Increasing State Restrictions on Russian Protestant Seminaries

In sum, Russian Protestant seminaries are presently undergoing a trial by state inspection that threatens their very existence. Academics Perry Glanzer and Konstantin Petrenko are correct in asserting that the Russian state’s “power to license and accredit” is “the power of life and death” over any educational institution. State justifications for close oversight of Protestant seminaries appear overstated at best and lack credibility at worst. As regards state concerns for quality control, should not the Russian constitution’s requirement for separation of church and state take precedence over a secular government’s presumption to instruct believers on how best to train their clergy

Lessons Learned in Eurasia Ministry: Mostly the Hard Way

The present article is based on a speech delivered at a conference of the United Methodist Church: “Eurasia-Central Asia – In Mission Together,” Fulton, Maryland, May 5, 2017

Measuring Supernova Neutrino Temperatures using Lead Perchlorate

Neutrino interactions with lead produce neutrons in numbers that depend on neutrino energy and type. A detector based on lead perchlorate, for example, would be able to measure the energy deposited by electrons and gammas in coincidence with the number of neutrons produced. Sorting the electron energy spectra by the number of coincident neutrons permits the identification of the neutrino type that induced the reaction. This separation allows an analysis which can determine the temperatures of electron neutrinos and electron anti-neutrinos from a supernova in one experiment. The neutrino reaction signatures of lead perchlorate and the fundamentals of using this material as a neutrino detector are described.Comment: minor changes, reference updat

Historical spaces as narrative: mapping collective memory onto cinematic space

The following article proposes and develops a single theory: that unlike written history which tends to privilege chronology, teleology and consequentiality, historical films have increasingly abandoned overt means of narration and instead inscribe historical meanings onto cinematic spaces in historical films. The reason for this shift, I argue, is that recent advances in historiography have begun to encourage scepticism towards the human element in reconstructing narratives. In a world bombarded with media rhetoric from all directions, persuasion from traditionally “authoritative” sources such as voiceovers, prologues, marketing material proclaiming the use of historical experts and research, individual viewpoints, eyewitness accounts, etc, all become open to criticism. In the absence of authorial authenticity, and the gradual erosion of trust in both grand narratives and individual insights, the historical film nevertheless still requires some means by which the viewer can be persuaded of its veracity through shared or collective memory, history proper and lived social experience. It is to answer this need, then, that history and historical narratives have begun to place an emphasis on historical spaces as a means to retell history by creating a “cognitive map”, which offers recourse to an intertextual “representational legacy”

A Concept for Exploring Western Music Tonality in Physical Space

Musical theory about the structure and morphology of Western tonality is quite difficult to teach to young children, due to the relatively complex mathematical concepts behind tonality. Children usually grasp the concepts of musical harmony intuitively through listening to music examples. Placing the 12 notes of the well-tempered scale into a spatial arrangement, in which the proximity of these notes represents their mutual harmonic relationship, would allow to link physical motion through a spatial area with the exploration of music tonality. Music theorists have postulated the Circle of Fifth, the “Spiral Array”, and the “Tonnetz” as paradigms for spatial arrangements of music notes which allow mapping the distance between notes onto their “mutual consonance”. These approaches mostly have been of qualitative nature, leaving the actual numeric parameters of the spatial description undetermined. In this paper, these parameters have been determined, leading to a concrete numerical description of the planar Tonnetz. This allows the design of a physical space in which the music notes are distributed in space according to their musical consonance. Set up in an outdoor area, handheld devices (e.g. PDA) with integrated Global Positioning System can be used to play these notes at their actual physical location. This makes it possible for children to explore this musical space by moving through the real spatial area and experience the relationships of the notes through their proximity. Defining a range for each note as a circular area around each note location, consonant chords can be produced in those areas where those circles overlap. Using this concept, games can be developed in which the listeners have to perform certain tasks related to this musical space. This appears to be a promising approach for the music education of young children who can intuitively learn about music morphology without being explicitly taught about the complex theoretical mathematical background