The Public Spectacle of Death: An Essay on Public Execution

If the Government were to make a statement saying that they were bringing back public executions, for the worst types of criminals, think along the lines of rapists and murders, and to make sure that everyone knows about and has access to them, there will be huge amounts of media coverage and the Government will be broadcasting it live on public TV. What do you think would happen? You would probably hope that the majority of the country would be outraged and disgusted by the prospect and refuse to watch such horrible human rights violations, right? But what if the opposite happens, what if the day the first execution is set to take place hundreds of thousands are watching on TV or at the place of execution. What if the people watching treated the execution like a football game, tailgating, paying for box seats, and buying souvenirs to remember the day, is this even conceivable? In the past this is exactly what happened. The religious and state executions of the 14th to 16th centuries quickly became public spectacle but how and why? This essay seeks to show you a road map with examples to help us to understand the transition from a religious ritual to a sensationalized tailgating party that enamored thousands of our ancestors

Ideals with Larger Projective Dimension and Regularity

We define a family of homogeneous ideals with large projective dimension and regularity relative to the number of generators and their common degree. This family subsumes and improves upon constructions given in [Cav04] and [McC]. In particular, we describe a family of three-generated homogeneous ideals in arbitrary characteristic whose projective dimension grows asymptotically as sqrt{d}^(sqrt(d) - 1).Comment: 10 pages. This work was completed at the MRC for Commutative Algebra in Snowbird, UT, which was generously supported by the AM

Alexander Ostrowski's "On Dirichlet Series and Algebraic Differential Equations"

This is an English translation of Ostrowski's article "\"Uber Dirichletsche Reihen und algebraische Differentialgleichungen" published German in Math. Zeit. vol. 8, 1920, pp. 241-298. In this article, Ostrowski proves a conjecture of Hilbert that the two variable function $\zeta(x,s)=\sum_{n\ge 1} \frac{x^n}{n^s}$ cannot be written as a composition of analytic functions of one variable and algebraic functions of any number of variables.Comment: 50 pages. Comments welcome

The Holy Spirit and prayer in the letters of Paul

The present thesis is the first monograph-length study of the pneumatic prayers in the letters of Paul. Paul mentions three experiences where the spirit inspires prayer: the Abba cry (Gal 4.6; Rom 8.15–16), prayer in tongues (1 Cor 14.14–15), and the spirit’s intercession (Rom 8.26–27). While each of these passages has received substantial attention from previous generations of Pauline scholarship, their precise meaning and significance remain contested. Even more controversial is their potential relation to each other. This thesis aims to propose a taxonomy for these pneumatic prayers based on their shared descriptive features and common connections to other aspects of Paul’s theology. Descriptively, I argue that Paul describes pneumatic prayers as common and perceptible experiences of inspired speech for early Christians. Theologically, I contend that Paul believed pneumatic prayers signified the eschatological time in which believers live and bore witness to believers’ new glorified filial status as they participated in the prayers and worship of heavenly beings

Report of the FAO/CRFM/MALMR Regional Workshop on the Collection of Demographic Information on Coastal Fishing Communities and its Use in Community-Based Fisheries and Integrated Coastal Zone Management in the Caribbean

One part of the two-part Science-to-Action Guidebook. The other part was intended for scientists, and this part is for decision-makers. Recognizing the importance of informed decisions and the differences between the scientific and decision-making processes, this guidebook provides practical tips on how to best bring these worlds together. In doing so, this guidebook emphasizes the roles of facilitating, synthesizing, translating, and communicating science to inform conservation action. It is geared toward the perspective of decision-makers working in tropical developing nations and focusing on marine resource management issues. However, the concepts are applicable to a broad range of scientists and decision-makers worldwide

Viscosity measurements of glycerol in a parallel-plate rheometer exposed to atmosphere

Glycerol is a hygroscopic fluid that spontaneously absorbs water vapor from the atmosphere. For applications involving glycerol, care must be taken to avoid exposure to humidity, since its viscosity decreases quickly as water is absorbed. We report experimental measurements of the viscosity of glycerol in a parallel-plate rheometer where the outer interface is exposed to atmosphere. The measurements decrease with time as water is absorbed from the atmosphere and transported throughout the glycerol via diffusion and advection. Measured viscosities drop faster at higher relative humidities, confirming the role of hygroscopicity on the transient viscosities. The rate of viscosity decrease shows a non-monotonic relationship with the rheometer gap height. This behavior is explained by considering the transition from diffusion-dominated transport in the narrow gap regime to the large gap regime where transport is dominated by inertia-driven secondary flows. Numerical simulations of the water absorption and transport confirm this non-monotonic behavior. The experimental viscosity measurements show unexpectedly fast decreases at very small gap heights, violating the parallel-plate, axisymmetric model. We propose that this drop-off may be due to misalignment in the rheometer that becomes non-negligible for small gaps. Theoretical considerations show that secondary flows in a misaligned rheometer dominate the typical secondary inertial flows in parallel-plate rheometers at small gaps. Finally, simulations in a misaligned parallel-plate system demonstrate the same sharp drop-off in viscosity measurements at small gap heights. This modeling can be used to estimate the gap height where misalignment effects dominate the transient glycerol viscosity measurements.Comment: 26 pages, 17 figure

Improving Grounded Natural Language Understanding through Human-Robot Dialog

Natural language understanding for robotics can require substantial domain- and platform-specific engineering. For example, for mobile robots to pick-and-place objects in an environment to satisfy human commands, we can specify the language humans use to issue such commands, and connect concept words like red can to physical object properties. One way to alleviate this engineering for a new domain is to enable robots in human environments to adapt dynamically---continually learning new language constructions and perceptual concepts. In this work, we present an end-to-end pipeline for translating natural language commands to discrete robot actions, and use clarification dialogs to jointly improve language parsing and concept grounding. We train and evaluate this agent in a virtual setting on Amazon Mechanical Turk, and we transfer the learned agent to a physical robot platform to demonstrate it in the real world

The Effect of Hepatitis C on Maternal Bile Acid Level and the Fetal Left Ventricular Tei Index

Hepatitis C (HCV) is a common form of liver disease encountered in pregnancy. The purpose of this study is to evaluate if hepatitis C is associated with elevated maternal serum bile acids and abnormal fetal cardiac function measured by the left ventricular Tei index in the absence of intrahepatic cholestasis of pregnancy. This is a prospective cohort study on pregnant women with hepatitis C seen through Marshall University’s high-risk obstetrics clinic from 2013 to 2014. Women with hepatitis C had a laboratory evaluation and an ultrasound on the fetus to calculate the left ventricular Tei index. Demographic information and delivery outcomes were recorded. There were 77 participants with hepatitis C recruited and consented for this study. Sixty-one participants had complete laboratory and delivery information available for analysis. Twenty-one participants had a viral load that was not detectable and 40 participants had a detectable viral load. The mean viral load overall was 1943771 IU/mL (SD 4257143). There was no difference in Tei index between detectable and non-detectable viral load, 0.41 and 0.38 respectively (p = 0.41). There was no statistical difference in bile acid level between detectable and undetectable viral load, 12 and 8 µmol/L respectively (p = 0.05). Hepatic liver disease manifested by elevated hepatitis C viral load or elevated bile acids did not affect the left ventricular Tei index