Around The World In Eight Days

Theological schools in the two-thirds world struggle with untrained staff and inadequate resources. On-site evaluations, training workshops, automation projects and blitz cataloging are four ways Christian librarians can assist through short visits overseas. Good communication and preparation are essential for a successful visit. Follow-up communication can tum a short visit into a long-term partnership

Connecting the Gospel and Reality Via Fiction

Despite the fact that last year The Purpose Driven Life outsold Harry Potter 5, other than a blip around the time of Mel Gibson\u27s record breaking film The Passion of the Christ, there has been a steady decline in the number of Christian bookstores over the past two years. And yet religious books are big sellers. Popular fiction is strong. Evangelical publishers are moving beyond Christian versions of secular genres and even breaking new ground in some areas. Ray Blackston\u27s Flabbergasted (Revell, 2003) pokes fun at Southern church culture, where singles rank churches according to which has the best pick of the opposite sex. It has been called chick lit from a male point of view. The good news is that evangelical fiction IS getting better- there are fewer bad books being published. Publishers note more professionalism and solid technique from writers, as well as a less sanitized view of life. Eerdman\u27s is bringing out fiction that is moral but without specific Christian references. They are also republishing the classics - George MacDonald, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, etc. And there is a growing amount of Christian literary fiction. Lawrence Dorr\u27s short stories about a Hungarian Calvinist during and after World War II are wrenching struggles with God, human nature and the problem of evil. (A Bearer of Divine Revelation, Eerdman\u27s, 2003) W Dale Cramer\u27s Sutter\u27s Cross (Bethany, 2002) received a starred review from Publisher\u27s Weekly. They wrote, Contemporary offerings such as this well-crafted debut from Cramer give the evangelical Christian fiction market reason to hope that the term \u27excellent CBA novel\u27 is not an oxymoron

All Shall Fade: Homer\u27s Foreshadowing of the End of the Heroic Age in The Iliad

Homer\u27s epic poems are filled with demi-gods and great heroes. However, in The Iliad, Homer undermines the triumph of these heroes by foreshadowing the end of their age and the forthcoming time of mortals. This essay examines how Achilleus\u27 shield, Nestor\u27s longevity, Paris\u27 effeminate nature, and Odysseus\u27 reliance on craftiness rather than physical prowess all indicate the rapid advance of the age of mortal men

Scaled Boolean Algebras

Scaled Boolean algebras are a category of mathematical objects that arose from attempts to understand why the conventional rules of probability should hold when probabilities are construed, not as frequencies or proportions or the like, but rather as degrees of belief in uncertain propositions. This paper separates the study of these objects from that not-entirely-mathematical problem that motivated them. That motivating problem is explicated in the first section, and the application of scaled Boolean algebras to it is explained in the last section. The intermediate sections deal only with the mathematics. It is hoped that this isolation of the mathematics from the motivating problem makes the mathematics clearer.Comment: 53 pages, 8 Postscript figures, Uses ajour.sty from Academic Press, To appear in Advances in Applied Mathematic

Cruise Report 72-KB-17 : Inshore fisheries habitat evaluation and monitoring

(2pp.

Matariki, commodity culture, and multiple identities

The event known as Matariki, the rising of the Pleiades in winter, which Māori take as the mark of the beginning of a new year, was not a strong feature of the wider public sphere for most of the 20th century. Since 2001, however, when Te Taura Whiri, the Māori Language Commission, published an explanatory booklet with the aim of reviving interest in Matariki as an aide to the maintenance of te reo, it has been promoted by several quasi-governmental institutions, especially the national museum, Te Papa, as a winter festival for all New Zealanders. Its main public presence to date has been through media products: posters, banners, websites, television programmes, newspaper features, calendars, some theatrical performances and physical commemoration ceremonies. The larger project, of which this paper represents an initial descriptive and positioning phase, is a continuation of the researcher's long-standing interest in the intersections of religiosity, culture, and media as they are active in the environment of Aotearoa New Zealand. It assumes, building on theorists such as Bellah and Lundby that the creation of such festivals is an act of 'civil religiosity' that attempts to create and strengthen national community around a set of numinous symbols. However, the development of an enterprise such as Matariki is pursued in a complex political field, where broad agreement across various factions is needed before the festival can take on an enduring material and symbolic existence. In investigating the factors that will determine the future of Matariki it is relevant to consider the interaction of three factors in particular: the ethno-political history of New Zealand; the characteristics of contemporary reflexive spirituality, which are intertwined with commodificatory tendencies and thirdly, the impacts of increasing globalisation on the parameters of identity-formation for citizens in late-modern societies

Polynomial Ensembles and Recurrence Coefficients

Polynomial ensembles are determinantal point processes associated with (non necessarily orthogonal) projections onto polynomial subspaces. The aim of this survey article is to put forward the use of recurrence coefficients to obtain the global asymptotic behavior of such ensembles in a rather simple way. We provide a unified approach to recover well-known convergence results for real OP ensembles. We study the mutual convergence of the polynomial ensemble and the zeros of its average characteristic polynomial; we discuss in particular the complex setting. We also control the variance of linear statistics of polynomial ensembles and derive comparison results, as well as asymptotic formulas for real OP ensembles. Finally, we reinterpret the classical algorithm to sample determinantal point processes so as to cover the setting of non-orthogonal projection kernels. A few open problems are also suggested.Comment: 23 page