Scottish protestant-trained medical missionaries in the nineteenth century and the rise of the Edinburgh Medical Missionary Society

During the nineteenth century the Protestant Churches of Scotland accelerated their involvement in the attempts to spread the Christian message out into the colonies. Africa, China and particularly India saw a dramatic rise in the number of evangelical preachers moving into the colonised areas. However, climatic conditions and the lack of preparedness of the missionaries for the role soon took a heavy toll on their numbers. To counteract this loss and to provide treatments for the missionary’s medical needs professional medical men were employed, by the mission boards, to look after those in the field. However, some at home saw the potential benefits of having medicine and evangelism combined to enhance the Christian message. This was not a universally popular ideology and came under sustained criticism from many within the protestant churches who could not accept anything other than pure evangelical preaching as the proper way to win over converts. However, the idea soon gained momentum and supporters lobbied for the creation of the medical missionary as a new method of proselityzation within the missionary enterprise. In Edinburgh a new society was formed to provide medically trained preachers for the foreign field. This organisation, the Edinburgh Medical Missionary Society, would develop and lay the template for all other such organisations to follow, becoming the foremost provider of medical missionaries in Europe. The life and work of a medical missionary was one of sacrifice and often dangerous labours, however, success or failure was an ever present condition for them. This thesis, by means of a comparative study of two medical missionaries, William Elmslie and Donald Morison, shows how they lived and worked within their missions and the reasoning by which they were declared a success or failure by their respective mission boards. This work concludes by arguing that the part played by the Scottish Protestant Church Missionary Boards, the Edinburgh Medical Missionary Society and the work of the medical missionaries themselves, propelled the Scottish medical missionary enterprise to the forefront of the foreign missionary project. The conclusions reached within this work are: Firstly, that the impetus for the creation, support and development of the medical missionary working across the British colonial holdings lies squarely within the effects of two major incidents within the Scottish Protestant community the Dissention of 1843 and the successive waves of evangelical fervour which swept through the country during the nineteenth century. Secondly, that the system of medical missionary work, when accompanied with Gospel teaching, proved to be a more successful method of proselityzation than simple evangelical preaching alone

Consistent and inconsistent truncations. Some results and the issue of the correct uplifting of solutions

We clarify the existence of two different types of truncations of the field content in a theory, the consistency of each type being achieved by different means. A proof is given of the conditions to have a consistent truncation in the case of dimensional reductions induced by independent Killing vectors. We explain in what sense the tracelessness condition found by Scherk and Scharwz is not only a necessary condition but also a {\it sufficient} one for a consistent truncation. The reduction of the gauge group is fully performed showing the existence of a sector of rigid symmetries. We show that truncations originated by the introduction of constraints will in general be inconsistent, but this fact does not prevent the possibility of correct upliftings of solutions in some cases. The presence of constraints has dynamical consequences that turn out to play a fundamental role in the correctness of the uplifting procedure.Comment: Latex, 33 pages, 1 eps fig. v2: typos removed, refs. adde

A Note on Hamilton-Jacobi Formalism and D-brane Effective Actions

We first review the canonical formalism with general space-like hypersurfaces developed by Dirac by rederiving the Hamilton-Jacobi equations which are satisfied by on-shell actions defined on such hypersurfaces. We compare the case of gravitational systems with that of the flat space. Next, we remark as a supplement to our previous results that the effective actions of D-brane and M-brane given by arbitrary embedding functions are on-shell actions of supergravities.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figure, section 3 is extended, references added, published versio

Truncations driven by constraints: consistency and conditions for correct upliftings

We discuss the mechanism of truncations driven by the imposition of constraints. We show how the consistency of such truncations is controlled, and give general theorems that establish conditions for the correct uplifting of solutions. We show in some particular examples how one can get correct upliftings from 7d supergravities to 10d type IIB supergravity, even in cases when the truncation is not initially consistent by its own.Comment: Latex, 23 page

Practical Sparse Matrices in C++ with Hybrid Storage and Template-Based Expression Optimisation

Despite the importance of sparse matrices in numerous fields of science, software implementations remain difficult to use for non-expert users, generally requiring the understanding of underlying details of the chosen sparse matrix storage format. In addition, to achieve good performance, several formats may need to be used in one program, requiring explicit selection and conversion between the formats. This can be both tedious and error-prone, especially for non-expert users. Motivated by these issues, we present a user-friendly and open-source sparse matrix class for the C++ language, with a high-level application programming interface deliberately similar to the widely used MATLAB language. This facilitates prototyping directly in C++ and aids the conversion of research code into production environments. The class internally uses two main approaches to achieve efficient execution: (i) a hybrid storage framework, which automatically and seamlessly switches between three underlying storage formats (compressed sparse column, Red-Black tree, coordinate list) depending on which format is best suited and/or available for specific operations, and (ii) a template-based meta-programming framework to automatically detect and optimise execution of common expression patterns. Empirical evaluations on large sparse matrices with various densities of non-zero elements demonstrate the advantages of the hybrid storage framework and the expression optimisation mechanism.Comment: extended and revised version of an earlier conference paper arXiv:1805.0338

Nonsupersymmetric multibrane solutions

Gravity coupled to an arbitrary number of antisymmetric tensors and scalar fields in arbitrary space-time dimensions is studied in a context of general, static, spherically symmetric solutions with many orthogonally intersecting branes. Neither supersymmetry nor harmonic gauge is assumed. It is shown that the system reduces to a Toda-like system after an adequate redefinition of transverse radial coordinate $r$. Duality $r \to 1/r$ in the set of solutions is observed

Searching for a Connection Between Matroid Theory and String Theory

We make a number of observations about matter-ghost string phase, which may eventually lead to a formal connection between matroid theory and string theory. In particular, in order to take advantage of the already established connection between matroid theory and Chern-Simons theory, we propose a generalization of string theory in terms of some kind of Kahler metric. We show that this generalization is closely related to the Kahler-Chern-Simons action due to Nair and Schiff. In addition, we discuss matroid/string connection via matroid bundles and a Schild type action, and we add new information about the relationship between matroid theory, D=11 supergravity and Chern-Simons formalism.Comment: 28 pages, LaTex, section 6 and references adde

Technological Devices in the Archives: A Policy Analysis

Doing research in the archive is the cornerstone of humanities scholarship. Various archives institute policies regarding the use of technological devices, such as mobile phones, laptops, and cameras in their reading rooms. Such policies directly affect the scholars as the devices mediate the nature of their interaction with the source materials in terms of capturing, organizing, note taking, and record keeping for future use of found materials. In this paper, we present our analysis of the policies of thirty archives regarding the use of technology in their reading rooms. This policy analysis, along with data from interviews of scholars and archivists, is intended to serve as a basis for developing mobile applications for assisting scholars in their research activities. In this paper we introduce an early prototype of such a mobile application— AMTracker.Informatio

Functional inequalities for modified Bessel functions

In this paper our aim is to show some mean value inequalities for the modified Bessel functions of the first and second kinds. Our proofs are based on some bounds for the logarithmic derivatives of these functions, which are in fact equivalent to the corresponding Tur\'an type inequalities for these functions. As an application of the results concerning the modified Bessel function of the second kind we prove that the cumulative distribution function of the gamma-gamma distribution is log-concave. At the end of this paper several open problems are posed, which may be of interest for further research.Comment: 14 page

Vacuum polarization in Schwarzschild space-time by anomaly induced effective actions

The characteristic features of $$ in the Boulware, Unruh and Hartle-Hawking states for a conformal massless scalar field propagating in the Schwarzschild space-time are obtained by means of effective actions deduced by the trace anomaly. The actions are made local by the introduction of auxiliary fields and boundary conditions are carefully imposed on them in order to select the different quantum states.Comment: 20 pages, latex; misprints corrected and references adde