My dissertation elucidates the roles feasts played in constructing the social order for different Jewish communities from approximately the third century B.C.E. to the third century C.E. Feasts - defined in this work as events based on the communal consumption of food and drink conscientiously differentiated from quotidian meals - punctuated the rhythms of the lives of Jews throughout ancient Palestine and the Diaspora. Jews convened feasts before and after the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. to mark seminal moments in Jewish history and to commemorate the roles God and his intermediaries played in these events. Jews also held feasts on a number of other occasions. Individuals and groups of Jews may have held feasts upon the visitation of foreign dignitaries, the completion of a major building project, after the safe return of a family or friend from a journey abroad, or during important life-cycle events. Regardless of the occasion, feasts consisted of a host of practices that provided Jews with the means to establish, maintain, or contest social hierarchies and group cohesion. How individuals and groups of Jews manipulated the constitutive elements of feasts during the period under investigation to actuate the social order within their communities is the focus of this dissertation.

To achieve this dissertation's objective, I will examine the textual and archaeological evidence for the performances of feasts within two domains that were central to the construction of Jewish society: privately owned Jewish domiciles in Palestine and the communal and religious institution of the synagogue located in the Diaspora and Palestine. There have been previous studies that have examined both the textual and archaeological data for the functions of feasts convened within these locations, but they have been temporally limited and have not taken into account recent anthropological and ethnographic studies demonstrating the dynamic functions of feasts. My analysis of the literary and archaeological evidence for feasts held within Jewish domiciles and synagogues shows that these repasts provided Jews with various opportunities to determine their relationships with one another, advance their economic and political agendas, seek power, and establish and/or contest broader tenets of the social order. I hope that my study will lead to further investigations into the social dynamics of Jewish feasts as well as their role as a catalyst for the transformation of economic, political, and religious institutions that shaped Jewish society in antiquity.

Due to the increasing cost of the enhancement techniques in current projection lithographic techniques and the required time in developing new technology's

as feasible manufacturing technology, EUVL is considered as the leading candidate for production of 45 nm node and less. In EUVL, mask is held electrostatically against chuck. This electrostatic chucking process affects the nonflatness of the mask due to contact interaction and the voltage force between the mask and chuck. A fundamental understanding of chucking phenomenon is required to realize the SEMI P37 and SEMI P40 stringent flatness requirements.

The primary challenge is to understand and characterize the ability of electrostatic chucking phenomenon to acheive consistent and reliable shapes of chucked masks.

The objective of this thesis is to study the effect of initial nonflatness of mask and chuck, chucking voltage, chuck and mask dimension and gravity on the final nonflatness of the mask A finite element model of the mask and chuck with initial nonflat surface is developed. To predict the final nonflatness of the mask frontside with nm accuracy, the contact interaction between mask and chuck is modeled using van der Waals forces. These results are compared with penalty method for the runtime and accuracy of results

Tremendous effort has been put into study of the etiology of complex

diseases including the breast cancer, type 2 diabetes,

cardiovascular diseases, and prostate cancers. Despite large numbers of reported disease-associated loci,

few associated loci have been replicated, and some true associations

does not belong to the group of the most significant loci

reported to be associated. We built a Bayesian hierarchical model incorporated

with SNP-level functional data that can help identify associated SNPs in pathway-wide association studies.

We applied the model to an association study for the serous invasive ovarian cancer based on the DNA repair and apoptosis pathways. We found that using our model, blocks of SNPs located in regions enriched for missense SNPs or gene inversions were more likely to be identified as candidates of the association.