Public religions and civil society: the case of London Methodism

Amendments to secularization theory have brought the issue of public religions to the fore in recent years. In particular, the work of Casanova and Beyer has maintained the importance of functional differentiation whilst pointing to the flow of religious discourses across social boundaries. These issues, however, have received little ethnographic attention, such that many of the problems associated with theories of differentiation and globalization have not been engaged in a sustained manner. Research within black majority London Methodist congregations is drawn upon to suggest ways in which these theories can be reconsidered. Three related issues are focused upon: the continued importance of the nation-state (including national stratifications); the importance of a practical approach to religion, such that discourses are understood as ‘practical discourses’; and the importance of not privileging religion by reifying it in functional terms. These considerations have ramifications not only for secularization theory, but the general field of the sociological study of religion.

Inference and Declaration of Independence in Task-Parallel Programs

The inherent difficulty of thread-based shared-memory programming has recently motivated research in high-level, task-parallel programming models. Recent advances of Task-Parallel models add implicit synchronization, where the system automatically detects and satisfies data dependencies among spawned tasks. However, dynamic dependence analysis incurs significant runtime overheads, because the runtime must track task resources and use this information to schedule tasks while avoiding conflicts and races.
We present SCOOP, a compiler that effectively integrates static and dynamic analysis in code generation. SCOOP combines context-sensitive points-to, control-flow, escape, and effect analyses to remove redundant dependence checks at runtime. Our static analysis can work in combination with existing dynamic analyses and task-parallel runtimes that use annotations to specify tasks and their memory footprints. We use our static dependence analysis to detect non-conflicting tasks and an existing dynamic analysis to handle the remaining dependencies. We evaluate the resulting hybrid dependence analysis on a set of task-parallel programs.

Review of: Whitehouse, R. 1993 Underground Religion: cult and culture in prehistoric Italy. Accordia Specialist Studies on Italy 1. London, University of London.

Malone , C., . Antiquity, 1993. 67(256): p. 686-7.

Servius in the Carolingian Age: A Case Study of London, British Library, Harley 2782

In Harley 2782, Servius’s late antique commentary on Vergil was transmitted as an independent text, edited, corrected, glossed, marked for mythological information, provided with NOTA monograms and headings, as well as interspersed and augmented with scholia adespota and non-Servian material. The scholarly conventions attested in this manuscript show the kinds of critical apparatus that fed into the early medieval appropriation of Vergil and above all demonstrate that Servius was a staple of the Carolingian world.

Dans le manuscrit Harley 2782, le commentaire tardo-antique de Servius sur Virgile a été transmis sous forme d’un document indépendant, modifié, corrigé, glosé, préparé pour retrouver les informations mythologiques, enrichi de monogrammes Nota, ainsi qu’il a été entrecoupé et augmenté à l’aide des scholia adespota et du matériel non Servien. Les conventions scolastiques attestées par ce manuscrit montrent quels types d’apparats critiques alimentaient le début de l’appropriation médiévale de Virgile et surtout prouvent que Servius était une composante essentielle du monde carolingien.

A contingent valuation of the 2012 London Olympic games - A regional perspective

Major sporting events such as the Olympics are usually assessed in terms of economic impacts. Recently, policy makers have begun to place greater emphasis on possible intangible effects (such as civic pride, legacy of sporting facilities) associated with such events. To date, little work has been carried out on quantifying these effects in a meaningful way. This study uses contingent valuation methodology to assess the value of the proposed 2012 London Olympic Games. The survey is carried out on the provincial city of Bath, approximately 2 hours west of London. Conducting the survey outside of London is justified on the basis that the organizers of London 2012 have emphasized the value of the event to the United Kingdom as a whole. The results suggest that positive intangible effects are associated with the event and residents outside of London are willing to pay toward funding.