Theology and politics in Richard Hooker's thought

Although Richard Hooker’s private attitudes were clericalist and authoritarian, his constitutional theory subordinated clergymen to laymen and monarchy to parliamentary statute. This article explains why his political ideas were nonetheless appropriate to his presumed religious purposes. It notes a very intimate connection between his teleological conception of a law and his hostility towards conventional high Calvinist ideas about predestination. The most significant anomaly within his broadly Aristotelian world-view was his belief that politics is nothing but a means to cope with sin. This too can be linked to his religious ends, but it creates an ambiguity that made his doctrines usable by Locke.

Effects of triazole and strobilurin fungicide programmes, with and without late-season nitrogen fertiliser, on the baking quality of Malacca winter wheat

Field experiments were conducted over 3 years to study the effect of applying triazole and strobilurin fungicides on the bread-making quality of Malacca winter wheat. Averaged over all years the application of a fungicide programme increased yields, particularly when strobilurin fungicides were applied. Reductions in protein concentration, sulphur concentration, Hageberg failing number and loaf volumes also occurred as the amount of fungicide applied increased. However, there were no deleterious effects of fungicide application on sodium dodecyl sulphate (SDS) sedimentation volumes, N:S ratios or dough theology. Effects of fungicide application on bread-making quality were not product specific. Therefore, it appears that new mechanisms to explain strobilurin effects on bread-making quality do not need to be invoked. Where reductions in protein concentration did occur they could be compensated for by a late-season application of nitrogen either as granular ammonium nitrate at flag leaf emergence or foliar urea at anthesis. These applications, however, sometimes increased the N:S ratio of the extracted flour and failed to improve loaf volume. Multiple regression analysis revealed that main effects of year, flour protein concentration and N:S ratio could explain 93% of the variance in loaf volume caused by season, fungicide and nitrogen treatments. However, an equally good fit was achieved by just including sulphur concentration with year. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Effects of triazole and strobilurin fungicide programmes, with and without late-season nitrogen fertiliser, on the baking quality of Malacca winter wheat

Field experiments were conducted over 3 years to study the effect of applying triazole and strobilurin fungicides on the bread-making quality of Malacca winter wheat. Averaged over all years the application of a fungicide programme increased yields, particularly when strobilurin fungicides were applied. Reductions in protein concentration, sulphur concentration, Hageberg failing number and loaf volumes also occurred as the amount of fungicide applied increased. However, there were no deleterious effects of fungicide application on sodium dodecyl sulphate (SDS) sedimentation volumes, N:S ratios or dough theology. Effects of fungicide application on bread-making quality were not product specific. Therefore, it appears that new mechanisms to explain strobilurin effects on bread-making quality do not need to be invoked. Where reductions in protein concentration did occur they could be compensated for by a late-season application of nitrogen either as granular ammonium nitrate at flag leaf emergence or foliar urea at anthesis. These applications, however, sometimes increased the N:S ratio of the extracted flour and failed to improve loaf volume. Multiple regression analysis revealed that main effects of year, flour protein concentration and N:S ratio could explain 93% of the variance in loaf volume caused by season, fungicide and nitrogen treatments. However, an equally good fit was achieved by just including sulphur concentration with year. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The lay of the trilobite: rereading May Kendall

The impact of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection on the culture of late Victorian England and on the development of Western thought at large is at once widely acknowledged and hotly contested. In this essay, I revisit the question of what difference an understanding of Darwin's ideas, their reception and their afterlife within evolutionary biology makes to how we read Victorian poetry. I suggest that there are three distinct ways of approaching poetry after Darwin. The first is to examine poems in their own cultural context, considering how they respond to the scientific discourses of their time in the light of internal and external evidence as to the specific sources of each poet's knowledge of those discourses. The second is to ground an interpretative framework in Darwinism's insights into human biology itself. The third is to explore how a given poem's responses to the philosophical issues raised by Darwin's thinking, including questions of ethics and theology, give its readers a possible model for their own responses to the same concerns today. I suggest too that the limitations of each approach may be best overcome by bringing them together. I go on to explore the potential of the first and third approaches through a reading of May Kendall's poem 'The Lay of the Trilobite' in a series of different contexts, from its first appearance in 'Punch', through her first collection Dreams to Sell, to her essays on Christian ethics from the 1880s and 1890s

Al-Qaeda - terrorists, hypocrites, fundamentalists? The view from within

This article investigates the ideology of Al-Qaeda as perceived from within the network. Particular attention is paid to the ideological background of Al-Qaeda's intellectual leadership, its sociopolitical context and the nature of its recruits. The inner logic of the Al-Qaeda organisation advances an intellectual concept that is not based on the main schools of Islamic theology, but on a new ideological starting point that results from the application of Islamic principles to sociopolitical change. With its political goals reinforced by the teachings of the Quran, exemplified by the content and rhetoric of a recently discovered training manual, the organisation creates powerful imagery embedded in the collective consciousness of the Muslim community. Thus, the message provided by Al-Qaeda inspires its followers to commit violent acts of destruction while being fully convinced that they are fulfilling the ordained will of Allah.

Heaney and the neighbour: poetry between politics and ethics

In this essay I argue that Heaney uses the figure of the neighbour to examine questions of otherness and cultural difference and their relationship to history and politics. The neighbour is of course a figure that has played a central role in Western philosophy and theology for centuries, from the Gospels and Kant to Freud and Lacan. It is also a concept to which Western poetry often returns, particularly in the work of Herbert, Clare, Eliot and Auden. Heaney too belongs to this tradition, in that his oeuvre contains many poems which consider the relationship between neighbours, and do so in ways profoundly suggestive for consideration of the relationship between historical events, social structures, cultural difference and psychic affect. In my essay I argue that Heaney sketches a profoundly materialist conception of subjectivity in its relationship with the Other. In doing so I contrast Heaney’s treatment of the neighbour, with its emphasis on questions of politics and locality, to the treatment of the neighbour in the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas.

On the relationship between the Indian summer monsoon and river flow in the Aral Sea basin

We study the contemporaneous relationship between the intensity of the Indian Summer Monsoon (ISM) and runoff in the major rivers of the Aral Sea basin (Amudarya, Syrdarya) and some of their subcatchments. To this end, we use All-India rainfall (AIR) data, CRU surface observations of precipitation and temperature, ERA40 atmospheric data, and natural discharge data corrected for human interference. We show that there is a highly significant positive correlation between ISM intensity and Amudarya runoff. This finding cannot be explained by the spill-over of ISM precipitation over the Hindu Kush into the Amudarya basin. Instead, we suggest that the observed co-variability is mediated by tropospheric temperature variations due to fluctuations in the ISM intensity. These variations are known to be due to Rossby-wave propagation in response to condensational heating during monsoon precipitation. We hypothesise that the corresponding anomalies in surface temperatures imply anomalies in meltwater formation.

Euthydemoss of Bactria

Euthydemos I (ca. 260–200 bce) was king of Bactria from around 230. He founded a dynasty which, most notably under his son Demetrios I, extended the control of the Greco-Bactrian kings south of the Hindu Kush into Arachosia and India.

File Transfer Protocol

The discourse surrounding the virtual has moved away from the utopian thinking accompanying the rise of the Internet in the 1990s. The Cyber-gurus of the last decades promised a technotopia removed from materiality and the confines of the flesh and the built environment, a liberation from old institutions and power structures. But since then, the virtual has grown into a distinct yet related sphere of cultural and political production that both parallels and occasionally flows over into the old world of material objects. The strict dichotomy of matter and digital purity has been replaced more recently with a more complex model where both the world of stuff and the world of knowledge support, resist and at the same time contain each other. Online social networks amplify and extend existing ones; other cultural interfaces like youtube have not replaced the communal experience of watching moving images in a semi-public space (the cinema) or the semi-private space (the family living room). Rather the experience of viewing is very much about sharing and communicating, offering interpretations and comments. Many of the web’s strongest entities (Amazon, eBay, Gumtree etc.) sit exactly at this juncture of applying tools taken from the knowledge management industry to organize the chaos of the material world along (post-)Fordist rationality. Since the early 1990s there have been many artistic and curatorial attempts to use the Internet as a platform of producing and exhibiting art, but a lot of these were reluctant to let go of the fantasy of digital freedom. Storage Room collapses the binary opposition of real and virtual space by using online data storage as a conduit for IRL art production. The artworks here will not be available for viewing online in a 'screen' environment but only as part of a downloadable package with the intention that the exhibition could be displayed (in a physical space) by any interested party and realised as ambitiously or minimally as the downloader wishes, based on their means. The artists will therefore also supply a set of instructions for the physical installation of the work alongside the digital files. In response to this curatorial initiative, File Transfer Protocol invites seven UK based artists to produce digital art for a physical environment, addressing the intersection between the virtual and the material. The files range from sound, video, digital prints and net art, blueprints for an action to take place, something to be made, a conceptual text piece, etc. About the works and artists: Polly Fibre is the pseudonym of London-based artist Christine Ellison. Ellison creates live music using domestic devices such as sewing machines, irons and slide projectors. Her costumes and stage sets propose a physical manifestation of the virtual space that is created inside software like Photoshop. For this exhibition, Polly Fibre invites the audience to create a musical composition using a pair of amplified scissors and a turntable. http://www.pollyfibre.com John Russell, a founding member of 1990s art group Bank, is an artist, curator and writer who explores in his work the contemporary political conditions of the work of art. In his digital print, Russell collages together visual representations of abstract philosophical ideas and transforms them into a post apocalyptic landscape that is complex and banal at the same time. www.john-russell.org The work of Bristol based artist Jem Nobel opens up a dialogue between the contemporary and the legacy of 20th century conceptual art around questions of collectivism and participation, authorship and individualism. His print SPACE concretizes the representation of the most common piece of Unicode: the vacant space between words. In this way, the gap itself turns from invisible cipher to sign. www.jemnoble.com Annabel Frearson is rewriting Mary Shelley's Frankenstein using all and only the words from the original text. Frankenstein 2, or the Monster of Main Stream, is read in parts by different performers, embodying the psychotic character of the protagonist, a mongrel hybrid of used language. www.annabelfrearson.com Darren Banks uses fragments of effect laden Holywood films to create an impossible space. The fictitious parts don't add up to a convincing material reality, leaving the viewer with a failed amalgamation of simulations of sophisticated technologies. www.darrenbanks.co.uk FIELDCLUB is collaboration between artist Paul Chaney and researcher Kenna Hernly. Chaney and Hernly developed together a project that critically examines various proposals for the management of sustainable ecological systems. Their FIELDMACHINE invites the public to design an ideal agricultural field. By playing with different types of crops that are found in the south west of England, it is possible for the user, for example, to create a balanced, but protein poor, diet or to simply decide to 'get rid' of half the population. The meeting point of the Platonic field and it physical consequences, generates a geometric abstraction that investigates the relationship between modernist utopianism and contemporary actuality. www.fieldclub.co.uk Pil and Galia Kollectiv, who have also curated the exhibition are London-based artists and run the xero, kline & coma gallery. Here they present a dialogue between two computers. The conversation opens with a simple text book problem in business studies. But gradually the language, mimicking the application of game theory in the business sector, becomes more abstract. The two interlocutors become adversaries trapped forever in a competition without winners. www.kollectiv.co.uk