Childhood sexual abuse of adult men has brought many adulthood clinical manifestations and issues, with several of them being tied to male sexuality. Two groups (N = 11) of adult men, heterosexual (N = 9) and homosexual (N = 2), were compared to each other across several variables, noting any differences or similarities. The Kinsey Heterosexual - Homosexual scale, the Bem Sex-Role Inventory, and a sexual abuse questionnaire were used to obtain information about the sexual orientation, present sex role identities, and past abuse experiences. The descriptive results suggested several trends indicating differences between sex role identification when compared to the average severity of sexual abuse factors experienced. Also, significant differences were found when t-tests and a one way A-NOVA were performed to compare the groups, sex roles, and Bem A and Bem B and Bem Differences. Recommendations for future research are outlined.

This study tested the hypothesis that oral bound-morpheme impairment is characteristic of school-age children with a language-based learning disorder. Ten school-age children (Mean age: 10:3) classified as language-learning disabled and ten controls (Mean age: 9:9) classified as "normal language" were presented with four tasks that assessed oral bound-morpheme skills. A two-way analysis of variance revealed significant group and task differences. Fisher a priori tests indicated significant group differences on three tasks: a measure of English bound-morpheme skill levels, a measure of ability to generalize English bound morphemes, and a measure of ability to learn novel bound morphemes. The findings suggest that the core deficit underlying the oral bound-morpheme impairment does not resolve with maturation and experience.

No description available.

<p> Publically-administered veterinary diagnostic laboratories are accredited to an industry-developed quality standard, AAVLD, which is similar to the ISO 17025 international standard. Laboratories wanting to improve their client base of private industry partners must increasingly consider ISO 17025 accreditation to be successful, as it goes beyond the AAVLD standard by verifying the laboratory's technical competence to perform testing within its accreditation scope.</p><p> The research considers the differences between the AAVLD and ISO 17025 standards and strategies used by other laboratories to successfully implement a quality program, and provides a gap analysis between the two standards. The plan considers project management and change management strategies, details roles and responsibilities for the project team, and provides a range of aids including commonly used quality assurance tools to successfully develop the ISO 17025 quality system. The project plan can be successfully implemented using the laboratory's existing AAVLD quality system as a starting point. </p>

<p> There is a consensus among economists and political scientists that institutions are crucial for economic development. Different attributes of institutions like rule of law, property rights, legal environment, and constraints on executive have profound effects on a nation's prosperity, growth and development. Recently economists have recognized that a system of strong institutions of property rights can enhance efficiency of financial sector. A significant part of the dissertation deals with the question that is it likely that causality operates the other way: Does a mature financial market acts as a strong catalyst for property rights? </p><p> The first essay develops a theoretical model of financial intermediation with incomplete information to augment the notion. The model predicts that the relationship does exist and is in fact nonlinear. Thus finance acts as propellant for property rights only after crossing a certain threshold. The second essay presents empirical evidence of threshold effects in the cross country relationship between property rights and finance that are consistent with the theory. Further, in a panel of countries, I show that the exogenous component of financial development helps predict property rights in a sample of countries where financial markets have crossed a threshold level of development. </p><p> The final essay of the dissertation deals with the effects of legal environment on financial market. More specifically, it explores the effects of collateral law reforms on firms' perceived access to finance by taking a panel of developing countries. I find evidence that collateral law reforms are effective in improving perceived access to credit. Moreover the effects are more pronounced when they are accompanied by established collateral registries for movable and intangible assets. Finally these beneficial effects seem to increase in the size of the firms.</p>

<p> These essays explore the microeconomic impact of federal, state and local public policies on individual behavior in three distinct settings. Chapter 1 examines the impact of municipal policies affecting retail liquor availability on the incidence of urban crime, based on a rapid 2012 expansion of liquor retailing in the City of Seattle. Chapter 2 examines whether state-level public sector employees are paid "wage rents" in excess of their outside options, based on an original survey of roughly 900 exogenously laid-off of government workers as part of a liquor privatization initiative in Washington State. Finally, Chapter 3 examines whether federal intergovernmental grants have a persistent long-term effect on state government tax policy, based on a 30-year panel of federal grants and tax revenue for the U.S. states. In all three cases I emphasize the identification of causal effects of policy characteristics on behavior, highlighting the importance of econometric program evaluation as a tool for understanding and developing well-designed public policy. </p>

<p> Attribution is an essential element of human interaction. Attribution theory deals with the processes by which people form causal explanations of human behaviors (Heider, 1958). The goal of this research is to address gaps in our current understanding of attribution by clearly segregating a target person's perceived intentions from her situation and behavior. We aim to accomplish this goal by testing whether motive attributions are made based on the traits of targets, and by examining the concurrent effect of motive and trait information on attribution processes. Experiment 1 examined how people make trait attributions based on motives. I employed the Multiple Inference Model (MIM; Reeder, 2004) to further examine and clarify the role of perceived intention in attribution, and showed that multiple inferences influence attributions. In Experiment 2, I tested motive attributions based on confluence theory (Trafimow, 2009), thus reversing the direction of the attribution process (i.e., traits to motives). Results revealed that motive attributions were not made, suggesting that the attributional process cannot be reversed. Finally, and most significantly, the goal of Experiment 3 was to combine Experiments 1 and 2 and explore how motives and traits jointly influence the attribution process. The results of Experiment 3 demonstrated the concurrent influence of traits, motives, situation and behavior on trait and motive attributions. Implications for future attribution research are discussed.</p>

Problems in hydraulic systems associated with hydraulic fluids are an important area of research. Time has proven that contamination control in hydraulic and lubricating systems are fundamental to reliability and performance. Contamination control is needed to guarantee the quality of the oil and machine reliability. Among the several condition monitoring techniques, oil and wear analysis are the most effective for contamination control in hydraulic equipment. An emerging maintenance philosophy is oil condition based maintenance, in which the active monitoring of oil parameters determines the machine health and the variable service intervals. This new maintenance philosophy requires sensor technology able to provide real time indicators of the status of the system.Nowadays, oil condition monitoring sensors are not a mature technology and their performance has not been widely assessed under controlled experimental conditions. This research explains the physical fundamentals of commercially available sensors and it discusses and evaluates their effectiveness under controlled experimental conditions.Tribology tests were performed for sliding contacts as they are the most predominant type of contacts within hydraulic systems. Results reveal that several characteristics of the sensors must be improved for a more meaningful output and for an earlier detection of abnormal trends which are typical indicators of the onset of faults.Finally, of all the future trends of oil condition monitoring sensors, the novel methodology to calculate the particle size distribution from ferrous debris density measurements is the most useful and important contribution to knowledge of this research. The proposed method when compared to current technology would bring a new type of particle counter that could break the technological size limitation of particle counters based on magnetometry (the most extended type in industrial and military machinery), leading to earlier fault detection. Improvements of this methodology would allow further development of low cost particle counters in the micrometer and submicrometer range which can be widely applied in many industrial processes and scientific disciplines.

No description available.

We present the serendipitous discovery of a projected pair of quasi-stellar objects (QSOs) with an angular separation of Delta theta = 4.50 arcsec. The redshifts of the two QSOs are widely different: one, our program target, is a QSO with a spectrum consistent with being a narrow line Seyfert 1 active galactic nucleus at z = 2.05. For this target we detect Ly alpha, C IV, and C III]. The other QSO, which by chance was included on the spectroscopic slit, is a Type 1 QSO at a redshift of z = 1.68, for which we detect C IV, CIII], and Mg II. We compare this system to previously detected projected QSO pairs and find that only about a dozen previously known pairs have smaller angular separation.