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We examine the census of star-forming galaxies and their extinctionproperties at redshift z~2, when a large fraction of the stellar massin the universe formed. We find a good agreement between the X-ray,radio, and de-reddened UV estimates of the average star formation rate(SFR) for our sample of z~2 galaxies of ~50 Msun/yr, indicating thatthe locally calibrated SFR relations appear to be statistically validfrom redshifts 1.5

Is there a qualitative difference between memory functions in adults and children? Given the relevance of memory processes for virtually every aspect of everyday life and the complex interactions between memory development and general cognitive abilities, surprisingly little is known about memory abilities in childhood.In four experiments with children aged 6-12 years and young adults, the developmental trajectories of two separate mechanisms underlying recognition memory - familiarity and recollection - were examined using event-related potentials (ERPs). Developmental changes were evident in both mechanisms of recognition memory. The data also revealed some surprising similarities across the life-span and emphasize the importance of strategic modulation of memory retrieval. Furthermore, the present investigation of memory development highlights age-related changes in cognitive processes and the maturation of the brain structures underlying these developmental changes.

Economic sanctions have been used as an instrument of American foreign policy ever since the Taft administration adopted the Dollar Diplomacy. This dissertation analyzes the trade Embargo the United States imposed upon Cuba after the Revolution from different perspectives: from the political, considering the main guidelines of American foreign policy toward Latin America, especially during the Cold War, and from the juridical, considering different perspectives of customary international law. Since the embargo was imposed only after American property had been expropriated without compensation, the dissertation analyzes the legality of expropriation, seen from the perspective of both capital-importing and capital-exporting countries, and the legality of economic sanctions as a legitimate peaceful reprisal. Due to the fact that the American embargo against Cuba is quasi-total, that is, consists of a number of different economic sanctions, it is the aim of this dissertation to analyze each of these, and finally, to assess the effectiveness of economic sanctions as an instrument of foreign policy. Many books and articles have been written about this very controversial embargo, almost as old as the Cuban Revolution itself. For the Cubans, it constitutes and "economic blockade", and a violation of Cuba's right to free trade; for the Americans, it is a reprisal for the confiscation of American property. Nonetheless, since the embargo, as stated above, is not a sanction itself but a number of different economic sanctions, it is the aim of this dissertation to analyze each of the sanctions that comprise the embargo and its legality, according to customary international law. Another aim of this dissertation is to prove why the American embargo against Cuba has only enhanced Castro's power and further centralized it. A brief chapter about the economic sanctions the United States imposed upon Chile under President Salvador Allende and the fall of his regime serves to compare the two cases with some similarities where sanctions were applied- in the first without success and in the second with success. Finally, the dissertation aims to prove that a lifting of the American embargo against Cuba is highly unlikely unless there is a change of regime in that nation of the Caribbean.

Since 1991, the Russian Federation has dealt with extreme political, economic, and social change. On the national level and at the local level, opponents of democratic reforms have retained their control of many important offices. This has resulted in contradictions and confusion in regards to national and local laws and policies, and has had little impact on local educational policies and practices. Added to this general crisis of Russian education reform is the inability of so-called Western education experts to comprehend the complexities and cultural differences of Russia and its education system when compared to the west. There have been several studies of business management ideology since the breakup of the Soviet Union, but American and Russian comparative educational leadership studies are not to be found. Inquiry has produced no empirical studies in Russia, and only two American empirical studies that have direct bearing on this research. Also, studies by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, and the World Bank have looked at the total educational system with little or no specific study of educational administration. The purpose of this descriptive study is to obtain an impression of how secondary school educators in the Russian Federation and the United States perceive their job responsibilities and organizational structure. This research study is of interest in terms of realizing the similarities and dissimilarities of Russian and American educational leadership. The survey instrument, based on Hofstede's Values Survey Module 1994, was distributed among secondary school administrators and faculty at Colquitt County High School in Moultrie, Georgia and their professional counterparts at Secondary Comprehensive School No. 56 in Novokuznetsk, Russia. The collected data may help in understanding organizational dynamics in general and allow for the judgment of cultural contexts on Russian and American educational leadership. This research study makes broad use of materials drawn from Russian and Western publications, government documentations, and other scholarly analyses.

Technological cooperation is not only costly and time consuming, but also has a high attrition rate. Most literature on strategic cooperation focuses mainly on issues related to cooperation formation and the reasons why firms form these cooperative partnerships. However, a successfully formed cooperation is not always managed well enough to achieve a satisfactory performance. The knowledge of cooperative formation is necessary, but insufficient to achieve a satisfactory performance. The literature suggests that scholars know little about the underlying factors affecting cooperative performance.A comprehensive literature review was conducted to establish the possible effects of key factors on the performance of international technological cooperation, and the possible relations between key factors. A qualitative pilot study was implemented to verify the practical relevance of those 12 key factors, of which 6 factors have a relatively more significant effect on performance than the other 6 factors. By applying theoretical modeling techniques, the research framework was then constructed according to the postulated relations between 7 key factors (6 relatively more significant factors and the focal concept, performance). Strictly based on the definition of key factors, measurement items of each key factor were carefully reviewed and selected. Following the process of structural equation modeling, the structural equation model in this research was constructed. Unlike most previous cooperation studies, a structural equation model allows researchers to examine simultaneously all the relations amongst key factors. The data were collected from mangers who had experience in managing a technological cooperative project with foreign partners, and were then analyzed by LISREL, a longstanding and widely distributed structural equation modeling computer program.The result suggests that symmetric opinions, commitment, dependence, relationships, partner analyses, and rewards have effects on the performance of international technological cooperation, which confirms the results of the thorough and comprehensive literature review and of the qualitative pilot study. In addition, in the structural equation model of this research, relationships and rewards have effects on commitment, and partner analyses and rewards have effects on dependence, which are also consistent with the literature review. The findings have contributed to theory advancement in cooperation studies, and to the knowledge of international business. Managerial implications from the findings also provide advices, which managers can proactively take, to avoid the odds of success.

Young stars are surrounded by massive, rotating disks of dust and gas, which supply a reservoir of material that may be incorporated into planets or accreted onto the central star. In this dissertation, I use high angular resolution observations at a range of wavelengths to understand the structure, ubiquity, and evolutionary timescales of protoplanetary disks.First, I describe a study of Class I protostars, objects believed to be at an evolutionary stage between collapsing spherical clouds and fully-assembled young stars surrounded by protoplanetary disks. I use a Monte Carlo radiative transfer code to model new 0.9 micron scattered light images, 1.3 mm continuum images, and broadband spectral energy distributions. This modeling shows that Class I sources are probably surrounded by massive protoplanetary disks embedded in massive infalling envelopes. For the best-fitting models of the circumstellar dust distributions, I determine several important properties, including envelope and disk masses, mass infall rates, and system inclinations, and I use these results to constrain the evolutionary stage of these objects.Second, I discuss observations of the innermost regions of more evolved disks around T Tauri and Herbig Ae/Be stars, obtained with the Palomar Testbed and Keck Interferometers. I constrain the spatial and temperature structure of the circumstellar material at sub-AU radii, and demonstrate that lower-mass stars are surrounded by inclined disks with puffed-up inner edges 0.1-1 AU from the star. In contrast, the truncated inner disks around more massive stars may not puff-up, indicating that disk structure depends on stellar properties. I discuss the implications of these results for disk accretion, terrestrial planet formation and giant planet migration.Finally, I put these detailed studies of disk structure into a broader context by constraining the mass distribution and evolutionary timescales of circumstellar disks. Using the Owens Valley Millimeter Array, I mapped the millimeter continuum emission toward >300 low-mass stars in the NGC 2024 and Orion Nebula clusters. These observations demonstrate that the average disk mass in each cluster is comparable to the "minimum-mass protosolar nebula," and that there may be disk evolution on one million year timescales.

The purpose of business is to employ capital factors in such a manner as to generate value for its customers and profits for its owners. To achieve these ends, management must make at least three distinct decisions - the operating, investment, and financing decisions. The purpose of this study is to formulate a modeling methodology that harmonically analyzes and explains how the investment decision and capital elasticity influence competitive advantage. The research explores the descriptive literature for the current states of computational modeling, accounting theory and practice, managerial finance, macroeconomics, capital theory, and harmonic analysis in order to provide evidence supporting the content validity of a proposed modeling framework, which encodes, modulates, and transforms raw financial data into waveforms suitable for harmonic analysis. The framework is operationalized algebraically, translated into a high-level computational language, and subsequently tested using simulation methods in order to analyze the computational robustness of the implementation. Finally, empirical testing shows a significant correlation exists between the model's reported results and the profitability of sole proprietorships in the U.S. providing initial evidence of the framework's construct validity. Additional empirical testing shows that the relationship between the model's reported results and net profitability is stronger than results returned from the use of raw capital magnitudes providing evidence of the model's positive capacity for recommending decisions. The study uses extant financial data obtained from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), which maintains and releases Federal tax information extracted from its archives into the public domain through its Statistics of Income (SOI) programs.

This dissertation proposes a computational technique for automated "invention" of conceptual schemes of thermal systems. The input provided to the automated problem solver is a description of the streams entering and leaving the system. The output is a network of elementary processes: compression, expansion, heating, cooling, and chemical processes. The problem solver seeks a network that is feasible, and offers an optimal (or at least favorable) combination of energy and capital costs. The synthesis process is modeled as a heuristic search conducted in a state-space of all possible design versions. The main ideas of the dissertation have been implemented in a computer program called TED, which invented a number of nontrivial schemes.TED starts with an initial state (or states), which may be either proposed by the user or generated automatically. TED evaluates each state using a special technique of exergy analysis applied to an infinitesimal temperature interval. This allows us to describe the thermal system by several integral characteristics which are functions of temperature. One particularly important integral characteristic - a measure of system's Second Law infeasibility - is introduced in this work; it allows a uniform treatment of both feasible and infeasible design states.TED then selects the most promising of the available designs. This selection is guided by a specialized search algorithm BP* which is shown to be probabilistically admissible. The results of the exergy analysis are used to perform a look-ahead evaluation of the design states. BP* also uses backpropagation of the state evaluation function to reduce the amount of backtracking.TED then improves the selected design by applying one of the transforming operators and thereby generating a new design. Each transformation involves addition of an incremental network of thermal processes to the original state and reduces either irreversibility (exergy loss) or infeasibility of the thermal system. The application of the transformations is controlled by a heuristic move generation function that selects the most promising transformations. The new design is added to the database of the available design states.The search continues with these evaluate-select-transform iterations until an (approximately) optimal design is found.

The purpose of this book was to describe the variables that contributed to the establishment of a charter school in an urban Arizona and rural California school district, noting the similarities and dissimilarities and disclosing the factors used to justify implementation of the Montessori theory of education. The secondary purpose of this book was to describe the guidelines for maintaining a charter school, the evaluation methods and factors used in the school's unique experience with staff development. The two schools experienced many similarities when the same variables were applied to both schools. As a result, the stakeholders of both schools used the principles of the organizational theory area of empowerment to implement choices in curriculum. This book provides an insight for parents, teachers, and community leaders to develop strategies by utilizing the same principles to meet the educational needs of children.

This study attempts to develop a conceptual frame work to deal with operations and management in a foreign business environment. The study develops a measure for business financial performance by employing factor analysis methods to integrate three profit-related ratios, derived from Modified DuPont Model, utilizing financial performance data from 630 multinational companies ranked in Business Week's Global 1000 report between years 1994-1997. In the analysis of multinational companies cases, approximately 400 sets of financial data (Return/Assets, Return/Revenues, Return/Equity), were categorized and computed for intercorrelations and development of the financial performance index. A new financial performance measure was derived and termed the Financial Performance Index or FPI. Indices trends for 4 years were generated and compared among four parent countries (France, Germany, Japan, and U.S.), across four selected industry groups, i.e., automobile, pharmaceuticals, electric and electronic equipments and banking. In the analysis of the multinational companies data, the financial performance index exhibited patterns and trends which varied by country and across industry groups; moreover, they added analytical depth when interpreted along with market shares and sales mode. To test the hypothesis that a multinational company's financial performance in foreign business environment is linearly related to the host country's political conditions. Twelve political uncertainties indicators (independent variable) in thirteen host countries were chosen to test for linear relationship with the level of financial performance index (dependent variables). Five equations were formulated to predict the Financial Performance Indices of the four selected industries and the country composite. A step-wise method of multiple regression analysis was employed to measure and determine a predication equation with most favorable financial performance in thirteen host countries of four major industries, i.e., automobile, pharmaceuticals, electric and electronic equipments, and banking. The combination of political risk indicators in the host country can explain the variations of the country composite FPI and the FPI across four selected industries. Results of multiple regression analysis support the hypothesis, enabling prediction of the FPI as well as analysis of the differential importance of the political risk indicators. A model of international business operations was fully developed to be applied as a conceptual framework for further research and practical applications in the field of international business operations.

A careful examination of the evolutions of Curriculum as Political Text and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 1973 disclosed certain contributory facets to teacher disillusionment in an inclusive high school environment. A diminishing sense of professional self-efficacy, self-empowerment, and optimism stemmed primarily from the political machinations of a hidden curriculum and a misapplication of an inclusive classroom practice.The process used to arrive at these conclusions was heuristic research, wherein outward perceptions and realties assumed meaning vis-a-vis inward reflection and introspection,disclosing an unequivocal new awareness, illumination, and enlightenment. Such personal enrichment, however, arrived only after a journey-of-self unfolded through the three phases of heuristic research--Immersion, Acquisition, and Realization.First and foremost, this was a human study that examined specific elements contributing to teacher disillusionment. During Immersion, disquieting professional life experiences formed the preliminary data through which and from which was extrapolated an essence or meaning that ultimately assumed form through autobiographical narrative.The second phase, Acquisition, included input from a variety of sources, ranging from texts, literature, and discourses to federal legislation and law review to human subjects'studies. What was "acquired," then scrutinized, was new knowledge relative to disillusionment in the inclusive classroom, especially with regard to curriculum as political text.Finally, the Realization Phase aggregated and synthesized the components disclosed in Immersion and Acquisition, which led to a dynamic "coming together" of seemingly disparate elements, ultimately affirming a sense of professionalism and validating search-of-self.