The shade of the divine: approaching the sacred in an Ethiopian orthodox Christian community

The dissertation is a study of the religious lives of Orthodox Christians in a semirural, coffee‐producing community on the shores of Lake Tana in northwest Ethiopia. Its thesis is that mediation in Ethiopian Orthodoxy – how things, substances, and people act as go‐betweens and enable connections between people and other people, the lived environment, saints, angels, and God – is characterised by an animating tension between commensality or shared substance, on the one hand, and hierarchical principles on the other. This tension pertains to long‐standing debates in the study of Christianity about the divide between the created world and the Kingdom of Heaven. Its archetype is the Eucharist, which entails full transubstantiation but is circumscribed by a series of purity regulations so rigorous as to make the Communion inaccessible to most people for most of their lives. These purity regulations, I argue, speak to an incommensurability between relations of human substance‐sharing, especially commensality and sexuality, and hierarchical relations between humans and divinity

R&D Efficiency in China: Can State-owned Firms Compete?

Can state-owned firms’ R&D compete with that of more nimble private and foreign innovator firms? This paper analyzes R&D efficiency in China’s high tech industries (i) theoretically, based on previous studies, and (ii) empirically, through Data Envelopment Analysis under both Constant and Variable Returns to Scale. Though Chinese state-owned firms can theoretically be R&D efficient in industries where the underlying science is well understood, a myriad of factors including persistent soft budget constraints and policy burdens mitigate the potential advantages – bureaucratic pre-screening and access to finance – that characterize state-owned firms. Using Chinese national statistics on high-tech industries, foreign firms are found to be R&D scale-efficient in the medical, aerospace, and computer industries. Private Chinese firms are shown to be scale efficient in computers and electronics. Though generally the least efficient of the firm types, state-owned firms are more efficient in aerospace than other domestic Chinese firms, showing that state-owned firms can be moderately efficient in some industries. The findings of this paper lend support to the notion that SOEs are inefficient and that privatization and competition stimulate innovation

Quasi-One-Dimensional Flow for Use in Real-Time Facility Simulations

Simulations have been, and continue to play, an important role at the Arnold Engineering Development Center as an aid in control system development and operator training. These models were just simple lumped-parameter methods. Since their initial inception, over ten years ago, little work has been done to increase the fidelity of the models. The processing power of the computer hardware used by the simulations has increased dramatically during this time and this left an opening for improvements to the models adopted in the simulation. To fill this void a quasi-one-dimensional control volume has been developed to run in real-time. The new control volume accounts for changes in area, transient effects, friction and other minor pressure losses, and localized heat transfer. All of which were previously unaccounted for. This new capability was compared against known analytical solutions and applied to an example flow system that demonstrates the new features. The result is a control volume that can be used in wind tunnel, or in other industrial process, simulations to provide a more realistic model

DEVELOPMENT OF A SCHEME TO EVALUATE CONSUMER APPLE VARIETY PREFERENCES

Consumer/Household Economics,

Vertical love:Forms of submission and top-down power in Orthodox Ethiopia

The classical sociological literature on Amhara hierarchy describes a society based on open relations of domination and an obsession with top-down power. This article asks how these accounts can be reconciled with the strong ethics of love and care that ground daily life in Amhara. We argue that love and care, like power, are understood in broadly asymmetrical terms rather than as egalitarian forms of relationship. As such, they play into wider discourses of hierarchy, but also serve to blur the distinction between legitimate authority and illegitimate power

A knight's tale: a rare case of inter-personal violence from medieval Norton Priory

YesThe opportunity to assess human skeletal remains from Norton Priory, near Runcorn (Cheshire), led to the discovery of peri-mortem blade trauma on an adult male skeleton. The burial evidence suggests that this individual was a wealthy knight and lay benefactor of the priory in the thirteenth century and skeletal evidence has revealed that he was the victim of inter-personal violence. Additionally, many skeletal elements were affected by advanced Paget’s disease, which may have resulted in a certain level of vulnerability due to restricted movement of his arms as a result of Pagetic thickening of the bones. This is the only evidence found of weaponrelated trauma on the Norton Priory skeletal assemblage, making it a rare case and contributing to our understanding of inter-personal violence associated with an ecclesiastical establishment in medieval Britain