FOOD DISTRIBUTION RESEARCH APPROACHES FOR THE 1970'S: CURRENT LIMITATIONS OF EDP

The author points out some of the limitations in EDP in site location or other research and management situations.Marketing,

A vocabulary list based on word frequency in fifth and sixth grade textbooks

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

From Sinners to Saints: Emerging Agency in American Women\u27s Novels before the Civil War

This study investigates the ways in which the narrative of salvation contributed to the development of female selfhood in American women\u27s novels before the Civil War. Over time, protagonists of some of the most popular of these novels were transformed from victims of seduction (as in Charlotte Temple or The Coquette) into self-reliant agents of virtue (as in The Wide, Wide World or The Lamplighter). Such a depiction suggests that a similar shift in readers\u27 imaginations of their own selfhood was also taking place, and it paralleled changes in the genre conventions of novels that have been traditionally identified as woman\u27s fiction. The examination of how selfhood functions in this fiction employs a concept of agency that is grounded in Michel Foucault\u27s notion of moral action. Because novels such as these generally sought to promote action that was deemed moral by the cultural environments in which they were written, the self that existed in those texts did so in relation to the social order of that time. The novel, as a genre, is especially useful in depicting an imaginary representation of those particular models in and against which a relationship with the self develops; through novel reading, one may imagine differing plot lines or disparate realms which function to reinforce or challenge accepted social norms for behavior. This study contends that the foundation for developing agency in these novels was based primarily on the concurrently fluctuating conception of the self in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century religious discourse as it moved from promoting a Calvinist world view to championing individual free will. As the restrictive Calvinist notion of election declined in popular theology, Americans began to embrace the doctrine of universal salvation that foregrounded the importance of the sinner\u27s ability to choose to accept God\u27s saving grace

Incomplete Quadratic Exponential Sums in Several Variables

We consider incomplete exponential sums in several variables of the form S(f,n,m) = \frac{1}{2^n} \sum_{x_1 \in \{-1,1\}} ... \sum_{x_n \in \{-1,1\}} x_1 ... x_n e^{2\pi i f(x)/p}, where m>1 is odd and f is a polynomial of degree d with coefficients in Z/mZ. We investigate the conjecture, originating in a problem in computational complexity, that for each fixed d and m the maximum norm of S(f,n,m) converges exponentially fast to 0 as n grows to infinity. The conjecture is known to hold in the case when m=3 and d=2, but existing methods for studying incomplete exponential sums appear to be insufficient to resolve the question for an arbitrary odd modulus m, even when d=2. In the present paper we develop three separate techniques for studying the problem in the case of quadratic f, each of which establishes a different special case of the conjecture. We show that a bound of the required sort holds for almost all quadratic polynomials, a stronger form of the conjecture holds for all quadratic polynomials with no more than 10 variables, and for arbitrarily many variables the conjecture is true for a class of quadratic polynomials having a special form.Comment: 31 pages (minor corrections from original draft, references to new results in the subject, publication information

Integrating Factors and Repeated Roots of the Characteristic Equation

Most texts on elementary differential equations solve homogeneous constant coefficient linear equations by introducing the characteristic equation; once the roots of the characteristic equation are known the solutions to the differential equation follow immediately, unless there is a repeated root. In this paper we show how an integrating factor can be used to find all of the solutions in the case of a repeated root without depending on an assumption about the form that these solutions will take. We also show how an integrating factor can be used to explain the extra power of t which appears in the trial form of the solution when using the method of undetermined coefficients on a nonhomogeneous equation in the case where the right hand side is a polynomial multiple of the corresponding homogeneous solution

Understanding the information needs of users of public information about higher education

Report to HEFCE by Oakleigh Consulting and Staffordshire University. "This study's aims were to carry out research into understanding the needs of intended users (primarily prospective students but with some focus on their advisors and employers) of public information on higher education (HE). The work focussed on England, but also took into account Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland where relevant." - Page 1