PICTURES OF PATRIARCHS: THE ILLUSTRATED LIFE AND ACTS OF HÔNEN









ABSTRACT










This dissertation is a study of the Illustrated Life and…

The use of clocks for timekeeping seems to be a straightforward and almost intuitive routine. Glancing at mechanical clocks designed in Edo period Japan, however, we witness how modern-day intuitions betray our attempts to understand devices created in a culture…

The Nusayri-'Alawis, the syncretistic Shiite sect currently prominent in Syria, are some of the only survivors of the heterodox cults of Early Islam. For theological and precautionary reasons they are forbidden from sharing their beliefs with outsiders. As a result,…

We describe an adaptation of the knowledge gradient, originally developed for discrete ranking and selection problems, to the problem of calibrating continuous parameters for the purpose of tuning a simulator. The knowledge gradient for continuous parameters uses a continuous approximation…

Amidst the disintegration of the Qing Empire (1644-1911), men and women in China began to understand their differences in terms of modern scientific knowledge. Why Sex Mattered provides an explanation for the relatively recent emergence of a psycho-biological notion of…

Current theories of physics cognition require specification of complex mechanisms for explaining knowledge acquisition. I demonstrate that a quantitative model of physics perception can be constructed by assuming that physics problem perception provides an optimal summary of a set of…

Despite the many assumptions that usually surround the importance of science education for scientific practice, scholarship on the history of subject has been scattered and usually undertaken en route to other pursuits. In this research, I aim to bring to…

Yes or no is perhaps the most common answer we provide each day. Indeed, binary answers to well structured questions are the building blocks of our knowledge. I started my research career in drafting such answers in various circumstances within…

This dissertation is the first comprehensive and interdisciplinary study of Ottoman economic thought within the context of modernization during the reign of Abdülhamid II (1876-1909). Drawing on a broad array of primary sources ranging from textbooks and manuals of economics…

The use of concepts underlies the most basic cognitive processes. Consequently, psychologists have long been interested in understanding the behavioral and neural correlates of conceptual knowledge and its manipulation. This has led to a rich set of research results that…