From the late-thirteenth through late-fifteenth centuries, among the most frequently produced and widely disseminated books in England were unofficial, common law statute-based miscellanies known as Statuta Angliæ or ‘statute books’. In ca. 1470, a large format, de luxe, yet highly standardized, version of this codicological genre emerged; likely produced on a speculative basis, it survives in approximately two dozen exemplars. This thesis takes as its focus a member of this latter group: Cambridge, MA, Harvard University, Houghton Library, MS Richardson 40 (ca. 1460– 70). After reviewing current scholarship on these codices—examining several key issues and clarifying previous descriptions to enhance our understanding—it endeavours to establish a likely provenance for MS Richardson 40, exploring the ways in which both the manuscript and the broader genre resonate with the life of the proposed patron, Philip Mede (d. 1476), merchant, twice MP, and thrice Mayor of Bristol.

The objective of the Diploma thesis is monitoring of promotional activities of the publishing house Maxdorf, made in context of publication of the book "Slovník nespisovné češtiny". The work focuses on distribution of the book to the partner net of bookstores in the Czech Republic and on activities supporting of the sell. The results of promotion will be compared with costs spent on the promotion and also with revenue from sold prints. In the conclusion, possible occasions and threats that can affect sell and promotion of the "Slovník nespisovné češtiny" will be described.

The subject matters of this thesis are comprehensive processes of period-end closing and preparing financial statements, performed under the applicable law of the Czech Republic. The first part includes a theoretical framework, summarizing the key operations and procedures that need to be completed before closing the books. These processes include stock taking, analysis of accounts and operations relating to period-end closing, then gross profit / loss determination and finally, income tax calculation. This section is immediately followed by the process of preparing financial statements. The last section of the theoretical part describes the subsequent obligations relating to period-end closing and financial statements, such as audits, annual report or mandatory disclosure. The second part of the thesis describes practical application of the theoretical knowledge in a specific company.

The thesis consist of two parts - a creative part and a written report.The creative part is a picture book about rivers and the plentiful connections they have with The creative part is a picture book about rivers and the plentiful connections they have with us humans. It follows a child and her grandma as they look for answers to a question – what is a river? In their imaginary expedition, they discover rivers flowing in the sky and in living organisms; meet pilgrims and conquistadores, magical shape-shifting river dolphins and older-than-dinosaurs species of sturgeons; fish and bathe; gathering all the stories they participate in into their own story about the river. The book combines factual infor­mation, various stories from riverine environments as well as more loose associations and metaphors. The themes I touch upon include folklore, myths, daily needs of people rivers cater to, cultural metaphors, environmental problems, peculiarities of plants and animals, history, language etc. Every spread of the book is like a different chapter about different meanings rivers might have in different contexts. The book tells about a river as a journey, home, a refreshment, a name, a meeting place, a riddle, memory, depth, energy, a reflection, a path, the ocean; and as a thread that connects stories of different times and places. To make my book, I used a variety of materials, including pencils, watercolours, gouache, digital drawing; and a collection of geographical, historical, mythological references I have gathered as well as my own memories of growing up close to a river. I have tried to balance both factually accurate and poetic storytelling to create a story of interconnectedness and wonder. The key questions I worked with were: how to tell a story about natural environment in an engaging way; how to find a narrative structure that would communicate my story effectively and would have its inner logic; how to deal with issues of historical consciousness, ecological awareness, management of natural resources in a context of children’s books; how to encourage readers to think about relations of their physical and emotional environemnts. The title of the book is What Is a River? . It is supposed to be for children, but also for adults who would find the subject interesting. The report analyses the background, processes, and results of making the book.

This research addresses the problem of automatic keyphrase extraction from large documents and back of the book indexing. The potential benefits of automating this process are far reaching, from improving information retrieval in digital libraries, to saving countless man-hours by helping professional indexers creating back of the book indexes. The dissertation introduces a new methodology to evaluate automated systems, which allows for a detailed, comparative analysis of several techniques for keyphrase extraction. We introduce and evaluate both supervised and unsupervised techniques, designed to balance the resource requirements of an automated system and the best achievable performance. Additionally, a number of novel features are proposed, including a statistical informativeness measure based on chi statistics; an encyclopedic feature that taps into the vast knowledge base of Wikipedia to establish the likelihood of a phrase referring to an informative concept; and a linguistic feature based on sophisticated semantic analysis of the text using current theories of discourse comprehension. The resulting keyphrase extraction system is shown to outperform the current state of the art in supervised keyphrase extraction by a large margin. Moreover, a fully automated back of the book indexing system based on the keyphrase extraction system was shown to lead to back of the book indexes closely resembling those created by human experts.

La thèse traite d’une section de la plus grande somme philosophique d’Avicenne (Ibn Sīnā, m. 1037), le Livre de la Guérison (Kitāb al-Šifāʾ). La somme s’articule en quatre parties qui concernent la logique, la philosophie naturelle, les mathématiques et la métaphysique ; la section dont il est question dans la thèse correspond à la réélaboration de l’Isagogé de Porphyre par Avicenne (Kitāb al-Madḫal, « Livre de l’Introduction ») qui ouvre la section de logique du Šifāʾ. La thèse est articulée en trois parties principales, c’est-à-dire (i) une édition du texte arabe du Madḫal d’Avicenne, (ii) une traduction en anglais et (iii) un commentaire de l’ouvrage ; ces trois parties principales sont précédées d’une Introduction (0) en deux parties, la première (0a) étant une Introduction Générale aux innovations doctrinales majeures de l’ouvrage, et la deuxième (0b) étant une Introduction à l’édition du texte, qui inclut la première étude systématique de sa tradition directe et indirecte et qui expose les critères suivis dans l’édition. (i) La seule édition existante du Madḫal d’Avicenne est celle imprimée au Caire en 1952 (réimprimée à Téhéran en 1983 et à Beyrouth en 1993), basée sur dix manuscrits. L’énorme tradition manuscrite du Madḫal d’Avicenne et, en général, du Livre de la Guérison, reste toujours à explorer. Selon les résultats provisionnels de la recherche bibliographique conduite dans le cadre de ce travail, on peut estimer que la tradition manuscrite du Madḫal compte au moins 119 manuscrits, avec la possible addition de 14 autres manuscrits (comme illustré dans l’Introduction à l’édition, 0b). Loin d’être représentatif de la tradition textuelle de l’ouvrage, le texte de l’édition du Caire a été constitué sur la base de dix manuscrits qui n’ont pas été choisis sur la base des critères philologiques, et dont les relations stemmatiques sont inconnues. Même si une édition critique fondée sur tous les 119 témoins sûrs du texte excède le but du présent travail, l’édition offerte dans la thèse utilise un nombre de manuscrits plus vaste que l’édition du Caire et sélectionne les témoins par une collation préliminaire achevée sur des morceaux du texte. Le but d’une telle collation préliminaire est de sélectionner les manuscrits d’une façon moins arbitraire et de fournir une reconstruction de leurs relations stemmatiques (proposée dans l’Introduction, 0b). En général, l’édition ici proposée inclut 32 manuscrits choisis parmi les 68 inspectés, dont 21 ont été systématiquement collationnés et 11 ont été éliminés en tant que codices descripti. La présente édition considère aussi la traduction latine du douzième siècle, comptée parmi les témoins les plus anciens de l’ouvrage. Ce travail éditorial est censé apporter une amélioration par rapport à l’édition du Caire dans un nombre de points cruciaux pour la compréhension des argumentations d’Avicenne. (ii) Au début de ce projet, les traductions intégrales du Madḫal d’Avicenne en langue moderne étaient disponibles uniquement en turque et en russe. Bien que des traductions partielles de l’ouvrage en d’autres langues aient été produites, une traduction anglaise complète était encore un desideratum. La thèse offre une traduction anglaise intégrale basée sur le texte arabe qui vient d’être établi, visant à préserver le plus possible la cohérence dans la traduction des termes philosophiques principaux. La traduction est complémentée par un apparat de notes, afin de faciliter la compréhension immédiate du texte. (iii) La troisième section de la thèse offre un commentaire systématique du Madḫal d’Avicenne, qui est censé supporter une lecture plus profonde du texte dans son intégrité. Le commentaire envisage soit les aspects historiques, soit les aspects philosophiques et inclut, plus en détail, l’analyse et l’identification, si possible, des sources d’Avicenne, en mettant en évidence les points de majeur intérêt philosophique du travail abordés de façon globale dans l’Introduction Générale (0a). / The thesis deals with a section of the major philosophical summa by Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā, d. 1037), namely the Book of the Healing (Kitāb al-Šifāʾ). The summa is structured into four parts, devoted to Logic, Natural Philosophy, Mathematics and Metaphysics; the section at stake is Avicenna’s reworking of Porphyry’s Isagoge (Kitāb al-Madḫal, i.e. “Book of the Introduction”) opening the section of Logic of the Šifāʾ. The thesis is articulated into three main parts, namely (i) an edition of the Arabic text of Avicenna’s Madḫal, (ii) an English translation and (iii) a systematic commentary; these three main parts are preceded by an Introduction (0) divided into two halves: (0a) a General Introduction focused on the doctrinal major innovations of the work and (0b) an Introduction to the Edition of the text, which offers a first comprehensive study of its direct and early indirect tradition and explains the criteria of the edition. (i) The only previous edition of Avicenna’s Madḫal was the one printed in Cairo in 1952 (then reprinted in Tehran in 1983 and in Beirut in 1993), based on ten manuscripts. The huge manuscript tradition of Avicenna’s Madḫal – and, more in general, of Avicenna’s Book of the Healing – is still a matter of investigation. According to the provisional results of the bibliographical research conducted in the present work, it can be estimated that the manuscript tradition of the Madḫal amounts to at least 119 certain witnesses and 14 possible additional witnesses (as explained in the Introduction to the edition, 0b). The text of the Cairo edition, far from being representative of the whole textual tradition, was reconstructed on the basis of ten manuscripts that were not selected on the basis of philological criteria and whose reciprocal stemmatic relations were not clear. Although a critical edition based on all the 119 certain witnesses of the work exceeds the scope of the present work, the edition provided in the thesis takes into account a larger number of manuscripts than the Cairo edition did and, most importantly, selects them by means of a preliminary collation made on portions of the text. The purpose of this preliminary collation is making the selection of the manuscripts employed less arbitrary and providing a reconstruction of their stemmatic relations (in the Introduction, 0b). Overall, 32 manuscripts among the 68 inspected were employed in the edition here proposed, 21 of which were systematically collated and 11 were eliminated as codices descripti. The present edition also assumes as a witness the twelfth-century Latin translation of the work, which is, at the present moment, among the earliest extant witnesses of the text. Hopefully, this editorial work allowed us to improve the text of the Cairo edition in a number of points that are crucial to the correct understanding of Avicenna’s argumentation. (ii) As this project started, complete translations of Avicenna’s Madḫal in modern languages were only available in Turkish and Russian. Chapters of the work had also been translated in other languages, but an English translation of the whole work was still a desideratum. A complete English translation is provided in the thesis, based on the newly-established Arabic text of the work and aiming at preserving the major possible consistency in rendering the relevant philosophical terms. As a complement to the translation, an apparatus of notes is offered to facilitate the immediate understanding of the text. (iii) The third section of the thesis consists in a systematic commentary on Avicenna’s Madḫal, which is meant to support a deeper understanding of the text in its entirety. The commentary deals with both historical and philosophical aspects; more in detail, it includes an analysis and an identification, when possible, of Avicenna’s sources, and underlines the points of major philosophical interest of the work, which are dealt in a more comprehensive manner in the General Introduction (0a).

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How can you increase children's motivation for reading outside the classroom - a sure predictor of increased reading achievement? You'll find the answers in Motivating Recreational Reading and Promoting Home-School Connections. This collection of articles presents classroom-tested ideas, resources, and activities to create motivational tools and home-school partnerships that will make literacy learning more effective and engaging for your students. The 33 articles present strategies that address a wide range of topics, including poetry, riddles in the classroom, book commercials, cooperative group rotation, classroom libraries, multiculturalism, reading workshops, peer tutoring, reading buddies and coaches, supporting parents and families, linking home and school, and community involvement. You'll also find in the appendixes a variety of resources for teachers and parents, including information on IRA parent material, U.S. reading initiatives and programs, and IRA's "Choices" booklists.

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