Images of God in Toba Batak Storytelling

This paper examines the ways in which God the Creator, the High God, is described in Toba Batak folk-tales. The sources for this investigation are stories recorded in pre-colonial (around 1850), colonial and post-colonial times (up to 2014). In different stories the High God can appear under various names, forms and gender, and resides in various places never inhabited by humans. Unlike a Deus otiosus, the Toba Batak High God is not “inactive” after creation, but continues to be involved in the life of mankind through local or supra-local manifestations. Although he rules the realm of death, he is nevertheless regarded as the source of life, fertility, health and prosperity. There are also stories about manifestations of God in which he shares the experience of suffering with human beings. The main Toba Batak community rituals in pre-colonial times were addressed to a manifestation of the High God

Generalization of Boltzmann Equilibration Dynamics

We propose a novel approach in the study of transport phenomena in dense systems or systems with long range interactions where multiple particle interactions must be taken into consideration. Within Boltzmann's kinetic formalism, we study the influence of other interacting particles in terms of a random distortion of energy and momentum conservation occurring when multi-particle interactions are considered as binary collisions. Energy and momentum conservation still holds exactly but not in each model binary collision. We show how this new system differs from the Boltzmann system and we note that our approach naturally explains the emergence of Tsallis-like equilibrium statistics in physically relevant systems in terms of the long since neglected physics of interacting and dense systems.Comment: 4 pages, references and clarifications adde

Centrality dependence of strangeness and (anti)hyperon production at BNL RHIC

We evaluate strangeness produced in Au--Au interactions at $\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}}=200$ GeV, as function of reaction participant number $A$, and obtain the relative strange quark content at hadronization. Strange baryon and antibaryon rapidity density yields are studied, relative to, and as function of, participant number, and produced hadron yields.Comment: 4 pages including 4 figures, v2 text improvmen

The role of social networks in development of small-scale enterprises in the Chimanimani district of Zimbabwe

The past decade has witnessed an increased interest in the concept of social networks after the seminal theses of Coleman (1988) and Putnam (1993). An area that has attracted a great deal of interest is the value of social networks in small-scale enterprise development. This paper interrogates the role of social networks in the establishment and expansion of rural non-farm enterprises in the Chimanimani district of Zimbabwe and established that rural non-farm entrepreneurs resort to their social networks for information and other resources needed to establish and expand their enterprises, and that there are some gender differences in the use of the various social networks.Social networks, rural non-farm entrepreneurs, rural non-farm enterprises, Agribusiness,

Vacuum Structure and Dark Energy

We consider that the universe is trapped in an excited vacuum state and the resulting excitation energy provides the observed dark energy. We explore the conditions under which this situation can arise from physics already known. Considering the example of how macroscopic QED fields alter the vacuum structure, we find that the energy scale 1 meV --- 1 eV is particularly interesting. We discuss how dark energy of this form is accessible to laboratory experiments.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures; recognized for Honorable Mention in 2010 Gravity Research Foundation Awards for Essays on Gravitation, in press with Int. J. Mod. Phys.

Clustering clinical departments for wards to achieve a prespecified blocking probability

When the number of available beds in a hospital is limited and fixed, it can be beneficial to cluster several clinical departments such that the probability of not being able to admit a patient is acceptably small. The clusters are then assigned to the available wards such that enough beds are available to guarantee a blocking probability below a prespecified value. We first give an exact formulation of the problem to be able to achieve optimal solutions. To reduce computation times, we also introduce two heuristic solution methods. The first heuristic is similar to the exact solution method, however, the number of beds needed is approximated by a linear function. The second heuristic uses a local search approach to determine the assignment of clinical departments to clusters and a restricted version of the exact solution method to determine the assignment of clusters to wards

Strangeness Chemical Equilibration in QGP at RHIC and LHC

We study, in the dynamically evolving QGP fireball formed in relativistic heavy ion collisions at RHIC and LHC, the growth of strangeness yield toward and beyond the chemical equilibrium. We account for the contribution of the direct strangeness production and evaluate the thermal-QCD strangeness production mechanisms. The specific yield of strangeness per entropy, s/S, is the primary target variable. We explore the effect of collision impact parameter, i.e., fireball size, on kinetic strangeness chemical equilibration in QGP. Insights gained in study the RHIC data with regard to the dynamics of the fireball are applied to the study strangeness production at the LHC. We use these results and consider the strange hadron relative particle yields at RHIC and LHC in a systematic fashion. We consider both the dependence on s/S and directly participant number dependence.Comment: 21 pages, 13 figures, PRC in press. Strangeness production recomputed with K-factor K=1.7. Particle yields recomputed with SHARE 2.