The Secular Beyond: Free Religious Dissent and Debates over the Afterlife in Nineteenth-Century Germany

The 1830s and 1840s saw the proliferating usage of “the Beyond” (Jenseits) as a choice term for the afterlife in German public discourse. This linguistic innovation coincided with the rise of empiricism in natural science. It also signaled an emerging religious debate in which bald challenges to the very existence of heaven were aired before the wider German public for the first time. Against the belief of many contemporaries that empirical science was chiefly responsible for this attack on one of the central tenets of Christianity, this essay shows instead that the role played by Christian dissenters in the negation of the Beyond. The polemical invocation of an empty Beyond coincided with the separation in the mid 1840s of two dissenting sects – the Deutschkatholiken (“German Catholics”) and the Protestant Free Congregations – from the main Christian Churches. During the Revolution of 1848, these sects, later known as Free Religious Congregations, deepened their critique of the Beyond as they articulated a new creed of radical humanism and natural scientific monism. Yet, despite their secularist agenda the Free Religious failed to fully secularize. The essay concludes by suggesting that the anticlerical activity of the Free Religious and affiliated freethinking organizations, which lasted into the 1930s, marks a century in which movements of radical political and social dissent remained open to and indeed partially dependent on the negation of the Beyond in order to sacralize humanity and nature

Spaces for children's play and travel close to home: the importance of threshold spaces

There is an increasing understanding of the role of the built environment on children's neighbourhood mobility and play and the importance of this for children's development. This has led to concerns over children's declining neighbourhood mobility and calls to see an increase in children's use of public space. This paper draws on findings from a research study working with 9 and 10 year olds living in inner London, England. The children participated in go-along interviews and a range of other qualitative methods, which explored how they used their neighbourhoods for getting around and play. Findings from the study demonstrate the importance of threshold spaces for children in supporting both their neighbourhood play and their wider neighbourhood travel and mobility. Threshold spaces are defined as a semi-public space that straddle the gap between the private space of the home and the wider public realm. Children's use of threshold spaces was influenced by a reduced movement function in these spaces, restricting vehicles and people passing through, and the presence of signals that it was ok to play, with girls being more sensitive to these features than boys. Threshold spaces were important as a start point for children's wider explorations of their neighbourhoods

Pilot dynamics for instrument approach tasks: Full panel multiloop and flight director operations

Measurements and interpretations of single and mutiloop pilot response properties during simulated instrument approach are presented. Pilot subjects flew Category 2-like ILS approaches in a fixed base DC-8 simulaton. A conventional instrument panel and controls were used, with simulated vertical gust and glide slope beam bend forcing functions. Reduced and interpreted pilot describing functions and remmant are given for pitch attitude, flight director, and multiloop (longitudinal) control tasks. The response data are correlated with simultaneously recorded eye scanning statistics, previously reported in NASA CR-1535. The resulting combined response and scanning data and their interpretations provide a basis for validating and extending the theory of manual control displays

The measurement of driver describing functions in simulated steering control tasks

Measurements of driver describing functions in steering control tasks have been made using a driving simulator. The task was to regulate against a random crosswind gust input on a straight roadway, in order to stay in the center of the lane. Although driving is a multiloop task in general, the forcing function and situation were configured so that an inner-loop visual cue feedback of heading angle of heading rate would dominate, and the driver's response was interpreted to be primarily single-loop. The driver describing functions were measured using an STI describing function analyzer. Three replications for each subject showed good repeatability within a subject. There were some intersubject differences as expected, but the crossover frequencies, effective time delays, and stability margins were generally consistent with the prior data and models for similar manual control tasks. The results further confirm the feasibility of measuring human operator response properties in nominal control tasks with full (real-world) visual field displays

Pilot dynamic response to sudden flight control system failures and implications for design

Pilot dynamic response to sudden flight control system failure

Principles for the design of advanced flight director systems based on the theory of manual control displays

Design and development of flight director systems based on theory of manual control display

'Deeply interested in these children whom you have not seen': the Protestant Sunday School view of the Pacific, 1900-1940

For Australian and New Zealand children in the early decades of the 20th century, much of their learning about the Pacific Islands came through missionary material, often aimed directly at them. This article examines the representation of Pacific peoples and societies in a number of monthly journals, sections within adult journals, books and plays designed to educate and enthuse the Sunday School child about missionary activity. Early attempts were ponderous, but Australasian societies soon followed the example of the London Missionary Society’s News from Afar (available through Australian Congregational churches), which included adventure stories about children in India, China and the Pacific, news of the various John Williams ships, competitions, specialized artwork and a generally child-friendly philosophy. Few were as successful, but some imaginative attempts were made by Methodist, Presbyterian and Anglican authorities to encourage Australian and New Zealand children to identify with the missionary needs of the Pacific

Post-processing partitions to identify domains of modularity optimization

We introduce the Convex Hull of Admissible Modularity Partitions (CHAMP) algorithm to prune and prioritize different network community structures identified across multiple runs of possibly various computational heuristics. Given a set of partitions, CHAMP identifies the domain of modularity optimization for each partition ---i.e., the parameter-space domain where it has the largest modularity relative to the input set---discarding partitions with empty domains to obtain the subset of partitions that are "admissible" candidate community structures that remain potentially optimal over indicated parameter domains. Importantly, CHAMP can be used for multi-dimensional parameter spaces, such as those for multilayer networks where one includes a resolution parameter and interlayer coupling. Using the results from CHAMP, a user can more appropriately select robust community structures by observing the sizes of domains of optimization and the pairwise comparisons between partitions in the admissible subset. We demonstrate the utility of CHAMP with several example networks. In these examples, CHAMP focuses attention onto pruned subsets of admissible partitions that are 20-to-1785 times smaller than the sets of unique partitions obtained by community detection heuristics that were input into CHAMP.Comment: http://www.mdpi.com/1999-4893/10/3/9

How Does the Stock Market React to Corporate Environmental News?

The environmental decisions of corporations can have a huge impact on both the environment and a company’s value. This paper finds that the stock market reacts negatively to news about the environmental behavior of firms. A 2009 Newsweek study on the “greenness” of companies is used in the study. The event study methodology is used with stock prices to measure the stock market reaction by creating Cumulative Abnormal Returns. The average abnormal returns of all the companies are significantly negative suggesting that investors react adversely to “green” news