The Five Articles of Perth

The General Assembly meeting at Perth in August 1618, out of deference to the wishes of James VI, enacted the five regulations concerning the worship of the Church which came to be known as the Five Articles of Perth. At its next meeting, admittedly twenty years later, after much mature deliberation, "The matter was put to voicing in these words, 'whether the Five Articles of Perth, by the Concession of Faith, as it was meaned and professed in the year 1580, 1581, 1590, 1591, ought to be removed out of this Kirk?' The whole Assembly all in one consent, one only excepted, did voice that the Five Articles above specified were abjured by this Kirk in that Concession, and so ought to be removed out of it; and therefore prohibiteth and dischargeth all disputing for them, or observing of them, or any of them, in all time coming".Some of the questions prompted by setting those two facts in such close juxta-position laid down the guide lines for the research which lies behind the present Thesis, and determined that, in broad terms, it should attempt to make six assessments. First it attempts to trace the origin and growth of the ideas expressed in the Articles, the roots of the opposition which these ideas immediately encountered, and the course of the conflict from its beginning up to the time of the death of James, to whom belongs the responsibility for conceiving the ideas and attempting to enforce them against the judgement, according to contemporary critics, of'some of the best professors'.The Records of the Church Courts which survive from this period are relatively few, disappointingly inadequate by reason of the facts they do not record, and for the most part cover only a few of the critical years, so that the most we can hope for from them is a series of glimpses of local Church life as influenced by the Articles. Imperfect as the picture is, however, it is important and though it inevitably covers the whole period, it has seemed best to examine the picture in some detail before taking up the history of the conflict during the reign of Charles. Chapter 7 therefore examines the evidence which can be gleaned from Session, Presbytery and Synod Records regarding the Articles as a whole and each of the Articles in turn.The Thesis then resumes its study of the history of the conflict from the accession of Charles to its conclusion at the Glasgow Assembly, and this is followed by an assessment of the strength of non-conformity and the abiding interest in the Five Articles throughout the period as witnessed in contemporary sources other than the Records of the Church Courts.But no assessment of the Articles can be considered adequate which regards them as of purely local or contemporary interest, so the Thesis examines the evidence for interest in them furth of Scotland, and attempts to trace their significance for subsequent generations in Scotland, with particular reference to the period 1660 to 1668.While the question - To conform or not to conform? was at the heart of the controversy through the whole twenty years of conflict, each man's answer was determined by his attitude on a number of other questional Consideration of the arguments advanced in favour of making innovations, and of those against the particular innovations proposed, leads on inevitably to the consideration of conflicting doctrines of the Ministry, differing estimates of the validity of the Assembly and the other instruments by which the King sought to impose his will, the force of Oaths, and ultimately the real seat of authority.In a final chapter an attempt is made to assess the importance of the controversy and to discover both its immediate effects and its more lasting influences on the development of the Church in Scotland. It is concluded that the attempt to enforce conformity in worship was a tactical blunder on the part of James, The immediate consequence was to stimulate wide ranging debate, which could not stop short of discussing the relationship between Kirk and Crown among other things. An inevitable result of protracted debate was to emphasise differences of opinion and to create division in the Scottish Kirk which had not previously existed. As to long term results, twenty years of controversy bred attitudes of mind toward the Scriptures, Orders of Worship, and systems of ecclesiastical organisation which have persisted to our own day. While practical experiences of the difficulty of preserving traditional practice against a powerful innovator prepared the minds of Presbyterian Churchmen for the first Barrier Acts.The Thesis proper is followed by a series of Appendices designed to shed additional light on some of the more personal aspects of the conflict, to make plain the important part played by the controversial pamphlets, and to indicate the extent of the field of contemporary and later literature in which the student may find clues to the true course of events, or valid answers to the questions raised by the controversy

Process of designing robust, dependable, safe and secure software for medical devices: Point of care testing device as a case study

This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Copyright © 2013 Sivanesan Tulasidas et al. This paper presents a holistic methodology for the design of medical device software, which encompasses of a new way of eliciting requirements, system design process, security design guideline, cloud architecture design, combinatorial testing process and agile project management. The paper uses point of care diagnostics as a case study where the software and hardware must be robust, reliable to provide accurate diagnosis of diseases. As software and software intensive systems are becoming increasingly complex, the impact of failures can lead to significant property damage, or damage to the environment. Within the medical diagnostic device software domain such failures can result in misdiagnosis leading to clinical complications and in some cases death. Software faults can arise due to the interaction among the software, the hardware, third party software and the operating environment. Unanticipated environmental changes and latent coding errors lead to operation faults despite of the fact that usually a significant effort has been expended in the design, verification and validation of the software system. It is becoming increasingly more apparent that one needs to adopt different approaches, which will guarantee that a complex software system meets all safety, security, and reliability requirements, in addition to complying with standards such as IEC 62304. There are many initiatives taken to develop safety and security critical systems, at different development phases and in different contexts, ranging from infrastructure design to device design. Different approaches are implemented to design error free software for safety critical systems. By adopting the strategies and processes presented in this paper one can overcome the challenges in developing error free software for medical devices (or safety critical systems).Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund

Stationary and moving breathers in a simplified model of curved alpha--helix proteins

The existence, stability and movability of breathers in a model for alpha-helix proteins is studied. This model basically consists a chain of dipole moments parallel to it. The existence of localized linear modes brings about that the system has a characteristic frequency, which depends on the curvature of the chain. Hard breathers are stable, while soft ones experiment subharmonic instabilities that preserve, however the localization. Moving breathers can travel across the bending point for small curvature and are reflected when it is increased. No trapping of breathers takes place.Comment: 19 pages, 11 figure

Conformal dimension and random groups

We give a lower and an upper bound for the conformal dimension of the boundaries of certain small cancellation groups. We apply these bounds to the few relator and density models for random groups. This gives generic bounds of the following form, where $l$ is the relator length, going to infinity. (a) 1 + 1/C < \Cdim(\bdry G) < C l / \log(l), for the few relator model, and (b) 1 + l / (C\log(l)) < \Cdim(\bdry G) < C l, for the density model, at densities $d < 1/16$. In particular, for the density model at densities $d < 1/16$, as the relator length $l$ goes to infinity, the random groups will pass through infinitely many different quasi-isometry classes.Comment: 32 pages, 4 figures. v2: Final version. Main result improved to density < 1/16. Many minor improvements. To appear in GAF

The Exact Ground State of the Frenkel-Kontorova Model with Repeated Parabolic Potential: I. Basic Results

The problem of finding the exact energies and configurations for the Frenkel-Kontorova model consisting of particles in one dimension connected to their nearest-neighbors by springs and placed in a periodic potential consisting of segments from parabolas of identical (positive) curvature but arbitrary height and spacing, is reduced to that of minimizing a certain convex function defined on a finite simplex.Comment: 12 RevTeX pages, using AMS-Fonts (amssym.tex,amssym.def), 6 Postscript figures, accepted by Phys. Rev.

Role of unstable periodic orbits in phase transitions of coupled map lattices

The thermodynamic formalism for dynamical systems with many degrees of freedom is extended to deal with time averages and fluctuations of some macroscopic quantity along typical orbits, and applied to coupled map lattices exhibiting phase transitions. Thereby, it turns out that a seed of phase transition is embedded as an anomalous distribution of unstable periodic orbits, which appears as a so-called q-phase transition in the spatio-temporal configuration space. This intimate relation between phase transitions and q-phase transitions leads to one natural way of defining transitions and their order in extended chaotic systems. Furthermore, a basis is obtained on which we can treat locally introduced control parameters as macroscopic ``temperature'' in some cases involved with phase transitions.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figures; further explanation and 2 figures are added (minor revision

Stability of non-time-reversible phonobreathers

Non-time reversible phonobreathers are non-linear waves that can transport energy in coupled oscillator chains by means of a phase-torsion mechanism. In this paper, the stability properties of these structures have been considered. It has been performed an analytical study for low-coupling solutions based upon the so called {\em multibreather stability theorem} previously developed by some of the authors [Physica D {\bf 180} 235]. A numerical analysis confirms the analytical predictions and gives a detailed picture of the existence and stability properties for arbitrary frequency and coupling.Comment: J. Phys. A.:Math. and Theor. In Press (2010

Heteroclinic intersections between Invariant Circles of Volume-Preserving Maps

We develop a Melnikov method for volume-preserving maps with codimension one invariant manifolds. The Melnikov function is shown to be related to the flux of the perturbation through the unperturbed invariant surface. As an example, we compute the Melnikov function for a perturbation of a three-dimensional map that has a heteroclinic connection between a pair of invariant circles. The intersection curves of the manifolds are shown to undergo bifurcations in homologyComment: LaTex with 10 eps figure

Optical structure and polarization of the western hot spot of Pictor A

HST images of the western hot spot of the nearby FRII radio galaxy Pictor A resolve the hot spot into an amorphous region of highly polarized wisps. The high polarization (>~ 50%) indicates that the optical emission is synchrotron radiation and that the magnetic field structure has been well resolved. The magnetic field is oriented nearly perpendicular to the jet axis and apparently very uniform. We interpret these observations in terms of a compressed magnetic field at the working surface where the jet impinges on the intergalactic medium some 100 kpc from the nucleus of the host galaxy. Keywords: Polarization --- radiation mechanisms: nonthermal --- galaxies: active --- galaxies: individual: Pictor A --- galaxies: jets.Comment: uuencoded compressed postscript. The preprint is also available at http://www.ast.cam.ac.uk/preprint/PrePrint.htm

Evidence for changes in historic and future groundwater levels in the UK

We examine the evidence for climate-change impacts on groundwater levels provided by studies of the historical observational record, and future climate-change impact modelling. To date no evidence has been found for systematic changes in groundwater drought frequency or intensity in the UK, but some evidence of multi-annual to decadal coherence of groundwater levels and large-scale climate indices has been found, which should be considered when trying to identify any trends. We analyse trends in long groundwater level time-series monitored in seven observation boreholes in the Chalk aquifer, and identify statistically significant declines at four of these sites, but do not attempt to attribute these to a change in a stimulus. The evidence for the impacts of future climate change on UK groundwater recharge and levels is limited. The number of studies that have been undertaken is small and different approaches have been adopted to quantify impacts. Furthermore, these studies have generally focused on relatively small regions and reported local findings. Consequently, it has been difficult to compare them between locations. We undertake some additional analysis of the probabilistic outputs of the one recent impact study that has produced coherent multi-site projections of changes in groundwater levels. These results suggest reductions in annual and average summer levels, and increases in average winter levels, by the 2050s under a high greenhouse gas emissions scenario, at most of the sites modelled, when expressed by the median of the ensemble of simulations. It is concluded, however, that local hydrogeological conditions can be an important control on the simulated response to a future climate projection