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This cross-cultural content analysis (which merged traditional content analysis method with semiotic concepts) compared advertising in the United States (a highly individualistic and low-context culture) and India (a highly collectivist and high-context culture). The study examined the characteristics, differences and similarities in advertising strategies and expressions. A stratified random sample of advertisements for consumer products was selected from nationally circulated news magazines and business magazines of each country between January 1993 and December 1994 (Time and Business W...

The phenomena of superconductivity has enormous industrial potential, but the penetration of superconductor-based products has, thus far, been slow. An indisputable fact is that there are prizes, and profits, for the teams that solve the critical problems in understanding and processing these complex materials. The continuous processing of superconducting tapes and wires is a necessary stage that will open up the industrial market to the designers of a diverse range of time and energy saving devices, particularly in ultra-fast computing and lossless power transmission. The aim of the resear...

Scope of Study: This dissertation investigates the effect of cost and dose on the hemodialysis treatment modality. This modality of dialysis is an alternative to renal transplantation for people diagnosed with end-stage renal disease. The mortality rate is used as a quality indicator of the hemodialysis treatment by assessing the quality of service in Colombia and comparing it with the quality of service in the United States. Findings and Conclusions: The hypothesis testing used in this research shows that there is a significant difference between the delivered dose of hemodialysis in Col...

The effect of video and written modeling on self-efficacy of 70 master's degree students enrolled in their first techniques course was investigated. The ability to understand and use reflection of content, feeling, and meaning was presented to the experimental group through videotaped instruction and examples and the control group through written instruction and examples. Facts about reflecting skills, which included information and three vignettes, demonstrated the use of the skills. Through two pilot studies, the Reflecting Skills Questionnaire (RSQ) developed for this study showed conver...

A new type of highly customized job enrichment was studied for its impact on job performance, by comparing its impact on job performance to those resulting from classical job enrichment. The study was conducted on participants comprised of employees of a financial institution and a small section of a residential population. Participants (n=38) were Human Resources staff in the financial institution and of mixed professional occupations in the other group. The Job Diagnostic Survey was used to measure job enrichment, and performance ratings were used to measure job performance. Correlations...

As distance education schools grow in popularity, contemporary educators are raising important instructional questions about quality of these programs. A vital question involves concerns about the level of interactivity or interaction between students and between teachers and students. Interactivity is a challenging subject because there are few research studies that address the issue. It is a dynamic entity that involves a number of important elements, but the researcher stressed three vital elements: communication, participation, and feedback. The study highlights research results from a su...

The problem of controlling sensory perception for use in discrete event feedback control systems is addressed in this thesis. The sensory perception controller (SPC) is formulated as a sequential Markov decision problem. The SPC has two main objectives; 1) to collect perceptual information to identify discrete events with high levels of confidence and 2) to keep the sensing costs low. Several event recognition techniques are available where each of the event recognisers produces confidence levels of recognised events. For a discrete event control system running in normal operation, the confid...

The dissertation presents the results of a multi-epoch very long baseline interferometric study of water masers located in the extended atmospheres of evolved stars. The research was performed using the Very Long Baseline Array and Very Large Array of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. Optical monitoring of the stars was provided by the American Association of Variable Star Observers, the Variable Star Network and Dr. Bill Neely of the NF/Observatory. Water masers of found to exist in a region where a population inversion of the rotation transition of 22 GHz can be maintained by collis...

Scope of Study: This dissertation summarizes the current use of concurrent software engineering (CSE) by information technology (IT) organizations in the United States and its effectiveness in improving software delivery time, quality, and cost. From a total population of 7,173 IT organizations, a one-third sample of 2,391 were surveyed. A net valid response of 142 organizations was received, which represents a valid return rate of 6.2 percent. The responses were then analyzed against software development time, quality, and cost metrics according to the software development methodologies us...

This study is designed to show how personality dispositions and cognitive variables may combine with social norms to influence wife abuse. Prior research examining the role of individual differences in wife abuse has been sparse, unsystematic, and appear questionable for two reasons. First, these studies have not considered that contextual norms and cognitive variables are likely to interact with dispositional variables to either facilitate or discourage abuse. Second, the theoretical relationship between dispositional variables and macrolevel approaches (i.e. feminist and sociological) has...