Bøker utgitt av Dissertation.com

Workplace bullying, the repeated and regular act of harassing, offending, socially excluding someone, or negatively affecting someone's work over time has been recognized as a serious threat to the health and well-being of employees. This study sought to explore resilience as a coping strategy to help improve the physical and mental health effects of professional women who have or are experiencing workplace bullying. The central research question was, how does perceived resilience, when used as a coping strategy, help with the physical and mental health stressors while helping to improve the overall well-being of professional women who were or have experienced workplace bullying? Using a qualitative methodology with a single-case study design, 10 professional women who have and are still experiencing workplace bullying were commissioned to participate. To increase the validity of the results, four data techniques were employed: open-ended interviews, researcher notes with observations, and two surveys-the Resilience at Work (R@W) Scale, and the SF12v2 Health Survey. Four major themes emerged: Negative Experiences, Consequences of Bullying, Impact on Health, and Support Systems. It was discovered that the majority of the participants believed that they were targeted at their workplace because of their race, followed by their gender, and age. The women shared that the negative experiences and consequences of bullying can serve as indicators that workplace bullying is evident and that it can affect their health negatively. Additionally, the participants reported that various support systems and networks greatly increased their resilience at work.

This thesis examines the reception of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War in US foreign policy debates since the end of the Cold War. It begins with a background survey of Thucydides' use in foreign policy debates up to and during the Cold War, primarily by the realist school of international relations, and the comparisons which were drawn between the Cold War and the Peloponnesian War. After the Cold War, these comparisons became less relevant to current debates, and critics of realism began to use Thucydides to support their own theories. The emphasis is on how the three key movements since the Cold War, realism, liberal internationalism and neoconservatism, have each seen aspects in Thucydides' writing to admire and utilise for their theories, at the same time building competing interpretations of key sections from Thucydides' History. At the same time, as well as drawing abstract theories from Thucydides, analysts have also drawn historical parallels between the present and the Peloponnesian War in a creative process which results in modern states playing different ancient roles depending upon the context. I show that Thucydides' text lends itself particularly well to such recycling due to the author's tendency to highlight complex tensions without providing explicit authorial 'answers'.

Amidst the dramatic real estate fluctuations in the first decade of the twenty-first century, this study recognized that there is a necessity to create a real estate prediction model for future real estate ventures and prevention of losses such as the mortgage meltdown and housing bust. This real estate prediction model study sought to reinstall the integrity into the American building and development industry, which was tarnished by the sudden emergence of various publications offering get-rich-quick schemes.In the fast-paced and competitive world of lending and real estate development, it is becoming more complex to combine current and evolving factors into a profitable business model. This prediction model correlated past real estate cycle pinpoints to economical driving forces in order to create an ongoing formula. The study used a descriptive, secondary interpretation of raw data already available. Quarterly data was taken from the study's seven independent variables over a 24-year span from 1985 to 2009 to examine the correlation over two real estate cycles. Public information from 97 quarters (1985-2009) was also gathered on seven topics: consumer confidence, loan origination volume, construction employment statistics, migration, GDP, inflation, and interest rates. The Null hypothesis underwent a test of variance at a .05 level of significance. Multiple regression analysis uncovered that four of seven variables have correlated and could predict movement in real estate cycle evidence from previous data, based in the Inland Empire. GDP, interest rates, loan origination volume, and inflation were the four economical driving variables that completed the Inland Empire's real estate prediction model and global test.Findings from this study certify that there is correlation between economical driving factors and the real estate cycle. These correlations illustrate patterns and trends, which can become a prediction model using statistics. By interpreting and examining the data, this study believes that the prediction model is best utilized through pinpointing an exact numerical location by running calculations through the established global equation, and recommends further research and regular update of quarterly trends and movements in the real estate cycle and specific variables in the formula.

United States Air Force Officers are not often given the choice of career fields when they enter active duty. This may have some impact on performance on an academic measure in the assigned field. In addition to choice, levels of two causality orientations were assessed using Deci and Ryan's 1985 General Causality Orientation Scale, 12-Vignette version. Causality orientations are posited to exist in varying degrees in every individual and, for the purposes of this study, are tested to determine their association with academic achievement in a situation of limited choice. The overall aim of this study is to determine whether choice and/or causality orientation predict academic achievement in missileers, and if a moderation model represents the relationship between the predictors and academic achievement. Missileers at Minot Air Force Base, the 91st Missile Wing, were surveyed and data regarding choice, a single month's aggregate academic scores and causality orientation were collected. Neither choice nor causality orientation alone predicted monthly test scores. Causality orientation moderated the relationship between choice and monthly test scores. Those respondents who reported that they had received their assignment of choice had higher monthly test scores when they also had high levels of autonomy relative to controlled orientation. In the group which reported they had not received their assignment of choice, there were no associations between choice, causality orientation and monthly test scores.

The idea that the solitary thinker, using pure reason, can unlock the deepest mysteries of reality is certainly an exciting one. The rationalist dream began with Parmenides of Elea and became the epistemological foundation for the greatest metaphysical systems ever constructed. This thesis traces the complete historical development of this neglected epistemology and inaugurates a radical new appraisal of its method. The new clarity provides fresh insights into traditional puzzles like the Cartesian Circle and whether Plato had a secret esoteric doctrine. A new positive re-evaluation of a doctrine thought to have been refuted by Kant and the positivists will provide interest for students, philosophers and those interested in the history of ideas.

The thesis explores the syntactic and semantic dimensions of four linguistic elements that appear in Modern Greek arguably as quantifiers and modifiers, i.e., in the form of Quantificational Modifiers (QMods) olos 'all, whole, overall' and its extension olikos 'total', merikos 'some, a few, partial', ligos 'some, few, little, insignificant' and polis 'many, great, considerable'. Such QMods are analyzed as 'measure' quantifiers of scalar semantics that appear in a syntactic position common to adjectival modifiers. The thesis explores specific sets of reading and their interpretations. Such a phenomenon is common to Modern Greek, English, French and Arabic QMods and gives evidence to the universality of Quantificational Modification.Chapter 1 discusses Quantification as semantic interpretation along with the main questions this research intends to answer, while Chapter 2 reviews recent literature on Quantification within and across languages. Chapter 3 focuses on Modern Greek expressions of Quantification and extends chapter 2 into a further discussion about the various syntactic manifestations. Chapters 4 and 5 are extensions to chapters 2 and 3 as they discuss the semantics of specific QMods as 'total' and 'partial' quantifiers, which operate on homomorphic sets of degrees and amounts.Chapter 6 discusses the broader issues in the thesis from a theoretical and typological perspective that establishes Quantificational Modification as a universal and purely semantic subclass of Quantification. Our findings are summarized in chapter 7, followed by suggestions for expanding our investigation into other related areas.

The modern FPGAs enable system designers to develop high-performance computing (HPC) applications with a large amount of parallelism. Real-time image processing is such a requirement that demands much more processing power than a conventional processor can deliver. In this research, we implemented software and hardware based architectures on FPGA to achieve real-time image processing. Furthermore, we benchmark and compare our implemented architectures with existing architectures. The operational structures of those systems consist of on-chip processors or custom vision coprocessors implemented in a parallel manner with efficient memory and bus architectures. The performance properties such as the accuracy, throughput and efficiency are measured and presented. According to results, FPGA implementations are faster than the DSP and GPP implementations for algorithms which can exploit a large amount of parallelism. Our image pre-processing architecture is nearly two times faster than the optimized software implementation on an Intel Core 2 Duo GPP. However, because of the higher clock frequency of DSPs/GPPs, the processing speed for sequential computations on on-chip processors in FPGAs is slower than on DSPs/GPPs. These on-chip processors are well suited for multi-processor systems for software level parallelism. Our quad-Microblaze architecture achieved 75-80% performance improvement compared to its single Microblaze counterpart. Moreover, the quad-Microblaze design is faster than the single-powerPC implementation on FPFA. Therefore, multi-processor architecture with customised coprocessors are effective for implementing custom parallel architecture to achieve real time image processing.