551 research outputs found
Search for microquasar features in cosmic ray spectra with AMS-01
No full textThesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Physics, 2004.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 97-102).Accreting x-ray binaries are sometimes observed to emit compact, relativistic jets of cool plasma; these objects are called "microquasars". It is possible that these jets are responsible for a large flux of galactic cosmic ray protons and nuclei. The energy spectrum from these sources will be very different from the featureless power-law expected from ordinary cosmic-ray acceleration in supernova shocks. The AMS-01 instrument measured cosmic ray protons and helium during 10 days on the Space Shuttle Discovery in 1998; we analyze this data searching for spectral distortions due to nearby microquasar activity. We show that the microquasar contribution to the CR proton flux can be no more than [approximately] 2% in the range 2-50 GeV.by Benjamin Monreal.Ph.D
Public worship and practical theology in the work of Benjamin Keach (1640-1704)
No full textThe late seventeenth century was a critical and fruitful period
for the Particular Baptists of England. Severely persecuted following
the Restoration, toleration in 1689 brought its own perils.
Particular Baptists were fortunate in having several strong leaders,
especially the London trio of Hanserd Knollys, William Kiffin, and
Benjamin Keach. Such a small and severely persecuted group as the
Baptists could afford little time for academic pursuits, thus of
necessity most of their theology was practical in nature.
Benjamin Keach (1640-1704) was the most outstanding practical
theologian among the English Particular Baptists of the late
seventeenth century. This dissertation is a study of Keach, in
particular his writings on public worship and practical theology.
Although Keach was a prolific author, he has been almost completely
neglected by scholars.
After a biographical sketch of Keach, this study considers his
writings on public worship and practical theology. In the area of
worship, Keach made two outstanding contributions: First, he was the
most vocal apologist for Baptist views on Baptism of his period.
Secondly, and more importantly, his hymn writing and defense of hymn
singing broke new ground, not just for Baptists, but for English
Protestantism, in general. In addition to his contributions in these
areas, he also dealt with the laying on of hands and the sabbath day
worship controversy.
Keach's contributions to practical theology fall into two main
groups: his writings that concern religious education and those that
deal with polity. In addition to these, Keach's vigorous advocacy of
a high Calvinist soteriology are also considered under the rubric of
practical theology. Keach's most important (although not his most
positive) contribution in this area were his soteriological writings.
Although well within the bounds of orthodoxy, some of the tendencies
in Keach's soteriology were taken up by the following generation of
Baptist leaders and developed into a stultifying hyper-Calvinism that
handicapped Baptist evangelism and missions.
In the conclusion, Keach's contributions to a theory of practical
theology are considered
The varieties of aesthetic experience in American modernist literature
No full textMy dissertation focuses on three American Modernists--Henry James, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens--whose major works portray the sacralization of art as a problematic aspiration. All three are known for essays, journals, or letters which argue that literature can be seen either as a secular replacement for religion (James, Stevens), or a secular conduit for rumination on divine grace (Moore). However, the dominant tendency in their literary writing is to depict these projects as unaccomplished and perhaps unaccomplishable. In their fiction and poetry, James, Moore, and Stevens suggest that when aesthetic experience is spiritualized, the writing that results will be solipsistic, imprecise, and ontologically implausible. I examine these writers' descriptions of the limitations and inconsistencies of imagining literature as a source of spiritual experience, and I demonstrate that the sacralization of art in American Modernism was not a dead metaphor but an ongoing problem.James, Moore, and Stevens conceived the parameters of this problem with language drawn from contemporary debates about religious experience. My methodology therefore seeks to contextualize these writers by examining their responses to particular aesthetic and theological issues--James on the afterlife, Moore on Neo-Orthodox doctrines of original sin, Stevens on mystic conceptions of "pure poetry." I suggest a more general context in my introductory chapter, where I argue that all three of these writers define the spiritual dimensions of art in ways that are closely tied to the intellectual legacy of American Protestantism. Unlike Matthew Arnold, who envisioned a civic religion of art with a redemptive, public mission, the writers I examine imagine that the spiritual work of literature is conducted in isolation, and does not allow the writer to heal the world but to escape it. James, Moore, and Stevens follow writers like Emerson, William James, and Reinhold Niebuhr in imagining individualism to be essential to spirituality, but they also criticize this individualist model, as can be seen when they worry that devotion to art leads to loneliness, greed, and withdrawal from life. This uneasy continuity between Protestantism and Modernism exemplifies the complex and incomplete ways that secularization occurred in American intellectual culture.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical references (p. 210-221)
Search for Stable Strange Quark Matter in Lunar Soil
No full textWe report results from a search for strangelets (small chunks of strange quark matter) in lunar soil using the Yale WNSL accelerator as a mass spectrometer. We have searched over a range in mass from A=42 to A=70 amu for nuclear charges 5, 6, 8, 9, and 11. No strangelets were found in the experiment. For strangelets with nuclear charge 8, a concentration in lunar soil higher than 10[superscript -16] is excluded at the 95% confidence level. The implied limit on the strangelet flux in cosmic rays is the most sensitive to date for the covered range and is relevant to both recent theoretical flux predictions and a strangelet candidate event found by the AMS-01 experiment.Danish Natural Science Research CouncilU.S. Department of Energy (Contracts No. DE-FG02-92ER-40704 and No. DE-FG02-91ER- 40609
Emulation is the most sincere form of flattery : retro videogames, rom distribution and copyright
No full textThe Internet has made it possible for amateur game creators to collaborate on projects irrespective of geographical location. The success of projects such as Minecraft, and even CounterStrike, demonstrates that ‘indie’ developers can create entertainment products just as popular and successful as mainstream developers with huge budgets. However, many individuals instead are more interested in the old than the new – reliving past experiences through the playing of old videogames that are no longer commercially sold. Through the creation of emulators, and the ripping of ROM images (data that allows for the playing of an emulated videogame, such as Super Mario Bros. on the Super Nintendo), games with nostalgic value can be easily distributed, played and replayed. In addition, this allows for the preservation of legacy content that may otherwise be consigned to the ‘dustbin of history’. However, irrespective of the effort and ingenuity that goes into the creation of emulation software, and the effort involved in ripping ROM data to make old games playable, are these pursuits entirely legal? The purpose of this paper is to consider the compatibility of such projects with pre-existing norms of intellectual property law, comparing and contrasting the approaches of US and EU IP regimes in their handling of emulators and ROMS. The paper will analyse the issue under pre-existing legislation and with regard to relevant case law, seeking to draw conclusions on whether the existing regimes in copyright law are compatible and satisfactorily balance the right of videogame publishers to seek fair remuneration for their work with the desire by enthusiasts to preserve and relive a form of creative culture
The later orchestral works of William Walton: a critical and analytical re-evaluation
No full textAlthough the British twentieth-century composer William Walton enJoys a continuing presence in the international canon, the body of scholarship that seriously engages with his life and work is small. The post-war music, which includes the Cello Concerto (1956), Second Symphony (1961), Variations on a Theme of Hindemith (1963), Improvisations on
an Impromptu of Benjamin Britten (1969), and the film score for Battle of Britain (1969), has been particularly underrepresented in critical and analytical writing. In this thesis, I give detailed analyses of these scores, alongside an investigation of the contemporary critical
climate and reception history of these works.
I argue that the series of significant lifestyle changes that Walton underwent in the years immediately following the Second World War - including exchanging the busy musical life of London and a series of affairs with high-profile figures for the 'dolce far niente' of an isolated Italian island and a stable marriage - are suggestive of a broad shift in the composer's social and cultural values with consequent changes in musical attitudes and compositional tendencies. Walton's later music is differentiated from the pre-war works by the presence of octatonic, twelve-note, hexatonic and other non-diatonic harmonic constructions in the foreground, and a change from teleological to network-based or rotational background structures. My analyses adopt a deliberately eclectic range of analytical strategies, combining aspects of set-class approaches alongside tools from the tonal tradition. This methodological pluralism reflects my argument that the vitality of these scores derives from a tension between modernist and traditional tendencies. I argue that
Walton appropriates a wide range of influences, including to some extent that of the European avant garde, in contradistinction to the assertion prominent in contemporary
reception literature that his music had stagnated into a single outmoded and rarefied style.
I conclude that although Walton's post-war music was indeed conservative in comparison to that of several of his younger contemporaries, his music engages, through opposition and assimilation, with many of the most characteristic trends of twentieth-century concert
music. Nevertheless, I argue that the temptation to label Walton as a 'modernist' should be avoided; his works should be judged on their own terms and not according to the
regressive--progressive axis prominent in much of the contemporary reception literature. These scores may not have been progressive, but they have a distinctive sound-world and an invigorating vitality that makes them exceptionally engaging both as works of art and
objects of study
Testimony of Jesus and the Spirit: The 'We' of John 3:11 in Its Literary Context
No full textJesus’ use of the first person plural in John 3:11 is rarely given more than passing comment. The common explanation that a group outside of the narrative speaks through Jesus ignores the literary context of the passage, which indicates a number of possible figures who could be included in Jesus’ use of the first person plural. These possibilities consist of the Father, John the Baptist, Jesus’ disciples, and the use of the “we” of majesty. While the Spirit has rarely been mentioned as a possible referent, the Spirit’s inclusion in Jesus’ “we” is more likely. Based on the similar content and manner of speaking and testifying shared by Jesus and the Spirit and the proximity of Jesus’ comments about the Spirit, the
Spirit is the most plausible referent for inclusion in Jesus’ “we”.1-25This is a pre-copyrighted, author-produced, peer-reviewed version of the article accepted for publication in Neotestamentica 41, no. 1 (2007)For AODA accommodation, including help with reading this content, please contact [email protected] manuscrip
Jews and gender in British literature 1815-1865.
No full textPhDThis thesis examines the variety of relationships between Jews and gender in early
to mid-nineteenth century British literature, focussing particularly on representations
of and by Jewish women. It reconstructs the social, political and literary context in
which writers produced images and narratives about Jews, and considers to what
extent stereotypes were reproduced, appropriated, or challenged. In particular it
examines the ways in which questions of gender were linked to ideas about religious
or racial difference in the Victorian period.
The study situates literary representations of Jews within the context of
contemporary debates about the participation of the Jews in the life of the modern
state. It also investigates the ways in which these political debates were gendered,
looking in particular at the relationship between the cultural construction of
femininity and English national identity.
It first considers Victorian culture's obsession with Rebecca, the Jewess created in
Walter Scott's influential novel Ivanhoe (1819). It examines Rebecca's refusal to
convert to Christianity in the context of Scott's discussion of racial separatism and
modern national unity.
Evangelical writers like Annie Webb, Amelia Bristow and Mrs Brendlah were
prolific literary producers, and preoccupied with converting Jewish women.
Particularly during the 18'40s and 1850s, evangelical writing provided an important
forum for the construction and consolidation of women's national identity.
Grace Aguilar's writing was an attempt to understand Jewish identity within the
terms of Victorian domestic ideology. In contrast, Celia and Marion Moss, in their
historical romances, offered narratives of female heroism and national liberation,
drawing on the contemporary debate about slavery.
Benjamin Disraeli's construction of a "tough version of Jewish identity was a
response both to the contemporary stereotype of the feminised Jew and to the debate
about Jewish emancipation. It also drew on the virile ideology of the Young England
movement of the 1840s
Relativistic cyclotron radiation detection of tritium decay electrons as a new technique for measuring the neutrino mass
No full textThe shape of the beta-decay energy distribution is sensitive to the mass of the electron neutrino. Attempts to measure the endpoint shape of tritium decay have so far seen no distortion from the zero-mass form, thus placing an upper limit of mνβ<2.3 eV. Here, we show that a new type of electron energy spectroscopy could improve future measurements of this spectrum and therefore of the neutrino mass. We propose to detect the coherent cyclotron radiation emitted by an energetic electron in a magnetic field. For mildly relativistic electrons, like those in tritium decay, the relativistic shift of the cyclotron frequency allows us to extract the electron energy from the emitted radiation. We present calculations for the energy resolution, noise limits, high-rate measurement capability, and systematic errors expected in such an experiment.Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Physic
The modernist angel: Art at the Limits of the Human in D. H. Lawrence, H. D. and Mina Loy
No full textPhDThe subject of this thesis is a figure that might provisionally be called the *modemist
angel'. Focusing on modernist literature, and more particularly on the work of D. H.
Lawrence, H. D. and Mina Loy, it aims to isolate from the many angels found in all periods
and all types of art a historically specific and intellectually coherent paradigm: an angel of
and for its modernist times. A figure of precisely this type could be said to exist in the
form of Walter Benjamin's 'angel of history'. Critics who address the question of the
modern angel in texts by Franz Kafka and Rainer Maria Rilke often do so in conjunction
with the problem posed by the angel of history. Beginning with a chapter on Benjamin,
this thesis nevertheless follows a different trajectory. Over five chapters, it explores a
modernist landscape formed not only by Lawrence, H. D. and Loy, but also by European
and American writers such as A. R. Orage, Allen Upward, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens,
Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter, Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche. Although the
angel that emerges from this investigation might, in some respects, be said to anticipate
Benjamin's later version, this figure is also very different, standing for a project that is
distinctively, and recognisably, modernist in nature. He/she (the sex of the modernist
angel is often open to question) represents an attempt to reconcile the divine
responsibilities of the artist with the material and gendered conditions of being,
specifically of being human, in the modem world. This thesis looks again at the clash of
intellectual paradigms in the early-twentieth century - notably, the confrontation of the
Romantic view of art as a superhuman or sacred undertaking with the psychoanalytical or
evolutionary idea that all human endeavour is underpinned by sub-human motives - and
suggests the angel as a new and instructive figure through which to think the perilous
limits between the human and the divine in modernist literature
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