249 research outputs found
Matthew’s Emmanuel Messiah: a paradigm of presence for god's people
No full textThe motif of divine presence is a clear phenomenon within the Gospel of Matthew. The modern critical means for assessing the ancient biblical text have multiplied to the point, some claim, of disparity. This study employs both narrative and redaction criticism in an attempt to respond authentically to the structural, historical and theological dimensions of Matthew's Gospel. This study begins with the presumption of the wholeness and integrity of Matthew's narrative, and assumes the gospel story to have an inherently dramatic structure which invites readers to inhabit imaginatively its narrative world and respond to its call. But since we are concerned with the role of both reader and author, this study also assumes a text with an historical author and context. The introduction focuses on the meta-critical dilemma facing New Testament students - what is the text and how do we read it? - and seeks some balance in terms of Krieger's analogy of the text as both window and mirror. Proposed is a narrative reading of Matthew's presence motif alongside a redaction critical assessment of it. In Chapter 2 the elements of narrative theory are introduced and relevant terms defined: the structure of narrative, the function of the narrator, points of view. Chapter 3 becomes an exercise in narrative reading, with Matthew's presence motif providing the focus, and the implied reader’s interaction with the story being predominant in interpretation. Characters, rhetorical devices, and points of view are discussed, to understand the motif's development throughout the story's progress. The thrust of Chapter 4 is thereafter to examine divine presence as a dominant motif within Matthew's most important literary context: the Jewish scriptures. Here the primary paradigms of divine presence provided by the Patriarchs, the Sinai experience, and the Davidic-Zion traditions are assessed. Chapter 5 follows with a more detailed examination of the OT "I am with you/God is with us" formula and its µeo' vµwv/ηuwv language, so strongly connected to Matthew's presence motif. Chapters 6-8 build on these investigations with a closer analysis of the three critical "presence passages" of Mt 1:23. 18:20 and 28:20. The passages and their contexts are probed from a redaction critical perspective, guided by the narrative investigation of Chapter 3, and the background from Chapters 4 and 5.The three major "presence passages" examined in Chapters 6-8 are also complimented by a number of secondary issues: worship, wisdom, the Spirit and the poor in Matthew, and their relation to Jesus' divine presence. These are discussed in Chapter 9. Chapter 10 summarizes and looks briefly at some implications. Matthew' presence motif proves to be an important element of the Gospel’s rhetorical design, redactional strategy and Christology. The presence of Jesus, the Emmanuel Messiah, exhibited in his risen authority, becomes the focus of his people's hopes and experiences in the post-Easter world. What the presence of Yahweh was to his people. Jesus now provides in a new paradigm for his people - his followers, the little ones, the poor and the marginalized, from all nations
Structure, proteolysis, and evolution of secreted tuberculosis virulence factors
No full textMycobacterium tuberculosis uses the ESX-1 type VII secretion system to export proteins to its cell surface, which permeabilize the host macrophage phagosomal membrane, allowing the bacterium to escape and spread to new cells. The structure of the type VII membrane complex and how it mediates this function is unknown, but it is hypothesized that some of the secreted proteins form an extracellular appendage that facilitates membrane lysis or direct secretion of virulence factors into the host cytoplasm. This thesis investigates the structural relationship between one of these secreted proteins, EspB, and a protease that processes it, MycP1. The x-ray crystallographic structures of both proteins are determined and described. EspB is shown to form a multimer with heptameric stoichiometry, and an EM reconstruction of this multimer is generated and used to create a model of the oligomer using symmetric Rosetta docking. The final model is supported by mass spectrometry-based detection of chemically cross-linked peptides from adjacent subunits. We use mass spectrometry to determine how EspB is proteolytically processed during secretion and discuss the effect of this processing event on the EspB ultrastructure. Finally, the structure of one of the membrane apparatus proteins, EccB1 is determined, revealing structural homology to a phage lysin. The combination of x-ray crystallography, EM, modeling, and mass-spectrometry provides an exciting first glimpse at the structure and function of the type VII secretion system - a critical factor in the TB pathogenesis cycle.Medicine, Faculty ofBiochemistry and Molecular Biology, Department ofGraduat
Beauty for the Present: Mill, Arnold, Ruskin and Aesthetic Education
No full textThe present thesis examines the idea of aesthetic education of three eminent Victorians: John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin. By focusing on the essence of what they meant with ‘the cultivation of the beautiful’ and, more importantly, the way their ideas of beauty informed their criticism of society, my study aims to contribute to our understanding of the idea of aesthetic education in the Victorian context and, further, to participate in a recent debate about the nature of beauty and aesthetic education.
Chapter One focuses on John Stuart Mill’s concept of ‘feeling’ in a series of essays. I will demonstrate how Mill’s idea of ‘aesthetic education’ was an ‘education of feelings,’ and moreover, how this idea was integrated into his literary criticism, his later critique of democratisation, his description of an ideal liberal society and even his own style of writing. Chapter Two contains a comparative study of Matthew Arnold and Friedrich Schiller. Through a rereading of Arnold, I will argue that his idea of aesthetic education is essentially Schillerian and that their resemblance consists primarily in their stress on the importance of aesthetic unity for modern life, which was becoming increasingly fragmentary and multitudinous. Chapter Three examines John Ruskin’s idea of aesthetic education and concentrates particularly on the cultivation of perception. Perception, as I shall show, was pivotal in Ruskin’s idea of aesthetic education. Just as what happened in Mill and Arnold, the emphasis on the education of seeing continued from his early writings well into his art and social criticisms. It not only differentiated him from his fellow art critics; the conviction that people should perceive with a pure heart also enabled him to link observation of artistic details with moral criticism of contemporary society and, thereby, to turn the cultivation of the beautiful into a moral-aesthetic experience
The Quest for Citations: Drivers of Article Impact
No full textWhy do some articles become building blocks for future scholars, while many others remain unnoticed? We aim to answer this question by contrasting, synthesizing and simultaneously testing three scientometric perspectives – universalism, social constructivism and presentation – on the influence of article and author characteristics on article citations. To do so, we study all articles published in a sample of five major journals in marketing from 1990 to 2002 that are central to the discipline. We count the number of citations each of these articles has received and regress this count on an extensive set of characteristics of the article (i.e. article quality, article domain, title length, the use of attention grabbers and expositional clarity), and the author (i.e. author visibility and author personal promotion). We find that the number of citations an article in the marketing discipline receives, depends upon “what one says†(quality and domain), on “who says it†(author visibility and personal promotion) and not so much on “how one says it†(title length, the use of attention grabbers, and expositional clarity). Our insights contribute to the marketing literature and are relevant to scientific stakeholders, such as the management of scientific journals and individual academic scholars, as they strive to maximize citations. They are also relevant to marketing practitioners. They inform practitioners on characteristics of the academic journals in marketing and their relevance to decisions they face. On the other hand, they also raise challenges towards making our journals accessible and relevant to marketing practitioners: (1) authors visible to academics are not necessarily visible to practitioners; (2) the readability of an article may hurt academic credibility and impact, while it may be instrumental in influencing practitioners; (3) it remains questionable whether articles that academics assess to be of high quality are also managerially relevant.Impact;Citation Analysis;Referencing;Scientometrics;Cite
TI DSP Dynamic Run-Time Loader
No full textThesis (M.Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2001.Includes bibliographical references (leaf 41).This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.The increased demand in applications of Digital Signal Processors (DSP) are reaching the limits of the basic method of statically loading libraries. These statically loaded libraries are fixed to the location in memory where they can be executed. Therefore these inflexible libraries are difficult to use in multitasking environments, are not portable between different DSP architectures and are an inefficient use of RAM. A Dynamic Run- Time Loader for libraries adds an abstraction layer between the DSP kernel and the library. This solution will remove the memory inflexibility of the static model while improving code reuse, portability and multitasking ability, to help meet the demands of tomorrows DSP applications.by Morris M. Tao.M.Eng
Harnessing metadata characteristics for efficient deduplication in distributed storage Systems
No full textThesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2011.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Cataloged from student submitted PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 61-62).As storage capacity requirements grow, storage systems are becoming distributed, and that distribution poses a challenge for space savings processes. In this thesis, I design and implement a mechanism for storing only a single instance of duplicated data within a distributed storage system which selectively performs deduplication across each of the independent computers, known as nodes, used for storage. This involves analyzing the contents of each node for objects with characteristics more likely to have duplicates elsewhere, particularly using duplication within a node as the indicative property - an object duplicated many times in a dataset will likely be duplicated at least once in some node. An inter-node system is responsible for efficiently collecting and distributing the information of these potential duplicates. A test implementation was built and run on several data sets characteristic of common storage workloads where deduplication is important, while distributing across 128 nodes. The efficiency of this implementation was analyzed and compared against the savings when distributed across 128 nodes with deduplication performed only between duplicate objects within each node, without inter-node deduplication. The inter-node deduplication was found to increase the space saved by a factor of four to six times. This represented in one case, a file storage server, only a quarter of potential savings due to the majority of potential savings being in files with only a few duplicates. This left a low probability of locating duplication within a single node. However in another case, a collection of over 100 virtual machine images, nearly all potential duplicates were found due to the high number of duplicates for each object, providing an example of where this inter-node mechanism can be most useful.by Matthew Goldstein.M.Eng
Occurrence and antimicrobial resistance of Escherichia coli in oysters and mussels from Atlantic Canada
No full textAcquiring antimicrobial-resistant (AMR) bacteria through consuming contaminated animal food products is an emerging public health concern, though the sources of contamination are not always clear. This study characterized the occurrence of AMR in Escherichia coli from bivalve molluscs and assessed for the possible sources in the Hillsborough river complex of Prince Edward Island, Canada in areas overlapping with an oyster fishery. Multivariable statistical analysis indicated that the probability of detecting E. coli increased as the estimated dosage of animal effluent contamination decreased. Isolates with AMR were only found from sampling sites closest to untreated human effluent sources. Twenty-seven percent (n=6 of 22) of the isolates were pathogenic, with virulence factors consistent with extraintestinal E. coli of human origin. Though there is more evidence of contamination arising from human effluent, more research is needed to identify driving sources
Where’s Morningside? Locating bro’Town in the ethnic genealogy of New Zealand/Aotearoa
No full textThis article uses discourse analysis to locate animated primetime cartoon comedy bro'Town in terms of ethnicity and identification in both a local New Zealand/Aotearoa (NZ) and a global, postmodern, postcolonial media environment. It analyses and problematises the polarisation of local ethnic discourse between conservative assimilationist and bicultural "politically correct" viewpoints by situating the text in global postmodern media environment and demonstrating the discursive interdependence of such binary oppositions. Finally it looks at the degree to which bro'Town's self-proclaimed status as "hilariously anti-PC" comedy works to both exploit and undermine polarities of ethnic representation through employing "reverse discourse". The overall aim of the paper is not to present a close reading or textual analysis, but to situate the text in larger discursive frameworks and thus offer a number of possible theoretical approaches
The influence of salinity and sea star wasting syndrome on sea star species composition and distribution in Nootka Sound, British Columbia
No full textSenior thesis written for Oceanography 445[author abstract] The effect of salinity and Sea Star Wasting Syndrome on the distribution and composition of sea star species was studied in Nootka Sound. Using an underwater camera survey were conducted over four days the Muchalat, Tlupana and Tahsis Inlets of Nootka Sound. These surveys revealed that not only do the sea stars show a trend in their distribution from salinity, but also that the Inlets may have been struck by Sea Star Wasting Syndrome at some point in the past. These results suggest that the intertidal of Nootka Sound could be changing due to the removal of the keystone predators.University of Washington School of Oceanograph
Understanding defence failures and coastal flood events: a case study approach
No full textExtreme sea level events are a current global threat, whilst sea-level rise (SLR) and climate change over the 21st century will increase the frequency and severity of flooding in most coastal regions. Numerical model simulations can help to understand and predict coastal floods (e.g. flood mapping and forecasting) but in comparison to flood sources (waves and water levels) coastal flood pathways (defence failures and inundation) are presently less integrated within these models. This thesis develops and demonstrates a methodology to rapidly simulate and understand the consequences of coastal flood events, with an emphasis upon regions where the risks of flooding are not well understood and could change quickly with SLR. The Solent on the south coast of England is the case study, and is prone to frequent flooding. This region is currently differentiated from the UK east and west coasts by experiencing smaller storm surges, and is characterised by undefended sections of shoreline and small floodplains. Within the Solent is Portsmouth, a city of national flood significance (only London and Hull contain more people considered at risk of coastal flooding in the UK). However, life threatening floods have not occurred in living memory. An integrated modelling approach is developed, coupling loads and defence failures with two-dimensional simulations of floodplain inundation. Observations collated from a real storm surge and flood event are shown to generate a validation data set, which indicates that this model can predict floodplain water levels to a good level of accuracy, whilst highlighting implications of such data collection. Solent-wide analysis includes simulations of hypothetical coastal flood events based upon scenarios that cover the full range of coastal loadings (realistic waves and water levels) and defence failures (overflow, outflanking, overtopping and breaching). More detailed case-studies are also applied at two sites within the region (including Portsmouth). This analysis generates peak flood water depths and an overview of impacts across this spectrum of possible floods.This research improves the existing knowledge of coastal flooding in the case study, and highlights a number of generic concepts that should be applied to others. For example the combination of flood simulation methods with real flood event analysis is essential for optimising the interpretation of model outputs whilst supporting inferences about flood consequences associated with extreme loading events (including how these may change with SLR). Simple methods estimated that >24,000 properties are within a 1 in 200 year flood event outline; and incorporating defence failures, flood dynamics, validation and detailed case studies substantially refine the assessment of places likely to experience damages. Breach defence failures generate the worst flood impacts, although in the Solent this failure mechanism is presently less of a threat than outflanking, overflow and wave overtopping. The modelling system includes easily interpreted outputs, whilst being computationally fast; therefore with potential applications including supporting land-use and defence planning, and real-time flood forecasting and warning
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