To my parents, Chongding Zhao and Fulan Yin, and my wife, Dawei. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis is dedicated to my parents, Chongdoing Zhao and Fulan Yin, and my dear wife, Dawei, for their patience and love through all these years. My parents did their best since my childhood to provide me the best educational opportunities. They have been a source of incessant support and encouragement in m...

ii Dedicated to my parents iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my sincere appreciation to my advisor Dr. Gu Guoxiang for his valuable academic suggestions and patient guidance throughout the research and preparation of this thesis. His expertise and technical advice deeply influenced me and my work recorded herein. Without his valuable suggestions and constructive direction, this thesi...

It is somewhat ironic that although youth today are saturated in media, no standardized instrument exists to measure individual differences in exposure to specific media content. Therefore, we developed and validated a scale to measure both the frequency and content of adolescents’ media exposure, which measures media exposure regardless of media channel: the Content-based Media Exposure Scale ...

the dedicated satellite mission goce will sense various small mass variations along its path around the earth. here we study the effect of the earth’s topography and atmosphere on goce data. the effects depend on the magnitude of topographic height, and they will therefore vary by region. as the effect of the atmosphere and topography must be removed from the total gravity anomaly prior to geoi...

search for the cup of jamshid from me, years my heart made. and for what it possessed, from a stranger, entreaty made. a jewel that is beyond the shell of existence and of time, from those lost on the shore of the sea, search it made. last night, i took my difficulty to the pir of the magians. who, by strengthening of sight, the solving of sublety made. him, happy, laughing, wine-goblet in hand...

in this paper we introduce and study an algebraic structure, namely grouplike. a grouplike is something between semigroup and group and its axioms are generalizations of the four group axioms. every grouplike is a semigroup containing the minimum ideal that is also a maximal subgroup (but the converse is not valid). the first idea of grouplikes comes from b-parts and $b$-addition of real number...

Previously unpublished comments on John Cooper’s paper “The Psychology of Justice in Plato” (American Philosophical Quarterly 14 (1977) 151-157). These comments were presented, as they appear here, along with Cooper’s paper, in a symposium at the Pacific Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association in Portland, Oregon, March 1977. Since Cooper’s paper has been several times anthol...