The Pelikan Movement - An Immigrant Story

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

Oesophageal cancer: with special reference to deaths in Scotland in 1970-1974

'...why oesophageal cancer in Scotland?'* Oesophageal cancer intrigues epidemiologists: probably no other cancer has a greater range of known and suspected risk factors, nor such elusive links with any of them. In the United Kingdom, studies of the disease in Wales in the 1960s produced tantalising associations with anaemia and Plummer-Vinson disease, metals in the soil and even 'degree of Welshness' (see Chapter One, section 1.5.3). When this study was proposed, oesophageal cancer rates in Scotland were twice those in England and Wales and rising: those in England and Wales were falling. The intrinsic interest of the subject, the growing Scottish death rate and the fact that almost nothing had been published on the subject in Scotland, all suggested that a geography of oesophageal cancer in Scotland might be rewarding. In the event it was frustrating. Since little was known of the mortality pattern, the study had to begin with a basic description of the situation - and a hope that the pattern disclosed might have aspects worthy of further investigation. The author defends this approach, dismissed as 'dredging' by Jones and Rushton (1982), on grounds that to describe a hitherto unknown situation is always useful, provided it is done well. However, the fact that so many good epidemiologists had failed to establish an incontrovertible link between risk factors and spatial distribution of the disease should have warned against the investment of too much time! Such geographical patterns as emerged might, of course, have more significance were they to re-emerge when mapped at different time periods. As the sequel narrates, an attempt at this had to be abandoned because of lack of funds to buy census material for a second period: however, the appearance of the Cancer Atlas of Scotland (Kemp et al, 1985) as the present study was approaching completion permits some consideration of this possibility. For the most part the Atlas shows very different spatial patterns to those found by the author. Thus, on the evidence assembled by the author, there are no geographical correlates of oesophageal cancer in Scotland and the distribution of the disease is almost entirely random. The author hypothesises that the distribution of this cancer in Scotland reflects random occurrence within the population of a particular personality type, and that at the end of a long development period small clusters will generally crop up randomly in various unrelated parts of the country (though one possible exception is discussed later). Needless to say, this hypothesis is exceedingly difficult to verify. Authors of research studies that after strenuous efforts produce such tenuous results must console themselves with the truism that negative results are nevertherless results, and that if well founded and well argued they are value to future researchers on the topic. A tinge of disappointment must and does remain, though the challenge and fascination of the subject have to some extent offset the many moments of frustration. * Paula Cook-Mozaffari, personal communication, 1981

The Workplace Information Sensitivity Appraisal (WISA) scale

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

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

In a model of $N$ volume-excluding spheres in a $d$-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

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