This text examines the sovereignty concept in Sayyid Qutb´s final book Milelstones, with a focus on the political and non-political aspects of the concept. The analysis also examines potentially radical and extreme aspects in the concept. The findings show that Qutb´s sovereignty concept is a practical theology focused on what God´s sovereignty means for Muslims in belief and practice. God´s sovereignty is an encompassing concept to Qutb, which means that His exclusive right to sovereignty should permeate through the souls of Muslims and guide their actions in all spheres of life, including in politics. In a concrete form, this means that God´s law and principles should be implemented. Qutb´s sovereignty concept is not extreme, but radical because it challenges established secular orders and the hegemonic assumption in modern discourses that human beings have a right to sovereignty.

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston University

El Salvador has a large population of children living in orphanages where, as predictions from previous research indicate, many will not meet developmental milestones that could be remediated with research and development. The purpose of this study was to determine milestone achievement and environmental impact among Salvadorian orphans at selected sites, in order to make recommendations for appropriate training materials to allow for the mentoring of caregivers to advance milestone achievement among the orphans. The five objectives addressed in the research are in context of two investigator selected orphanages in El Salvador: 1. Determine the current level of development of orphans using the Battelle Developmental Inventory Screening Test. 2. Determine characteristics of caregivers who have frequent interactions with the orphans. 3. Determine areas of strength and deficiency among the orphans with respect to Personal-Social, Adaptive, Motor, Communications, and Cognition. 4. Determine the level of association between selected characteristics of orphans with developmental milestone achievement. 5. Develop a model caregiver-training program for implementation at the two selected orphanages based on investigator-derived characteristics and related findings. Screening Tool strengths and deficiencies were identified among the orphans with respect to Personal-Social, Adaptive, Motor, Communications, and Cognition. The Batelle Developmental Inventory Screening Tool in Spanish was completed on 34 qualifying children at Hogar Immaculado Corazon de Maria orphanage and an additional ten screening tools were completed on qualifying children at Casa de Mi Padre. Statistical analyses determined the level of association between selected characteristics of orphans with developmental milestone achievement. Using findings from this initial phase, a model caregiver-training program was developed and implemented at the two selected orphanages based on investigator-derived characteristics and related findings. Conclusions from the study and recommendations were developed from the findings. The level of achievement of developmental milestones among the selected orphans was below the expected level for their chronological age. The caregivers employed by the two orphanages were a diverse group of individuals from a variety of backgrounds. The majority of them described themselves as not having formal education in child development. The strong interest they demonstrated during the training program indicated an eagerness and willingness to learn. The areas of greatest deficiency were communication and cognitive scores. The areas of relative strength were Adaptive and Motor skills. There were few statistically significant relationships between the selected independent variables and the scores on the screening tool with the exception of association between motor scores and both the child?s nutritional status and the number of months they have spent in the orphanage. Months spent in the orphanage also show some evidence of association with communication scores, but not statistically significant. The model intervention program was successfully implemented and should be part of an on-going training program. Future research should replicate this study in similar setting and provide additional probes with a larger sample to substantiate these finding and more in depth understanding for enhancement of both theory and practice. / Ph. D.

Parents of children with developmental disabilities seek out therapy in order to assist their child to reach full potential. In order to help parents understand where their child should be in comparison to a typically developing child, they must be provided with proper resources. While commercially available assessments are available to speech-language pathologists, parents only have access to checklists that provide minimal direction at certain age ranges. The purpose of this literature review is to discuss developmental domains important for the developing child, examine developmental milestone checklists available to parents as well as two commercially available assessments for speech-language pathologists, investigate available research on developmental milestones in the areas of language output, language comprehension, cognition, social-emotional skills, and motor development, and identify ages at which developmental milestones within the identified domains occur in typically developing children. The aim of this project will be to create developmental milestone checklists available for speech-language pathologists to provide to parents. / text

No description available.

No description available.

The present study attempts to determine the specific interrelationship between a child’s intentional communicative act rate, maternal responsiveness and child temperament to help give further insight into the nature of the interaction. This present study also aims to determine the unique contributions of a child’s communicative act rate, parental responsiveness, and child temperament to a child’s later vocabulary size. Given the growing evidence that a child’s use of communicative acts has an effect on the rate of adult responses (Vallotton, 2009; Tamis-LeMonda et al., 2001) we predict that there will be a positive reciprocal relationship between a child’s communicative act rate at 7, 10, 13, and 20 months and the rate of parental responsiveness to the communicative act. The researchers also propose that individuals who are considered temperamentally difficult will exhibit slower language development than those with easy temperaments. As far as the unique contributions of the 3 areas to children’s vocabulary size, this particular research question is incomparable to any other in that it seeks to decipher the unique contributions of each. Twenty-two participants were selected from a larger sample of 70 children who were part of a previous study, which connected temperament and language acquisition at 7, 10, 13, and 20 months. To measure vocabulary, the MacArthur Communication Development Inventory: Sounds and Gestures was administered to the subjects of this study. The mothers were asked to complete the MCDI and to report about their children’s vocabulary comprehension at 7, 10, 13, and 20 months and production at 10, 13, 20 months. To measure a child’s communicative act rate, video samples were gathered from 22 mother and child pairs during play and book-reading at each of the four ages during a play and a book-reading activity as part of their original study. Individual sample times were used to calculate rates of communicative acts and canonical vocalizations. Each potential communicative act received codes to indicate: the means of communication, direction of the behavior toward the caregiver, and the purpose of communicative act. Each maternal response was coded using the following operational definitions: on-topic response, off- topic response (with or without linguistic mapping), and no response. According to our findings, child communicative act at 10 months is correlated to vocabulary production totals at 13 and 20 months. In addition, a child’s communicative act rate is highly correlated with parental linguistic mapping at 10 months. Parental responsiveness, defined as on topic linguistic mapping, was found to be positively correlated with a child’s word production totals at 13 and 20 months. Our findings support previous research examining parental responsiveness and child communicative act rate and their relationship to a child’s later vocabulary. The results of this study also determined that temperament did not correlate with a child’s prelinguistic communicative act rate, parental responsiveness, or later child vocabulary comprehension or production at the first linguistic stage (13 and 20 months). Results from previous studies have indicated a relationship between temperament and the aforementioned variables; however, our findings negate these earlier findings.

No description available.

No description available.

ABB Power Grids Grid Integration, PGGI, deliver substations to external customers, the performed work is done in project form and all the projects are being tracked by several Key Performance Indicators, KPI. In this Thesis work one KPI will be investigated, which is OTD. The OTD is in form of 17 standardized milestones that are set from ABB to support the PGGI-project’s on-time-delivery. The problem that shall be investigated is the downward trend discovered regarding the OTD for the 17 milestones. This downward trend means that the PGGI-project’s ability to deliver on time is decreasing. To take on the problem a status analysis to achieve a picture of the current situation regarding the 17 milestones was done, the current situation is called As-Is. An analyze of the targeted situation regarding the milestones was also performed, which is called To-Be. When these two were made an analysis between them was also done. The result from this was that a gap between the As-Is and the To-Be situation exists. The reasons for this gap are; deficiencies in knowledge and lack of understanding regarding OTD, reporting, and unreliable data regarding the 17 milestones. Thereafter a roadmap was developed to suggest how the notified gap between As-Is and To-Be situation can be reduced and possibly be eliminated. This roadmap contains 7 improvement suggestion and an implementation plan for how some of the suggestions is recommended to be managed. This goes out to the company to perspicuous illustrate the shown gap and how to minimize it. Lean philosophy and Statistical Process Control laid as foundation for the developed improvement suggestions. An implementation of the roadmap as a template for the improvement suggestions that were developed are therefore suggested as further work. / ABB Power Grids Grid Integration, PGGI, levererar transformatorstationer till externa kunder, arbetet som utförs är i projektform. Alla projekt följs upp via nyckeltal, nyckeltalet OTD som ska undersökas i detta examensarbete är i form av 17 stycken standardiserade milstolpar satta från ABB för att stötta PGGI-projektens leveranssäkerhet. Problemet som ska redas ut är den nedåtgående trenden som upptäckts i leveranssäkerheten hos de 17 milstolparna. För att ta an detta gjordes en nulägesbeskrivning samt en börlägesbeskrivning, detta visade ett gap i arbetssättet gällande de 17 milstolparna. En analys av gapet mellan nuläge och börläge genomfördes, i analysen upptäcktes brister i kunskap, förståelse, rapportering samt opålitlig data gällande de 17 milstolparna. Därefter utvecklades en plan för att föreslå hur gapet mellan börläge och nuläge ska minska för att sedan elimineras. Lean filosofi, Lean verktyg samt Statistisk Process Styrning låg som grund för de framtagna förbättringsförslagen. Den framtagna planen är tänkt att användas som grund för vidare arbete med förbättringsförslagen som tagits fram.