The stroboscopic human vision

When the frequency of seeing light from a pair of point flashes is beyond the probability summation of the separate flashes, the surplus is due to the successful interaction of subliminal responses from the different flashes. Experiments with various distances and various periods of the pair show thet successful interaction occurs when in each of two successive time-quanta of 0.04 seconds and in each of two adjacent distinct receptor groups at least one subliminal receptor response occurs. An autonomous source produces the time-quanta. It serves the time-processing of the central nervous system and of the motor system. Posdsibly, action potentials from the purkinje cells of the myocardium play a role. Hyper acuity in direction and in depth, flicker fusion, perceptual rivalry and ather phenomena follow from the quantized spatiotemporal signal processing

Like WheatT Arising Green: How the Church Grows and Thrives

(Excerpt) The theme for the 1991 Institute of Liturgical Studies is taken from the hymn Now the Green Blade Rises. This wonderful Easter hymn, No. 148 in The Lutheran Book of Worship, concludes each stanza with the refrain, Love is come again like wheat arising green. The resurrection of Jesus is portrayed as grain which sprouts from seed. The imagery comes from the Gospel of John, from a saying of Jesus, the whole context of which is instructive

Holy Communion Is an Artifact of the Future

(Excerpt) A bit of reminiscing seems appropriate on this anniversary occasion.2 The Institute of Liturgical Studies was founded by true pioneers in the liturgical movement. The blessings granted to that movement in terms of its achievements are awesome. I don\u27t know if anyone counted such things in the 1940s, but in the decade in which the Institute of Liturgical Studies was founded there were not a hundred congregations in all of North American Lutheranism where there was a weekly Eucharist

A Voltage Multiplier for the nEDM Experiment

The nEDM experiment at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is a search for the electric dipole moment of the neutron (nEDM) at the 10-28 level. The experiment is currently in the research and development phase. One of the variables proportional to the sensitivity of the measurement is the strength of the electric field in the measurement cell where the effect of an nEDM is to be generated. The design of the experiment calls for an electric field of 75 kV/cm in this cell. A unique voltage multiplier involving a variable capacitor has been proposed to achieve this large required electric field. Electrostatic calculations using two independent software packages, COMSOL and Field Precision, were carried out to study the feasibility of the proposed voltage multiplier. A prototype of the electrodes and the voltage multiplier whose size was 25% of full size was also built to verify the predictions of the electrostatic calculations. Results of the tests with the prototype and the electrostatic calculations, are presented

Identity and Witness: Liturgy and the Mission of the Church

(Excerpt) The text for this lecture is a provocative aphorism which I owe to Stanley Hauerwas. In a 1987 presentation at Trinity Seminary, he said: The church has missionary power in direct proportion to its liturgical integrity. I cite this because Liturgy and Mission are often perceived as unrelated, if not actually opposed, to each other.1 Manuals and exhortations on evangelism often do not relate the Church\u27s mission of evangelization and conversion to the administration of Holy Baptism. Programs and advice on outreach which focus on inviting persons to the Sunday gathering of the Church often do not assume that what t~kes place at the Sunday gathering is the Holy Eucharist. For many advocates of the Church\u27s mission, liturgy belongs to the task of nurture, and attention to nurture must be balanced by attention to nurture. Liturgy is thus viewed as an inward focus, and the fear is that too much attention to liturgy makes the Church narcissistic

Using the Transitional Jobs Strategy to Help Chronically Unemployed Veterans

One in nine Iraq and Afghanistan veterans was out of work in spring 2009, the unemployment rate of those veterans having risen in the course of a year from 7.2 percent to 11.2 percent -- substantially higher than the 8.8 percent rate for the non-veteran population.The disproportionate unemployment numbers among veterans also reflect a deeper problem: issues rooted in their military experience create barriers to veterans becoming or remaining employed. Thus a veteran's initial unemployment upon return often becomes chronic

Lingering Issues in Distributed Scheduling

Recent advances have resulted in queue-based algorithms for medium access control which operate in a distributed fashion, and yet achieve the optimal throughput performance of centralized scheduling algorithms. However, fundamental performance bounds reveal that the "cautious" activation rules involved in establishing throughput optimality tend to produce extremely large delays, typically growing exponentially in 1/(1-r), with r the load of the system, in contrast to the usual linear growth. Motivated by that issue, we explore to what extent more "aggressive" schemes can improve the delay performance. Our main finding is that aggressive activation rules induce a lingering effect, where individual nodes retain possession of a shared resource for excessive lengths of time even while a majority of other nodes idle. Using central limit theorem type arguments, we prove that the idleness induced by the lingering effect may cause the delays to grow with 1/(1-r) at a quadratic rate. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first mathematical results illuminating the lingering effect and quantifying the performance impact. In addition extensive simulation experiments are conducted to illustrate and validate the various analytical results

Delay Performance and Mixing Times in Random-Access Networks

We explore the achievable delay performance in wireless random-access networks. While relatively simple and inherently distributed in nature, suitably designed queue-based random-access schemes provide the striking capability to match the optimal throughput performance of centralized scheduling mechanisms in a wide range of scenarios. The specific type of activation rules for which throughput optimality has been established, may however yield excessive queues and delays. Motivated by that issue, we examine whether the poor delay performance is inherent to the basic operation of these schemes, or caused by the specific kind of activation rules. We derive delay lower bounds for queue-based activation rules, which offer fundamental insight in the cause of the excessive delays. For fixed activation rates we obtain lower bounds indicating that delays and mixing times can grow dramatically with the load in certain topologies as well