a text with the individual who wrote it. It is now well accepted that authors develop distinct and unconscious writing features. Over one thousand stylometric features (style markers) have been proposed in a variety of research disciplines [44] but none of that research has looked at the syntactic structure of the text. I conjectures that the distinct writing features of …

Nietzschean Critique And Philosophical Hermeneutics, Francis J. Mootz Iii

Scholarly Works

This article appears as part of a Symposium on "Nietzsche and Legal Theory" published by the Cardozo Law Review. It addresses connections between philosophical hermeneutics and Nietzschean critique, and the relevance that these connections might have for legal theory.

Legal practice inevitably is hermeneutical, with lawyers and judges interpreting governing legal texts and the social situations in which they must be applied. Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics describes this practice well, but he treats the question of the possibility of a critical hermeneutics in an ambiguous and under-developed manner. Consequently, Gadamer is frequently (and unfairly) accused of conventionalism and quietism. At …

The Evaluation Of A Family Literacy Program, Katrina Denise Hopkins

LSU Master's Theses

Based on the literacy need in the state of Louisiana, this project was interested in whether the Ready to Learn: Between the Lions literacy workshop could equip parents to enhance and develop their child’s literacy skills and to enhance family literacy interactions. The purpose of this research was to evaluate the effectiveness and usefulness of a Ready to Learn literacy workshop in two Baton Rouge Head Start preschool centers, Banks and Southern University. Participants attended workshops once a month from January to April, lasting approximately 30 minutes each. The workshop was evaluated using a pretest/posttest instrument consisting of seven likert-type …

Delta Memories And Delta Days: Facets Of Ladies' Lives As Revealed To A Southern Daughter, Susan E. Probasco

LSU Master's Theses

The Arkansas Delta is a land considered by many to be devoid of beauty and richness of life. However, to a daughter who was the youngest child of the youngest child of a youngest child that was born in the Delta, the region is beautiful, enhanced by the observations of the lives of the women she observed there. An ethnography of the everyday lives of white, middle-class southern women in a small Arkansas Delta town seeks to communicate some of the richness and beauty of their lives, as well as other aspects of culture illustrative of southern culture in general, …

Language, Identity And The Achievement Gap: Comparing Experiences Of African-American Students In A French Immersion And A Regular Education Context, Michelle Georgette Haj-Broussard

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The Black/White Achievement gap has been a persistent problem in education. Previous research attributed this gap to students' culture (Jenks & Phillips, 1998; Ogbu, 1995a.b) or teachers' expectancy (Rist, 1970). Post-colonial literature suggests that this research itself is oppressive, and that learning is negotiating the "spaces" between students and teachers (Ellsworth, 1997); creating a hybrid "mestiza" space (Anzaldúa, 1987). The openness of immersion to diversity, and its subsequent educational benefits for African-American students (Caldas & Boudreaux, 1999) conforms to this post-colonial perspective. This mixed-methodology study examined both academic achievement and the experiences of Louisiana fourth grade students/teachers in both the …

The Social Context Of Norse Jarlshof, Marcie Anne Kimball

LSU Master's Theses

A series of excavations from 1897 to 1951 showed the site of Jarlshof in Shetland to have been occupied by proto-Pictish, Pictish, and Viking peoples. These inquiries culminated in J.R.C. Hamilton’s 1956 monograph Excavations at Jarlshof, Shetland. In the years since the writing of the monograph, much new information has come to light that relates to the time periods found at Jarlshof. The concern of this thesis is how the new findings relate to Viking Age Jarlshof and how Viking Age Jarlshof relates to this new information. In order to set Viking Age Jarlshof into its overall historical context regarding …

Perceptions Of Stereotypes In Hispanic Children's Literature, Nancy Gomez

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study attempted to determine the accurateness of the representation of the Hispanic culture in children’s books. I interviewed ten people: five non-Hispanic and five Hispanic, and I found that the Hispanic people do not seem to pay as much attention to physical features as non-Hispanic people do. However, they were concerned about the portrayal of the Hispanic culture in traditional ways: the traditional roles of women, the traditional dress, the architecture of the houses and the portrayal of the Hispanic people living in rural areas and being extremely poor. It appears that from the timeline covered by the books, …

Drawing Of The Mind, Buddy Harper

LSU Master's Theses

The rules of drawing I have described are an outline to my method of working. It is to be used like the rules of a game. The thesis paper provides the viewer the basic parameters for looking at my work. The body of work is produced like two people playing a game of chess. I establish the rules and then I develop the work in an investigative manner.

Dialogic Dogs And Phatic Felines: Speaking To And Through Our Pets, Nicole M. Dufour

LSU Master's Theses

While many pet owners acknowledge that they speak to their pet, Pet Communication has remained mostly overlooked by researchers. Through discourse analysis, this thesis is an attempt to analyze Pet Communication, which deals with human speech to a pet, about a pet, or through a pet. I analyze data which I transcribed in the waiting room of the Louisiana State University School of Veterinary Medicine Small Animal Clinic. Data were collected from conversations that took place between pet owners, between pet owners and the Clinic's staff, pet owners and their pets, and between staff and pets. These data were then …

Literacy As A Performing Art: A Phenomenological Study Of Oral Dramatic Reading, Neva Virginia Cramer

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Based on semiotic, aesthetic response, reader response, and drama in education theories, this phenomenological study seeks to describe the literary experience of text through oral interpretation for middle to high SES, fourth and eighth grade students as compared to Low SES fourth and eighth grade students. Using the research methodology of Moustakas (1994) and data analysis of Teddlie (2000), this study proposes to describe and understand the relation of literary understanding and oral dramatic expression implicit in the descriptive paralinguistic and chronemic patternizations of the oral rendition of text and describe the act of reading as phenomenology. Descriptions of the …

Atomic And Electronic Structure Of Bulk Intermetallic And Heteroepitaxially Grown Surface Alloys, Orhan Kizilkaya

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

It has been well documented that the surfaces of solids may differ from their bulk counterpart. The symmetry that a bulk possesses is broken at the surface. Due to this broken symmetry in the reduced dimension of the surface, the energetic of the surface also differs from the bulk counterpart. Reconstruction, charge redistribution, and surface alloying are phenomena that minimize the surface free energy. Surface properties of scientifically and technologically important bimetallic systems are the main focus of this dissertation. Specifically, surfaces of bulk alloy or heteroepitaxially grown metal-on-metal systems have been investigated primarily with two indispensable surface techniques, scanning …

Slaughter-House Five: Views Of The Case, David S. Bogen

UC Law Journal

This Article discusses five views of the Slaughter-House Cases: (I) that Justice Miller was deliberately ambiguous about whether the Bill of Rights is incorporated against the states by the privileges and immunities clause of the Fourteenth Amendment; (2) that Justice Miller rejected incorporation through the privileges and immunities clause; (3) that he adopted incorporation of the Bill of Rights in the Slaughter-House Cases; (4) that the Slaughter- House Cases should be reexamined and overturned by the modern court; and (5) that the Slaughter-House Cases should remain the way in which the privileges or immunities clause of the Fourteenth Amendment is …

An Africanist-Orientalist Discourse: The Other In Shakespeare And Hellenistic Tragedy, Haegap Jeoung

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The main aim of this dissertation is to show how the discourse of the psychoanalytical other--femininity, death, madness, disorder, and impiety--overlaps with colonial discourse in some plays from Shakespearean and Greek-Roman tragedy, and what difference or similarity there is between the two ages. The hypothesis is that foreigners are allegories of the psychoanalytical other. For this purpose, the research tries to grasp the concept of the other, from the viewpoint of psychoanalysis, and to analyze the core of colonial discourse on the basis of the concept of the psychoanalytical other. The starting point of the dissertation is that the other …

Power And Empowerment In Writing Center Conferences, Kerri Stanley Jordan

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study explores power and empowerment in writing center peer conferences. Arguing against the notion of “hierarchical” and “collaborative” conference categories, it suggests that because both participants enact power in conference interaction, conferencing power dynamics exist on a continuum. Issues of ownership are also placed on a continuum (and associated with enactments of power); this study argues against idealized notions of tutees “owning” their texts and conferencing goals. It distinguishes between empowerment in a practical sense (associated with improving writing skills) and in a political sense (associated with increasing critical awareness). The research involved ethnographic methods: it followed two peer …

The Impact Of A Life-Application Learning Instructional Program On Struggling Readers At The Middle School Level, Angelle Rae Stringer

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This eight-week descriptive study examined the impact of the incorporation of a Life-Application Learning Methods Program on struggling middle school readers. Two questions were explored: 1) How did incorporating life–application learning into the middle school curriculum impact reading motivation?, and 2) How did incorporating life-application learning in the middle school curriculum impact the reading levels? Participants in the study were eight eighth-grade students considered to be struggling readers Qualitative methods were used for this study utilizing responses from a survey, two inventories, student journals, and researcher observations. Data gathered suggested that students are more likely to become motivated and engaged …

Hearing Voices: Speaker Identification In Court, Lawrence M. Solan, Peter M. Tiersma

UC Law Journal

Many of the problems that people have identifying speakers solely by their voices are similar to those that people have as eyewitnesses. The amount of exposure, the nature of the identification process, and the number of exposures all matter in determining how likely a witness is to make a correct identification. Yet while the reliability of eyewitness identification has been a focal point in the news, scholarly literature, and the courts, the reliability of earwitness identification has gone virtually unnoticed in the case law and legal literature. The reluctance of the legal system to deal with this problem stems from …

Conceptualized Direct Perception: A Hybrid Theory Of Vision, Jason L. Megill

LSU Master's Theses

I formulate a hybrid theory of perception, one in which the mind’s interaction with the world is a more direct affair than many suppose (no perceptual mental representations, no sense data, no Cartesian Theater), but one in which our concepts also play a role. My claims have implications for philosophical attempts to understand perception, cognitive science theories of vision, debates over the nature of consciousness, and philosophical debates concerning Artificial Intelligence.

Advancing The Language Of Human Rights In A Global Economic Order: An Analysis Of A Discourse, Christiana Ochoa

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Human rights language is particularly attuned to setting out the goals of protecting the worlds least protected people. As human rights advocates have entered negotiations with international economic institutions and transnational corporations (TNCs), such negotiations have often resulted in an alternative language to describe the necessity of protecting and promoting human rights. After describing the progressive inclusion of human rights ideas by TNCs, the World Bank, the IMF, and the WTO, this Article argues that, while such inclusion is a benefit to the human rights movement, the creation of an alternative language to describe human rights goals is potentially detrimental. …

The Relationship Between Elementary School Foreign Language Study In Grades Three Through Five And Academic Achievement On The Iowa Tests Of Basic Skills (Itbs) And The Fourth-Grade Louisiana Educational Assessment Program For The 21st Century (Leap 21) Test, Carolyn Joyce Taylor-Ward

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The passage of the federal educational legislation, No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, established foreign languages as a core curricular content area. Nonetheless, educational policy makers at the state and local levels often opt to allocate greater resources and give instructional priority to content areas in which students, and ultimately the school systems themselves, are held accountable through high-stakes testing. Although foreign languages are designated as a core content area, instructional emphasis continues to be placed on curricular areas that factor into state educational accountability programs. The present study employed a mixed-methodology design. The primary goal was to explore …

Narrative Immediacy And First-Person Voice In Contemporary American Novels, Amy Faulds Sandefur

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study of first-person fictive narration analyzes a selection of contemporary American novels so as to understand and describe more fully a literary effect I call immediacy. I employ the term immediacy to define narrative situations in which little durational gap exists between experience and narration and in which little ideological and emotional distance is communicated between the narrating persona and the subject self. The following chapters provide a close examination of narrative techniques employed by writers in the creation of immediacy and argues that both the tone of the novels and their themes of maturation and self-identity are attributable …

The Institutional Determinants Of Property Regime Change In New Democracies: The Russian Federation, Hungary, And Czechoslovakia, R. Vanessa Krasner

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Is there a relationship between the design of democratic institutions and optimal collective decisions? Optimum decisions are defined as achieving goals important to the transition such as deep and equitable property reforms. Democratic institutions refer to first-order institutions of governance and the electoral rules for choosing leaders. Overseeing both are the written or "parchment" constitutions. Constitutions are designed to distribute power among actors, generate efficiency, and govern the interactions among actors. My findings showed that constitutional designs intentionally and sometimes with unanticipated consequences can result in highly cooperative, competitive, or conflictual struggles by political actors over high-stakes distributive issues such …

Alternative Language Sample Analyses For The Assessment Of Low-Income African American Children, Christy Gayle Wynn

LSU Master's Theses

The purpose of this study was to examine the clinical utility of three language sample analyses when working with low-income, African American (AA) children. Eighteen normally developing and three at-risk AA three-year-old preschoolers participated in the study. Language samples were elicited from each child during a 15-20 minute play interaction. Three language sample analyses, contrastive analysis, average sentence length, and complex syntax use, were completed on each language sample. Also coded was each child’s use of nonmainstream African American English (AAE) patterns. Only the contrastive analysis generated reliable differences between the at-risk children and the normally developing children. Other group …

"You Stupid, Lazy Kid": Perceptions Of Verbal Aggressiveness In Older Adults, Jon M. Croghan

LSU Master's Theses

Young adults' stereotypes of older adults has been well-documented in communication literature, however, there has been a lack of research on the impact of message strategy on intergenerational interactions. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship among three factors that previous research suggests should influence the activation of stereotypes toward a target: age, relational level, and message strategy. This study examines the role that message strategy, in this case, verbal aggressiveness, plays in activating young adults' (n = 186) negative stereotypes of older adults. The young adults' self-reported levels of trait verbal aggressiveness was positively correlated with …

The Dual Paths Of A Political Movement: Convergence And Divergence In Contemporary Conservative Public Address, Lyman Davis Hunt

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study examines the rhetorical choices made in public addresses by members of the contemporary conservative movement in the United States during the 1990s. The contemporary conservative movement in this instance is defined as a post World War II phenomenon. Specifically, it is argued that the popular notion of a unified conservative ascendence in America is but an illusion. Rather, two distinct tribes of conservatives, the economic and the traditional conservative, participate in a rhetorical homology that serves to hide significant ontological differences beneath the dialectical God terms freedom and order. Additionally, the charismatic nature of the term freedom authorizes …