Library: Best sellers

The collapse of Enron, WorldCom, and other large corporations in 2001 and 2002 motivated Congress to pass the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX). The purpose of this legislation was to restore investor confidence in the United States stock markets, and to prevent and detect fraud in financial statements as well. This dissertation examines the effectiveness of SOX for the latter purpose of preventing and detecting fraud, using statistical enforcement data presented by the Securities and Exchange Commission, and financial statement restatement numbers published by the Huron Corporation. The tw...

The carotid body initiates reflexes aimed principally at the homeostatic maintenance of blood gas tensions. This thesis tested the hypothesis that the carotid body is also a physiological glucosensor, with a role in mediating exercise hyperpnoea. In anaesthetised rats, insulin-induced hypoglycaemia (from ca. 6.5 to 2.8 mmol L-1) caused an ca. two-fold increase of oxygen consumption that was associated with a significant, carotid body-dependent increase in ventilation (from ca. 420 to 640 ml min-1 kg-1) without change in blood gas tensions. This hypoglycaemic hyperpnoea was associated with hypo...

This research used the online experiment, the Berkana Community of Conversations (BCC), as a case study to explore learning and leadership in a self-organizing online microworld (an internet “small world” with rules of engagement simulating complex adaptive organization(s)). Based on theories of learning (Papert, 1996), biology of consciousness (Maturana and Varela, 1992), and integral models (Wilber, 1996), an integral methodological design, analyzed languaging and relationships as key data sources. Leadership was mapped as a continuum of behaviors that created effective processes for ...

Juvenile firesetting is a complex and dangerous problem. According to the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) between 2005 and 2009 juvenile firesetters were responsible on average for 56,300 fires annually and, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, over the past twenty years more than half of juvenile arrests have been for arson. The Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA) Juvenile Firesetter Intervention Handbook provides risk assessment tools to assess future firesetting involvement. The fire service, because of its role in fire suppression and investigation, is oft...

The core issue underlying the bulk of scholarly research into the Japanese political economy is the relationship between the bureaucracy and the politicians. My study investigates whether there has been a relative decline in bureaucratic influence and whether politicians are displaying more independence in the policy making process than they did during previous decades. My main hypothesis is that the loss of bureaucratic influence has largely been a function of the declining position of former bureaucrats within the ruling Liberal Democrat Party (LDP), and that it has largely been politicia...

Success Stories of African Americans in the Nonprofit Sector presents the stories of 6 executives whose stories define African-American business success. Thriving in spite of multiple obstacles, they have enjoyed extraordinary careers at (and helped build the fortunes of) nonprofit organizations. In remarkably candid interviews, these exemplary professionals reveal not only the secrets of their successes, but the sources of their fears, their most difficult challenges, and their hopes for the future. Their experiences are presented according to what they rev...

Intravenous fluid and blood component resuscitation is an integral part of modern medicine practice in a variety of medical fields. However, these therapies are usually led by rigid and very approximate guidelines. The purpose of creating the Homeostatic blood states theory was to develop more accurate guidelines. On the basis of the new theory the following results have been reached: 1. The physiological-mathematical model explaining blood volume homeostasis has been created; 2. Nomograms for infusion therapy measures, blood loss evaluation and calculating red blood cell transfusion amount...

Internalizing problems are common among adolescents. Poor outcomes such as academic failure, substance misuse, and adult mental health problems have all been linked to internalizing problems. Although the potential effects are serious, internalizing disorders tend to be under-diagnosed and under-treated. To compound the problem, research in the area of internalizing disorders continues to lag behind that of other disorders. In the last ten years, however, research has indicated that relationships with parents, gender, and self-esteem are factors associated with internalizing disorders. T...

Using a quantitative causal-comparative approach, the researcher conducted a relational study that compared injured and rehabilitated soldiers with no religious foundation to similar soldiers possessing religious preferences and spirituality. The two primary research questions were (a) Does religious preference and spirituality have a positive impact on the retention and attrition rates of injured soldiers? (b) Does an injured soldier’s frequency of spirituality increase the likelihood of being returned to initial-entry training? The study addressed several possible variables; among these were...

The problem of automatic toponym resolution, or computing the mapping from occurrences of names for places as found in a text to an unambiguous spatial footprint of the location referred to, such as a geographic latitude/longitude centroid is difficult to automate due to insufficient and error-prone geographic databases, and a large degree of place name ambiguity: common words need to be distinguished from proper names (geo/non-geo ambiguity), and the mapping between names and locations is ambiguous (London can refer to the capital of the UK or to London, Ontario, Canada, or to about forty oth...