Interested in nurturing beauty, I create paintings that reference life processes through layers of struggle, discovery, recovery and generation. Employing a metaphor of the garden, my paintings can be seen as spaces where I determine what grows, stays, is mulched, or weeded out. I seek a balance between coexisting desires of restraint and control and extravagance with a sense of coming unbound. I emphasize the painting field as a whole, while also paying deep attention to the minute, inviting the viewer to discover complex worlds at different scales within each environment I create. My intimate, domesticated painted environments offer the viewer the possibility to experience the spaces I find beautiful and to add to the conversation of where beauty resides today in contemporary art. / by Kim Spivey. / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2011. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2011. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Here, the natural world is consumed - a physical reality and an internal one. It is walled, but roofless - a contained space. Elements are absorbed, same energies interacting within us that work around us - the natural forces of gravitation and electromagnetism, fire and water, growth, and time. Fundamental interactions in nature, forces that hold the universe together are treated as symbolic of the human experience. The sense of rooflessness is an essential theme to my thesis. There is a constant return to the sky. The shifting clouds, the stages of the sun and the moon mimic a traveling through time, a constant change. There is a given feeling of freedom and confinement. There is a vulnerability, a destitution, and a lack of shelter. The open sky, always out of reach, is a tease to be free. Though it also hints at a feeling of oneness, a symbolic relation between the divine and the human. The open, uninterrupted path for direct prayer. Roofless indicates a continuous linkage between the ground and the sky, between rain and dirt, between nature and humankind. . / by Sahar Rehman. / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2011. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2011. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Dans cet article, nous présentons une approche générale pour construire des catégories de motifs et établissons une partie du formalisme des six foncteurs pour ces catégories. Dans le cas de la cohomologie MW-motivique, nous prouvons le th'eorème des fibrés quaternioniques et construisons un triangle de Gysin. Ceci nous permet de définir des classes de Pontryagin sur les anneaux de Chow-Witt pour des fibrés symplectiques. Appliquant ces outils, nous calculons le groupe des morphismes entre schémas lisses et propres dans la catégorie des MW-motifs (effectifs). / In this thesis, we present a general framework to construct categories of motives and build part of the six operations formalism for these categories. In the case of MW-motivic cohomology, we prove the quaternionic projective bundle theorem and construct a Gysin triangle, which enable us to define Pontryagin classes on Chow-Witt rings for symplectic bundles. Applying these tools together, we compute the group of morphisms between smooth proper schemes in the category of (effective) MW-motives.

Objective: The current study aimed to explore associations between hypomanic personality traits, over-ambitious life goals, exercise motives, behavioural regulation and exercise behaviour. It was hypothesised that hypomanic traits would be significantly associated with setting more overly-ambitious life goals and extrinsic motives for exercise; these were derived from the theoretical perspectives of Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan, 2000) and research into goal dysregulation in Bipolar Disorders (Johnson, 2005). Method: A sample of 165 undergraduate students (83% female [n = 133]; age, M = 19.3 years old, SD = 0.4, range 18-40) was recruited from the University of Exeter to take part in this longitudinal study. Participants completed a selection of self-report questionnaires measuring variables including hypomanic personality traits, over-ambitious goal setting, motives for exercise, behavioural regulation and exercise behaviour via an online survey. Exercise behaviour was then captured a week later in a follow-up survey. Results: Mediation analyses revealed an indirect effect of hypomanic traits on exercise motives via overly-ambitious goal setting. No significant relationships were found between hypomanic traits and exercise behaviour itself and further mediation analyses revealed no effect of exercise motives on exercise behaviour through behavioural regulations. Conclusions: Findings from this study provided mixed support for the proposed hypotheses; despite no significant associations between hypomanic traits and exercise behaviour itself, hypomanic traits appear to make a unique contribution to exercise motives, via over-ambitious goal setting. Therefore, they may play a role in the motivational processes that have consistently shown to be associated with exercise engagement and adherence (Ingledew & Markland, 2008, Teixeira et al., 2012). Exploring these variables within a clinical population may be a useful next step in further understanding these motivational processes.

The theme of this diploma thesis is mergers and acquisitions. The theoretical part is given the nature of mergers and acquisitions, their historical development with examples of recent mergers and acquisitions in the Czech Republic and in foreign countries. Thesis also includes a list of motives that lead companies to cross-linking. In the end of theoretical part the procedure followed by limited companies that decide to merge is described. In the practical part is simulated the real merger of two existing limited companies which precedes the description of the business sector of both participating companies and their main motives of merger. The core of the practical part consists in the preparation of draft documents - Project of merger and Agreement of merge. The estimation of property trend, its sources and economic profit.

The purpose of this study was to examine the construct validation of an instrument based on students university choice and their perceptions of professor effectiveness and academic reputation at the University of Los Andes (ULA). Moreover, a comparative analysis was carried out to determine how the selected factors that influence the students decisions and perceptions differ according to student demographic factors such as: gender and university campus. This instrument was developed with items based on the three domains formulated: university choice process, professor effectiveness, and university academic reputation. To determine the instruments appropriateness to measure the students decisions in university choice process and their perceptions about professor effectiveness and university academic reputation at the ULA, this research examined the reliability of scores by domains and factors across domains. The participants were undergraduate students who were registered in the second semester of 2002 and enrolled in the different courses by college within the ULAs main campus, which consists of ten colleges throughout the city of Merida, and within the other two university branch campuses in Tachira and Trujillo. For purposes of this research, a stratified probability sample was used to select the participants. The data show that the instrument designed has adequate internal consistency reliability estimates (all the domains exceeded .70). The confirmatory factor analysis shows that the overall fit indices revealed values at or close to the acceptable range .90, even when the model has statistically significant chi-square and demonstrates significant problems with some of the standardized residuals, which indicates that the fit of the model could possibly be significantly improved. The modified model revealed a relatively small improvement in the overall goodness of fit. These results provide supportive evidence of construct validity. Finally, the multivariate analyses of variance using gender and university campus as the predictor variables revealed a nonsignificant gender effect and a significant university campus effect, respectively. The Tukey multiple comparison test used to determine university campus differences across the domains showed approximately similar results, although they are separate and distinguishable. ULA-Merida established the highest mean scores when they are compared on the factors that influence their decisions in university choice process and their perceptions about professor effectiveness and university academic reputation, and the campus 1 (NURR-Trujillo) show the smaller mean scores.

Volunteer organizations face two challenges not found in non-volunteer organizations: recruiting and retaining volunteers. While social media use is increasing amongst individuals, its use and effectiveness for volunteer recruitment and retention by volunteer organizations is unknown. The dissertation reports the results of three studies to investigate this important question. Using a mixed-methods approach, it addressed the dual nature of social media and its effectiveness by including volunteer organizations and social media users. This dissertation found that although volunteer organizations are not using social media effectively, they could virtualize requirements of the recruitment process by focusing on relatable events instead of sterile marketing. This dissertation contributes to information systems literature by extending the post-acceptance model of IS continuance to show that social media mediates volunteer continuance. It further contributes by revealing a potential new area of research, i.e., the use and effectiveness of online social media for volunteer organizations.

<p>This thesis is mainly based on an extensive literature review and statistic analysis. The purpose is to find out the motives and effects of four different options in both literature and empirical study and then answer research questions. The four options are in house production, off-shoring, domestic outsourcing and international outsourcing.</p><p>After the explanation of four options’ definitions, literature review will discuss most common motives and effects of outsourcing from many articles. The theory basis, such as transaction cost, resource based view, industrial view and their influence on the outsourcing will be mentioned to help reader to understand outsourcing.</p><p>In empirical study, four options model and two questions (in house/outsourcing, domestic/off-shoring) from survey are used to classify Swedish companies into four groups which stand for four options. The statistics analysis results are from SPSS's ANOVA and Scheffe.</p><p>According to the results, important motives of Swedish companies are “cost reduction”, “investment reduction”, “fixed cost”, and “accessing to core competence”. They are a little different from the literature review. And most effects of four options are positive, only “lead time” and “delivery time” is significant between “in house production” and “off-shoring” options.</p>

<p>The formation of sovereign states in regional blocks has become an essential feature in the world system. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to investigate which motives and driving forces that affect the creation of projects of regional integration outside Europe and the Western World. By choosing the Latin American project of integration ALBA (<em>the Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas</em>) as a case of regional integration outside Europe and the Western World, the study investigates the motives expressed by the most prominent actors of the project, Venezuela and Cuba. ALBA is chosen as a representative and a unique case and through the consumption of the gramscian and the realist approaches, the essay defines two motives that affect the creation of projects of regional integration. As a way of investigating the actors’ motives, the paper studies political statements, especially those of the Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, and official positions expressed in central documents and declarations. The result shows that the motives behind ALBA are to promote a regionalism that gives priority to social welfare issues and to use this regional organization to create a multipolar world system. The essay concludes, with ALBA as a case, that the fundamental motives that could govern the regional integration process outside Europe and the Western World are, firstly, the will to resist a hegemonic world order that doesn’t give priority to social welfare issues and, secondly, to resist a unipolar world system and work as a “balancer”. While this applies to Venezuela, there are in the case of Cuba certain self-interests that could serve as motives. However, the study can’t rule out that also other motives can exist, but there is no evidence that can be used to prove that in this paper.</p>

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