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Although scholars have often acknowledged the spirituality in the writings of Clement of Alexandria (cir. 150-215 AD), a thorough study of the Platonic category θεωρία as it appears in this second century Father has never been undertaken. Most studies on Christian spirituality either ignore Clement's role altogether, or rush past him with little comment in favor of the great Origen (cir. 185-255 AD). Stromateis, Clement's most enigmatic work, contains over 75 occurrences of θεωρία. A close examination of these texts reveals that his use of the term is somewhat different from two of his greatest philosophical and spiritual mentors, Plato and Philo. Clement uses this term (usually translated "contemplation") to refer to a spiritual experience which occurs in space and time, as well as an ethereal one and one which occurs in the mind. A possible explanation for this difference lies with Clement's claim in the opening chapter of the work: he is the recipient of an oral tradition which has never been recorded, but which he plans to include in the Stromateis. This thesis demonstrates: 1) that Clement is the first Christian writer to adapt this philosophical category into Christian spirituality; 2) the primary purpose of Stromateis is to present the third stage in a spiritual pathway - to reveal θεωρία as the spiritual "meat" for the advanced believer; and 3) to present God and His contact with the Christian as immediate. In a radical move, going against the philosophical setting of the day, Clement presents this Platonic category as a means for the Christian to experience an immanent God.

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Currently, Title II of the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT Act) Act of 2001 appears to be stalled as a result of controversy over the intent and meaning of the law. Proponents of the title advocate the necessity of the act to combat modern terrorism, whereas opponents warn of circumventions of the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Using punctuated equilibrium as the theoretical foundation, the purpose of this case study was to explore the dialogue and legal exchanges between the American Civil Liberties Union and the Department of Justice related to the National Security Agency's metadata collection program. In specific, the study sought to explore the nature of resistance to changes needed to mollify the controversies associated with Title II. Data for this study were acquired through publicly available documents and artifacts including transcripts of Congressional hearings, legal documents, and briefing statements from the US Department of Justice and the American Civil Liberties Union. These data were deductively coded according to the elements of PET and then subjected to thematic analysis. Findings indicate that supporters and opponents of the law are locked in a consistent ideological polarization, with supporters of the law touting the necessity of the authorizations in combatting terrorism and opponents arguing the law violates civil liberties. Neither side of the debate displayed a willingness to compromise or acknowledge the legitimacy of the other viewpoint. Legislators who accept the legitimacy of both researched viewpoints could create positive social change by refining the law to meet national security needs while preserving constitutional protections.

Poly(ethylene terephthalate), PET, which is commonly used as a packaging material, is not degradable in nature. As an issue of sustainable development it must be recycled and converted into other products. During this process, extrusion is an important unit operation. In extrusion process, if the operating conditions are not controlled, PET can go under degradation, which results in the loss of some mechanical properties. In order to overcome the degradation of recycled PET (RPET), this study aims the control of the extrusion process. Dynamic models of the system for control purposes are obtained by experimental studies. In the experimental studies, screw speed, feed rate and barrel temperatures are taken as process variables in the ranges of 50 &ndash / 500 rpm, 3.85 &ndash / 8.16 g/min and 270 &ndash / 310 oC respectively. Singular value decomposition (SVD) technique is used for the best pairing between the manipulated &ndash / controlled variables, where screw speed is taken as the manipulated variable and molecular weight of the product is taken as the controlled variable. PID and model predictive controller (MPC) are designed utilizing the dynamic models in the feedback inferential control algorithm. In the simulation studies, the performance of the designed inferential control system, where molecular weight (Mv) of the product is estimated from the measured intrinsic viscosity ([&amp / #951 / ]) of the product, is investigated. The controller utilizing PID and MPC control algorithms are found to be robust and satisfactory in tracking the given set points and eliminating the effects of the disturbances.

GPS/INS (Global Positioning System / Inertial Navigation System) brings possibility of relaxing the demand for aerial triangulation in stereo model construction and rectification. In this thesis a differential rectification algorithm is programmed with Matlab software for aerial frame camera images. This program is tested using exterior orientation parameters obtained by GPS/INS and images are ortho-rectified. Ground Control Points (GCP) are measured in the orthorectified images and compared with other rectification methods according to RMSE and mean error. Besides, direct georeferencing accuracy is investigated by using GPS/INS data. Therefore, stereo models and ortho-images are constructed by using exterior orientation parameters obtained with both aerial triangulation and GPS/INS integration. GCPs are measured in both stereo models and ortho-images, compared with respect to their RMSE and mean error. In order to determine Digital Elevation Model (DEM) effect in ortho-rectification, different DEM data are used and the results are compared.

In this dissertation, we present a framework to enhance the retrieval, ranking, and categorization of text documents in medical domain. The contributions of this study are the introduction of a similarity model to retrieve and rank medical textdocuments and the introduction of rule-based categorization method based on lexical syntactic patterns features. We formulate the similarity model by combining three features to model the relationship among document and construct a document network. We aim to rank retrieved documents according to their topics / making highly relevant document on the top of the hit-list. We have applied this model on OHSUMED collection (TREC-9) in order to demonstrate the performance effectiveness in terms of topical ranking, recall, and precision metrics. In addition, we introduce ROLEX-SP (Rules Of LEXical Syntactic Patterns) / a method for the automatic induction of rule-based text-classifiers relies on lexical syntactic patterns as a set of features to categorize text-documents. The proposed method is dedicated to solve the problem of multi-class classification and feature imbalance problems in domain specific text documents. Furthermore, our proposed method is able to categorize documents according to a predefined set of characteristics such as: user-specific, domain-specific, and query-based categorization which facilitates browsing documents in search-engines and increase users ability to choose among relevant documents. To demonstrate the applicability of ROLEX-SP, we have performed experiments on OHSUMED (categorization collection). The results indicate that ROLEX-SP outperforms state-of-the-art methods in categorizing short-text medical documents.

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A video data model that allows efficient and effective representation and querying of spatio-temporal properties of objects has been previously developed. The data model is focused on the semantic content of video streams. Objects, events, activities performed by objects are the main interests of the model. The model supports fuzzy spatial queries including querying spatial relationships between objects and querying the trajectories of objects. In this thesis, this work is used as a basis for the development of an XML-based video database system. This system is aimed to be compliant with the MPEG-7 Multimedia Description Schemes in order to obey a universal standard. The system is implemented using a native XML database management system. Query entrance facilities are enhanced via integrating an NLP interface.

Clement of Alexandria played an important role in the development of Christian educational philosophy in a non-Christian culture in the second-century Roman Empire. Born into a pagan society and educated in Greek philosophy prior to his conversion, Clement sought to explain the orthodox Christian relationship between philosophy and theology and that the two are not enemies. His longest and perhaps most significant work, the Stromata, is a collection of the material that he taught to his students. As an educational record, it also provides two primary mechanisms for understanding some principles of his educational philosophy. First, his use of the term “Gnostic” (primarily γνωστικός, but also γνώμη) is unique and shows that he understands education to be crucial to, and even necessary for, Christian growth and development. Clement’s Gnostic figure is not just his ideal Christian, but of his understanding of what an ideally educated Christian would look like. Second, his use of γνῶσις and πίστις, and their relationship to each other throughout the Stromata provide further clues about his understanding of the relationship between education and discipleship. Clement argued for a complementary relationship between the two whereby faith is the ground of true knowledge and knowledge is the protector and aid to faith. Deduced from these elements in the Stromata, seven overarching principles of Clement’s philosophy of education are presented.