The Grace of God in the Law of Moses: A Second Look at Israel’s Written Code

For centuries, the Mosaic Code (“MC”) has been viewed as Israel’s prescriptive legislation, whereby Jewish leaders were to judge infractions by the “letter of the law.” This view is one which permeates both pulpit and pew alike, even in this modern era. However, recent developments in scholarship are challenging this understanding of MC, concluding instead that this “law code” was not utilized in Israelite jurisprudence, but rather as a covenant contract that worked not prescriptively in the lives of the Jews, but rather descriptively, in that it relayed the heart of YHWH to its reader. Accordingly, MC was to be utilized in the civil sphere as idyllic law to help the civil magistrate to formulate just rulings. In the personal and interpersonal realm, this descriptive view of the law was to be utilized to change the individual from the inside out, thereby conforming the heart of the individual to the character and likeness of YHWH. Internal biblical data does show evidence of MC use as a prescriptive legislative tool, but the question must be asked, when did this shift from descriptive to prescriptive take place? This study argues that the conceptual shift of MC to a prescriptive law code took place during the Intertestamental Period, or, during the period of Greek Hellenization. This study likewise argues that during the ministry of Christ, the Lord came to challenge the prescriptive presuppositions of His Jewish counterparts, thus reforming their narrow understanding of MC to one which focuses primarily on the heart

Method and device for determining battery state of charge Patent

Indicator device for monitoring charge of wet cell battery, using semiconductor light emitter and photodetecto

Transport coefficients for the shear dynamo problem at small Reynolds numbers

We build on the formulation developed in Sridhar & Singh (JFM, 664, 265, 2010), and present a theory of the \emph{shear dynamo problem} for small magnetic and fluid Reynolds numbers, but for arbitrary values of the shear parameter. Specializing to the case of a mean magnetic field that is slowly varying in time, explicit expressions for the transport coefficients, $\alpha_{il}$ and $\eta_{iml}$, are derived. We prove that, when the velocity field is non helical, the transport coefficient $\alpha_{il}$ vanishes. We then consider forced, stochastic dynamics for the incompressible velocity field at low Reynolds number. An exact, explicit solution for the velocity field is derived, and the velocity spectrum tensor is calculated in terms of the Galilean--invariant forcing statistics. We consider forcing statistics that is non helical, isotropic and delta-correlated-in-time, and specialize to the case when the mean-field is a function only of the spatial coordinate $X_3$ and time $\tau\,$; this reduction is necessary for comparison with the numerical experiments of Brandenburg, R{\"a}dler, Rheinhardt & K\"apyl\"a (ApJ, 676, 740, 2008). Explicit expressions are derived for all four components of the magnetic diffusivity tensor, $\eta_{ij}(\tau)\,$. These are used to prove that the shear-current effect cannot be responsible for dynamo action at small \re and \rem, but for all values of the shear parameter.Comment: 27 pages, 5 figures, Published in Physical Review

Has Europe Been Catching Up? An Industry Level Analysis of Venture Capital Success over 1985 - 2009

After nearly two decades of U.S. leadership in the 1980s and 1990s, are Europe's venture capital markets in the 2000s finally catching up regarding the provision of financing and successful exits, or is the performance gap as wide as ever? Are we amidst overall dismal performance of the venture capital experience without any encouraging news? We attempt to answer these questions by tracking down over 40,000 venture capital--backed firms of six industries in 13 European countries and the U.S., and determine which type of exit - if any - each particular firm's investors have chosen between 1985 and 2009. Our empirical findings suggest that: (i) in terms of the number of venture capital-backed firms successfully going public, European venture capitalists have closed the gap with respect to the U.S., albeit as a result of a worse initial public offering performance overall; (ii) Europe continues to lag behind the U.S. by means of mergers and acquisitions, and in successful exits of seed/start-up and early stage firms, (iii) average investment and R&D are important determinants of venture capital success, but only have a positive impact after 2000; and (iv) idiosyncratic differences across industries seem to be more relevant than country-specific characteristics in explaining differences in performance.Venture capital, private equity, success rates, performance, IPOs.

A Small Cosmological Constant and Backreaction of Non-Finetuned Parameters

We include the backreaction on the warped geometry induced by non-finetuned parameters in a two domain-wall set-up to obtain an exponentially small Cosmological Constant $\Lambda_4$. The mechanism to suppress the Cosmological Constant involves one classical fine-tuning as compared to an infinity of finetunings at the quantum level in standard D=4 field theory.Comment: 13 pages, minor corrections and references adde