Thesis (M.B.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 104-107).

Thesis (M. Hous. M.)--University of Hong Kong, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.Hous.M.)--University of Hong Kong, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available in print.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 1993. / Includes vita and abstract. Order number 9320541. Includes bibliographical references (p. 180-186).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Education, August 1999. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ed. D.)--Illinois State University, 1999. / Title from title page screen, viewed July 27, 2006. Dissertation Committee: Elizabeth Lugg (chair), James Martindale, James Palmer, Al Azinger. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 134-142) and abstract. Also available in print.

Subject of the thesis is "The expansion of the company Partners to the Romanian market." It analyses each step of this financial advisory firm that it took while preparing the expansion abroad. The thesis consists of four chapters: the first summarises the theory concerning the expansion abroad and the composition of the entrepreneurial plan of expansion. The second chapter analyses the romanian market. It includes both macro- and micro-analysis specializing on the sector of financial services. The analyses PEST follows. The third chapter states basic information about the company Partners For Life Planning, including economic results and the composition of product portfolio. Last chapter looks at each practical step that the company had to deal with while getting ready for the expansion: choice of legal form, budget and the composition of entrepreneurial plan. The thesis is suppose to serve as both theoretical and practical guide to the expansion of a Czech company to an eastern European market.

The purpose of this study was to determine the perceived effectiveness of specific advisory committee activities during a school bond proposal and election process. The study began with an extensive review of the literature on the use of advisory committee activities in school districts for the purpose of promoting a school bond issue. This revealed that school officials maintaining a low profile, the presence of a diverse community task force, focusing on YES voters, involving the committee in early planning, focusing on disseminating information, and focusing on benefits to children and the community are all important in the passage of a school bond election. A survey was developed and administered to committee members, school board members and school district administrators in a North Texas school district that had successfully completed a bond election. Survey respondents consistently supported the practices put into place by the studied school district, which closely mirrored the activities espoused in the research. Respondents believed the diversity of the task force and the roles of the committee members to be crucial to the passage of the bond. The only subcategory of questions that drew mixed reviews and positions of support was that of the need for the administration and board to maintain a low profile. Participants in the survey viewed having a diverse community task force, focusing on YES votes, involvement in early planning, focusing on disseminating information, and focusing on benefits to children and the community as being important to the successful passage of the school bond election, with clear dissemination of information being the most important activity of the committee.

No description available.

Reading is a fundamental skill that each person needs to develop during early childhood and continue to enhance into adulthood. While children/teenagers depend on this skill to advance academically and become educated individuals, adults are expected to acquire a certain level of proficiency in reading so that they can engage in social/civic activities and successfully participate in the workforce. A step towards assisting individuals to become lifelong readers is to provide them adequate reading selections which can cultivate their intellectual and emotional growth. Turning to (web) search engines for such reading choices can be overwhelming, given the huge volume of reading materials offered as a result of a search. An alternative is to rely on reading materials suggested by existing recommendation systems, which unfortunately are not capable of simultaneously matching the information needs, preferences, and reading abilities of individual readers. In this dissertation, we present novel recommendation strategies which identify appealing reading materials that the readers can comprehend, which in turn can motivate them to read. In accomplishing this task, we have examined used-defined data, in addition to information retrieved/inferred from reputable and freely-accessible online sources. We have incorporated the concept of “social trust” when making recommendations for advanced readers and suggested fiction books that match the reading ability of individual K-12 readers using our readability-analysis tool for books. Furthermore, we have emulated the readers' advisory service offered at school/public libraries in making recommendations for K-12 readers, which can be applied to advanced readers as well. A major contribution of our work is in the development of unsupervised recommendation strategies for advanced readers which suggest reading materials for both entertainment and learning acquisition purposes. Unlike their counterparts, these recommendation strategies are unaffected by the cold-start or long-tail problems, since they exploit user-defined data (if available) while taking advantage of alternative publicly-available metadata. Our readability-analysis tool is innovative, which can predict the readability-levels of books on-the-fly, even in the absence of excerpts from books, a task that cannot be accomplished by any of the well-known readability tools/strategies. Moreover, our multi-dimensional recommendation strategy is novel, since it simultaneously analyzes the reading abilities of K-12 readers, which books readers enjoy, why the books are appealing to them, and what subject matters the readers favor. Besides assisting K-12 readers, our recommender can be used by parents/teachers/librarians in locating reading materials to be suggested to their (K-12) children/students/patrons. We have validated the performance of each methodology presented in this dissertation using existing benchmark datasets or datasets we created for the evaluation purpose (which is another contribution we make to the research community). We have also compared the performance of our proposed methodologies with their corresponding baselines and state-of-the-art counterparts, which further verifies the correctness of the proposed methodologies.