An investigation into the hermeneutical viability of the interpretive practices of the LDS (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints)

This dissertation explores the various uses of the Bible by the LDS church. In the first chapter, I note the danger of oversimplification for the task at hand, the complexity of the LDS church, and the lack of a published LDS hermeneutic. In chapter two, I investigate two prevailing LDS presuppositions evinced in their literature. The first presupposition is an asymmetrical perspective on the Bible, whereas the second concerns “continuing revelation.” Given the conceptual scaffolding afforded by these introductory matters, the subsequent five chapters examine the church’s specific hermeneutical approaches to the Bible. Chapter three details a prevalent insistence on “literal” interpretation. Although ostensibly literal, I will argue that these LDS readings are, in fact, “literalistic.” Chapter four is an examination of LDS allegorical interpretation that is more accurately labeled “allegorization.” This is followed by a sociological exploration in chapter five. In the initial decades of the movement, a sociological reading purported to legitimize the separation of the LDS church (a “new reform movement”), from the existing church of the 19th century (the “parent community”). Chapter six describes what I have called “emendatory” interpretation, where the modern LDS church not only claims to restore the ancient biblical text, but also, at times, clarifies the meaning of phrases from the KJV. In the penultimate chapter, I investigate a “re-authoring” of the Bible that amounts to “locutionary reassignment,” where a phrase or word is lifted from its original biblical context, and re-used with a new meaning. On account of this reassignment, “re-authoring” is, in actuality, non-interpretive, in contradistinction to the four interpretive categories examined in the previous four chapters. Nevertheless, this final category merits discussion, as it details a frequent approach to the Bible by the LDS. Finally, in chapter eight, I discuss specific insights of Hans-Georg Gadamer, in order to evaluate these five uses of the Bible by the LDS church—literal, allegorical, sociological, emendatory, and “reauthoring.” A Gadamerian hermeneutic initially appears to align with the interpretive practices of the LDS, given his emphasis on presuppositional matters, the community in interpretation, and the importance of application in the interpretive process. However, Gadamer’s hermeneutical flexibility ultimately fails to lend credibility to LDS hermeneutics

Jet Charge at the LHC

Knowing the charge of the parton initiating a light-quark jet could be extremely useful both for testing aspects of the Standard Model and for characterizing potential beyond-the-Standard-Model signals. We show that despite the complications of hadronization and out-of-jet radiation such as pile-up, a weighted sum of the charges of a jet's constituents can be used at the LHC to distinguish among jets with different charges. Potential applications include measuring electroweak quantum numbers of hadronically decaying resonances or supersymmetric particles, as well as Standard Model tests, such as jet charge in dijet events or in hadronically-decaying W bosons in t-tbar events. We develop a systematically improvable method to calculate moments of these charge distributions by combining multi-hadron fragmentation functions with perturbative jet functions and pertubative evolution equations. We show that the dependence on energy and jet size for the average and width of the jet charge can be calculated despite the large experimental uncertainty on fragmentation functions. These calculations can provide a validation tool for data independent of Monte-Carlo fragmentation models.Comment: 5 pages, 6 figures; v2 published versio

Development of reliability methodology for systems engineering. Volume I - Methodology - Analysis techniques and procedures Final report

Reliability analyses for equipment in design stag

Relation of lineaments to sulfide deposits: Bald Eagle Mountain, Centre County, Pennsylvania

The author has identified the following significant results. Discrete areas of finely-fractured and brecciated sandstone float are present along the crest of Bald Mountain and are commonly sites of sulfide mineralization, as evidenced by the presence of barite and limonite gossans. The frequency distributions of the brecciated float as the negative binomial distribution supports the interpretation of a separate population of intensely fractured material. Such zones of concentrated breccia float have an average width of one kilometer with a range from 0.4 to 1.6 kilometers and were observed in a quarry face to have subvertical dips. Direct spatial correlation of the Landsat-derived lineaments to the fractured areas on the ridge is low; however, the mineralized and fracture zones are commonly assymetrical to the lineament positions. Such a systematic dislocation might result from an inherent bias in the float population or could be the product of the relative erosional resistance of the silicified material in the mineralized areas in relation to the erosionally weak material at the stream gaps

Algorithmic Verification of Asynchronous Programs

Asynchronous programming is a ubiquitous systems programming idiom to manage concurrent interactions with the environment. In this style, instead of waiting for time-consuming operations to complete, the programmer makes a non-blocking call to the operation and posts a callback task to a task buffer that is executed later when the time-consuming operation completes. A co-operative scheduler mediates the interaction by picking and executing callback tasks from the task buffer to completion (and these callbacks can post further callbacks to be executed later). Writing correct asynchronous programs is hard because the use of callbacks, while efficient, obscures program control flow. We provide a formal model underlying asynchronous programs and study verification problems for this model. We show that the safety verification problem for finite-data asynchronous programs is expspace-complete. We show that liveness verification for finite-data asynchronous programs is decidable and polynomial-time equivalent to Petri Net reachability. Decidability is not obvious, since even if the data is finite-state, asynchronous programs constitute infinite-state transition systems: both the program stack and the task buffer of pending asynchronous calls can be potentially unbounded. Our main technical construction is a polynomial-time semantics-preserving reduction from asynchronous programs to Petri Nets and conversely. The reduction allows the use of algorithmic techniques on Petri Nets to the verification of asynchronous programs. We also study several extensions to the basic models of asynchronous programs that are inspired by additional capabilities provided by implementations of asynchronous libraries, and classify the decidability and undecidability of verification questions on these extensions.Comment: 46 pages, 9 figure

Whooping Cranes Consume Plains Leopard Frogs at Migratory Stopover Sites in Nebraska

Whooping cranes (Grus americana) currently consist of a single, wild population that migrates annually from breeding grounds at Wood Buffalo National Park, Canada, to wintering grounds on and around the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge along the Texas coast, USA (NRC 2005). This population reached a low of less than 20 individuals in 1941 (Allen 1952) but has rebounded to over 250 individuals (Chavez-Ramirez and Wehtje 2012, Gil-Weir et al. 2012). Whooping cranes migrate approximately 4,000 km each spring and autumn, traversing much of the North American Great Plains (Lewis 1995) and periodically landing along rivers, wetlands, and other shallow bodies of water for short-duration stopovers (Austin and Richert 2001). Our observations represent some of the few published accounts of a frog species being consumed by whooping cranes along the Central Flyway