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

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

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

Metal enrichment in galactic winds

Observations give evidences of the presence of metals in the intergalactic medium (IGM). The stars responsible for transforming hydrogen and helium into more complex atoms do not form outside the galaxies in the standard scenario of galaxy formation. Supernovae-driven winds and their associated feedback was proposed as a possible solution to explain such enrichment of the IGM. It turned out that a proper modelling of supernovae explosions within a turbulent interstellar medium (ISM) is a difficult task. Recent advances have been obtained using a multiphase approach to solve for the thermal state of the ISM, plus some additional recipes to account for the kinetic effect of supernovae on the galactic gas. We briefly describe here our implementation of supernovae feedback within the RAMSES code, and apply it to the formation and evolution of isolated galaxies of various masses and angular momenta. We have explored under what conditions a galactic wind can develop, if one considers only a quiescent mode of star formation. We have also characterized the distribution and evolution of metallicity in the gas outflow spreading in the IGM.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures, To appear in the proceedings of the CRAL-Conference Series I "Chemodynamics: from first stars to local galaxies", Lyon 10-14 July 2006, France, Eds. Emsellem, Wozniak, Massacrier, Gonzalez, Devriendt, Champavert, EAS Publications Serie

Hyperbolicity of varieties supporting a variation of Hodge structure

We generalize former results of Zuo and the first author showing some hyperbolicity properties of varieties supporting a variation of Hodge structure. Our proof only uses the special curvature properties of period domains. In particular, in contrast to the former approaches, it does not use any result on the asymptotic behaviour of the Hodge metric

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&