Thesis (Ph. D.)--West Virginia University, 2007. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains iv, 111 p. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 82-97).

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston University, missing page 106 / This thesis is an investigation into the nature of mysticism as it is represented in the sixteenth century Spanish Christian mystic, St. John of the Cross, and the nineteenth century Hindu mystic, Ramakrishna. In the problematic development of the thesis St. John was considered first. The order of consideration was an investigation into the nature of the way of approach to the full mystic experience, followed by a discussion of the theory of reality derived from the examination of the way. The consideration of Ramakrishna followed that of St. John. Finally mysticism as such was analyzed and illustrated according to the two above named mystics. The method in the final two chapters was the same. The way according to St. John is the way of agony. God is separate from the soul of man. Yet God is discovered, and the way to God is manifest. This way is conceived in terms of the active and passive nights of the sense and spirit. The seeker purges his soul and spirit of sensual attraction. He gains pleasure in nothing save God. In the passive night of the spirit, he waits in detachment for the "inflowing of the spirit of God into the soul." This is known in union which is the goal of the way. It is characterized as a union of wills in love [TRUNCATED]

First popularized in the 1970s, transition metal-catalyzed cross-couplings now constitute staple reactions for the formation of carbon-carbon and carbon-heteroatom bonds. Recent endeavours in the field have been invested towards expanding the range of compatible coupling partners, with the aim of accessing complex molecules from simple, widely available starting materials. Notably, esters represent an attractive class of alternative coupling partners compared to traditional aryl halides, due to their ubiquity and robustness. Moreover, different cleavage modes can be accessed with esters. Which bond cleavage occurs is highly dependent on which catalyst is used, providing an opportunity to quickly access diverse products from a common precursor. Chapter 1 of this thesis provides a literature overview of cross-couplings with carboxylic acid derivatives to contextualize our contributions described in Chapter 2 and 3. Chapter 2 describes the Pd-catalyzed cross-coupling of phenyl esters with alkyl boranes. Two reaction modes are enabled, namely C(acyl)–O bond activation with carbonyl-retention and C(acyl)–O bond activation with decarbonylation. As such, both alkyl ketones and alkylated arenes are accessed selectively by simple changes in the catalytic system. The disclosed reaction is applied to the diversification of bioactive molecules and discussed in light of recent mechanistic studies of related transformations. In Chapter 3, the first additive-free Ni-catalyzed amidation and transesterification of methyl esters are disclosed. In both transformations, a simple Ni catalyst enables widely available methyl or ethyl esters to be converted into value-added products, producing methanol as the only stoichiometric waste by-product. The Ni-catalyzed amidation protocol strongly contrasts wasteful yet common methods used to convert methyl esters into amides, involving wasteful hydrolysis and coupling with stoichiometric activating agents.

Successful communication requires that the two parties involved in the activity acquire mutually shared socio-cultural background knowledge. The shared expectations, beliefs and cultural values enable the two parties to properly and correctly infer the intended meaning of each other's messages in order to respond or act accordingly and appropriately. International diplomats, who use language at almost al I times to conduct and negotiate international relations, belong to different cultures. This implies that they do not share sociocultural background knowledge which is vital ly crucial for any successful communication. The diversity of their expectations, beliefs and values causes interference between linguistic and sociocultural meanings which leads to problems of misunderstanding and misinterpretation. By applying sociolinguistics perspective in its holistic sense, the thesis investigated diplomatic communication events of personal experience of the 'dip l omat-res ear cher' as we 11 as se If -reported events by the career diplomats who were interviewed and taperecorded. The analysed diplomatic events were measured by quantitative data obtained from the questionnaire which was distributed among ambassadors around the world. The questionnaire results were corroborated by the results obtained from the events of persona 1 exper i ence as we 11 as by the e vents reported by the career di pl omats. iii The verified results, which proved the thesis' hypothesisq explored the shortcomings of current diplomatic communication; misunderstand i ng, misinterpretation and misjudgement characterized the career diplomats' activities and eventuated undesired and unfortunate outcomes. In order to overcome such unpleasant results and to minimize the effect of the diversity of diplomats' socio-cultural background the thesis proposed certain criteria which included elements of the language of diplomacy, qualities of good diplomats and principles of conducting successful diplomatic communication. By observing and satisfying the conditions of these criteria, future diplomacy is most likely to produce successful results.

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A Thesis submitted to The University of Arizona College of Medicine - Phoenix in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Medicine. / Background: Esotropic strabismus is a condition in which the eyes are not properly aligned with each other. In children, uncorrected esotropia may result in permanent loss of vision due to amblyopia, a condition where the nonpreferred, crossing eye is suppressed. Early identification and treatment of esotropia in children is critical, as doing so may prevent permanent loss of vision.

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Cross validation (CV) is widely used for model assessment and comparison. In this thesis, we first review and compare three v-fold CV strategies: best single CV, repeated and averaged CV and double CV. The mean squared errors of the CV strategies in estimating the best predictive performance are illustrated by using simulated and real data examples. The results show that repeated and averaged CV is a good strategy and outperforms the other two CV strategies for finite samples in terms of the mean squared error in estimating prediction accuracy and the probability of choosing an optimal model. In practice, when we need to compare many models, conducting repeated and averaged CV strategy is not computational feasible. We develop an efficient sequential methodology for model comparison based on CV. It also takes into account the randomness in CV. The number of models is reduced via an adaptive, multiplicity-adjusted sequential algorithm, where poor performers are quickly eliminated. By exploiting matching of individual observations, it is sometimes even possible to establish the statistically significant inferiority of some models with just one execution of CV. This adaptive and computationally efficient methodology is demonstrated on a large cheminformatics data set from PubChem. Cross validated mean squared error (CVMSE) is widely used to estimate the prediction mean squared error (MSE) of statistical methods. For linear models, we show how CVMSE depends on the number of folds, v, used in cross validation, the number of observations, and the number of model parameters. We establish that the bias of CVMSE in estimating the true MSE decreases with v and increases with model complexity. In particular, the bias may be very substantial for models with many parameters relative to the number of observations, even if v is large. These results are used to correct CVMSE for its bias. We compare our proposed bias correction with that of Burman (1989), through simulated and real examples. We also illustrate that our method of correcting for the bias of CVMSE may change the results of model selection. / Science, Faculty of / Statistics, Department of / Graduate

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