Gods, Heroes, & Kings: The Battle for Mythic Britain

The islands of Britain have been a crossroads of gods, heroes, and kings-those of flesh as well as those of myth-for thousands of years. Successive waves of invasion brought distinctive legends, rites, and beliefs. The ancient Celts displaced earlier indigenous peoples, only to find themselves displaced in turn by the Romans, who then abandoned the islands to Germanic tribes, a people themselves nearly overcome in time by an influx of Scandinavians. With each wave of invaders came a battle for the mythic mind of the Isles as the newcomer\u27s belief system met with the existing systems of gods, legends, and myths.In Gods, Heroes, and Kings, medievalist Christopher Fee and veteran myth scholar David Leeming unearth the layers of the British Isles\u27 unique folkloric tradition to discover how this body of seemingly disparate tales developed. The authors find a virtual battlefield of myths in which pagan and Judeo-Christian beliefs fought for dominance, and classical, Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, and Celtic narrative threads became tangled together. The resulting body of legends became a strange but coherent hybrid, so that by the time Chaucer wrote The Wife of Bath\u27s Tale in the fourteenth century, a Christian theme of redemption fought for prominence with a tripartite Celtic goddess and the Arthurian legends of Sir Gawain-itself a hybrid mythology.Without a guide, the corpus of British mythology can seem impenetrable. Taking advantage of the latest research, Fee and Leeming employ a unique comparative approach to map the origins and development of one of the richest folkloric traditions. Copiously illustrated with excerpts in translation from the original sources,Gods, Heroes, and Kings provides a fascinating and accessible new perspective on the history of British mythology. [From the publisher]https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/books/1066/thumbnail.jp

Lyman alpha radiation in external galaxies

The Ly alpha line of atomic hydrogen is often a luminous component of the radiation emitted by distant galaxies. Except for those galaxies which have a substantial central source of non-stellar ionizing radiation, most of the Ly alpha radiation emitted by galaxies is generated within regions of the interstellar medium which are photoionized by starlight. Conversely, much of the energy radiated by photoionized regions is carried by the Ly alpha line. Only hot, massive stars are capable of ionizing hydrogen in the interstellar medium which surrounds them, and because such stars are necessarily short-lived, Ly alpha emission traces regions of active star formation. Researchers argue that the strength of the Ly alpha emission observed from external galaxies may be used to estimate quantitatively the dust content of the emitting region, while the Ly alpha line profile is sensitive to the presence of shock waves. Interstellar dust particles and shock waves are intimately associated with the process of star formation in two senses. First, both dust particles and shock waves owe their existence to stellar activity; second, they may both serve as agents which facilitate the formation of stars, shocks by triggering gravitational instabilities in the interstellar gas that they compress, and dust by shielding star-forming molecular clouds from the ionizing and dissociative effects of external UV radiation. By using Ly alpha observations as a probe of the dust content in diffuse gas at high redshift, we might hope to learn about the earliest epochs of star formation

FORECASTING AGRICULTURAL PRICES USING A BAYESIAN COMPOSITE APPROACH

Forecast users and market analysts need quality forecast information to improve their decision-making abilities. When more than one forecast is available, the analyst can improve forecast accuracy by using a composite forecast. One of several approaches to forming composite forecasts is a Bayesian approach using matrix beta priors. This paper explains the matrix beta approach and applies it to three individual forecasts of U.S. hog prices. The Bayesian composite forecast is evaluated relative to composites made from simple averages, restricted least squares, and an adaptive weighting technique.Demand and Price Analysis,

Spatio-temporal modelling of extreme storms

A flexible spatio-temporal model is implemented to analyse extreme extra-tropical cyclones objectively identified over the Atlantic and Europe in 6-hourly re-analyses from 1979-2009. Spatial variation in the extremal properties of the cyclones is captured using a 150 cell spatial regularisation, latitude as a covariate, and spatial random effects. The North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) is also used as a covariate and is found to have a significant effect on intensifying extremal storm behaviour, especially over Northern Europe and the Iberian peninsula. Estimates of lower bounds on minimum sea-level pressure are typically 10-50 hPa below the minimum values observed for historical storms with largest differences occurring when the NAO index is positive.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/14-AOAS766 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Is a Higher Calling Enough? Incentive Compensation in the Church (CRI 2009-011)

We study the compensation and productivity of more than 2,000 Methodist ministers in a 43-year panel data set. The church appears to use pay-for-performance incentives for its clergy, as their compensation follows a sharing rule by which pastors receive approximately 3% of the incremental revenue from membership increases. Ministers receive the strongest rewards for attracting new parishioners who switch from other congregations within their denomination. Monetary incentives are weaker in settings where ministers have less control over their measured performance