The smell of God: scent trails from Ficino to Baudelaire

God has a smell. Or rather, our sense of smell can bring us to a deeper knowledge of God. This is one aspect of a theory which runs through much of European history from the Renaissance onwards, with fluctuating intensity and with fundamental variations. It has been referred to, principally, as the theory of signatures, the theory of universal analogy, and the theory of correspondences, and is originally derived from Plato's philosophy of Ideas. The most common thread of the doctrine is that there are correspondences between the material and the spiritual worlds and that the material world can therefore be read like a book, revealing the secrets of the spiritual world. Another common thread of the doctrine is that the senses, which diffusely allow us to experience the material world, can be united as one, enabling our complete grasp of spiritual harmony, of the ideal world. The senses have usually figured highly in the doctrine of correspondences in general, as enabling this leap from the material to the spiritual. But individual senses have enjoyed varying degrees of attention throughout time. Smell has not been the most popular of them, but it is markedly emphasised by two users of the doctrine, the eighteenth-century Swedish scientist, theologian and mystic, Emanuel Swedenborg, and the French Symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire. What Nathalie Wourm attempts here is a short history of the idea of a spiritual scent, from the Neoplatonist thinkers of the fifteenth century to the present day

Subjugating the Beast and the Angel: Suggestions of Dante's Inferno in "Altarwise by owl-light"

‘Altarwise by owl-light’ is one of Thomas’s most intransigent poems, an intricately woven text of images and symbols. It has generated, over the years, a great variety of interpretations ranging from the astrological, to the Freudian to the Surrealistic . The reading of this poem often involves a search for sources, the unravelling of references and allusions. For instance, in some of the sonnets’ most seemingly surreal lines , at the end of Sonnet V, an unexpected source has been discovered by Walford Davies and Ralph Maud. In - Cross-stroked salt Adam to the frozen angel Pin-legged on pole-hills with a black medusa By waste seas where the white bear quoted Virgil And sirens singing from our lady’s sea-straw. - the image of the ‘waste seas where the white bear quoted Virgil’ originates in an allegorical text by Anatole France entitled L’île des pingouins . There now remains the problem of finding out who the ‘frozen angel’ and the ‘black medusa’ are, and of piecing together the elements. This paper will offer suggestions regarding these and other images, by concentrating on allusions, in the poem, to Dante’s Inferno. In the process, it will raise a previously unrecognised possibility in the core interpretation of the poem

Book review: no more generating knowledge for its own sake, research creativity is the new frontier

As technological creativity, corporate research, and talent flows become more important than ever, Globalization and Technocapitalism explores the manner in which globalisation acquires new contextual features that will become central to the macro-social dynamics of 21st century societies. Nathalie Mitev recognises the book is not for a broad readership but argues that any invested reader will find many rewarding insights. Globalization and Technocapitalism: The Political Economy of Corporate Power and Technological Domination. Luis Suarez-Villa. Ashgate. 2012

Congolese Children and Youth: USCCB Network Unaccompanied Refugee Minor Program Experiences and Implications

While over thousands of Congolese have resettled through the adult resettlement program, the USCCB network has assisted a smaller number of approximately 100 children and youth between 2007 through early 2013. However, Unaccompanied Refugee Minors (URM) from the DRC represent the country of origin of the largest number of overseas arrivals to the URM program network.One of USCCB's roles is to examine trends affecting the URM program and address issues related to capacity development. We wished to understand the individual and program needs for this population in particular, as resettlement of Congolese URMs is expected to continue and increase in the next several years. Between November 2012 and March 2013, USCCB conducted informal interviews with program managers by phone or in person, or received written survey responses from each program. The responses of all twelve network programs are reflected in this synthesis of the collective experience providing resettlement support to the Congolese URMs from 2007 through early 2013. A number of themes emerged from the URM program responses which are described throughout this paper which also reflects the knowledge and experience of USCCB staff in conducting case coordination and placement and capacity development

Our Future Southeastern Turkish Frontiers. CEPS Policy Brief No. 6, October 2001

[From the Introduction]. Today’s southeast Turkey has historically been the homeland of a large number of diverse ethnic groups. Nowadays, in many town and villages of the region the largest ethnic group is Kurdish. Turkish officials under Turgut Özal in the 1990s for the first time admitted there may be around 10 million Kurds living in Turkey. Other estimates indicate a Kurdish population of around 15 million. Adding to this figure the additional 10 million or so Kurds living in Iran, Iraq, Syria and the former Soviet Union, the Kurdish people represent the largest ethnic group in the world without a state of their own

Statistical estimation of jump rates for a specific class of Piecewise Deterministic Markov Processes

We consider the class of Piecewise Deterministic Markov Processes (PDMP), whose state space is $\R\_{+}^{*}$, that possess an increasing deterministic motion and that shrink deterministically when they jump. Well known examples for this class of processes are Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) window size process and the processes modeling the size of a "marked" {\it Escherichia coli} cell. Having observed the PDMP until its $n$th jump, we construct a nonparametric estimator of the jump rate $\lambda$. Our main result is that for $D$ a compact subset of $\R\_{+}^{*}$, if $\lambda$ is in the H{\''{o}}lder space ${\mathcal H}^s({\mathcal D})$, the squared-loss error of the estimator is asymptotically close to the rate of $n^{-s/(2s+1)}$. Simulations illustrate the behavior of our estimator

Credit derivatives: instruments of hedging and factors of instability. The example of ?Credit Default Swaps? on French reference entities

Through a long-period analysis of the inter-temporal relations between the French markets for credit default swaps (CDS), shares and bonds between 2001 and 2008, this article shows how a financial innovation like CDS could heighten financial instability. After describing the operating principles of credit derivatives in general and CDS in particular, we construct two difference VAR models on the series: the share return rates, the variation in bond spreads and the variation in CDS spreads for thirteen French companies, with the aim of bringing to light the relations between these three markets. According to these models, there is indeed an interdependence between the French share, CDS and bond markets, with a strong influence of the share market on the other two. This interdependence increases during periods of tension on the markets (2001-2002, and since the summer of 2007).Comment: 2

Choice of theme in John Fowles's Mantissa

I have chosen the second chapter of my thesis (The Theme of Art and the Artist in John Fowles's Mantissa) as opposed to any of the remaining five for publication because I believe it to be largely self-sufficient. However, a short note on the study as a whole is, I think called for here. The basis of the thesis is the discussion of the major thesis of John Fowles's novel Mantissa (1982), with special emphasis on the literary devices which the author chose to use in order to develop it.peer-reviewe