Novel Preaching: Tips from Top Writers on Crafting Creative Sermons

Title: Novel preaching: tips from top writers on crafting creative sermons. Author: Alyce M McKenzie. Publisher: Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, ©2010. ISBN: 978066423322

Prophetic Preaching: A Pastoral Approach

Title: Prophetic preaching : a pastoral approach. Author: Leonora Tubbs Tisdale. Publisher: Louisville, Ky. : Westminster John Knox Press, ©2010. ISBN: 978066423332

Mediated Contests and Strategic Foundations for Contest Success Functions

This paper examines the foundations of arbitrary contest success functions (CSFs) in two distinct types of contests – unmediated and mediated contests. In an unmediated contest, CSFs arise as the (interim) players’ equilibrium beliefs of a two-stage game – the gun-butter game – in which players choose an activity (appropriative vs. productive) in the first stage, and apply effort to their activity in the second stage. In this view a CSF is rationalizable if a contest is induced on the equilibrium path of the gun-butter game. In the second approach, a CSF is the result of the optimal design of an administrator. Here, the designer seeks to maximize his utility by implementing a probability distribution on the set of contestants. However, he is curbed by a disutility term which represents the underlying institutional constraints or the designer’s preferences. Both approaches provide foundations for arbitrary CSFs with no restrictions on the number of contestants.Induced contests; Gun-butter game; Control costs

Inter and intra-group conflicts as a foundation for contest success functions

This paper introduces a notion of partitioned correlated equilibrium that extends Aumann's correlated equilibrium concept (1974, 1987). This concept captures the non-cooperative interactions arising simultaneously within and between groups. We build on this notion in order to provide a foundation for contest success functions (CSFs) in a game wherein contests arise endogenously. Our solution concept and analysis are general enough to give a foundation for any model of contest using standard equilibrium concepts like e.g., Nash, Bayesian-Nash or Perfect-Nash equilibria. In our environment, popular CSFs can be interpreted as a list of equilibrium conjectures held by players whenever they contemplate deviating from the ``peaceful outcome'' of the ``group formation game''. Our setup allows to relate the form of prominent CSFs with some textbook examples of quasi-linear utility functions, social utility functions in the spirit of Fehr and Schmidt (1999) and non-expected models of utility a la Quiggin (1981, 1982). We also show that our framework can accommodate situations in which agents cannot correlate their actions.Contest success functions; Correlated equilibrium; Inter and intra-group conflicts; Induced contests

A class of fast exact Bayesian filters in dynamical models with jumps

In this paper, we focus on the statistical filtering problem in dynamical models with jumps. When a particular application relies on physical properties which are modeled by linear and Gaussian probability density functions with jumps, an usualmethod consists in approximating the optimal Bayesian estimate (in the sense of the Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE)) in a linear and Gaussian Jump Markov State Space System (JMSS). Practical solutions include algorithms based on numerical approximations or based on Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods. In this paper, we propose a class of alternative methods which consists in building statistical models which share the same physical properties of interest but in which the computation of the optimal MMSE estimate can be done at a computational cost which is linear in the number of observations.Comment: 21 pages, 7 figure

An implicit scheme for solving the anisotropic diffusion of heat and cosmic rays in the RAMSES code

Astrophysical plasmas are subject to a tight connection between magnetic fields and the diffusion of particles, which leads to an anisotropic transport of energy. Under the fluid assumption, this effect can be reduced to an advection-diffusion equation augmenting the equations of magnetohydrodynamics. We introduce a new method for solving the anisotropic diffusion equation using an implicit finite-volume method with adaptive mesh refinement and adaptive time-stepping in the RAMSES code. We apply this numerical solver to the diffusion of cosmic ray energy, and diffusion of heat carried by electrons, which couple to the ion temperature. We test this new implementation against several numerical experiments and apply it to a simple supernova explosion with a uniform magnetic field.Comment: 11 pages, 10 figures, A&