Library: Best sellers

This document shows the current state of the research work done around the SmartSpectra project. The SmartSpectra project is a Research, Technological development and Demonstration (RTD) project funded under EU’s Fifth Framework Programme (FP5) by the Information Society Technologies (IST) Programme. The project pursues the development of a Smart Multispectral System for Commercial Applications. SmartSpectra is an acronym of "Smart Multispectral System for Commercial Applications." In this project, a Smart Multispectral System will be designed and implemented. The system will allow multisp...

Discourses of menopause are varied and complex, just as the lives of women themselves are diverse and multifaceted. Traditionally, menopause has signalled the end of the child-bearing years and the "change of life," a time when women might experience a great deal of change, in many ways. But menopause can also be understood as a natural physical change, or a time of hormonal change, or as a passage from one way of life to a different one, often accompanied by emotional flux and changes in ways women think about themselves. For this study of menopause and women’s lives, using life story meth...

Institutions develop geographic strategies in order to diffuse their ideas and organizations. These strategies may be either or both explicit and implicit and involve the generation of organizational structures, the examination of problems and possibilities and the deployment of resources. American Protestant religious institutions expand territorially and numerically by establishing new congregations. Founding methods, operational relationships between judicatories and existing congregations, and deployment processes of six denominations (Dutch Reformed, Episcopal, Presbyterian, Congregati...

Commercial companies and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are internationalising at an increasing pace. Yet little is known about the management of NGOs during this process. Indeed, they have been neglected by comparison to the literature on companies. This thesis draws on theories of how and why companies internationalise to determine whether the explanations they offer can be extended to cover NGOs. It considers the driving forces experienced by NGOs, the stages they pass through. This was undertaken through a postal survey using results from 52 international NGOs from Europe and the ...

Young stars are surrounded by massive, rotating disks of dust and gas, which supply a reservoir of material that may be incorporated into planets or accreted onto the central star. In this dissertation, I use high angular resolution observations at a range of wavelengths to understand the structure, ubiquity, and evolutionary timescales of protoplanetary disks. First, I describe a study of Class I protostars, objects believed to be at an evolutionary stage between collapsing spherical clouds and fully-assembled young stars surrounded by protoplanetary disks. I use a Monte Carlo ra...

Technological cooperation is not only costly and time consuming, but also has a high attrition rate. Most literature on strategic cooperation focuses mainly on issues related to cooperation formation and the reasons why firms form these cooperative partnerships. However, a successfully formed cooperation is not always managed well enough to achieve a satisfactory performance. The knowledge of cooperative formation is necessary, but insufficient to achieve a satisfactory performance. The literature suggests that scholars know little about the underlying factors affecting cooperative performance...

The purpose of business is to employ capital factors in such a manner as to generate value for its customers and profits for its owners. To achieve these ends, management must make at least three distinct decisions – the operating, investment, and financing decisions. The purpose of this study is to formulate a modeling methodology that harmonically analyzes and explains how the investment decision and capital elasticity influence competitive advantage. The research explores the descriptive literature for the current states of computational modeling, accounting theory and pra...

The role of legal origin was first introduced in the Law and Finance Literature by La Porta et al. (1997) in an original study of legal determinants of external finance. Their study is timely given that investor protection is crucial because in many countries, expropriation of minority shareholders and creditors by controlling shareholders or corporate insiders is extensive. This dissertation intends to replicate the original La Porta et al. (1997) study for Property stocks in 23 countries whose legal jurisdictions falls into the four of the legal fraternities established by La Porta namely, E...

The study of the general development of children in infancy assumes special significance in connection with the reform of schools providing general education and vocational schools, and also in connection with the change to starting systematic study at the age of 6 years. One way of solving this problem may be to look for methods stimulating a more dynamic psycho-physiological development of infants. The assumption is that during the first months of life, when psychosomatic development proceeds more rapidly •than in the adult, the study of the effect of environmental factors on the formati...

The results of previous investigations have revealed very sparse information concerning the real life effects of treating patients in a traditional pri-mary care facility. These patients were violent, hallucinatory, boisterous, and manipulative. In addition, the majority sought to avoid primary medical care on every occasion. The process by which they were admitted and treated has been observed and reported in detail. Two hundred and fifty-six patients were enrolled over a period of five months in an integrated medical facility design. This facility provided both primary medical care and behav...