By incorporating voices from history that have too long been lost in the din of tradition--especially the voices of Native Americans and blacks, women and laborers--Kansas and the West provides a provocative and much-needed new view of the state's past.
This edited collection provides a state-of-the art overview of research on willingness to communicate (WTC) in a second and foreign language. In particular, it includes innovative studies seeking to demonstrate the ways in which WTC can be examined within the framework of complex dynamic systems, how the construct is related to self-assessment, reticence and extroversion, and what is signifies in the case of immigrants. Another group of papers is related to the role of technology in fostering WTC in different contexts. The volume also comprises papers that touch on methodological issues in the study of WTC such as experience case sampling, the network approach or the integration of the macro- and micro-perspective. The book will be of values to researchers interested in the study of WTC but will also provide inspiration for students, teachers and materials writers.
Essays in New Perspectives on Yenching University, 1916·1952 reevaluate the experience of China's preeminent Christian university in an era of nationalism and revolution. Although the university was denounced by the Chinese Communists and critics as an elitist and imperialist enterprise irrelevant to China's real needs, the essays demonstrate that Yenching's emphasis on biculturalism, cultural exchange, and a broad liberal education combined with professional expertise ultimately are compatible with nation-building and a modern Chinese identity. They show that the university fostered transnational exchanges of knowledge, changed the lives of students and faculty, and responded to the pressures of nationalism, war, and revolution. Topics include efforts to make Christianity relevant to China's needs; promotion of professional expertise, gender relationships and coeducation; the liberal arts; Sino-American cultural interactions; and Yenching's ambiguous response to Chinese nationalism, Japanese invasion, and revolution.
New Perspectives on Marketing by Word-of-Mouth offers insight to a world where consumers play an even bigger part in the building or breaking of a company's reputation. Some of the things the book will explain include:- How brand love is built in the fashion industry - How larger organisations effectively respond to negative social media.
In this book the authors present new results on interpolation for nonmonotonic logics, abstract (function) independence, the Talmudic Kal Vachomer rule, and an equational solution of contrary-to-duty obligations. The chapter on formal construction is the conceptual core of the book, where the authors combine the ideas of several types of nonmonotonic logics and their analysis of 'natural' concepts into a formal logic, a special preferential construction that combines formal clarity with the intuitive advantages of Reiter defaults, defeasible inheritance, theory revision, and epistemic considerations. It is suitable for researchers in the area of computer science and mathematical logic.
ÔThis collection of articles by an internationally recognized team of authors is a welcome addition to the literature on firm growth. The authors, singly and together, have previously made important contributions with regard to frameworks for understanding growth, as well as cutting-edge empirical research on the actual growth process. In this volume, the authors bring previous research up-to-date, providing a critical look at what has been published in the last decade and offering new theoretically informed insights in how and why firms grow.Õ Ð Howard Aldrich, University of North Carolina, US This insightful volume presents a collection of cutting-edge works by two of the leading researchers of firm growth. The studies extend previous research by providing stronger theoretical underpinnings and using longitudinal databases that can separate in time the firmsÕ growth from its presumed causes. They also break new ground by examining different modes of growth, such as sales growth vs. employment growth, and organic growth vs. acquisition-based expansion. Further, the studies investigate the drivers of firm growth and take a critical look at the effects, such as under what circumstances high growth is associated with high profitability. The issue of how firm growth is achieved and managed, and what consequences it has for different stakeholders is both theoretically interesting and practically important. The book will strongly appeal to academics of entrepreneurship, small business management and strategy.
This volume, in honor of Yakov Eliashberg, gives a panorama of some of the most fascinating recent developments in symplectic, contact and gauge theories. It contains research papers aimed at experts, as well as a series of skillfully written surveys accessible for a broad geometrically oriented readership from the graduate level onwards. This collection will serve as an enduring source of information and ideas for those who want to enter this exciting area as well as for experts.
"The book describes how functional inequalities are often manifestations of natural mathematical structures and physical phenomena, and how a few general principles validate large classes of analytic/geometric inequalities, old and new. This point of view leads to "systematic" approaches for proving the most basic inequalities, but also for improving them, and for devising new ones--sometimes at will and often on demand. These general principles also offer novel ways for estimating best constants and for deciding whether these are attained in appropriate function spaces. As such, improvements of Hardy and Hardy-Rellich type inequalities involving radially symmetric weights are variational manifestations of Sturm's theory on the oscillatory behavior of certain ordinary differential equations. On the other hand, most geometric inequalities, including those of Sobolev and Log-Sobolev type, are simply expressions of the convexity of certain free energy functionals along the geodesics on the Wasserstein manifold of probability measures equipped with the optimal mass transport metric. Caffarelli-Kohn-Nirenberg and Hardy-Rellich-Sobolev type inequalities are then obtained by interpolating the above two classes of inequalities via the classical ones of Hölder. The subtle Moser-Onofri-Aubin inequalities on the two-dimensional sphere are connected to Liouville type theorems for planar mean field equations."--Publisher's website.
Clinical Psychometrics can be defined as a discipline that deals with the definition and measurement of clinical constructs. Among its interests, it includes dimensions, such as skills, behavior, psychopathology, quality of life, and personality. Indeed, this discipline focuses on individual differences, the theory of measurement, the construction of measure instruments and their application in an international context. Clinical Psychometrics can be considered as an essential tool in many fields of research related to psychological and psychiatric interventions: for example, it is useful for diagnostic assessment (in various fields, including clinical and forensic areas), for the design and evaluation of specific psychological and pharmacological treatments. Therefore, Clinical Psychometrics is an applied discipline using psychometric tools to develop evidence-based type procedures relating to the understanding and improvement of the psychological conditions of individuals. This Research Topic on “Clinical Psychometrics” is interested in several aspects of measurement of psychological variables, focusing on the two fundamental paradigmatic aspects of the discipline, the Classical Test Theory and the Item Response Theory. This Research Topic seeks to stimulate a scientific debate between psychotherapists and psychometricians in this area. It could have applicative fallouts, such as designing trans-cultural studies in order to: 1) investigate the invariance of new instruments for measuring clinical variables; 2) test the invariance of existing instruments used in clinical research; 3) develop more refined measure instruments for the evaluation of clinical dimensions, similarly to work conducted by the Obsessive Compulsive Cognitions Working Group in identifying domains considered central to OCD and developing the 87-item Obsessive Beliefs Questionnaire; 4) evaluate therapeutic outcomes and processes (such as, states stress, psychological distress, psychological adjustment to illness, health-related quality of life, mood disorders, sexual functioning, etc.). The goal of this Research Topic is to disseminate a culture of integration between “psychometric model” and “clinical model”, promoting the scientific debate about the deepening of the existing methods and/or the proposal of new methods capable of combining clinical significance with quantitative rigor. This Research Topic welcomed all types of articles, with the exception of case reports. We were particularly interested in: 1. Systematic reviews shedding new lights on the psychometric properties of the most used psychological measures in clinical psychology, neuroscience, psychiatry, psychosomatics, etc.; 2. Guidelines and suggestions on the correct use and gold standards in psychological assessment in the form of research studies and brief reports on the development of new measures and adaptation of existing ones.