A Comparison of the Ecclesiology of Representatives of the Lutheran and Helvetic Reformers

There are two major areas that need to be investigated. The first concerns the ecclesiology of the four reformers selected for this study. It must be noted that the Reformation was not the work of isolated individuals, but a movement caused by the joint efforts of various persons and schools of thought. A comparison among these reformers is therefore very much needed in order to gain a better picture of the era. The following study will therefore analyse the various aspects of the ecclesiology of these four reformers and comparisons will be made accordingly. Secondly, how the reformers\u27 convictions of the nature of the 21James J. Raun, Church Discipline: A Comparative Study of Luther and Calvin, The Lutheran Church Quarterly 6 (January 1933):61- 83. 12 church affect their practices in ecclesiastical discipline also needs to be studied. Implicit with it will be the reformers* views on the relationship between church and state in the enforcement of discipline and this will be discussed as well. Again, a comparative approach will be adopted so that a broader picture of the issue can be perceived. These two areas—ecclesiology and discipline—will constitute the body of the present study. The investigation will focus on the major elements of the ecclesiology of the reformers and how these elements influence their understandings of the church and state relationship, especially in the administration of ecclesiastical discipline. As a comparative study, it will also attempt to analyse the factors, from an ecclesiological viewpoint, which caused the split between the Lutheran and the Reformed parties

Changes in a Chinese interior design firm due to the development and use of a blog-based reflective practitioner knowledge management system inspired by Chinese philosophy: An autoethnographic case study

Dao (Way) The Way that can be experienced is not true; The world that can be constructed is not true. The Way manifests all that happens and may happen; The world represents all that exists and may exist. To experience without intention is to sense the world: To experience with intention is to anticipate the world. These two experiences are indistinguishable; Their construction differs but their effect is the same. Beyond the gate of experience flows the Way\u27. Which is ever greater and more subtle than/he world. Lao-Tzu, TaoDeChing, tr. Peter A. Merel This thesis is a reflective practitioner autoethnographic account of the way in which a Chinese interior design firm, through inspiration from Chinese philosophy (as exemplied in the beginning quotes), developed and used a reflective practitioner knowledge management system, called kBlogCentral, based around web-based blogs. The objective of setting up kBlogCentral was to build a simple, low cost knowledge management system for managing knowledge regarding various projects among the staff. All members of the firm are encouraged to perform reflective practitioner research and publish their knowledge as part of virtual teams regarding their professional practice. This reflective practitioner study depicts the rationale, process, and implications of building the system especially regarding inspiration from traditional and contemporary Chinese philosophy as this is seen as a culturally appropriate philosophical underpinning. The research outcome, present d throughout the thesis, is a rich description and reflections of employing action reflective practitioner research and a Web technology on the Internet, called Blog to manage knowledge in the interior design company in the light of Chine e thinking. Blog technology is mainly manifested in interactive websites that allow for rich Web based interaction and communication. The research question is: How did the process of developing an using a Blog-based reflective practitioner knowledge management system, through inspiration from Chinese philosophy, change the professional practice of member of a Chinese interior design firm? As part of answering this question, I report on my attempts to inspire change in the purpose, behaviour and underlying culture of a Chinese design firm aspiring to transform its management and practice. The major arena for this transformation is the KBlogCentral knowledge management system. The Dao (way) to such transformation is the member of the firm employing heuristic elf-reflective action research to \u27find it future\u27, with and through its people. In this process I have reported on innovative and, to my mind, valuable discoveries in knowledge elicitation and methods of integrating the views f my colleagues. This doctoral thesis, reporting on my finding of these discoveries, is my contribution to knowledge within the academic information systems, design, and management fields. The research reveals that knowledge, as a social product of human interactions, does not exist outside an agent - human beings. Thus the main role of knowledge management is to support social human interactions instead of just employing information technology to manipulate data, information and explicit knowledge as advocated by the functionalist approach. Knowledge management practices in China are found to be highly influenced by the contemporary interpretations of strands of traditional Chine e philosophy. The existence of a linguistic divide, resulting from some obsolete or misinterpreted doctrines of traditional Chinese philosophy, impedes the processes of creating and sharing knowledge in China. This thesis is a b ginning endeavour to critically examine these obsolete and distorted doctrines as a contribution towards a modem form of Chinese philosophy revitalizing Chinese to meet the challenges of a growing knowledge economy. Thus an undercurrent of heuristic hope runs through this thesis in that, within technology originating from and dominated by the West, this thesis reveals how knowledge management practice in China can be inspired by Chinese philosophy

Neurostimulation of the Rat Motor System

Ce document fait la synthèse d'un ensemble de travaux concernant la nature de la plasticité neuronale et la manière dont la neurostimulation peut être utilisée pour améliorer la récupération motrice après une atteinte neurologique. Nous commençons par les principes fondamentaux généraux des neurosciences, la structure du système nerveux moteur chez l'homme et le rat, ainsi qu'une brève discussion sur les lésions neurologiques. Les sujets sont vastes et couverts avec la brièveté nécessaire, mais ils fournissent un contexte essentiel pour les chapitres suivants, présentés sous forme d'articles scientifiques. Dans le premier article, nous passons en revue le domaine de la neurostimulation sous ses aspects fondamental et clinique avec l'Accident Vasculaire Cerebral (AVC) en tant que maladie modèle pour les lésions neurologiques. Nous classifions les interventions de stimulation en trois modèles différents d'induction de la plasticité. Notre thèse centrale est qu'une meilleure compréhension des règles sous-jacentes de la plasticité, accompagnée de progrès dans une plus grande précision spatio-temporelle, est nécessaire pour faire avancer le domaine de la neurostimulation. Dans le deuxième article, nous décrivons, étape par étape, un nouveau protocole pour évaluer l'excitabilité corticospinale chez le rongeur éveillé pendant le comportement libre, ainsi que les plateformes matérielles et logicielles associées que notre équipe a développées à cette fin. L'une de ses principale caractéristique est la possibilité d'évaluer l'excitabilité corticomotrice en boucle fermée, en fonction de l'EMG, une nouvelle façon d'accroître l'uniformité des mesures sur des animaux en comportement. Cette plateforme de développement sera utile aux neuroscientifiques intéressés par l'évaluation de l'excitabilité du système nerveux chez les rongeurs éveillés par le biais d'une interrogation électrique ou optogénétique, un intermédiaire important avant les essais chez les primates non humains et éventuellement chez les humains. Dans le troisième article, nous avons utilisé cette plateforme prototype pour étudier la stimulation électrique associative appariée et le rôle de la plasticité dépendant de la synchronisation des potentiels d'action chez des rats implantés de façon chronique, sans l'influence de l'anesthésie. Nous nous sommes concentrés sur la variation systématique de l'intervalle entre la stimulation corticale et musculaire dans notre cohorte d'animaux afin de révéler l'effet de la synchronisation relative de l'activité aux niveaux cortical et spinal. Nous n'avons pas observé de potentialisation significative dans tous les intervalles de stimulation testés, mais plutôt des tendances vers des effets de type LTD dans la plupart des conditions de synchronisation. Nous discutons des raisons possibles pour lesquelles nous avons observé ces résultats. Dans le dernier article et dans le projet en cours, nous décrivons les premiers travaux prometteurs impliquant la neurostimulation optogénétique et électrique, ainsi que la réadaptation post-AVC comme tremplin pour des recherches futures. Nous concluons par une discussion générale et nous nous projetons dans l'avenir, tant à moyen qu'à long terme. La poursuite scientifique, tant sur le plan personnel que sur celui du domaine, se poursuivra, comme il se doit. Bien que ce travail soit conçu pour être lu dans un ordre séquentiel, chaque chapitre est indépendant. Collectivement, les travaux de cette thèse posent les bases et plaident en faveur d'une meilleure compréhension de la plasticité neuronale, du développement d'outils pour l'évaluer et de l'étude de ses applications pratiques pour parvenir à une meilleure récupération motrice après une lésion neurologique.This document synthesizes a body of work concerning the nature of neural plasticity and how neurostimulation may be used to improve motor recovery after neurological insult. We begin with general foundational principles in neuroscience, the structure of the nervous and motor systems in humans and rats, and a brief discussion of neurological injury. The topics are broad and covered with the necessary brevity, but provides critical context for the following chapters. In the first paper, we review the fields of neurostimulation across the clinical and basic science domains in the service of stroke as a model disease for neurological injury, framing the field in terms of three different models of plasticity induction. Our central thesis here is that enhanced understanding of the underlying rules of plasticity, accompanied with advances in greater spatiotemporal precision is necessary to move the field of neurostimulation forward. In the second paper we describe a stable, novel step-by-step protocol to assess corticospinal excitability in the awake, freely behaving rodent, and the associated hardware and software platforms that our team has developed for this purpose. A core feature enables corticomotor excitability assessment in a closed-loop, Electromyogram (EMG)-dependent manner, a novel way of increasing consistency during free behavior in untrained animals. This development platform will be of use to neuroscientists interested in assessing the excitability of the nervous system in awake, unrestrained rodents via electrical or optogenetic interrogation, an important intermediary before trials in non-human primates and eventually humans. In the third paper, we used this prototype platform to investigate electrical paired associative stimulation and the role of spike-timing-dependent plasticity in chronically implanted rats, without the influence of anaesthesia. Our focus was on systematically varying the Inter-Stimulus Interval (ISI) between cortical and muscle stimulation in our animal cohort in order to reveal the effect of relative activity timing at both the cortical and spinal levels. We did not observe significant potentiation across all of the stimulus intervals we tested, but instead observed trends towards Long-Term Depression (LTD)-like effects in the short term across most timing conditions. We discuss possible reasons why we observed these results. In the final paper and project currently in progress, we describe early promising work involving optogenetic and electrical neurostimulation, and stroke recovery as a launchpad for future investigations. We conclude with a general discussion and peer into the future, both in the medium term and the long term. The scientific pursuit, both personally and as a field will continue, as it should. Although this work is designed to be read in sequential order, each chapter stands alone. Collectively, the work in this thesis lays the groundwork and argues for a greater understanding of neural plasticity, development of tools to assess it, and study of its practical applications to achieve enhanced motor recovery after neurological injury

A Robust Numerical Algorithm for Efficient Overland-flow Routing

Source: ICHE Conference Archive - https://mdi-de.baw.de/icheArchive

Improving Students’ Intensive Reading Ability by Using Survey-Question-Read-Review-Recite-Reflect Method

The current study is a classroom action research with the objective of analyzing the improvement of students’ intensive reading ability using Survey-Question-Read-Review-Recite-Reflect (SQ4R) method. This research was conducted at Ryulgok Secondary School, Pyongyang, by involving 32 the 3rd grade students as the research participants. Data collection techniques were interviews, observation, documentation, and tests. The data analysis method used in this study was divided into qualitative data analysis and quantitative data analysis. The results of the first cycle of the research showed that 58.4% of students were active, it meant that it was still less than the target 75% of the results of intensive reading, because only 53% of students achieved a score of 70 and above for reading ability. In the second cycle, it shows that 85% of students actively participated in learning and the percentage of students was 87% of the target 75% of students got a score of 70 and above for reading ability. This indicated that there was an increase in learning outcomes (reading ability) as a result of an increase in the learning process after using the SQ4R method

BAC-FISH assays delineate complex chromosomal rearrangements in a case of post-Chernobyl childhood thyroid cancer

Structural chromosome aberrations are known hallmarks of many solid tumors. In the papillary form of thyroid cancer (PTC), for example, activation of the receptor tyrosine kinase (RTK) genes, RET and neurotrophic tyrosine kinase receptor type I (NTRK1) by intra- and interchromosomal rearrangements has been suggested as a cause of the disease. However, many phenotypically similar tumors do not carry an activated RET or NTRK-1 gene or express abnormal ret or NTRK- 1 transcripts. Thus, we hypothesize that other cellular RTK-type genes are aberrantly expressed in these tumors. Using fluorescence in situ hybridization-based methods, we are studying karyotype changes in a relatively rare subgroup of PTCs, i.e., tumors that arose in children following the 1986 nuclear accident in Chernobyl, Ukraine. Here, we report our technical developments and progress in deciphering complex chromosome aberrations in case S48TK, an aggressively growing PTC cell line, which shows an unusual high number of unbalanced translocations