Balancing Blood, Balancing Books: Medicine, Commerce, and the Royal Court in Seventeenth-Century England

This dissertation argues that the Williams Harvey's novel conceptualization of the circulation developed from a set of concerns and sensitivities that Harvey shared with merchants and courtiers, and that it emerged at the courts of King James and King Charles, alongside a new conceptualizations of commercial circulation. As a brother to merchants and a physician to kings during the commercial crises of the 1620s, Harvey was exposed to ways of thinking about circulation that he used to make sense of the disparate observations he made about the motion of the heart and blood. Harvey's famous quantitative argument, the thought experiment at the center of his conceptualization of the blood, was an exercise in accounting. Through a process of "reckoning," and "by laying of account," Harvey balanced blood like a merchant balances books, conceptualizing arterial and venous blood as fungible. Harvey showed that there was a recirculation of blood through the heart. Over time, these aspects of Harvey's circulation became easier to overlook; the Great Fire of 1666 destroyed the most tangible artifacts of Harvey's mercantile sociability, such as his fine Persian rugs or the collection of marvels contained in the library and museum that Harvey established at the College of Physicians of London. By situating Harvey among courtiers and royal patrons who were concerned with the circulation of cloths, dyestuffs, coin, and bullion, this dissertation aims to add to the burgeoning literature on the scientific revolution that posits a multitude of different scientific practitioners with diverse philosophical commitments and varied connections to other facets of early modern life, while stressing key conceptual changes in Harvey's thought

Principal self-efficacy in the implementation of a standards based teacher evaluation reform.

States across the country are adopting new methods of determining teacher effectiveness. A method that has increased in popularity is the use of standards based teacher evaluation (SBTE). These systems are typically created by state legislation and approved for the scope of work associated with a state’s Race to the Top (RTTT) application and federally approved Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) waiver application. The evaluation of teachers now relies on two key components—an administrator’s rating of teacher performance and a rating of student academic growth. The enactment and implementation of teacher evaluation laws have changed the way administrators evaluate classroom instruction and are in direct contrast to previous evaluation systems in terms of format, timelines, measures, and opportunity costs incurred. One major concern is that although the method of evaluating teachers has changed, internal school infrastructures have not. Using Tschannen-Moran and Gareis (2004) measure of self-efficacy, this study will utilize multiple regression in order to determine how efficacious principals are with the implementation of a SBTE system and examine the relationship between school-related factors, principal characteristics, and principal efficacy in implementing SBTE. The results of this study have implications for the implementation of future reform efforts. Furthermore, it advances the existing literature on principal self-efficacy and teacher evaluation

TOPIC MODELLING METHODOLOGY: ITS USE IN INFORMATION SYSTEMS AND OTHER MANAGERIAL DISCIPLINES

Over the last decade, quantitative text mining approaches to content analysis have gained increasing traction within information systems research, and related fields, such as business administration. Recently, topic models, which are supposed to provide their user with an overview of themes being dis-cussed in documents, have gained popularity. However, while convenient tools for the creation of this model class exist, the evaluation of topic models poses significant challenges to their users. In this research, we investigate how questions of model validity and trustworthiness of presented analyses are addressed across disciplines. We accomplish this by providing a structured review of methodological approaches across the Financial Times 50 journal ranking. We identify 59 methodological research papers, 24 implementations of topic models, as well as 33 research papers using topic models in In-formation Systems (IS) research, and 29 papers using such models in other managerial disciplines. Results indicate a need for model implementations usable by a wider audience, as well as the need for more implementations of model validation techniques, and the need for a discussion about the theoretical foundations of topic modelling based research

Analysis of a two-scale system for gas-liquid reactions with non-linear Henry-type transfer

In this paper, we consider a coupled two-scale nonlinear reaction-diffusion system modelling gas-liquid reactions. The novel feature of the model is the nonlinear transmission condition between the microscopic and macroscopic concentrations, given by a nonlinear Henry-type transfer function. The solution is approximated by using a Galerkin method adapted to the multiscale form of the system. This approach leads to existence and uniqueness of the solution, and can also be used for numerical computations for a larger class of nonlinear multiscale problems