The purpose of the study is to explore the life experiences, identities, and self-esteem of a group of Mexican women who attend Even Start, a family literacy program. The study also focuses on the effect that the program has on the women's self-identities. I chose qualitative research considering I was interested in their phenomenological experience. In order to gather data I interviewed ten women, conducted a focus group with the women who were not interviewed, and did participant observation while the women were in class. The Mexican women I interviewed came to this country hoping to improve their socioeconomic status. Most of them had relatives in the US and the support that they gave them made it easier for them to come and get established. As a result of being away from their people and their culture, they had a hard time, particularly at the beginning. Their illegal status and the fact that they didn't speak English complicated things even more. In spite of the many difficulties they had to face, their experiences in this country have allowed them to improve their socioeconomic situation and to achieve greater levels of independence. In regards to their self-esteem, most of my informants have positive self-images. The few that have lower levels of self-esteem were often mistreated by caregivers and their families were dysfunctional in some way. Even though a few have lower levels of self-esteem, all my informants felt loved by their parents and other family members. Because of this and because they were raised in social environments that fostered interdependence, my informants have generally developed into responsible and reliable people who work towards their goals. Their identities mirror their society and in particular their social network. At the core of 'who they are' are traits of the identities of caregivers that through active choices (Blumstein 1991) they came to internalize. Even Start plays a crucial role in their self-identities for two main reasons. First, in the program the women are taught English which is the basic tool they need in order to communicate and move around in this country. Second, the women are around people from their country. By feeling they belong to a larger community, the women feel supported and find strategies to cope with their reality. At the same time, being around other Mexicans strengthens their Hispanic identity. The following are recommendations that could be used by Even Start to enhance the women's self-esteem. (1) Incorporate more one-on-one activities to enable students to learn at their own pace and to help participants with special needs to work without feeling a sense of pressure. (2) Provide the women with the opportunity to improve their literacy skills in Spanish and to strengthen their knowledge in basic areas. (3) Include activities that would allow the participants to release stress and thus to improve their ability to concentrate. (4) Provide the students with skills that will enable them to find jobs or get promoted. Although the literature on self-identities was useful to conducting this research, the fact that scholars have approached the topic mainly from an intellectual perspective has resulted in an understanding of the self often disconnected from reality. Among the main contributions of this research is the realization that adult experiences such as migration and participation in a literacy program play a crucial role in people's self-esteem and identities. / Graduation date: 2004

Thesis (M.Ing. (Development and Management))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2007.

Thesis (M.Eng. (Development and Management Engineering)--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2008.

This dissertation is focused on developing a new passband behavioral model in order to account for asymmetric intermodulation distortion resulted from memory effect. First, a measurement setup is prepared to measure the AM/AM, AM/PM distortion, magnitudes and the phases of intermodulation (IMD) and fundamental (FUND) components which are created by the amplifier where phase is calculated only by measuring magnitudes. Then, responses of a sample amplifier are measured for different excitation situations (center frequency and tone spacing are swept). A new modeling technique, namely Odd Order Modeling (OOM), is proposed which has unequal time delay terms. The reason of unequal time delay addition is the change of effective channel length according to the average power passing through that channel. These unequal delays create asymmetry in the IMD components. General Power Series Expansion (GPSE) model is also extracted, OOM and GPSE model performances are compared by using NMSE metric. In order to improve model performance, even order terms with envelope of input are added. It is mathematically proven that even order terms with envelope of the input have contribution to IMD and FUND components&rsquo / . This improved version of modeling is named as Even Order modeling (EOM). EOM model performance is compared with the others&rsquo / performance for two-tone excitation measurement results. It is shown that EOM gives the most accurate result. Model performance is checked for unequal four-tone signal as well. EOM model is applied to baseband DPD circuit after making some modifications. Model linearization performance is compared with the performances of the other memory polynomial modeling techniques.

Today, a large proportion of the world's plenteous offshore natural gas resource are stranded, flared or re-injected due to constraints pertaining to its utilisation. The major constraint in the utilisation of this resource is linked to its properties, which makes it difficult to transport or store. Although the resource presents an excellent opportunity for the Gas-to-Liquid (GTL) technology (process for converting natural gas into high energy liquid fuels with qualities that surpass the most stringent current and future clean-fuel requirements), the further processing of this resource is still impeded by high cost of transportation. However, it is believed that the emerging Floating GTL concept could offer superb opportunities to bring such offshore stranded natural gas reserves to markets by converting the gas into high quality liquid fuels, at the production sites, before it is transported using conventional oil tankers or vessels. But the question is: can this venture be profitable or economically viable? In response, an Economic Model (the EV Model) to review the economic viability of the Floating GTL option was developed. Analyses on technical and economical aspects of the floating GTL application offshore are presented with case studies on Syntroleum's and Statoil's floating GTL designs. Profitability analyses were conducted using the EV model to evaluate economic parameters such as Net Present Value (NPV), Internal Rate of Return (IRR), Discounted PayBack Period (DPBP), Profitability index (PI), Break-Even Analysis (BEA) and Scale Economies for some assumed case scenarios involving both designs. In addition, sensitivity analyses were also carried out to find the most sensitive parameters which affect the viability of the floating GTL option. The economic analyses revealed that, a modest feedstock cost (~0 - $3/MSCF), high crude oil price (that stays above $30 per barrel) and reduction trend in capital expenditure (for stand alone Floating GTL plant) up to $20,00O/BPD or lower in the next few years, will open windows for the floating GTL concept. Finally, the energy policy needed to achieve the capitalisation of the plenteous offshore stranded gas resource via floating GTL is also discussed. / Thesis (M.Ing. (Development and Management))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2007.

Thesis (M.Eng. (Development and Management Engineering)--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2008.

Thesis (M.Eng. (Development and Management Engineering)--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2008.

The work is focused on measuring corporate performance in particular one of the key factors influencing the financial results of the company, which is the volume of production and change. The aim is to assess how a change in production volume affects business performance of selected business entity.

SILVA, Aline Alves da. Decomposição e largura em árvore de grafos planares livres de ciclos pares induzidos. 2007. 80 f. Dissertação (Mestrado em ciência da computação)- Universidade Federal do Ceará, Fortaleza-CE, 2007. / Submitted by Elineudson Ribeiro (elineudsonr@gmail.com) on 2016-07-08T17:52:45Z No. of bitstreams: 1 2007_dis_aasilva.pdf: 635256 bytes, checksum: 0ac10f7ac58ad14294969b2e4a830ce0 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Rocilda Sales (rocilda@ufc.br) on 2016-07-13T12:18:29Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 2007_dis_aasilva.pdf: 635256 bytes, checksum: 0ac10f7ac58ad14294969b2e4a830ce0 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-07-13T12:18:29Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 2007_dis_aasilva.pdf: 635256 bytes, checksum: 0ac10f7ac58ad14294969b2e4a830ce0 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2007 / The definitions of tree decomposition and treewidth were introduced by Robertson and Seymour in their series of papers on graph minors, published during the nineties. It is known that many NP-hard problems can be polynomially solved if a tree decomposition of bounded treewidth is given. So, it is of interest to bound the treewidth of certain classes of graphs. In this context, the planar graphs seem to be specially challenging because, in despite of having many known bounded metrics (for example, chromatic number), they have unbounded treewidth. So, an alternative approach is to restrict ourselves to a subclass of planar graphs. In this work, we investigate the class of even-hole-free planar graphs. We show that if G is an even-hole-free planar graph, then it does not contain a subdivision of the 10£10 grid. So, if the grid minors of G are obtained from subdivisions, then G has treewidth at most 49. Furthermore, two polynomial, non-exact algorithms to compute a tree decomposition of a even-hole-free planar graph are given, both based on known characterizations of even-hole-free graphs. In the ¯rst one, a tree decomposition is built from basic graphs by concatenating the tree decomposition of small pieces via the clique, k-stars (k = 1; 2; 3) and 2-join cutsets. In the second one, a tree decomposition is built by including one by one the vertices of G, following their bi-simplicial order. / Os conceitos de Decomposição em Árvore e Largura em Árvore foram introduzidos por Robertson e Seymour em sua série de artigos sobre menores de grafos, publicados ao longo da década de 90. Sabe-se que muitos problemas NP - difíceis podem ser resolvidos polinomialmente para um grafo G, dada uma decomposição em Árvore de G de largura limitada. Logo, limitar a largura em árvore de uma classe de grafos torna-se um objeto de estudo de grande interesse. Neste contexto, a classe dos grafos planares se mostra bastante intrigante, uma vez que, apesar de possuir outras métricas limitadas em valores baixos (por exemplo, número cromático), não possui largura em árvore limitada. Desta forma, uma alternativa é restringir a classe estudada para uma subclasse dos grafos planares. Neste trabalho, nós investigamos a classe dos grafos planares livres de buracos pares. Nós mostramos que se G é um grafo planar livre de buracos pares, então ele não contém uma subdivisão de uma grade 10 £ 10. Portanto, se os menores grades de G são obtidos de subdivisões G tem largura em árvore no máximo 49. Além disso, dois algoritmos não exatos polinomiais para computar uma decomposição em árvore de um grafo planar livre de buracos pares são apresentados, ambos baseados em caracterizações conhecidas de tal classe de grafos. No primeiro algoritmo, uma decomposição em árvore é construída a partir de grafos básicos pela concatenação de decomposições em árvores de pedaços pequenos via os cortes clique, k-estrelas (k = 1; 2; 3) e 2-join. No segundo, uma decomposição em árvore é construída pela inclusão dos vértices de G um a um, seguindo sua ordem bi-simplicial.

The thesis is focus on means of tracking and cost management in selected farm company. The first part is devote to theoretical and methodological basis of costs and calculate the costs that are obtained from the literature and then applied to the farm company. Further thesis is focus on selected performances (rape, eggs), the development costs of these performances in each year and the application of their calculations that the farm company use and application of the calculation method, which in agriculture is not so common. Here I use microeconomic knowledge in decision making firms not only on the optimal output.