Montanism can be regarded as the first of the many voices of protest that have been raised at intervals throughout the history of the Church against the idea of treating the lay believer as a subordinate part of a collective system. This reaction towards individualism on the part of the Montanists tended to go too far in some respects and the exaggerated enthusiasm and bigotry of certain members of the movement led to narrowness of outlook and excesses of behaviour which have no doubt coloured later historians' view of Montanism.

ABSTRACT INVESTIGATION OF STUDENTS&rsquo / PROBABILISTIC MISCONCEPTIONS MUT, Ali ihsan M.S. in Secondary Science and Mathematics Education Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Safure BULUT December 2003, 86 pages The purpose of the study was to investigate the students&rsquo / probabilistic misconceptions with respect to grade level, previous instruction on probability and gender. The sample of the study was 885 students from different types of the schools (general high schools, private collages, Anatolian high school, vocational high schools, and elementary schools) and from grade levels (5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10). The sample represented a range of students with respect to socio-economic level and cultural background. To collect data for the study Probabilistic Misconception Test (PMT) and a questionnaire were administered. The test consisted of 14 problems from 8 probabilistic misconception types. Its content validity was tested. The data of the study were analyzed by means of SPSS. Each misconception type is investigated with respect to all variables. The results of the study revealed that: (a) The frequencies of all misconception types varied across grade levels. (b) The percentages of students who received instruction on probability in the school were higher than those who did not received instruction in terms of misconceptions on Effect of Sample Size and Time Axis Fallacy. In addition, the other misconception types were more frequent among the students who did not receive a certain instruction on probability than the students who received a certain instruction probability before the study / (c) The frequencies of all misconception types varied across gender.

Analysis of Functionality and Data Models of Social Network Services, Proposal of a protocol based on XMPP/Publish-Subscribe, Comparison to OStatus and OneSocialWeb, Discussion of Inbox

This paper investigates the advantages and disadvantages of the use of e-mail to obtain agreement between two parties with overlapping but also conflicting interests. The literature on Media Richness suggests that e-mail is too lean to facilitate agreement; but all supporting evidence stems from homogenous populations. This paper, however, starts from the hypothesis that in connection with lingua franca interaction, the text format provides advantages for parties that need to think how to phrase an argument. However, the evidence provided from a negotiation task performed by international business students indicates that, while there is a distinct advantage in the feature of reviewability, the text format itself also poses a problem because it allows selective attention. / Series: WU Online Papers in International Business Communication / Series One: Intercultural Communication and Language Learning

Scholarship to date on the Nag Hammadi Codices has been predominantly concerned with establishing the compositional history and doctrinal affiliations of each tractate within the collection. Much less attention has been paid to the library as a fourth-century collection of texts, which must have been understood by the compiler/s of the codices as having ideological coherence, and overarching messages. The present thesis is first and foremost an attempt to address this deficiency. Due to the site of the codices’ discovery in the Egyptian desert being in close proximity to the Pachomian monastery at Phbow, the suggestion was made that perhaps these monks were once the owners of the collection, forced to purge their monastery of these texts due to the increasing concern of the Alexandrian Church over the circulation of what it viewed to be ‘heretical’ religious documents. This ‘Pachomian connection’ was substantiated mainly by the apparent promotion of ascetic practice and a value placed on knowledge both in the Pachomian movement and many of the tractates from Nag Hammadi, as well as the presence of some monastic documents in the waste paper used to strengthen the covers of the codices. None are sufficient to conclude a relationship between the two. Moreover, scholarly conception of the Nag Hammadi Library as a representative of ‘Gnosticism,’ which since the critiques of this category by the likes of Williams (1996) and King (2004) has been something of a taboo term, meant that inquiry into connections with Pachomian monastic literature was too invested in searching for so-called ‘Gnostic’ overlap. On the contrary, this work argues that in order to gain a better understanding of why the Nag Hammadi texts were collected and collated in the way that they were, and how and why they might have been utilised by Christian inhabitants of the Egyptian desert, they must be viewed primarily as a fourth-century Christian collection. The thesis attempts to offer a fresh perspective on the question of monastic usage by viewing the Nag Hammadi texts simply as part of the Egyptian Christian landscape, rather than as a ‘heretical’ invasion of it. In order to conduct a controlled and sufficiently detailed analysis, this thesis examines one sub-collection of the Nag Hammadi Library – Codex II, alongside contemporaneous Pachomian monastic literature, and suggests agreement on various centralised issues. Building on the suggestions of Michael Williams (1996) and James Robinson (2004), that meaningful order can be detected in the arrangement of the Nag Hammadi Codices, the thesis contends that Nag Hammadi Codex II develops certain key themes through the particular sequencing of its tractates. Each of these, it is argued, would have been attractive to a fourth-century Pachomian monastic readership. Firstly, asceticism must be moderated so as not to lose sight of its spiritual value amidst competitive arrogance. Secondly, one’s duty to share and encourage the promulgation of spiritual truths among one’s brethren is of vital importance. Thirdly, identification as an ‘elite’ spiritually superior individual is in no way predetermined, as older definitions of ‘Gnosticism’ have suggested, but based entirely on one’s conscious choice to leave behind worldly pursuits.

Im Rahmen dieser Arbeit wird das Modell der Case Retrieval Netze vorgestellt, das ein Speichermodell für die Phase des Retrievals beim fallbasierten Schliessen darstellt. Dieses Modell lehnt sich an Assoziativspeicher an, insbesondere wird das Retrieval als Rekonstruktion des Falles betrachtet anstatt als eine Suche im traditionellen Sinne. Zwei der wesentlichen Vorteile des Modells sind Effizienz und Flexibilität: Effizienz beschreibt dabei die Fähigkeit, mit grossen Fallbasen umzugehen und dennoch schnell ein Resultat des Retrievals liefern zu können. Im Rahmen dieser Arbeit wird dieser Aspekt formal untersucht, das Hauptaugenmerk ist aber eher pragmatisch motiviert insofern als der Retrieval-Prozess so schnell sein sollte, dass der Benutzer möglichst keine Wartezeiten in Kauf nehmen muss. Flexibilität betrifft andererseits die allgemeine Anwendbarkeit des Modells in Bezug auf veränderte Aufgabenstellungen, auf alternative Formen der Fallrepräsentation usw. Hierfür wird das Konzept der Informationsvervollständigung diskutiert, welches insbesondere für die Beschreibung von interaktiven Entscheidungsunterstützungssystemen geeignet ist. Traditionelle Problemlöseverfahren, wie etwa Klassifikation oder Diagnose, können als Spezialfälle von Informationsvervollständigung aufgefasst werden. Das formale Modell der Case Retrieval Netze wird im Detail erläutert und dessen Eigenschaften untersucht. Anschliessend werden einige möglich Erweiterungen beschrieben. Neben diesen theoretischen Aspekten bilden Anwendungen, die mit Hilfe des Case Retrieval Netz Modells erstellt wurden, einen weiteren Schwerpunkt. Diese lassen sich in zwei grosse Richtungen einordnen: intelligente Verkaufsunterstützung für Zwecke des E-Commerce sowie Wissensmanagement auf Basis textueller Dokumente, wobei für letzteres der Aspekt der Wiederbenutzung von Problemlösewissen essentiell ist. Für jedes dieser Gebiete wird eine Anwendung im Detail beschrieben, weitere dienen der Illustration und werden nur kurz erläutert. Zuvor wird allgemein beschrieben, welche Aspekte bei Entwurf und Implementierung eines Informationssystems zu beachten sind, welches das Modell der Case Retrieval Netze nutzt. / In this thesis, a specific memory structure is presented that has been developed for the retrieval task in Case-Based Reasoning systems, namely Case Retrieval Nets (CRNs). This model borrows from associative memories in that it suggests to interpret case retrieval as a process of re-constructing a stored case rather than searching for it in the traditional sense. Tow major advantages of this model are efficiency and flexibility: Efficiency, on the one hand, is concerned with the ability to handle large case bases and still deliver retrieval results reasonably fast. In this thesis, a formal investigation of efficiency is included but the main focus is set on a more pragmatic view in the sense that retrieval should, in the ideal case, be fast enough such that for the users of a related system no delay will be noticeable. Flexibility, on the other hand, is related to the general applicability of a case memory depending on the type of task to perform, the representation of cases etc. For this, the concept of information completion is discussed which allows to capture the interactive nature of problem solving methods in particular when they are applied within a decision support system environment. As discussed, information completion, thus, covers more specific problem solving types, such as classification and diagnosis. The formal model of CRNs is presented in detail and its properties are investigated. After that, some possible extensions are described. Besides these more theoretical aspects, a further focus is set on applications that have been developed on the basis of the CRN model. Roughly speaking, two areas of applications can be recognized: electronic commerce applications for which Case-Based Reasoning may provide intelligent sales support, and knowledge management based on textual documents where the reuse of problem solving knowledge plays a crucial role. For each of these areas, a single application is described in full detail and further case studies are listed for illustration purposes. Prior to the details of the applications, a more general framework is presented describing the general design and implementation of an information system that makes uses of the model of CRNs.

This edition of the treatise on heresy ascribed to Pseudo-Reinerius is based on a collation of 29 extant mss. The text prepared from these has been compared with two mss. of sections V-XI of the longer recension of the so-called Anonymous of Passau treatise, the earliest version of which was compiled about 1260. This comparison has shown conclusively that the Pseudo- Reinerius treatise is derived in its entirety from these sections of the longer recension of the Anonymous of Passau treatise. The contents of both treatises have been analysed in detail, so that an assessment might be made of their value as source material for the history of heresy in the thirteenth century, more particularly in south Germany and Austria.

Lifelines provide the vital utilities for human being in the modern life. They convey a great variety of products in order to meet the general needs. Also, buried continuous pipelines are generally used to transmit energy sources, such as natural gas and crude oil, from production sources to target places. To be able to sustain this energy corridor efficiently and safely, interruption of the flow should be prevented as much as possible. This can be achieved providing target reliability index standing for the desired level of performance and reliability. For natural gas transmission, assessment of earthquake threats to buried continuous pipelines is the primary concern of this thesis in terms of reliability. Operating loads due to internal pressure and temperature changes are also discussed. Seismic wave propagation effects, liquefaction induced lateral spreading, including longitudinal and transverse permanent ground deformation effects, liquefaction induced buoyancy effects and fault crossing effects that the buried continuous pipelines subjected to are explained in detail. Limit state functions are presented for each one of the above mentioned earthquake effects combined with operating loads. Advanced First Order Second Moment method is used in reliability calculations. Two case studies are presented. In the first study, considering only the load effect due to internal pressure, reliability of an existing natural gas pipeline is evaluated. Additionally, safety factors are recommended for achieving the specified target reliability indexes. In the second case study, reliability of another existing natural gas pipeline subjected to above mentioned earthquake effects is evaluated in detail.

Estimation of location and scale parameters from a random sample of size n is of paramount importance in Statistics. An estimator is called fully efficient if it attains the Cramer-Rao minimum variance bound besides being unbiased. The method that yields such estimators, at any rate for large n, is the method of modified maximum likelihood estimation. Apparently, such estimators cannot be made more efficient by using sample based classical methods. That makes room for Bayesian method of estimation which engages prior distributions and likelihood functions. A formal combination of the prior knowledge and the sample information is called posterior distribution. The posterior distribution is maximized with respect to the unknown parameter(s). That gives HPD (highest probability density) estimator(s). Locating the maximum of the posterior distribution is, however, enormously difficult (computationally and analytically) in most situations. To alleviate these difficulties, we use modified likelihood function in the posterior distribution instead of the likelihood function. We derived the HPD estimators of location and scale parameters of distributions in the family of Generalized Logistic. We have extended the work to experimental design, one way ANOVA. We have obtained the HPD estimators of the block effects and the scale parameter (in the distribution of errors) / they have beautiful algebraic forms. We have shown that they are highly efficient. We have given real life examples to illustrate the usefulness of our results. Thus, the enormous computational and analytical difficulties with the traditional Bayesian method of estimation are circumvented at any rate in the context of experimental design.

Today, there are user annotated internet sites, user interaction logs, online user communities which are valuable sources of information concerning the personalized recommendation problem. In the literature, hybrid social recommender systems have been proposed to reduce the sparsity of the usage data by integrating the user related information sources together. In this thesis, a method based on probabilistic latent semantic analysis is used as a framework for a hybrid social recommendation system. Different data hybridization approaches on probabilistic latent semantic analysis are experimented. Based on this flexible probabilistic model, network regularization and model blending approaches are applied on probabilistic latent semantic analysis model as a solution for social trust network usage throughout the collaborative filtering process. The proposed model has outperformed the baseline methods in our experiments. As a result of the research, it is shown that the proposed methods successfully model the rating and social trust data together in a theoretically principled way.