"Hinnerk Pick und der Steernkieker" ist ein poetischer Text, der sich mit dem Astronomen J. J. Sievers, der an der Altonaer Sternwarte tätig war, befasst. J. J. Sievers (1804-1881) stammte aus Stafstedt (Kreis Rendsburg-Eckernförde), einem Dorf in der Nähe von Luhnstedt, dem Heimatdorf von F. E. Peters. Er wird beschrieben als märchenhaft geheimnisvolle Gestalt und zugleich liebenswerter Sonderling, in dessen Augen sich eine Pascalsche Scheu vor der Unendlichkeit des Raumes widerspiegelt. "Immer aber wird mir der Steernkieker teuer bleiben als ein Zeugnis dafür, dass aus der Enge eines holsteinischen Dorfes zum Geist geführt werden kann, wen der Geist gerufen hat. Am Ende ist eines Menschen Drang ins Weite doch vergeblich, wenn er sie nach unruhigen Jahren des Suchens nicht findet in sich selbst." In den Mund des Astronomen Sievers ("de ool Steernkieker", "de ool Klooksnacker") legt Peters am Anfang der "Baasdörper Krönk" die berühmte Beschreibung von Baasdorp und der Anlage des Dorfes in drei sozial definierte konzentrische Kreise (reiche Bauern; Halbhufner und kleine Bauern; schließlich Handwerker und Katenbauern).

Diss.--Marburg, 2002. / Bibliogr. p. 361-374.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of New Brunswick, 1993. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--Central Connecticut State University, 2002. / Thesis advisor: Marie-Claire Rohinsky. " ... in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in French." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 110-111). Also available via the World Wide Web.

The Ku Klux Klan during the 1920's attained a high level of influence though not outright control in the political and social affairs of Indiana. The Klan with its nativist vision of American life regarded with hostility the deviant values represented by Negroes, Jews, Roman Catholics, and aliens. The irony of the rise of this movement in Indiana was that the population of these minorities was proportionally lower in the Hoosier state than in most other states.

The use of the exodus theme in the interpretation of scripture has been espoused by a number of liberation theologians, notably Jose Severino Croatto. The responses to the use of this theme vary. This thesis examines Croatto's use of the hermeneutic circle, as a method of biblical interpretation, in its application to the narratives of Exodus 1--15. The process of interpretation and application are examined against the background of the liberation movement and liberation theology. As an advocate of the liberation movement, Croatto uses the hermeneutic circle to relate the meaning of the exodus narratives to the socio-political situation of oppression in Latin America. This use of the hermeneutic circle, therefore, allows the meaning of the exodus narratives, in interaction with a contemporary socio-political context, to facilitate the creation of a message of liberation for the present.

The Capacity Limited, Cognitive Constructionist (CLCC) model of presence is proposed as an information processing model of presence, which is demonstrated to have more theoretical power than extant models. The CLCC model defines information processing paths between attention, working memory, declarative memory and procedural memory, which operate to create and maintain a semantic context or bias. Bottom-up information entering the sensory cortices is filtered by attention into working memory where it forms temporary structures encoding the subject’s experience of the VE. These structures also receive top-down information, which arises in declarative memory. This interaction of top-down and bottom-up data gives the entire model a semantic bias which attempts to keep the subject’s construction of the environment semantically coherent. This allows for inferences and decision making, which translates into high presence. A semantically incoherent construction, or one which does not have enough working memory capacity allocated to it will result in poorer inferences about the environment, and reduced presence. If, as the CLCC model contends, presence involves information processing rather than simple perception, then one would expect to see working memory interference effects and semantic content effects in presence. Six studies were conducted to test these conjectures and validate the CLCC model. Studies 1 – 3 examined the role of working memory and attention on presence (the bottom half of the model), while Studies 4 – 6 examined semantic content and processing effects on presence (the top half of the model). Study 1 manipulated working memory (WM) load during VE exploration. The CLCC prediction was that WM load would interfere with presence. Data from 177 subjects showed smaller effects than predicted: No WM effects on spatial presence, lower naturalness under spatial WM load, and lower engagement under verbal WM load. This suggests that spatial presence makes no use of WM, and that engagement and naturalness make limited use of it. While engagement seems to make use of semantic processing as predicted, naturalness seems to use spatial processing. Study 2 examined WM use by media decoders by repeating Study 1 with a text-based VE. Data from 114 subjects shows no WM effects exist on any of the four ITC-SOPI factors. This supports Study 1’s finding that spatial presence does not use WM, but 3 contradicts results engagement and naturalness. Study 3 examined the relative contribution of attention and WM. 46 subjects viewed VE walkthroughs in three conditions: Viewing one walkthrough only (baseline), viewing two walkthroughs simultaneously (WM load condition), or viewing one walkthrough and a jumbled video simultaneously (attention load condition). The CLCC model predicted the WM load condition would interfere with presence the most, followed by the attention load condition, followed by the baseline. No difference was found across conditions, although naturalness and engagement predicted task performance, indicating that spatial presence is distinct from these factors, in agreement with the findings of Study 1 and 2. Study 4 was a survey of semantic and processing effects on presence. Data from 101 computer gamers indicate that it is how often gamers play presence games (and not how many years they have been playing) that predicts how important they consider presence to their gaming experience. This suggests a moderate term activation effect rather than a long term learning effect. Furthermore, gamers with a high thematic inertia rate presence as important to gaming, indicating a processing effect. Finally, gamers who are capable of integrating non-diegetic music into their experiences rate presence as more important, which supports the CLCC notion that information processing of both semantic and perceptual information is important to presence. Study 5 followed up Study 4 by focusing on one specific content area. 461 flight simulation gamers completed the survey. Findings largely agree with those of Study 4, and strongly support the CLCC model prediction that highly specific expectations of content will reduce presence, while generalized expectations will increase it. Thematic inertia and priming were are also positively associated with presence, as predicted by the CLCC model. Study 6 manipulated non-diegetic information (background music) and semantic priming to test semantic processing in presence. The CLCC model predicted that all VE related information (semantic or perceptual) contributes to presence, particularly engagement and naturalness. 181 subjects were primed with materials semantically relevant or irrelevant to VE content, and then experienced the VE with no background music (baseline), music which semantically fit the VE, or VE music which was not a semantic fit. Priming did not influence presence as predicted, but non-diegetic music which fit the VE increased naturalness as predicted. The no-fit music produced the same presence scores as the baseline 4 condition, indicating that it was filtered out by attention, as predicted by the CLCC model. Overall, the CLCC model and data show that content effects occur in presence, and how these are mediated by declarative memory. It also shows that presence is a complex multi-level processing phenomenon. Spatial presence is at a cognitively low level, relying on perceptual (bottom-up) information, while engagement and naturalness are heavily dependent on conceptual (top-down) information, operating as a set of expectation-content comparisons which, when met by the content, lead to enhanced presence. These high and low cognitive forms of presence are largely independent, but do share some semantic effects, likely due to a reliance on common underlying cognitive processes such as priming and thematic inertia. The top half of the CLCC model (which encodes semantic meaning and explains content effects) is better supported that the bottom half (which predicted interference and attention effects). This finding is highly unexpected, as the literature on almost all extant models predicts an important role for attention in presence. From the data however, one must conclude that spatial presence makes no use of working memory, while cognitive higher forms of presence make use of limited amounts of working memory.

We designed and developed a Collaborative Annotation System for Proteins called DAS Writeback, which extends the Distributed Annotation System (DAS) to provide the functionalities of adding, editing and deleting annotations. A great deal of effort has gone into gathering information about proteins over the last few years. By June 2009, UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot, a curated database, contained over four hundred thousand sequence entries and UniProtKB/TrEMBL, a database with automated annotation, contained over eight million sequence entries. Every protein is annotated with relevant information, which needs to be eciently captured and made available to other research groups. These include annotations about the structure, the function or the biochemical residues. Several research groups have taken on the task of making this information accessible to the community, however, information flow in the opposite direction has not been extensively explored. Users are currently passive actors that behave as consumers of one or several sources of protein annotations and they have no immediate way to provide feedback to the source if, for example, a mistake is detected or they want to add information. Any change has to be done by the owner of the database. The current lack of being able to feed information back to a database is tackled in this project. The solution consists of an extension of the DAS protocol that defines the communication rules between the client and the writeback server following the Uniform Interface of the RESTful architecture. A protocol extension was proposed to the DAS community and implementations of both server and client were created in order to have a fully functional system. For the development of the server, writing functionalities were added to MyDAS, which is a widely used DAS server. The writeback client is an extended version of the web-based protein client Dasty2. The involvement of the DAS community and other potential users was a fundamental component of this project. The architecture was designed with the insight of the DAS specialized forum, a prototype was then created and subsequently presented in the DAS workshop 2009. The feedback from the forum and workshop was used to redefine the architecture and implement the system. A usability experiment was performed using potential users of the system emulating a real annotation task. It demonstrated that DAS writeback is effective, usable and will provide the appropriate environment for the creation and evolution of a protein annotation community. Although the scope of this research is limited to protein annotations, the specification was defined in a general way. It can, therefore, be used for other types of information supported by DAS, implying that the server is versatile enough to be used in other scenarios without major modifications.

Objective: To determine the accuracy, measured by error rate, with which Clinical Research Workers (CRWs), with minimal experience in data entry, could capture data on a feature phone during an interview using two different mobile phone applications, compared to the accuracy with which they could record data on paper Case Report Forms (CRFs). Design: A comparative study was performed where 10 participating CRWs performed 90 mock interviews using either paper CRFs or one of two mobile phone applications. The phone applications were a commonly used open source application and an application custom built for this study that followed a simplified, less flexible user interface paradigm. The answers to the interview questions were randomly generated and provided to the interviewees in sealed envelopes prior to the scheduling of the mock interview. Error rates of the captured data were calculated relative to the randomly generated expected answers. Results and Conclusion: The study aimed to show that error rates of clinical research data captured using a mobile phone application would not be inferior to data recorded on paper CRFs. For the custom application, this desired result was not found unequivocally. An error in judgment when designing the custom phone application resulted in dates being captured in a manner unfamiliar to the study participants, leading to high error rates for this type of data. If this error is condoned by excluding the date type from the results for the custom application, the custom application is shown to be non-inferior, at the 95% confidence level, to standard paper forms when capturing data for clinical research. Analysis of the results for the open source application showed that using this application for data capture was inferior to paper CRFs. Secondary analysis showed that error rates for data captured on the custom mobile phone application by non-computer literate users were significantly lower at the 95% confidence level than the error rates for data recorded by the same users on paper and for data captured by computer literate users using the custom application. This result confirms that even non-computer literate users can capture data accurately using a feature phone with a simplified user interface.

JACK CLEMO: CARTOGRAPHER OF GRACE is an interpretative study of the novels and poetry of Jack Clemo. Chapter One traces, through published biographical material, the main personal influences upon the development of his vision. Chapters Two to Four show how ideas which first found publication in his published poetry only after 1951 had developed over a period of twenty years. The material for these chapters (mainly unpublished novels and juvenile poetry) was kindly loaned to the author by Mr Clemo. The published novels and first collection of verses are studied in the four following chapters, where it becomes clear that Clemo's initial, distinctive Calvinist view of life shows striking similarities with the neo-orthodox writings of Karl Earth (whom he had not then read) and the post-Barthian Jurgen Moltmann (whom Clemo has never read). These chapters offer an interpretation of Clemo's Calvinist vision and show it to be both theologically sound and, in terms of literature, unique. Clemo's contribution, it is seen, is in terms of his metaphoric use of landscape in a sustained refutation of the case for a natural theology; this, and his personal adaptation of the idea of election inspired by his admiration for Robert Browning. Substantial changes of poetic technique appear in the collection Cactus on Carmel, and these, and their sources, are accounted for in Chapter Nine. Chapters Ten to Twelve trace the development of Clemo's poetry away from its pre-occupation with the landscape of South- East Cornwall, the expansion of genre to include portraiture and dramatic monologue, and account for these developments in terms of Clemo's life-long determination to marry. This determination is seen to be the most important influence upon Clemo's life, shaping all the work he has produced. Chapter Thirteen examines the poetry in which Clemo challenges head on the materialism of the century. The final chapter is a detailed study of the worksheets of poems Clemo wrote over some twenty five years, and thus compares the processes of production adopted after the poet became blind with those employed earlier.