Weeding... It Isn\u27t Just For Gardens

Sorry, I haven’t posted in a while; I’ve been holding out until I got to the finishing stages of the Collection Development project. Yes, that’s right, for the past couple of weeks, when I was pacing up and down the stacks on the second floor, I was not actually going crazy. [excerpt

The Desperate Rebels of Shimabara: The Economic and Political Persecutions And the Tradition of Peasant Revolt

The Shimabara Rebellion has been studied throughout history by historians of East Asia. Originally conceived by both Japanese and Western scholars as a religious revolt against the anti-Christian Tokugawa government, later scholars contended that the Rebellion was a demonstration by the mistreated and impoverished and only tacitly related to Christian influences. This paper sets out to build on that narrative and to show the connection between the Christian resistance to the Tokugawa government and the movement of impoverished and desperate peasants, pushed to the brink of existence. Furthermore, this paper hopes to explore the goals of the Rebellion and establish the Shimabara Rebellion within the context of other rebellions during the Tokugawa era

On the Web-WorldCat, Digital Publications, and New Editions

I hope everyone is doing well and enjoying the warmer weather! Despite the real arrival of spring and sun, the Reference Desk is expecting a huge pick-up in the library and in citation and research questions as we move towards the end of the semester and the due dates for final research papers. Apart from regular work at the Desk, I am still working on the Collection Development Project, now in the online section of the project. I’ve been working a lot with MUSCAT and WorldCat, trying to discover how many copies of the Parkin books are available in other libraries and to see how rare each book is. Some of the books could only be found in ten or so other libraries worldwide! [excerpt

A Sing-Song Way of Vocalizing: Generalization and Specificity in Language and Birdsong.

Spoken languages such as German are extremely discrete, whereas others such as Portuguese are melodic or "sing-song" wherein identifying a word relies on what comes before and after. Perhaps surprisingly, birdsong also exhibits specificity and generalization as articulated by Tian and Brainard (2017)

An unconditional maximum likelihood test for a unit root

We investigate a test for unit roots in autoregressive time series based on maximization of the unconditional likelihood. This is the likelihood function appropriate for stationary time series. While this function is the true likelihood only under the stationary alternative, it can nevertheless be maximized for any data including data from a unit root process. It thus gives a way to test for unit roots, provided percentill~s can be calculated. For models with estimated means, the power of the new test is better than that of some currently popular tests

Hadronic current correlation functions at finite temperature in the NJL model

Recently there have been suggestions that for a proper description of hadronic matter and hadronic correlation functions within the NJL model at finite density/temperature the parameters of the model should be taken density/temperature dependent. Here we show that qualitatively similar results can be obtained using a cutoff-independent regularization of the NJL model. In this regularization scheme one can express the divergent parts at finite density/temperature of the amplitudes in terms of their counterparts in vacuum.Comment: Presented at 9th Hadron Physics and 8th Relativistic Aspects of Nuclear Physics (HADRON-RANP 2004): A Joint Meeting on QCD and QGP, Angra dos Reis, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 28 Mar - 3 Apr 200