acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

This case study investigates the process of revolutionary social change at the crucial point in its genesis where diffuse and unarticulated frustrations, irritations, and antagonisms are first articulated and are translated into a kind of incipient reform ideology. Although this phenomenon, which some have termed 'integrative mass unrest,' has been identified as the necessary precondition of revolution, it has never been studied historically, largely because the evidence of the transfer of opinion from the individual level to mass consensus is lacking in most instances. However, in the case of the French Revolution, the pre-revolutionary lists of grievances (cahiers de doleances) drawn up at the village level provide an interesting and important exception, allowing us to glimpse not only the consensus formation process, but also to analyze precisely the content of that consensus once it had emerged. This dissertation does this by relating first the consensus formation process and then the consensus itself to the social context of increasing hostility to the old regime which attended the convocation of the Estates General It demonstrates further that, in the Departement of the Gard, the convocation and the process of consensus formation which it inspired occurred at the critical convergence of long-term economic, political, religious (sectarian), and social malaise with the sudden onset of myriad short-term catastrophes. This conjuncture of crises, occurring as it did at the precise moment of the convocation, had a decisive effect on radicalizing the content of consensus and of insuring that the people of N(')imes formulated consistently revolutionary solutions to local and national problems / acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu

Substantial progress has been made during the past decade in our understanding of the deity figures represented in the Postclassic Maya codices. Many can now be identified with their counterparts in both the Classic and Colonial periods, whereas others can be linked to specific calendrical cycles. Research during the past century has moreover allowed the preliminary definition of relationships between various deities, although the task of quantifying these findings has just begun The goal of my study is to enrich our knowledge of the roles and relationships of the codical deities by quantifying the impressions of previous scholars. In order to address these issues, I have chosen to focus on the deities represented in the Madrid Codex (although data from the Dresden Codex were used for comparative purposes). Because it is less well known and less consistent than the other codices, the Madrid Codex was seen as providing a source of new information to be used in testing and formulating theories about the deity figures. I used a computerized database as a means of storing, accessing, and manipulating the large quantity of information contained in the manuscript. The following topics were considered: naming patterns (as expressed through name glyphs and attributives); contextual associations; and the distribution of various categories of attributes. Specific elements were examined both at the level of the individual and across deity lines, the first as a means to further refine our understanding of the roles of individual deities and the second to delineate relationships between and among the various figures. A similar approach has been applied successfully to certain sections of the Dresden and Madrid codices but never to an entire manuscript As a result of my study, I have established that what is seemingly a large pantheon of gods may actually represent various aspects or manifestations of a much smaller number of underlying deities, a pattern similar in many respects to that seen in central Mexico. My discussion focuses on defining links between individual deities, as well as identifying larger groupings, as a means of developing an explanatory model of deity relationships / acase@tulane.edu

The methods used by professional debuggers of large systems have received little study, although computer manufacturers and users rely heavily on this group. This research investigates the reasoning professional debuggers use in asking questions and collecting information when attempting to solve a problem in a large system Specifically, this thesis describes the professional debugger's use of a goal driven strategy. The questions asked are (1) are goals used in debugging? (2) what are the goals used? (3) is there a relationship among goals? and (4) does conscious knowledge of the goals alter the debugger's behavior? A preliminary study determined that goals are used, and that they are beneficial in categorizing the information available about an error situation. This study also derived a set of sixteen goals. Experiments investigated goal usage in both the initial stages of debugging and in the complete problem solving process. These experiments verified that goals are used. Furthermore, the goals are frequently used in specific pairings. The use of goals is not an artifact of the experiments described in this study, however this study does demonstrate that conscious knowledge of the goals does alter the frequency with which specific goals are used This research finds evidence of a top-down approach to debugging, in which the debugger attempts to use a general, high level knowledge of the system to solve the problem. Also studied are key words and concepts, and what causes a particular goal to be used. This investigation finds that professional debuggers rely on a goal driven, top down strategy when solving problems / acase@tulane.edu

acase@tulane.edu