The continuing difficulty of integrating immigrants, especially Muslims, has led many European political leaders to question the merits of multiculturalism and to promote more commitment towards national values and social cohesion. This thesis aims to examine how these national discourses are interconnected and why they have an exclusionary character. Starting from this point, I draw on a theoretical approach based on a model of mediatised convergence in the European public sphere. Secondly, I reconstruct through a critical discourse analysis, the national debates that have emerged across Europe. I then identify commonalities, by looking into the strategies through which these discourses are articulated. Thirdly, I investigate through content analysis, how press coverage has amplified and reinforced this debate. The cross-national comparison demonstrates a shared concern for how multicultural policies have passively tolerated and encouraged Muslim immigrants to live in self-segregated and isolated communities. This nexus between securitisation and multiculturalism targets first and second generation of Muslims who are assumed, because of their religious and cultural identity, to have authoritarian customs and illiberal values. Conversely, embracing those secular and liberal values that characterise the European ethos is exemplified as the best practice to deal with a correct and safe integration. However, this strategy to reduce integration towards a process of assimilation to majority norms and values risks creating further exclusion, rather than enhancing social cohesion and political belonging. The analysis of national press coverage confirms a shared way of thinking and talking about integration. Despite the political specificity of each national debate, simultaneous coverage across Europe develops reciprocal discursive references on how to achieve community cohesion and manage the migration of Muslims. It can be claimed, therefore, that the more discourses converge across national public spheres, the more they are perceived as stable and consensual. Hence, convergence is a crucial factor to be considered because it allows us to define the boundaries of the European public sphere. However, the study of this transnational debate is crucial not only for scholars of media and communication, but also of European policies and immigration, as this debate involves a larger discussion on how to manage the complexity of relationships between immigrant minorities and the majority in Europe.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Mathematics / Ivan Blank / We study the obstacle problem with an elliptic operator in nondivergence form with principal coefficients in VMO. We develop all of the basic theory of existence, uniqueness, optimal regularity, and nondegeneracy of the solutions. These results, in turn, allow us to begin the study of the regularity of the free boundary, and we show existence of blowup limits, a basic measure stability result, and a measure-theoretic version of the Caffarelli alternative proven in Caffarelli's 1977 paper ``The regularity of free boundaries in higher dimensions." Finally, we show that blowup limits are in general not unique at free boundary points.

Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1964 H34 / Master of Science

In this paper the relation between managerial ownership and conservatism is examined. Managerial ownership decreases agency problems caused by the separation of ownership and control. Managerial ownership increases the time horizon of managers and decreases expropriating behaviour. Conservatism is hypothesized to have the same effect on managers due to the asymmetric timeliness of earnings. This suggest that in firms with lower managerial ownership a demand for conservatism arises to substitute for the alignment function of managerial ownership. This paper test this with two approaches. The first replicates the methodology of previous literature. The findings provide no evidence for substitution between managerial ownership and conservatism. Because the estimators of the first methodology are biased a second method is used applying fixed effects. Consistent with the first approach no supporting evidence is found. However, it finds that firms in the sample have conservative accounting. The main implication of this paper is that rewarding managers with shares is not decreasing their conservative behaviour.

Master of Science / Department of Family Studies and Human Services / Sandra Stith / The Rutgers Alcohol Problem Index (RAPI) is a well-known instrument used as a primary outcome measure in intervention studies with college students. It has been used in studies assessing the developmental trajectory of high-risk drinking and also used in studies which address the predictors of alcohol-related problems among college students (Carey & Correia, 1997; Ham & Hope, 2005; Levy & Earleywine, 2003). Martens et al. (2006) found that the RAPI individual items were able to be grouped in three distinct subfactors (Abuse/Dependence, Personal Consequences, and Social Consequences). The objective of this study was to examine the relationship between various mental health problems (depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, physical abuse victimization, physical abuse perpetration, sexual coercion victimization, sexual coercion perpetration, and self-esteem) and the three subscales of the RAPI. It was anticipated that the mental health problems explain more of the variance on Abuse/Dependence than on Personal or Social Consequences. Results indicated that even though mental health problems explain more of the variance on Abuse/Dependence than on Personal or Social Consequences, the difference did not appear large enough to suggest that the subfactors represent unique domains. In conclusion, it cannot be assumed that the three subfactors measure distinct and exclusive types of consequences. A student that scores high on Abuse/Dependence also may be experiencing Personal and Social Consequences.

Published Article / Children with Learning Problems (LP) differ from other children and are mostly identified in the primary grades. Factors which may influence the development of sensory products to stimulate children with LP are design factors such as illustrations, colour, themes and supporting factors which include therapeutic practices and cultural sensitivity. The previous mentioned factors may be beneficial for text enhancement and reading comprehension within books for children with Learning Disabilities (LD). It is envisaged that if design factors as well as sensory stimulants are integrated into play therapy mediums such as the Sensory Product (SP), it will be able to stimulate a child with LP through different therapeutic practices. Special needs teachers aid children with LP through intervention strategies once they are identified. Intervention strategies involve the use of instruments such as scripted and prescribed programmes (Fuchs & Fuchs, 2006), reading aloud by teachers to children (Fisher, Flood, Lapp & Frey, 2004) and one-on-one instruction as part of the three-tiered Reading to Intervention Model (RIM) (Scanlon & Sweeney, 2008). SP have the potential to assist teachers and children with LP but only if those products are appropriate for the children's developmental level (Oravec, 2000).

This study was prompted by serious problems regarding specific teaching and learning problems in calculus at the technikon. The general aims were to identify and analyze particular teaching and learning problems relating to 2nd level engineering courses in calculus and to recommend improvements which could increase student performance in engineering calculus courses. An extensive study revealed world wide concern in calculus reform. The empirical research instruments consisted of structured questionnaires given to staff and students from nine technikons plus interviews. Five serious problem areas were identified: student ability in mathematics, content difficulty, background difficulties, timetable pressures and lecturer's presentation. The impact of training technology on calculus was investigated. Recommendations were that routine exercises can be done on computer with extra tutorial time for computer laboratory projects. Background recommendations suggested that schools give more time to trigonometry and coordinate geometry and that bridging courses at technikons for weaker students be developed. / Curriculum and Instructional Studies / M. Ed. (Didactics)

Package exams provides a framework for automatic generation of simple (statistical) exams. To employ the tools, users just need to supply a pool of exercises and a master file controlling the layout of the final PDF document. The exercises are specified in separate Sweave files (containing R code for data generation and LaTeX code for problem and solution description) and the master file is a LaTeX document with some additional control commands. This paper gives an overview on the main design aims and principles as well as strategies for adaptation and extension. Hands-on illustrations - based on example exercises and control files provided in the package - are presented to get new users started easily. (author´s abstract) / Series: Research Report Series / Department of Statistics and Mathematics

In recent years, Chinese engagement with Africa has expanded dramatically but has also become increasingly diverse as a wide range of Chinese institutions and individuals have undertaken activities on the continent. This phenomenon has attracted significant interest from scholars in different disciplines; however, most of the research carried out to date has been relatively macro-level, e.g. looking into international political-economic relations between states. This thesis aims to contribute to the recently emerging research perspective that focuses on Sino-African interactions from the ground up. It is based on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork carried out mainly in two sites near Lusaka, Zambia: a Chinese state-sponsored ‘agricultural technology demonstration farm’ and a private farm that is owned and run by a Chinese family. With their respective modes of organization and operation, fieldwork in these two farms provided access to very different types of interlocutors and situations. The primary focus in the thesis, building on data from these two contrasting settings, is on everyday situational interactions within the Chinese community itself and, to a lesser extent, between Chinese migrants and their Zambian hosts. The daily patterns of interaction among the Chinese migrants illustrate the essential role that emotion plays in forming and reproducing social relations and groups. On the one hand, in the Chinese folk understanding emotions are stressed and they are seen to be more important than instrumental exchanges when it comes to achieving sustainable relationships. On the other hand, as they are embedded in everyday moral interaction and conversational situations, the empathetic realization of embedded emotions is held to encourage convivial communication and group formation. At the pragmatic level, I argue that the significant role given to emotion within the folk understanding of social life may actually hinder interaction with ‘outsiders’. This can be manifested in the form of mismatched ethical practices in the course of everyday interaction. In this particular setting, it therefore causes tension between Chinese migrants and their Zambian hosts. Theoretically, against Potter’s claim that emotion is largely irrelevant in Chinese society, I argue that emotion, with an extensive connotation, is in fact the fundamental factor in the formation and reproduction of Chinese social relations.