Digital Transformation in Healthcare

This book presents a collection of papers revealing the impact of advanced computation and instrumentation on healthcare. It highlights the increasing global trend driving innovation for a new era of multifunctional technologies for personalized digital healthcare. Moreover, it highlights that contemporary research on healthcare is performed on a multidisciplinary basis comprising computational engineering, biomedicine, biomedical engineering, electronic engineering, and automation engineering, among other areas

Mechanics of Empire: the Karanis Register and the Writing Offices of Roman Egypt.

This dissertation uses the public writing offices (grapheia) of Roman Egypt and the larger notarial system to explore the interplay between state and society in the Roman Empire. The starting point is a series of papyrus rolls from the village of Karanis in Egypt’s Fayum region, the so-called “threshold papyri,” which are reconstructed, edited, and analyzed here for the first time. Their importance lies in the fact that they contain lengthy portions of an account in Greek that documents four months of activity in the grapheion of Karanis during the early second century CE. The Karanis Register, as it is termed, takes on a deeper historical importance when read in light of the larger notarial system of Egypt, originally established under Ptolemaic rule. The Ptolemies successfully “reoriented” private transactions towards the state by incorporating the native Egyptian scribal class into new institutions that monitored and eventually produced private contracts. The Romans chose not only to perpetuate the Ptolemaic notarial system, but to improve it by expanding its archival functions. This innovation can be explained by the fact that the system was beneficial to both the Roman state and the provincial populace: it gave the Romans unprecedented access to information about its subjects, allowing efficient collection of taxes and assignment of compulsory duties, while providing provincials with unprecedented security for their private transactions. Yet this dissertation also gives credence to Rome’s commitment to enforcing the rule of law in the provinces as part of the imperial ideology of consensus, a shared conception of the proper relationship between the Roman state and the provincial population. The local writing offices and the larger notarial system in fact helped define this relationship: the routine act of having a contract registered in the writing office reinforced the validity of Roman hegemonic claims, but also shaped the nature of this hegemony by raising the expectation that Rome would enforce contracts. Viewed in this way, the Karanis Register is best understood as part of a Roman repurposing of the notarial system within a new ideology of empire, which imagined the unequal imperial relationship as rule by consensus.PHDGreek and Roman HistoryUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/110468/1/gclaytor_1.pd

The Poetics of Plot in the Egyptian and Judean Novella

This dissertation contributes to the history of storytelling literature of the ancient Eastern Mediterranean and North African world and, more specifically, advances the comparative study of the literature of Ancient Egypt and the Hebrew Bible and Early Judaism, focusing on prose fiction, a promising yet neglected topic of the comparative literature of these two cultures. In the dissertation, I identify a contemporaneous genre of fiction written in both of these cultures during the Achaemenian and Hellenistic Periods which I call novellas, by analogy to the prominent genre of European literature. As a genre of fiction that is usually defined as being shorter than the novel but longer than the short story, novellas are easy to recognize among Egyptian and Judean literature of these periods, yet previous research has not given due consideration to its international basis, nor adequately differentiated the novellas in each culture from other similar genres of fiction. The basic claim of the dissertation is that the Egyptian and Judean novellas are in fact a genre that would have been recognized as such in elite, literary circles. In constructing a poetics of the plot of the Egyptian and Judean novella, I elicit a significant number of shared features which, when put together, confirm the initial identification of the genre and specify that further. The Egyptian and Judean novellas are presented as complex and engaging stories conveyed in plots that are remarkably cohesive as well as economical in their complexity, relentlessly focused and not prone to digressions or multiple plot-lines and which, most characteristically, center on a single sequences of events which resolve the central, driving conflict of the story and bring it to its conclusion