Today's media are a significant force in aiding individuals in constructing an understanding of their own identities and their place within the world. Therefore, closer attention should be paid to the processes by which media themselves construct those identities and make them available to audiences. This case study explores the means by which Texas Monthly magazine constructs a sense of Texan identity. Employing a media sociology perspective, the study combines three research techniques: content analysis, indepth interviews, and textual analysis. The magazine includes primarily white and wealthy individuals in its version of Texan identity, suggesting that this identity is narrowly applicable, despite the actual diversity of the state. The magazine's content does little to define, deepen, or critique that geographic identity. Furthermore, it seems difficult for the Texas Monthly staff to explain exactly the notion of Texan identity that provides a foundation for the magazine's composition, and advertisers appear to be little concerned with this concept. An examination of the magazine's coverage of President George W. Bush additionally reveals the indistinct and somewhat arbitrary nature of Texan identity within Texas Monthly, as Bush's geographic identity alters in accordance with his political status. Overall, the magazine's image of Texan identity is largely positive yet insubstantial, a surprising finding given its claim to be the "national magazine of Texas." This construction of Texan identity suggests and supports the magazine's need to preserve a positive and commercially appealing image of Texas, both for its readers and for its financial success. In constructing the magazine, then, its staff must weigh this need against the goal of journalism to provide wide-ranging and critical perspectives for audiences. The roles of both consumerism and citizenship in today's media world are clearly demonstrated in the unique position of Texas Monthly as a journalistic product / text

Thesis (B.A.(Hons.)) -- Dept. of History, University of Adelaide, 1975.

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-01

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-01

Seen from the viewpoints of politics and administration, the retirement system of civil servant is related to the overall planning and flexible utilization of human resource, the improvement of national competitiveness and the collocation of financial resource of a country; seen from the viewpoint of economy, the prosperity or depression of national economy closely affects the planning of retirement payment system; in the aspect of society, as the aged society comes earlier than expected and the social structure changes, the retirement system of civil servant is related to whether the living security and social welfare system for the aged people is sound enough. Through the proper and reasonable retirement payment, the retirement system of civil servant is intended, firstly, to motivate the civil servants to be satisfied with the job and work hard for the public; secondly, to provide a reasonable income for the civil servants and guarantee their life in the years after retirement; and thirdly, with the reasonable retirement payment mechanism and the social security mechanism of the country, to construct a complete social security system network and build a safe and peaceful society in which all people can make their own livings. The implementation of the new pension system has really improved the problems faced in the old public finance-based pension system, and has laid a solid foundation in stabilizing the source of pension fund and establishing the civil servants' concept of being prepared to burden their post-retirement life when they are on the job. However, the current retirement system was designed more than 20 years ago and some tradeoff or progressive measures were taken for the purpose of reducing the resistance in the beginning of implementation. As the age and the environment both have changed, some provisions of the pension system have been behind the time. Therefore, it is really necessary to research how to manage and operate the retirement system, think over the problems in the current retirement system of civil servant, and research how to build a better retirement fund system and balance the retirement benefits of the civil servants of different generations. In this thesis, the legal system of retirement of civil servant is the subject of research and the other related administrative legal provisions are used for explanation, and the basic theories of administrative law ¡V administrative principles, administrative organization, administrative authority, administrative remedy, and administrative supervision, are used as the research methods to review the retirement system of civil servant in Taiwan. Through the research it is found that, the average age of Taiwanese people has been higher and a lot of civil servants choose to retire earlier for they can receive monthly pension for a long time; this is likely to deteriorate the governmental finance. How to solve this problem efficiently and reasonably, relieve the accumulation of retirement cost and avoid it from being transferred to the later generations as a heavy burden, maintain the existing rights and benefits, provide a reasonable guarantee for the original expectation of civil servants and distribute the national resources reasonably? It is necessary for us to think about for planning a reasonable legal system of retirement.

As the baby boomer population continues to age, the number of older adults in the United States continues to rise as well, which has and will continue to result in an ongoing increase in the nursing home population. Challenges in nursing home care include assuring the provision of comprehensive quality care, person centered care, and continuity of care. This DNP project evaluated a comprehensive template for nurse practitioners to use when completing monthly nursing home visits that would help address these challenges. The purpose of this project was to evaluate nurse practitioner satisfaction regarding the effectiveness of the tool in assuring comprehensive, quality and patient centered care when completing monthly nursing home visits. This was accomplished via a descriptive analysis of 10 nurse practitioners providing care in nursing homes. A Likert scale questionnaire was used before and after the nurse practitioners used the tool for a period of two months. All 10 participants agreed or strongly agreed that they would recommend the tool for use by nurse practitioners when completing monthly nursing home visits. Seven of the participants agreed or strongly agreed that the tool helped improve overall quality of the visit. The results demonstrated that the monthly nursing home assessment tool was beneficial in improving the quality of the visits and that there are future implications for use of the tool by not only nurse practitioners who practice in this setting but also for nurse practitioner students and physicians.

This project accompanies a TEI transcription of Lady Blessington's Conversations with Lord Byron, currently available on the Life and Times of Lord Byron online archive. Although often cited in biographies of Lord Byron, Lady Blessington's Conversations of Lord Byron has received little critical attention. Further, the genre of Blessington's work, the conversation as a biographical form, suffers the same dearth of critical material. My aims, then, are to 1) present a brief history of the conversation as biographical form; 2) examine the publication history of the Conversations and underscore the social dimensions of its publication; and 3) evaluate Blessington's rhetorical strategies in the Conversations and to argue that Blessington's work is superior to two other accounts of Byron (by James Kennedy and Thomas Medwin) in terms of its psychological depth. / Master of Arts

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the employers¡¦ perception of monthly bonus profit sharing mechanism on the ratio of job quitting, job morale and job performance of a selected company. We set up testing hypotheses based on the selected company and collect data through questionnaire. The following three testing hypothesis are examined in the thesis. They are whether monthly bonus profit sharing mechanism can effectively decrease job quitting ratio, increase job morale and job performance. Our empirical results support employers¡¦ perception that the profit sharing mechanism is helpful to decrease job quitting ratio as well as to increase job morale and performance.

The purpose of this study was to determine the degree of relationship between selected socio-economic factors and the average monthly unpaid credit card balance subject to a finance charge. The socio-economic factors chosen were: 1) family and per capita income; 2) education of husband; 3) education of wife; 4) gainful employment of wife; 5) amount of savings; and 6) number of children. The sample consisted of 80 couples, married in the year 1971, currently residing in the Logan, Utah, area. A questionnaire was used to measure the six variables. The statistical tests used were the chi square and the gamma analysis. It was found that the six variables tested had no significant relationship upon the amount of the average monthly unpaid credit card balance.

With gradually increasing interdependence of international political and economic environments, part of Asian countries' financial markets reform adopted progressive policies towards liberalization and internationalization. Therefore, the integration of international financial markets has attracted a bunch of scholars to investigate related topics of international stock market. Granger and (1993) documented that most of the economic variables have nonlinear characters. Chelley-Steeley (2004) uses smooth transition regression model to explore the financial market integration of regional and global markets among emerging and developed countries. Smooth transition regression model considered the possibility of nonlinear changes in regression parameters. This paper applies the smooth transition regression model to reinvestigate Chelley-Steeley¡¦s (2004) study of nonlinear relationship of stock markets among some East Asian countries and the United States, Japan and Germany. The main difference of our model and Chelley-Steeley¡¦ model is that we relax his constant market index correlation between two countries by allowing the autoregressive process on market index correlation. Empirical evidences of linear model, original non-linear model and our non-linear extension model show that our non-linear extension model outperformedthe other two models in terms of goodness of fit.