A sartrean existentialist look at Bach's illusions: the adventures of reluctant Messiah

Primarily introduced through the works of a Danish scholar Søren Kierkegaard in nineteenth century, existentialism is in fact a socio-personal philosophy, which assumes man as radically free, while he is captivated in the inevitable chains of social responsibilities and commitments. Existentialism disregards the established traditional values, and emphasizes an individual's choice and free will while compelling him to confront his duplicities and to take responsibility of them. For existentialists, being-in-the-world defines experience. Following Sartrean notion of whether you are present here and now or you are off in an illusive state, an existentialist would not ask, Who you are? rather he focuses on Where you are?. Thus existentialism gives priority to existence not essence. This article investigates the significant trends of the twentieth century existentialism with regard to Sartrean notion of the term and applies existentialism and the notion of individualistic and social illusions to Richard Bach's Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah which questions the authenticity of reality from the view point of the central character

Association schemes and mutually unbiased Hadamard matrices

This thesis is an examination of the theory of association schemes. A part of this thesis focuses on the relation between association schemes and different combinatorial objects. Special attention is paid to the notion of Bose-Mesner algebra of an association scheme, which leads us to eigenmatrices, Krein matrices, and intersection matrices. It is shown that if an association scheme is imprimitive, it can be used to generate a quotient association scheme. Different constructions are used to generate association schemes. This thesis explains how to generate a new class of association schemes from mutually unbiased Bushtype Hadamard matrices (abbreviated as MUBH). This class of association schemes leads to an upper bound on the number of mutually unbiased Bush-type Hadamard matrices. Lastly, the existence of this class of association schemes results in the existence of sets of MUBH

Decomposition of complete designs

Through six chapters, the concept of decomposing the complete design is demonstrated. Group divisible designs, symmetric designs, strongly regular graphs, and association schemes are examples of the combinatorial objects that complete designs are decomposed into. Reconstructing McFarland designs leads to the existence of sets of designs with disjoint incidence matrices whose sum is the complete design. The existence of infinite classes of symmetric association schemes follows from the decomposition. Applying a similar technique on the Spence designs provides sets of designs all sharing the same complete tripartite graphs. By appropriately splitting the designs a decomposition of the complete design is obtained leading to an infinite class of non-commutative association schemes. A final attempt is made to combine the constructed decomposition with specific classes of balanced generalized weighing matrices

Nurses' perceptions of aids and obstacles to the provision of optimal end of life care in ICU

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