Constructing Futures: Outlining a Transhumanist Vision of the Future and the Challenge to Christian Theology of its Proposed Uses of New and Future Developments in Technology

Transhumanists arc committed to re-evaluating the entire human condition and offering proposalsfor transcending mortality, principally by augmenting the human body with mechanical components or by transferring the human mind into intelligent hyper-computers. In this essay, the author\'s methodology is to critique the culture oftranshumanism, arguing, with Barbour, that all technology is tool whose use is determined by the cultural and socialframeworks within which it is utilized. Transhumanism is characterized as morally ambiguous, extremely individualistic, fixated upon health, vitality, and power, ideological, reductionist, and self-deluded. Its proposed use of technology is, thus, highly suspect and deserves a robust theological response

Pion and Nucleon Structure Functions near x = 1

In a colored-quark and vector-gluon model of hadrons we show that a quark carrying nearly all the momentum of a nucleon (x≈1) must have the same helicity as the nucleon; consequently νW^2_n/νW^p_2→(3/7) as x→1, not (2/3) as might naively have been expected. Furthermore as x→1, νW^(π)_2∼(1-x)^2 and (σ_(L)/σ_(T))π∼μ^(2)Q^(-2)(1-x)^(-2)+O(g^2); the resulting angular dependence for e^(+)e^(-)→h^(±)+ X is consistent with present data and has a distinctive form which can be easily tested when better data are available

Bordered by COVID-19 and the EU-27: Imagining a theology of global domicile

The European Union legislates the free movement of people, capital and goods, within and between its member states. This political commitment has been hard-pressed by the undocumented migrants entering the EU. The COVID-19 pandemic catalysed restrictions upon the free movement of people within the EU. Whilst legal, these restrictions posed a significant existential threat to the EU. Accompanying these is an increasing tendency to prioritise the claims of the nation state above all other obligations, including those of international law or any sense of moral or ethical obligation. European churches play an active role in refugee advocacy and welfare, fostering processes of welcome and integration, accompanied by the development of ecclesiologies that simultaneously transcend borders and acknowledge their legal and political necessity. This paper highlights the responses of nation-states to migrants and contrasts these with a constructive diaspora theology that is fit for purpose within the context of the European Union and its member states

The small-slope approximation for layered, fluid seafloors

The article of record as published may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/10.0000470The small-slope approximation (SSA) for rough-interface scattering is most commonly applied to the upper bound ary of either impenetrable media or uniform half-space media, but has been recently developed for layered media in the acoustic and electromagnetic cases. The present work gives an overview of three forms of the SSA for layered media. The first has been previously presented in the acoustics literature. The second is from the electromagnetics literature and in the present work is converted to the fluid-sediment problem. A missing proof is supplied of a key consistency condition demanded of the small-slope ansatz. As is usual, these small-slope results are expressed in k-space. A third SSA for layered seafloors follows from conversion of the usual half-space formulation from k-space to coordinate space. This form turns out to be useful for reverberation simulations. The three different approaches are compared with respect to scattering strength and the coherent reflection coefficient, but an assessment of their relative merits will require comparison with exact calculations.U.S. Office of Naval Researc

A Guiding Vision for Fluid Learning: The Future of Education and Training

Position paper by the Digital Media Collaboratory (DMC) of the IC² Institute at The University of Texas at Austin. The authors envision learning systems as a ubiquitous public utility and propose an architecture to accomplish it. The paper includes a description of DMC research activities in 2003.IC2 Institut