Mary Magdalene has fulfilled many roles since she was first mentioned in the New Testament. Some of the most popular characters she has played are as First Witness to Christ's resurrection, follower and companion of Christ, Apostle to the Apostles, penitential whore, and exemplar for Christian women. This thesis was researched and written to explore some of these personae as they appear in Renaissance images of the Noli Me Tangere scene. The Noli Me Tangere story, which describes Christ's post-resurrection appearance to Mary Magdalene, comes from the Gospel of John Chapter 20:12-15. Until the fourteenth century the Noli Me Tangere scene was depicted as a part of pictorial cycles concerning the life and death of Christ, or on rare occasions the life and death of the Magdalene herself. However, with an increasing interest in humanism, artists began to explore the Noli Me Tangere scene as an opportunity to analyze Christ's humanity and sexuality. The Noli Me Tangere as a backdrop is ideal since Mary Magdalene already suffers a reputation as a wanton woman. Renaissance images of Mary Magdalene often depict the Magdalene as a Heavenly Venus. While the sensuality of Mary Magdalene as a licentious saint and the iconography of Venus as the representation of sexuality have been previously examined by scholars, the "love" aspect of Venus iconology as evident in the Noli Me Tangere images of the Magdalene has received little, if any, attention. As the foremost icon of reformed sinner, Mary Magdalene is representative of both lust and love, much like the goddess Venus, and several Renaissance images illustrate this dichotomy. The image of the Magdalene as both a symbol of lust and love relates to her dual nature as an ideal woman and a wanton woman. In Renaissance culture, two fundamental types of women existed, the good and the bad. Each type of woman was assigned a set of traits which would indicate her social standing. The ideal woman should be beautiful, chaste, and obedient while the wanton woman was promiscuous and independent. Due to her mistaken identity as a fallen woman, Mary Magdalene was on the one hand assumed to be a prostitute and is often portrayed with the attributes of a temptress; in addition, the Gospels describe the Magdalene as a woman with independent means. On the other hand, Mary Magdalene repented her "evil" ways and found faith in Jesus Christ. She was already a renowned beauty, and after her conversion, she became the model of chastity and obedience. Analyses of Mary Magdalene's image in several Renaissance Noli Me Tangere paintings reflect both actual Renaissance women's lives and the perception of Renaissance women. Thus, Mary Magdalene represents the dichotomy of woman as ideal and wanton; loving and lustful; forgiven and fallen; exemplary and immoral; chaste and seductive; obedient and willful; and lastly, saint and sinner.

The number of accidents over the past decade involving emergency vehicles is a major concern for emergency service providers. This study assessed the effectiveness of adding a driving simulator to a traditional training program. Potential relationships with students' learning styles using Gregorc Mind Style Delineator were also examined. The general research design consisted of a quantitative portion (quasi-experimental) and a qualitative portion (phenomenological). The sample population consisted of Emergency Medical Technician students attending the National EMS Academy in Lafayette, LA. The didactic session was conducted first with 102 participants in attendance. The driving portion was conducted over five days. The group self-scheduled which day they would attend the driving portion of the class. This resulted in 52 participants in the control group and 50 participants in the treatment group. The treatment group used a driving simulator prior to driving on the competency course. The results indicated that the treatment group took significantly less time to drive through the competency course on the first run (t=3.74, p=0.0003), acquired significantly fewer penalty points on the first run (t=2.41, p=0.0178), and required significantly fewer runs to complete the course (t=3.53, p=0.0006). Participants with Abstract Random learning styles performed significantly better on a written, knowledge test than those with Abstract Random/Concrete Random learning styles and Abstract Sequential learning styles. When examining the participants' performance on the competency course in relationship to their learning styles, those with a sequential learning style took less total time to drive the competency course on the first run than those with random learning styles. A t-test was significant, t=2.13, p=0.0357. A simulator improves the individual's ability to drive an ambulance on the required competency course. The use of a driving simulator has potential savings for the emergency service industry and increases the safety of training drivers. In addition, the qualitative portion of the study found all participants had a favorable attitude toward using a simulator to learn to drive an emergency vehicle as part of the training program.

This thesis presents a novel, non-simulative, probabilistic model for switching activity in sequential circuits, capturing both spatio-temporal correlations at internal nodes and higher order temporal correlations due to feedback. Switching activity, one of the key components in dynamic power dissipation, is dependent on input streams and exhibits spatio-temporal correlation amongst the signals. One can handle dependency modeling of switching activity in a combinational circuit by Bayesian Networks [2] that encapsulates the underlying joint probability distribution function exactly. We present the underlying switching model of a sequential circuit as the time coupled logic induced directed acyclic graph (TC-LiDAG), that can be constructed from the logic structure and prove it to be a dynamic Bayesian Network. Dynamic Bayesian Networks over n time slices are also minimal representation of the dependency model where nodes denote the random variable and edges either denote direct dependency between variables at one time instant or denote dependencies between the random variables at different time instants. Dynamic Bayesian Networks are extremely powerful in modeling higher order temporal as well as spatial correlations; it is an exact model for the underlying conditional independencies. The attractive feature of this graphical representation of the joint probability function is that not only does it make the dependency relationships amongst the nodes explicit but it also serves as a computational mechanism for probabilistic inference. We use stochastic inference engines for dynamic Bayesian Networks which provides any-time estimates and scales well with respect to size We observe that less than a thousand samples usually converge to the correct estimates and that three time slices are sufficient for the ISCAS benchmark circuits. The average errors in switching probability of 0.006, with errors tightly distributed around the mean error values, on ISCAS'89 benchmark circuits involving up to 10000 signals are reported.

Religion, many times, is one of the phenomena that is misunderstood and often rejected due to apprehension. There is an expected "norm" within our culture for religion and those that fall outside that "norm" are typically criticized for their beliefs. Within Christianity there are a number of extremist groups that follow millennial doctrines and believe they are living in the end times. These organizations tend to view the government as oppressive, disrespectful, immoral and corrupt. Because of this when an incident occurs with one of these millennial groups and the government steps in to control the situation, the way it responds is critical. This is an examination of three incidents with American radical religious groups and the formal reactions to them by the United States government. The three incidents I will analyze are the incident with the Weaver family at Ruby Ridge, the incident with the Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas, and the incident with the Montana Freemen at Justus Township, and how the government handled each of these interactions. I will evaluate Mark Juergensmeyer's theories and patterns of cosmic war and performance violence, and Catherine Wessinger's categories and guidelines for radical religious groups and how she claims the government and media should interact with them. The criteria I will use for evaluation will be how well their theories help us to understand the beliefs and actions of the group. Too often the government is unable to interact constructively with these groups because they do not understand their beliefs, and thereby provoke further violence. What is needed is a shift in attitude, a realization that the language of the groups is not "Bible Babble". Juergensmeyer and Wessinger have a unique perspective because they have directly interacted with radical religious groups and can provide the government with an insider understanding of the worldview of such religious groups, what it means to them through their eyes. I provide a list of guidelines derived from these two scholars, for the government and media to follow that will aid in constructive interaction with millennial groups and aid in peaceful negotiations in the future.

This thesis describes the design and implementation of a distributed robot architecture, Distributed Field Robot Architecture. The approach taken in this thesis is threefold. First, the distributed architecture builds on existing hybrid deliberative/reactive architectures used for individual robots rather than creating a distributed architecture that requires re-engineering of existing robots. Second, the distributed layer of the architecture incorporates concepts from artificial intelligence and software agents. Third, the architecture is designed around Suns Jini middleware layer, rather than creating a middleware layer from scratch or attempting to adapt a software agent architecture. This thesis makes three primary contributions, both theoretical and practical, to intelligent robotics. First, the thesis defines key characteristics of a distributed robot architecture. Second, this thesis describes, implements, and validates a distributed robot architecture. Third, the implementation with a team of mobile ground robots interacting with an external software "mission controller" agent in a complex, outdoor task is itself a contribution. The architecture is validated with three existence proofs. First, an example is presented to show the implementation of a basic sensor service. Second, a basic behavior is presented to validate the reactive portion of the architecture. Finally, an intelligent agent is presented to validate the deliberative layer of the architecture and describe the integration with the distributed layer.

The set of all sequences that are generated by a bio-molecular protocol forms a language over the four letter alphabet Delta = [A,G,C,T]. This alphabet is associated with natural involution mapping Theta, A maps to T and G maps to C which is an antimorphism of Delta* In order to avoid undesirable Watson-Crick bonds between the words the language has to satisfy certain coding properties. Hence for an involution Theta we consider involution codes: Theta-infix, Theta-comma-free, Theta-k-codes and Theta-subword-k-codes which avoid certain undesirable hybridization. We investigate the closure properties of these codes and also the conditions under which both X and X+ are the same type of involution codes. We provide properties of the splicing system such that the language generated by the system preserves the desired properties of code words. Algebraic characterizations of these involutions through their syntactic monoids have also been discussed. Methods of constructing involution codes that are strictly locally testable are also given. General methods for generating such involution codes are given and teh information capacity of these codes show to be optimal in most cases. A specific set of these codes were chosen for experimental testing and the results of these experiments are presented.

This is an in-depth study of the Nigerian press, the ubiquitous behemoth which called itself the "defender" of Nigeria's national independence and the last "hope" of the common man. It's a bold attempt to critically examine its antecedents, its evolution or development especially the historical, political, technological and socio-economic events that had impacted its growth, its world views and ideologies. It's a thorough assessment of the press' influence on Nigeria's socio-economic and political development, as well as the suitability of its tactics and posturing toward attaining its set goals of economic and political emancipation of Nigerians. Most importantly, this study is aimed at determining whether the Nigerian Press' militantly combative and adversarial posturing, cultivated since its emergence on Nigeria's political scene during the colonial era, is still relevant in view of the nation's current democratic experiment. And also whether there are better alternative strategies toward achieving good governance in Nigeria, which is its utmost desire.

The problem of junk mail, also called spam, has reached epic proportions and various efforts are underway to fight spam. Junk mail classification using machine learning techniques is a key method to fight spam. We have devised a machine learning algorithm where features are created from individual sentences in the subject and body of a message by forming all possible word-pairings from a sentence. Weights are assigned to the features based on the strength of their predictive capabilities for spam/legitimate determination. The predictive capabilities are estimated by the frequency of occurrence of the feature in spam/legitimate collections as well as by application of heuristic rules. During classification, total spam and legitimate evidence in the message is obtained by summing up the weights of extracted features of each class and the message is classified into whichever class accumulates the greater sum. We compared the algorithm against the popular naïve-bayes algorithm (in [8]) and found it's performance exceeded that of naïve-bayes algorithm both in terms of catching spam and for reducing false positives.

This paper studies the history of just war theory and critiques it from various feminist perspectives. Using a definition of war as inseparable from the system within which it is embedded, the paper contends that just war theory has been incorporated into the realist paradigm that predominates current political thought, making it susceptible to manipulation. Most importantly, this usurpation has shifted just war theory's focus from jus ad bellum to jus in bello considerations, seriously weakening its deterrent effects on war. The paper proposes its replacement with a just peace theory, discussing several existing frameworks and explaining the important part women are playing to achieve its principles. It concludes that although just war principles might still be helpful as a framework for limiting the worst excesses of war, current applications do not adequately meet the presumption against war and for peaceful settlement of disputes that the theory's originators envisioned. Just peace theory is an active theory that promotes practices leading to the reduction of violence in all arenas and at all levels, from fights in the schoolyard to ethnic conflicts and beyond, offering concrete examples that can strengthen the last resort criteria of just war theory.

This dissertation presents the design of a unique prototype chemical agent detector which utilizes an array of polymer coated SAW resonators as the sensor elements. The design's particular embodiment is that of a testing platform for evaluating the utility of constructing a portable chemical agent detector, utilizing commercially available SAW resonators. It involves the consolidation of the sub-systems comprising a large laboratory development system, into a portable enclosure. A combination of design techniques, utilized to achieve an overall balance between the physical dimensions of the system and its detection performance, comprises the unique nature of the overall design of this detection system. Such techniques include; sensor power cycling, individually phase-tunable sensor oscillators, single step down conversion and the locality of the sensor's driving circuitry and sensing chamber. A frequency shift model is developed to characterize the device's response to target analytes. Reported here are the results of the preliminary tests of the detector system and the verifications of the device's operation as per the design requirements. Further, an assay of the system noise is undertaken, and the detector's limit of detection (LOD) is reported. The analytes used in this investigation were simulants of nerve and mustard gas as well as the interferent compound diesel. Among others, the following conclusions are reported: 1) that a mass loading model can adequately describe the frequency shifts of the SAW resonators utilized for sorption sensing; 2) that the quality factor of a polymer coated SAW resonator ultimately determines the noise performance of the driving oscillator; 3) that the lowest usable quality factor for the designed oscillator is 2500; 4) that the implementation of individual phase-tuning networks for each sensor in the sensor array can adequately compensate for phase variations among these sensors, and 5) that commercially available SAW resonators coated with chemo-selective polymers provide a reasonably inexpensive and reliable solution to the detection of chemical warfare agents when incorporated into a miniaturized sensing platform.