5,901 research outputs found
Yoga, Christians Practicing Yoga, and God: On Theological Compatibility, or Is There a Better Question?
Houston is a wildly diverse city; nonetheless it should come as no surprise that the Houston Chronicle âBeliefâ section frequently features stories about church expansions or declines, pastoral developments, and other reports on Christian communities. Christians, after all, make up over 70% of the cityâs population. A provocative cover of a 2011 Belief section, however, shed light on a very different face of religion in Houston. The cover featured an image of local yoga teacher and entrepreneur Jennifer Buergermeister donning fashionable yoga attire and in the posture of a South Asian goddess, complete (thanks to clever photography) with six arms. The headline read, âTHE SOUL OF YOGA.â In the article, journalist Shellnutt quotes Buergermeister on how yoga helped her connect with âGod as a creator, as a sourceâ and brought her âcloser to my divinity.â Another local yoga teacher and entrepreneur, Roger Rippy, was also interviewed for the article and is quoted denying that yoga is a religion because it is not based in dogma, but it is, nonetheless, âabout your own particular practice and your own particular relationship with God.â
The Malleability of Yoga: A Response to Christian and Hindu Opponents of the Popularization of Yoga
FOR over three thousand years, people have attached divergent meanings and functions to yoga. Its history has been characterized by moments of continuity, but also by divergence and change. This applies as much to precolonial yoga systems as to modern ones. All of this evidences yogaâs malleability (literally, the capacity to be bent into new shapes without breaking) in the hands of human beings
Health, well-being, and the ascetic ideal: Modern yoga in the Jain Terapanth
This dissertation evaluates preksha dhyana, a form of modern yoga introduced by the Jain Shvetambara Terapanth in 1975. Modern yoga emerged as a consequence of a complex encounter of Indian yogic gurus, American and British metaphysical thinkers, and modern ideas about science and health. I provide a brief history of the Terapanth from its eighteenth-century founder, Bikshu, to its current monastic guru, Mahaprajna, who constructed preksha dhyana. I evaluate the historical trajectory that led from the Terapanth's beginnings as a sect that maintained a world-rejecting ascetic ideal to its late twentieth-century introduction of preksha dhyana, which is popularly disseminated as a practice aimed at health and well-being. The practice and ideology of preksha dhyana is, however, context specific. In the Terapanthi monastic context, it functions as a metaphysical, mystical, and ascetic practice. In this way, it intersects with classical schools of yoga, which aim at ascetic purification and release from the world. In its popular dissemination by the samanis, female members of an intermediary Terapanthi monastic order, it functions as a physiotherapeutic practice. The samanis teach yoga to students in India, the United States, and Britain whose interests are primarily in yoga's physical and psychological benefits. In this way, it is a case study of modern yoga, which aims at the enhancement of the body and life in the world. I demonstrate how the samanis are mediators of their guru, Mahaprajna, and thus resolve ancient and contemporary tensions between ascetic and worldly values. I also demonstrate how Mahaprajna and the samanis construct preksha dhyana as a form of modern yoga by appropriating scientific discourse and attributing physiological function to the yogic subtle body. I argue that preksha dhyana can be located at an intersection with late capitalist cultural processes as well as New Age spirituality insofar as its proponents participate in the transnational yoga market. Finally, I conclude with some thoughts on the successes and failures of the Terapanth in its attempt to globally disseminate preksha dhyana
Thermal Transport in Chiral Conformal Theories and Hierarchical Quantum Hall States
Chiral conformal field theories are characterized by a ground-state current
at finite temperature, that could be observed, e.g. in the edge excitations of
the quantum Hall effect. We show that the corresponding thermal conductance is
directly proportional to the gravitational anomaly of the conformal theory,
upon extending the well-known relation between specific heat and conformal
anomaly. The thermal current could signal the elusive neutral edge modes that
are expected in the hierarchical Hall states. We then compute the thermal
conductance for the Abelian multi-component theory and the W-infinity minimal
model, two conformal theories that are good candidates for describing the
hierarchical states. Their conductances agree to leading order but differ in
the first, universal finite-size correction, that could be used as a selective
experimental signature.Comment: Latex, 17 pages, 2 figure
LemurFaceID: a face recognition system to facilitate individual identification of lemurs
Background: Long-term research of known individuals is critical for understanding the demographic and evolutionary processes that influence natural populations. Current methods for individual identification of many animals include capture and tagging techniques and/or researcher knowledge of natural variation in individual phenotypes. These methods can be costly, time-consuming, and may be impractical for larger-scale, populationlevel studies. Accordingly, for many animal lineages, long-term research projects are often limited to only a few taxa. Lemurs, a mammalian lineage endemic to Madagascar, are no exception. Long-term data needed to address evolutionary questions are lacking for many species. This is, at least in part, due to difficulties collecting consistent data on known individuals over long periods of time. Here, we present a new method for individual identification of lemurs (LemurFaceID). LemurFaceID is a computer-assisted facial recognition system that can be used to identify individual lemurs based on photographs.
Results: LemurFaceID was developed using patch-wise Multiscale Local Binary Pattern features and modified facial image normalization techniques to reduce the effects of facial hair and variation in ambient lighting on identification. We trained and tested our system using images from wild red-bellied lemurs (Eulemur rubriventer) collected in Ranomafana National Park, Madagascar. Across 100 trials, with different partitions of training and test sets, we demonstrate that the LemurFaceID can achieve 98.7% ± 1.81% accuracy (using 2-query image fusion) in correctly identifying individual lemurs.
Conclusions: Our results suggest that human facial recognition techniques can be modified for identification of individual lemurs based on variation in facial patterns. LemurFaceID was able to identify individual lemurs based on photographs of wild individuals with a relatively high degree of accuracy. This technology would remove many limitations of traditional methods for individual identification. Once optimized, our system can facilitate long-term research of known individuals by providing a rapid, cost-effective, and accurate method for individual identification
Matrix Model Description of Laughlin Hall States
We analyze Susskind's proposal of applying the non-commutative Chern-Simons
theory to the quantum Hall effect. We study the corresponding regularized
matrix Chern-Simons theory introduced by Polychronakos. We use holomorphic
quantization and perform a change of matrix variables that solves the Gauss law
constraint. The remaining physical degrees of freedom are the complex
eigenvalues that can be interpreted as the coordinates of electrons in the
lowest Landau level with Laughlin's wave function. At the same time, a
statistical interaction is generated among the electrons that is necessary to
stabilize the ground state. The stability conditions can be expressed as the
highest-weight conditions for the representations of the W-infinity algebra in
the matrix theory. This symmetry provides a coordinate-independent
characterization of the incompressible quantum Hall states.Comment: 31 pages, large additions on the path integral and overlaps, and on
the W-infinity symmetr
Infinite Symmetry in the Quantum Hall Effect
Free planar electrons in a uniform magnetic field are shown to possess the
symmetry of area-preserving diffeomorphisms (-infinity algebra).
Intuitively, this is a consequence of gauge invariance, which forces dynamics
to depend only on the flux. The infinity of generators of this symmetry act
within each Landau level, which is infinite-dimensional in the thermodynamical
limit. The incompressible ground states corresponding to completely filled
Landau levels (integer quantum Hall effect) are shown to be infinitely
symmetric, since they are annihilated by an infinite subset of generators. This
geometrical characterization of incompressibility also holds for fractional
fillings of the lowest level (simplest fractional Hall effect) in the presence
of Haldane's effective two-body interactions. Although these modify the
symmetry algebra, the corresponding incompressible ground states proposed by
Laughlin are again symmetric with respect to the modified infinite algebra.Comment: 28 page
Modular Invariant Partition Functions in the Quantum Hall Effect
We study the partition function for the low-energy edge excitations of the
incompressible electron fluid. On an annular geometry, these excitations have
opposite chiralities on the two edges; thus, the partition function takes the
standard form of rational conformal field theories. In particular, it is
invariant under modular transformations of the toroidal geometry made by the
angular variable and the compact Euclidean time. The Jain series of plateaus
have been described by two types of edge theories: the minimal models of the
W-infinity algebra of quantum area-preserving diffeomorphisms, and their
non-minimal version, the theories with U(1)xSU(m) affine algebra. We find
modular invariant partition functions for the latter models. Moreover, we
relate the Wen topological order to the modular transformations and the
Verlinde fusion algebra. We find new, non-diagonal modular invariants which
describe edge theories with extended symmetry algebra; their Hall
conductivities match the experimental values beyond the Jain series.Comment: Latex, 38 pages, 1 table (one minor error has been corrected
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