From Pilgrim to Tourist and Back Again: Travel as a Sacred Journey

This paper explores the gray area that exists between the semantic differentiation of the terms pilgrim and tourist. Understanding all travel in light of Graburn's "sacred journey", the importance of this semantic difference is diminished. I use original Roman itineraria (travelogues) to trace travel to the Holy Land spanning nearly 1600 years. I include my own ethnographic field observations as a modern travelogue of a visit to the Holy Land. Ultimately, this paper provides a sweeping view of travel and its ability through fleeting moments of earnest self-fulfillment, memory creation, and embodied experience to function as a dynamic (re)creator of identity

The Power of Perception: Authentic Inauthenticity of Christian Pilgrimage Sites in the Galilee

This paper explores the intersection of empirical archaeological knowledge and historical tradition at sites in the Galilee. Tracing the accounts of the earliest pilgrims to the Holy Land, I examine how some sites in the Galilee came to be associated with Biblical events and how those associations, combined with modern archaeology, affect perceptions of these sites by modern pilgrims. I described these sites where traditional narratives are directly contested by modern archaeology as sites of 'authentic inauthenticity'. In many cases, modern archaeological evidence does little to dissuade pilgrims of the importance and meaning found at these sites

Opportunities for Global-Competence Education in Secondary Extracurricular Programs

Globalization has formed a complex world of challenge and promise for countries, communities, and individuals. Global-competence education seeks to train students in the skills and understandings they will need to relate to other ideas, people, and ways of life in this 21st-Century reality. To date, the university has been the primary setting for global-competence efforts in education, but recent trends have encouraged its translation to K-12 education. This study proposes that secondary extracurricular programs offer an additional, complementary opportunity for students to bolster their global competence before graduating from high school. Outlining the process of including global competence in the existing framework of an extracurricular character- and leadership-development program makes apparent the limitations of secondary extracurricular programs in global-competence education but, more importantly, the great opportunities they present students, educators, and society at large

Price Signaling in a Two-Market Duopoly

Within any industry, firms typically produce related products over multiple subsequent periods in an attempt to build consumer loyalty and achieve continued sales. Apple releases new iPhones and car companies produce new models every year, relying on consumers believing each new product is of high quality. Firms rely on the spillover effects from previous markets, where firms are able to more easily demonstrate their product\u27s quality to the consumers before purchase. The goal is to find a range of prices which allows the high quality firm to distinguish its type to consumers via the price pH and if spillover effects in subsequent markets can occur. We look at a duopoly of two firms, of high and low qualities, where each firm produces a product in an initial market and a second, related product in a subsequent market. Using each firm\u27s expected profits, based on Bayesian probabilities, we analyze a firm\u27s mimicking strategy to find the range of pH that allows for a separating equilibrium and spillover effects. In a second market where firms are the same qualities as in the first market, the high quality firm experiences spillover effects and can signal its quality with a lower price than in the first market. When firms change qualities in the second market, no spillover effect occurs and the newly high quality firm must increase pH from the previous market in order to separate

A Bosonic Analog of a Topological Dirac Semi-Metal: Effective Theory, Neighboring Phases, and Wire Construction

We construct a bosonic analog of a two-dimensional topological Dirac Semi-Metal (DSM). The low-energy description of the most basic 2D DSM model consists of two Dirac cones at positions $\pm\mathbf{k}_0$ in momentum space. The local stability of the Dirac cones is guaranteed by a composite symmetry $Z_2^{\mathcal{TI}}$, where $\mathcal{T}$ is time-reversal and $\mathcal{I}$ is inversion. This model also exhibits interesting time-reversal and inversion symmetry breaking electromagnetic responses. In this work we construct a bosonic version by replacing each Dirac cone with a copy of the $O(4)$ Nonlinear Sigma Model (NLSM) with topological theta term and theta angle $\theta=\pm \pi$. One copy of this NLSM also describes the gapless surface termination of the 3D Bosonic Topological Insulator (BTI). We compute the time-reversal and inversion symmetry breaking electromagnetic responses for our model and show that they are twice the value one gets in the DSM case matching what one might expect from, for example, a bosonic Chern insulator. We also investigate the stability of the BSM model and find that the composite $Z_2^{\mathcal{TI}}$ symmetry again plays an important role. Along the way we clarify many aspects of the surface theory of the BTI including the electromagnetic response, the charges and statistics of vortex excitations, and the stability to symmetry-allowed perturbations. We briefly comment on the relation between the various descriptions of the $O(4)$ NLSM with $\theta=\pi$ used in this paper (a dual vortex description and a description in terms of four massless fermions) and the recently proposed dual description of the BTI surface in terms of $2+1$ dimensional Quantum Electrodynamics with two flavors of fermion ($N=2$ QED$_3$). In a set of four Appendixes we review some of the tools used in the paper, and also derive some of the more technical results.Comment: 33 pages, 4 appendixes, v2: small corrections and added references, v3: new section added (Sec. VI) and additional references. To appear in PR

Re-conceptualizing Recreation-based Social Worlds

Social worlds are a distinct form of human organization in which individuals organize themselves by using communication channels to spread knowledge and culture around a shared interest. Over the past thirty years, the leisure sciences have increasingly used the social world vernacular to describe population samples of recreation-based groups. While important to the leisure and recreation disciplines, social world vernacular can be confusing, often leading to improper use. This research returns to the original definition of social worlds created by Shibutani and reexamines what social worlds were intended to be in the context of recreation and tourism. By reexamining the original definition of social worlds, the researchers identified three major characteristics and those characteristics’ ability to predict and make comparisons among social worlds and their membership. These characteristics include a social world’s shared culture, shared communication channels, and shared knowledge

Galois Representations From Non-Torsion Points on Elliptic Curves

Working from well-known results regarding l-adic Galois representations attached to elliptic curves arising from successive preimages of the identity, we consider a natural deformation. Given a non-zero point P on a curve, we investigate the Galois action on the splitting fields of preimages of P under multiplication-by-l maps. We give a group-theoretic structure theorem for the corresponding Galois group, and state a conjecture regarding composita of two such splitting fields