Trade, urban hinterlands and market integration, 1300-1600: a summing up

Paper given at a conference organised by the Centre for Metropolitan History and supported by the Economic and Social Research Council, 7 July 199

Infusing a Paradigm of Mission and Multiplication into the Greater Ohio District of the Wesleyan Church

This dissertation will explore appropriate methodology for reinvigorating the Greater Ohio District of The Wesleyan Church by creating a new paradigm of mission and multiplication. Statistics show there is a declining number of congregations in The Wesleyan Church of North America, and specifically, within the Greater Ohio District. Local churches are being closed at a rapid rate and multi-faceted congregational multiplication is needed to replace these lost congregations and restore missional presence. The narrative of the District is one of fear, fatigue, and closed-mindedness; discriminatory against church multiplication due to nearly two decades of perceived failed attempts which resulted in massive financial losses and indebtedness. If the district is to survive and increase in presence, ministry, and mission, new congregations are needed. This can happen through multiple avenues, but this dissertation will make the claim that there must be an infusion of a new paradigm that will change the narrative of the District; that through biblical imperative, theological re-alignment, and a new missionally driven strategy, the declining District can be resuscitated and existing congregations can individually and collectively advance God’s Kingdom through birthing new congregations. Section 1 describes the crisis the District (and denomination) is presently facing. Section 2 will explore the practices and beliefs which can be, have been, or are currently being employed to rectify this crisis. Section 3 will describe the need for theological realignment and a synthesis of best practices for producing a paradigm of mission and multiplication which the author believes to be readily adaptable and ultimately effective for changing the narrative of Greater Ohio. These practices have been verified by the author’s extensive research of five districts within The Wesleyan Church in which this type of cultural shift is taking place. Sections 4 and 5 describe the artifact for the dissertation. This is a website specifically designed to help facilitate the goal of infusing a new paradigm for mission and multiplication into the District. Section 6 is the postscript in which the author will describe his journey in the development of this paper and expected results for the thoughts outlined in the thesis. Finally, the artifact is presented as described in sections 4 and 5

Problems With Truth: Scope, Mixing, and Truth Pluralism

In this paper, I will be taking up the debate between monistic and pluralistic inflationary theories of truth. Truth monism claims that there is one explanatory story which accounts for the truth of all and only true propositions. There seem to be, however, certain domains of discourse wherein monistic theories fail. If monistic theories cannot provide an explanation for how all true propositions are true, then they would not be adequate theories of truth. Truth pluralism is motivated to avoid the scope problem. The pluralist sees that there are as many truth properties as there are domains of discourse. A true proposition about objects in the physical world will be true because of a truth property belonging to objects in the physical world. A true proposition about funny jokes will be true because of a truth property pertaining to funny jokes. The nature of truth is variant across discourses, but there is no domain in which a pluralistic truth theory cannot provide an explanation for the truth of true propositions. The scope problem is thus avoided. But truth pluralism encounters a new problem, one of its own creation. If two or more pluralistically true propositions stand as premises and conclusion in a valid argument, in what way is the inference true? Logic preserves truth between propositions, but in cases where the truth to be preserved is heterogeneous, it is unclear as to what the truth property would be. This is the (logical) mixing problem, and it appears to be as intractable as the scope problem. I argue that the debate between truth pluralists and monists reduces to the choice of accepting the epistemic consequences of the scope problem or accepting the logical consequences of the mixing problem. The scope problem assumes truth monism, but also a specific epistemological view about the conditions for using the truth predicate. The mixing problem entails that we revise logic in some way

A Formal Model of Ambiguity and its Applications in Machine Translation

Systems that process natural language must cope with and resolve ambiguity. In this dissertation, a model of language processing is advocated in which multiple inputs and multiple analyses of inputs are considered concurrently and a single analysis is only a last resort. Compared to conventional models, this approach can be understood as replacing single-element inputs and outputs with weighted sets of inputs and outputs. Although processing components must deal with sets (rather than individual elements), constraints are imposed on the elements of these sets, and the representations from existing models may be reused. However, to deal efficiently with large (or infinite) sets, compact representations of sets that share structure between elements, such as weighted finite-state transducers and synchronous context-free grammars, are necessary. These representations and algorithms for manipulating them are discussed in depth in depth. To establish the effectiveness and tractability of the proposed processing model, it is applied to several problems in machine translation. Starting with spoken language translation, it is shown that translating a set of transcription hypotheses yields better translations compared to a baseline in which a single (1-best) transcription hypothesis is selected and then translated, independent of the translation model formalism used. More subtle forms of ambiguity that arise even in text-only translation (such as decisions conventionally made during system development about how to preprocess text) are then discussed, and it is shown that the ambiguity-preserving paradigm can be employed in these cases as well, again leading to improved translation quality. A model for supervised learning that learns from training data where sets (rather than single elements) of correct labels are provided for each training instance and use it to learn a model of compound word segmentation is also introduced, which is used as a preprocessing step in machine translation

Effects of geometry on blast-induced loadings

Simulations of blasts in an urban environment were performed using Loci/BLAST, a fulleatured fluid dynamics simulation code, and analyzed. A two-structure urban environment blast case was used to perform a mesh refinement study. Results show that mesh spacing on and around the structure must be 12.5 cm or less to resolve fluid dynamic features sufficiently to yield accurate results. The effects of confinement were illustrated by analyzing a blast initiated from the same location with and without the presence of a neighboring structure. Analysis of extreme pressures and impulses on showed that confinement can increase blast loading by more than 200 percent

The drinking water contaminant dibromoacetonitrile delays G1-S transition and suppresses Chk1 activation at broken replication forks

Abstract Chlorination of drinking water protects humans from water-born pathogens, but it also produces low concentrations of dibromoacetonitrile (DBAN), a common disinfectant by-product found in many water supply systems. DBAN is not mutagenic but causes DNA breaks and elevates sister chromatid exchange in mammalian cells. The WHO issued guidelines for DBAN after it was linked with cancer of the liver and stomach in rodents. How this haloacetonitrile promotes malignant cell transformation is unknown. Using fission yeast as a model, we report here that DBAN delays G1-S transition. DBAN does not hinder ongoing DNA replication, but specifically blocks the serine 345 phosphorylation of the DNA damage checkpoint kinase Chk1 by Rad3 (ATR) at broken replication forks. DBAN is particularly damaging for cells with defects in the lagging-strand DNA polymerase delta. This sensitivity can be explained by the dependency of pol delta mutants on Chk1 activation for survival. We conclude that DBAN targets a process or protein that acts at the start of S phase and is required for Chk1 phosphorylation. Taken together, DBAN may precipitate cancer by perturbing S phase and by blocking the Chk1-dependent response to replication fork damage