Library: Best sellers

Septoria leaf blotch has been the major disease of wheat in Britain and much of the rest of Europe. It has been reported that the disease causes serious yield losses to range from 31 to 53%. Mycosphaerella graminicola (anamorph: Septoria tritici) is the pathogen which causes Septoria leaf blotch. The disease can be controlled by various methods such as cultural practices, chemical control, using resistant varieties and biological control. In plant pathology, the term biological control leads to the introduction of microbial antagonists or host specific pathogens to suppress diseases and popula...

Women in Hawai`i graduate at slightly higher rates than men at three of the four major institutions of higher education in Hawai`i (Institute for Women's Policy Research The Status of Women in Hawaii 2006) as compared to up to seventy-three percent of men at these same Hawai'i institutions and compared to nearly eighty-five percent of women who enroll at women-only colleges. With fewer than half of all enrolled women students at the four major Hawai`i institutions graduating, it is important to understand the possible influences that may contribute to this problem -- one of which is observa...

Promoting healthier ageing amongst older adults has never been more important. Most conventional health promotion interventions for older adults take very reactive approaches, typically attempting to minimise specific age-related functional losses. This implies an underlining assumption that such age-related losses are inevitable. However, we know that it is possible to take proactive action to prevent or mitigate negative health events in later life before they occur. Research suggests that proactive coping and future investment strategies may work harmoniously with adaptive definitions of he...

In the sociological literature, Otherness is conceptualized as a condition of difference that is imposed upon a group by another more powerful group. In this qualitative, phenomenological study, it was determined that Americans of Korean descent do, in fact, experience Otherness and it is an integral part of their identities. However, the experience of Otherness can be divided into two separate but interrelated components: racial Otherness and cultural Otherness. It was also determined that the severity of Otherness experiences was shaped by the contexts of phenotype, socio-geographical locati...

Much of the discussion about Peake's Titus Books has been about how to place them in the lexicon of English literature. I am proposing that these books should be read as works of postmodern existentialism. Both postmodern theory and existential theory are interested in the same issues, such as the loss of grand narratives, the rejection of totalizing world views, the subjectivity of truth, the nature of one's existence, and the search for meaning in an increasingly incomprehensible world. Societal issues, such as political upheaval, the growth of major cities, war, and advances in science and...

A significant volume of literature has been developed that seeks to provide an explanation for the growth of FDI and its impact on less developed countries. The literature is characterized by diversity and controversy. Based on it, a range of reasons for encouraging investment have been proposed including its favorable effects on employment levels, the balance of payments and balance of trade of the host country and also the potential for acquisition of technology and skills (Cave: 1982 and Dunning: 1993). Equally, the potentially negative effects of growing levels of foreign investment on dom...

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...

The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is the basic network architecture for Next Generation Networks (NGN) which is intended to bridge the divide between the traditional circuit switched and packet switched networks, thereby providing a single network capable of providing all service offerings. IMS is based on the IP infrastructure and it enables the convergence of data, speech and video on the same network platform. The IMS forms the basis of Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC), where fixed-line operators are striving to provide mobile access and mobile operators are trying to provide fixed access. Th...

Data assimilation of satellite-based observations of hydrological variables with full numerical physics models can be used to downscale these observations from coarse to high resolution to improve microwave sensor-based soil moisture observations. Moreover, assimilation can also be used to predict related hydrological variables, e.g., precipitation products can be assimilated in a land information system to estimate soil moisture. High quality spatio-temporal observations of these processes are vital for a successful assimilation which in turn needs a detailed analysis and improvement. In this...

During a conversation, listeners do not assimilate passively all of the speaker's words; they actively participate in the interaction providing information about how they feel and what they think of the speaker's speech. The speaker relies on signals emitted by the listener to know if he is listening or not, understanding or not, agreeing or not, etc. This informs the speaker on the success or failure of the communication and helps him to decide how to carry on with the interaction. In this thesis, to refer to signals provided by listeners, we adopt the term backchannel proposed by Yngve. We d...