The purpose of this study was to assess the perception held by managers of feed and farm supply stores in Texas regarding the contribution of employee training to the competitiveness of the firm, determine if managers of feed and farm supply stores perceive that employee training can improve their competitive strength, and to determine if they will invest in employee training in order to gain a competitive advantage. The objectives of this study include: describe the operating environment of feed and farm supply stores in Texas; describe feed and farm supply store managers? perception of employee training?s contribution to their firm?s competitive advantage; identify barriers to employee training in feed and farm supply stores; determine Internet availability and potential use for employee training in feed and farm supply stores; and describe the willingness of feed and farm supply store managers to engage in employee training delivered via the Internet. This study employed a descriptive and correlational research design. A selfadministered questionnaire was used to collect data from a sample frame of 305 feed and farm supply stores randomly selected from 1,487 stores in Texas. These stores operate in a demanding, competitive environment that is changing at a rapid pace. They perceive that employee training improves customer satisfaction, contributes to business growth, improves productivity, and increases profits. The skills needed by their employees are increasing and they need training in sales, communication skills, technical knowledge, time management, retail merchandising, marketing, and business management to help the business stay competitive. Barriers to training include not being able to see immediate results, cost, difficulties created when key employees are not on the job, travel distances to attend training, and a lack of training programs relevant to their needs. Over 80 percent of these stores have both computers and Internet access. Managers will allow employees to use these resources for training purposes, encourage participation in online training, and allow their employees to participate in training during business hours. It is recommended that Internet based training programs be developed in sales, communication skills, technical knowledge, time management, retail merchandising, and business management for these small agribusinesses.

An ad hoc network is formed by a group of self-configuring nodes, typically deployed in two or three dimensional spaces, and communicating with each other through wireless or some other media. The distinct characteristics of ad hoc networks include the lack of pre-designed infrastructure, the natural correlation between the network topology and geometry, and limited communication and computation resources. These characteristics introduce new challenges and opportunities for de- signing ad hoc network applications. This dissertation studies various optimization problems in ad hoc network information retrieval and transmission. Information stored in ad hoc networks is naturally associated with its location. To effectively retrieve such information, we study two fundamental problems, range search and object locating, from a distance sensitive point of view, where the retrieval cost depends on the distance between the user and the target information. We develop a general framework that is applicable to both problems for optimizing the storage overhead while maintaining the distance sensitive retrieval requirement. In addition, we derive a lowerbound result for the object locating problem which shows that logarithmic storage overhead is asymptotically optimal to achieve linear retrieval cost for growth bounded networks. Bandwidth is a scarce resource for wireless ad hoc networks, and its proper utilization is crucial to effective information transmission. To avoid conflict of wireless transmissions, links need to be carefully scheduled to satisfy various constraints. In this part of the study, we first consider an optimization problem of end-to-end on- demand bandwidth allocation with the single transceiver constraint. We study its complexity and present a 2-approximation algorithm. We then discuss how to estimate the end-to-end throughput under a widely adopted model for radio signal interference. A method based on identifying certain clique patterns is proposed and shown to have good practical performance.

Uniqueness and complexity of military news usually enrich and enhance the significance of the news. Sometimes simple issues are even further elaborated to become negative turmoil and multiple matters. The navy, being in a rapidly changing and multiple-form society, has been expressed in different forms by media of different natures. Sometimes, the navy is even perceived with different ideologies according to descriptions of different media. Ways that the officers and men of the navy as well as the general public view the negative news of the military and the impacts are worth further attention. Hence, this research, based on applications and perspectives of the relevant mass communication theory, is performed by quantifying the questionnaires, and investigates the impact of negative news on officers and men of the navy as well as the third-person effect. In addition, the relationship between the third-person effect and supports of media control. This research has managed to derive four conclusions: The first finding is the verification of existence of ¡§the third-person effect¡¨, i.e. people generally think that the impact of negative naval news on others is greater than that of oneself. The second finding is that the greater the perception of the third-person effect by the interviewed officers and men of the navy, the greater is the willingness to be inclined to controlling the mass media so as to mitigate the negative effects of the negative news about the navy on the general public. The third important finding is that the variable, population, presents a certain degree of relevancy to the third-person effect. This result is the same as the results of other researches. With regard to the perception of the third-person effect by oneself, other officers and men and the general public, the rank, seniority, and education of the population variable present respective obvious relevancy. In particular, age level appears in the third-person effect on ¡§other officers and men¡¨ and ¡§the general public¡¨, showing that the age level has greater impact on the perception of the third-person effect by the navy officers and men. The last important finding is about the information source. Television is the main source of information for most of the navy officers and men. Internet has surpassed newspaper as the second source of information, which is slightly different when compared to the past researches. This finding is thus worth further investigation in future work.

No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2000. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 48-51). Also available on the Internet.

Reproduction de : Thèse de doctorat : Informatique : Le Mans : 2004. / Saafir = Système d'Aide à l'Appropriation de la Formation via InteRnet. Titre provenant de l'écran-titre. Bibliogr. p. 205-224.

Reproduction de : Thèse de doctorat : Informatique : Le Mans : 2006. / Titre provenant de l'écran-titre. Bibliogr. p. 280-295.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Open University. BLDSC no. DX222119.

Thesis (M.Ed.), Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2000. / Restricted until June 2001. Bibliography: leaves 113-120. Also available online.

Originally presented as the author's thesis (doctoral)--University of Gothenburg, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 123-131).