Most Popular Books by David Morton

"A lone Jesuit Priest, Father Dominic Lindquist, a spy for the most powerful and feared Secret Society on Earth, has gone rogue to unravel a conspiracy to bring about Armageddon. ... A fanatic cabal within the Church has aided former Nazis in the creation of an advanced DNA-SPECIFIC "GENE-BOMB." With it, Hitler''s ultimate dream can finally be realized: The Mass Extermination of the Jewish Race"--Page 4 of cover

Have you ever thought about resurrection and eternal life? Has the thought ever crossed your mind: If we''re already going to heaven with Jesus when we die, then why is our future resurrection such a big deal? If so, this book is for you. "Awake, Oh Sleeper!" is an overview of what the Bible really says about heaven, hell, eternity and the afterlife. In a conversational tone, David Morton analyzes over 150 Biblical passages, and provides support for the position known as conditional immortality, or conditionalism. You''ll read about: Why resurrection is so much more important than we think it is. How our modern concepts of heaven and hell came to be the mainstream view. Why the mainstream view is likely not what the original authors intended. What the Bible teaches about the "intermediate state". How traditional interpretations change the typical meanings of words to support doctrine the Bible does not teach. How deeply God loves mankind that he would save us (all!) from eternal conscious torment. Why conditional immortality offers a Biblical "third way" between traditionalism and universalism that still allows for God''s justice, but rejects the concept of eternal torment. The topics covered include immortality, Sheol, resurrection, heaven, hell, eternal life, and why any of this even matters. David offers Biblically sound interpretations of problem passages, interpreting them by their historical and cultural context, to bring out the truth that is in the Bible. If you trust the integrity of the Bible, but eternal conscious torment is a theological rock in your shoe, this book is what you''re looking for.

This is a 4 color briefer version of the top-selling intro biology lab manual that has been reworked to contain the most popular labs only. This is in inventory and containing just the top 23 labs.

Defined contribution (DC) pension plans have been gaining ground in the last 10-20 years as the preferred system for many countries and other agencies, both private and public. The central question for a DC plan is how to invest in order to reach the participant''s retirement goals. Given the financial illiteracy of the general population, it is common to offer a default policy for members who do not actively make investment choices. Using data from the Chilean system, we discuss an investment model with fixed contribution rates and compare the results with the default policy under multiple objectives. Our results indicate that the Chilean default policy has a good overall performance, but specific closed-loop policies have a higher probability of achieving desired retirement goals and can reduce the expected shortfall at retirement.

We consider portfolio allocation in which the underlying investment instruments are hedge funds. Benchmarks and conditional-value-at-risk motivate a family of utility functions involving the probability of outperforming a benchmark and expected shortfall from another benchmark. Non-normal return vectors with prescribed marginal distributions and correlation structure are modeled and simulated using the normal-to-anything method. A Monte Carlo procedure is used to obtain, and establish the quality of, a solution to the associated portfolio optimization model. Computational results are presented on a problem in which we construct a fund of 13 CSFB/Tremont hedge-fund indices.

This dissertation draws on the artistic traditions of seventeenth-century Baroque and nineteenth-century Decadence in seeking to formulate an analytical vocabulary for the aesthetics of digitally-animated spectacle in contemporary cinema. The dissertation seeks to critique binary antinomies of narrative vs. spectacle, and instead propose a concept of narrativized spectacle whereby digital visual effects have brought about a profound liberation in cinemas capacity to envision narrative story-worlds, and depict their workings. It takes the contemporary Hollywood blockbuster as its chief subject for this inquiry, insofar as this is the filmmaking idiom most given to the embrace and deployment of digitally-liberated spectacle, and one which is frequently assumed to be largely bereft of formal and narrative sophistication. This dissertation argues, on the contrary, that the Hollywood blockbusters spectacular nature in fact bears complex utopian implications, and that the crudities which occasionally mar the form in practice are more the result of not being imaginatively hyperbolic enough, rather than being too much so. The dissertations invocation of Baroque and Decadent aesthetics provides a conceptual apparatus for describing this contemporary cinematic idiom of digitized blockbuster spectacle. It identifies a Baroque aesthetic in such stylistic traits as verticality, profusion, and the sublime, as well as narrative themes of transgression of limits, reverence before imposing scale and grandeur, and refusal to ennoble passivity and martyrdom. Likewise, it identifies Decadent aesthetics in stylistics which privilege the gaze, the enclosed and aestheticized space, and formal ritual, as well as narratives ordered around principles of perversity, self-consciousness, and interconnectedness. The ultimate intervention which this dissertation seeks to make, however, is to demonstrate the centrality rather than marginality of animation to cinema, insofar as cel animation has always possessed the graphic freedom to realize any imaginative vision, which digital effects have only recently extended to live-action cinema. All of the aesthetics of Baroque and Decadent blockbuster spectacle that the dissertation traces could be and, the dissertation seeks to show, were deployed in the animated feature years in advance of the liberation of representation that digital effects would bring to live-action.