Hip Hop Hermeneutics: How the Culture Influences Preachers

Hip Hop Hermeneutics essay lays out findings of current research into how Hip Hop culture has been formational for African American preachers, and how that culture informs their preaching. There is a generation of preachers leading congregations today that have grown up with Hip Hop. Hip Hop culture has left an indelible mark upon them; just as the church has. How does the cultural influence of Hip Hop affect their preaching? Hip Hop hermeneutics is the response put forth by this article. This article traces the practice and theology of early African American preachers, the work of James Cone in Black Liberation theology, and Womanist theologians to demonstrate how Black theology has always included the Black experience as part of its theological norm. The article then posits that the next generation of Black theology must take into account that Hip Hop is also part of that Black experience, before going on to delineate a Hip Hop hermeneutic. A Hip Hop hermeneutic is a particular way of reading scripture that embraces the honest and raw fullness of the Black experience

Europe and the Unitary Patent: Progress Towards Reshaping the European Patent Landscape

It is surprising that the European Union has failed to create a Unitary Patent which would fully liberalise the flow of ideas as the single market facilitated the flow of capital and people. This is apparent when one considers that the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union explicitly mandates the Council and the Parliament of the EU to “establish measures for the creation of European intellectual property rights to provide uniform protection of intellectual property rights throughout the Union and for the setting up of centralised Union-wide authorisation, coordination and supervision arrangements”. It is true that a European Patent has existed since 1973, but nomenclature should not be mistaken for reality. The European Patent Convention (EPC) in fact serves only to make the fragmentary nature of intellectual property law tolerable for those intent on seeking patent protection across the European Union. It does so outside of European Union mechanisms, which is made plain by the fact that several non-member states are signatories. More importantly, the EPC does not create anything which resembles a single patent title. In light of this, recent attempts by the Commission and the Council of the EU to create a unitary patent are welcome. Recent patent disputes, both in Europe and across the Atlantic, have been hailed as a sign of inadequacies in the current system of patent application and protection. The size of settlements and legal fees has led commentators, lawmakers and members of the judiciary to question whether the current approach is desirable from the point of the consumer or even sustainable. In particular, certain groups of patents are maligned, whether they are software or business method patents, or those owned by so-called patent trolls

Vertex Isoperimetric Inequalities for a Family of Graphs on Z^k

We consider the family of graphs whose vertex set is Z^k where two vertices are connected by an edge when their l\infty-distance is 1. We prove the optimal vertex isoperimetric inequality for this family of graphs. That is, given a positive integer n, we find a set A \subset Z^k of size n such that the number of vertices who share an edge with some vertex in A is minimized. These sets of minimal boundary are nested, and the proof uses the technique of compression. We also show a method of calculating the vertex boundary for certain subsets in this family of graphs. This calculation and the isoperimetric inequality allow us to indirectly find the sets which minimize the function calculating the boundary.Comment: 19 pages, 2 figure

Minimizing the number of independent sets in triangle-free regular graphs

Recently, Davies, Jenssen, Perkins, and Roberts gave a very nice proof of the result (due, in various parts, to Kahn, Galvin-Tetali, and Zhao) that the independence polynomial of a $d$-regular graph is maximized by disjoint copies of $K_{d,d}$. Their proof uses linear programming bounds on the distribution of a cleverly chosen random variable. In this paper, we use this method to give lower bounds on the independence polynomial of regular graphs. We also give new bounds on the number of independent sets in triangle-free regular graphs

Counting dominating sets and related structures in graphs

We consider some problems concerning the maximum number of (strong) dominating sets in a regular graph, and their weighted analogues. Our primary tool is Shearer's entropy lemma. These techniques extend to a reasonably broad class of graph parameters enumerating vertex colorings satisfying conditions on the multiset of colors appearing in (closed) neighborhoods. We also generalize further to enumeration problems for what we call existence homomorphisms. Here our results are substantially less complete, though we do solve some natural problems