History of the Study of Theology

Traces the study of theology from its beginning until the beginning of the 20th centur

History of the Study of Theology

Traces the study of theology from its beginning until the beginning of the 20th centur

My cautious optimism for Zimbabwe’s 2012 elections

In this Opinion, prominent Zimbabwean civil society activist Briggs Bomba argues that 2012 could to be a decisive year in Zimbabwe’s recent history. A number of domestic and international factors could come together to force the regime to hold democratic elections, and the transformed international scene – with the influence of the Arab spring and the NATO-led Libyan intervention – could create an auspicious environment for the country’s long-awaited transition. Bomba also insists that the continued pressure from Zimbabwe’s vibrant civil society organisations is vital for the real democratisation of Zimbabwe’s institutions. For any transition to become truly meaningful it ‘must be completed in the hard years after democratic election’

Neither ātman Nor anattā: Tapering Our Conception of Selfhood

I provide critical discussion of conception of and talk of psychic integration which I take to be both excessive and deficient; these viciously extreme positions are championed by the Apostle Paul and St. Augustine (and both their religious and their secular cultural descendants in the West), and by Jacques Lacan and María Lugones (and their contemporaries), respectively. I suggest that we must negotiate a Buddhist-inspired understanding located between these extremes in endorsing any acceptable conception of the self, generally speaking—a conception which, contra the strong antirealist about selves, allows for the continued use of selfhood in everyday discourse, but which, contra the strong realist about selves, does not fall into an unhealthy idealization of anything approximating perfect psychic wholeness

Some explicit badly approximable pairs

I consider the Diophantine approximation problem of sup-norm simultaneous rational approximation with common denominator of a pair of irrational numbers, and compute explicitly some pairs with large approximation constant. One of these pairs is the most badly approximable pair yet computed.Comment: 2 figure

A Bayesian approach to stochastic cost-effectiveness analysis

The aim of this paper is to discuss the use of Bayesian methods in cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) and the common ground between Bayesian and traditional frequentist approaches. A further aim is to explore the use of the net benefit statistic and its advantages over the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) statistic. In particular, the use of cost-effectiveness acceptability curves is examined as a device for presenting the implications of uncertainty in a CEA to decision makers. Although it is argued that the interpretation of such curves as the probability that an intervention is cost-effective given the data requires a Bayesian approach, this should generate no misgivings for the frequentist. Furthermore, cost-effectiveness acceptability curves estimated using the net benefit statistic are exactly equivalent to those estimated from an appropriate analysis of ICERs on the cost-effectiveness plane. The principles examined in this paper are illustrated by application to the cost-effectiveness of blood pressure control in the U.K. Prospective Diabetes Study (UKPDS 40). Due to a lack of good-quality prior information on the cost and effectiveness of blood pressure control in diabetes, a Bayesian analysis assuming an uninformative prior is argued to be most appropriate. This generates exactly the same cost-effectiveness results as a standard frequentist analysis

Generation i-Pod: from apathy to engagement

Youth political participation is a topical issue in 2010. Not only are politicians and political scientists alike interested in whether younger voters will turn out in the 2010 General Election; there is an ongoing debate as to whether the voting age should be lowered. In part this drive to lower the voting age is driven by a desire to re-engage young people with the political process. A recent survey by the Children’s Society stated that Stephen Fry is the most popular choice for Prime Minister and that fewer than one in ten young people (9 per cent) think that politicians can be trusted