Revisiting the Afterlife: The Inadequacies of Heaven and Hell

This paper deals with some of the ambiguities that are associated with the intermediate and final states after death. Whereas many in the church have dismissed these concepts as myths of the ancients, this discussion shows how the grounding of such beliefs in the Hebrew mindset was the key to Jesus’ own teachings about the afterlife. The argument begins by developing a biblical anthropology over against the modern naturalistic anthropologies that have largely dominated the philosophical and theological scenes. From here we look at the Old Testament concept of the afterlife, and how the modern view that the Hebrews were ambivalent about such a concept is plainly false. Then it is argued that the New Testament doctrines of heaven and hell, which become very specific at this point, are thoroughly indebted to Jewish underpinnings. Without this foundation there would be no clear divisions within the realms of the dead, but because Jesus and his followers assume the validity of the Old Testament material they are able to flesh out such eschatological questions as where Jesus went after death, and where the saint and reprobate will go today. Far from being a stale theological issue, this study has direct bearing upon how one evangelizes today. For when the specific concepts are grasped, the believer will realize that the lost are not going to hell, at least not yet

Natural Selection: A Stethoscopic Amphibious Installation.

This paper discusses emergence as a complex behaviour in the sound domain and presents a design strategy that was used in the creation of the sound installation Natural Selection to encourage the perception of sonic emergence. The interactions in Natural Selection are based on an algorithm derived from an innately sonic emergent ecological system found in nature, that of mating choices by female frogs within a calling male frog chorus. This paper outlines the design and implementation of the installation and describes the research behind its design, most notably the notion of embodiment within a sonic environment and its importance to the perception of sonic emergence

Some evidence on financial factors in the determination of aggregate business investment

Standard theories of investment behaviour have concentrated on the neoclassical and Tobin’s Q approaches, with most empirical work on aggregate data focusing on the former. In contrast, a separate literature on monetary transmission, centred on the credit channel and financial accelerator effects, has highlighted the potential impact of credit market imperfections in constraining the investment behaviour of firms. In this paper we present evidence at a macro level for the G7 countries that a broad range of financial variables, consistent with the valuation ratio, financial accelerator and credit channel approaches, are relevant determinants of business fixed investment above those variables normally included in traditional macroeconomic investment functions. The results indicate a wider incidence of these financial effects on investment than the existing literature, focused as it is on the US, would otherwise indicate

Productivity and equity returns: A century of evidence for 9 OECD countries

The share market boom in the 1990s is often linked to the acceleration in labour productivity over the same period. This paper explores the suggestions that labour productivity may be an inaccurate measure of firm’s cash flow which underlies equity valuations, and that innovations in productivity in the 1990s may have had only have temporary effects on capital productivity, the key element of the more correct measure of cash flow. Using a century of data for the OECD countries it is shown empirically that the link of productivity to share returns is indeed strongest for capital productivity, but generally the link is weaker that is sometimes maintained in the literature

Conformal Inflation Coupled to Matter

We formulate new conformal models of inflation and dark energy which generalise the Higgs-Dilaton scenario. We embed these models in unimodular gravity whose effect is to break scale invariance in the late time Universe. In the early Universe, inflation occurs close to a maximum of both the scalar potential and the scalar coupling to the Ricci scalar in the Jordan frame. At late times, the dilaton, which decouples from the dynamics during inflation, receives a potential term from unimodular gravity and leads to the acceleration of the Universe. We address two central issues in this scenario. First we show that the Damour-Polyalov mechanism, when non-relativistic matter is present prior to the start of inflation, sets the initial conditions for inflation at the maximum of the scalar potential. We then show that conformal invariance implies that matter particles are not coupled to the dilaton in the late Universe at the classical level. When fermions acquire masses at low energy, scale invariance is broken and quantum corrections induce a coupling between the dilaton and matter which is still small enough to evade the gravitational constraints in the solar system.Comment: 24 page

Institutional investors and corporate governance

The growing dominance of equity holdings by institutional investors, both domestic and international, is casting a sharp focus on their activities and owners and monitors of firms. It is suggested that whereas some general considerations arise in all cases, it is useful to separate discussion of the developments in the Anglo Saxon countries and continental Europe/Japan. The former is showing an increase in direct influence of institutions in place of the previous reliance on the takeover mechanism to discipline managers. This has arguably led to improved corporate performance. The latter remain more firmly in the bank-relationship based governance paradigm. On the other hand, such differences should not be exaggerated, and some convergence is discernible on a modified form of the Anglo Saxon paradigm where institutions are the primary actors in corporate governance generally. In Europe, EMU will provide a major spur to such convergence