Description: Retail geography is an expanding field that is becoming increasingly important within academia, the business environment, and the national and global economy. The focus of this study is to provide insight and additional understanding of the site selection processes employed by Wal-Mart in the United States. The research studies Wal-Mart from a national perspective and investigates the patterns of retail store expansion across the United States from 1990 to 2005. The study employs the use of a continuous Poisson model to check for significant clustering, and a single and multiple correlation analysis to identify the types of relationships that exist between retail stores and location. The results of the study make apparent several distinct patterns of retail store dispersion within the United States between the years 1990 to 2005.

Description: This qualitative study explored Facebook as a communication tool for student affairs and compared it as a source with other communication modalities to describe the 18-24 year old student preference on receiving information about student affairs departments and activities. The research questions were designed to provide feedback on the current purpose[s] of student use of Facebook for student affairs services as well as reporting additional services and activities that would be considered through the use of Facebook. Differences in use among institutional types were also explored. The results of 395 online survey responses were compared to focus groups consisting of student ambassadors at a two-year public, four-year private, and four-year public institution. The online survey participants were asked to respond to specific modes of communication based upon each service or activity. The focus groups were asked the same questions in an open-ended format and the results were compared to the online results. The results indicate that depending on the event or activity, the students preferred a different method of communication, not necessarily Facebook for information on student affairs programming. These results also differed among institutional types. Two-year institutions have the greatest potential to increase their presence on Facebook. One theme ...

Description: Location-based services (LBS) are available on a variety of mobile platforms like cell phones, PDA's, etc. and an increasing number of users subscribe to and use these services. Two of the popular models of information flow in LBS are the client-server model and the peer-to-peer model, in both of which, existing approaches do not always provide privacy for all parties concerned. In this work, I study the feasibility of applying cryptographic protocols to design privacy-preserving solutions for LBS from an experimental and theoretical standpoint. In the client-server model, I construct a two-phase framework for processing nearest neighbor queries using combinations of cryptographic protocols such as oblivious transfer and private information retrieval. In the peer-to-peer model, I present privacy preserving solutions for processing group nearest neighbor queries in the semi-honest and dishonest adversarial models. I apply concepts from secure multi-party computation to realize our constructions and also leverage the capabilities of trusted computing technology, specifically TPM chips. My solution for the dishonest adversarial model is also of independent cryptographic interest. I prove my constructions secure under standard cryptographic assumptions and design experiments for testing the feasibility or practicability of our constructions and benchmark key operations. My experiments show that the proposed ...

Description: This study explores the research productivity of Addis Ababa University (AAU) faculty. AAU was established in 1950 and is the oldest modern higher educational institution in Ethiopia. Recently AAU took steps to transform itself to become a pre-eminent African research university. One of the characteristics of a research university is the focus on the amount of research conducted by the institution's faculty. Academic institutions measure research productivity primarily based on published work. The purpose of this study was to analyze the research productivity of AAU faculty, and to examine the differential predictive effects of individual and environmental variables on faculty research productivity. This quantitative study used a theoretical framework and instrument, Faculty at Work. Four hundred questionnaires were distributed to Addis AAU faculty in person and 298 questionnaires were returned resulting in a 74.5% response rate. After exclusion of 12 cases with missing information, 286 cases (71.5% response rate) were analyzed. Most of the respondents were men (M = 92.1%, F = 7.9%). The average age of AAU faculty was 44. A hierarchical multiple regression was used to examine the ability of six sets of independent variables (sociodemographic, career, self-knowledge, social knowledge, behavior, and environmental response) to predict research productivity ...

Description: The issue of religion and its place in society has been a topic of controversy and debate since long before the creation of our constitutional republic. The relationship between religion and government has witnessed some of its most intense conflicts when the governmental entity in question involves public education. As our country moved into the 20th century, legal challenges in the field of public education began to emerge calling into question the constitutionality of various policies and practices at both the state and local levels. This dissertation examined the legal methodology that was initially developed and then subsequently modified as the judicial branch has interpreted how the Establishment Clause delineates the relationship between religion and public education. Because the United States Supreme Court has not overturned its decision in Lemon v. Kurtzman, the tri-partite test it established still remains the law of the land. Subsequent decisions by the Court leading up to their ruling in Mitchell v. Helms, however, have continued to modify the judiciary's approach toward the use of the Lemon test in Establishment Clause jurisprudence. This research analyzed the decisions of the various federal courts subsequent to the ruling issued in Mitchell to discern both the present position ...