Remembrance of a Friend

In lieu of an abstract, below is the essay\u27s first paragraph. I do not propose that my authorship of this reflection on my friend Michael places me in some sort of place of privilege among those who were fortunate enough to cross paths with him at some point in their academic, artistic or faith journeys. No, this is not a case of one who knew him better rising above others. In fact, it may be the opposite: I suspect that my commentary on our friendship might be indistinguishable from the observations of others. That seems a fitting epitaph for one who made you feel as if you were his only friend in the world. We know that this is not the case. C.S. Lewis notes in his work The Four Loves, that when it comes to friendship two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth... (p. 61). This was how I knew Michael Costanzo, the CEO and chief creative officer of a massive network of friendship

RooStats for Searches

The RooStats toolkit, which is distributed with the ROOT software package, provides a large collection of software tools that implement statistical methods commonly used by the High Energy Physics community. The toolkit is based on RooFit, a high-level data analysis modeling package that implements various methods of statistical data analysis. RooStats enforces a clear mapping of statistical concepts to C++ classes and methods and emphasizes the ability to easily combine analyses within and across experiments. We present an overview of the RooStats toolkit, describe some of the methods used for hypothesis testing and estimation of confidence intervals and finally discuss some of the latest developments.Comment: Contributed to "PHYSTAT 2011 Workshop on Statistical Issues Related to Discovery Claims in Search Experiments and Unfolding

High & Low Christology: Examining Jesus & the Syrophoenician Woman

In lieu of an abstract, below is the essay\u27s first paragraph. In this pericope, Jesus and his disciples headed to Tyre, where Jesus continued his ministry in another location. When Jesus entered the house, the gospel writer claims that he wanted no one to know about his presence. However, in that line the gospel writer said that Jesus could not escape notice. Perhaps it was Jesus’ intention all along to be noticed. He was calling people to him—in this case, the Syrophoenician woman

Language-GAME-Players: Articulating the pleasures of ‘violent’ game texts

Young peoples’ voices have been considered irrelevant or unreliable when it comes to discussing the influence and impact of their engagement with screen-mediated depictions of violence. Historically, such viewpoints have been derived from the controlled experimentation of modernist psychology, which constitutes the most sustained and prominent enquiries into the consequences of individual participation in, and viewing of, simulated violence. In espousing an impersonal approach, psychological research has opted not to demonstrate any understanding of the properties of the particular games or the medium its findings have been used to denigrate. Neither does its research possess broader awareness of the social dimensions of play or the productivity inherent in the practices of its surrounding cultures. This paper introduces findings taken from a two-year project that attempted to draw together what have essentially remained separate lines of inquiry – the critical and analytical scrutiny of Game Studies applied to understanding the pleasures of engagement with game violence. The aim of this research was to achieve a more contextual understanding of texts that utilise violence from the perspective of young people that opt to experience them as an entertainment form. In doing so, a range of qualitative methods were employed to encourage game players to present their viewpoints and offer a voice that is all too often absent from the ‘one-way debate’ attached to the representation of violence within games

Review of single vector boson production in pp collisions at s=7\sqrt{s} = 7 TeV

This review summarises the main results on the production of single vector bosons in the Standard Model, both inclusively and in association with light and heavy flavour jets, at the Large Hadron Collider in proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV. The general purpose detectors at this collider, ATLAS and CMS, each recorded an integrated luminosity of $\approx 40\,{\rm pb^{-1}}$ and $5\,{\rm fb^{-1}}$ in the years 2010 and 2011, respectively. The corresponding data offer the unique possibility to precisely study the properties of the production of heavy vector bosons in a new energy regime. The accurate understanding of the Standard Model is not only crucial for searches of unknown particles and phenomena but also to test predictions of perturbative Quantum-Chromo-Dynamics calculations and for precision measurements of observables in the electroweak sector. Results from a variety of measurements in which single W or Z bosons are identified are reviewed. Special emphasis in this review is given to interpretations of the experimental results in the context of state-of-the-art predictions.Comment: 60 pages, 64 figures, For Eur. Phys. J.

Heavy Hero or Digital Dummy? Multimodal Player–Avatar Relations in Final Fantasy 7

This article analyses the player-avatar relation in Final Fantasy 7, drawing on multimodality theory to analyse textual structures both in the game and in the discourse of player-interviews and fan writing. It argues that the avatar is a two-part structure, partly designed in conventional narrative terms as a protagonist of popular narrative, and partly as a vehicle for interactive game-play. The former structure is replete with the traditions and designs of Japanese popular narrative, oral formulaic narrative and contemporary superhero narratives; and is presented to the player as an offer act – a declarative narrative statement. The latter is a construct of evolving attributes and economies characteristic of roleplaying games; and is presented to the player as a demand act – a rule-based command. Though these two functions separate out in the grammar of player and fan discourse, it is their integration which provides the pleasure of gameplay and narrative engagement

Toward WTO 2000: a Seattle odyssey

World Trade Organization ; International trade