232 research outputs found

    The Pelikan Movement - An Immigrant Story

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    Blythe, Richard J. “The Pelikan Movement: An Immigrant Story.” Ph.D. diss., Concordia Seminary, 2008. 306 pp. The Pelikan Movement, led initially by Jan Pelikan, the grandfather of the Yale historian Jaroslav Pelikan, was a pivotal event in a Slovak Lutheran immigrant community that desired to provide a confessional Lutheran witness to their mother country. Shortly after the First World War, this immigrant community was resolute to return to Slovakia to share their confessional Lutheran understanding of the Christian faith, in the Hurban tradition, as well as their new church polity and practices that they adopted in America during the previous few decades. They were initially well received, but soon found that they were of a different spirit. After being rejected as partners in ministry with their former countrymen, they determined that the best way to ensure a confessional Lutheran witness was to start their own mission and create their own church against the desires of the indigenous Slovak Lutheran Church. The Slovak Lutheran Church received the missionaries as interlopers in a process of self-definition of a new European church that was shaking off years of domination under Hungarian rule. They were not understood as a confessional witness, but as divisive and sectarian. At the end of the movement, the immigrant community retreated from their mission, losing interest in a direct relationship with their mother church. Having failed to keep a strong connection to their home church and culture, they chose to embrace their new American reality and to assimilate into America as an American church. The Pelikan Movement marked the beginning of the end of one immigrant community’s attempt to keep close ties with their home culture and spiritual home

    Nonequilibrium phase transitions and dynamical scaling regimes

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    The Workplace Information Sensitivity Appraisal (WISA) scale

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    Human error in security plays a significant role in the majority of cyber-attacks on businesses. Security behaviours are impacted by numerous factors, including individual perceptions of information sensitivity. However, there is currently a lack of empirical measurement of information sensitivity and its role in determining security behaviours. This research presents a measure of information sensitivity appraisal that predicts security behaviour. We outline the design, development and validation of the Workplace Information Sensitivity Appraisal scale. The psychometric properties were assessed with data from an online sample of 326 employees in the UK. The scale comprises of five subscales: Privacy, Worth, Consequences, Low proximity interest by others and High proximity interest by others. The final 16-item WISA scale, alongside its five subscales, represents a comprehensive measure of information sensitivity appraisal in the workplace. The WISA scale has been found to have strong factorial validity, confirmed across eight information types, strong content validity, good criterion-related validity, adequate discriminant validity, and high internal reliability. This research utilised the WISA scale to explore sensitivity differences across eight information types: four concerning living individuals (Personal, Health, Financial & Lifestyle) and four organisationally-focused information types (IP, day to day, commercial & HR). Financial information was found to have the highest ratings for overall sensitivity followed by health and HR. Finally, scores for the WISA scale predicted a range of security behaviours including password usage, secure Wi-Fi usage, physical security and avoiding security risks. This demonstrates the potential role for information sensitivity appraisal as a determinant of security behaviours

    Parasites on parasites:Coupled fluctuations in stacked contact processes

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    We present a model for host-parasite dynamics which incorporates both vertical and horizontal transmission as well as spatial structure. Our model consists of stacked contact processes (CP), where the dynamics of the host is a simple CP on a lattice while the dynamics of the parasite is a secondary CP which sits on top of the host-occupied sites. In the simplest case, where infection does not incur any cost, we uncover a novel effect: a non-monotonic dependence of parasite prevalence on host turnover. Inspired by natural examples of hyperparasitism, we extend our model to multiple levels of parasites and identify a transition between the maintenance of a finite and infinite number of levels, which we conjecture is connected to a roughening transition in models of surface growth

    Inter-particle ratchet effect determines global current of heterogeneous particles diffusing in confinement

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    In a model of NN volume-excluding spheres in a dd-dimensional tube, we consider how differences between particles in their drift velocities, diffusivities, and sizes influence the steady state distribution and axial particle current. We show that the model is exactly solvable when the geometrical constraints prevent any particle from overtaking every other -- a notion we term quasi-one-dimensionality. Then, due to a ratchet effect, the current is biased towards the velocities of the least diffusive particles. We consider special cases of this model in one dimension, and derive the exact joint gap distribution for driven tracers in a passive bath. We describe the relationship between phase space structure and irreversible drift that makes the quasi-one-dimensional supposition key to the model's solvability.Comment: 26 pages, 7 figure

    Quantifying the dynamics of topical fluctuations in language

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    The availability of large diachronic corpora has provided the impetus for a growing body of quantitative research on language evolution and meaning change. The central quantities in this research are token frequencies of linguistic elements in texts, with changes in frequency taken to reflect the popularity or selective fitness of an element. However, corpus frequencies may change for a wide variety of reasons, including purely random sampling effects, or because corpora are composed of contemporary media and fiction texts within which the underlying topics ebb and flow with cultural and socio-political trends. In this work, we introduce a simple model for controlling for topical fluctuations in corpora - the topical-cultural advection model - and demonstrate how it provides a robust baseline of variability in word frequency changes over time. We validate the model on a diachronic corpus spanning two centuries, and a carefully-controlled artificial language change scenario, and then use it to correct for topical fluctuations in historical time series. Finally, we use the model to show that the emergence of new words typically corresponds with the rise of a trending topic. This suggests that some lexical innovations occur due to growing communicative need in a subspace of the lexicon, and that the topical-cultural advection model can be used to quantify this.Comment: Code to run the analyses described in this paper is now available at https://github.com/andreskarjus/topical_cultural_advection_model . A previous shorter version of this paper outlining the basic model appeared as an extended abstract in the proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics (Karjus et al. 2018, Topical advection as a baseline model for corpus-based lexical dynamics
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