Library: Best sellers

Diligent application of the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) approach is believed by many to provide a comprehensive system for food safety management. This belief, however, is not shared uniformly by all stakeholders. Because of the dichotomy of opinion surrounding food safety, there is a compelling need for additional dialogue and consensus on this issue. The aim of this expert survey instrument is to identify the gaps and the areas of agreement among various stakeholders. Two hundred and thirty-one survey instruments were received out of three hundred and sixty sent (64.2%...

The Fuller School is one of the six elementary schools in Gloucester, Massachusetts, a small urban community known for shipbuilding and fishing. Fuller students come from a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds (from public housing facilities to affluent families) and a variety of ethnic groups (including Italian, Hispanic and Vietnamese). With its diverse population, the Fuller School represented an excellent environment to test the use of Multiple Intelligences (MI) as a foundation for its curriculum. This study aimed to examine one of the ten objectives of the FIRST Schools and Teache...

The effects of attention deficit disorders seem to touch many people's lives today, and the questions surrounding this disorder are many. There is more information regarding this disorder than at any time in its history. Unfortunately, there is just as much misinformation surrounding the facts of this disorder as ever. It is the intention of this book to, in some way, unveil a few misconceptions surrounding Attention Deficit Disorders; logically, medically, and more important scientifically. By exploring the history, etiology, comorbidity and neurological diagnostic perspectives, those in ...

This study examined the relationship between the education heterogeneity of top management teams and organizational performance measured as long-term total shareholder returns. The subjects were 46 publicly traded North American insurance companies that had been traded for at least five years. I employed two metrics to measure education heterogeneity. One metric assessed the education heterogeneity of top management teams based on the highest education certification and the other metric assessed education heterogeneity of the teams based on all education certifications, and therefore the under...

The major research questions for this study were: (a) What forms do teacher interview portfolios take? (b) What meaning do school principals make of these portfolios? (c) How, if at all, are teacher portfolios being used by principals in deciding whom to hire?This was a case study using qualitative research procedures. The study was situated in the hiring policies and practices of Central City School District from 1995 to 1999. Semi-structured interviews of 18 k-12 principals and 4 key informants were primary means of data gathering. Document analyses supplemented interview data.Interview p...

Shape classification is a challenging image processing problem because shapes can occur in any position, at any orientation, and at any scale in an image. Shapes can also be obscured by gaps in their boundaries, occlusions, and noise. General shape classifiers often suffer from low precision, and specialized shape classifiers rely on specific features, like vertices or connected boundaries, making them difficult to generalize. The objective of this research is to design, implement, and test a general, high-precision two-dimensional shape classifier that is invariant to translation, scale, and ...

The thesis starts with a short description of the credit derivatives' place in the credit risk management. Then it proceeds by outlining the basic forms of credit derivatives, their applications, and their contract elements. A short description of the two common pricing frameworks for credit derivatives, the Firm's Value Models and the Credit Rating Transition Models is given. The major approach reviewed in this thesis is the one of Duffie-Singleton for valuing credit derivatives with term structure models. This framework is also applied in a simulation and examines the importance of the di...

Polyclonal lymphocyte activation and hypergammaglobulinemia characterize the acute phase of Chagas' disease, a debilitating condition caused by Trypanosoma cruzi. Such pathogenic hyper-reactivities not only compromise specific host defense against the pathogen, but may also contribute to infection-induced chronic autoimmune responses. Characterizing parasite-derived factors driving non-specific immune responses will provide insights for parasite evasion of host specific immunity. This study shows that T. cruzi trans-sialidase (TS) is one such polyclonal activator for normal murine lymphoid and...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the general job satisfaction, intrinsic job satisfaction, and extrinsic job satisfaction levels of Directors of Classified Personnel in the 97 Merit (Civil Service ) Systems school districts in California that employ approximately 60 percent of classified employees. Also examined was the influence or relationship of job satisfaction to variables such as the Director's gender, age, highest degree (or equivalent) earned, years of Director experience, size of organization (district), responsibility for certificated only or both certificated (teaching)...

Simulation modeling is arguably the most versatile scientific tool for predicting the future environment. However, the reliability of model-based predictions is limited to the behavior domain defined by the historical data employed for conceptualizing and calibrating the model. Future changes in external inputs and internal structure tend to produce system behavior significantly different from prior predictions. To abate this seeming lack of credibility, it is now customary to qualify model predictions with uncertainty estimates. This dissertation explores the complementary approach of back-ca...