Death rites in Korea : the Confucian-Christian interplay

This study examines Christian death rites in modem Korea in the light of the complex interplay of Confucian and Christian values. It is based on the fact that Korea, once the most thoroughly Confucianized state in East Asia, has become one of the most dynamic Christian countries in the world within the space of a century. The study uncovers the ways in which Korean Christians, in their death rites, have struggled to balance 'religious piety to God' and 'filial duty to ancestors', which represent core Christian and Confucian values respectively. They cannot simply choose the one at the expense of the other as both are integral to their identity. This study innovatively classifies death rites into three categories: ritual before death (bible-copying), ritual at death (funerary rites), and ritual after death (ancestral ritual). After presenting historical and contemporary data of the three death rites, the study provides two different types of analysis: one is a historical-theological analysis and the other sociological-anthropological. Drawing upon historical and theological perspectives, it reveals the underlying principle of complex phenomena surrounding the three death rites. The thesis then explores these death rites in terms of three sociological and anthropological theoretical themes, viz. embodiment, exchange, and material culture. The three death rites are viewed as a 'total social phenomenon', a concept derived from Marcel Mauss' study and employed here as an overarching interpretive framework.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Fast Compartment Model Calibration using Annealed and Transformed Variational Inference

Compartment models are widely used in climate science, epidemiology, and physics, among other disciplines. An important example of a compartment model is susceptible-infected-recovered (SIR) model, which can describe disease dynamics. Bayesian inference for SIR models is challenging because likelihood evaluation requires solving expensive ordinary differential equations. Although variational inference (VI) can be a fast alternative to the traditional Bayes approaches, VI has limited applicability due to boundary issues and local optima problems. To address these challenges, we propose flexible VI methods based on deep generative models that do not require parametric assumptions on the variational distribution. We embed a surjective transformation in our framework to avoid posterior truncation at the boundary. We provide theoretical conditions that guarantee the success of the algorithm. Furthermore, our temperature annealing scheme can avoid being trapped in local optima through a series of intermediate posteriors. We apply our method to variants of SIR models, illustrating that the proposed method can provide fast and accurate inference compared to its competitors

Entropic measure of directional emissions in microcavity lasers

We propose a noble notion of the directional emission in microcavity lasers. First, Shannon entropy of the far-field profiles in the polar coordinate can quantify the degree of unidirectionality of the emission, while previous notions about the unidirectionality can not efficiently measure in the robust range against a variation of the deformation parameter. Second, a divergence angle of the directional emission is defined phenomenologically in terms of full width at half maximum, and it is barely applicable to a complicated peak structure. However, Shannon entropy of semi-marginal probability of the far-field profiles in the cartesian coordinate can present equivalent results, and moreover it is applicable to even the cases with a complicated peak structure of the emission

Marangoni Effects on the Bubble Dynamics in a Pressure Driven Flow

The motion of air bubbles and water drops in a Hele-Shaw cell filled with a silicone oil has been studied experimentally and theoretically. By adding a predetermined amount of a surfactant to the water drops we attempted to investigate the surfactant influence systematically. While the motion of air bubbles was in reasonable agreement with the predictions of Taylor and Saffman, water drops behaved quite differently in that the translational velocities were smaller by an order of magnitude and their shapes were very unusual as observed previously by Kopf-Sill and Homsy. Assuming that the surrounding fluid wets the solid wall and the bubble (or the drop) surface is rigid due to the surfactant influence, we have estimated the translational velocity of an elliptic bubble. The calculated velocities were in good agreement with the observations indicating that the surfactant influence could retard the bubble motion significantly. The present study also indicates that the unusual bubble shapes are also due to the surfactant influence