Library: Best sellers

How does the state system measure up to today's realitites when it comes to managing conflict? To what extent are efforts to manage conflict successful, and for whom? Prevailing structures designed to deal with conflict between collectives -- sovereign states supported by militaries, military industry, and the United Nations -- operate mainly on principles that are hundreds of years old. Conditions for conflict and its management have changed radically since this state system was constructed. There is a risk that institutional inertia produces growing disparity between real-world probl...

Amerasians are persons of American and Asian ethnic heritage who have appeared as a group mainly in the past forty years. Beginning with the massive involvement of the United States in the Occupation of Japan, thousands of Amerasians have been born from Japan to Vietnam. In the U.S. they are the children of approximately eighty thousand American/Asian couples who have come here since that time. This study sought to examine the lives of Amerasians in the United States. The primary research questions centered around finding the nature of Amerasian issues and concerns which are encountered ...

Se analiza el uso de redes neuro-difusas para solucionar problemas de clasificación y modelización. El objetivo es intentar combinar las cualidades de las redes neuronales y de la descripción de sistemas mediante Lógica Difusa. Las redes neuronales son conocidas por su alta capacidad de aprendizaje, lo que permite una adecuada generalización en el tipo de problemas comentado anteriormente. Su aplicación a problemas reales no ha dejado de crecer durante los últimos años. Por otro lado, la Lógica Difusa es una herramienta más novedosa, cuya propiedad más atractiva es la capacidad que pose...

This qualitative study explores how middle managers who thrived during Hurricane Katrina used their workplace social support systems. An emphasis was placed on identifying the sources and types of support received before, during, and after the Katrina crisis. Significant challenges exist today for organizations on the basis of societal, political, environmental, and technological trends. Among those trends are predictions of greater numbers and intensities of weather-related crises triggered in part by global weather pattern shifts and global warming. These challenges create a compelling ne...

This thesis argues that there is a popular culture of space exploration characteristic of a wider Russia; its roots lie in pagan times and it grew through Orthodox Christianity and Soviet Communism to the twenty-first century, where it is actively promoted by Russia and neighbouring nations. The key influences stem from Nikolai Fedorov, Kontsantin Tsiolkovsky, Friedrich Tsander and Yuri Gagarin. The narrative of the twentieth-century Soviet space programme is considered from this perspective and the cultural importance of Tsiolkovsky to this programme is acknowledged. This is an alternative...

Suicide has been declared an epidemic and rates of suicide increase within occupational subcultures experiencing increased levels of stress and trauma, such as law enforcement. Explored in the qualitative phenomenological study were the lived experiences of White, male law enforcement officers concerning perceptions of care by administrators and peers and the influence of mental health training in the incidence of officer suicide. The study population was chosen because of the resemblance to the segment of the general population deemed at-risk for suicide. Officers provided perceptions of care...

The economic and human costs of diabetes in the U.S. population place an enormous burden on its healthcare system as well as on employers, diabetics, and their respective families. Many Medicare Advantage plans have responded to this burden by implementing diabetes case management programs (DCMPs) aimed at reducing inappropriate health services utilization, improving health outcomes, and containing costs. While the use of DCMPs is common to many health plans, the research regarding their effectiveness has been sparse or inconclusive. The purpose of this study was to help fill a critical gap in...

State terrorism, as a concept, has largely been operationalised out of terrorism literature. When a state uses violence systematically against unarmed victims, with the purpose of generating fear and communicating a message to a group beyond the immediate victims, this steps outside the bounds of legitimate use of violence. The Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) has engaged in such acts of violence against the Bahá’í community in that country. In this study, a working model of state terrorism is devised and the following central research question is addressed: do the strategy and tactics utilized ...

Shamanism, hypnosis, imaginal psychotherapies, and meditation are based on the use of what we in the modern western world think of as non-ordinary human consciousness. These four modalities have fundamental similarities and differences in purpose, theory, technique, type of alternative consciousness, and their application of non-ordinary reality. Shamanism, the oldest and most intertwined with the cultures in which it is practiced, will be explored as a model for individual healing and transformation and professional training. The shamanic way will also be explored as a model of consciousness ...

This study claims that scholars need to examine all twenty-seven English illustrated editions of Wilde's and Beardsley's Salomë to understand whether Beardsley's compositions do, or do not, illustrate Wilde's words. For the last one hundred years scholars have addressed the aesthetic function of Beardsley's compositions (whether or not Beardsley's compositions illustrate Wilde's words), and each scholar sees something different: Beardsley's compositions are "irrelevant" to Wilde's words; Beardsley's compositions are "relevant" to Wilde's words; Beardsley's compositions are both "irrelevant" a...