Students of Second Temple Judaism have drawn two broad conclusions. First, Judaism of the first century is characterized by diversity. Second, the most pervasive influence on Judaism of this period was Hellenism. The present study seeks to contribute to the continuing discussion of Second Temple Judaism, bearing in mind these two factors. Specifically, the aim is to identify the shared ideas of Judaism. The thesis is concerned with the search for common features of the Jewish religion what may be termed "common denominators" within Second Temple Judaism. This should help to decide the question of how we are to understand the diversity within first-century Judaism in relation to its common shared features. In the search for these shared features two main bodies of evidence are explored: Josephus' Contra Apionem. 2. 190-219, and the letters of Paul; for differing reasons both of these documents may be used profitably. The letters of Paul are valuable since this material is all dated before the destruction of the Second Temple; whereas Contra Apionem. 2. 190-219, is one of the earliest and possibly oldest theological summaries compiled by a contemporary of the NT writers. While there are other summaries on the Jewish religion (Philo's Hypothetica. his Spec. Laws and Josephus' Antiquities 4.196-301) Contra Apionem offers a summary of a different kind because its focus is on basic Jewish principles. The method used is first to consider Ap. 2. 190-219 paragraph by paragraph in conjunction with Philo's Hypothetica and the Sentences of Pseudo-Phocylides. Where appropriate appeal is also made to the DSS, the rabbis, and the apocalyptic literature. This follows an assessment of the undisputed letters of Paul. The analysis of this evidence is conducted under the following headings: Jewish autobiography; Jewish elements in Paul's Christian theology; debates with Jewish Christian opponents; Jewish ethics embraced by Gentile converts; a dialogue on the nature of the Jewish religion. Three main conclusions are reached. The first is that there are discernible common features within first-century Judaism. This is supported by an analysis of the Contra Apionem precis and related Jewish material. Second, there is a body of common opinion that may be deemed to belong to the period before AD 70. This will be argued from the letters of Paul by appeal to various criteria. The third point is that there are Jewish ideas that are both common and pre-70. This will be confirmed by appealing in a comparative way to evidence from both the letters of Paul and Contra Apionem. The criterion can be formulated in the following way: ideas may be considered both common and pre-70 whenever those found in Contra Apionem and attested in a wide variety of Jewish evidence (thus common) are also attested in the letters of Paul (and so pre-70).

This thesis studies the intellectual development of the painter and writer Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957). His career is seen as an unique expression of the creative and critical intelligence within modern society. The liberal, secular, and individualistic aspects of Lewis's thought are stressed. / The thesis concentrates on four aspects of Lewis's life and work. First, Lewis's relationship with T. E. Hulme, usually described as one of direct influence, is shown to be adversarial and complicated by basic differences of their worldview. Second, the nature of Lewis's fascism is discussed using a new reading of Hitler (1931). Third, Lewis's view of the position and the role of the artist in society is explained by studying three of his models of culture and society, each drawn from a different period of his career. Finally, the relationship of Lewis and Marshall McLuhan is examined to determine the nature and extent of the ideas passed on.

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The purpose of the study was to investigate the effects of discovery and application based instruction (DABI) on students&rsquo / mathematics achievement and also to explore opinions of students toward DABI. The research was conducted by 118 ninth grade students from Etimesgut Anatolian High School, in Ankara, during the spring semester of 2001-2002 academic year. During the study, experimental groups received DABI and control groups received Traditionally Based Instruction (TBI). The treatment was completed in three weeks. Mathematics Achievement Test (MAT) and Logarithm Achievement Test (LAT) were administered as pre and posttest respectively. In addition, a questionnaire, Students&rsquo / Views and Attitudes About DABI (SVA) and interviews were administered to determine students&rsquo / views and attitudes toward DABI. Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA), independent sample t-test and descriptive statistics were used for testing the hypothesis of the study. No significant difference was found between LAT mean scores of students taught with DABI and traditionally based instruction when MAT test scores were controlled. In addition, neither students&rsquo / field of study nor gender was a significant factor for LAT scores. Students&rsquo / gender was not a significant factor for SVA scores. However, there was significant effect of math grades and field selections of students on SVA scores.

The aim of this study is to investigate the views of preservice science teachers on science-technology-society, STS, issue. A total of 176 preservice science teachers participated in the study. A 26-item &ldquo / Views on Science-Technology-Society (VOSTS)&rdquo / instrument, translated and adapted into Turkish, were utilized to assess participants&rsquo / views on STS. The VOSTS (Aikenhead, Ryan and Fleming, 1989) is a pool of 114 empirically developed multiple-choice items with nine categories. In order to understand participants&rsquo / views on STS in depth, semi-structured interviews were also conducted by 9 volunteer preservice science teachers. The results gave a colorful picture of the views of preservice science teachers on science-technology-society issue. The analysis revealed that preservice science teachers often confuse the definitions of technology with science. Most of the participants of the study had specific views about the reasons of doing scientific researches in their country, for example, to be independent from other countries, to get financial profit. Results displayed a consensus on the possible positive effects of upbringing and the importance of education given to high school students. According to the data obtained from the present study, respondents possess varied views about the influences of society on science and technology. While preservice science teachers claiming that scientists could break the rules of science, they also claimed scientists as objective in their study. On the other hand, participants supported the view that scientists&rsquo / concern on all the effects of their experiments. Preservice science teachers advocated also that technological developments can be controlled by citizens.

Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is an autoimmune disease of central nervous system. It may result in a variety of symptoms from blurred vision to severe muscle weakness and degradation, depending on the affected regions in brain. To better understand this disease and to quantify its evolution, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is increasingly used nowadays. Manual delineation of MS lesions in MR images by human expert is time-consuming, subjective, and prone to inter-expert variability. Therefore, automatic segmentation is needed as an alternative to manual segmentation. However, the progression of the MS lesions shows considerable variability and MS lesions present temporal changes in shape, location, and area between patients and even for the same patient, which renders the automatic segmentation of MS lesions a challenging problem. In this dissertation, a set of segmentation pipelines are proposed for automatic segmentation of multiple sclerosis (MS) lesions from brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data. These techniques use a trained support vector machine (SVM) to discriminate between the blocks in regions of MS lesions and the blocks in non-MS lesion regions mainly based on the textural features with aid of the other features. The main contribution of this set of frameworks is the use of textural features to detect MS lesions in a fully automated approach that does not rely on manually delineating the MS lesions. In addition, the technique introduces the concept of the multi-sectional views segmentation to produce verified segmentation. The multi-sectional views pipeline is customized to provide better segmentation performance and to benefit from the properties and the nature of MS lesion in MRI. These customization and enhancement leads to development of the customized MV-T-SVM. The MRI datasets that were used in the evaluation of the proposed pipelines are simulated MRI datasets (3 subjects) generated using the McGill University BrainWeb MRI Simulator, real datasets (51 subjects) publicly available at the workshop of MS Lesion Segmentation Challenge 2008 and real MRI datasets (10 subjects) for MS subjects acquired at the University of Miami. The obtained results indicate that the proposed method would be viable for use in clinical practice for the detection of MS lesions in MRI.

Children benefit in many ways from play. Play provides children with an excellent way to express their feelings and conceptions of the world in which they live. Play also provides a forum in which researchers can capture, understand and interpret children's voices and views. Like many countries around the world, Vietnam is currently reforming their early childhood education curriculum to provide a play-based, child centred and outcomes focused approach to early childhood education. In order to capture children's interest and promote child initiated and directed learning, educators and policy makers need to consider how children interpret their personal play lives. This study presents data from children's programs in nine kindergartens and cultural programs in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. Children's drawings and stories were collected to document young children's conceptions of play in Vietnam at the turn of the millennium. Through these 353 drawings and stories, key themes in the children's play lives were identified. The purpose of this study is to examine children's views about play. What do they like to play? How do they define play? How are young Vietnam's children's conceptions of their play influenced by cultural attitudes and expectations? In addition, the study proposes some new play-based, child centred and outcomes focused approaches to curriculum development for Vietnamese early childhood programs.

The introduction of a universal, full-time Preparatory Year in all Queensland schools from 2007 is a significant reform in early childhood education and care (ECEC) in that state. Rapidly increasing enrolment of children in full-time Preparatory Year programs in non-government schools has been a feature of the Queensland context over the past decade. These trends, along with efforts towards consistency of services and universal school starting ages across Australian states and territories have prompted this important reform to early education in Queensland. Constructions of the role of parents as consumers of early childhood services and/or partners in their children's early education suggest that consideration of parent views of this reform is both timely and strategic. This thesis reports the findings of a research project investigating parent conceptions of a Preparatory Year in a non-government school in outer urban Queensland. The research used a phenomenographic approach to elicit and describe the qualitatively different ways in which a group of 26 parents viewed the Preparatory Year. Analysis revealed that the range of parent conceptions of the Preparatory Year demonstrated varying emphasis on parent needs, child needs and preparation for future success in school and beyond. The study led to the construction of five categories of description outlining five different ways of understanding the Preparatory Year. The Preparatory Year was viewed in relation to (1) the current needs of the parents, (2) the current needs of the child, (3) preparation for Year One, (4) providing an advantage in primary school, and (5) preparation for future success beyond school. These five categories were linked and differentiated from each other by two central themes, or dimensions of variation: (1) a beneficiary dimension in which either the parent or the child were seen to benefit from the program, and (2) a temporal dimension in which the program was viewed in relation to meeting current needs or preparing for the future. The results of the study suggest that variation exists in the ways that parents may conceptualise the phenomenon of the Preparatory Year in Queensland. Analysis of the data further suggests that tensions exist around whether the Preparatory Year ought to emphasise preparation for the future and/or meet current needs of children; and whether those programs should meet the needs of the parent and/or the needs of the child. This thesis opens up the possibility of future tensions, with the potential for parent preferences for a formal interpretation of the Preparatory Year curriculum being at odds with the new play-based Early Years Curriculum Guidelines. Results of the study suggest that more attention be given to engaging parents and eliciting their views of the early childhood programs experienced by their children. Moreover, it provides an approach for ways in which parent views might be generated, analysed and incorporated into future policy developments and reforms.

No description available.

No description available.