1,618 research outputs found
Legislative Prayer: Historical Tradition and Contemporary Issues
Get PDFThe Establishment Clause of the First Amendment provides that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . . .”1 There is a great deal of confusion among scholars, lower federal courts, and the Justices of the Supreme Court over appropriate Establishment Clause principles,2 but it is at least clear that the government “may not coerce anyone to support or participate in religion or its exercise, or otherwise act in a way which establishes a state religion or religious faith, or tends to do so.”3 It has long been settled that state and local legislative bodies may, in harmony with the Establishment Clause, open meetings with prayers given by state-employed or volunteer clergy.4 Less clear is whether legislators themselves may (1) offer prayers in local government meetings, and (2) restrict the opportunity to give prayers to themselves. This Note reviews the history of legislative prayer in the United States and the Supreme Court’s decisions about clergy-led prayer practices, provides an overview of the current circuit-split on the issue of legislator-led prayer, argues that legislator-led prayer cannot be upheld under the same analysis used to allow clergy-led prayer, and proposes options for resolving the split
Interview with Chad Long
Get PDFChad Long talks about Honey Bucketshttps://digital.kenyon.edu/ps_interviews/1044/thumbnail.jp
Finding a Water Ethic through Religion, Aesthetics, Conflicts & the Law
Get PDFWater is important to humans for household uses, manufacturing, agriculture, ecological preservation, recreation, and many other interests. Legislators developing water policies often cannot reconcile conflicting water interests because they do not understand their regions’ water ethics. Ethics philosophers and legal analysts have performed extensive studies on environmental ethics and human values. These same experts, however, have neglected to separate water ethics from environmental ethics. In this article, I do not speculate on what the ideal water ethic should be. Instead, I use religion, aesthetics, water conflicts, and the law to exhibit that no single water ethic exists. Each continent, country, and region has its own water interests and water ethics. Governments and lobbyists should understand a region’s water ethic before writing policies or lobbying for policy changes. By understanding water ethics, these entities can more effectively allocate water resources
Fuzzy c-means clustering of web users for educational sites
Get PDFPublisher's version/PDFCharacterization of users is an important issue in the design and maintenance of websites. Analysis of the data from the World Wide Web faces certain challenges that are not commonly observed in conventional data analysis. The likelihood of bad or incomplete web usage data is higher than in conventional applications. The clusters and associations in web mining do not necessarily have crisp boundaries. Researchers have studied the possibility of using fuzzy sets for clustering of web resources. This paper presents clustering using a fuzzy c-means algorithm, on secondary data consisting of access logs from the World Wide Web. This type of analysis is called web usage mining, which involves applying data mining techniques to discover usage patterns from web data. The fuzzy c-means clustering was applied to the web visitors to three educational websites. The analysis shows the ability of the fuzzy c-means clustering to distinguish different user characteristics of these sites
Frame-Independence of Exclusive Amplitudes in the Light-Front Quantization
Get PDFWhile the particle-number-conserving convolution formalism established in the
Drell-Yan-West reference frame is frequently used to compute exclusive
amplitudes in the light-front quantization, this formalism is limited to only
those frames where the light-front helicities are not changed and the good
(plus) component of the current remains unmixed. For an explicit demonstration
of such criteria, we present the relations between the current matrix elements
in the two typical reference frames used for calculations of the exclusive
amplitudes, i.e. the Drell-Yan-West and Breit frames and investigate both
pseudoscalar and vector electromagnetic currents in detail. We find that the
light-front helicities are unchanged and the good component of the current does
not mix with the other components of the current under the transformation
between these two frames. Thus, the pseudoscalar and vector form factors
obtained by the diagonal convolution formalism in both frames must indeed be
identical. However, such coincidence between the Drell-Yan-West and Breit
frames does not hold in general. We give an explicit example in which the
light-front helicities are changed and the plus component of the current is
mixed with other components under the change of reference frame. In such a
case, the relationship between the frames should be carefully analyzed before
the established convolution formalism in the Drell-Yan-West frame is used.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figure
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