Evangelizing a Nation: Catholic Priests in America

According to the most recent statistics provided by the American bishops, there are an astonishing seventy million Catholics who call the United States home. Five hundred years ago, there was not a single Roman Catholic to be found anywhere in this vast expanse of forests, prairies, and mountains. (Moreover, presumably no one living at that time in what is now the United States had any knowledge of Jesus Christ, for the episcopacy of Erik Gnupsson in twelfth century Greenland hardly resulted in any evangelization of the Christian faith in the western hemisphere.) As the European authorities competed to establish colonies and settlements in the New World, each journeyed across the Atlantic with three primary intentions: to amass wealth, to establish glorious and prestigious settlements, and to spread the Christian faith. In the centuries that followed, several religious orders—perhaps the most well-known of which were the Jesuits and the Franciscans—washed up on the shores of America, forever shaping the progress and expansion of Roman Catholicism in America

Gendered Discourses of Responsibility and Domestic Abuse Victim-Blame in the English Children’s Social Care System

Purpose This paper foregrounds the experiences of mothers involved with England’s children’s social care system when experiencing domestic abuse. It reports on data from a survivor-led study on domestic violence and/or abuse (DVA), involving women victim-survivors and domestic abuse practitioners. It aimed to understand how dominant discourses governing child protection work with families in which there is a perpetrator of DVA, might be revised to shift a tendency to hold mothers (solely) responsible for the protection of children as well as for their partners’ abuse. Methods The study advances a discourse analysis of interview and focus group data, substantiating how children’s social care practices produce the routine responsibilisation of the non-abusing parent, usually the mother, with limited focus on the abusing parent, usually the father. Results The paper exposes the gendered discourses of mother-victim-blame and responsibility patterning children’s social care responses to domestic abuse, which together intensify adult and child victim-survivor material harm and hamper child protection work. Also in evidence are the enduring traumatic consequences of the court-ordered removal of children. Conclusion The paper has implications for policy and practice, asserting that shifting responsibility away from mothers requires the ongoing interrogation of normative understandings of gender relations and gender-role stereotypes as they manifest in families. Fathers’ accountability should be constructed on a structural as well as individual level, which in the case of DVA and the family, incorporates efforts to enable perpetrators of DVA to cultivate an individual sense of responsibility and accountability, as standard practice

Measuring Electric Fields From Surface Contaminants with Neutral Atoms

In this paper we demonstrate a technique of utilizing magnetically trapped neutral Rb-87 atoms to measure the magnitude and direction of stray electric fields emanating from surface contaminants. We apply an alternating external electric field that adds to (or subtracts from) the stray field in such a way as to resonantly drive the trapped atoms into a mechanical dipole oscillation. The growth rate of the oscillation's amplitude provides information about the magnitude and sign of the stray field gradient. Using this measurement technique, we are able to reconstruct the vector electric field produced by surface contaminants. In addition, we can accurately measure the electric fields generated from adsorbed atoms purposely placed onto the surface and account for their systematic effects, which can plague a precision surface-force measurement. We show that baking the substrate can reduce the electric fields emanating from adsorbate, and that the mechanism for reduction is likely surface diffusion, not desorption.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures, published in Physical Review

Indirect long-term global radiative cooling from NOx emissions

Anthropogenic emissions of short‐lived, chemically reactive gases, such as NO x and CO, are known to influence climate by altering the chemistry of the global troposphere and thereby the abundance of the greenhouse gases O3, CH4 and the HFCs. This study uses the characteristics of the natural modes of the tropospheric chemical system to decompose the greenhouse effect of NO x and CO emissions into (i) short‐lived modes involving predominantly tropospheric O3 and (ii) the long‐lived mode involving a global coupled CH4‐CO‐O3 perturbation. Combining these two classes of greenhouse perturbations—large, short‐lived, regional O3 increases and smaller, long‐lived, global decreases in CH4 and O3—we find that most types of anthropogenic NO x emissions lead to a negative radiative forcing and an overall cooling of the earth

Enhancement of Xe-129 polarization by off-resonant spin exchange optical pumping

A high power narrow line width (38 W, 0.09 nm full width at half maximum) external cavity diode laser is investigated for rubidium spin exchange optical pumping of Xe-129. This tunable photon source has a constant line width, independent of operating power or wavelength within a 1 nm tuning range. When using this laser, an increase in the Xe-129 nuclear polarization is observed when optically pumping at a lower wavelength than the measured Rb electron D-1 absorption. The exact detuning from D1 for the highest polarization is dependent upon the gas density. Furthermore, at high power and/or high Rb density, a reduction in the polarization occurs at the optimum wavelength as previously reported in spin exchange optical pumping studies of He-3 which is consistent with high absorption close to the cell front face. These results are encouraging for moderate high throughput polarization of Xe-129 in the midpressure range of (0.5-2.0 amagat). (C) 2010 American Institute of Physics. [doi: 10.1063/1.3478707

Managerial Incentives and the Valuation of International Joint Venture Formation

Strategic management decisions and actions involving international joint venture formations are significant to many firms and have major economic consequences. Previous empirical evidence on the effects of joint venture formation announcements on shareholder wealth reveals that firm value is more often positively impacted. However, many previous analyses of shareholder wealth from joint venture formations do not fully explore cross-sectional differences in managerial incentives to pursue these international investments. The primary purpose of this study is to exploit these cross-sectional differences using agency theory to explain managerial behavior and subsequent shareholder effects. This study capitalizes on agency theory’s notion that managers are not necessarily motivated solely by the maximization of firm value, but instead are interested in maximizing their own utility. The study’s findings are consistent with agency theoretic hypotheses based on a broad cross-section of international joint ventures. Results demonstrate that shareholder returns to international joint venture formation exhibit considerable variability and, importantly, are at least partially explained by cross-sectional differences in agency incentives. Specifically, returns to shareholders are positively related to the level of managerial ownership and inversely related to the level of free cash flow. Moreover, a positive relation is found between shareholder returns and the joint interaction between leverage and free cash flow. These findings indicate that the effect of international joint venture formation on shareholder value is not uniform and, more importantly is at least partly influenced by managers’ agency incentives

Testing for the Existence of a Generalized Wiener Process- the Case of Stock Prices

In this article, we present two nonparametric trispectrum based tests for testing the hypothesis that an observed time series was generated by what we call a generalized Wiener process (GWP). Assuming the existence of a Weiner process for asset rates of return is critical to the Black-Scholes model and its extension by Merton (BSM). The Hinich trispectrum-based test of linearity and the trispectrum extension of the Hinich-Rothman bispectrum test for time reversibility are used to test the validity of BSM. We apply the tests to a selection of high frequency NYSE and Australian (ASX) stocks.