Of Fathers and Daughters - Biblical Studies as a Multi-Faith, Pluralist, and Multi-Cultural Project

The essay argues that biblical studies is a unique area for inter-religious and inter-cultural dialogue and enrichment. The biblical narratives provide sacred stories for at least three of the world religions. The paper explores Jewish, Christian and Islamic interpretations of the incident in Genesis 19 where Lot offers his daughters to the Sodomite mob and by comparing these interpretations highlights moral failings in the dominant Christian interpretive tradition. The essay argues that by recognising the biblical narratives as a multi-faith shared scripture, biblical studies can become grounded in principles of appreciation and respect for pluralism and diversity. These principles can be applied not only across traditions but also within traditions to ensure all voices have a chance to speak, especially those that might be silenced for not conforming to rigid orthodoxies including those based on gender, class, ethnicity, or sexuality

CAHOST Facilitating the Johnson-Neyman Technique for Two-Way Interactions in Multiple Regression

When using multiple regression, researchers frequently wish to explore how the relationship between two variables is moderated by another variable; this is termed an interaction. Historically, two approaches have been used to probe interactions: the pick-a-point approach and the Johnson-Neyman (JN) technique. The pick-a-point approach has limitations that can be avoided using the JN technique. Currently, the software available for implementing the JN technique and creating corresponding figures lacks several desirable features–most notably, ease of use and figure quality. To fill this gap in the literature, we offer a free Microsoft Excel 2013 workbook, CAHOST (a concatenation of the first two letters of the authors’ last names), that allows the user to seamlessly create publication-ready figures of the results of the JN technique

Compulsory Heterosexuality in Biblical Narratives and their Interpretations: Reading Homophobia and Rape in Sodom and Gibeah

Christianity has made the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19 a locus of homophobia. This is most dramatically evidenced in the words 'sodomy' and 'sodomite' being applied to male/male homoeroticism. However, rabbinic Judaism has read Sodom and Gomorrah as a locus of cruelty, inhospitality and xenophobia. While critical scholarship has moved from traditional Christian understandings, discussion of Genesis 19 (and its parallel, Judges 19) is still couched in such terms as 'homosexual rape' and 'homosexuality'. The paper argues that readings of Genesis 19 and Judges 19 that highlight homosexuality as an interpretive device ignore the different historical and cultural context behind these texts and the contemporary politics in which these texts are enmeshed. Such readings overlook issues of patriarchy, compulsory heterosexuality and homosexual panic. The paper draws on anthropological literature concerning Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cultures to argue that male rape in Genesis 19 and Judges 19 is an act of homophobic violence signifying the abuse of outsiders and the breach of the community of Israel. Male rape serves to reinforce the heterosexuality of the insiders by inscribing outsiders as queer and queers as outsiders. The paper closes by exploring some implications of this argument in light of issues of racism and xenophobia arising from Pauline Hansen's One Nation and the Wik High Court decision, and of the problem of homophobia, especially in our schools as exampled by the recent Christopher Tsakalos case in New South Wales

Pragmatic Trellis Coded Modulation: A Simulation Using 24-Sector Quantized 8-PSK

Trellis Coded Modulation (TCM)[2,3,4], combines convolutional encoding with PSK or QAM signalling to provide spectrally efficient communication with forward error correction. Pragmatic TCM[1], uses the industry standard, 64-state, binary convolutional code. This paper presents a simulation of a pragmatic TCM system for 8-PSK. This system associates each sector of a quantized phase receiver[9] with a pair of weights to be used as soft decision inputs of the Viterbi decoder. This system approaches 3dB of coding gain at bit error rates of 10-5 and less

Pragmatic Trellis Coded Modulation: A Hardware Implementation Using 24-sector 8-PSK

Trellis Coded Modulation (TCM)[2,3], combines convolutional encoding with PSK or QAM signalling to provide spectrally efficient communication with forward error correction. Pragmatic TCM[4], uses the industry standard, 64-state, binary convolutional code. This paper presents a hardware implementation of a pragmatic TCM system for 8-PSK. This system associates each sector of a quantized phase receiver[7] with a pair of weights to be used as soft decision inputs of the Viterbi decoder. This system approaches 3dB of coding gain at bit error rates of 10-5 and less

Fast TCM Decoding: Phase Quantization and Integer Weighting

TCM, combining modulation and coding, achieves coding gains over conventional uncoded multilevel modulation without the attendant bandwidth expansion. Since TCM was proposed Ungerboeck (1982, 1987) substantial work has done in this area. A large portion of the TCM work has been in the area of high-speed data transmission over voice grade modems using quadrature amplitude modulation, QAM. QAM, not having a constant envelope, is unattractive for employing a TWT with its nonlinear behavior as the power stage. Additional work has been done in utilizing M-ary PSK with TCM. Simulations by Taylor and Chan (1981) utilizing a 4-state convolutional code demonstrated the coding gain of a rate 2/3 coded 8-PSK modulation scheme. Wilson et. al. (1984) obtained results for 16-PSK TCM using codes with 4 to 32 states and achieved coding gains of 3.5 to 4.8 dB respectively, over 8-PSK and demonstrated that small memory codes achieved good gains with simple design procedures

Ultrastructural Changes Accompanying the Mechanical Deformation of Bone Tissue: A Raman Imaging Study

Raman spectroscopy and imaging are known to be valuable tools for the analysis of bone, the determination of protein secondary structure, and the study of the composition of crystalline materials. We have utilized all of these attributes to examine how mechanical loading and the resulting deformation affects bone ultrastructure, addressing the hypothesis that bone spectra are altered, in both the organic and inorganic regions, in response to mechanical loading/deformation. Using a cylindrical indenter, we have permanently deformed bovine cortical bone specimens and investigated the ultrastructure in and around the deformed areas using hyperspectral Raman imaging coupled with multivariate analysis techniques. Indent morphology was further examined using scanning electron microscopy. Raman images taken at the edge of the indents show increases in the low-frequency component of the amide III band and high-frequency component of the amide I band. These changes are indicative of the rupture of collagen crosslinks due to shear forces exerted by the indenter passing through the bone. However, within the indent itself no evidence was seen of crosslink rupture, indicating that only compression of the organic matrix takes place in this region. We also present evidence of what is possibly a pressure-induced structural transformation occurring in the bone mineral within the indents, as indicated by the appearance of additional mineral factors in Raman image data from indented areas. These results give new insight into the mechanisms and causes of bone failure at the ultrastructural level.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/42363/1/30720166.pd

Grey wolf genomic history reveals a dual ancestry of dogs

The grey wolf (Canis lupus) was the first species to give rise to a domestic population, and they remained widespread throughout the last Ice Age when many other large mammal species went extinct. Little is known, however, about the history and possible extinction of past wolf populations or when and where the wolf progenitors of the present-day dog lineage (Canisfamiliaris) lived(1-8). Here we analysed 72 ancient wolf genomes spanning the last 100,000 years from Europe, Siberia and North America. We found that wolf populations were highly connected throughout the Late Pleistocene, with levels of differentiation an order of magnitude lower than they are today. This population connectivity allowed us to detect natural selection across the time series, including rapid fixation of mutations in the gene IFT8840,000-30,000 years ago. We show that dogs are overall more closely related to ancient wolves from eastern Eurasia than to those from western Eurasia, suggesting a domestication process in the east. However, we also found that dogs in the Near East and Africa derive up to half of their ancestry from a distinct population related to modern southwest Eurasian wolves, reflecting either an independent domestication process or admixture from local wolves. None of the analysed ancient wolf genomes is a direct match for either of these dog ancestries, meaning that the exact progenitor populations remain to be located.Peer reviewe

Identification of Tumor Suppressors and Oncogenes from Genomic and Epigenetic Features in Ovarian Cancer

The identification of genetic and epigenetic alterations from primary tumor cells has become a common method to identify genes critical to the development and progression of cancer. We seek to identify those genetic and epigenetic aberrations that have the most impact on gene function within the tumor. First, we perform a bioinformatic analysis of copy number variation (CNV) and DNA methylation covering the genetic landscape of ovarian cancer tumor cells. We separately examined CNV and DNA methylation for 42 primary serous ovarian cancer samples using MOMA-ROMA assays and 379 tumor samples analyzed by The Cancer Genome Atlas. We have identified 346 genes with significant deletions or amplifications among the tumor samples. Utilizing associated gene expression data we predict 156 genes with altered copy number and correlated changes in expression. Among these genes CCNE1, POP4, UQCRB, PHF20L1 and C19orf2 were identified within both data sets. We were specifically interested in copy number variation as our base genomic property in the prediction of tumor suppressors and oncogenes in the altered ovarian tumor. We therefore identify changes in DNA methylation and expression for all amplified and deleted genes. We statistically define tumor suppressor and oncogenic features for these modalities and perform a correlation analysis with expression. We predicted 611 potential oncogenes and tumor suppressors candidates by integrating these data types. Genes with a strong correlation for methylation dependent expression changes exhibited at varying copy number aberrations include CDCA8, ATAD2, CDKN2A, RAB25, AURKA, BOP1 and EIF2C3. We provide copy number variation and DNA methylation analysis for over 11,500 individual genes covering the genetic landscape of ovarian cancer tumors. We show the extent of genomic and epigenetic alterations for known tumor suppressors and oncogenes and also use these defined features to identify potential ovarian cancer gene candidates