Two Kingdoms and Reformed Christianity: Why Recovering an Old Paradigm is Historically Sound, Biblically Grounded, and Practically Useful

This article was written in response to several Pro Rege articles critiquing Dr. VanDrunen’s position on the two kingdoms doctrine

Jesus Came Not to Abolish the Law but to Fulfill It : The Sermon on the Mount and Its Implications for Contemporary Law

This Article interprets Matthew 5:17–48 and argues that, because Jesus came not to abolish but to fulfill the law and the prophets, the Old Testament law takes on a new form for New Testament Christians. The law of God has been refracted through the ministry of Christ. While Matthew 5 does not address contemporary human law directly, its teaching does have radical implications for it. These implications flow particularly from the fact that Matthew 5 marks a decisive shift from the Mosaic theocracy to the worldwide new-covenant church that has no civil jurisdiction

LARVAL FISH EXPORT IN RESPONSE TO VARYING COMPENSATING GATE DISCHARGE AT THE SAULT RAPIDS, ST. MARYS RIVER

The St. Marys River (SMR) forms the border between Michigan, USA and Ontario, Canada connecting lakes Superior and Huron. Discharge is controlled by a compensating gate system upstream of the SMR rapids. Because spring and summer discharge fluctuates widely, resource managers required information on how flow variability influences larval fish drift. I estimated annual larval fish export in relation to variable discharge during 2018-2021 and compared results to published habitat model predictions. Mean discharge and water temperature were lowest in 2021 and highest in 2019. Water warming rates during high discharge differed from low discharge trends. Across years, I identified 10 families and 14 species of fish larvae drifting from the rapids. During my study, larval rainbow smelt (Osmerus mordax) densities were best explained by water temperature, discharge, and year of sampling while non-smelt densities were best explained by year of sampling and water temperature. Using a Bayesian state-space model, I estimated rainbow smelt larvae exceeded 30% of total export. Observed catch composition differed from previously published hydrodynamic models suggesting that modeled species did not spawn in the rapids. However, our catch composition was similar to prior river-wide studies conducted in the 1980s and 1990s. Future research on SMR larval fish export should be expanded to increase river coverage to identify spawning habitats for sensitive species included in the hydrodynamic model and of concern to resource managers

The Pragmatic Vindication of Conditionalization

This dissertation is a systematic exposition of the pragmatic case for Bayesian conditionalization. In contrast to traditional epistemologies which begin with notions of belief, justification, or knowledge, I begin with the notion of an update, and then ask the question: How would an agent want to update in various situations? To answer the question, I retrieve and generalize a value of information theorem due to Peter M. Brown. In many situations, agents will want to update by conditionalization or by some other method that approximates it. One of the main contributions is an exposition of what it means to approximate conditionalization, with special attention to the case of Jeffrey conditionalization and, by extension, some non-partitional updates. The second half of the dissertation catalogs situations in which an agent wouldn't want to update by conditionalization, with new implications for accuracy-centered epistemology and social epistemology

Gain-compensated metal cavity modes and a million-fold improvement of Purcell factors

Using a rigorous mode theory for gain-compensated plasmonic dimers, we demonstrate how quality factors and Purcell factors can be dramatically increased, improving the quality factors from 10 to over 26,000 and the peak Purcell factors from around 3000 to over 10 billion. Full three-dimensional calculations are presented for gold dimers in a finite-size gain medium, which allows one to easily surpass fundamental Purcell factor limits of lossy media. Within a regime of linear system response, we show how the Purcell factors are modified from the contributions from the projected local density of states as well as a non-local gain. Further, we show that the effective mode volume and radiative beta factors remain relatively constant, despite the significant enhancement of the Purcell factors

Rejuvenation Of Used Turbine Blades By Hot Isostatic Processing

LecturePg. 55-60.The creep properties of gas turbine blades will deteriorate with prolonged service exposure. This deterioration is primarily due to internal microstructural changes and the formation of creep voids or cavitation. Development work has shown that HIP processing is the best available treatment for recovery of properties in used blades. The results obtained on a complete engine set of lnconel X-750 blades indicate that HIP processing is capable of restoring new or near new creep resistance to used blades

Sifting the Signal from the Noise

Signalling games are useful for understanding how language emerges. In the standard models the dynamics in some sense already knows what the signals are, even if they do not yet have meaning. In this paper we relax this assumption, and develop a simple model we call an `attention game' in which agents have to learn which feature in their environment is the signal. We demonstrate that simple reinforcement learning agents can still learn to coordinate in contexts in which (i) the agents do not already know what the signal is and (ii) the other features in the agents' environment are uncorrelated with the signal. Furthermore, we show that, in cases in which other features are correlated with the signal, there is a surprising trade-off between learning what the signal is, and success in action. We show that the mutual information between a signal and a feature plays a key role in governing the accuracy and attention of the agent

Language Games and the Emergence of Discourse

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1958) used the notion of a language game to illustrate how language is interwoven with action. Here we consider how successful linguistic discourse of the sort he described might emerge in the context of a self-assembling evolutionary game. More specifically, we consider how discourse and coordinated action might self-assemble in the context of two generalized signaling games. The first game shows how prospective language users might learn to initiate meaningful discourse. The second shows how more subtle varieties of discourse might co-emerge with a meaningful language