The interpretive approach to religious education : challenging Thompson's interpretation

In a recent book chapter, Matthew Thompson makes some criticisms of my work, including the interpretive approach to religious education and the research and activity of Warwick Religions and Education Research Unit. Against the background of a discussion of religious education in the public sphere, my response challenges Thompson’s account, commenting on his own position in relation to dialogical approaches to religious education. The article rehearses my long held view that the ideal form of religious education in fully state funded schools of a liberal democracy should be ‘secular’ but not ‘secularist’; there should be no implication of an axiomatic secular humanist interpretation of religions

The use of soil analysis in the interpretation of an early historic landscape at Puxton in Somerset

Reproduced with permission of the publisher. Journal home page http://www.landscapestudies.com/index_files/Volumes.htmSoil samples taken from two adjoining fields close to the village of Puxton in the county of North Somerset, UK, were analysed in 1997 for heavy metals, phosphorus, magnetic susceptibility and loss on ignition as part of an archaeological investigation of the origins and development of a medieval settlement. It had been argued that an oval-shaped field next to the church was the nucleus of marshland reclamation during the early medieval period, though it was unclear whether the enclosure was occupied by a settlement or was simply an area of embanked agricultural land. Soil chemistry shows certain elements, including phosphorus and the heavy metals (Pb, Zn, Cd, Cu, etc), to be concentrated in a restricted part of the enclosure, which earthwork, resistivity and fieldwalking surveys suggest correlates with an area of human occupation associated with the dumping of midden material (a hypothesis confirmed through excavation). This paper demonstrates the value of multifaceted soil chemistry, alongside a range of other survey methods, for characterizing the nature of human activity on archaeological sites, and in the future may be used to locate previously unrecorded sites in more speculative landscape surveys

Religion and religious education : comparing and contrasting pupils’ and teachers’ views in an English school

This publication builds on and develops the English findings of the qualitative study of European teenagers’ perspectives on religion and religious education (Knauth et al. 2008), part of ‘Religion in Education: A contribution to dialogue or a factor of conflict in transforming societies of European countries?’ (REDCo) project. It uses data gathered from 27 pupils, aged 15-16, from a school in a multicultural Northern town in England and compares those findings with data gathered from ten teachers in the humanities faculty of the same school, collected during research for the Warwick REDCo Community of Practice. Comparisons are drawn between the teachers’ and their pupils’ attitudes and values using the same structure as the European study: personal views and experiences of religion, the social dimension of religion, and religious education in school. The discussion offers an analysis of the similarities and differences in worldviews and beliefs which emerged. These include religious commitment/observance differences between the mainly Muslim-heritage pupils and their mainly non-practising Christian-heritage teachers. The research should inform the ways in which the statutory duties to promote community cohesion and equalities can be implemented in schools. It should also facilitate intercultural and interreligious understanding between teachers and the pupils from different ethnic and religious backgrounds

Operator-Algebraic Approach to the Yrast Spectrum of Weakly Interacting Trapped Bosons

We present an operator-algebraic approach to deriving the low-lying quasi-degenerate spectrum of weakly interacting trapped N bosons with total angular momentum \hbar L for the case of small L/N, demonstrating that the lowest-lying excitation spectrum is given by 27 g n_3(n_3-1)/34, where g is the strength of the repulsive contact interaction and n_3 the number of excited octupole quanta. Our method provides constraints for these quasi-degenerate many-body states and gives higher excitation energies that depend linearly on N.Comment: 7 pages, one figur

Dashen's phenomenon in gauge theories with spontaneously broken chiral symmetries

We examine Dashen’s phenomenon in the Leutwyler-Smilga regime of QCD with any number of colors and quarks in either the fundamental or adjoint representations of the gauge group. In this limit, the theories only depend on simple combinations of quark masses, the volume, chiral condensate and vacuum angle. Based upon this observation, we derive simple expressions for the chiral condensate and the topological density and show that they are in fact related. By examining the zeros of the various partition functions, we elucidate the mechanism leading to Dashen’s phenomena in QCD

Novel fast semi-automated software to segment cartilage for knee MR acquisitions

AbstractObjectiveValidation of a new fast software technique to segment the cartilage on knee magnetic resonance (MR) acquisitions. Large studies of knee osteoarthritis (OA) will require fast and reproducible methods to quantify cartilage changes for knee MR data. In this report we document and measure the reproducibility and reader time of a software-based technique to quantify the volume and thickness of articular cartilage on knee MR images.MethodsThe software was tested on a set of duplicate sagittal three-dimensional (3D) dual echo steady state (DESS) acquisitions from 15 (8 OA, 7 normal) subjects. The repositioning, inter-reader, and intra-reader reproducibility of the cartilage volume (VC) and thickness (ThC) were measured independently as well as the reader time for each cartilage plate. The root-mean square coefficient of variation (RMSCoV) was used as metric to quantify the reproducibility of VC and mean ThC.ResultsThe repositioning RMSCoV was as follows: VC=2.0% and ThC=1.2% (femur), VC=2.9% and ThC=1.6% (medial tibial plateau), VC=5.5% and ThC=2.4% (lateral tibial plateau), and VC=4.6% and ThC=2.3% (patella). RMSCoV values were higher for the inter-reader reproducibility (VC: 2.5–8.6%) (ThC: 1.9–5.2%) and lower for the intra-reader reproducibility (VC: 1.6–2.5%) (ThC: 1.2–1.9%). The method required an average of 75.4min per knee.ConclusionsWe have documented a fast reproducible semi-automated software method to segment articular cartilage on knee MR acquisitions

Vortex Rings in two Component Bose-Einstein Condensates

We study the structure of the vortex core in two-component Bose-Einstein condensates. We demonstrate that the order parameter may not vanish and the symmetry may not be restored in the core of the vortex. In this case such vortices can form vortex rings known as vortons in particle physics literature. In contrast with well-studied superfluid $^4He$, where similar vortex rings can be stable due to Magnus force only if they move, the vortex rings in two-component BECs can be stable even if they are at rest. This beautiful effect was first discussed by Witten in the cosmic string context, where it was shown that the stabilization occurs due to condensation of the second component of the field in the vortex core. This second condensate trapped in the core may carry a current along the vortex ring counteracting the effect of string tension that causes the loop to shrink. We speculate that such vortons may have been already observed in the laboratory. We also speculate that the experimental study of topological structures in BECs can provide a unique opportunity to study cosmology and astrophysics by doing laboratory experiments.Comment: 21 pages, 2 figure

Connected Green function approach to ground state symmetry breaking in Φ1+14\Phi^4_{1+1}-theory

Using the cluster expansions for n-point Green functions we derive a closed set of dynamical equations of motion for connected equal-time Green functions by neglecting all connected functions higher than $4^{th}$ order for the $\lambda \Phi^4$-theory in $1+1$ dimensions. We apply the equations to the investigation of spontaneous ground state symmetry breaking, i.e. to the evaluation of the effective potential at temperature $T=0$. Within our momentum space discretization we obtain a second order phase transition (in agreement with the Simon-Griffith theorem) and a critical coupling of $\lambda_{crit}/4m^2=2.446$ as compared to a first order phase transition and $\lambda_{crit}/4m^2=2.568$ from the Gaussian effective potential approach.Comment: 25 Revtex pages, 5 figures available via fpt from the directory ugi-94-11 of [email protected] as one postscript file (there was a bug in our calculations, all numerical results and figures have changed significantly), ugi-94-1

The putative proteinase maturation protein A of Streptococcus pneumoniae is a conserved surface protein with potential to elicit protective immune responses

Surface-exposed proteins often play an important role in the interaction between pathogenic bacteria and their host. We isolated a pool of hydrophobic, surface-associated proteins of Streptococcus pneumoniae. The opsonophagocytic activity of hyperimmune serum raised against this protein fraction was high and species specific. Moreover, the opsonophagocytic activity was independent of the capsular type and chromosomal genotype of the pneumococcus. Since the opsonophagocytic activity is presumed to correlate with in vivo protection, these data indicate that the protein fraction has the potential to elicit species-specific immune protection with cross-protection against various pneumococcal strains. Individual proteins in the extract were purified by two-dimensional gel electrophoresis. Antibodies raised against three distinct proteins contributed to the opsonophagocytic activity of the serum. The proteins were identified by mass spectrometry and N-terminal amino acid sequencing. Two proteins were the previously characterized pneumococcal surface protein A and oligopeptide-binding lipoprotein AmiA. The third protein was the recently identified putative proteinase maturation protein A (PpmA), which showed homology to members of the family of peptidyl-prolyl cis/trans isomerases. Immunoelectron microscopy demonstrated that PpmA was associated with the pneumococcal surface. In addition, PpmA was shown to elicit species-specific opsonophagocytic antibodies that were cross-reactive with various pneumococcal strains. This antibody cross-reactivity was in line with the limited sequence variation of ppmA. The importance of PpmA in pneumococcal pathogenesis was demonstrated in a mouse pneumonia model. Pneumococcal ppmA-deficient mutants showed reduced virulence. The properties of PpmA reported here indicate its potential for inclusion in multicomponent protein vaccines

Temperature Variation of Ultra Slow Light in a Cold Gas

A model is developed to explain the temperature dependence of the group velocity as observed in the experiments of Hau et al (Nature {\bf397}, 594 (1999)). The group velocity is quite sensitive to the change in the spatial density. The inhomogeneity in the density and its temperature dependence are primarily responsible for the observed behavior.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure