In this dissertation I examine the conceptions of opinion (<italic>doxa</italic>}), knowledge (<italic>gnosis</italic>), and understanding (<italic>episteme</italic>) that are presented by the character Socrates in Plato's <italic>Meno</italic> and <italic>Republic</italic>. A central claim I make, and one that sets my interpretation apart from…

This dissertation is a history of astronomy in three cultural locations in late Ottoman Egypt: the scholarly culture of Muslim ulama, the state institution of the Viceregal Observatory, and the Arabic press. Through an interwoven history of these cultures, the…

Descripción completa.

This dissertation focuses on the specific strategies by which authors of the travel writing genre seize narrative agency. Throughout its centuries-long history, the genre of travel writing has offered multiple generations of authors a means by which to convey observations…

The United States is struggling to provide health care in the face of ever increasing demand. As medical students continue their decades long march toward specialization, questions of how to provide generalist care become quickly intertwined with that of who…

The use of new technologies does not mean that the applied education model is modern. New technologies can be used in a way that follows the traditional education model, with all its deficiencies. The collaborative education model involves students in…

When training hidden-Markov-model-based part-of-speech (PoS) taggers involved in machine translation systems in an unsupervised manner the use of target-language information has proven to give better results than the standard Baum-Welch algorithm. The target-language-driven training algorithm proceeds by translating every possible…

During the twentieth century, tobacco farmers in rural North Carolina quietly changed the relationship between the government and citizen in America . Flue-cured tobacco growers produced not only the finest cigarette leaf, but also new systems of marketing, regulating, and…

This dissertation studies nonlinear panel data models with multiple fixed effects. The first two chapters consider the adaptability of estimation methods for nonlinear panel data models to multiple fixed effects. The first chapter investigates whether existing methods can be modified…

Network-based modeling of complex systems with emergent behavior is increasingly being employed across different disciplines. Much of the focus in such efforts has been on detailed, "microscopic" modeling, in which the dynamics is described in terms of the individual nodes…