Tese de mestrado. Manutenção Industrial. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 2004

The Common Factors Model was introduced in 1992 by Michael Lambert suggesting that four factors that exist in all forms of psychotherapy are what account for positive therapeutic outcomes. The four common factors posited by Lambert include: Extratherapeutic Factors, The Therapeutic Relationship, Hope and Expectancy and Specific Factors. Marriage and family therapy is one form of psychotherapy that has taken an interest in The Common Factors Model and dedicated various amounts of research to understand connections between the two philosophies. Despite the efforts to understand common factors that exist in marriage and family therapy, very little research has been done studying the relationship between the common factor Hope and Expectancy, and marriage and family therapy. The current study aimed to fill that gap, by exploring the relationship between marriage and family therapy, and the common factor hope and expectancy through the lens of Snyder’s Hope Theory. In this study, a mixed methods sequential embedded designed was implemented to examine the relationship that exists between marriage and family therapy and the common factor Hope and Expectancy. The results indicated that levels of hope and expectancy were high in parents/guardians who were going to start participating family therapy with their child. The high levels of hope and expectancy were likely due to the activation of an interaction between extratherapeutic factors and hope and expectancy. Some of the extratherapeutic factors involved in the interaction were specific to marriage and family therapy, while others can be found in all forms of psychotherapy.

The problem that anchored this study was district leaders' and administrators' lack of clarity regarding teacher concerns about the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (CCSSM) implementation in high school math. The purposes of the study were to (a) examine the perception of high school math teachers regarding the barriers for successfully implementing the CCSSM, and (b) to elicit recommendations for teacher preparation. Ely's theory of change was utilized to relate the entity of the CCSSM to this new shift in education. To better understand this phenomenon, 2 research questions accompanied this study. The research questions were geared to not only understanding teacher perceptions but also discovering strategies to assist educators with implementing the new CCSSM. Using purposeful sampling, 5 participants participated in this case study; the data collection components were an open-ended survey, interviews, and field notes. Data were analyzed by hand, using inductive reasoning and the process of coding to determine themes. The results indicated that teachers needed to know more about the standards and needed the time to gain this efficacy. Based on the themes of the study, a professional development was chosen to represent the project. Implications for positive social change are to bring awareness to teachers who are implementing the CCSSM in secondary schools, by ensuring teachers articulate consistent conversations with stakeholders, gain a form of self-efficacy, and think not only procedurally but conceptually to implement the standards. Teachers will acquire knowledge and skills to effectively educate students to become thinkers and problem solvers. This outcome will contribute to the development of college and career ready individuals.

No description available.

This thesis examines common-law and civil-law jurisdictions in order to find differences between them. These differences are then being qualified as either relevant or irrelevant for the categorisation of individual jurisdictions. This reflects the argument that only features occurring in only one of the legal families can be relevant when categorising jurisdictions. Only such features can be, from the author’s point of view, specific and typical for their legal family and inherent features of them.The first thing to be considered under this premise is the respective sources of law (Chapter 1). These are in civil-law jurisdictions traditionally statutes and in commonlaw jurisdictions predominantly courts’ decisions. There are, of course, statutes also in common-law jurisdictions and previous courts’ decisions play an important role also in civil-law systems. The differences are not inherent. Furthermore, there are fundamental legal concepts, that is important concepts underlying the respective rules. These concepts may explain differences between the rules. The examination of sources of law, altogether, does not reveal any distinguishing factors.Chapters 2–5 discuss the issue of attitudes of common-law and civil-law judges to statutory interpretation. Chapter 2 examines the respective methods of statutory interpretation. This does not reveal any differences as to common-law and civil-law judges’ attitudes; for instance, greater adherence of common-law judges to the literal meaning of rules arguably does not exist. As shown in Chapter 3, this is true also in the area of Criminal Law under the special safeguards this subject provides. Chapter 4 asserts terminology causes differences between the systems; this is true even in case of identical terminology which is sometimes being interpreted in a diametrically different way. Moreover, differences can also be compensated for elsewhere in the legal system. Altogether, Chapter 4 does not reveal any inherent differences between the systems. As Chapter 5 shows, there is an ongoing process of convergence between common-law and civil-law systems, which means the categorisation into legal families becomes even less plausible.Chapter 6 shows that the categorisation into legal families is not only incorrect but also highly misleading and that there are numerous scholarly statements relying incorrectly on the family concept. The proposition (Chapter 7) is that it may nevertheless be feasible to structure comparative-law texts according to the wellknown legal families, as these show a common historical background. However, for conducting research into particular foreign legal rules (micro-comparative research), the family concept becomes a misleading starting-point. Insofar the concept should be abandoned or, at least, used only together with an appropriate warning.

A Common Pool Resource (CPR) is a natural or man-made resource system with open or widespread access where the resources are depletable with increased use. CPR examples include forests, pastures, irrigations, rivers, lakes, and fisheries. This research examines a common pool resource in Thailand, i.e. a canal in Nonthaburi Province (NP). The canal, named Klong Om-Klong Bangkok Noi-Klong Bang Kruai, is utilised for agriculture, transportation, commerce, tourism and aesthetics. Currently, urbanisation threatens the canal through changes in land use along the canal. Also, an increasing amount of garbage and water hyacinths in the canal are degrading the quality of the canal environment and waterway transportation. The aims of this thesis were to identify essential factors in the canal system that support the success of collective action in environmental management. This study analyses CPR management in the NP canal system by applying design principles illustrated by long-enduring CPR institutions. These have been identified by Elinor Ostrom (Ostrom, 1990; 1992) and by analysing the situational variables as barriers or resources for collective action. The research was conducted on five communities in Thailand. The primary data collection techniques were qualitative and consisted of two different interview processes and five focus groups. The interviews were completed with local residents and government officials while the focus groups were completed with individuals from five communities. The N6 computer program for handling qualitative data was used to analyse the responses.

The interaction between optimal contractual design and macroeconomic aspects of economic systems is a sensitive issue for contemporary economics, in particular within the framework of the incentive theory. Information problems are crucial for incentives. Typically, in the credit markets lender-borrower interactions are affected by incentive problems and financial intermediation can be helpful. This work deals with financial markets, contracts and asymmetric information, with particular attention on how incentives and competition model the structure of the credit markets when the entrepreneur can simultaneously contract with more than one lender. In these cases we examine the implications of strategic competition on contracts among loans suppliers. Dealing with economies affected by information incompleteness or imperfection, competition on contracts delivers externalities among the players in the credit markets that can be responsible for inefficient outcomes. The issue of whether there could be any welfare-enhancing role of policy intervention, to improve on market outcomes is also analyzed.

I have added support for predicate dispatching, a powerful generalization of other dispatching mechanisms, to the Common Lisp Object System (CLOS). To demonstrate its utility, I used predicate dispatching to enhance Weyl, a computer algebra system which doubles as a CLOS library. My result is Dispatching-Enhanced Weyl (DEW), a computer algebra system that I have demonstrated to be well suited for both users and programmers.

Thesis (LL.M. (Labour Law))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2008.

Biopotential signals are important to physicians for diagnosing medical conditions in patients. Traditionally, biopotentials are acquired using contact electrodes together with instrumentation amplifiers (INAs). The biopotentials are generally weak and in the presence of stronger common mode signals. The INA thus needs to have very good Common Mode Rejection Ratio (CMRR) to amplify the weak biopotential while rejecting the stronger common mode interferers. Opamp based INAs with a resistor-capacitor feedback are suitable for acquiring biopotentials with low power and low noise performance. However, CMRR of such INA topologies is typically very poor. In the presented research, a technique is proposed for improving the CMRR of opamp based INAs in RC feedback configurations by dynamically matching input and feedback capacitor pairs. Two instrumentation amplifiers (one fully differential and the other fully balanced fully symmetric) are designed with the proposed dynamic element matching scheme. Post layout simulation results show that with 1 percent mismatch between the limiting capacitor pairs, CMRR is improved to above 150dB when the proposed dynamic element matching scheme is used. The INAs draw about 10uA of quiescent current from a 1.5 dual power supply source. The input referred noise of the INAs is less than 3uV/sqrt(Hz).