Love the Stranger for You were Strangers: The Development of a Biblical Literary Theme and Motif

The Hebrew Bible recounts the development of Israel’s self-identity as “Strangers and Sojourners” and their relationship with God and other Strangers. A significant passage that connects these relationships says that God “loves the Strangers…You shall also love the Stranger, for you were Strangers in the land of Egypt” (Deut 10:17-19). In the same book that commands love for the Stranger, God tells Israel to separate themselves from foreign nations in the land that they will occupy. In order to investigate an evident disparity concerning the relationship with the Stranger, this dissertation examines the literary motif of the Stranger and the theme of God’s love for the Stranger in the Torah/Pentateuch, as well as the Book of Ruth, by looking at the different representations of the Stranger and how the motif developed with both positive (gēr) and negative implications (nēkār, and zār). The love command in Deuteronomy 10:17-19 specifically concerns the Stranger who is a sojourner (gēr), evoking Israel’s collective memory as sojourners in order to inspire their empathy and compassion. On the other hand, the Stranger who is foreign (nēkār) evokes fear and enmity. The Book of Ruth acts as a commentary on the negative perceptions of the foreigner in the Torah/Pentatuech by serving as an example of love from a Stranger. Ruth gives new meaning to the love command by broadening the sphere of compassion to include the Strangers who are traditionally viewed as foreign threats or enemies. While other research generally focuses on a particular form of the Stranger, this study expands on the research by examining the occurrences of all three forms (gēr, nēkār, and zār) in order to understand the different levels of meaning connected to the Stranger and how that meaning is dependent on the historical context of the literature, the rhetorical and theological interests of the final redactors, and the methods of interpretation by later readers

The effects of in-service training on teachers\u27 opinions about mainstreaming.

Public Law 94-142, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, was implemented during the 1977-1978 school year. Its primary goal was to provide free, appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment for all handicapped children. PL 94-142 made the state responsible for ensuring that services be provided. School districts could receive program funds from the federal government by providing evidence that procedures had been established to ensure parental rights for participation in assessment, placement and reassessment of their handicapped child

The entropy of intoxicated speech - lexical creativity and heavy tongues

Spontaneous speech produced in sober and intoxicated conditions has been compared in information theoretic terms on the phoneme and word level to examine phonological and lexical aspects of intoxication. Word level entropy has been calculated to capture roughly the effect of alcohol on cognitive lexical creativity. Phoneme level entropy is intended to reflect heavy tongue influences on phoneme combinations. Moreover, mispronunciations have been investigated by relating canonical to realised pronunciation by means of mutual information and the Levenshtein distance. To account for the gradual nature of intoxication, examinations have been carried out regarding the offsets and slopes of linear functions mapping the blood alcohol concentration to the information theoretic variables. It turned out that male speakers compensate less for the alcohol-induced degradations with regard to lexical creativity and articulatory precision than female speakers. Furthermore, the pronunciation of male speakers generally deviates more from canonical forms

Exploring the connection of acoustic and distinctive features

This study is a contribution to link the abstract phonological level to the acoustic signal level by identifying the main acoustic correlates for the distinctive feature set developed by Chomsky and Halle (1968). The acoustic features were extracted by the openSMILE toolkit from spontaneous speech data. For each distinctive feature a set of closely related acoustic features was derived by means of correlation-based feature selection. Based on the respective acoustic feature pools C4.5 trees and support vector machines for binary feature classification were trained. The classification performance ranged from 76 to 89% for vocalic features and from 78 to 93% for consonantal features. The methods proposed in this study can be of use to identify systematic speech signal correspondencies for phonological models and as a starting point for distinctive feature detection in speech recognition

A dialect distance metric based on string and temporal alignment

The Levenshtein distance is an established metric to represent phonological distances between dialects. So far, this metric has usually been applied on manually transcribed word lists. In this study we introduce several extensions of the Levenshtein distance by incorporating probabilistic edit costs as well as temporal alignment costs. We tested all variants for compliance with the axioms that within-dialect utterance pairs are phonologically more similar than across-dialect ones. In contrast to former studies we are not applying the metrics on preselected, prototypical word lists but on real connected speech data which was automatically segmented and labeled. It turned out, that the transcription edit distances already performed well in reflecting the difference between within- and across-dialect comparisons, and that the adding of a temporal component rather weakens the performance of the metrics

College Women’s Experiences of Intimate Partner Violence: Exploring Mental Health Issues

College women’s experiences with sexual and physical violence are so common that campus interventions are needed. To help guide these, we surveyed 339 college women and asked: (a) are college women’s experiences with different types of relational violence interrelated and (b) are there patterns of association between types of violence and mental health symptoms? Analyses showed that experiences with verbal aggression, and minor and major physical violence overlapped. Experiences of sexual assault and minor physical violence also co-occurred. Moreover, women who encountered verbal and physical, but not sexual violence, suffered from symptoms of hostility, anxiety, and depression; those who encountered sexual coercion displayed signs of depression. We explore the implications of these findings for those who work with college women

Efficient Azimuthal Mode Analysis using Compressed Sensing

A new approach for the Azimuthal Mode Analysis (AMA) of over- and subsampled sound fields in flow ducts of turbomachines using circumferential sensor arrays is presented which is based on Compressed Sensing. Compressed Sensing is a framework to solve underdetermined systems of linear equations under the assumption that the solution vector is sparse. In the context of AMA, such sparse mode spectra often occur in the analysis of tonal sound field components generated by rotor-stator interaction. Important features such as stability and accuracy are investigated by analysis of a wide range of simulated and measured pressure data and comparison with commonly applied methods. Also two different optimisation approaches for the design of circumferential sensor arrays are introduced which allows a reduction of the number of sensors for large modal ranges if only a limited number of modes are dominant. Furthermore, the remaining mode amplitudes are estimated exploiting the deconvolution property of the applied Compressed Sensing algorithm

How to get away with insider trading and how to stop it?

The realm of investing, while promising, is often clouded by complexity and opacity, exacerbated by the prevalence of insider trading. This unethical practice allows select individuals to amass vast fortunes by exploiting confidential information unavailable to the public. Particularly alarming is the possibility of insider trading within Congress, where lawmakers wield privileged access to non-public information and could possibly engage in lucrative stock transactions. This paper delves into specific coincidences of Congressional stock trading to underscore the systemic nature of this phenomenon among influential figures

Die neue Avantgarde der jungen Väter?

Auf deutsche (lokal exemplifizierte) Verhältnisse richtet sich das Untersuchungsinteresse der erziehungswissenschaftlichen Feldforschungsstudie von Martina Kisler (Dipl.-Päd.), Die neue Avantgarde der jungen Väter? Eine Untersuchung in einer Dresdner Kindertagesstätte über die Beteiligung junger Väter von Kindern unter drei Jahren an der elterlichen Sorge. Wie in der Titelmetapher der ‚Avantgarde‘ angedeutet, überprüft der Beitrag das diskursive Postulat der ‚neuen Väter‘ und ihres Anspruchs auf Rollentransgression, Symmetrierung des Geschlechterverhältnisses und Involvierung in den Kindes-Alltag auf Gültigkeit, indem er im ausgewählten Feld einer Dresdner Kindertagesstätte wiederkehrende Alltagssituationen beobachtet und analysiert. Auf das Dachthema referiert die Untersuchung dabei in doppelter Weise – zum einen im ‚Voranschreiten‘ und ‚Überschreiten‘ überkommener, stereotyper Väterlichkeits- und Männlichkeitsbilder durch die jungen Väter in „traditionell weibliche Sphären“ hinein, zum andern in der Wahl eines bestimmten, signifikanten Momentes familialer Interaktion: So sind Verbringung und Abholung des Kleinkindes in die beziehungsweise aus der Kindertagestätte nicht nur Teil des täglichen Fürsorgemanagements der Eltern und ihres komplexen, konfliktanfälligen Aushandlungsprozesses an der genderfizierten Grenze von familiärer Lebens- und Arbeitswelt. Die täglich wiederkehrende Bring- und Holsituation aus dem privaten in den institutionellen Kommunikations- und Handlungskontext (beziehungsweise umgekehrt) stellt für alle Beteiligten (Eltern, Kind, Erzieher/in) ein klassisches ‚Schwellenmoment‘ dar, das für die Beobachtung und Entzifferung genderfizierter Normen, Verhaltensstandards und Veränderungspotenziale besonders aussagekräftig ist