Studies on the olfactory responses of certain calliphorine flies

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The function of the church as critic of society: exemplified in the area of United States international policy

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston UniversityThe purpose of this dissertation is to examine the function of the church as critic of society in the area of international relations. In order that the analysis will have some practical value as an evaluative tool, the goals of a particular nation, the United States, have been chosen as a specific context within which the criticism of the church regarding international affairs may be focused. The problem is basically concerned with analysis and application of the implications of the normative structure of the concept of the Responsible Society in the area of a responsible world community. Although many men have advanced elaborations and drawn forth implications of the concept formulated at Amsterdam, specifically Walter Muelder's contribution is considered in this dissertation, primarily because of its applicability in three areas: first, in the area of advancing the norms of the concept of the Responsible Society in an international context; second, in the context of a criticism of the specific goals of the United States regarding international relations policy; and third, as an evaluation of certain aspects of the church's witness regarding problems of war, peace, and disarmament. [TRUNCATED

The Effects of Fine and Gross Motor Occupations on Handwriting Legibility of First Grade Students

The purpose of this study was to determine if participation in fine motor or gross motor occupations prior to handwriting instruction affect first grade students\u27 handwriting legibility as measured by the Test of Handwriting Skills (Gardner, 1998). A convenience sample consisting of 52 students between the ages of 5 and 7 from 4 first grade classrooms were assigned to one of two pre-writing programs or to control groups. One pre-writing program was based on Mary Benbow\u27s approaches and included neurokinesthetic fine motor strategies (Benbow, 1995). The second pre-writing program was modified from Mary Benbow\u27s gross motor approaches (Benbow, 1995) and Brain Gym methods (Dennison & Dennison, 1986) to consist of neurokinesthetic gross motor strategies. The classroom teachers conducted the pre-writing programs daily for 3 consecutive weeks prior to typical handwriting instruction in the classrooms. The participants in the two control classrooms were pre- and post-tested for comparison with students in the pre-writing program classrooms, but no modifications to the classroom programs were made. At the conclusion of the program, a statistical correlation between groups was demonstrated on 1 out of 10 subtests on the Test of Handwriting Skills. No statistically significant differences were noted between classes in handwriting legibility on the other 9 subtests of the Test of Handwriting Skills. These results suggest that the addition of a motor program prior to handwriting instruction does not affect legibility in any of the conditions stated in the research questions. There is a need for future research related to prewriting programs for the purposes of handwriting acquisition

Member Checking: Can Benefits Be Gained Similar to Group Therapy?

Member checking continues to be an important quality control process in qualitative research as during the course of conducting a study, participants receive the opportunity to review their statements for accuracy and, in so doing; they may acquire a therapeutic benefit. The authors of this article suggest that this benefit is similar to some of the components of group therapy, especially in normalizing the phenomenon being experienced. Even if the participants never meet, they can feel a sense of relief that their feelings are validated and that they are not alone

Old northumbrian verbal morphology in the glosses to the lindisfarne gospels

Tesis descargada en TeseoIn considering a text such as the Lindisfarne Gospels, one is very much aware of the vast philological attention the manuscript has received since the first contribution made to its study by George Hickes in 1705. Since then, scholars of the stature of Bouterwek (1857), Skeat (1871-87), Lindelöf (1901), Holmqvist (1922), Berndt (1956) and Ross, Stanley & Brown (1960) have advanced the subject (see Ross 1937:17-25 for a detailed summary of early studies on Lindisfarne). This Latin Gospelbook written in the North of England in the early eight century constitutes a major landmark of human cultural, intellectual, spiritual and artistic achievement. While the Latin text of the Lindisfarne Gospels is a valuable early witness to St Jerome’s ‘Vulgate’, it is the carefully inserted interlinear gloss to the Latin, written in Old Northumbrian and added around the 950s960s, and the linguistic importance this gloss holds as one of the most substantial earliest surviving renderings of early northern dialect that will concern us in this study, and more concretely the distribution of verbal morphology found therein. Old and Middle English verbal morphology in the northern dialects diverged most remarkably from that of the southern dialects in two main areas. Crucially, the tenth-century Northumbrian texts bear witness to the replacement of the inherited present-indicative -ð suffixes with -s forms, and by the Middle English period, presentindicative plural verbal morphology in northern dialects was governed by a grammatical constraint commonly referred to as the Northern Subject Rule (NSR) that conditioned verbal morphology according to the type and position of the subject. The plural marker was -s unless the verb had an immediately adjacent personal pronoun subject in which case the marker was the reduced -e or the zero morpheme, giving a system whereby They play occurred in juxtaposition to The children plays, They who plays, They eat and plays. It has tacitly been assumed in the literature that the reduced forms at the crux of the NSR, and the constraint that triggers them, must have emerged in the northern dialects during the early Middle English period, as there is little indication of the pattern existing in extant Northumbrian texts from the tenth century, and by the time northern textual evidence is once again available from c.1300, the NSR is clearly prevalent (Pietsch 2005; de Haas 2008; de Haas & van Kemenade 2009). Nevertheless, the assumption that the NSR was entirely lacking in Old Northumbrian stands on shaky grounds without further detailed analysis of the tenth-century northern writings, as has been pointed out in the literature (Benskin 2011:170). As might well be imagined, such an endeavour is hindered by the fact that extant textual evidence from the period is far from abundant, and that which remains is limited in nature: the only substantial Northumbrian texts passed down to us are the interlinear glosses to the Latin manuscripts of the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Durham Ritual supposedly written by the same scribe, Aldred, in the second half of the tenth-century, as well as the Northumbrian part of the Rushworth Gospels gloss (Rushworth 2 ), written by a scribe called Owun in the late tenth-century and heavily reliant on the Lindisfarne gloss. Yet despite their limitations, the glosses constitute a substantial record of late ONrth verbal morphology that provides important insights into the mechanisms of linguistic change. Although the study of the Northern Subject Rule in the early northern writings has barely been touched upon in the literature (as far as I am aware the matter has only been cursorily considered by de Haas 2008), morphological variation between -s as opposed to -ð in the late Northumbrian texts has been the object of numerous quantitative analyses (most famously Holmqvist 1922; Ross 1934; Blakeley 1949/50 and Berndt 1956). It is striking, however, that the vast majority of these studies were written well over fifty years ago and the matter has not been thoroughly considered since. A reconsideration of present-tense marking patterns in Old Northumbrian that draws from the insights of recent research into variation and benefits from the application of modern statistical methodology is clearly long overdue. Furthermore, certain potentially relevant factors remain unexplored. For instance, while grammatical person and number have been identified as important factors in conditioning variation between the interdental and alveolar variants, the effect of subject type and adjacency on morphological variation in Old Northumbrian has hitherto been disregarded. This is despite the fact that research indicates that subject effects are a crucial factor in determining the selection of verbal morphology, not just in non-standard varieties of present-day English (cf. Chambers 2004; Tagliamonte 2009) and in varieties of EModE, as discussed above, but also most notably in Middle English northern dialect itself (McIntosh 1989; Montgomery 1994; de Haas & van Kemenade 2009; de Haas 2011). Using data drawn from the standard edition of the Lindisfarne gloss (Skeat 1871-87) collated with the facsimile copy of the manuscript (Kendrick, T. D. et al., 1960), this dissertation carries out a detailed study of the replacement of the interdental fricative by the alveolar fricative which differs both methodologically and in perspective from previous studies in several crucial ways. It constitutes the first study to simultaneously examine the effects of all relevant phonetic, lexical and syntactic variables on the process of change using statistical quantitative methodology. The study approaches the issue from an innovative hitherto disregarded perspective and considers factors such as lexical conditioning and morphosyntactic priming and pays particular reference to the subject and adjacency effects of the so-called Northern Subject Rule. By analysing the full breadth of possible language-internal explanatory variables on the development of the alveolar fricative ending in late Old Northumbrian and by applying statistical methodology, the study aims to elaborate and refine the overall view presented in early studies and set the Northumbrian developments within a broader framework of diachronic variation that will aid the verification of crosslinguistic generalisations and further our understanding of regularisation processes. It will be shown that the distribution of ONrth verbal morphology constitutes the first attested manifestation of a tendency in English for subject type to compete with person and number features for the function of grammatical material. In addition to a variationist study of -ð and -s forms, this dissertation also carries out a contextual and quantitative analysis of reduced morphology in the Old Northumbrian interlinear gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels. It looks in detail at reduced forms in the Lindisfarne gloss and considers to what extent the nature and distribution of these forms are indicative of the incipient development of the ME -s versus -e/Ø NSR pattern in late Old Northumbrian. I also assess to what extent inflectional morphology already present in the northern dialects constitutes the historical source for the occurrence of -e/Ø/n in the present indicative. To this end, I posit that, not only present-subjunctive morphology, but also preterite-present and preterite-indicative verbal morphology played an important role in perpetuating the levelling of reduced forms and -n into the present indicative. I show that the subject and adjacency effects at the heart of the NSR appear not only to govern the occurrence of reduced morphology in the present indicative as a low frequency variant but also conditions the distribution of reduced verbal morphology in the preterite. A further question that will be examined in this dissertation involves the contentious issue of the authorship of the glosses to Lindisfarne and whether or not the interlinear gloss of the Lindisfarne Gospels was the work of a single hand, Aldred (Ross, Stanley & Brown 1960; Brunner 1947/48; van Bergen 2008). To this end, I will consider the utility of language variation as a diagnostic for determining the authorship and more specifically, what light is shed upon this unresolved problem of Old English philology by the distribution of variants verbal forms in Li. Another aspect under consideration relates to methodology and the unreliability of the text editions of medieval sources for linguistic research. In general, editions are unsuitable as sources unless they are collated with the raw data of the original manuscript because, as van der Hoek (2010) points out, they tend to involve “a reconstruction of a non-extant version of the text in question by selecting and altering from among the different surviving versions, in the attempt to arrive at a text that is purer from either a literary or philological point of view.” The edition in question, in the case of the Lindisfarne Gospels, is that of Skeat (1871-87) which relies on the sole version of Li. but whose language and grammar have nevertheless been subjected to editorial interpretation and alteration

Information Requirements for the Air Force Institute of Technology Under a Fee-For-Service Concept

Due to the current shift in national defense strategy, the DoD is going to have to perform new roles and missions with major reductions in resources. One of the major initiatives committed to achieving savings is Corporate Information Management, a broad program designed to help the DoD operate more efficiently by application of successful private sector business practices and better application of information technology. To meet the challenge of operating in a business-like environment AFIT must be able to maximize its competitiveness to provide customers with the quality and types of services they desire. To accomplish this task, information technology can be of benefit in identifying exactly how AFITs business processes can be improved and in assessing the future DoD policy decisions on the Institute. This study developed a top level business process model for AFITs information requirements under a fee-for-service concept. Once a comprehensive business process model is completed for AFIT, it will provide a framework on which AFIT decision-makers can assess the impacts of changes in DoD and Air Force policy on the Institute. The model will also provide a foundation for the development of an integrated information system capable of meeting AFITs future information requirements

Assessing Barriers to Health Care Access for New Americans

Introduction. Healthcare within the United States has been at the forefront of public discussion and political representation in recent years, particularly as it relates to healthcare access and barriers to said access. Focus has been placed on low-income groups that most generally represent the face of the average American, but this leaves the question: How are new Americans faring, and do their struggles match those faced by the rest of the country? The new Americans of Burlington, Vermont serve as a small window into a unique refugee population’s experiences with healthcare in the United States. Methods. A focus group consisting of 8 women was hosted on-site at the Burlington Housing Authority Franklin Square apartments. Questions were designed to determine demographic data as well facilitate subjective discussion on participants’ healthcare experiences. Translation services were provided by the resident manager. Results. Languages spoken were Mai Mai, Swahili, and English. Five major themes for healthcare access barriers were identified: language barriers, having children, transportation barriers, financial barriers, and a lack of preventative care. Sub- themes were also identified, which formed a taxonomy of barriers to healthcare access among the representative population. Discussion/Conclusions. The difficulties faced by new Americans are numerous and interrelated, leading to a perpetual cycle of insufficient healthcare. Throughout the discussion, the financial burden of healthcare was regularly raised as one of the most prominent issues faced. This concern matches with those found in similar, previous studies, that have analyzed the difficulties faced by the rest of America.https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/comphp_gallery/1254/thumbnail.jp

The Positive Effects of Task, Relation and Change Oriented Leadership Behavior on Employee Engagement

This research examined the relationship between task, relation-oriented, and change-oriented leadership behavior on employee engagement. This study employed a quantitative design and collected data from 117 participants in 13 countries through an online survey. Employee engagement and leadership behavior were evaluated using Cronbach’s coefficient alpha, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), and regression analyses. Results suggest that all three types of leadership behavior (task, relation, and change-oriented) have positive impact on employee engagement with change being the highest, and that the impact of leadership behavior on employee engagement is moderated by employee age and management status. Strategies for improving employee engagement are presented