The Son of God and Trinitarian Identity Statements

Classical Trinitarians claim that Jesus—the Son of God—is truly God and that there is only one God and the Father is God, the Spirit is God, and the Father, Son, and Spirit are distinct. However, if the identity statement that ‘the Son is God’ is understood in the sense of numerical identity, logical incoherence seems immanent. Yet, if the identity statement is understood according to an ‘is’ of predication then it lacks accuracy and permits polytheism. Therefore, we argue that there is another sense of ‘is’ needed in trinitarian discourse that will allow the Christian to avoid logical incoherence while still fully affirming all that is meant to be affirmed in the confession ‘Jesus is God.’ We suggest a sense of ‘is’ that meets this need

Differences in IMF Data: Incidence and Implications

Data published in IMF country reports and International Financial Statistics (IFS) may differ for seemingly identical variables, and at times users may be unaware of the reasons underlying such differences and may lack the information needed to permit reconciliation. This paper presents a study of the consistency of annual data on core statistical indicators presented in the IFS and a sample of country reports. The paper finds a significant incidence of apparent discrepancies for similarly defined variables. It discusses the reasons for differences and examines the implications for research using an example from the debt sustainability literature. Copyright 2006, International Monetary Fund

A characterisation of generically rigid frameworks on surfaces of revolution

A foundational theorem of Laman provides a counting characterisation of the finite simple graphs whose generic bar-joint frameworks in two dimensions are infinitesimally rigid. Recently a Laman-type characterisation was obtained for frameworks in three dimensions whose vertices are constrained to concentric spheres or to concentric cylinders. Noting that the plane and the sphere have 3 independent locally tangential infinitesimal motions while the cylinder has 2, we obtain here a Laman-Henneberg theorem for frameworks on algebraic surfaces with a 1-dimensional space of tangential motions. Such surfaces include the torus, helicoids and surfaces of revolution. The relevant class of graphs are the (2,1)-tight graphs, in contrast to (2,3)-tightness for the plane/sphere and (2,2)-tightness for the cylinder. The proof uses a new characterisation of simple (2,1)-tight graphs and an inductive construction requiring generic rigidity preservation for 5 graph moves, including the two Henneberg moves, an edge joining move and various vertex surgery moves.Comment: 23 pages, 5 figures. Minor revisions - most importantly, the new version has a different titl

Automatic quantitative morphological analysis of interacting galaxies

The large number of galaxies imaged by digital sky surveys reinforces the need for computational methods for analyzing galaxy morphology. While the morphology of most galaxies can be associated with a stage on the Hubble sequence, morphology of galaxy mergers is far more complex due to the combination of two or more galaxies with different morphologies and the interaction between them. Here we propose a computational method based on unsupervised machine learning that can quantitatively analyze morphologies of galaxy mergers and associate galaxies by their morphology. The method works by first generating multiple synthetic galaxy models for each galaxy merger, and then extracting a large set of numerical image content descriptors for each galaxy model. These numbers are weighted using Fisher discriminant scores, and then the similarities between the galaxy mergers are deduced using a variation of Weighted Nearest Neighbor analysis such that the Fisher scores are used as weights. The similarities between the galaxy mergers are visualized using phylogenies to provide a graph that reflects the morphological similarities between the different galaxy mergers, and thus quantitatively profile the morphology of galaxy mergers.Comment: Astronomy & Computing, accepte

Reforming Immigration Law to Allow More Foreign Student Entrepreneurs to Launch Job-Creating Ventures in the United States

As universities move toward a more experiential approach to entrepreneurship education, many academic units and cross-campus entrepreneurship programs are encouraging their students to actively engage with the curriculum and apply the skills they learn. One such approach is to have students start their own businesses before they graduate. In addition to enhancing their education, participation in the planning, launch and operation of a start-up venture can lead directly to the creation of new jobs for many other individuals. Unfortunately, being the founder of a start-up venture in the United States proves complicated for foreign students in our colleges and universities. Across the country, both undergraduate and graduate entrepreneurship students desiring to participate actively in a startup face vexing immigration law challenges. This paper outlines some of the barriers that foreign student entrepreneurs face, and describes how bipartisan legislation would help to address some of these roadblocks

Shifting credit standards and the boom and bust in U.S. house prices

The U.S. house price boom has been linked to an unsustainable easing of mortgage credit standards. However, standard time series models of U.S. house prices omit credit constraints and perform poorly in the 2000s. We incorporate data on credit constraints for first-time buyers into a model of U.S. house prices based on the (inverted) demand for housing services. The model yields not only a stable long-run cointegrating relationship, a reasonable speed of adjustment, plausible income and price elasticities and an improved fit, but also sensible estimates of tax credit effects and the possible bottom in real house prices.Housing - Prices ; Credit ; Subprime mortgage