Dressing for dinner : Renée's literary explorations of the changing roles available to strong women in New Zealand society : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English at Massey University

Renée has defined herself as a "lesbian feminist with socialist working class ideals." Throughout her oeuvre she has explored the changing roles open to strong women who assume a leadership position in New Zealand society. Among these possibilities is the development of strong bonding between women which can lead to the formation of non-traditional family units. Accordingly, the study of her accessible plays and prose, organised in chronological order of the times in which the fictional events were set, may follow that exploration in terms of a series of key motifs

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN A PATIENT\u27S STRESS LEVEL DURING HOSPITALIZATION AND HIS PERCEPTION OF HIS SIGNIFICANT FAMILY MEMBER\u27S ROLE IN PROVIDING SUPPORT

A descriptive study was undertaken to investigate the relationship between a patient\u27s stress level during hospitalization and his perception of his significant family member\u27s role providing support. The following subproblems were also addressed: (1) What types of activities, presently or potentially performed by a significant family member, does the patient perceive as supportive? (2) What types of nursing activities, as perceived by the patient, are being done to encourage/discourage performance of family support activities? (3) What other factors does the patient perceive as encouraging/discouraging performance of these family role-related activities? The Hospital Stress Rating Scale (Volicer and Bohannon, 1975) was administered to 30 adult surgical patients on the third postoperative day to determine stress levels associated with hospitalization. An investigator developed semi-structured interview was also administered to these subjects to determine the patient\u27s perception of his significant family member\u27s role in providing support. The data obtained from the subjects were analyzed utilizing descriptive statistics and the Spearman Rank Correlation Coefficient. Application of the Spearman Rank Correlation Coefficient revealed the finding that there was no statistically significant association between a patient\u27s stress level and his perception of his family\u27s role in providing support. Resuits of this study suggested, however, that the family does play an important supportive role during the hospitalization phase of illness

Temporary in Tennessee: CATS for Stable Jobs

[Excerpt] Morristown is a mid-sized town in the mountains of upper east Tennessee. Like the rest of Tennessee, Morristown has a low rate of unionization and has seen minimal organizing on workplace and fair labor issues. At the same time, Tennessee has been hard hit by plant closings and layoffs and has seen higher paying industrial jobs replaced by lower paying, part-time and service jobs and temporary and contract-labor jobs. The security of the workforce is declining dramatically. From this setting, a citizens group called Citizens Against Temporary Services, or CATS, organized last year in search of a better deal for workers in Tennessee. In little more than a year, CATS has made remarkable strides. This is the CATS story

Twisted Alexander Invariants of Twisted Links

Let L be an oriented (d+1)-component link in the 3-sphere, and let L(q) be the d-component link in a homology 3-sphere that results from performing 1/q-surgery on the last component. Results about the Alexander polynomial and twisted Alexander polynomials of L(q) corresponding to finite-image representations are obtained. The behavior of the invariants as q increases without bound is described.Comment: 21 pages, 6 figure

Twisted Alexander Polynomials and Representation Shifts

For any knot, the following are equivalent. (1) The infinite cyclic cover has uncountably many finite covers; (2) there exists a finite-image representation of the knot group for which the twisted Alexander polynomial vanishes; (3) the knot group admits a finite-image representation such that the image of the fundamental group of an incompressible Seifert surface is a proper subgroup of the image of the commutator subgroup of the knot group.Comment: 7 pages, no figure