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This study examines the results of multiple evaluations of the Cleveland Scholarship and Tutoring Grant Program (CTSP), a state-funded voucher program, by exploring extant evaluations and literature. Attention will be given to the following research question: Does participation in the Cleveland Scholarship and Tutoring Grant Program have the hypothesized positive effect on traditional public school students' academic achievement? Cleveland's voucher program provides an ideal contextualized setting for ascertaining the extent to which school choice programs afford poor families the same educational options available to affluent families. This study concludes that overall there are no statistically significant gains in voucher students' academic achievement. In fact, it appears that some voucher students performed slightly worse in math. The program does, however, afford low-income students the opportunity to attend private secular or religious schools in accordance with the program's initial design and intent.

In Germany, political foundations (Stiftungen) play an important role in shaping civil society through political democracy education. The foundations, however, have also committed themselves to strengthening democratic political and societal structures abroad. Their joint mission abroad is the contribution to democratic structures, information and debate in the countries and regions they are working in. They complement the official German foreign policy, but choose their own priorities and strategies. The focus of this thesis is the German political foundations as actors in democracy assistance. 'Democracy assistance' focuses less on the aspects of technical assistance but much more on political parties and the promotion of civil society as the backbone of democracy. Democracy assistance is a relatively recent international development activity of governments and international organizations. In recent years the international community has come to realize the importance of political parties and a well-functioning political party system for the process of democratisation. Here the German political foundations are working internationally as actors in democracy assistance - independent from the German government but at the same time fully state-funded. The objectives of this dissertation are to understand the work and strategies of the German political foundations as actors in the context of democracy assistance abroad, research their partner spectrums on selected countries, to identify their short comings and to give an outlook of the foundations work in the future in the fast-changing global political environment.

The thesis has one main focus, the purity laws of a religious group in Europe, an original piece of research never done before in the UK. The thesis uses diasporic theories of identity; theories of women and the body; theories of women, their bodies and patriarchal religion and theories of women, purity and pollution in religion, to explain why European Zoroastrian women continue to support six of the purity laws of Zoroastrianism in the year 2003. Purity and pollution are at the heart of the Zoroastrian religion and the research demonstrated that Zoroastrians belief in and knowledge of the six purity laws was strong in 2003.Zoroastrians are a diasporic religious group whose modern origins are in Iran and the sub-continent of India. They have been visiting and settling, from the sub-continent, in Europe, and especially in London, in small numbers since the middle of the nineteenth century.There have been three quantitative surveys of the Zoroastrian community in Europe, in 1976, 1985 and 2003, with each survey building on the last one. Thus, the analytical, quantitative research leading up to the thesis covers a period of nearly 30 years. In the 2003 survey, new questions, never posed before in academic research, were asked about six of the Zoroastrian purity laws, which yielded data for the main focus of the thesis. The women support the six purity laws more than the men and the majority of both women and men affirmed four of the purity laws and rejected two of them.The conclusion of the thesis is that the six Zoroastrian purity laws examined in this research are used in the creation of a hybrid, immanent and liminal religious identity and in some cases ethnic identity, by the women of the European Zoroastrian community; purity laws are known about and matter to these women in Europe in 2003.

This thesis focuses on iterative methods for the treatment of the steady state neutron transport equation in slab geometry, bounded convex domain of Rn (n = 2,3) and in 1-D spherical geometry. We introduce a generic Alternate Direction Implicit (ADI)-like iterative method based on positive definite and m-accretive splitting (PAS) for linear operator equations with operators admitting such splitting. This method converges unconditionally and its SOR acceleration yields convergence results similar to those obtained in presence of finite dimensional systems with matrices possessing the Young property A. The proposed methods are illustrated by a numerical example in which an integro-differential problem of transport theory is considered. In the particular case where the positive definite part of the linear equation operator is self-adjoint, an upper bound for the contraction factor of the iterative method, which depends solely on the spectrum of the self-adjoint part is derived. As such, this method has been successfully applied to the neutron transport equation in slab and 2-D cartesian geometry and in 1-D spherical geometry. The self-adjoint and m-accretive splitting leads to a fixed point problem where the operator is a 2 by 2 matrix of operators. An infinite dimensional adaptation of minimal residual and preconditioned minimal residual algorithms using Gauss-Seidel, symmetric Gauss-Seidel and polynomial preconditioning are then applied to solve the matrix operator equation. Theoretical analysis shows that the methods converge unconditionally and upper bounds of the rate of residual decreasing which depend solely on the spectrum of the self-adjoint part of the operator are derived. The convergence of theses solvers is illustrated numerically on a sample neutron transport problem in 2-D geometry. Various test cases, including pure scattering and optically thick domains are considered.

The economic and human costs of diabetes in the U.S. population place an enormous burden on its healthcare system as well as on employers, diabetics, and their respective families. Many Medicare Advantage plans have responded to this burden by implementing diabetes case management programs (DCMPs) aimed at reducing inappropriate health services utilization, improving health outcomes, and containing costs. While the use of DCMPs is common to many health plans, the research regarding their effectiveness has been sparse or inconclusive. The purpose of this study was to help fill a critical gap in the research literature by evaluating the effect of a diabetes case management program known as CareContact on a Medicare population in Texas. The study population consisted of 2,972 confirmed diabetic members who were continuously enrolled in SelectCare of Texas, a Medicare Advantage plan, for the two-year period between January 1, 2005 and December 31, 2006. To be eligible for this study, diabetic members had to have a minimum of 6 months without exposure to CareContact and 6 months of exposure to CareContact after the initial exposure. Twelve separate cohorts, defined by date of initial program exposure, were evaluated using a one group interrupted time series design. Cross sectional time series analysis, which combines ordinary least square regression techniques and time series analyses, was used to evaluate program effectiveness. After controlling for confounders and the effects of time, the data indicated that membership in the DCMP was associated with increased costs and increased utilization over the two-year study period. The study points to the need for further research into the effectiveness of diabetes case management programs, especially for participants of Medicare Advantage health plans.