Christian Initiation: Development, Dismemberment, Reintegration

(excerpt) Worshipers tend to assume that the patterns of worship that they know have been practiced since time immemorial. A little familiarity with liturgical history soon reveals that that is not in fact the case. You in your churches, with your new Lutheran Book of Worship (1978), have inevitably been introduced to some liturgical history as you had to come to terms with new things that were really old things

The geometry of kernelized spectral clustering

Clustering of data sets is a standard problem in many areas of science and engineering. The method of spectral clustering is based on embedding the data set using a kernel function, and using the top eigenvectors of the normalized Laplacian to recover the connected components. We study the performance of spectral clustering in recovering the latent labels of i.i.d. samples from a finite mixture of nonparametric distributions. The difficulty of this label recovery problem depends on the overlap between mixture components and how easily a mixture component is divided into two nonoverlapping components. When the overlap is small compared to the indivisibility of the mixture components, the principal eigenspace of the population-level normalized Laplacian operator is approximately spanned by the square-root kernelized component densities. In the finite sample setting, and under the same assumption, embedded samples from different components are approximately orthogonal with high probability when the sample size is large. As a corollary we control the fraction of samples mislabeled by spectral clustering under finite mixtures with nonparametric components.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/14-AOS1283 in the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Stonehenge excavations 2008

The following paper is the first published account of an excavation that took place at Stonehenge during April 2008. As this was the first excavation to take place within the stone circle for some forty years, the excavation has attracted an uncommon degree of interest, hence its publication in the Antiquaries Journal as an interim account of work in progress, in the form of an edited transcript of a paper first given at the Ordinary Meeting of the Society of Antiquaries of London on 9 October 2008. The paper explains that the 2008 excavation set out to date the construction of the Double Bluestone Circle at Stonehenge and to chart the subsequent history of the bluestones and their use at the monument. Evidence is presented for a provisional working date of around 2300 BC for the construction of the Double Bluestone Circle, while it is argued that the history of the site is far more complex than has been allowed for in existing interpretations, with a multiplicity of overlapping and intercutting (though not continuous) events, including substantial late Roman, medieval and early modern activity. The excavated material, and the evidence from the surviving stones, supports the suggestion that bluestones were brought to the site because of their perceived special qualities, perhaps for their supposed healing properties, and that some knowledge of those qualities remained current in later times with the result that in excess of two-thirds of the original bluestone volume has now disappeared

How do phenomena diagnosed as mental illness impact upon personal identity?

The central question of this study was to ascertain how phenomena diagnosed as mental illness impacted upon sense of personal identity. To facilitate the necessary research, the aims of this study were to examine the experience of mental illness from the perspective of service users. Nine adult respondents (five men, four women) participated in a series of unstructured interviews, each lasting approximately one and a half hours. Some respondents were interviewed twice. Data from the interviews were transcribed by the researcher and subjected to four levels of analysis. Of these levels, the first was the act of transcription, the second conclusions following same, the third close scrutiny of the transcribed document, and the fourth deconstruction into 'idea units'. Integral to this exercise was the use of narrative theory to develop concepts of the respondents' personal narratives with particular reference to the respondents' mental health narratives. Following the four levels of analysis, the personal narratives of the respondents were compared and contrasted in a cross-case analysis. With reference to narrative models developed for the specific purpose of this study, the conclusion was drawn that initial experience of mental illness has a profound effect upon the personal narrative. Thereafter, the resultant impact upon personal identity is influenced by a combination of personal and environmental factors. Some of these may lead to a re-evaluation of past experiences and associated understanding. Accordingly, the outcome of the illness experience may not necessarily be negative, but may be positive by virtue of insights gained. Implications for mental health practice and further research, including the personalisation agenda, are considered

Genetic control of the innate immune response

BACKGROUND: Susceptibility to infectious diseases is directed, in part, by the interaction between the invading pathogen and host macrophages. This study examines the influence of genetic background on host-pathogen interactions, by assessing the transcriptional responses of macrophages from five inbred mouse strains to lipopolysaccharide (LPS), a major determinant of responses to gram-negative microorganisms. RESULTS: The mouse strains examined varied greatly in the number, amplitude and rate of induction of genes expressed in response to LPS. The response was attenuated in the C3H/HeJlps(d )strain, which has a mutation in the LPS receptor Toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4). Variation between mouse strains allowed clustering into early (C57Bl/6J and DBA/2J) and delayed (BALB/c and C3H/ARC) transcriptional phenotypes. There was no clear correlation between gene induction patterns and variation at the Bcg locus (Slc11A1) or propensity to bias Th1 versus Th2 T cell activation responses. CONCLUSION: Macrophages from each strain responded to LPS with unique gene expression profiles. The variation apparent between genetic backgrounds provides insights into the breadth of possible inflammatory responses, and paradoxically, this divergence was used to identify a common transcriptional program that responds to TLR4 signalling, irrespective of genetic background. Our data indicates that many additional genetic loci control the nature and the extent of transcriptional responses promoted by a single pathogen-associated molecular pattern (PAMP), such as LPS

New genetic loci link adipose and insulin biology to body fat distribution.

Body fat distribution is a heritable trait and a well-established predictor of adverse metabolic outcomes, independent of overall adiposity. To increase our understanding of the genetic basis of body fat distribution and its molecular links to cardiometabolic traits, here we conduct genome-wide association meta-analyses of traits related to waist and hip circumferences in up to 224,459 individuals. We identify 49 loci (33 new) associated with waist-to-hip ratio adjusted for body mass index (BMI), and an additional 19 loci newly associated with related waist and hip circumference measures (P < 5 × 10(-8)). In total, 20 of the 49 waist-to-hip ratio adjusted for BMI loci show significant sexual dimorphism, 19 of which display a stronger effect in women. The identified loci were enriched for genes expressed in adipose tissue and for putative regulatory elements in adipocytes. Pathway analyses implicated adipogenesis, angiogenesis, transcriptional regulation and insulin resistance as processes affecting fat distribution, providing insight into potential pathophysiological mechanisms