Forgiveness: Hindu and Western Perspectives

This paper compares Hindu and Christian beliefs on forgiveness: it argues that forgiveness is an important element within the Hindu religious world-view, even if less explicitly so than within the Christian tradition. Before the late 1980s, discussion of forgiveness in the West was for the most part confined to Christian communities, seldom reaching mainstream publications in other areas. The situation has now changed dramatically. Since the 1990s, scholars from different disciplines have written dozens of books and journal articles on forgiveness, which also featured in numerous popular essays, exhibitions, websites, and other media. There are four major areas for forgiveness research in the West: religion, philosophy, psychology and, perhaps surprisingly at first sight, politics. However, relatively little analysis of forgiveness in other faiths, except Judaism, has appeared

Using Decentralized Networks and Distributed Ledger Technologies for Foreign Aid Distribution and Reporting

The U.S. federal government is responsible for the creation and disbursement of roughly $95 billion worth of international spending packages annually. Of this amount, nearly$45 billion is allocated for the advancement of economic and humanitarian aid initiatives. However, these programs often face challenges when attempting to distribute funds to individual recipients in regions lacking stable government or reliable financial infrastructure. In addition, existing inefficiencies within the allocation process for these awards may introduce various inequalities through bias or other procedural complexities. As a result, many aid initiatives are not administered in a cost-effective manner and the subsequent lack of transparent reporting makes it difficult for the public to audit these programs and assess outcomes. To address these challenges, a new mobile based (Android/iOS) application has been developed in which foreign aid awards are distributed through the transaction of digital currency and asset-backed stable-coins on the Stellar network. Following user registration and onboarding, the application confirms that users meet the required qualifications through the use of a novel crowdsourcing mechanism comprised of previous recipients. Network validators are incentivized through continued awards to verify new recipient eligibility and further expand the verification network. Once confirmed, the application allows users to transact their awards in USDC, network-native Stellar lumens (XLM) or transfer their tokens to other marketplaces and asset representations with minimal transaction cost. While other available software addresses each of these issues separately, this application combines the end-to-end transfer and housing of aid funds into a singular process for both administrators and recipients. Furthermore, the awarding of these funds is recorded on a public ledger that allows for detailed analysis of initiative outcomes in a verifiable and trust-less manner. Finally, a simulation script was constructed for the purposed of modeling network growth and efficiency in relation to incentivizing future participation in validating new applicants

Lorentz Violation and Short-Baseline Neutrino Experiments

A general discussion is given of signals for broken Lorentz symmetry in short-baseline neutrino experiments. Among the effects that Lorentz violation can introduce are a dependence on energy differing from that of the usual massive-neutrino solution and a dependence on the direction of neutrino propagation. Using the results of the LSND experiment, explicit analysis of the effects of broken Lorentz symmetry yields a nonzero value (3+/-1) x 10^{-19} GeV for a combination of coefficients for Lorentz violation. This lies in the range expected for effects originating from the Planck scale in an underlying unified theory.Comment: 4 pages REVTe