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In October 1988, Gen. Carl E. Vuono, then chief of staff of the U.S. Army, considered the value of the staff ride as an educational tool. In an article in [...]

One of the rare epic poems in the history of Korean literature, the Chewang un’gi,completed by Yi Sŭnghyu in 1287, remained a work never translated in the West till 2022 and little known in Korea itself. This article intends to re-evaluate the Chewang un’gi, presenting it not only as a pivotal text of medieval Korean literature, but also as a possible historical source that on numerous occasions diverges from what is stated by the historiography commonly accepted, studied and taught today. In particular, the article focuses on four historical/mythological episodes treated by Yi Sŭnghyu in an absolutely original way, probably on the basis of as yet unidentified sources. First, there is the use of the Suijŏn(only known as a literary work) as a historical/mythological source. Next there is Tan’gun’s myth, very different from the Samguk yusa’s narration. Continuing, there is the reference to Parhae, where the author becomes a precursor of a topic that will gain the attention of historians only much later, and finally there is the Kyŏnggang’s story, narrated in a more “souverainist” way than in the Samguk yusa.

Abstract:Poorly known in Korea and almost completely ignored abroad, the Pŏphwa yŏnghŏmjŏn 法華靈驗傳 (Miraculous tales of the Lotus Sūtra), compiled in the fourteenth century, still represents an important work among the Buddhist literature of the late Koryŏ period. This importance is certainly not due to its content or originality: far from being innovative, the Pŏphwa yŏnghŏmjŏn is in fact an anthology of stories, focused on the miraculous character of the Lotus Sūtra, taken from previous works. Despite this, the work is not without a certain interest sufficient to justify research on it, and this interest lies above all in the issues concerning its author and the choice of sources, which are mostly Chinese but also Korean. The value of the collection increases if we consider that various tales are derived from works today lost. In the following pages, this article will deal with the work and its author, and then present some critical notes regarding the Korean sources from which the author drew his stories.

Abstract:This article examines three episodes reported from Suijŏn (Unusual Stories), a text full of fantastical elements compiled between the 10th and 12th centuries and surviving only in part, due to fragments reported in later works. The three episodes are united by the literary tòpos of crossing the sea, common to many cultures since the most remote antiquity. By conducting a comparative/structuralist analysis of the Korean text and other texts of the Western tradition, the paper seeks to identify a common “cultural structure”, because of which crossing of the sea becomes a metaphor of atonement and transformation of the individual. In this regard, the three Korean stories are particularly interesting in that the “mechanisms” that drive the crossing of the sea (and therefore of the “alchemical” process of transformation), differ in each episode, but are ultimately positive in terms of the formative path of the protagonists.

TWO DOES fed their way up the hill and continued browsing in my direction. My stand was on the downhill side of a ledge that ran horizontally along the hillside [...]

Abstract:In a field such as Korean Studies, where Gyeongju is considered by many the eastern arrival point of the various "Silk Roads" (both land and maritime), and a "multicultural" approach to the various topics is strongly encouraged (although still extremely rare are the scholars able to follow this encouragement), this article is an invitation to consider the possibility, hitherto never explored, that elements of European/Mediterranean derivation may have influenced Korean mythology. In particular, the author examines the myth of the birth of Aryeong, the female progenitor of Silla, and, above all, the figure of the hen-dragon (gyeryong), whose existence in Korea seems absolutely episodic and limited to the cultural context of Silla only. Taking the cue from the fact that the hendragon is instead very well known in the West, where indeed it has a long history, both on a literary and an artistic level, the author therefore hypothesizes, on the basis of the concordance of various elements, that the basilisk of the Western tradition may have influenced the Korean myth of the hen-dragon, ending up creating a new version to be added to the indigenous ones.

To meet the growing use of solid modeling, sophisticated analysis codes, and network communications, engineers have created a new desktop-computer architecture with the bandwidth and graphics power to support virtual [...]

The issue of trickster in old Korean literature has yet to be discussed in a broadly comparative way in a scientific context. Using a structuralist approach, this article addresses the anthropological theme of the “divine trickster” in some stories from ancient Korea and the ancient West. In particular, by examining three famous episodes from Korean folklore alongside three cases from Western fantastic literature, this article investigates the strategies aimed at acquiring the feminine element as represented by high-ranking foreign women. Starting with the hunting mentality of prehistoric society, where man tries to prevail with intelligence over his prey, the article reviews literary episodes from different anthropological contexts (Indo-European societies, Semitic societies of the Near East, and ancient Korean society), underlining their similarities and differences, but always highlighting and emphasizing the presence of a divine trickster. Ultimately, together with the common denominator of the progressive masculinization of the various societies, we note a more passive role of women in the Korean stories, which appear to be of more recent codification than their Western counterparts, and therefore seem more inspired by cultural patterns of patriarchal orientation.

Less than three years ago simply trying to catch a snapshot of the growth of global private wealth was as illusive as photographing a speeding bullet. We tagged it at [...]

Abstract:This article investigates a story regarding King Kyŏngmun of Silla found in the Samguk yusa. In particular, the research is focused on the donkey ears the king is said to have acquired after his ascent to the throne in 861, an episode that resembles the well-known tale of King Midas of Phrygia. Given the allegoric nature of the tale, I divide the article into three parts, dealing first of all with the donkey’s symbolism in ancient Eurasia. The second section shows other literary examples of kings having horse or donkey ears, including that of Midas, in an attempt at interpreting these stories. Finally, I give my personal explanation of the passage regarding King Kyŏngmun, assessing the similarities and differences with the story of Midas. In conclusion, the tale of King Kyŏngmun, an actual historical figure, appears much more tragic, since it is deeply anchored in a precise historical context, namely, the process leading to the inevitable ruin and fall of the state after a dramatic series of uprisings and revolts.

The startling growth of private wealth in the last two decades is stimulating exponential growth in the private banking industry -- and competition to attract and retain relationship managers. About [...]

The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) has two scientific objectives of cosmological focus: to probe the expansion rate of the universe, and to understand stochastic gravitational-wave backgrounds and their implications for early universe and particle physics, from the MeV to the Planck scale. However, the range of potential cosmological applications of gravitational-wave observations extends well beyond these two objectives. This publication presents a summary of the state of the art in LISA cosmology, theory and methods, and identifies new opportunities to use gravitational-wave observations by LISA to probe the universe.

The Campaigns For Vicksburg, 1862-1863: Leadership Lessons, Kevin J. Dougherty, Casemate Publishers, Philadelphia, PA, 2011, 240 pages, $32.95. In The Campaigns for Vicksburg, 1862-1863: Leadership Lessons, historian Kevin J. Dougherty [...]

Factors at the level of family/healthcare worker, organization, and system are neglected in medication nonadherence research in heart transplantation (HTx). The 4‐continent, 11‐country cross‐sectional Building Research Initiative Group: Chronic Illness Management and Adherence in Transplantation (BRIGHT) study used multistaged sampling to examine 36 HTx centers, including 36 HTx directors, 100 clinicians, and 1397 patients. Nonadherence to immunosuppressants—defined as any deviation in taking or timing adherence and/or dose reduction—was assessed using the Basel Assessment of Adherence to Immunosuppressive Medications Scale©(BAASIS©) interview. Guided by the Integrative Model of Behavioral Prediction and Bronfenbrenner's ecological model, we analyzed factors at these multiple levels using sequential logistic regression analysis (6 blocks). The nonadherence prevalence was 34.1%. Six multilevel factors were associated independently (either positively or negatively) with nonadherence: patient level: barriers to taking immunosuppressants (odds ratio [OR]: 11.48); smoking (OR: 2.19); family/healthcare provider level: frequency of having someone to help patients read health‐related materials (OR: 0.85); organization level: clinicians reporting nonadherent patients were targeted with adherence interventions (OR: 0.66); pickup of medications at physician's office (OR: 2.31); and policy level: monthly out‐of‐pocket costs for medication (OR: 1.16). Factors associated with nonadherence are evident at multiple levels. Improving medication nonadherence requires addressing not only the patient, but also family/healthcare provider, organization, and policy levels. Multilevel factors, such as relation to the patient, healthcare provider, transplant center, and healthcare system, are associated with immunosuppressive drug nonadherence in heart transplant recipients, indicating a need for multilevel interventions to address nonadherence.

This paper proposes a new interpretation of a controversial inscription found in 1988 at Kara Kamar, Uzbekistan. Despite several problems in its reading and interpretation, in fact, the inscription has been generally considered a dedicatory (?) epigraph written in ancient Greek. This paper, however, shows that a significant part of the inscription makes sense when considered written in Korean language and alphabet. Therefore, the paper suggests the possibility that the author of the epigraph might have been a Korean individual lived in modern/contemporary epoch.

The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) has the potential to reveal wonders about the fundamental theory of nature at play in the extreme gravity regime, where the gravitational interaction is both strong and dynamical. In this white paper, the Fundamental Physics Working Group of the LISA Consortium summarizes the current topics in fundamental physics where LISA observations of gravitational waves can be expected to provide key input. We provide the briefest of reviews to then delineate avenues for future research directions and to discuss connections between this working group, other working groups and the consortium work package teams. These connections must be developed for LISA to live up to its science potential in these areas.

Three weeks on and we can reflect on a very successful International Licensing Show in New York. The excitement we have come to expect was there and many new properties [...]

This year's list is unlike any that's been seen in the licensing and entertainment industry for years. Spider-Man. Star Wars. Scooby Doo. Stuart Little. Harry Potter. Lord of the Rings. [...]

Nearly 20% of adults in the US suffer from depression at some point, and depression has a major effect on job productivity and health care costs. Ways in which employers can handle depression in the workforce are examined.

The recent detection by the BICEP2 Collaboration of a high level of tensor modes has relevant implications which we briefly discuss in this short note. In particular, the large angle CMB B-mode polarization seems to imply problematic super-Planckian excursions of the inflaton field. We provide some comments about this point and in particular we stress a natural resolution to it: given our current (and probably future) observational ignorance about the true source of the scalar perturbations, one should abandon the theoretical prejudice that they are associated to the inflaton fluctuations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If one is not ready to pay a large fine-tuning price within supersymmetric models given the current measurement of the Higgs boson mass, one can envisage a scenario where the supersymmetric spectrum is made of heavy scalar sparticles and much lighter fermionic superpartners. We offer a cosmological explanation of why nature might have chosen such a mass pattern: the opposite mass pattern is not observed experimentally because it is not compatible with the plausible idea that the Universe went through a period of primordial inflation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We discuss models of primordial density perturbations where the non-Gaussianity is strongly scale dependent. In particular, the non-Gaussianity may have a sharp cutoff and be very suppressed on large cosmological scales, but sizable on small scales. This may have an impact on probes of non-Gaussianity in the large-scale structure and in the cosmic microwave background radiation anisotropies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The costs of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 have been tremendous on small firms. Will there be life, death or transformation for the firm? Although SOX has addressed the concerns relating to the financial scandals of Enron and WorldCom and somewhat restored investor confidence, the financial costs of doing so cannot be ignored. Of the Act, Section 404, effectiveness of internal controls over financial reporting, has been the largest cost burden on small firms. Large companies are better able to absorb the costs and have the necessary resources to comply as opposed to small firms. As a result of the high costs, some small firms have opted to go private, sell their company, or merge with another company. A new auditing standard was introduced recently to help make compliance less complex, and therefore, reduce costs.

We compute the effect of primordial non-Gaussianity on the halo mass function, using excursion set theory. In the presence of non-Gaussianity, the stochastic evolution of the smoothed density field, as a function of the smoothing scale, is non-Markovian and beside "local" terms that generalize Press-Schechter (PS) theory, there are also "memory" terms, whose effect on the mass function can be computed using the formalism developed in the first paper of this series. We find that, when computing the effect of the three-point correlator on the mass function, a PS-like approach which consists in neglecting the cloud-in-cloud problem and in multiplying the final result by a fudge factor [?]2, is in principle not justified. When computed correctly in the framework of excursion set theory, in fact, the "local" contribution vanishes (for all odd-point correlators the contribution of the image Gaussian cancels the PS contribution rather than adding up), and the result comes entirely from non-trivial memory terms which are absent in PS theory. However it turns out that, in the limit of large halo masses, where the effect of non-Gaussianity is more relevant, these memory terms give a contribution which is the same as that computed naively with PS theory, plus subleading terms depending on derivatives of the three-point correlator. We finally combine these results with the diffusive barrier model developed in the second paper of this series, and we find that the resulting mass function reproduces recent N-body simulations with non-Gaussian initial conditions, without the introduction of any ad hoc parameter.

In excursion set theory, the computation of the halo mass function is mapped into a first-passage time process in the presence of a barrier, which in the spherical collapse model is a constant and in the ellipsoidal collapse model is a fixed function of the variance of the smoothed density field. However, N-body simulations show that dark matter halos grow through a mixture of smooth accretion, violent encounters, and fragmentations, and modeling halo collapse as spherical, or even as ellipsoidal, is a significant oversimplification. In addition, the very definition of what is a dark matter halo, both in N-body simulations and observationally, is a difficult problem. We propose that some of the physical complications inherent to a realistic description of halo formation can be included in the excursion set theory framework, at least at an effective level, by taking into account that the critical value for collapse is not a fixed constant d c , as in the spherical collapse model, nor a fixed function of the variance s of the smoothed density field, as in the ellipsoidal collapse model, but rather is itself a stochastic variable, whose scatter reflects a number of complicated aspects of the underlying dynamics. Solving the first-passage time problem in the presence of a diffusing barrier we find that the exponential factor in the Press-Schechter mass function changes from exp{-d2 c /2s2} to exp{-ad2 c /2s2}, where a = 1/(1 + DB ) and DB is the diffusion coefficient of the barrier. The numerical value of DB , and therefore the corresponding value of a, depends among other things on the algorithm used for identifying halos. We discuss the physical origin of the stochasticity of the barrier and, from recent N-body simulations that studied the properties of the collapse barrier, we deduce a value DB [?] 0.25. Our model then predicts a [?] 0.80, in excellent agreement with the exponential fall off of the mass function found in N-body simulations, for the same halo definition. Combining this result with the non-Markovian corrections computed in Paper I of this series, we derive an analytic expression for the halo mass function for Gaussian fluctuations and we compare it with N-body simulations.

A classic method for computing the mass function of dark matter halos is provided by excursion set theory, where density perturbations evolve stochastically with the smoothing scale, and the problem of computing the probability of halo formation is mapped into the so-called first-passage time problem in the presence of a barrier. While the full dynamical complexity of halo formation can only be revealed through N-body simulations, excursion set theory provides a simple analytic framework for understanding various aspects of this complex process. In this series of papers we propose improvements of both technical and conceptual aspects of excursion set theory, and we explore up to which point the method can reproduce quantitatively the data from N-body simulations. In Paper I of the series, we show how to derive excursion set theory from a path integral formulation. This allows us both to derive rigorously the absorbing barrier boundary condition, that in the usual formulation is just postulated, and to deal analytically with the non-Markovian nature of the random walk. Such a non-Markovian dynamics inevitably enters when either the density is smoothed with filters such as the top-hat filter in coordinate space (which is the only filter associated with a well-defined halo mass) or when one considers non-Gaussian fluctuations. In these cases, beside "Markovian" terms, we find "memory" terms that reflect the non-Markovianity of the evolution with the smoothing scale. We develop a general formalism for evaluating perturbatively these non-Markovian corrections, and in this paper we perform explicitly the computation of the halo mass function for Gaussian fluctuations, to first order in the non-Markovian corrections due to the use of a top-hat filter in coordinate space. In Paper II of this series we propose to extend excursion set theory by treating the critical threshold for collapse as a stochastic variable, which better captures some of the dynamical complexity of the halo formation phenomenon, while in Paper III we use the formalism developed in this paper to compute the effect of non-Gaussianities on the halo mass function.

Monitoring represents one solution for the safeguard of historical buildings. The need for a non-destructive and comprehensive monitoring methodology suggests using related to Structural Health Monitoring. This paper is intended to present the outcomes of an experimental campaign on a masonry triumphal arch representing a real scale model of a church part, which was built outside ELSA laboratory at the Joint Research Centre of European Commission. This study aims to evaluate the damage pattern of the structure through simplified dynamic methods producing a quick evaluation of structural safety, easy to use on real cases. As in traditional monitoring, both the instrumentation precision and the measurement variability due to the different testing condition (e.g. ambient conditions) have to be considered. The related effects on the structural dynamic behaviour were analysed and evaluated in order to distinguish an effective change in the “structural health” (a real damage) from an alteration caused by external conditions (a “false positive”). Once studied such effects, settlements were induced to one column base through an “ad hoc” device. Varying the settlement width, three damage levels were obtained in the structure. For each state the structural dynamic properties and their variation were evaluated. Sensitivity of dynamic behaviour to structural damage and to its changes was analysed comparing the results for each level.

A supersymmetric inflationary stage dominated by an F-term has the problem that the flatness of the potential is spoiled by supergravity corrections, that is the slow-roll parameter ηgets contributions of order unity. We show that in F-term inflationary models based on strings there is natural way of obtaining small values of η. This happens in models of hybrid inflation based on orbifold constructions, in which a modulus Tfield is responsible for the large value of the potential during inflation, and a second field φwith appropriate modular weight is responsible for the roll-over. We illustrate the mechanism with a model in which the inflaton potential is provided by gaugino condensation, leading to successful inflation.

The scale at which supersymmetry is broken and the mechanism by which supersymmetry breaking is fed down to the observable sector has rich implications on the way Nature may have chosen to accomplish inflation. We discuss a simple model for slow rollover inflation which is minimal in the sense that the inflation may be identified with the field responsible for the generation of the μ-term. Inflation takes place at very late times and is characterized by a very low reheating temperature. This property is crucial to solve the gravitino problem and may help to ameliorate the cosmological moduli problem. The COBE normalized value of the vacuum energy driving inflation is naturally of the order of 1011GeV. This favors the N= 1 supergravity scenario where supersymmetry breaking is mediated by gravitational interactions. Nonetheless, smaller values of the vacuum energy are not excluded by present data on the temperature anisotropy and the inflationary scenario may be implemented in the context of new recent ideas about gauge mediation where the standard model gauge interactions can serve as the messengers of supersymmetry breaking. In this class of models supersymmetry breaking masses are usually proportional to the F-term of a gauge singlet superfield. The same F-term may provide the vacuum energy density necessary to drive inflation. The spectrum of density perturbations is characterized by a spectral index which is significantly displaced from one. The measurements of the temperature anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background radiation at the accuracy expected to result from the planned missions will be able to confirm or disprove this prediction and to help in getting some deeper insight into the nature of supersymmetry breaking.