Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Germany: The Rise of the Fourth Confession

Negotiating the boundaries of the secular and of the religious is a core aspect of modern experience. In mid-nineteenth-century Germany, secularism emerged to oppose church establishment, conservative orthodoxy, and national division between Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. Yet, as historian Todd H. Weir argues in this provocative book, early secularism was not the opposite of religion. It developed in the rationalist dissent of Free Religion and, even as secularism took more atheistic forms in Freethought and Monism, it was subject to the forces of the confessional system it sought to dismantle. Similar to its religious competitors, it elaborated a clear worldview, sustained social milieus, and was integrated into the political system. Secularism was, in many ways, Germany's fourth confession. While challenging assumptions about the causes and course of the Kulturkampf and modern antisemitism, this study casts new light on the history of popular science, radical politics, and social reform.

Second-to-Fourth Digit Ratio and Impulsivity: A Comparison between Offenders and Nonoffenders

Personality characteristics, particularly impulsive tendencies, have long been conceived as the primary culprit in delinquent behavior. One crucial question to emerge from this line of work is whether impulsivity has a biological basis. To test this possibility, 44 male offenders and 46 nonoffenders completed the Eysenck Impulsivity Questionnaire, and had their 2D:4D ratio measured. Offenders exhibited smaller right hand digit ratio measurements compared to non-offenders, but higher impulsivity scores. Both impulsivity and 2D:4D ratio measurements significantly predicted criminality (offenders vs. nonoffenders). Controlling for education level, the 2D:4D ratio measurements had remained a significant predictor of criminality, while impulsivity scores no longer predicted criminality significantly. Our data, thus, indicates that impulsivity but not 2D:4D ratio measurements relate to educational attainment. As offenders varied in their number of previous convictions and the nature of their individual crimes, we also tested for differences in 2D:4D ratio and impulsivity among offenders. Number of previous convictions did not correlate significantly with the 2D:4D ratio measurements or impulsivity scores. Our study established a link between a biological marker and impulsivity among offenders (and lack thereof among non-offenders), which emphasise the importance of studying the relationship between biological markers, impulsivity and criminal behavior.

If Music Be the Food of Love:An Acoustic ‘Fourth World’ in Ong Keng Sen’s Awaking”

Staged as an attempt to ‘bring together Shakespeare’s plays and Tang Xian Zu’s classical Kunqu opera, The Peony Pavilion,’ (Ong, Programme Notes) Awaking stands as Singapore Director Ong Keng Sen’s most recent and prominent attempt at engaging issues of the intercultural through music and sound. While Ong’s previous intercultural projects sought to explore the politics of intercultural performance through the exchange, layering, confrontation and inter-mixing of Asian performance modes as visual aesthetics, Awaking is a performance at the borders of theatrical and musical conventions, as it features the music and musicians as central performative devices of staging the intercultural. Northern Kunqu opera, Chinese classical music and Elizabethan folk tunes from Shakespeare’s plays were re-moved, re-contextualised, and juxtaposed to explore ‘differing yet connected philosophies on love, death, and the afterlife’ (Awaking, Publicity). These humanist and ‘universal’ themes found expression in the ‘universal’ language of music. Through a study of the musicalities and sonic expressions of Awaking, the paper seeks to explore the implications of such cultural-musical juxtapositions. The paper engages, specifically, with the problematics and possibilities of music as a ‘universal language’ as implied by Ong’s concordance of Eastern and Western sounds in the final act. It further considers the politics of an intercultural soundscape and the acoustemologies of such an intercultural approach.

State of the art in research into the risk of low dose radiation exposure-findings of the fourth MELODI workshop

The fourth workshop of the Multidisciplinary European Low Dose Initiative (MELODI) was organised by STUK-Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority of Finland. It took place from 12 to 14 September 2012 in Helsinki, Finland. The meeting was attended by 179 scientists and professionals engaged in radiation research and radiation protection. We summarise the major scientific findings of the workshop and the recommendations for updating the MELODI Strategic Research Agenda and Road Map for future low dose research activities.

Solutions of fourth-order parabolic equation modeling thin film growth

In this paper we study the well-posedness for a fourth-order parabolic equation modeling epitaxial thin film growth. Using Kato's Method [1], [2] and [3] we establish existence, uniqueness and regularity of the solution to the model, in suitable spaces, namelyC⁰([0,T];L^p(Ω)) where  with 1<α<2, n∈N and n≥2. We also show the global existence solution to the nonlinear parabolic equations for small initial data. Our main tools are L_p–L_q-estimates, regularization property of the linear part of e^−tΔ2 and successive approximations. Furthermore, we illustrate the qualitative behavior of the approximate solution through some numerical simulations. The approximate solutions exhibit some favorable absorption properties of the model, which highlight the stabilizing effect of our specific formulation of the source term associated with the upward hopping of atoms. Consequently, the solutions describe well some experimentally observed phenomena, which characterize the growth of thin film such as grain coarsening, island formation and thickness growth.

FOURTH ANNUAL REPORT OF THE AUDUBON SOCIETY OF SOUTH CAROLINA

Annual report of the Audubon Society of South Carolina, 1 January 1911, discusses hunting licensing, fish and game laws, educational bird work performed by the Charleston Museum, and membership information.

An address delivered in the Indigo Hall, Georgetown, South Carolina, on the fourth day of May, 1860, the 105th anniversary of the Winyaw Indigo Society

This pamphlet presents the text of the address given by Plowden C.J. Weston on May 4, 1860 to the Winyaw Indigo Society on their 105th anniversary.

Effective-fourth-order resonator based MASH bandpass sigma-delta modulators

Two novel effective-fourth-order (eighth-order) resonator based MASH (MultistAge noise SHaping) bandpass Σ-Δ modulators are introduced at the behavioural level and subsequently examined by simulations utilising the ALTA SPW environment. The considered bandpass configurations have in their loop filter a cascade of standard second-order resonator structures in order to achieve appropriate noise shaping. The quantisation noise in each stage is suppressed by feeding the error of each section into the input of the following stage. It is demonstrated in this paper that the quadruple effective-first-order cascade configuration has significantly better performance as well as conforming more closely with theory in comparison with the effective-second-order effective-second-order cascade. The superior performance of the former can be attributed to the cumulative effect of the multi-bit outputs as well as the presence of more notch filters.

The fourth extracellular loop of the alpha subunit of Na,K-ATPase. Functional evidence for close proximity with the second extracellular loop.

Na,K-ATPase is the main active transport system that maintains the large gradients of Na(+) and K(+) across the plasma membrane of animal cells. The crystal structure of a K(+)-occluding conformation of this protein has been recently published, but the movements of its different domains allowing for the cation pumping mechanism are not yet known. The structure of many more conformations is known for the related calcium ATPase SERCA, but the reliability of homology modeling is poor for several domains with low sequence identity, in particular the extracellular loops. To better define the structure of the large fourth extracellular loop between the seventh and eighth transmembrane segments of the alpha subunit, we have studied the formation of a disulfide bond between pairs of cysteine residues introduced by site-directed mutagenesis in the second and the fourth extracellular loop. We found a specific pair of cysteine positions (Y308C and D884C) for which extracellular treatment with an oxidizing agent inhibited the Na,K pump function, which could be rapidly restored by a reducing agent. The formation of the disulfide bond occurred preferentially under the E2-P conformation of Na,K-ATPase, in the absence of extracellular cations. Using recently published crystal structure and a distance constraint reproducing the existence of disulfide bond, we performed an extensive conformational space search using simulated annealing and showed that the Tyr(308) and Asp(884) residues can be in close proximity, and simultaneously, the SYGQ motif of the fourth extracellular loop, known to interact with the extracellular domain of the beta subunit, can be exposed to the exterior of the protein and can easily interact with the beta subunit.

Application of [Lambda] to the fourth perturbation theory in calculating the equation of state of rare gas solids and fcc metals

We have calculated the thermodynamic properties of monatomic fcc crystals from the high temperature limit of the Helmholtz free energy. This equation of state included the static and vibrational energy components. The latter contribution was calculated to order A4 of perturbation theory, for a range of crystal volumes, in which a nearest neighbour central force model was used. We have calculated the lattice constant, the coefficient of volume expansion, the specific heat at constant volume and at constant pressure, the adiabatic and the isothermal bulk modulus, and the Gruneisen parameter, for two of the rare gas solids, Xe and Kr, and for the fcc metals Cu, Ag, Au, Al, and Pb. The LennardJones and the Morse potential were each used to represent the atomic interactions for the rare gas solids, and only the Morse potential was used for the fcc metals. The thermodynamic properties obtained from the A4 equation of state with the Lennard-Jones potential, seem to be in reasonable agreement with experiment for temperatures up to about threequarters of the melting temperature. However, for the higher temperatures, the results are less than satisfactory. For Xe and Kr, the thermodynamic properties calculated from the A2 equation of state with the Morse potential, are qualitatively similar to the A 2 results obtained with the Lennard-Jones potential, however, the properties obtained from the A4 equation of state are in good agreement with experiment, since the contribution from the A4 terms seem to be small. The lattice contribution to the thermal properties of the fcc metals was calculated from the A4 equation of state, and these results produced a slight improvement over the properties calculated from the A2 equation of state. In order to compare the calculated specific heats and bulk moduli results with experiment~ the electronic contribution to thermal properties was taken into account~ by using the free electron model. We found that the results varied significantly with the value chosen for the number of free electrons per atom.