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What is Public?

The concept of "public" sits at the intersection of numerous academic disciplines, including political science, public administration, health policy, education, and finance. Students engage with this topic in courses that examine how resources, services, and institutions are organized, funded, and made accessible to society at large. What makes it academically compelling is the tension between collective responsibility and individual benefit — questions about who provides essential services, who bears their costs, and how quality is maintained are debated across fields ranging from healthcare and education to corporate governance and public safety.

The papers archived on this topic reflect a wide range of approaches. Comparative analysis is common, with essays weighing public versus private models in areas such as school systems, personnel administration, and university attendance outcomes. Policy-focused writing appears in examinations of public health preparedness, healthcare fraud, and investor confidence in financial reporting. Case-study methods surface in workplace safety incidents and adult care services. Some papers take an investigative or developmental angle, tracing how institutions like corporate universities have evolved internationally.

A strong essay on this topic begins with a clearly scoped thesis that specifies which dimension of "public" is under examination — governance, funding, access, or accountability — rather than treating the term as self-explanatory. Evidence carries the most weight when it draws on concrete examples, policy documents, or institutional data that directly support the central argument. A common pitfall is conflating descriptive summary with analysis; the most effective papers move beyond defining public versus private distinctions to argue why those distinctions produce meaningful differences in outcomes for individuals and communities.

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Research Paper Doctorate
Brown v. Board of Education
Brown v Board of Education is one of the most famous landmark cases in American court history. Set against the backdrop of the early 1950s, just as the civil rights movement was beginning to heat up, Brown v Board of…
Paper Undergraduate
Myth of the American Dream:
¶ … myth of the American dream: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Dumbo
Essay Doctorate
Deontological ethics as a theoretical lens for business ethics in organizations
This paper is about the Adelphia accounting fraud case. The case examines the issues from the deontological perspective, where the imperative is defined in terms of maximizing shareholder value and upholding the integrity of the financial system. The actions of the executives, board members and the auditors are all given consideration.
Paper Undergraduate
Secretary of State Transition From
Transitioning from Clinton to Kerry in the Secretary of State position will bring upon a new perspective in terms of foreign affairs. Ed Koch was a political figure that gained notoriety as mayor of New York City and brought forth many changes that benefited NYC residents. Gun control requires for a common middle ground to be found by both extreme conservatives and liberals in order to protect our children. The Presidential Inauguration allows citizens to hear what they should expect in the next four years. Wilkerson's book 'The Warmth of Other Suns' depicts the Great Migration and its great contribution to American society.
Essay Doctorate
Retail management and brand identity in Prada's Soho flagship store
Large retail stores around the globe aim for "similar look" in architecture so their stores can stand out and be an identifying factor for their brand. Even the fast food chains would aim for the same kind of…
Essay Doctorate
Statewide initiatives and classroom motivation strategies in Alabama
The Alabama Reading Initiative (ARI) began as project of the State Board of Education and the State Department of Education. After the ARI showed promise in classrooms across the state the Alabama State Legislature…
Essay Doctorate
Economic Impact of the Vietnam War
This paper focuses on the Vietnam War and its effects upon America, both in the political and economic sense. The paper also discusses the War from a more psychological standpoint, mainly focusing on the toll it took upon America. The Vietnam War's economic consequences are shown to have had a deep impact upon the country both before, during and after the conflict.
Essay Doctorate
Speece, Deborah L, Et Al., Identifying Children
Critique of Spence, Deborah L, et al, Identifying Children in Middle Childhood Who are at Risk for Reading Problems: New evidence and to analyze and access an appropriate tool for reading in elementary students using a response to intervention model, School Psychology Review 2010, Volume 39, No.2 , pp258-276 • The term paper assignment for this class requires you to select a scientific article published in a journal selected from a list of approved journals, and then critique the research methods used in that article using what you learned in this course. It is also OK in your critique to mention things about the methodology that were done right. Also, while I don't expect you to become an expert in the subject of your chosen article, I do expect you to look at the scientific literature on that subject—and one way to do that would be to read some of the studies the authors' of your chosen article cite—and incorporate information from that literature in your paper where appropriate. • The list of approved journals from which the article you critique may be selected is as follows: American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, International Journal of Aging & Human Development, Social Problem, Sociological Perspectives, Sociological Quarterly, of Sociology of Education. • If you want to use an article from a different journal than these, you will have to show me the article you select so that I can approve it. In that case please do NOT email me a copy of the article. Instead, print it out and show it to me before or after class or during office hours. The article must be from a scholarly scientific journal (not a magazine, etc.) and it must be a research article (not an opinion piece, etc.). I do not have to see or approve the article in advance if it is in one of the approved journals. • The article you select must be quantitative in nature, in other words it must present numbers and statistics. Also, make sure what you have selected is an actual research article (a good indicator of that is if the article has an abstract at the beginning of it). • To locate the articles published in those journals online, follow these steps. Go to Blackboard for the course, click on the USF Libraries tab, the select "All USF Libraries", then click on "E Journals by Title", then type in the name of one of the approved journals, then select a year for the journal, then select one of the electronic sources for articles in that journal (JSTOR, Ebcohost, etc.). The procedure may vary a little from what I have said here, so use common sense as you point and click through it. If you have any problems, one of the librarians on the first floor of the main USF library can help you, or call Academic Computing Help at 974-1222. • Once you pull up the pdf of the article you want to use, a good idea is to download it to your computer's desktop (or better yet a memory stick or other external storage device in case your computer crashes). Or you could just print it out, since you will have to attach a printed copy of the article to your term paper when you turn it in. • Your paper must be typed, and you must staple a copy of the article you critiqued to the back of it. In other words, your paper will go on top, with the article underneath it and stapled to it. Do NOT turn the paper in in a plastic binder or in any form other than stapled. Make sure both your name and your U number are on your typed paper. • The best tip I can give for doing the paper is just to take the basic points made in class and in the readings, and then see if the article violated any of those things or did them right. For example, in class we said you need to have a probability sample in order to test for statistical significance. So if the article you picked doesn't have a probability sample but they ran significance tests anyway, that would be a critique. As another example, in class we said that a research study should include all possible variables that could affect the outcome variable. So if you can think of explanatory variables the authors didn't include, that would be another critique. On the other hand, if your chosen article did these things right, then you could compliment the authors for that. In other words just make a list of the points about statistics we made in class and/or were mentioned in the book, and then take that list and see if your article did those things right. Remember also to take a look at some of the other studies on that topic and incorporate information from those into your paper where appropriate. • When you critique the methods the authors used, it would be a plus if you could also suggest alternatives that would have been better. For instance if the authors did an experiment and they try to generalize from that to the society in general, you could mention that we learned in class that experiments are typically weak on generalizability and you could suggest that the authors might have been better off using a survey (if the advantages of a survey would in fact outweight those of an experiment for that particular topic). • When you critique or praise methodology, be specific and say why the methods are good or incorrect. For example, don't just say "the authors shouldn't have use tests of statistical significance", instead give the reason (for example "the authors shouldn't have used tests of statistical significance because they have a nonprobability sample and we learned in class that you need to have a probability sample to properly do significance tests."). • For the format of the term paper as well as an example of how to do it, see the term paper example I have posted in the Course Documents section of Blackboard. The article my example paper critiques is also in the Course Documents section. The format you should use for your paper is to state the page, column, and paragraph number for each comment you want to make, and then briefly make the comment just like I did in my example. Notice in the example paper that I critiqued the methods when the authors were wrong, I complimented them when they did something well, and I discussed their study in light of what other studies on that topic show. I don't necessarily expect your paper to be as detailed as mine (after all I've been doing this for years) but at least it will give you an idea of how to do the assignment.
Paper Doctorate
Technology Updates the Cost of Technological Advances
The development of technological advances has been significant in the last 50 years but more so in the last 30. According to Moore an early pioneer in silicone technology, the capacity for engineering technology innovation is clearly rapid. Moore set a benchmark for silicone technology claiming that capacity would double the number of transistors on a chip, which determines the capacity for memory every 24months. This law served as a standard for Intel and other chip manufacture companies, creating a demonstrative goal that was followed almost to the letter from its inception to now (Intel, 2011). This rapid advancement of technology has made many functions and aspects of technology capabilities possible as computers and servers can process more and more tasks and information more rapidly than ever. The result of these advances has been both an extreme learning curve cost as well as an extreme financial outlay for many organizations, both as a response to legal and legislative mandates and the need for competitive advantage development. Though the development of so much capacity and possibilities has made it possible to do and make many things faster and more efficiently than ever before people rarely if ever look specifically at the cost of such technology with regard to human attrition, due to inability to learn and update rapidly enough (Russell, 2011), the loss of organizations based on size and productivity and inability to shoulder costs of upgrading technology and of course likely the most looked at but still neglected financial burden of upgrading technology on a near constant basis. This work will look specifically at these three areas of the cost of technological advance, financial, individual attrition and small organization loss.
Paper Undergraduate
Sickle Gene Therapies for Sickle
This document contains an annotated bibliography on the topic of gene therapies for sickle cell anemia, identifying and summarizing / critiquing six primary research articles, one textbook, and one review of existing research in approximately one hundred words for each entry. Stem cell research is found to represent a substantial portion of the research.