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Queensland and much of eastern Australia have had significant rainfall declines since ~1951, causing economic hardship on rural and urban communities. However, no significant attempt has been made to identify and understand the physical causes of the rainfall declines over southeast Queensland (SE QLD) and whether they are likely to continue into the 21st century under higher levels of global warming.In this research, climate observations, models and global climate data as well as palaeoclimate information are used to investigate past, present and future rainfall trends in SE QLD. Five global climate models (GCMs) from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report (IPCC–AR4) show a significant decrease in rainfall will occur over the SE QLD region during the 21st century. Observations since ~1951 show the mean sea level pressure (MSLP) has been increasing over much of Queensland, indicating the subtropical ridge has been expanding. This study attributes the increase in the MSLP and some of the rainfall decline to changes in the subtropical ridge and the Southern Annular Mode (SAM). Projections show increases in the MSLP over the region are likely to continue during the 21st century associated with the positive polarity of SAM. Land cover changes over SE QLD were investigated using a regional climate model and show rainfall decreases with higher surface albedo values. Finally, a palaeoenvironmental record developed using lake sediments from Lake Broadwater in SE QLD, indicates a gradual rainfall decline has occurred during the last ~3.2 kyr B.P. Hence SE QLD has undergone a slow rainfall decline since the late Holocene and also since ~1951, with these conditions likely to continue and intensify during the 21st century.

Cette étude tente d’améliorer le modèle standard de prévision de l’indice de volatilité VIX à l’aide du Search Volume Index (SVI) rapporté par Google Trends à l’échelle journalière. La volatilité des marchés étant basée sur la peur et la recherche de gains économiques des agents de marché, Google Trends permet un accès direct et virtuellement immédiat aux désirs et aux inquiétudes de ceux-ci. Durant la période de janvier 2010 à décembre 2016, les séries de 15 termes de recherche liés à l’économie sont utilisées pour tenter d’améliorer les modèles ARIMA et SARIMA recommandés dans la prévision du VIX. Contrairement aux études similaires effectuées à l’échelle hebdomadaire, les résultats démontrent qu’il n’y a pas d’amélioration des prévisions causée par l’addition des données Google Trends aux modèles.

Class of 2006 Abstract / Objectives: To gain insight into current trends in pharmacy employment directly after graduation in the areas of community, hospital, pharmacy practice residencies and to relate those findings to environmental factors within the field. Methods: An exit survey was distributed to fourth-year students at The University of Arizona College of Pharmacy (UACOP) in the spring prior to graduation during the years 1993 to 2005. Among other items, the survey inquired about each student’s initial job selection. Group I consisted of data from the graduates of 1993-1995, Group II contained graduates from 1996-2000, and Group III included data from students during the years 2001-2005. The groups were compared using the chi-square method. Results: Data were collected from a total of 688 graduating students over the thirteen year period. Groups were assigned based upon the year of graduation. The largest reported difference between the groups was the percentage of students pursuing community practice, increasing from 25% to 51.8% between the groups, respectively (p <0.0001). Additionally, a significant reduction in percentage of students pursuing residency training was also noted, decreasing between Group I (36.2%) and Group III (23.7%), with p = 0.006. There were no significant changes in the percentage of students taking hospital positions throughout the study duration. Conclusions: Over the last 13 years, the percentage of students from The University of Arizona College of Pharmacy that choose community pharmacy as their initial employment is increasing. The percentage of students starting out in hospital pharmacy has remained relatively stable, while the fraction of students choosing to pursue residency training is declining. This trend may be influenced by a variety of factors, including increased salaries in community pharmacy, more openings in the retail practice area, and increased competition for residency positions.

South African criminology's structural aetiology is in crisis. This dissertation offers a novel account of the nature, origin, severity, implications, and possibilities of that crisis. It suggests that, rather than a normative problem, it should be understood as an empirical one, related to the challenge of crime prevalence measurement. The question of crime prevalence patterns and trends has mistakenly been treated as trivial. This dissertation conducts meta-theoretical and historical analyses to reveal a fundamental criminological quandary: making defensible and testable claims about aggregate crime prevalence patterns and trends is at once both indispensable and impossible. This dilemma is in some respects inherent to the task of primary criminology, but its origin and manifestation are also uniquely crippling and revealing in the South African context. The aetiological crisis is more severe, more fundamental, and more complex than previously thought. In demonstration of this, this dissertation seeks to establish, as defensibly as possible, just one observation about long-term South African crime prevalence trends that would seem to require explanatory effort. It collects official South African police murder statistics over the longest-possible time frame and at the lowest-possible level of aggregation and combines them with census data using Geographic Information System technology. The result is by far the most extensive and defensible possible description of South African long-term crime prevalence patterns and trends. It shows a large, unprecedented, widespread murder rate decrease from 1994 to 2011. This poses problems for existing theory and reveals the discipline's failure to even identify that which is relatively unequivocal and requires explanation. This dissertation concludes that there is an unidentified void at what should be the empirical heart of South African criminology. There is much to gain in engaging head-on the question of how to go about systematic empirical observation in the context of profound ambiguity about the meaning and measure of crime.

When looking back through the last eighty years, one thing is certain: the socio-political climate has changed dramatically. From the beginning of the 20th century where racism and sexism was rampant to the beginning of the 21st century where equal rights and acceptance of all is becoming the norm, the climate has flipped throughout the last one hundred years. The question to then ask is how does the climate impact literature, specifically children’s literature. Research shows that children’s literature is impacted, but research does not describe how it is impacted. This thesis will work to qualify the quantitative research by explaining how the socio-political climate impacts children’s literature. By looking at three texts over the past eighty years, the qualitative analysis shows how children’s literature is impacted by the socio-political climate. The three texts that will be analyzed are And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street by Dr. Seuss (1937), Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak (1963), and Ada Twist, Scientist by Andrea Beaty (2016).

This purpose of this report is to gain insight into the current training trends for training new operations personnel within the oil and gas and petrochemical industries in the United States. Companies in these industries face an increasing number of training challenges presented by an array of factors including: regulatory compliance mandates, an aging workforce, training costs and the need to maintain or improve production rates while decreasing safety and environmental incidents. In response to these challenges Learning and Development (L&D) leaders and practitioners in these industries must provide sound instructional strategies that meet the learning needs of their employees while meeting the requirements of their employers and regulatory requirements. This report focuses on the design and delivery tools and methods, the training management tools, and the challenges faced by training professionals in this industry, including the gaps and areas of greatest training concern. The study also investigates the future plans to accommodate training methods and tools used to address younger employees. / text

The theoretical part of the work deals with education as such, it builds people's adult education and result in trends of management's education, both from a time past and present. The practical part deals with the comparison of the three schools on the basis of the qualitative description, analysis, comparison and synthesis. The result of the work is answer questions whether the school places equal emphasis on the same articles and where the contents of these articles on individual schools agree. It also includes recommendations for how to analyze, to achieve more meaningful capabilities.

Since 1950 Guilford promoted creativity research, the quality and quantity of creativity studies have increased substantially. Several programs have been designed for such purpose worldwide. The competitiveness of nations assesses innovation status among different countries as well. However, no study aims to analyze the recent research trends in creativity academic journal since 2000; therefore, this study analyzed three major creativity journals from 2000 to 2011 using the content analysis. This study employed Mayer (1999)¡¦s approach, and integrated the Runco (2004)¡¦s research topics for coding foundation. The uniqueness of this study was to provide the research trend from 760 creativity research literature in the past 11 years, and directions for future development. Results showed that the first three research approaches adopted were psychometric, experimental and contextual approach respectively. As for research topics, most of the articles elaborated on cognitive process, and then on personality. After 2006, however, the topics of personality shifted to education. The participants were mainly from higher education stage but rarely from preschool or retirees. Regarding international comparisons, the USA was the major output country. The rank of publish number in different countries was correlated with the rank of the innovation scores in the Global Competitiveness Report (GCR) of World Economic Forum (WEF). More journals and further investigations are needed for future studies. And also develop the creativity research area in different methodology and cultural system.

Objective: To estimate the associations between measures of religiousness and depression and to determine if these associations have changed over the period 1952 to 1992. Methods: Data were drawn from 2,398 individuals from the 1952 and 1992 cross sectional surveys of the Stirling County Study as a means of studying time trends. For this thesis, questions about frequency of religious worship attendance, frequency of saying grace, religious importance were employed to develop a scale of secularism. The individual questions and the scale were analyzed in terms of the prevalence of depression at each time point. Logistic regression was used to determine associations of depression with religion variables, adjusted for demographic and other covariates. Results: Individuals who attended religious services weekly were over two times less likely to meet criteria for depression than infrequent attenders and this relationship did not change over time. Associations between religious attendance and depression were stronger among women and the medically healthy compared to men and those with a medical condition. Being more secular was associated with higher odds of depression among females. Conclusions: Religious attendance has consistently been associated with lower depression over a forty year period, irrespective of marked declines in population-level religious behaviors. Associations between religiousness and depression may be stronger in females than in males.