4,059 research outputs found
Revisiting the Afterlife: The Inadequacies of Heaven and Hell
This paper deals with some of the ambiguities that are associated with the intermediate and final states after death. Whereas many in the church have dismissed these concepts as myths of the ancients, this discussion shows how the grounding of such beliefs in the Hebrew mindset was the key to Jesus’ own teachings about the afterlife. The argument begins by developing a biblical anthropology over against the modern naturalistic anthropologies that have largely dominated the philosophical and theological scenes. From here we look at the Old Testament concept of the afterlife, and how the modern view that the Hebrews were ambivalent about such a concept is plainly false. Then it is argued that the New Testament doctrines of heaven and hell, which become very specific at this point, are thoroughly indebted to Jewish underpinnings. Without this foundation there would be no clear divisions within the realms of the dead, but because Jesus and his followers assume the validity of the Old Testament material they are able to flesh out such eschatological questions as where Jesus went after death, and where the saint and reprobate will go today. Far from being a stale theological issue, this study has direct bearing upon how one evangelizes today. For when the specific concepts are grasped, the believer will realize that the lost are not going to hell, at least not yet
Exobiology and Future Mars Missions
Scientific questions associated with exobiology on Mars were considered and how these questions should be addressed on future Mars missions was determined. The mission that provided a focus for discussions was the Mars Rover/Sample Return Mission
Multi-epoch infrared photometry of the star forming region G173.58+2.45
We present a multi-epoch infrared photometric study of the intermediate-mass
star forming region G173.58+2.45. Photometric observations are obtained using
the near-infrared filters and narrow-band filters centered at the
wavelengths of H (1-0) S(1) (2.122 m) and [FeII] (1.644 m) lines.
The H image shows molecular emission from shocked gas, implying the
presence of multiple star formation and associated outflow activity. We see
evidence for several collimated outflows. The most extended jet is at least
0.25 pc in length and has a collimation factor of 10, which may be
associated with a binary system within the central cluster, resolved for the
first time here. This outflow is found to be episodic; probably occurring or
getting enhanced during the periastron passage of the binary. We also find that
the variable star in the vicinity of the outflow source, which was known as a
FU Ori type star, is probably not a FU Ori object. However, it does drive a
spectacular outflow and the variability is likely to be related to accretion,
when large clouds of gas and dust spiral in towards the central source. Many
other convincing accretion-outflow systems and YSO candidates are discovered in
the field.Comment: 15 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA
Construction and evaluation of classifiers for forensic document analysis
In this study we illustrate a statistical approach to questioned document
examination. Specifically, we consider the construction of three classifiers
that predict the writer of a sample document based on categorical data. To
evaluate these classifiers, we use a data set with a large number of writers
and a small number of writing samples per writer. Since the resulting
classifiers were found to have near perfect accuracy using leave-one-out
cross-validation, we propose a novel Bayesian-based cross-validation method for
evaluating the classifiers.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/10-AOAS379 the Annals of
Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
Will Changing Demographics Affect U.S. Cheese Demand?
U.S. cheese consumption has grown considerably over the last three decades. Using a censored demand model and Nielsen Homescan retail data, this study identifies price and non-price factors affecting the demand for differentiated cheese products. Own-price and expenditure elasticities for all of the cheese products are statistically significant and elastic. Results also reveal that a strong substitution relationship exists among all cheese products. Although demographic influences are generally smaller than those related to prices and expenditures, empirical findings show that household size, college educated female heads of household who are age 40 and older, residing in the South, Central, and Western regions of the United States, as well as Black heads of household, have positive statistically significant effects on consumers’ cheese purchases.cheese form, cheese purchase, demand elasticities, demographic and economic factors, Nielsen Homescan data, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Marketing, C25, D12, Q11,
Influence of classical resonances on chaotic tunnelling
Dynamical tunnelling between symmetry-related stable modes is studied in the
periodically driven pendulum. We present strong evidence that the tunnelling
process is governed by nonlinear resonances that manifest within the regular
phase-space islands on which the stable modes are localized. By means of a
quantitative numerical study of the corresponding Floquet problem, we identify
the trace of such resonances not only in the level splittings between
near-degenerate quantum states, where they lead to prominent plateau
structures, but also in overlap matrix elements of the Floquet eigenstates,
which reveal characteristic sequences of avoided crossings in the Floquet
spectrum. The semiclassical theory of resonance-assisted tunnelling yields good
overall agreement with the quantum-tunnelling rates, and indicates that partial
barriers within the chaos might play a prominent role
Vortex pairing in two-dimensional Bose gases
Recent experiments on ultracold Bose gases in two dimensions have provided
evidence for the existence of the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) phase
via analysis of the interference between two independent systems. In this work
we study the two-dimensional quantum degenerate Bose gas at finite temperature
using the projected Gross-Pitaevskii equation classical field method. While
this describes the highly occupied modes of the gas below a momentum cutoff, we
have developed a method to incorporate the higher momentum states in our model.
We concentrate on finite-sized homogeneous systems in order to simplify the
analysis of the vortex pairing. We determine the dependence of the condensate
fraction on temperature and compare this to the calculated superfluid fraction.
By measuring the first order correlation function we determine the boundary of
the Bose-Einstein condensate and BKT phases, and find it is consistent with the
superfluid fraction decreasing to zero. We reveal the characteristic unbinding
of vortex pairs above the BKT transition via a coarse-graining procedure.
Finally, we model the procedure used in experiments to infer system
correlations [Hadzibabic et al., Nature 441, 1118 (2006)], and quantify its
level of agreement with directly calculated in situ correlation functions.Comment: published versio
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