Ο νεοπλατωνικός φιλόσοφος Πρόκλος, στο α΄ μέρος της πραγματείας του Εις τον Παρμενίδη του Πλάτωνος Β΄, διατυπώνει μία εισαγωγική σκέψη για την πλατωνική θεωρία των Ιδεών, την οποία παρουσιάζει αναλυτικά στην συνέχεια του έργου του, δηλώνοντας ρητά την αδιαμφισβήτητη αντικειμενική ύπαρξη των Ιδεών, ως αρχετύπων των όσων λαμβάνουν χώρα στον κόσμο της αισθητής εμπειρίας. Τονίζει , ότι τόσο οι Ιδέες, όσο και τα αισθητά οφείλουν την ύπαρξή τους στο Έν, την ανώτατη υπερβατική Αρχή, η οποία αποτελεί την απόλυτη ενότητα και από την οποία απορρέει το πλήθος. Επομένως, η ενότητα προηγείται του πλήθους και η εν λόγω προτεραιότητα παρουσιάζεται με μία σειρά από επιχειρήματα. Έπειτα αναζητείται η καταστατική τάξη των Ιδεών, οι οποίες βρίσκονται τοποθετημένες στον δικό τους «τόπο», συμπλέκονται χωρίς να υφίστανται αλλοιώσεις, διατηρώντας την μοναδικότητα, την ταυτότητα καθώς και την ενότητά τους. Συγκεκριμένα, παρακολουθούμε ποια είναι η ουσία και οι δυνάμεις της Ομοιότητας και της Ανομοιότητας αντιστοίχως, ποια είναι η διάταξή τους ανάμεσα στις Ιδέες ποια είναι η λειτουργική παρουσία τους και εν τέλει ποια είναι η μεταξύ τους σχέση. Πρόκειται για ένα ζήτημα που ανήκει στον συστηματικό κλάδο της μεταφυσικής οντολογίας αλλά και συγχρόνως εντάσσεται και στην ιστορία της φιλοσοφίας, καθότι παρουσιάζει ένα στάδιο της εξέλιξης μιας θεωρίας που αναπτύχθηκε τον 4ο αιώνα π. Χ. / --

Assessment is a well understood educational topic with a really long history and a wealth of literature. Given this level of understanding of the topic, educational practitioners are able to differentiate, for example, between valid and invalid assessments. Despite the fact that we can test for the validity of an assessment, knowing how to systematically generate a valid assessment is still challenging and needs to be understood. In this thesis we introduce a similarity-based method to generate a specific type of questions, namely multiple choice questions, and control their difficulty. This form of questions is widely used especially in contexts where automatic grading is a necessity. The generation of MCQs is more challenging than generating open-ended questions due to the fact that their construction includes the generation of a set of answers. These answers need to be all plausible, otherwise the validity of the question can be questionable. Our proposed generation method is applicable to both manual and automatic gener- ation. We show how to implement it by utilising ontologies for which we also develop similarity measures. Those measures are simply functions which compute the similarity, i.e., degree of resemblance, between two concepts based on how they are described in a given ontology. We show that it is possible to control the difficulty of an MCQ by varying the degree of similarity between its answers. The thesis and its contributions can be summarised in a few points. Firstly, we provide literature reviews for the two main pillars of the thesis, namely question generation and similarity measures. Secondly, we propose a method to automatically generate MCQs from ontologies and control their difficulty. Thirdly, we introduce a new family of similarity measures. Fourthly, we provide a protocol to evaluate a set of automatically generated assessment questions. The evaluation takes into account experts' reviews and students' performance. Finally, we introduce an automatic approach which makes it possible to evaluate a large number of assessment questions by simulating a student trying to answer the questions.

Research about ribonucleic acid (RNA) is gaining popularity as we widen our knowledge about its function. But to properly examine new structures, we need robust computational tools to analyse different properties. One of such tools is structural superposition, which is a method to align two structures over each other and quantify their similarity. This tool can be used on tertiary RNA structures for visual comparison, clustering or the assessment of their function. The aim of this thesis is to present a novel approach for achieving RNA superposition using information about secondary RNA structure and its link to trees. Tree edit distance algorithms are used to compare the trees, and a multitude of methods for generating the structural superposition from the calculated tree similarities is presented. The new method is aligned in the context of existing works, and its accuracy is compared to the best current approaches for structural superposition. The implementation can be accessed at https://github.com/gyfis/rawted.

Parenting is one of the most influential as well as modifiable factors influencing healthy child development (Grusec, 2011; Sanders, 2012). This dissertation includes two studies that were designed to broaden our understanding of parenting in developmental periods widely recognized to present parenting challenges: Study 1 focused on the toddler and preschool years (Crnic & Low, 2002; Kwon, Han, Jeon, & Bingham, 2013) and Study 2 focused on adolescence (Eisenberg et al., 2008; Laursen & Collins, 2009). Both studies involve analysis of data on self-reported parenting responses and parenting goals, as well as parent-rated child adjustment from community samples of mothers and fathers. In the first study parenting similarity in the parenting responses and parenting goals of mothers and fathers of toddlers and preschoolers were examined. As well, I examined whether these were linked to parents’ ratings of their children’s adjustment on the Child Behavior Checklist Preschool form (Achenbach & Rescorla, 2000). In addition, I examined whether there were differences between parenting situations involving child misbehaviour and child withdrawn behaviour. Participants were 148 families of children aged between 18 months and 60 months. Parenting similarity was found both for parenting responses and for parenting goals. However, neither similarity in parenting responses or parenting goals differed for situations involving child misbehaviour versus child withdrawn behaviour. Furthermore, parenting similarity in parenting responses and parenting goals were not found to be related to each other or to child adjustment. The second study was conducted with mothers and fathers of adolescents and was designed to extend on the work of Hastings and Grusec (1998). In this study I also examined parenting similarity in parenting responses and parenting goals. Participants were 285 parents of adolescents aged 14 to 17 years old (mothers n = 213, fathers n = 68, dyads n = 43). Parenting goals were influenced by characteristics of the situation, but not by parent or adolescent gender. Parenting goals were not related to parents’ ratings of their adolescent children’s adjustment on the Child Behavior Checklist School Age form (Achenbach & Rescorla, 2001). As in the first study, I found parenting similarity for parenting responses and parenting similarity for parenting goals, but the two types of similarity were not related to each other. The findings with respect to parenting goals indicate that there is insufficient evidence to justify future parenting goals studies given the limitations of the extant methodology for measuring them. Future parenting similarity studies that use statistical analyses, such as cluster analyses, that allow for the examination of the links between specific parenting similarity (e.g., having two parents that are authoritative vs. two that are authoritarian) and child adjustment hold promise for informing clinical practice with families.

This thesis investigates ways of incorporating reasoning by analogy into Pure (Unary) Inductive Logic. We start with an analysis of similarity as distance, noting that this is the conception that has received most attention in the literature so far. Chapter 4 looks in some detail at the consequences of adopting Hamming Distance as our measure of similarity, which proves to be a strong requirement. Chapter 5 then examines various adaptations of Hamming Distance and proposes a subtle modification, further-away-ness, that generates a much larger class of solutions.

No description available.

The number of available protein sequences in public databases is increasing exponentially. However, a significant fraction of these sequences lack functional annotation which is essential to our understanding of how biological systems and processes operate. In this master thesis project, we worked on inferring protein functions based on the primary protein sequence. In the approach we follow, 3D models are first constructed using I-TASSER. Functions are then deduced by structurally matching these predicted models, using global and local similarities, through three independent enzyme commission (EC) and gene ontology (GO) function libraries. The method was tested on 250 “hard” proteins, which lack homologous templates in both structure and function libraries. The results show that this method outperforms the conventional prediction methods based on sequence similarity or threading. Additionally, our method could be improved even further by incorporating protein-protein interaction information. Overall, the method we use provides an efficient approach for automated functional annotation of non-homologous proteins, starting from their sequence.

This study looked at how individuals choose whom to work with when a task necessitates collaboration. Prior research done on collaborative environments as well as outcomes of collaboration suggests that who you collaborate with will depend on two primary factors: the individuals from which you have to choose and the circumstances surrounding the task. In the proposed study, these factors will be explored. This thesis identified the lack of literature on informal collaboration, addressing the gap in the literature regarding processes that individuals use when choosing collaborators. This research focused on the influencing factors of similarity and expertise involved in this decision processes. Furthermore, this study aimed to understand how individuals choose collaborators under differing conditions of difficulty, novelty, and interdependence necessitated by the task.

Research has documented that the dietary patterns of parents of typically developing (TD) children have an impact on their child's diets, including diet quality and intake of certain foods. This influence is thought to be a function of a combination of serving various foods to their child, modeling healthy eating behaviors, providing companionship during mealtime, and implementing various feeding styles and beliefs as their child develops. The extent to which parents of children with intellectual disabilities (ID) influence their children’s dietary intake is unknown. Children with ID experience aversions to certain sensory characteristics of food, food selectivity, and idiosyncratic mealtime behaviors, all of which may result in limited dietary variety. These factors may make children with ID less responsive to their parents’ dietary habits and patterns. Weak to moderate correlations have been found to exist between parents of TD children and their offspring in terms of dietary intake, however, studies examining the parent to child associations of fruit and vegetable intake in the ID population are lacking. We performed a secondary data analysis on a cohort of children and parents involved in the Children's Mealtime Study, a cross-sectional study conducted from 2013-2016 in order to examine factors associated with weight status in children with ID compared to TD children. The goal of our analysis was to determine whether correlations exist between fruit and vegetable variety and consumption frequency among children and mothers and whether these differ between children with ID and TD children. A modified food frequency questionnaire was used to assess variety and frequency of fruits and vegetables consumed by mothers and their children. Statistically significant positive correlations were observed for both fruit and vegetable variety score and consumption frequency among the entire sample. However, the strength of the correlations were weak overall. A significant positive relationship was shown to exist between child fruit consumption frequency for mothers of TD children and their children (p<0.01), but not between mothers and children with ID. The findings indicate that although children with ID may experience greater aversions to food during mealtime compared to TD children, they still appear to be responsive to dietary habits of their mothers for most measures of fruit and vegetable intake.

BACKGROUND: Growth of the cranial base and its structures are of particular interest to the orthodontic community. The midface and nasal bones have a significant influence on facial esthetics and thus pattern recognition of facial growth from parental data can influence orthodontic treatment plans. We aimed to determine if there is a similarity in midface and nasal bone and soft tissue growth between a child and either parent. MATERIALS AND METHODS: This cross-sectional study was comprised of forty-seven western European families from the Forsyth/Moorrees Twin Study. The lateral cephalograms of each parent and post pubertal child, who were at least 2 years past peak growth (age ≥ 16 yrs for females and ≥ 17 yrs for males) were evaluated on fourteen cephalometric variables. The radiographs were digitized and analyzed using the Mimics™ software program (Materialise, Leuven, Belgium) by a single investigator. A linear regression analysis was used to correlate linear and angular measurements to one another. An ANOVA with multiple comparisons (TUKEY) was performed to test for the differences between family members controlling for the effect of the individual family (as each family has a trend within itself). Age and gender interactions were tested for in the models. Statistical significance was set at p < 0.05. RESULTS: Twenty-five male and twenty-two female children and their parents were studied. When comparing the fourteen parameters between the mean of the child and both parents, a significant difference (p < 0.05) was found between the child and the father but not the mother in six measurements. These included the ratio of nasal height to total face height, angle of nasal bone to SN, distance from rhinion to pronasale (mm), distance from ANS to pronasale (mm), projection of nose (mm) and nasal length (mm). A significant difference was also found between the child and the mother, but not the father for rhinion to ANS (mm). A significant difference was found between the child and both parents for nasal height (mm). When controlling for family and isolating the gender of the child, males and females were not significantly different from their fathers for ratio of nasal height to total face height. For angle of nasal bone (S-N-Rh) and nasal length (N’-vertical line from Pro), females but not males were significantly different from the father. Both girls and boys were still significantly different from the father in the rhinion to pronasale and ANS to pronasale distances, projection of nose and nasal heights. Only males showed a significant difference from the mother for rhinion to ANS and nasal height when isolated for by gender. CONCLUSION: Statistically significant differences were found between the child and father and not the mother for six out of our fourteen measurements of interest. Two measurements of interest showed a difference between the child and the mother and not the father and one showed a significant difference from both parents. From this study we conclude that children tend to be morphologically less similar to their fathers when comparing midface and nasal soft and hard tissue parameters.