No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

<p> This dissertation examines Bernard Lonergan' s understanding of value, its assumptions and its development, for the sake of determining the role of human nature and human historicity in the experience of value. The categories of nature and history reflect a specifically modem form of the long-standing question of the relationship between physis and nomos- i.e., nature and convention, or 'nature and nurture'-for modernity has made us accutely aware of the historicity of cultural conventions. We ask of Lonergan: how or to what extent is the experience of value determined by human nature, and how or to what extent is it historically conditioned?</p> <p> To understand Lonergan' s position one must appreciate both the difference and the continuity between his earlier and later thought. Lonergan' s earlier thought reflects a rather Kantian fonnalistic account of value as the rational good, but his later thought embraces Scheler' s non-fonnal, material account of value-i.e., the good is an object of natural appetite-a position in which affectivity plays a role in revealing value. In spite of this development, there yet remains an underlying unity: there is a fundamental opposition of affect and intellect that precludes the possibility of understanding value as both rationally and materially good. Lonergan associates affect with natural spontaneity, and intellect with the deliberate:, progressive dynamic of history. Because of this, in his earlier work he presents value as rationally, and therefore historically, determined; yet in his ma1ure position value is grasped primarily in affective apprehensions, which are ahistorical intuitions, grounded in human nature and the 'reasons of the heart'.</p> <p> In response, it will be argued that this dichotomy of feeling and rationality can be transcended without sacrificing Lonergan' s account of self-transcendence.</p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

No description available.

Multiway data are becoming more and more common. While there are many approaches to extending principal component analysis (PCA) from usual data matrices to multiway arrays, their conceptual differences from the usual PCA, and the methodological implications of such differences remain largely unknown. This thesis aims to specifically address these questions. In particular, we clarify the subtle difference between PCA and singular value decomposition (SVD) for multiway data, and show that multiway principal components (PCs) can be estimated reliably in absence of the eigengaps required by the usual PCA, and in general much more efficiently than the usual PCs. Furthermore, the sample multiway PCs are asymptotically independent and hence allow for separate and more accurate inferences about the population PCs. The practical merits of multiway PCA are further demonstrated through numerical, both simulated and real data, examples.

This dissertation studies the legal theory and historical practice of land taxation in the Iraqi province of Kūfa in the second/eighth and early third/ninth centuries. In a broader sense, it engages land taxation as an investigative tool through which to examine the relationship between law and politics; capital and empire; and land taxation and conquest in early Islam. It begins by drawing on chronicles, administrative texts, and other narrative works to narrate the history of Kūfa, and of the nearby Sawād, the rich, alluvial plains which provided the Abbasid Empire with its primary source of revenue. Due to their proximity to the Sawād and to the imperial center of Baghdad, Kūfan legal scholars were at the forefront of developing legal theories of land taxation. The following chapters analyze legal texts to reconstruct these theories and trace their reception by scholars outside of Kūfa. Finally, “Common Wealth: Land Taxation in Early Islam” connects legal theories of land taxation to themes of post-conquest governance and political jurisdiction over and through land.

How does one estimate the value of an individual's time? One possible way is to estimate how much a person is willing to pay for time savings. The majority of transportation studies have used stated preference surveys to estimate an individual's willingness to pay (WTP) for travel time savings. However, stated preferences approaches are subject to hypothetical bias since they elicit WTP for hypothetical outcomes instead of real outcomes. One study used a revealed preference approach in a natural experiment to elicit WTP for travel time savings but the data was for a non-recurring event, which was not replicable. The purpose of this pilot study is to explore new methods, using procedures from a replicable field experiment, to elicit individual WTP for travel time savings. By using a revealed preference approach in an experimental setting, we address the legitimate concern over hypothetical bias while allowing the experimental methods and resulting data set to be replicated in other settings. The results show that the proposed field experiment is feasible, and that a sample of college students places a value of $22.43 on an hour of time. This estimated value is significantly greater than zero. We also find that individual WTP for travel time savings is significantly larger than the average wage rate, and that this WTP varies significantly across certain demographics. We conclude by reviewing the simplifying assumptions made within the study and offer extensions of how our data set can be replicated in the future for more complete analysis.