336 research outputs found
Artful living and the eradication of worry in Søren Kierkegaard's interpretation of Matthew 6:24-34
No full textDanish thinker Søren Kierkegaard published fourteen discourses, across four collections, on Matthew 6:24-34. The repeated readings of the biblical text, whose themes include the choice between God and mammon, worry, what it means to consider the birds and lilies, and how to seek first the kingdom of God, converge with Kierkegaard’s interest in anxiety, despair, worry, subjectivity, indirect communication, choice, the moment, and life before God. Accordingly, the discourses make connections with his larger works, elucidate frequently explored Kierkegaardian themes in recent scholarship, and contribute to his critique of nineteenth-century Copenhagen. Additionally, the collections present an interpretation of each verse and phrase of Matthew’s text and, held up against modern Matthew scholarship, they correlate with and contribute to Sermon on the Mount and New Testament studies. Kierkegaard’s reading of Matthew also holds implications for the practice of biblical interpretation as it promotes the importance of awareness of sin, interestedness, and appropriation as central to proper reading. His emphasis on Christ as the primary exemplar of Matthew’s text adds an additional Christological element to his hermeneutic. Furthermore, the discourses serve as spiritual treatises which provide the reader with theological terminology to help confront the problem of worry and suffering. In light of a human being’s distinctiveness as imago Dei, Kierkegaard elucidates ways an individual may respond artfully to the ongoing possibility of worry, a possibility which the discourses connect with Christian anthropology and external labels associated with possessions and status. The Matthew 6 discourses intimate Kierkegaard’s sympathy with classic Christian spirituality and, in combination with the cultural-ecclesiastical critique, the creative exegesis, and the in-depth analysis of the cause of and cure for worry, his work emerges as an excellent example of spiritual theology
New and old in Matthew 11-13 : normativity in the development of three theological themes.
Full text linkSIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DXN026380 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo
‘The Churchillian Paradigm and the “Other British Isles”: An Examination of Second World War Remembrance in Man, Orkney, and Jersey’
No full textThis dissertation studies Second World War ‘sites of memory’ in the islands of Jersey, Orkney and the Isle of Man, to determine if each island celebrates the war’s events as Britain does, or if they have charted their own mnemonic course. It builds on the work of Angus Calder, Malcolm Smith, and Mark Connelly, who have explored how popular conception of the Second World War in Britain has been structured around a certain set of commemorative motifs, most of which centre on Winston Churchill and the events of 1940. The British war narrative is now commonly referred to as the ‘Churchillian paradigm’ or ‘finest-hour myth’, and continues to be the driving force in commemoration and memorialization on the British mainland. The three islands in this study are culturally and historically distinct from Britain, and each has strong notions of its own ‘island identity’. Each also possesses a tangential and divisive domestic experience of war, one which is often minimized in the iconography of the Churchillian paradigm. Jersey was occupied by Nazi Germany from 1940 to 1945, Orkney was home to several thousand Italian POWs who built important infrastructure in the island, and the Isle of Man was home to 14,000 German, Finnish, Japanese, and Italian internees in what one critic has called ‘a bespattered page’ in the nation’s history. By examining ‘sites of memory’— museums, heritage sites, commemorations, celebrations, philately, and use of public space—this dissertation shows that each island simultaneously accepts and rejects elements of the finest-hour myth in their collective memory. Each island displays its unique (though often quite negative) heritage in order to differentiate itself from Britain, while at the same time allowing them, at certain events, to participate in celebration of Britain’s ‘greatest victory’. In this way, islands’ use ‘Britishness’ pragmatically, by basking in traditionally ‘British’ commemorative tropes, while at the same time deepening their own cultural and historical sovereignty
Keys under doormats - mandating insecurity by requiring government access to all data and communications
Full text linkAbstract
Twenty years ago, law enforcement organizations lobbied to require data and communication services to engineer their products to guarantee law enforcement access to all data. After lengthy debate and vigorous predictions of enforcement channels “going dark,” these attempts to regulate the emerging Internet were abandoned. In the intervening years, innovation on the Internet flourished, and law enforcement agencies found new and more effective means of accessing vastly larger quantities of data. Today we are again hearing calls for regulation to mandate the provision of exceptional access mechanisms. In this report, a group of computer scientists and security experts, many of whom participated in a 1997 study of these same topics, has convened to explore the likely effects of imposing extraordinary access mandates.
We have found that the damage that could be caused by law enforcement exceptional access requirements would be even greater today than it would have been 20 years ago. In the wake of the growing economic and social cost of the fundamental insecurity of today’s Internet environment, any proposals that alter the security dynamics online should be approached with caution. Exceptional access would force Internet system developers to reverse “forward secrecy” design practices that seek to minimize the impact on user privacy when systems are breached.
The complexity of today’s Internet environment, with millions of apps and globally connected services, means that new law enforcement requirements are likely to introduce unanticipated, hard to detect security flaws. Beyond these and other technical vulnerabilities, the prospect of globally deployed exceptional access systems raises difficult problems about how such an environment would be governed and how to ensure that such systems would respect human rights and the rule of law
High yield direct fusion welding of glass and metal
No full textBonding components made from highly dissimilar materials is generally accomplished by the use of an interlayer such as an adhesive, solder or frit. However this form of indirect bonding exhibits issues with absolute accuracy of positioning, thermal conductivity, contamination and, critically, lifetime outgassing. A reliable technique to directly bond highly dissimilar materials would thus be highly attractive. Microwelding using an ultrashort pulsed laser has been demonstrated to be such a method [1, 2]. Here the weld process is accomplished by tightly focussing an ultra-short laser through the glass and onto the metal surface. Careful control allows for simultaneous absorption in both the glass and the metal with the resulting plasma, mixing, cooling and forming a fusion weld. Transferring this process from the lab to industry requires a high yield. In this presentation we report studies on the surface finish requirements in order to obtain this while maintaining bonding strength. [1] R.M. Carter, J. Chen, J.D. Shephard, R.R. Thomson, D.P. Hand (2014) Picosecond laser welding of similar and dissimilar materials, Applied Optics, vol. 19, pp. 4233-4238. [2] R.M. Carter, M. Troughton, J. Chen, I. Elder, R.R. Thomson, M. J. D. Esser, R. A. Lamb, and D. P. Hand, (2017) Towards industrial ultrafast laser microwelding: SiO2 and BK7 to aluminium alloy, Applied Optics, vol. 56, pp. 4873-4881. <br/
The Evolution of the Insurance Sector in Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union
Full text linkThis paper provides a detailed profile of the development of the insurance industry between 1989-98 in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the New Independent States (NIS) of the former Soviet Union. In doing so, the author utilizes various sources of data to describe the nature of the insurance market in the region. On an individual host country basis, attention is given to data on premium income with respect to both life and non-life coverage, an analysis of average annual growth rates, as well as insurance density and penetration rates by type of coverage. The paper also addresses a number of issues pertaining to the competitive environment, including the legal conditions for insurance operators, a profile of the key players, and the role of foreign insurers operating within the region. The paper concludes by identifying the three main trends of the insurance industry in the region, the associated policy implications of each, as well as the need for future research.
Canon Barnett and the first thirty years of Toynbee Hall
No full textPhDThis thesis is a study of the changing role which Toynbee
Hall, the first university settlement, played in East London between
1884 and 1914. The first chapter presents a brief biography of
Sainiel Augustus Barnett, the founder and first warden of the
settlement, and analyzes his social thought in relation to the
beliefs which were current in Britain during the period. The
second chapter discusses the founding of the settlement, its organization, structure and the aims which underlay its early work. The
third chapter, concentrating on three residents, C.R. Ashbee, .H.
Beveridge and T. Edmund Harvey, shows the way in which subsequent
settlement workers reformulated these aims In accordance with their
own social and economic views. The subsequent chapters discuss the
accomplishments of the settlement in various fields. The fourth
shows that Toynbee Hall's educational program, which was largely an
attempt to work out Matthew Arnold's theory of culture, left little
impact on the life of East London. The fifth chapter discusses the
settlement residents' ineffectual attempts to establish contact with
working men's organizations. The final chapter seeks to demonstrate
that In the field of philanthropy the residents were far more successful than in any other sphere in adapting the settlement to changing
social thought
An Assessment of How Urban Crime and Victimization Affects Life Satisfaction
Full text linkWe assess the effect of the homicide rate, individual´s perception of security in their neighborhood of residence, and of the effect of their having been victimized, on life satisfaction. We find a negative effect of the homicide rate on life satisfaction for the subsample of individuals living in their current houses for at least 10 years or more, who had moved to that place at some point in the past. We also find a positive and robust effect of the perception of security in the households´neighborhood for the whole sample, and for different subsamples considered. Having been victim of an offense is also robustly negatively related to life satisfaction, in particular in the cases where the offense was robbery.Quality of Life, Life Satisfaction, Crime. Classification JEL: I32, K40, K42.
Simulations of three-dimensional water flow with discrete classes of soil structure: laboratory and field applications
No full textSimulation of water flow in a soil volume requires the characterization of the soil hydraulic properties in three dimensions. Such characterization is expensive and requires destructive sampling. The implementation of a non-destructive method to represent variations of soil structure in space could potentially reduce sampling expenses without compromising the accuracy of flow simulations. The overall objectives of this dissertation were to investigate the reduction of soil complexity from a continuum to discrete classes, each assumed to have uniform hydraulic properties, and test the impact of such a simplification on the simulation of water flow.
Electrical Resistivity Tomography (ERT) was used to define variations of soil properties within the volume of interest. This technique allows the generation of three-dimensional distributions (i.e., tomographs) of electrical resistivity (ER). A clustering method was used to reduce the spatial variation of ER values to three classes. Two of the classes contained ER values that were correlated to each other and represented regions with ER greater or smaller than the average ER. The third class contained non-correlated ER values. Each of these cluster types were assigned uniform soil hydraulic properties. A three-dimensional numerical model was used to assess the impact of clustering on simulated water flow.
In the second chapter of this dissertation, clusters of simulated ER data from a previous study were used to characterize the impact data inversion (required to produce the tomographs) may have on simulated water flow. The simulated datasets consisted of a total of 100 realizations of spatial distributions of ER values clustered into two sizes. Each of those realizations consisted of the raw (r) and the inverted (i) data. The clusters were assigned hydraulic properties obtained from a laboratory core experiment previously conducted at Rutgers University, and used to generate spatial structures in a flow model. Each realization was used to simulate water flow over ten flow rates. Correlations between model outputs of the r- and corresponding i-datasets were quantified with the normalized mutual information. The inversion process homogenized the spatial structure of the model domain, smoothing out the smaller clusters. Gradients in water content and velocity at cluster edges were sharper at higher flow rates and it was concluded that the soil hydraulic properties used in the clusters likely influenced these interactions.
The third chapter simulated the laboratory experiment conducted at Rutgers on an undisturbed soil core, with spatial structural units defined by clusters of electrical resistivity data measured several times over the course of the experiment. Water retention was measured on thirty soil cores extracted from an experimental lysimeter. The water retention model parameters for each core were estimated by assuming that the pore system had unimodal or bimodal distributions. A third representation of water retention was derived from the texture and bulk density measured in each core. Clusters were assigned spatially-averaged parameter sets defined by median values or similar-media scaling. Spatially-variable outflow from the lower boundary of the lysimeter was simulated through a three-dimensional domain that replicated the Rutgers lysimeter at five flow rates. The main finding of this work was that the spatial distribution of the hydraulic properties is more important than the method used to define those properties.
The fourth chapter applied the clustering framework to the field scale by comparing clusters of electrical resistivity derived from a measurement at the beginning of the experiment and water content values simulated over a period of 150 days. The soil hydraulic properties of the experimental volumes were characterized by 121 soil core samples and by field measurements of pressure potential and water content. The spatial distribution of the hydraulic properties in the model domain was defined by maps of scaling factors interpolated through Ordinary Kriging. Maps of simulated water content were clustered and compared to clusters of electrical resistivity measurements from the field. The dynamic nature of the simulated water content made it difficult to characterize consistent spatial clusters and made comparisons between electrical resistivity and water content clusters uncertain.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference
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