Library: Best sellers

This study explores the emergence and development of the conservation movement in Argentina during the twentieth century. I argue that the development of the conservation movement has been linked to shifts in the broader spectrum of Argentina's political arena as well as the international political situation as nations competed for the sovereignty of newly acquired territories after the Indian Wars. This book explores the development of Argentina as a nation in relation to conservation of its natural resources as a counter measure to resource extraction. Thus, I establish the relationship be...

This dissertation examines the sociological process of conflict resolution and consensus building in South Florida Everglades Ecosystem Restoration through what I define as a Network Management Coordinative Interstitial Group (NetMIG). The process of conflict resolution can be summarized as the participation of interested and affected parties (stakeholders) in a forum of negotiation. I study the case of the Governor's Commission for a Sustainable South Florida (GCSSF) that was established to reduce social conflict. Such conflict originated from environmental disputes about the Everglades and...

This dissertation introduces a new design for a computer-aided algorithmic music composition system. Rather than exploring specific algorithms, this study focuses on system and component design. The design introduced here is demonstrated through its implementation in athenaCL, a modular, polyphonic, poly-paradigm algorithmic music composition system in a cross-platform interactive command-line environment. The athenaCL system offers an open-source, object-oriented composition tool written in Python. The system can be scripted and embedded, and includes integrated instrument libraries, post-ton...

The revision of Origen's philosophical theology by St. Maximus the Confessor resulted in an eschatology involving the replacement of the human ego by the divine presence. In this study, I will examine the theological developments that led to this loss of a sense of human freedom and creativity in the face of the divine, tracing the influence of Origen's eschatology through the Cappadocian Fathers, Evagrius Ponticus and others, up to Maximus. This will allow me to show the manner in which Origen's humanistic theology was misunderstood and misinterpreted throughout the Patristic era, culminati...

This research explored how identity transitions are accomplished when individuals experience distress in relationship to the social systems in which they are embedded. Study participants grew up in cultic groups, where they were parented by committed members. Twenty-two people who chose to leave or were ejected from 12 cultic groups provided low point, high point, and turning point stories for an exploratory narrative analysis. Life story narratives revealed a jarring disconnect between what participants were expected to believe and become and how they experienced themselves. The research i...

Adventure-based training has become an effective medium for delivering experiential training programs within a variety of disciplines such as; school outdoor education, corporate teamwork development, youth at risk and psychological counseling. In addition, Meyer & Wenger (1998) and Meyer (2000) were instrumental in pioneering research in to the efficacy of adventure-based training with sporting teams. This investigation adds to the growing body of knowledge in this area by demonstrating the positive effects an adventure training intervention has on athletes ability to...

Despite the growing popularity and influence of Japanese animation in America and other parts of the world, the importance of anime studies as audio-visual translation has not been well-recognized academically. In order to throw new light on this problem, the author attempts to clarify distinctive characteristics of English dubs of Japanese animated films between the 1980s and the 2000s, including Hayao Miyazaki's, in descriptive ways: through a corpus-based statistical analysis of vocabulary and a qualitative case study approach to the multimodal text from a synchronic and diachronic point of...

In the limits of the density functional theory there are introduced and deduced fundamental chemical descriptors as the chemical action concept, the chemical field, new electronegativity, rate reaction and chemical hardness formulations, the reduced total energy and the partial Hohenberg-Kohn functionals. For electronic density computations the quantum statistic picture of the path integral Feynman-Kleinert formalism is employed to its markovian approximation, providing the framework in which the majority of the chemical reactions and the reactivity of the electronic systems can be treated tog...

As the sun set on the 20th century, a new age dawned in Japan. This new era, symbolized by the postmodern city of Tokyo, has ushered in not only technological innovation and economic prowess, but changing attitudes and values among Japanese young people. This transformation is not an uncommon or even new phenomenon, but simply the result of modern life. And one of the symptoms of modernity is the prevalence of an “ethics of materialism,” the ever-increasing concern for the acquisition of wealth and commodity goods, sometimes at the expense of the concern for human life itself. Walter Benja...

This dissertation analyses developments in the international regulation of foreign direct investment (FDI). The international legal framework of investment encompasses numerous binding or non-binding legal instruments, including customary international law, bilateral investment treaties, and international organizations’ decisions and resolutions. The rules established by the international legal framework become effective and significant when they are able to be adapted by appropriate and compatible domestic law frameworks. Through analyzing the Turkish foreign investment regulations and pol...