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

Feynman-Jackson integrals

We introduce perturbative Feynman integrals in the context of q-calculus generalizing the Gaussian q-integrals introduced by Diaz and Teruel. We provide analytic as well as combinatorial interpretations for the Feynman-Jackson integrals.Comment: Final versio

Resolving the structure of TiBe12_{12}

There has been considerable controversy regarding the structure of TiBe$_{12}$, which is variously reported as hexagonal and tetragonal. Lattice dynamics simulations based on density functional theory show the tetragonal phase space group $I4/mmm$ to be more stable over all temperatures, while the hexagonal phase exhibits an imaginary phonon mode, which, if followed, would lead to the cell adopting the tetragonal structure. We then report the predicted ground state elastic constants and temperature dependence of the bulk modulus and thermal expansion for the tetragonal phase.Comment: In press at Acta Crystallographica B. Supplementary material appende

Discrimination of growth and water stress in wheat by various vegetation indices through a clear a turbid atmosphere

Reflectance data were obtained over a drought-stressed and a well-watered wheat plot with a hand-held radiometer having bands similar to the MSS bands of the LANDSAT satellites. Data for 48 clear days were interpolated to yield reflectance values for each day of the growing season, from planting until harvest. With an atmospheric path radiance model and LANDSAT-2 calibration data, the reflectance were used to simulate LANDSAT digital counts (not quantized) for the four LANDSAT bands for each day of the growing season, through a clear (approximately 100 km meteorological range) and a turbid (approximately 10 km meteorological range) atmosphere. Several ratios and linear combinations of bands were calculated using the simulated data, then assessed for their relative ability to discriminate vegetative growth and plant stress through the two atmospheres. The results show that water stress was not detected by any of the indices until after growth was retarded, and the sensitivity of the various indices to vegetation depended on plant growth stage and atmospheric path radiance

Adjusting the tasseled cap brightness and greenness factors for atmospheric path radiance and absorption on a pixel by pixel basis

A radiative transfer model was used to convert ground measured reflectances into the radiance at the top of the atmosphere, for several levels of atmospheric path radiance. The radiance in MSS7 (0.8 to 1.1 m) was multiplied by the transmission fraction for atmospheres having different levels of precipitable water. The radiance values were converted to simulated LANDSAT digital counts for four path radiance levels and four levels of precipitable water. These values were used to calculate the Kauth-Thomas brightness, greenness, yellowness, and nonsuch factors. Brightness was affected by surface conditions and path radiance. Greenness was affected by surface conditions, path radiance, and precipitable water. Yellowness was affected by path radiance and nonsuch by precipitable water, and both factors changed only slightly with surface conditions. Yellowness and nonsuch were used to adjust brightness and greenness to produce factors that were affected only by surface conditions such as soils and vegetation, and not by path radiance and precipitable water

Support Vector Machine classification of strong gravitational lenses

The imminent advent of very large-scale optical sky surveys, such as Euclid and LSST, makes it important to find efficient ways of discovering rare objects such as strong gravitational lens systems, where a background object is multiply gravitationally imaged by a foreground mass. As well as finding the lens systems, it is important to reject false positives due to intrinsic structure in galaxies, and much work is in progress with machine learning algorithms such as neural networks in order to achieve both these aims. We present and discuss a Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm which makes use of a Gabor filterbank in order to provide learning criteria for separation of lenses and non-lenses, and demonstrate using blind challenges that under certain circumstances it is a particularly efficient algorithm for rejecting false positives. We compare the SVM engine with a large-scale human examination of 100000 simulated lenses in a challenge dataset, and also apply the SVM method to survey images from the Kilo-Degree Survey.Comment: Accepted by MNRA

Dynamics of immersed molecules in superfluids

The dynamics of a molecule immersed in a superfluid medium are considered. Results are derived using a classical hydrodynamic approach followed by canonical quantization. The classical model, a rigid body immersed in incompressible fluid, permits a thorough analysis; its effective Hamiltonian generalizes the usual rigid-rotor Hamiltonian. In contrast to the free rigid rotor, the immersed body is shown to have chaotic dynamics. Quantization of the classical model leads to new and experimentally verifiable features. It is shown, for instance, that chiral molecules can behave as "quantum propellers": the rotational-translational coupling induced by the superfluid leads to a nonzero linear momentum in the ground state. Hydrogen peroxide is a strong candidate for experimental detection of this effect. The signature is a characteristic splitting of rotational absorption lines. The 1_{01} --> 1_{10} line in hydrogen peroxide, for example, is predicted to split into three lines separated by as much as 0.01 cm^{-1}, which is about the experimental linewidth.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure

Advanced manufacturing development of a composite empennage component for L-1011 aircraft. Phase 3: Production readiness verification testing

Twenty-two specimens of each of two key structural elements of the Advance Composite Vertical Fin (ACVF) were fabricated and tested. One element represented the front spar at the fuselage attachment area and the other element represented the cover at the fuselage joint area. Ten specimens of each element were selected for static testing. The coefficient of variation resulting from the tests was 3.28 percent for the ten cover specimens and 6.11 percent for the ten spar specimens, which compare well with metallic structures. The remaining twelve cover and twelve spar specimens were durability tested in environmental chambers which permitted the temperature and humidity environment to be cycled as well as the applied loads. Results of the durability tests indicated that such components will survive the service environment