...Controlled Longitudinal Study Beverly Hinderliter A growing body of evidence suggests meditation-based interventions have the potential to reduce symptoms and improve well-being (Marchand, 2013 for review; Mitchell et al., 2014). The Stanford University study entitled Breathing-Based Meditation Decreased Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Symptoms in U.S. Military Veterans: A Randomized Controlled Longitudinal Study explores the effects of Sudarshan Kriya yoga, a meditation-based therapy, on U.S. military veterans with PTSD symptoms having served in Iraq and Afghanistan. “We selected Sudarshan Kriya yoga because it has effectively reduced PTSD symptoms in tsunami survivors (Descilo et al., 2009), increased self-reported optimism and well-being in college students (Kjellgren, Bood, Axelsson, Norlander, & Saatcioglu, 2007), decreased self-reported anxiety in those with general anxiety disorder (Katzman et al., 2012), and decreased self-reported depression in those with melancholic depression (Janakiramaiah et al., 2000) as well as in alcohol-dependent inpatients (Vedamurthachar et al., 2006)” – Emma M. Seppala, Center for Compassion and Altruism Research, Stanford University. This study falls under multiple categories. It is randomized, controlled, correlational, and longitudinal. These will be touched on in the following paragraphs. The random sample population was chosen through means of public outreach. The participants learned about the study through flyers and veteran...
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...rate public and private corporate bond issues, commercial paper, preferred stock, and some large debt offerings of foreign companies and governments. Other rating agencies are Duff and Phelps, and Fitch’s. The information provided by the rating agencies is one of the factors that the marketplace uses to determine the appropriate yield on debt securities. Since many institutional investors can only own bonds above a certain rating, the rating also determines who will or will not buy the issue. A bond rating may also influence the value of a company’s common equity, since some common stock rating services take bond ratings into account when they rate stocks. A committee of the rating agency is responsible for ratings. Initially, in the case of corporate bonds, the company seeking a rating for a new issue makes a presentation to the rating agency. Based on these and other data, such as company visits, a bond analyst employed by the rating agency prepares a report on the company that measures the probability of trouble or loss for the investor, especially from default and poor marketability of the bonds. In this report, the analyst assesses the likelihood of earnings declining or turning negative, the likelihood of a company’s survival during a recession, and the likelihood that the issuer will be able to repay the principal borrowed and pay the interest owed at the times agreed upon. The analyst may suggest a rating to the rating committee. The rating agencies charge...
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...Dr. David Conner (Department of CARRS) Dr. Dale Rozeboom (Animal Science) Prepared by: Victoria Campbell-Arvai Department of CARRS, Michigan State University August 17, 2009 Literature Review: A Comparison of Dairy Production Systems SUMMARY This literature review focused on studies comparing the effects of dairy production systems (pasture-based, conventional/confinement1, and mixed) on (i) environmental issues, (ii) social issues, (iii) economic issues, (iv) human health issues, and (v) animal welfare issues. The review was based on peer-reviewed research papers identified by experts at MSU, as well as (where specifically suggested) non peer-reviewed university and government reports. Additional studies were identified from the reference section of recommended papers, as well as via their citation index (primarily Google Scholar). A synopsis of each section is available below, as well as at the end of each section. There is a great deal of research –much of it based in the United States- on the environmental effects of all types of dairy farming, including intensive/confinement, mixed, pasture-based, and management-intensive rotational grazing (MIRG) operations. The vast majority of studies identified for this review focused on the fate and management of excess nitrogen and phosphorous, their effects on terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, and contributions to air quality and climate change. Many environmental mitigation efforts were suggested, including balancing nutrient...
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...Q-Sort Technique and Q-Methodology—Innovative Methods for Examining Attitudes and Opinions Florian H. Müller, Elisabeth Kals Abstract In the German tradition of social sciences Q-method is not well known. Q-method combines both qualitative and quantitative research and is used to examine complex subjective structures like opinions, attitudes and values. This paper presents an introduction to Q-technique and its underlying methodology. The various applications of the method for a qualitative orientated research in the fields of market, opinion and media are also listed. The significance of the method for single case studies, for exploratory cluster analysis and for a combined application of qualitative and quantitative research strategies is emphasized. URN: urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs0402347 Q-Sort technique First developed by Stephenson (1953), and later by Carl Rogers (1954) in humanistic psychotherapy. The Q-Sort technique helps judge self-esteem and personal growth. It helps indicate the individuals (poor) perceived self, and ideal-self. Q-sort technique - scaling General methodology developed to discriminate among relatively large number of objects quickly. It gathers data and processes the collected information; the subjects are assigned the task of sorting a number of statements by placing a specific number of statements in each sorting category; the emphases are on determining the relative ranking of stimuli by individuals and in deriving cluster of individuals...
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...said that it’s an inordinate amount of time and money and that it is an obsession it’s just because that people feel a responsibility to fit into today's society, they want to look as better as possible due to the outside influences one has. People’s desire for physical beauty, while shaped and polished by the superficial media culture rather than just having a nice personality, actually has deeper roots in who they are. This desire for physical appearance is an original human feeling, like the desire for food, nurturing, or happiness according to Studies. In this times this even includes surgical procedures to correct perceived faults in the face or body they have been given. Before, only the rich and famous people or those with severe deformities, birthmarks and injuries would have any kind of cosmetic surgery. Now it’s becoming increasingly. And also before World War I, women were supposed to be soft and feminine, as in the case of the oft-referenced Rubens nude paintings. Now their culture worships jutting hipbones, protruding clavicles, and visible rib cages. Despite beauty's transience, there is no end to the things humankind will do in its name. Modern society marvels at the extremes these allegedly “primitive”...
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...Case study Charles Martin in Uganda Contents I. Case Background 3 II. Statement of the Problem 4 III. Alternatives 5 IV. Recommended Solution 6 V. Answers to the case questions …..6-8 VI. Learnings 8 I. Case Background Hydro Generation (HG) is a U.S. based company that specializes in power plant. It has built power plants in 16 countries where they maintained an ownership in about half of them. The company has targeted a construction of large dam in Uganda Africa. HG put Charles Martin in this project to facilitate the preliminary construction and in case up to the construction phase to get an operating structure and facility start-up activities that includes obtaining licenses, installing telephones and utilities and securing the initial staff that would hire the full range of local personnel. But Vice president James Green pondered whether to continue employing Martin for the construction phase of the project. In particular, Green was concerned about Martin’s lifestyle, some of his business practices, and his participation in Ugandan tribal rituals. Green worried that Martin’s practices were counter to both HG’s corporate culture and methods of operating elsewhere, that some of his actions bordered on the unethical, and that some might be illegal under U.S. law. Characters in the case Lawrence Lovell * HG’s founder and CEO * A devout Christian and very influential in shaping the company’s management culture * Believed that business...
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...Working Group Report This report provided content for the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts first report, Wisconsin’s Changing Climate: Impacts and Adaptation, released in February 2011. THE WISCONSIN INITIATIVE ON CLIMATE CHANGE IMPACTS 1st Adaptive Assessment Report Contribution of the Soil Conservation Working Group July 2010 Contour stripcropping in central Wisconsin Photo by Ron Nichols, USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service Participants of Working Group William L. Bland, Professor, Department of Soil Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison (Working Group Chair and lead author) Kelly R. Maynard, M.S. Agroecology, University of Wisconsin-Madison (Project Assistant) Jeremy Balousek, P.E., Urban Conservation Engineer, Dane County Land and Water Resources Department Denny Caneff, Executive Director, River Alliance of Wisconsin, Inc. Laura W. Good, Associate Scientist, Department of Soil Science, University of Wisconson-Madison Kevin Kirsch, Water Resource Engineer, Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources Patrick Murphy, State Resource Conservationist, Natural Resources Conservation Service John M. Norman, Emeritus Professor of Soil science, Department of Soil Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison James VandenBrook, Water Quality Section Chief, Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection Sara Walling, Water Quality Specialist, Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade, and Consumer Protection ...
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...uk/infoskills/referencing.shtml#MHRA you will find a link to the Style Guide. There you will also find links to documents containing MHRA-format examples from the Guide, and from the New College Humanities Programme Handbook. • Check and double-check for inaccuracies and inconsistencies in spelling, punctuation and spacing • Include as wide a range of types of information sources on your topic as you can find. The main ones are books, journal articles, electronic journal articles, conferences, theses, websites, and newspaper articles, reports and government publications (though the last two types are unlikely for the subject of this sample bibliography) • Choose references that are up to date, unless your topic has a historical slant, in which case older material will be appropriate • Select from good quality resources with academic validity THE BIBLIOGRAPHY The subject chosen is Post-structuralism. Search strategy: The topic has a lot of material. To reduce this and to ensure that references will be up to date, only items published between 1998 and 2003 in English have been used. A wide range of information sources has been consulted to ensure a balance...
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...– QUANTITATIVE METHODS FOR BUSINESS Assignment [15 marks] Due November 21, 2013 Questions 9.32 – formulate, solve the formulated question and prepare a report on the results. 9.48 - formulate, solve the formulated question and prepare a report on the results. Case study 1 Mexicana Wire Works Page 306-307 Case study 2 Custom Vans, Inc. Custom Vans, Inc., specializes in converting standard vans into campers. Depending on the amount of work and customizing to be done, the customizing could cost less than $1,000 to more than $5,000. In less than four years, Tony Rizzo was able to expand his small operation in Gary, Indiana, to other major outlets in Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and Detroit. Innovation was the major factor in Tony’s success in converting a small van shop into one of the largest and most profitable custom van operations in the Midwest. Tony seemed to have a special ability to design and develop unique features and devices that were always in high demand by van owners. An example was Shower-Rific, which was developed by Tony only six months after Custom Vans, Inc., was started. These small showers were completely self-contained, and they could be placed in almost any type of van and in a number of different locations within a van. Shower-Rific was made of fiberglass and contained towel racks, built-in soap and shampoo holders, and a unique plastic door. Each Shower-Rific took 2 gallons of fiberglass and 3 hours of labor to manufacture. Most...
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...As the part of the curriculum, I had the opportunity to take in real data from an industry for the Optimization of transportation cost. The case study was to reduce the cost of transportation of a local industry to transport their products from various warehouses to their various supply points. It gave me my first experience as an engineer in which I reduced the cost of transportation of the particular industry by five per cent. I am also working on my project on “Multi objective optimization of Selective Laser Sintered (SLS) components using genetic algorithm”. The project aims at optimizing the process parameters of the SLS manufactured components using an algorithm by which a product can be made of superior mechanical properties rather than optimizing just one property and to bring Rapid Prototyping into main scale manufacturing of components. I was also able to co-author three international...
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...Research By Song Gao This essay compares the research method of case study with five other methods in business research. The five methods are focus group, in-depth interview, observation, questionnaires and field experiment. This essay provides the definition, advantages, disadvantages/limitations for each of the six methods. Moreover, five published articles related to case study method and two published articles related to each of the other five methods were found to further discuss their application in research. Case Study Definition It is an understatement that there is confusion among students, teachers and researchers about the definition of case study research. In this essay, I use the definition as follows: A case study is a study in which (a) one case (single case study) or a small number of cases (comparative case study) in their real life context are selected, and (b) scores obtained from these cases are analysed in a qualitative manner.(Dul & Hak, 2008). Advantages The case study method involves detailed, holistic investigation and can utilise a range of different measurement techniques (the case study researcher is not limited to any one methodological tool). Data can be collected over a period of time, and it is contextual. The histories and stories that can be told about the company are also something that can be assessed and documented.(The university of Melbourne, 2010) Limitations The case study involves analysis of small data sets, such as one or two companies...
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...www.elsevier.com/locate/ynimg NeuroImage 25 (2005) 1256 – 1265 Cortical thickness analysis in autism with heat kernel smoothing Moo K. Chung,a,b,c,* Steven M. Robbins,f Kim M. Dalton,c Richard J. Davidson,c,d Andrew L. Alexander,c,e and Alan C. Evansf a Department of Statistics, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1210 West Dayton Street, WI 53706, USA Biostatistics and Medical Informatics, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1210 West Dayton Street, WI 53706, USA c W.M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706, USA d Department of Psychology and Psychiatry, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706, USA e Department of Medical Physics, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706, USA f Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University, Canada b Received 5 October 2004; revised 22 November 2004; accepted 3 December 2004 Available online 10 March 2005 We present a novel data smoothing and analysis framework for cortical thickness data defined on the brain cortical manifold. Gaussian kernel smoothing, which weights neighboring observations according to their 3D Euclidean distance, has been widely used in 3D brain images to increase the signal-to-noise ratio. When the observations lie on a convoluted brain surface, however, it is more natural to assign the weights based on the geodesic distance along the surface. We therefore develop a framework for geodesic distance-based kernel smoothing and ...
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...THE STATE OF HMONG-AMERICAN STUDIES (A BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSAY) By Mark E. Pfeifer, PhD Director, Hmong Resource Center, Saint Paul Editor, Hmong Studies Journal Introduction In the newly published volume Hmong/Miao in Asia, Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, co-editor Nicholas Tapp provides an insightful essay “The State of Hmong Studies: An Essay on Bibliography” which traces the temporal development of research on the Hmong and assesses some of the key works within the interdisciplinary realm of Hmong Studies. Tapp’s essay is very valuable as an overview of the growth of Hmong Studies research based in Asia. Unfortunately, the sections of his piece pertaining to Hmong-American Studies, are, as he himself acknowledges, dated as they are heavily focused on publications from the 1980s and early 1990s. It is the purpose of the present short essay to provide the reader with an assessment of recent developments in Hmong-American Studies and some insights about certain research areas that need further development in the field. Health and Medicine Hmong-American Studies research has grown dramatically since the early 1990s. The Hmong Resource Center library in Saint Paul now possesses more than 150 dissertations/theses and 450 journal articles pertaining to HmongAmericans (as opposed to Hmong in Asia and other countries). The vast majority 1 of these works have been published since 1994. There are certain fields within Hmong-American Studies that have seen very important...
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...http://ann.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://ann.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Citations: http://ann.sagepub.com/content/611/1/31.refs.html >> Version of Record - Apr 30, 2007 What is This? Downloaded from ann.sagepub.com at NATIONAL UNIV SINGAPORE on October 14, 2011 Capital, Consumption, Communication, and Citizenship: The Social Positioning of Taste and Civic Culture in the United States By LEWIS FRIEDLAND, DHAVAN V. SHAH, NAM-JIN LEE, MARK A. RADEMACHER, LUCY ATKINSON, and THOMAS HOVE In this article, the authors analyze the field of cultural consumption in the United States. Using the 2000 DDB Lifestyle Study, they examine a cross-section of Americans in terms of their occupational categories, media usage, consumption practices, social behaviors, and indicators of civic and political engagement. In doing so, the authors find many parallels to the determinants of taste, cultural discrimination, and choice within the field structure observed by Bourdieu in 1960s French...
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...LTC Reprint No. 114 U.S. ISSN 0084-0807 May 1974 Land Taxation and Land Reform by Geraldo W. Sazama and Harlan Davis LAND TENURE CENTER University of Wisconsin-Madison 53706 Land Taxation and Land Reform* Reprinted from ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AND CULTURAL CHANGE Vol. 21,No. 4, Part I, July 1973 01973 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Printed in U.S.A. Geraldo W. Sazama University of Connecticut Harlan Davis U.S. Agency for InternationalDevelopment, Brazil Land taxation frequently has been presented as a panacea for certain problems of agricultural development. More specifically, the land tax has been seen by many as aquick and easy substitute for land reform, especially in Latin America.' This type of thinking, unfortunately, can cloud the real and important contribution that land taxation can make to the develop ment process. Because of its ability to be relatively neutral in its economic effects on agriculture, land taxation isalmost unique among the many ways 2 available to convert surplus agricultural output into development capital. It is, however, no substitute for a direct land reform program; it merely complements a nation's direct efforts to improve the agricultural sector while it goes about its principal task of raising new public investment capital for the economy.3 This paper uses both theoretical and empirical analysis to examine the effectiveness ofa land tax as aregulatory tool. Weare particularly interested in evaluating...
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