Practising the Space Between: Embodying Belief as an Evangelical Anglican Student

This article explores the formation of British evangelical university students as believers. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with a conservative evangelical Anglican congregation in London, I describe how students in this church come to embody a highly cognitive, word-based mode of belief through particular material practices. As they learn to identify themselves as believers, practices of reflexivity and accountability enable them to develop a sense of narrative coherence in their lives that allows them to negotiate tensions that arise from their participation in church and broader social structures. I demonstrate that propositional belief – in contexts where it becomes an identity marker – is bound up with relational practices of belief, such that distinctions between “belief in” and “belief that” are necessarily blurred in the lives of young evangelicals

Decomposing Dual Scale Soil Surface Roughness for Microwave Remote Sensing Applications

Soil surface roughness, as investigated in this study, is decomposed in a dual scale process. Therefore, we investigated photogrammetrically acquired roughness information over different agricultural fields in the size of 6-22 m(2) and decomposed them into a dual scale process by using geostatistical techniques. For the characterization of soil surface roughness, we calculated two different roughness indices (the RMS height s and the autocorrelation length l) differing significantly for each scale. While we could relate the small scale roughness pattern clearly to the seedbed rows, the larger second scale pattern could be related to the appearance of wheel tracks of the tillage machine used. As a result, major progress was made in the understanding of the different scales in soil surface roughness characterization and its quantification possibilities

The ballarat incremental knowledge engine

Ripple Down Rules (RDR) is a maturing collection of methodologies for the incremental development and maintenance of medium to large rule-based knowledge systems. While earlier knowledge based systems relied on extensive modeling and knowledge engineering, RDR instead takes a simple no-model approach that merges the development and maintenance stages. Over the last twenty years RDR has been significantly expanded and applied in numerous domains. Until now researchers have generally implemented their own version of the methodologies, while commercial implementations are not made available. This has resulted in much duplicated code and the advantages of RDR not being available to a wider audience. The aim of this project is to develop a comprehensive and extensible platform that supports current and future RDR technologies, thereby allowing researchers and developers access to the power and versatility of RDR. This paper is a report on the current status of the project and marks the first release of the software. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

Hydrodynamics of the stream-disk impact in interacting binaries

We use hydrodynamic simulations to provide quantitative estimates of the effects of the impact of the accretion stream on disks in interacting binaries. For low accretion rates, efficient radiative cooling of the hotspot region can occur, and the primary consequence of the stream impact is stream overflow toward smaller disk radii. The stream is well described by a ballistic trajectory, but larger masses of gas are swept up and overflow at smaller, but still highly supersonic, velocities. If cooling is inefficient, overflow still occurs, but there is no coherent stream inward of the disk rim. Qualitatively, the resulting structure appears as a bulge extending downstream along the disk rim. We calculate the mass fraction and velocity of the overflowing component as a function of the important system parameters, and discuss the implications of the results for X-ray observations and doppler tomography of cataclysmic variables, low-mass X-ray binaries and supersoft X-ray sources.Comment: 16 pages, including 8 figures. 1 color figure as a jpeg. ApJ, in pres

Interaction of ENSO-driven Flood Variability and Anthropogenic Changes in Driving Channel Evolution: Corryong/ Nariel Creek, Australia

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Australian Geographer on 03/09/2015, available online: 10.1080/00049182.2015.1048595Understanding the relative contributions of climatic and anthropogenic drivers of channel change are important to inform river management, especially in the context of environmental change. This global debate is especially pertinent in Australia as catchments have been severely altered since recent European settlement, and there is also strong evidence of cyclical climate variability controlling environmental systems. Corryong/Nariel Creek is an ideal setting to further study the interaction between climate and anthropogenic changes on channel evolution as it has experienced both significant periods of flood and drought, controlled by the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), and extensive anthropogenic changes. Since European settlement the floodplain has been completely cleared, the riparian zone almost entirely invaded by willows, and every reach of the channel has experienced some form of direct channel modification. Through the combined analysis of channel evolution, climate changes and anthropogenic history of the river it was found that both the ENSO-driven climate and anthropogenic drivers are significant, although at different scales of channel change. Significant straightening in response to land clearing in the early twentieth century occurred before any records of direct channel modifications. Following this, most river management works were in response to instabilities created in the clearing period, or to instabilities created by flooding triggering a new phase of instability in reaches which had already undergone stabilisation works. Overall, human activities triggered channel instability via land clearing, and management works since then generally exacerbated erosion during high flows that are driven by climate fluctuations. This research raises the interesting question of whether rivers in Australia have become more responsive to the ENSO cycle since the clearing of catchment and riparian vegetation, or whether the past response to climate variability was different

The Strayed Reveller, No. 7

The seventh issue of The Strayed Reveller.https://scholarworks.sfasu.edu/reveller/1006/thumbnail.jp

Oral nitrate supplementation improves cardiovascular risk markers in COPD: ON-BC a randomised controlled trial

BACKGROUND: Short term studies suggest that dietary nitrate supplementation may improve cardiovascular risk profile, lowering blood pressure (BP) and enhancing endothelial function. It is not clear if these beneficial effects are sustained and whether they apply in people with COPD, who have a worse cardiovascular profile than those without COPD. Nitrate-rich beetroot juice BRJ (NR-BRJ) is a convenient dietary source of nitrate. METHODS: The ON-BC trial was a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled parallel group study in stable COPD patients with home systolic BP (SBP) measurement ≥130 mmHg. Participants were randomly allocated (1:1) using computer-generated, block randomization to either 70 mL of NR-BRJ (400 mg NO3 -) (n=40) or an otherwise identical nitrate-depleted placebo juice Pl-BRJ (0 mg NO3 -) (n=41), once daily for 12 weeks. The primary endpoint was between group change in home SBP measurement. Secondary outcomes included change in 6-minute walking distance (6MWD) and measures of endothelial function (reactive hyperaemia index (RHI) and augmentation index (AIx75)) using an EndoPAT device. Plasma nitrate and platelet function were also measured. RESULTS: Compared to placebo, active treatment lowered SBP (Hodges-Lemman treatment effect MD[95% CI]; -4.5[-3.0 to -5.9] improved 6MWD (+30.0 m [15.7 to 44.2], p<0.001), RHI +0.34 (0.03 to 0.63) p=0.03, and AIx75 -7.61% [-14.3 to -0.95], p=0.026. CONCLUSIONS: In people with COPD, prolonged dietary nitrate supplementation in the form of beetroot juice produces a sustained reduction in BP, associated with an improvement in endothelial function and exercise capacity

The Strayed Reveller, No. 5

The fifth issue of The Strayed Reveller.https://scholarworks.sfasu.edu/reveller/1004/thumbnail.jp