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The Ranking Of Football Teams Using Concepts From The Analytic Hierarchy Process., Yepeng Sun 1976-

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A new method to rank football teams with the concepts associated with the Analytic Hierarchy Process(AHP) and Graph theory is developed in this thesis. A set of games is interpreted as a graph, in which every vertex represents a team, and every edge represents a team quality comparison evaluated directly from the score difference of a game. A weighted quality comparison value between every two teams is computed from the graph, based on the transitivity relationship of comparison values in the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). All the quality comparison values are input into the software package Expert Choice as the …

Religiosity, Beliefs About Mental Illness, And Attitudes Toward Seeking Professional Psychological Help Among Protestant Christians., Juan Michael Thompson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Researchers have long been interested in the relationship among the separate fields of psychology and religion. This dissertation seeks to explore the differences in the way protestant Christians with various religious orientations view mental illness and how these views relate to their attitudes toward seeking professional psychological help. A total of 540 individuals from church congregations representing ten different denominations completed measures of religiosity, beliefs about mental illness, and attitudes toward seeking professional psychological help. Scores on these measures were analyzed to observe group differences between religious orientations and correlations among the orientations and dependent variables of belief about mental …

Teacher Candidates' Experience Of Ubd In A Social Studies Methods Course, Patricia K. Gulsvig

Theses and Dissertations

Teacher candidates in secondary social studies education come to their methods course eager to share their passion for the subject. Enthusiasm often turns to confusion and frustration when they are confronted with unforeseen decisions about the content they will teach before they determine the instructional strategies for teaching that material. The purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of Understanding by Design (UbD) as a model in a social studies methods course for preparing teacher candidates to make purposeful curricular and instructional decisions.

This study took place at a small private Midwestern college and involved 10 participants between …

Impact Of Microfinance And Remittances On The Livelihood Of Nepali People, Bishal B. Kasu

Theses and Dissertations

This research is about the impact of microfinance and remittances on the livelihood of Nepali people. The research has adopted a quantitative approach and used the Nepal Living Standard Survey 2003-04 dataset. The research shows that microfinance and remittances have a clear effect on percent of expenses made on food, health, education, and the housing quality of Nepali people. Out of four dependent variables, microfinance is significantly associated with percent of expenses on food, health and housing quality. Amount of microfinance loans received is negatively associated with percent of expenses on food and quality of housing but positively associated with …

Transactional Algorithm For Subtracting Fractions: Go Shopping, James Seishin Pinckard

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this quasi-experimental research study was to examine the effects of an alternative or transactional algorithm for subtracting mixed numbers within the middle school setting. Initial data were gathered from the student achievement of four mathematics teachers at three different school sites. The results indicated students who utilized the transactional algorithm demonstrated greater comprehension, retention, and computational accuracy than those who utilized traditional algorithms. The difference between the scores of the two groups was statistically significant. The follow-up investigation employed a quasi-experimental nonrandomized Test 1-Test2 control research with two teachers. An analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to …

Identity And Democracy: Linking Individual And Social Reasoning, John B. Davis, Solange Regina Marin

Economics Faculty Research and Publications

Following Amartya Sen's approach, John Davis and Solange Regina Marin look at individual and social reasoning when examining the complex relationship between identity and democracy. They characterize democracy as a process of social or public reasoning that combines the individual reasoning of all citizens. Identity is explained in terms of personal identity, social identity, and individual identity. They argue that democracy in combining the individual reasoning of all citizens responds to individuals’ different personal identity concerns and needs, reflects their shared social identity interests and goals, and accords them rights and responsibilities associated with their many different individual identities.

Development And Validation Of The Arabic Allergic Rhinitis Quality Of Life Questionnaire., Salah M. Aburuz, Naela R. Bulatova, Mohammed I. Tawalbeh

Saudi Medical Journal

OBJECTIVES: To develop and validate an Arabic allergic rhinitis quality of life questionnaire (AAQQ). METHODS: The study was conducted at the Ear, Nose, and Throat Clinic at the University of Jordan Hospital, Amman, Jordan, from February 2006 to June 2007. A questionnaire was developed from data obtained from 90 patients, and the validation study was conducted on 140 patients. The study was a 5-week observational study. We evaluated the measurement properties necessary for use of the AAQQ in clinical practice, clinical trials, and cross-sectional surveys. RESULTS: The intraclass correlation coefficient for the repeated AAQQ measurements was excellent (0.93), indicating a …

Pelvic Organs Prolapse Characteristics In Saudi Women., Hanan M. Al-Kadri, Najla F. Al-Marri, Hani M. Tamim

Saudi Medical Journal

No abstract provided.

Beyond Ethnocentrism In Communication Theory: Towards A Culture-Centric Approach, Eddie C. Y. Kuo, Han Ei Chew

Research Collection Office of Impact

Communications scholars have been challenging the universality of Eurocentric scholarship, which they argue to be a form of intellectual imperialism imposing its provincial ideals and masquerading these as universal. As an answer to Eurocentricity, Asiacentricity proposes to place Asian values and ideals at the center of inquiry to see Asian phenomena from the standpoint of Asians as subjects and agents. This article critiques this Asiacentric agenda and critically examines the implications and premises of this paradigm. It suggests instead that a culture-centric paradigm be adopted to avoid an Asian version of the Eurocentricity crisis. The article advocates the adoption of …

An Environment That Fosters Shared Leadership And The Effects On Engineering Education: An Analysis And Proposed Structure, Brian J. Galli, Ray Luechtefeld

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Engineers must not only have design and technical skills, but they must also possess the ability to work in and lead teams, adopt and adapt to change, and act as leaders who can think in terms of the bigger picture. to develop these skills, engineering students must be actively involved in their education and trained to continually learn. Many engineering students have become accustomed to traditional forms of education, which can lead to passivity and dependence on faculty to tell them what to know and why they need to know it. Research in organizational behavior suggests a solution can lie …

Risk Matrix Input Data Biases, Eric D. Smith, William T. Siefert, David Drain

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Risk matrices used in industry characterize particular risks in terms of the likelihood of occurrence, and the consequence of the actualized risk. Human cognitive bias research led by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky exposed systematic translations of objective probability and value as judged by human subjects. Applying these translations to the risk matrix allows the formation of statistical hypotheses of risk point placement biases. Industry-generated risk matrix data reveals evidence of biases in the judgment of likelihood and consequence-principally, likelihood centering, a systematic increase in consequence, and a diagonal bias. Statistical analyses are conducted with linear regression, normal distribution fitting, …

Neo-Orthodoxy In Academic Freedom, J. Peter Byrne

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This review essay analyzes two recent books that advance neo-orthodox theories of academic freedom: Matthew Finkin and Robert Post, For the Common Good: Principles of American Academic Freedom, and Stanley Fish, Save the World on Your Own Time. Both books develop principles articulated in the American Association of University Professors 1915 Declaration, which emphasize the role of faculty in advancing knowledge and the need to insulate professional evaluation of academic work from lay, political interference. This review essay defends the return to protection of the scholarly search for truth as the touchstone of academic freedom, offers critiques of the authors’ …

Montana Kaimin, December 1, 2009, Students Of The University Of Montana, Missoula

Montana Kaimin, 1898-present

Student newspaper of the University of Montana, Missoula.

Well-Being On Planet Earth, Ed Diener, William Tov

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The Gallup World Poll allows a look at how humanity is flourishing, based on the answers of survey respondents sampled from across the globe. Several conclusions are clear. First, how people are doing depends enormously on the society in which they live, and nations vary from doing very well to extremely poorly. In terms of subjective well-being, nations vary greatly, in both judgments of overall life and in positive and negative emotions. The best predictors of global life judgments were income and ownership of modern conveniences, whereas the best predictors of emotions were social factors such as the control of …

The Hard Embodiment Of Culture, Dov Cohen, Angela K. Y. Leung

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The way humans move and comport their bodies is one way they (literally) carry their culture. In pre-wired embodiments, body comportment triggers basic, evolutionarily prepared affective and cognitive reactions that subsequently prime more complex representations. Culture suffuses this process, because (1) cultural artifacts, affordances, and practices make certain body comportments more likely, (2) cultural practices, rituals, schemas, and rules promote the learning of an otherwise underspecified connection between a given body comportment and a particular basic reaction, and (3) cultural meaning systems elaborate basic affective and cognitive reactions into more complex representations. These points are illustrated with three experiments that …

Culture, Psyche, And Body Make Each Other Up, Dov Cohen, Angela K. Y. Leung, Hans Ijzerman

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The commentaries make important points, including ones about the purposeful uses of embodiment effects. Research examining such effects needs to look at how such effects play themselves out in people's everyday lives. Research might usefully integrate work on embodiment with work on attribution and work in other disciplines concerned with body–psyche connections (e.g., research on somaticizing versus “psychologizing” illnesses and hypercognizing versus hypocognizing emotions). Such work may help us understand the way positive and negative feedback loops operate as culture, psyche, and body make each other up.

The Psychological Effects Of Elective Abortion On Women: Implications For Nurses, Karry Pepper

Theses and Dissertations

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine the links between abortion and subsequent mental health disorders, emotional health disorders, substance abuse disorders, and relational health problems, to create a PowerPoint presentation summarizing the research findings, and to present the information to nursing students so as to prepare them for post-abortion patients they may encounter in the practice setting

Methods: The long-term effects of elective abortion on women were investigated tlu·ough a comprehensive review of the relevant literature. A presentation for nursing students was prepared based on the information gathered

Conclusion: There is some evidence suggesting that there is …

Sustainable Employment Creation: A Strategic Concern For The Philippine Economy, Fernando T. Aldaba, Reuel R. Hermoso

Economics Department Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

An Exploratory Study Of The Relationship Among Perceived Personal And Social Competence, Health Risk Behaviors, And Academic Achievement Of Selected Undergraduate Students, Darson Lee Rhodes

Dissertations

A sample of 656 undergraduate students from multiple sections of an introductory nutrition course, a personal health course, and a physical fitness course at a large Midwestern University completed one of four surveys. Using matrix sampling, each participant completed a survey measuring one of four personal and social competence constructs; coping skills, interpersonal skills, intrapersonal skills, or judgment skills; 11 health risk behaviors, and college grade point average (GPA). Descriptive statistics, correlations, and multiple regression analyses were calculated to determine relationships among these variables. Thirteen statistically significant correlations were found among personal and social competence constructs and health risk behaviors. …

A Critical Analysis Of Rural Teachers' Usage Of Online Communities, Sherri A. Snider

Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to analyze data related to rural teachers' use of online communities. Rural teachers are often isolated in their practice and sometimes have difficulty connecting with other teachers with their same assignments or needs due to their professional setting. As Internet availability increases and online communities proliferate, teachers have more opportunity than ever to seek personal and professional support in virtual relationships when face-to-face ones are not easily available. In small schools such as the ones included in this study, teachers can become burned out as they perform the difficult task of teaching with few …

The Impact Of Training And Its Integration In The Firm's Business Strategies On The Firm's Competitiveness, Vichet Sum

Dissertations

The problem of the present study was to determine training professionals' perceptions of their awareness of and involvement in the integration of training in the firm's business strategies and the impact of training on the firm's competitiveness. The analysis of data obtained from the online survey of 111 participants who were training professionals employed in small, medium, and large firms across three different industries - service, retailing, and manufacturing - revealed that more than 50% of the participants indicated that they either had some understanding of or understood in depth the integration of training in their firms' business strategies. And …

Climate Change In The Changing Climate Of News Media: A Comparative Analysis Of Mainstream Media And Blog Coverage Of Climate Change In The United States And The People's Republic Of China, 2005-2008, Lei Xie

Dissertations

The social construction of climate change has been an enduring interest to media scholars. Extensive research has been done to explore how the mass media portrayed climate change and how the influence of their representations contributed to the social reality of climate change. However, most research focused on the news media in the United States and other developed countries and ignored China--the second largest greenhouse gases emitter in the world. This oversight has led to a sociological map of global climate change with the one of the biggest puzzle pieces missing. In addition, traditional news media were in the spotlight …

Decreased Functional Connectivity With Aging And Disease Duration In Schizophrenia, Christopher Abbott

Biomedical Sciences ETDs

Objective: Progressive brain changes late in the disease course of schizophrenia may be detected with functional connectivity. This study compared functional connectivity between patients with schizophrenia late in the disease course with matched healthy controls.

Method: Subjects included 18 patients with schizophrenia with minimum 15 years disease duration and 28 matched healthy controls from the MIND Clinical Imaging Consortium database. The functional magnetic resonance imaging paradigm was the auditory oddball task. We used independent components analysis to identify temporally cohesive but spatially distributed neural networks. We selected the executive control and default mode networks for additional analysis. The temporal course …

Duol: A Double Updating Approach For Online Learning, Peilin Zhao, Steven C. H. Hoi, Rong Jin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In most online learning algorithms, the weights assigned to the misclassified examples (or support vectors) remain unchanged during the entire learning process. This is clearly insufficient since when a new misclassified example is added to the pool of support vectors, we generally expect it to affect the weights for the existing support vectors. In this paper, we propose a new online learning method, termed Double Updating Online Learning, or DUOL for short. Instead of only assigning a fixed weight to the misclassified example received in current trial, the proposed online learning algorithm also tries to update the weight for one …

What Do Healthcare Providers Think Of Patients Who Use The Internet?: An Exploratory Study, Matt Willis

Communication ETDs

The Internet is a technology that is influencing multiple human factors (i.e. cognitive and social). Adults who seek information on the Internet about their health conditions are becoming more common. Providers have been wary of patient information searches, fearing that, at worst, conflicting information may provoke confrontation and doubt and, at best, the information is trivial or already well known to the provider. For this exploratory study a survey was conducted that investigates trends in healthcare provider information technology use and information seeking opinions. This survey was followed by a highly structured interview of n=21 providers. The researcher shows two …

Nuclear Family Conflict And Cooperation Among Tsimane' Forager-Horticulturalists Of Bolivia, Jonathan Stieglitz

Anthropology ETDs

Household production is the result of inputs from a variety of members, each of whom contains overlapping but non-identical interests. This dissertation explores the conditions under which the division of labor and the allocation of household resources precipitates parent-offspring and spousal conflict. This broad goal is addressed through three specific goals: 1) to identify factors affecting variation in the likelihood of task delegation to children and resistance toward performing delegated tasks; 2) to understand how variation in household labor demand influences childrens time allocation, considering ways in which behavioral manipulation might compromise the child's future prospects; and 3) to understand …

Impact Of Increased Technology Use In The Free-Time Choices Of Fifth And Seventh Grade Students In A Southern School District, Cynthia Susan Miller

Masters Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

The study sought to determine if increased technology use affects the free-time choices of students. While technology options have grown exponentially, time remains a fixed commodity. Therefore, it is suggested that students who increasingly use technology must draw time from more traditional childhood activities. Students' free-time activities were examined to document discernable patterns among the activities valued by students who use technology extensively and the activities valued by students who use technology less frequently. Study participants were fifth and seventh grade students in a semi-rural suburban county in the southeastern United States. The data collection instrument was a self-reporting survey …

The Metaphor Of Assimilation In Rabéarivelo's Poetry, Yasser Khamees Ragab Aman

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Metaphor of Assimilation in Rabéarivelo's Poetry" Yasser Khamees Ragab Aman discusses the impact of the metaphor and the policy of assimilation in the poetry of Jean-Joseph Rabéarivelo, who swings between a desired image of a superior France based on a mythically archetypal symbol of a patron and a reality which, as a matter of course, distorts the image of a good-natured colonizer. Aman traces the influence of French Symbolists such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and Laforgue on Rabéarivelo's poems and discusses to what extent these influences help make an assimilé of the poet. In Aman's interpretation …

Adams's Quest For The Unity Of Knowledge, Karl Shaddox

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In "Adams's Quest for the Unity of Knowledge," Karl Shaddox discusses Henry Adams's lesser known work, The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma, as a continuation of the historian's attempt at unifying knowledge in The Education. Whereas unification in The Education was proposed by historicizing force, whether religious or molecular, Adams's effort in The Degradation employed a scientistic approach to history. Using Josiah Gibb's research on the equilibrium of heterogeneous substances, Adams felt he had provided a natural explanation of social and historical change — and thus the elemental connection between matter and mind. Critical opinion has not been receptive to …

Necropolitics And Contemporary Hungarian Literature And Cinema, Ryan Michael Kehoe

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Necropolitics and Contemporary Hungarian Literature and Cinema" Ryan Michael discusses aspects of the concept of necropower (Mbembe) applied to contemporary Hungarian literature and cinema. Kehoe argues that his analysis provides models of postcolonial "aesthetic acts" that disrupt, destabilize, and ultimately subvert the global regimes to which Achille Mbembe refers. Accordingly, Hungary's status as a postcolony is discussed within the context of Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek's and David Chioni Moore's contention that the parameters of postcolonial cultural analysis need to be expanded to account for Central and East Europe's transition out of the Soviet sphere of influence. Further, …