The “Catholic” Church in Socrates of Constantinople and Pacian of Barcelona

While this article does not presume to answer the old question “Was Socrates of Constantinople a Novatian?”, it does offer a hitherto-unnoticed observation that may bear on the question. Socrates, as has been noted, is very reticent to use the term “catholic” in describing the church in his Historia ecclesiastica. This is unlikely to be a stylistic quirk, as a comparison to the history of Sozomen shows. No one yet has connected his reticence to the Novatian Sympronian, who objects to the same term on theological grounds in letters exchanged with Pacian of Barcelona. Given Socrates’ reluctance to use the term and a(nother) Novatian’s rejection of the same term, we may well have more evidence suggesting that Socrates was at the very least sympathetic not only to Novatians as a community but to their theological positions as well. In any case, the resistance of both Sympronian and Socrates to the notion of a “catholic” church stands in contrast to the usual interpretation of late antiquity as a period of growing universalism. The article also discusses whether it is even valid to ask whether Socrates was a Novatian or whether this question falls into less useful confessional dichotomies.

Unleveraged Portfolios and Pure Allocation Return

In asset management, the portfolio leverage affects performance, and can be subject to constraints and operational limitations. Due to the possible leverage aversion of the investors, the comparison between portfolio performances can be incomplete or misleading. We propose a procedure to unleverage the mean-variance efficient portfolios to satisfy a leverage requirement. We obtain a class of unleveraged portfolios that are homogeneous in terms of leverage, so therefore properly comparable. The proposed unleverage procedure permits isolating the pure allocation return, i.e., the return component, due to the qualitative choice of portfolio allocation, from the return component due to the portfolio leverage. Theoretical analysis and empirical evidence on actual data show that efficient mean-variance portfolios, once unleveraged, uncover mean-variance dominance relations hidden by the leverage contribution to portfolio return. Our approach may be useful to practitioners proposing to take long positions on “short assets” (e.g. inverse ETF), thereby considering short positions as active investment choices, in contrast with the usual interpretation where are used to overweight long positions.

How Not to Become Tolerant: Habitus and Affects in Lessing’s Nathan the Wise

The coincidences and phantasms that open Lessing’s play Nathan the Wise reappear throughout the entire drama and even bring about its happy ending. While the usual interpretation of the plot maintains that the illusions held by the protagonists of the play – such as their superstitions, unrestrained affects, and prejudices – are overcome via a learning process and transformed into tolerance, I propose a different view. In this article I argue, firstly, that these previous illusions are already slightly enlightened, rather than completely dim and dull, and, secondly, that this process only ostensibly leads to tolerance. As a consequence, my analysis focuses on the negotiation between tolerance and intolerance. Finally, I arrive at the conclusion that the maid Daja actually represents tolerance in a better way than the protagonists because she is the only one from whom tolerant endurance is demanded. The analysis of the affective patterns of the play demonstrate that Nathan the Wise can not only be read as a parable of tolerance, but also as a parable of the formation of a privileged habitus within the realm of the family.

A backward-spinning star with two coplanar planets

It is widely assumed that a star and its protoplanetary disk are initially aligned, with the stellar equator parallel to the disk plane. When observations reveal a misalignment between stellar rotation and the orbital motion of a planet, the usual interpretation is that the initial alignment was upset by gravitational perturbations that took place after planet formation. Most of the previously known misalignments involve isolated hot Jupiters, for which planet–planet scattering or secular effects from a wider-orbiting planet are the leading explanations. In theory, star/disk misalignments can result from turbulence during star formation or the gravitational torque of a wide-orbiting companion star, but no definite examples of this scenario are known. An ideal example would combine a coplanar system of multiple planets—ruling out planet–planet scattering or other disruptive postformation events—with a backward-rotating star, a condition that is easier to obtain from a primordial misalignment than from postformation perturbations. There are two previously known examples of a misaligned star in a coplanar multiplanet system, but in neither case has a suitable companion star been identified, nor is the stellar rotation known to be retrograde. Here, we show that the star K2-290 A is tilted by 124○±6○ compared with the orbits of both of its known planets and has a wide-orbiting stellar companion that is capable of having tilted the protoplanetary disk. The system provides the clearest demonstration that stars and protoplanetary disks can become grossly misaligned due to the gravitational torque from a neighboring star.

Why Economic Valuation Does Not Value the Environment: Climate Policy as Collective Endeavour

Economics takes an individualistic approach to human behaviour. This is reflected in the use of ‘contingent valuation’ surveys to conduct cost benefit analysis for economic policy evaluation. An individual’s valuation of a policy is assumed to be unaffected by the burdens it places on others. We report a survey experiment to test this supposition in the context of climate change policy. Willingness to pay for climate change mitigation was higher when richer individuals were to bear higher costs than when, as is usual, no explicit information was provided about cost distribution. This result is inconsistent with the usual interpretation of contingent valuation data. It also suggests that the data may be biased indicators of policy acceptance. Additional survey questions suggest that a collective mode of reasoning is common.

Nominal predication with estar

Spanish is a dual copula system — ser and estar. According to traditional interpretations of their distribution, estar does not take nominal complements. Instead, this type of complements appears with the copula ser. There are, however, some counterexamples to this rule. On the one hand, we have examples such as Pepe estuvo torero ayer ‘Pepe was like a bullfighter yesterday.’ In this example, the noun torero does not have its usual interpretation, but rather it refers to the prototypical qualities associated with bullfighters — bravery, unfazed by danger. In this manner, the restriction that Spanish imposes on the copula estar regarding NP complementation does not seem apply in cases where the NP does not provide an identificational interpretation, but rather one associated with the prototypical qualities associated with the noun. A second case in which estar can take nominal complements can be seen in examples such as Esta película está una masa ‘This movie is pretty cool.’ This type of estar predication has a different interpretation than the ones presented in the previous example. While the former provides a predication denoting the properties associated with the noun, the nouns in the latter are expressing a measure of quality regarding their subject. The subjects película ‘movie’ is not being identified with the prototypical qualities of a mass but rather are expressions of high quality. In this respect, the estar predication in this example can be ascribed to the evidential uses of estar. Not every dialect of Spanish can produce examples such as the ones found in the está una masa example, while data similar to está torero is common in all the dialectal continuum. The focus of this investigation is to examine these two types of nominal complements with estar and provide an analysis of the differences between them, as well as provide an explanation regarding their acceptability in estar predications.

Methodology for Reliable Assessment of Water Quality. I. Risk-based Rationing and Evaluation

The problems of ensuring the reliability of water quality assessment and optimizing its rationing are considered. Specific examples show that the usual interpretation of water quality standards and results of measurements of pollutants concentration as deterministic values does not comply with a number of provisions of Russian legislation and leads to errors, the consequences of which are incompatible with the requirements of environmental safety of water use. The reliability and stability of water use can only be guaranteed if both the measurement data and the established standards are considered as random values determined with an unavoidable error. In accordance with the probabilistic approach, one of the key tasks of water quality management is considered – determining the number of checks necessary for sufficiently reliable confirmation or refutation of the hypothesis of quality compliance with the standard. Various options for solving this problem in the framework of a risk-based approach are analyzed.

Structure of accretion flows in the nova-like cataclysmic variable RW Tri

ABSTRACT We obtained photometric observations of the nova-like (NL) cataclysmic variable RW Tri and gathered all available AAVSO and other data from the literature. We determined the system parameters and found their uncertainties using the code developed by us to model the light curves of binary systems. New time-resolved optical spectroscopic observations of RW Tri were also obtained to study the properties of emission features produced by the system. The usual interpretation of the single-peaked emission lines in NL systems is related to the bi-conical wind from the accretion disc’s inner part. However, we found that the Hα emission profile is comprised of two components with different widths. We argue that the narrow component originates from the irradiated surface of the secondary, while the broader component’s source is an extended, low-velocity region in the outskirts of the accretion disc, located opposite to the collision point of the accretion stream and the disc. It appears to be a common feature for long-period NL systems – a point we discuss.

Fiction and Emotion: The Puzzle of Divergent Norms

A familiar question in the literature on emotional responses to fiction, originally put forward by Colin Radford, is how such responses can be rational. How can we make sense of pitying Anna Karenina when we know there is no such person? In this paper I argue that contrary to the usual interpretation, the question of rationality has nothing to do with the Paradox of Fiction. Instead, the real problem is why there is a divergence in our normative assessments of emotions in different contexts. I argue that explaining this divergence requires a more nuanced account of the rationality of emotion than has previously been proposed. One advantage of my proposal over alternatives is that it helps to explain one way we can learn emotionally from fiction and imagination.

Heart Rate Variability is Correlated with Perceived Physical Fitness in Elite Soccer Players

Heart Rate Variability (HRV) has been typically used to monitor athletes’ physical fitness readiness. The supine position maximizes parasympathetic tone, which is important for monitoring in continuous aerobic sports, however, this is not the case of team sports that rely on anaerobic intermittent bouts, thus increasing sympathetic activation and vagal withdrawal. We hypothesized that HRV during sympathetic activation and vagal withdrawal would be a useful marker to evaluate perceived physical fitness in team sports. HRV was measured in both supine and standing positions during the mornings of 4 match days in 14 professional players. The supine Root Mean Square of the Successive Differences (RMSSD), as well as spectral analysis indices were recorded. Perceived physical fitness was assessed after each match by means of a visual analogue scale (VAS). Supine RMSSD was moderately correlated with perceived physical fitness (rho = 0.416), however, larger correlations were observed for supine and standing spectral indices (rho > 0.5). Correlation between RMSSD and Total Power was very large, thus questioning the usual interpretation of RMSSD (rho > 0.7). Standing Spectral HRV analyses may be a useful method for evaluating perceived physical fitness in the context of team sports. RMSSD may reflect the overall variability of HR and not only the parasympathetic influence, as observed in the current study.