Abstract Beyond ethnographic portrayals of religious competition as conducive to rupture and separation, this article shows forms intradenominational competitive coexistence that allow for both the social reproduction community faith change innovation. In a Spanish village, Catholic congregants compete not only secure worldly resources such priestly time or church-owned spaces, but also over le...

The opposition in Azerbaijan has long been considered a dysfunctional political group that does not threaten the ruling regime. Large swathes of the Azerbaijani public see opposition forces as badly organized, poorly funded, and vulnerable, allowing the Aliyev regime to stand largely unchallenged in the political arena. The traditional opposition’s image of failure drove newly emerging groups t...

A comparative analysis was made of the public's attitudes toward the use of animals in scientific research in 15 different nations. The intensity of opposition to animal research was found to vary from relatively low levels in Japan and the United States to much higher levels in France, Belgium, and Great Britain. More women than men were opposed to animal research in all 15 nations. Scientific...

For many soft computing methods, we need to generate random numbers to use either as initial estimates or during the learning and search process. Recently, results for evolutionary algorithms, reinforcement learning and neural networks have been reported which indicate that the simultaneous consideration of randomness and opposition is more advantageous than pure randomness. This new scheme, ca...

Existing studies of judicial decisionmaking have found that elected judges are more likely to dissent and to oppose judges from the same party. These findings are explained by elected judges having stronger preferences for risk or being more independent. In this paper, I offer an alternative explanation: judges’ efforts to be retained should yield different patterns of opposition among judges f...

We show that every automorphism of a thick twin building interchanging the halves of the building maps some residue to an opposite one. Furthermore, we show that no automorphism of a locally finite 2spherical twin building of rank at least 3 maps every residue of one fixed type to an opposite (a key step in the proof is showing that every duality of a thick finite projective plane admits an abs...

We give an interpretation of the Square of Opposition in an orthomodular structure enriched with a monadic quantifier.