Is Northern Ireland abnormal? An extension of the sociological debate on religion in modern Britain

This article places Northern Ireland within the unfolding sociological debate on religion in modern Britain. It measures secularization along Casanova’s three dimensions (1994): religious differentiation, decline and privatization. It finds that Northern Ireland has, in common with Britain, high levels of religious differentiation, grey areas of religious belief and little convinced secularism. However, Northern Ireland differs in that it has higher levels of religious affiliation and practice, and religion plays more roles in civil society than it does in other parts of Britain. The article explores the role of conflict in forming these religious trends, asking if they represent a persistence of the sacred, or simply mask deeper ethnic divisions. It concludes that the social dimensions of religion are just as important as the supernatural, and that they often inform each other. Finally, it suggests that the dynamics of religious change are comparable across regions and, as such, Northern Ireland might be a useful case study for British policy makers, particularly as it becomes increasingly multicultural and religiously plural.

Melancholy and the Early Modern University

Critics have observed that in early Stuart England, the broad, socially significant concept of melancholy was recoded as a specifically medical phenomenon—a disease rather than a fashion. This recoding made melancholy seem less a social attitude than a private ailment. However, I argue that at the Stuart universities, this recoded melancholy became a covert expression of the disillusionment, disappointment, and frustration produced by pressures there—the overcrowding and competition which left many men “disappointed” in preferment, alongside James I’s unprecedented royal involvement in the universities. My argument has implications for Jürgen Habermas’s account of the emergence of the public sphere, which he claims did not occur until the eighteenth-century. I argue that although the university was increasingly subordinated to the crown’s authority, a lingering sense of autonomy persisted there, a residue of the medieval university’s relative autonomy from the crown; politicized by the encroaching Stuart presence, an alienated community at the university formed a kind of public in private from authority within that authority’s midst. The audience for the printed book, a sphere apart from court or university, represented a forum in which the publicity at the universities could be consolidated, especially in seemingly “private” literary forms such as the treatise on melancholy. I argue that Robert Burton’s exaggerated performance of melancholy in The Anatomy of Melancholy, which gains him license to say almost anything, resembles the performed melancholy that the student-prince Hamlet uses to frustrate his uncle’s attempts to surveil him. After tracing melancholy’s evolving literary function through Hamlet, I go on to discuss James’s interventions into the universities. I conclude by considering two printed (and widely circulated) books by university men: the aforementioned The Anatomy of Melancholy by Burton, an Oxford cleric, and The Temple by George Herbert, who left a career as Cambridge’s public orator to become a country parson. I examine how each of these books uses the affective pattern of courtly-scholarly disappointment—transumed by Burton as melancholy, and by Herbert as holy affliction—to develop an empathic form of publicity among its readership which is in tacit opposition to the Stuart court.

Application-Specific Instruction Set Processor for SoC implementation of Modern Signal Processing Algorithms

A novel application-specific instruction set processor (ASIP) for use in the construction of modern signal processing systems is presented. This is a flexible device that can be used in the construction of array processor systems for the real-time implementation of functions such as singular-value decomposition (SVD) and QR decomposition (QRD), as well as other important matrix computations. It uses a coordinate rotation digital computer (CORDIC) module to perform arithmetic operations and several approaches are adopted to achieve high performance including pipelining of the micro-rotations, the use of parallel instructions and a dual-bus architecture. In addition, a novel method for scale factor correction is presented which only needs to be applied once at the end of the computation. This also reduces computation time and enhances performance. Methods are described which allow this processor to be used in reduced dimension (i.e., folded) array processor structures that allow tradeoffs between hardware and performance. The net result is a flexible matrix computational processing element (PE) whose functionality can be changed under program control for use in a wider range of scenarios than previous work. Details are presented of the results of a design study, which considers the application of this decomposition PE architecture in a combined SVD/QRD system and demonstrates that a combination of high performance and efficient silicon implementation are achievable. © 2005 IEEE.