This dissertation plots the myriad connections between Southern France and the multicultural Iberian Peninsula during the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, the people to people contacts which effectively connected Southern France with the Islamic world. The example of courtly culture demonstrates the pattern of informal cultural absorption that resulted from these contacts, as aspects of Andalusian courtly culture were adopted and adapted to Occitan court settings, fitting within a pattern of Pan-Mediterranean courtly culture. This courtly culture absorption was a result of the long-term and broad-based people to people connections and acculturation between Occcitania and the multi-cultural Iberian world. First, using charter evidence, the interaction between the two Iberias, one Islamic and Arabic, the other Christian and Latin, is traced through the people, institutions, and infrastructure that passed from one Iberia to the other. By the early twelfth century, major Islamic medinas with large Arabic-speaking populations had been incorporated into the Christian kingdoms. In the close confines of these medina/urbs,day-to-day life brought different religious and ethnic groups together. Properties bought, sold, and exchanged involved people of different faiths and backgrounds. Women, like the nuns at Sigena outside Huesca, or the Islamic and Jewish brides of French settlers, often had a unique role to play intercultural interaction. On the other side of the Pyrenees, several types of cross border relationships occurred: family ties through marriages and alliances, institutional ties through monastic and church affiliation, and travel ties through legates, bishop and abbot appointments, and pilgrimage. Roads to the Spanish shrine of Saint-James of Compostela blanketed southern France, bringing pilgrims to stops along the way at Sainte-Foy de Conques, Saint-Sernin de Toulouse, the Cathedral of Bayonne, and La-Sauve-Majeure. The archival and published charters of these towns and monasteries of Occitania show how these relationships created the means for acculturation, interaction and communication between Occitan and Iberia. As a consequence of these trans-Pyrenean relationships, people with Iberian, Arabic-language origins, interacted with Occitan peoples bringing greater awareness of the intellectual and material culture of Iberia with its cosmopolitan sensibilities. My dissertation demonstrates the cultural reverberations resulting from cross-cultural contact. While most agree that there was some Arabic influence on medieval Europe, it is generally limited to instances where there is a clear paper trail, such as translated scientific, medical and philosophical texts. There is still significant scholarly resistance to the idea of a more generalized cultural influence due to the theory that connections between Arabic-speaking populations and Europeans were limited and inhibited by language and cultural barriers. we accept that people absorb cultural influence in many ways, including orally, visually, and in what are termed 'low culture' registers, often imperfectly understanding what they scavenge, contact and communication become key to understanding acculaturation. My methodology, using names, ethnicity, and information on captured in charters to identify cross-cultural interaction and evidence of cultural influence, focuses on the pathway from the Arabophone world to Occitania. Since charter evidence shows that cross-cultural interaction was long-term, rapidly increasing over the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and broad-based, involving many areas of Occitania and many types of people. acculturation would be the expected outcome.

Scream If You Can is an episodic memoir that captures the driving lifestyle of southern California while focusing on significant life events of a twenty-something young woman. The memoir explores themes of family, trauma, and perseverance. Biculturalism and disability are explored alongside the use of education to make a better life for oneself.

Social workers comprise one of the leading professions who interact with sex offenders through means of treatment, as well as unexpected life events. The purpose of this study is to evaluate social workers’ knowledge of sex offender laws and how their knowledge impacts their thoughts and feelings about working with sex offenders. Through a survey, social workers registered with the National Association of Social Work (NASW) in Southern California were asked to complete a questionnaire, in which addressed laws and thoughts in regards to sex offenders. One hundred surveys at random were evaluated. The study findings show a relationship between greater knowledge about the sex offender population and lower levels of apprehension a social worker has when working with a sex offender.

This thesis focuses on the discourse strategies investigative journalism uses to disclose social tensions in China. It delivers a theoretical framework for the understanding of investigative journalism in general and its Chinese counterpart in particular. Furthermore, the author elaborates on the possibilities, strategies and limitations of investigative journalism in China. Investigative stories that disclose three major social tensions in China were selected for analysis. These social tensions focus on “crimes against the underprivileged”, “abuse in education” and “desperate crimes”. Since the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) perceives these social tensions as a potential threat to its legitimacy of leadership, news about them are considered to be highly sensitive while at the same time useful in alerting the CCP to solve them. The research has found that most of the strategies used are “circumvention of value” and “interviewee opinion formation” followed by the strategy “open end”. However, Chinese investigative journalism has to toe a thin line in its practice.

The dynamical nature of atmospheric disturbances in the Southern Hemisphere simulated by a two-level general circulation (GCM) model is studied. Time series of the dependent variables and diabatic heating components from 10 Southern Hemisphere winters (JJA) and summers (DJF) simulated by the Oregon State University two-level GCM are used. The time mean fields are presented and discussed. Variance and covariance analyses are performed to determine the geographical distribution, intensities and transport properties of high-frequency (periods between 2.5 and 10 days) and low-frequency (periods between 10 days and a season) transient eddies. These are discussed in terms of dynamical consistency with the time-mean circulation. It is found that the behavior of the high-frequency eddies at mid and high-latitudes is consistent with baroclinic instability theory, i.e., the eddies have properties similar to observed migratory weather disturbances. The low-frequency eddies appear to be quasi-stationary Rossby waves originating at middle latitudes. They seem to disperse energy in a manner consistent with arguments based on simple linear wave dynamics. During wintertime, the time mean flow directs eddies poleward where they grow by baroclinic processes. Also during wintertime, the slow phase velocity, fast group velocity and cyclic domain lead to quasi-resonant behavior on a hemispheric scale. / Graduation date: 1988

Drawing on ethnographic research conducted with a Southern Baptist congregation in Atlanta, this thesis analyzes members’ experiences of becoming born-again Christians and their engagement with prayer to explore the affects that permeate the practice of developing a personal relationship with Jesus.

The seasonal pattern of ice motion in response to wind forcing and potential consequences to upwelling on the Mackenzie Shelf are considered using satellite-derived ice motion data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center and the NCEP 10 m wind data. The frequency of strong upwelling-favorable alongshore ice motion is high in early winter (November and December) compared to middle and late winter (January to May).For periods when the alongshore component of the wind is upwelling-favorable, the ratio of ice drift divided by wind speed on the Mackenzie Shelf is 0.024 in November and0.008 in March; we conjecture that this ratio decreases as winter progresses because the internal ice stress becomes stronger as both ice thickness and ice concentration increase. This constitutes a possible 10-fold decrease in the seasonal transmission of wind stress to the underlying water from November to March. This ratio in May (0.015) is higher than that in March. We suggest that it is because the internal ice stress becomes weaker as ice concentration decreases on the Mackenzie Shelf in May. Hence, under the same wind forcing, the potential for winter upwelling on Mackenzie Shelf may be enhanced if climate warming results in reduced ice thickness and/or ice concentration. Numerical model results show that the stress on the shelf could be reduced because of the internal ice stress from the pack ice over the deep ocean when the ice moves like a rigid body. We found that the model results are not realistic when the ice strength is 5,000 Nm-2. When the ice strength is 27,500 Nm-2, the model results are more realistic.

As a reassessment of the southern grotesque, this dissertation places Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, and William Faulkner in context and conversation with the fiction of Fyodor Dostoevsky. While many southern artists and intellectuals have testified to his importance as a creative model and personal inspiration, Dostoevsky’s relationship to southern writers has rarely been the focus of sustained analysis. Drawing upon Mikhail Bakhtin’s deeply positive understanding of grotesque realism, I see the grotesque as an empowering aesthetic strategy that, for O’Connor, McCullers, and Faulkner, captured their characters’ unfinished struggles to achieve renewal despite alienation and pain. My project suggests that the preponderance of a specific type of character in their fiction—a physically or mentally deformed outsider—accounts for both the distinctiveness of the southern grotesque and its affinity with Dostoevsky’s artistic approach. His grotesque characters, consequently, can fruitfully illuminate the misfits, mystics, and madmen who stand at the heart—and the margins—of modern southern fiction. By locating one source of the southern grotesque in Dostoevsky’s fiction, I assume that the southern literary imagination is not directed incestuously inward toward its southern past but also outward beyond the nation or even the hemisphere. This study thus offers one of the first evaluations of Dostoevsky’s impact on southern writers as a group.

The overall goal of this study was to develop a framework for using airborne lidar to derive inputs for the SPB infestation growth model TAMBEETLE. The specific objectives were (1) to estimate individual tree characteristics of XY location, individual bole height (IBH), diameter at breast height (DBH), length of crown (CrHT), and age for use in TAMBEETLE; (2) to estimate individual tree age using lidar-estimated height and site index provided by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) Soil Survey Geographic Database (SSURGO); and (3) to compare TAMBEETLE simulation results using field measurements and lidarderived measurements as inputs. Diameter at breast height, individual bole height, and crown length were estimated using lidar with an error for mean measurements at plot level of 0.16cm, 0.19m, and 1.07m, respectively. These errors were within root mean square error (RMSE) for other studies at the study site. Age was estimated using the site index provided by SSURGO and the site index curves created for the study area with an RMSE of 4.8 years for mean plot age. Underestimation of tree height by lidar and error in the site index curve explained 91% of the error in mean plot age. TAMBEETLE was used to compare spot growth between a lidar-derived forest map and a forest map generated by TAMBEETLE, based on sample plot characteristics. The lidar-derived forest performed comparably to the TAMBEETLE generated forest. Using lidar to map forests can provide the large spatial extents of the TAMBEETLE generated forest while maintaining the spatially explicit forest characteristics, which were previously only available through field measurements.

The digital content industry has the indicator meaning of developing knowledge economy and digital economy, and is the important driving force to sustain the next wave of upgrading and transforming industry in Taiwan. The digital content industry is the high added value industry for knowledge type, which owns huge business opportunity and development¡¦s potentiality. So, Taiwan government puts relevant resources into it actively in order to assist the development of the digital content industry, and expect it could drive the development of it by means of balancing the development of Taiwan islands. This research builds up the frame work of digital content industry in reference to ecological model proposed by scholars on basis of ecological theory. It transforms the traditional analysis of industry into the one with view point of ecological development to observe the development of digital content industry. Among the ecology of the digital content industry, includes the environment of industry¡¦s development¡Bcurrent operation situation of companies and industry¡¦s ecology constituted by the relation among companies. Take digital content industry in southern Taiwan for example to investigate the current development of it. This research had interview with experts first before proceeding questionnaire. Through the relevant materials collected by interviewing experts and in accordance with the investigation of quantification from said questionnaire, find out as to the ecology of digital content industry, what company most satisfy is the company¡¦s operation. The following is the relation among companies. But the most unsatisfactory part to them is the environment of industry¡¦s development. This research constructs the ecological model of digital content industry and analyzes the ecology of it. Hopefully it could be the reference of following study of digital content industry and in the meantime provides industry the suggestion of orientation and strategy.