Most Popular Books by Keith Ward

Keith Ward''s great contribution to theological scholarship is his exploration of what he calls comparative theology. He describes this as, a way of doing theology in which scholars holding different world-views share together in the investigation of concepts of ultimate reality, the final human goal, and the way to achieve it. This book is devoted to that theme with essays on the central topics of his mature work: revelation, creation, human nature and community.

Keith Ward believes passionately in the importance of the Bible, and describes himself as a born-again Christian. This is a vigorous and lively contribution to the debate on the authority of scripture-how we read the Bible and how, he believes, a fundamentalist reading is unsustainable.

This title is the first in a series that employs a simple and effective concept to illustrate and describe the multiplicity of equipment and weapons systems used on the ground during World War II. Whilst many books have described such weapons and war matériel, Keith Ward''s unique abilities as a 3D technical artist bring these items to life, illustrated throughout in full color. Here, in a single concise volume, are all major and many minor and less well-known items of German weaponry and equipment, rendered precisely, including detailed cutaways showing their internal workings, information which is often absent from other publications. Technical details are also provided. This is an essential volume for anyone interested in the German Armed Forces of World War II.

"Following a horrifying event, Pastor Leon Rivkin feels God calling him out of his inner-city Baltimore church into a rich white suburb. With his new church, he''s determined to show the people there how empty their lives of wealth and privilege really are. Problem is, people don''t like hearing that. Especially from a black man. The church struggles at first, being mostly ignored. But Pastor Leon isn''t a man to be ignored. Then something happens. Young folks start showing up, captivated by Pastor Leon''s dynamic preaching. Church attendance grows. The Internet and social media spread his message. As the church grows, so does its threat to certain communities. And threats must be eliminated. A campaign of intimidation is launched to force Pastor Leon out and kill his increasingly-effective church. The pressure mounts, as dark forces grow desperate to stop the powerful black man in their midst. But they don''t know who they''re up against"--Back cover.

Disaster response and recovery are crucial phases of disaster management. Decision-support systems used in disaster management must cope with the complexity and uncertainty involved with the scheduling and assignment of differentially-skilled personnel and assets to specific tasks. Operational constraints -- such as workload and labor requirements, precedence constraints, resource availability, and critical deadlines among others -- make timely and appropriate task assignment and sequencing difficult. Failure to assign personnel in an efficient and effective manner may result in unnecessary fatalities and significant additional loss of property as well as damaging the reputation of the disaster management organizations. Therefore, this paper proposes a decision-support system for disaster response and recovery using hybrid meta-heuristics.

The quality of service which could be delivered by the U.S. healthcare system is in contrast with the customer''s perceived expectations and reported levels of satisfaction. Due to the uncertainty about stakeholder views and the anomaly of the third-party payment system, healthcare service providers are accused of not relating to their patients. This article examines how -- by using an analytical framework -- a healthcare provider can develop competitive advantage through implementing electronic customer relationship management (e-CRM) systems that create perceived customer value for its patients. This framework allows the firm to systematically look at points where the customer interacts with specific organizational assets. By examining individual interactions and understanding how the customer perceives an interaction, the firm may then develop specific e-CRM systems to maximize the value a customer may realize through that interaction. Due to the in-depth and lengthy nature of most patient relationships with a healthcare provider, the healthcare industry is used as an example of how this framework can be used by all service providers.

Decisions are a part of everyday life. Decisions can range from the type of job offer we accept, the type of car we purchase, or the kind of home we select. However, in many decisions there are multiple criteria upon which we make our final decision. Mathematical functions can be developed, called utility functions, which model how the decision maker ranks the alternatives under consideration. There are various utility functions; in this thesis we have examined the linear and Tchebycheff utility functions and a hybrid of the two. The purpose of this thesis was to approximate the assumed true utility function (we assumed that the true utility function caused the score and rank of the alternatives in the sample data we obtained from Consumer Reports) by fitting the previously mentioned utility functions to the scored data. We considered three products. The goodness of fit measures we used were the sum of absolute deviations and the sum of squares residual.^It was a our goal to show, for the data set we selected, how the linear, Tchebycheff, and the hybrid of the two performed in comparison to one another for each product. The results showed that for a set of alternatives that appeared to have a solely a linear utility function, the hybrid of the linear and Tchebycheff utility functions was able to perform best. In considering all products chosen for this thesis, the true utility function never seemed to be Tchebycheff entirely; yet by adding the linear utility function to it, the goodness of fit results were favorable. In general, the hybrid utility function can be of superior performance compared to the linear and Tchebycheff utility functions independently. The hybrid utility function could provide increased flexibility when used in conjunction with an interactive method.^The hybrid utility function is of notable advantage as it can be modified to not only incorporate the combination of linear and Tchebycheff utility functions; it also can be extended to quadratic-Tchebycheff combinations or higher ordered combinations of utility functions and used in union with interactive methods.

Buffalo State College Master''s project in Speech-Language Pathology, 1987.

Based on literature review, we derive a set of dimensions that influence patient-perceived health care quality. Utilizing outpatient survey data from 222 different physicians, we identified six underlying quality factors and classified them according to the derived dimensions. These quality factors explain approximately 51 percent of the variation in overall patient-perceived health care quality.