This dissertation explores the ascribed social meanings and processes of conversion among contemporary American converts to Eastern Orthodoxy in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Employing the ethnographic field methods of participant observation and interviewing at two primary fieldsites, a Greek Orthodox and Orthodox Church in America parish, I examine how converts, as choice-makers using consumer-like strategies and print/electronic media to study and compare religious options, reflect and effect change in communities commonly regarded in the United States as preserving the languages and customs of various immigrant groups from Eastern, Southeastern Europe, and the Middle East. Much of the existing scholarly literature on Eastern Orthodoxy in the United States characterizes it as an ancient, unchanging form of Christianity that is highly resistant to the conditions of what religion scholars refer to as the spiritual marketplace of expansive religious diversity and individual choice-making in regard to religious affiliation. Yet, through the lens of conversion, I chart how the language and methods of the marketplace are taken-for-granted elements of church life, engrained in the words and actions of Orthodox clerics and lifelong church members in addition to converts themselves. Drawing upon the work of sociologist Ann Swidler, I argue that the marketplace remains one of the most powerful toolkits or cultural repertoires, although by no means the only one, by which local Orthodox Christians in Pittsburgh have come to understand their religious lives and serves as a new means of gauging the influence and engagement of Orthodox Christianity with its surrounding American culture.

The established interpretations of four biblical narratives--Lot's daughters, Tamar, Ruth and Bathsheba--often reduce the women to stock characters who inform our ideas about biblical Israel (Rendsburg; Frymer-Kensky) or the line of David (Menn). When read for their gender information, however, one finds women who employ individual strategies of deception and trickery, motivated by self-interest, to successfully maneuver within the system to their benefit. Such initiative is valorous: they save themselves through their own pluck and ingenuity. The title of this dissertation evokes an argument that heroic biblical women carry their essential weapons upon and within themselves. This study begins by considering the historiographical background to the Hebrew Bible. Next, the four narratives are placed in context by presenting some of the major textual theories behind Genesis through Kings, the books where these stories appear. The women are incorporated into the Bible's larger civic themes by subsuming them under the heading of "Israel," thus deflating the characters' gender and initiative. The action which marks these stories--women motivated by self-interest coupled with deception and an incidence of Wendy Doniger's "bedtrick," an instance of sexual trickery that challenges the text's power and gender dynamics--puts these characters in league with female heroes from folk tale and legend. Folklore methodologies are then applied in order to highlight their robust action. A structuralist frame adapted from Vladimir Propp and Mary Ann Jezewski is applied to several biblical stories, testing their common motifs and actions with traits established by other non-biblical female heroic narratives. Strong heroic themes are found in all four narratives. A collective approach to the four narratives then uncovers the allusions, parallelisms and language which links them together and offers a trait list for the female biblical heroic. This work concludes by critiquing previous discussions of women in the Bible as well as conjecturing on the stories' origins and their role as religious models. The dissertation argues for the efficacy of women as an analytic category as suggested by Ortner and Heilbrun and suggests how this new identification of heroic women in the Bible affects further interpretation of the Bible.

Mark 13 predicts that certain events will occur literally within the generation of Jesus contemporaries, and todays reader recognizes that some of these events have not taken place. The reader therefore appropriates the text as a false configuration of the world because it describes the world differently from how it is. However, the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur enables a reader to appropriate the text as a presentation of truth. His argument for textual autonomy supports the contention that a texts meaning is not limited to what the author intended and the original readers perceived. In new reading contexts, the meaning that comes from the text itself creates an evocative dialectic between the readers lived world and the world description of the text. Although Mark 13 was originally understood literally, todays audience is able to read it as metaphor. Metaphor is not a rhetorically attractive literary trope; it is a transgression of language codes and categories. Through its association of previously unrelated concepts, metaphor creates new, multiple meanings and changes the linguistic structures within which it operates. Metaphor is able to present truth, not as a verifiable presentation of the world as it is perceived by the reader, but as a manifestation of the world in a new way. The reader recognizes this truth only as she is willing to engage with the text without imposing her preconceptions upon it. Mark 13, as it is read by todays reader, functions as metaphor because of the double dissonance first between the configured world of the text and the lived world of the reader and second between claim that Jesus is able to predict when the events will take place (v. 30) and the assertion that he is not able to do so (v. 32). One option for todays reader to appropriate the metaphor of Mark 13 as truth is a perception of the presence in the world of forces that challenge and subvert powers which appear to be dominant, and which deceive, destroy, and persecute.

Thesis--PlanB (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Stout, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references.

The author's Habilitationsschrift--Freie Universität Berlin, 1983. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [1478-1511]) and index.

Thèse--Faculté de droit de Genève.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Guo li zheng zhi da xue, 1977. / Cover title. Reproduced by typescript on double leaves. Includes bibliographical references.

A performance evaluation of CSTC (Cooperative Space Time Coding) with spatially cor-related fading and imperfect channel estimation in Gaussian as well as impulsive noise is presented. Closed form expressions for the pairwise error probability conditioned on the estimated channel gains are derived by assuming the components of the received vector are independent given the estimated channel gains. An expurgated union bound using the limiting before averaging technique given the estimated channel gains is then obtained. Although this assumption is not strictly valid, simulation results show that the bound is accurate in estimating the diversity order as long the channel estimation is not very poor. It is found that CSTC with block fading channels can reduce the frame error rate (FER) relative to SUSTC (Single User Space Time Coding) with quasi-static fading channels, even when the channel gains for each user are strongly correlated and when the channel estimations are very poor. A decision metric for CSTC with spatially correlated fading, imperfect channel estimation, and impulsive mixture Gaussian noise is derived which yields lower FERs than the Gaussian noise decision metric. Simulation results show that the FER performance of CSTC with mixture Gaussian noise outperforms CSTC with Gaussian noise at low SNR. At high SNR, the FER performance of CSTC with Gaussian noise is better than the FER performance of CSTC with mixture Gaussian noise due to the heavy tail of the mixture Gaussian noise.

This study focuses on the compilation of guidelines for the implementation of cooperative education in teaching and learning organisations, in the Gauteng region in South Africa. Since no or limited guidelines exist in cooperative education in such organisations, it was intended to determine the present position or status of cooperative education in such organisations with the concomitant development of a conceptual framework and guidelines that could act as directive in higher education institutions and industry, with regard to cooperative education. At first a literature review was undertaken on the basic principles and nature of cooperative education, with an analysis of the current status of cooperative education locally and abroad. Special emphasis was placed during the literature survey on one of the components of cooperative education, namely experiential learning, with its different forms of learning such as work-integrated learning and service learning. Traditionally, higher education institutions in South Africa, and especially universities of technology and comprehensive universities, used a variety of terminology to describe the principles and practice of cooperative education. This created much confusion among academics in these institutions. A need for the standardisation of such terminology was identified and an attempt was made to redefine the concept of cooperative education and related terminology, to clarify this matter by defining cooperative education and related terminology. Furthermore, a comparative literature survey was undertaken with regard to the best practices in cooperative education on a national and international level. One of the most important issues in higher education since the origin and implementation of cooperative education is the strategic management of cooperative education. The various roles and responsibilities of the relevant role players involved in cooperative education were researched and recorded from literature. In consideration of the literature and on completion of the empirical study, an integrated (eclectic) management structure for the management and administration of cooperative education was proposed and described for higher education institutions. Funding of experiential learning in higher education institutions in South Africa by the Department of Education (DOE) is presently a serious concern. Without the proper funding of the experiential learning endeavour, it would be rendered null and void. Literature, according to a survey by the Committee of Technikon Principals (CTP) in former technikons, among others, indicated that funds from the DOE allocated in the form of subsidy and earmarked for experiential learning were not used for its intended purpose, and that such institutions did not deliver satisfactorily with regard to experiential learning. The consequence was that government subsidy for experiential learning in universities of technologies (the former technikons) was ceased, with serious implications for its implementation on operational level. Literature revealed that similar experiences were encountered historically in the United States of America (USA). Many challenges have been identified in the literature on cooperative education, such as the initiation of new strategies and the need to promote research and development in cooperative education. Future perspectives indicated a confirmation for the need for innovation and continuous improvement for cooperative education, locally and abroad. Finally, the literature review confirmed that cooperative education locally and abroad creates the "cutting edge" for higher education institutions. An empirical study involved students, heads of academic departments in higher education institutions and supervisors in industry, to ascertain the current status with regard to the basic principles and nature of cooperative education as well as best practices in cooperative education. Thereafter, a conceptual framework with concomitant guidelines was developed and compiled for cooperative education for teaching and learning organisations. Supported by a literature survey which highlighted the importance of quality assurance of experiential learning as one of the components of cooperative education, a quality assurance conceptual framework to be used in the quality management of experiential learning for learning programmes in higher education institutions was described. Finally, various recommendations and guidelines have been proposed for the implementation of cooperative education in teaching and learning organisations in the Gauteng province in South Africa. Keywords for indexing: cooperative education, work-based learning, work-integrated learning, experiential learning, experiential training, in-service training, placement of learners in industry, preparation of learners for experiential learning, placement of learners, monitoring/mentoring of learners, assessment of learners, debriefing of learners, research in cooperative education, management information systems in cooperative education, marketing of cooperative education, management models, models of cooperative education, companies in cooperative education, best practices in cooperative education, industrial liaison, partnerships with industry, training of learners in industry, nationally and internationally exchange/placement of learners, quality management, skills development and literacy development, learnership and skills programmes. / Thesis (Ph.D. (Education))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2007.

One of the great challenges facing the South African economy is to increase the number and variety of viable and sustainable economic enterprises. We have a history that has brought about many interruptions in the development of enterprises in particular. This has been particularly associated with our racial history and the destruction of wealth in black hands in both the rural and urban areas. It has adverse effects on income distribution, entrepreneurship and employment creation. The recent history of South Africa cannot ignore the role of cooperatives in developing its economic foundation. Cooperatives in the financial, service and agricultural sectors were backbones of the apartheid economy, hence we see the cooperative idea resonates on numerous platforms in the democratic Government as part of its empowerment discourse and addressing the national objective of economic growth, poverty and unemployment reduction. A number of studies have identified that the culture of entrepreneurship is one of the prerequisites for the prosperity and the high rate of economic development registered by most of the developed countries. However in terms of South Africa, the low level of entrepreneurship activity compared to its peers has been identified as one of the key factors responsible for the low rate of economic growth experienced by South Africa over the past 10 years, and cooperatives as model can be a solution to foster entrepreneurial culture and as a result maximise economic growth, reduce poverty and unemployment. / Thesis (M.B.A.)--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2012.