Book Review

Review of: WESLEY A. MAGAT & W. KIP VISCUSI, INFORMATIONAL APPROACHES TO REGULATION. (MIT Press 1992) [274 pp.] Appendices, endnotes, illustrations, index, list of titles in the Regulation of Economic Activity series, list of tables and figures, preface, series foreword. LC 91-29483; ISBN 0-262-13277-X. [$32.50 cloth. 55 Hayward Street; Cambridge MA 02142.

Book Review

Review of the following book: ELAINE VAUGHAN, SOME FACTORS INFLUENCING THE NONEXPERT\u27S PERCEPTION AND EVALUATION OF ENVIRONMENTAL Risks. (Garland Pub. Co. 1990) [249 pp.] Abstract, appendices, bibliography, figures, tables. LC: 90-13855, ISBN: 0-8420-0422-1. [Cloth $59.00. 136 Madison Ave., New York, NY 10016.

Book Review

Review of the following: Risk-Taking BEHAVIOR. (J. Frank Yates, ed., Wiley 1992) [244 pp.] Acknowledgements, author index, figures, preface, references, series preface, subject index, tables. LC 91-21229, ISBN 0-471-92250-1. [Cloth $64.95. 1 Wiley Drive, Somerset NJ 08875

Age Differences in Personal Risk Perceptions: A Note on an Exploratory Descriptive Study

The authors test for differences in risk perceptions among different age groups

Stuff as dreams are made on

A personal reflection on Canterbury, Canterbury Christ Church University, Sofia and The Tempest, in the context of the Covid pandemic in summer 2020

The ears of my ears awake

Many people have experienced an ‘awakening’ which has led to positive changes in their lives, and a sense of an enhanced reality. In ‘The Leap’, Steve Taylor (2017) documents the different catalysts for an awakening experience and describes how a transformation may be gradual or sudden, conclusive or temporary. In my work over the past twenty years using poetry therapy techniques with groups, I have often witnessed how a poem facilitates insights and acts as a portal into an enhanced reality. This familiar experience was suddenly made new for me when I read an account by Eckhart Tolle of the first flowers blooming on this planet (Tolle, 2005). Taylor (2017, ibid) notes that spiritual literature can facilitate awakening. He describes how poetry ‘encourages stillness in the reader’ because it requires attentiveness and receptivity. In this reflective essay, I will look at three characteristics of poetry as an art form that may be factors in facilitating awakening, namely: form, rich ambiguity and metaphor, and include reflections on the similarities between poems and flowers

The Pilgrim-Writer: The transformative potential of the language arts and pilgrimage – an embodied investigation of self, drawing on theory and practice, including my own direct experience of contemporary pilgrimage and ‘languaging’.

This thesis explores the transformative potential of the language arts and pilgrimage. The writer presents an embodied investigation of herself, drawing on theories of pilgrimage and writing, and her own direct experience of identifying as a pilgrim-writer. The thesis is firmly located in Canterbury, a historic and contemporary pilgrimage centre, and home to Canterbury Christ Church University, on the site of the Anglo-Saxon St Augustine’s Abbey, and uses the Via Francigena, a pilgrimage route from Canterbury to Rome first documented in the tenth century as an example of a historical pilgrim route in contemporary use. Making a direct connection between the specific and material, and the esoteric and spiritual is a theme of the thesis. Setting pilgrimage in context of pre-modern, post-modern and contemporary practice, she examines notions of healing, ritual, transformation, transcendence, deep ecology and modern gnosis as mechanisms for personal change. As well as drawing on her own experience, she interrogates five published pilgrimage memoirs of the Via Francigena as exemplars of narratives of personal transformation through pilgrimage. She explores memoir alongside other kinds of personal writing such as diaries, journals, poetry and fiction, as documents of transformation

Enhancement of prompt photons in ultrarelativistic proton-proton collisions from nonlinear gluon evolution at small-xx

In this paper we estimate the influence of nonlinear gluon evolution in the production of prompt photons at the LHC pp collider. We assume the validity of collinear factorization and consider the EHKQS parton distributions, which are solutions of the GLR-MQ evolution equations and describe quite well the DESY $ep$ HERA data, as input in our calculations. We find that both single and double photon production are enhanced for low-$p_T$ photons and central rapidities, while this effect is absent for the high-$p_T$ photons. The implications of this effect for the Quark-Gluon Plasma searches and for the QCD background to Higgs are also discussed.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures. Version to be published in Physical Review

Post Hoc Evaluations of Obviousness: Preliminary Report of an Attempt to Identify, Empirically, the Characteristics of a Superior Evaluator

Over a century and a quarter have passed since the Supreme Court in Hotchkiss v. Greenwood held that more than mere novelty is necessary to support a valid patent. Congress, after 100 years of experience with a concept which came to be called invention, attempted to improve the situation by requiring that an invention not be obvious if it is to be patented. It seems safe to say that in the intervening time the doctrine of non-obviousness has not developed into a foolproof yardstick for measuring the quality of cerebral or other effort necessary to make an advance over the prior art a patentable one. Several years ago, as will be described in detail below, research was commenced in order to learn not about non-obviousness, per se, but rather to identify characteristics which might make some individuals more capable of hindsight evaluations of obviousness than others. It was thought that if such characteristics could be identified, they might be helpful in making policy decisions concerning the choices of fora which might be available for post-issue determinations of patent validity. While a great deal of data has been collected, progress has been hampered by the lack of resources for its analysis. Nevertheless, enough progress has been made to report on the research to date