The formation of the Christian biblical canon

Reviewed Book: McDonald, Lee M. The formation of the Christian biblical canon. Peabody, Mass: Hendrickson Pubs, 1995

Extraordinary Gentlemen: the Economic League, business networks, and organised labour in war planning and rearmament

For an organisation active for three-quarters of the twentieth century and heavily backed by some of Britain’s largest companies, it is astonishing how little is known about the Economic League. Founded after the First World War by well-known and influential individuals from the upper echelons of Business to ‘disseminate economic knowledge [and] put forward the case for capitalism amongst the working class’, ephemera produced by the League, especially for the period between the world wars, was circulated by the million and still survives in significant quantities. However, the totality of published academic historical research into its activities extends to just one article and one (self- published) book, by Arthur McIvor in 1989 and Mike Hughes in 1994, respectively. Never at any point willing to divulge past secrets, the League denied McIvor access to its archives while Hughes based his work on a handful of published sources. Late 1980s and early 1990s investigative journalism by Paul Foot and others into the League’s systematic blacklisting of workers brought about its collapse in 1993, and with it – it appears – the deliberate destruction of its records. Thus, until now, Hughes’ work marked the end of research into its activities. This paper has two goals. Firstly, it attempts to answer some of the unknown questions about the League’s membership and finance. The second is to understand the League’s ‘power’ by viewing it through a different lens, not only as a shadowy organisation whose dubious activities warrant highlighting, but as an organisation with aims and objectives like any other, which took decisions that can be evaluated and whose success one can attempt to measure. To achieve this, the years of initial defence planning and subsequent arms expenditure programme from c.1932 to 1940 are re-examined from an employer, rather than employee, perspective, drawing on previously unused material from the Scottish Business Archives

An investigation of arc discharging on negatively biased dielectric conductor samples in a plasma

Proposals are now being developed for the construction of high-power photovoltaic systems for operation in low Earth orbit, where the plasma number density is about 1,000 to 1,000,000 per cubic cm. Existing data indicate that interactions between the plasma and high-voltage surfaces of an orbiting power system will occur. In ground tests, where the applied voltage is increased negatively from ground, the array current collection shows an approximately linear rise until it terminates in arcing at greater than several hundred volts negative. This arcing may reduce the power generation efficiency and could possibly affect the low-level logic circuits of the spacecraft. Therefore it is important that the arcing phenomenon be well understood. This study is a survey of the behavior of different dielectric-conductor samples, including a solar cell module, that were biased negatively in a low-density plasma environment with the intent of defining arc discharge conditions and characteristics. Procedures and results are discussed

Studies of the internal properties of jets and jet substructure with the ATLAS Detector

The internal structure of jets produced in pp collisions at the LHC is measured using the ATLAS detector in an inclusive jet sample corresponding to 35pb-1 of pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV. Classical jet shape and energy flow measurements are complemented with measurements of new substructure observables with comparisons made to several leading order parton shower Monte Carlo programs. The jet invariant mass and \kt splitting scale are measured for anti-kt jets with a distance parameter of R=1.0 and Cambridge-Aachen jets with R=1.2. Furthermore, a splitting and filtering procedure is applied to the Cambridge-Aachen jets. These tools are then utilized for the first measurements of the filtered jet mass at the LHC in the inclusive jet sample as well the W+1 jet sample, in which a hadronic W mass peak is observed in the jet invariant mass spectrum. A sample of candidate boosted top quark events is also analyzed in detail for the jet substructure properties of hadronic "top-jets" in the final state.Comment: Proceedings of the EPS-HEP 2011 Conference, 21 - 27 July 2011, Grenoble, Rhone-Alpes, Franc