<p>Among the numerous commitments late ancient Christians throughout the Roman Empire shared with their non-Christian neighbors was a preoccupation with justice. Not only was the latter one of the celebrated characteristics of God, the New Testament had charged Christians, particularly those who served as bishops or elders, with ensuring and maintaining justice in their communities from the tradition's very origins. In the early fourth century, this aspect of episcopal responsibilities had received an unexpected boost when the Emperor Constantine not only recognized bishops' role in intra-Christian conflict resolution, but expanded their judicial capacity to include even outsiders in the so-called audientia episcopalis, the bishop's court. </p><p>Christians had, of course, never resolved the question of what constituted justice in a vacuum. Yet bishops' increasing integration into the sprawling and frequently amorphous apparatus of the Roman legal system introduced new pressures as well as new opportunities into Christian judicial discourse. Roman law could become an ally in a minister's exegetical or homiletical efforts. Yet it also came to intrude into spheres that had previously regarded themselves as set apart from Roman society, including especially monastic and clerical communities. The latter proved to be particularly permeable to different shades of legal discourse, inasmuch as they served as privileged feeders for episcopal sees. Their members were part of the Christian elites, whose judicial formation promised to bear disproportionate fruit among the laity under their actual or eventual care. This dissertation's task is the examination of the ways in which Christians in these environments throughout the Latin West at the turn of the fifth century thought and wrote about justice. I contend that no single influence proved dominant, but that three strands of judicial discourse emerge as significant throughout these sources: that of popular philosophical thought; that of biblical exegesis; and that of reasoning from Roman legal precept and practice. Late ancient Christian rhetoric consciously and selectively deployed these threads to craft visions of justice, both divine and human, that could be treated as distinctively Christian while remaining intelligible in the broader context of the Roman Empire.</p> / Dissertation

The fifth generation (5G) wireless communications technology will be a paradigm shift which does not only provide an explosive increment on the achievable data rate per cell, but also ideally decreases the costs and energy consumption per data link. The engineering requirements of 5G standard can be intuitively interpreted as highly enhanced spectral efficiency and energy efficiency. This thesis focuses on the practical implementation issues of the massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) and energy harvesting systems. To begin with, massive MIMO, as one of the key technologies of 5G systems, can provide enormous enhancement in spectral efficiency. For a practical massive MIMO system, hybrid processing (precoding/combining), by restricting the number of RF chains to far less than the number of antenna elements, can significantly reduce the implementation cost compared to the full-complexity radio frequency (RF) chain configuration. This thesis designs the hybrid RF and baseband precoders/combiners for multi-stream transmission in the point-to-point (P2P) massive MIMO systems, by directly decomposing the pre-designed digital precoder/combiner of a large dimension. The performance of the matrix decomposition based hybrid processing (MD-HP) scheme is near-optimal compared to the singular value decomposition (SVD) based full-complexity processing. In addition, the downlink communication of a massive multiuser MIMO (MU-MIMO) system is also investigated, and a low-complexity hybrid block diagonalization (Hy-BD) scheme is developed to approach the performance of the traditional BD method. We aim to harvest the large array gain through the phase-only RF precoding and combining and then BD processing is performed on the equivalent baseband channel in the massive MU-MIMO scenario. The MD-HP and Hy-BD schemes are examined in both the large Rayleigh fading channels and millimeter wave channels. On the other hand, energy harvesting is an increasingly attractive and renewable source of power for wireless communications devices, which contributes to the enhancement of the system energy efficiency. This thesis also designs the energy cooperation assisted energy harvesting communication between a practical transmitter and receiver, whose hardware circuits consume non-zero power when active. The energy cooperation save-then-transmit (EC-ST) scheme aims to obtain the optimal active time ratio and energy cooperation power for the maximum throughput under additive white Gaussian channels and the minimum outage probability under block Rayleigh fading channels. / Graduate

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This quantitative study explored the effect of intervention lessons on online reading skills in fifth grade classrooms. First, it sought to examine the relationships among demographic variables including gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status and self-reported Internet use and Internet ability. Second, this study was designed to investigate which variables best predict performance on a measure of online reading. Third, the effect of lessons designed to improve online reading comprehension was explored to determine the efficacy of targeted classroom-based instruction on learned skills. Three theoretical frameworks underpinned this study: 1) a new literacies framework (Leu, Kinzer, Coiro, & Cammack, 2004), 2) transactional model (Rosenblatt, 1978), and 3) socioconitive model (Ruddell & Unrau, 2004a). The study was conducted in a Midwestern, suburban school over a 12-week time period with 443 fifth grade students. The repeated measures quasi-experimental research design allowed a quantitative investigation of online reading comprehension instruction to provide a reliable and valid assessment of the impact of online reading comprehension instruction on changes in student performance on an established measure of online reading comprehension. Additional attention to common variables known to influence outcomes in reading and technology performance (e.g., demographic variables, prior reading achievement scores) strengthened the design by allowing a more refined analysis of the isolated impact from the instructional activities. A regression analysis revealed prior achievement on norm-referenced measures of English/Language Arts as well as reported Internet use accounted for a significant amount of variance on online reading comprehension performance. Statistical analyses revealed significant differences between the experimental and control groups in online reading performance growth. Results from the subskill analysis show students in the experimental group demonstrated significant improvement over the control group on two of the three subskills (locating and synthesizing). No significant differences in group growth were observed for the Web evaluation task. Findings from this study indicate teachers varying in experience and Internet familiarity can effectively teach online reading in a classroom setting, and that students who received this instruction developed these skills at a greater rate. This work can inform future efforts as to how to best teach the skills and strategies of online reading. / Department of Educational Psychology

This qualitative study used a triangulation of survey, conversational interviews, and observations in an authentic setting to explore the phenomenon of reading motivation from the perspectives of a specific group of individuals. Five participants, all African American fifth grade boys qualifying for meal subsidies, gathered in a local youth facility, where they regularly attended as members. The researcher interviewed and observed the boys over the span of three months. Three major themes from the study unveiled the influence of individual interests on reading motivation. This particular group of boys was motivated to read according to measured success and competition, familiarity of topics, and varied selections of reading materials. The study’s findings could potentially influence the gender achievement gap in literacy. / Department of Elementary Education

Thesis (M.Ed.)--Bowling Green State University, 2009. / Document formatted into pages; contains vii, 137 p. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--University of Delaware, 2008. / Principal faculty advisor: Robert Hampel, School of Education. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at El Paso, 2008. / Title from title screen. Vita. CD-ROM. Includes bibliographical references. Also available online.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 1997. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 132-139). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Teachers College, Columbia University, 1996. / Typescript; issued also on microfilm. Sponsor: Celia Genishi. Dissertation Committee: Karen Kepler Zumwalt. "Bibliography of children's books and other fiction"--Leaf 372. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 362-371).