11,400 research outputs found

    Do Catholics have an external locus of evaluation? Inauthentic experiences of Catholic guilt in the pursuit of self-forgiveness

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    This two-part mixed methods study investigated emotional response to transgression and selffor-giveness in Catholic individuals in concert with locus of evaluation orientation following a hypothe-sis that Catholics may be particularly unable to find self-forgiveness in the teachings of their reli-gion. Study 1 was a qualitative semi-structured interview with a sample of 20 practicing Catholic participants. Questions focused on the emotive experiences of selfforgiveness and transgressions and the contribution that Catholic practices (prayer and reconciliation) make to the process. Data were analysed using thematic analysis which supported evidence of Catholic guilt but suggested that there may be some inauthenticity and insincerity with which penitents' approach reconciliato-ry practices. Study 2 used a sample of 239 Christian participants in groups of Catholics and Christian non-Catholics. Participants responded to two psychometric questionnaires: the Heartland Forgiveness Scale, and the Locus of Evaluation Inventory. Followed by two additional questions pertaining to self-forgiveness experiences, and one question requiring participants to prioritise types of forgiveness. The results found no difference between Catholics and non-Catholics in their response to self-forgiveness or locus of evaluation orientation. However, in non-Catholic Christians but not in Catholics, the frequency of religious practice correlated with higher total forgiveness and its subscales (including self-forgiveness), with more internal locus of evaluation, and with lower self-regard, suggesting that church attendance does not relate to the propensity for self-forgiveness in Catholic individuals

    The Disputation: The Enduring Representations in William Holman Hunt's “The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple,” 1860

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    This interdisciplinary thesis problematizes the Jewish presence in the painting The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple (1860) by William Holman Hunt. This “Jewish presence” refers to characters within the painting, Jews who posed for the picture and the painting’s portrayal of Judaism. The thesis takes a phenomenological and hermeneutical approach to The Finding providing careful description and interpretation of what appears in the painting. It situates the painting within a newly configured genre of disputation paintings depicting the Temple scene from the Gospel of Luke (2:47 – 52). It asks two questions. Why does The Finding look the way it does? And how did Holman Hunt know how to create the picture? Under the rubric of the first question, it explores and challenges customary accounts of the painting, explicitly challenging the over reliance upon F.G. Stephens’s pamphlet. Additionally, it examines Pre-Raphaelite and Victorian religious contexts and bringing hitherto unacknowledged artistic contexts to the fore. The second question examines less apparent influences through an analysis of the originary Lukan narrative in conjunction with the under-examined genre of Temple “disputation” paintings, and a legacy of scholarly and religious disputation. This demonstrates a discourse of disputation informing The Finding over and above the biblical narrative. In showing that this discourse strongly correlates with the painting’s objectifying and spectacular properties, this thesis provides a new way to understand The Finding’s orientalism which is further revealed in its typological critical reworking of two Christian medieval and renaissance paintings. As a demonstration of the discourse, the thesis includes an examination of Jewish artists who addressed the theme of disputation overtly or obliquely thereby engaging with and challenging the assumptions upon which the disputation rests

    Moduli Stabilisation and the Statistics of Low-Energy Physics in the String Landscape

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    In this thesis we present a detailed analysis of the statistical properties of the type IIB flux landscape of string theory. We focus primarily on models constructed via the Large Volume Scenario (LVS) and KKLT and study the distribution of various phenomenologically relevant quantities. First, we compare our considerations with previous results and point out the importance of Kähler moduli stabilisation, which has been neglected in this context so far. We perform different moduli stabilisation procedures and compare the resulting distributions. To this end, we derive the expressions for the gravitino mass, various quantities related to axion physics and other phenomenologically interesting quantities in terms of the fundamental flux dependent quantities gsg_s, W0W_0 and n\mathfrak{n}, the parameter which specifies the nature of the non-perturbative effects. Exploiting our knowledge of the distribution of these fundamental parameters, we can derive a distribution for all the quantities we are interested in. For models that are stabilised via LVS we find a logarithmic distribution, whereas for KKLT and perturbatively stabilised models we find a power-law distribution. We continue by investigating the statistical significance of a newly found class of KKLT vacua and present a search algorithm for such constructions. We conclude by presenting an application of our findings. Given the mild preference for higher scale supersymmetry breaking, we present a model of the early universe, which allows for additional periods of early matter domination and ultimately leads to rather sharp predictions for the dark matter mass in this model. We find the dark matter mass to be in the very heavy range mχ10101011 GeVm_{\chi}\sim 10^{10}-10^{11}\text{ GeV}

    TOWARDS AN UNDERSTANDING OF EFFORTFUL FUNDRAISING EXPERIENCES: USING INTERPRETATIVE PHENOMENOLOGICAL ANALYSIS IN FUNDRAISING RESEARCH

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    Physical-activity oriented community fundraising has experienced an exponential growth in popularity over the past 15 years. The aim of this study was to explore the value of effortful fundraising experiences, from the point of view of participants, and explore the impact that these experiences have on people’s lives. This study used an IPA approach to interview 23 individuals, recognising the role of participants as proxy (nonprofessional) fundraisers for charitable organisations, and the unique organisation donor dynamic that this creates. It also bought together relevant psychological theory related to physical activity fundraising experiences (through a narrative literature review) and used primary interview data to substantiate these. Effortful fundraising experiences are examined in detail to understand their significance to participants, and how such experiences influence their connection with a charity or cause. This was done with an idiographic focus at first, before examining convergences and divergences across the sample. This study found that effortful fundraising experiences can have a profound positive impact upon community fundraisers in both the short and the long term. Additionally, it found that these experiences can be opportunities for charitable organisations to create lasting meaningful relationships with participants, and foster mutually beneficial lifetime relationships with them. Further research is needed to test specific psychological theory in this context, including self-esteem theory, self determination theory, and the martyrdom effect (among others)

    Cultivating Agrobiodiversity in the U.S.: Barriers and Bridges at Multiple Scales

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    The diversity of crops grown in the United States (U.S.) is declining, causing agricultural landscapes to become more and more simplified. This trend is concerning for the loss of important plant, insect, and animal species, as well as the pollution and degradation of our environment. Through three separate but related studies, this dissertation addresses the need to increase the diversity of these agricultural landscapes in the U.S., particularly through diversifying the type and number of crops grown. The first study uses multiple, openly accessible datasets related to agricultural land use and policies to document and visualize change over recent decades. Through this, I show that U.S. agriculture has gradually become more specialized in the crops grown, crop production is heavily concentrated in certain areas, and crop diversity is continuing to decline. Meanwhile, federal agricultural policy, while having become more influential over how U.S. agriculture operates, incentivizes this specialization. The second study uses nonlinear statistical modeling to identify and compare social, political, and ecological factors that best predict crop diversity across nine regions in the U.S. Factors of climate, prior land use, and farm inputs best predict diversity across regions, but regions show key differences in how factors are important, indicating that patterns at the regional scale constrain and enable further diversification. Finally, the third study relied on interviews with farmers and key informants in southern Idaho’s Magic Valley – a cluster of eight counties that is known to be agriculturally diverse. Interviews gauge what farmers are currently doing to manage crop diversity (the present) and how they imagine alternative landscapes (the imaginary). We found that farmers in the Magic Valley manage current diversity mainly through cover cropping and diverse crop rotations, but daily struggles and political barriers make experimenting with and imagining alternative landscapes difficult and unlikely to occur. Together, these three studies provide an integrated view of how and why U.S. agriculture landscapes simplify or diversify, as well as the barriers and bridges such pathways of diversification

    Towards a non-equilibrium thermodynamic theory of ecosystem assembly and development

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    Non-equilibrium thermodynamics has had a significant historic influence on the development of theoretical ecology, even informing the very concept of an ecosystem. Much of this influence has manifested as proposed extremal principles. These principles hold that systems will tend to maximise certain thermodynamic quantities, subject to the other constraints they operate under. A particularly notable extremal principle is the maximum entropy production principle (MaxEPP); that systems maximise their rate of entropy production. However, these principles are not robustly based in physical theory, and suffer from treating complex ecosystems in an extremely coarse manner. To address this gap, this thesis derives a limited but physically justified extremal principle, as well as carrying out a detailed investigation of the impact of non-equilibrium thermodynamic constraints on the assembly of microbial communities. The extremal principle we obtain pertains to the switching between states in simple bistable systems, with switching paths that generate more entropy being favoured. Our detailed investigation into microbial communities involved developing a novel thermodynamic microbial community model, using which we found the rate of ecosystem development to be set by the availability of free-energy. Further investigation was carried out using this model, demonstrating the way that trade-offs emerging from fundamental thermodynamic constraints impact the dynamics of assembling microbial communities. Taken together our results demonstrate that theory can be developed from non-equilibrium thermodynamics, that is both ecologically relevant and physically well grounded. We find that broad extremal principles are unlikely to be obtained, absent significant advances in the field of stochastic thermodynamics, limiting their applicability to ecology. However, we find that detailed consideration of the non-equilibrium thermodynamic mechanisms that impact microbial communities can broaden our understanding of their assembly and functioning.Open Acces

    From wallet to mobile: exploring how mobile payments create customer value in the service experience

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    This study explores how mobile proximity payments (MPP) (e.g., Apple Pay) create customer value in the service experience compared to traditional payment methods (e.g. cash and card). The main objectives were firstly to understand how customer value manifests as an outcome in the MPP service experience, and secondly to understand how the customer activities in the process of using MPP create customer value. To achieve these objectives a conceptual framework is built upon the Grönroos-Voima Value Model (Grönroos and Voima, 2013), and uses the Theory of Consumption Value (Sheth et al., 1991) to determine the customer value constructs for MPP, which is complimented with Script theory (Abelson, 1981) to determine the value creating activities the consumer does in the process of paying with MPP. The study uses a sequential exploratory mixed methods design, wherein the first qualitative stage uses two methods, self-observations (n=200) and semi-structured interviews (n=18). The subsequent second quantitative stage uses an online survey (n=441) and Structural Equation Modelling analysis to further examine the relationships and effect between the value creating activities and customer value constructs identified in stage one. The academic contributions include the development of a model of mobile payment services value creation in the service experience, introducing the concept of in-use barriers which occur after adoption and constrains the consumers existing use of MPP, and revealing the importance of the mobile in-hand momentary condition as an antecedent state. Additionally, the customer value perspective of this thesis demonstrates an alternative to the dominant Information Technology approaches to researching mobile payments and broadens the view of technology from purely an object a user interacts with to an object that is immersed in consumers’ daily life

    Aspects of the topological dynamics of sparse graph automorphism groups

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    We examine sparse graph automorphism groups from the perspective of the Kechris-Pestov-Todorčević (KPT) correspondence. The sparse graphs that we discuss are Hrushovski constructions: we consider the 'ab initio’ Hrushovski construction M_0, the Fraïssé limit of the class of 2-sparse graphs with self-sufficient closure; M_1, a simplified version of M_0; and the ω-categorical Hrushovski construction M_F. We prove a series of results that show that the automorphism groups of these Hrushovski constructions demonstrate very different behaviour to previous classes studied in the KPT context. Extending results of Evans, Hubička and Nešetřil, we show that Aut(M_0) has no coprecompact amenable subgroup. We investigate the fixed points on type spaces property, a weakening of extreme amenability, and show that for a particular choice of control function F, Aut(M_F) does not have any closed oligomorphic subgroup with this property. Next we consider the Aut(M_1)-flow of linear orders on M_1, and show that minimal subflows of this have all Aut(M_1)-orbits meagre. We give partial analogous results for the Aut(M_0)-flow of linear orders on M_0, and find the universal minimal flow of the automorphism group of the “dimension 0” part of M_0.Open Acces
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