Turkey has long been a country which exercises secular state system. Its constitution identifies the country as a secular one, and state institutions are no doubt secular. It has been the state’s policy to exercise laicism on every level from education to legal system since the establishment of the Republic in 1923. Yet, this policy did not end up with Turkish people turning away from religion....

Updating Kormendy & Kennicutt (2004, ARA&A, 42, 603), we review internal secular evolution of galaxy disks. One consequence is the growth of pseudobulges that often are mistaken for true (merger-built) bulges. Many pseudobulges are recognizable as cold, rapidly rotating, disky structures. Bulges have Sérsic function brightness profiles with index n > ∼ 2 while most pseudobulges have n < ∼ 2. Re...

We evaluate the accuracy of Tully's surface hopping algorithm for the spin-boson model in the limit of small to moderate reorganization energy. We calculate transition rates between diabatic surfaces in the exciton basis and compare against exact results from the hierarchical equations of motion; we also compare against approximate rates from the secular Redfield equation and Ehrenfest dynamics...

The dynamics of small bodies around the Earth has gained a renewed interest, since the awareness of the problems that space debris can cause in the nearby future. A relevant role in space debris is played by lunisolar secular resonances, which might contribute to an increase of the orbital elements, typically of the eccentricity. We concentrate our attention on the lunisolar secular resonance d...

The Council for Secular Humanism identifies Secular Humanism as a "way of thinking and living" committed to rejecting authoritarian beliefs and embracing "individual freedom and responsibility ... and cooperation." The paradigmatic practices of psychiatry are civil commitment and insanity defense, that is, depriving innocent persons of liberty and excusing guilty persons of their crimes: the co...

This paper considers general relativistic (GR) effects in currently observed extrasolar planetary systems. Although GR corrections are small, they can compete with secular interactions in these systems and thereby play an important role. Specifically, some of the observed multiple planet systems are close to secular resonance, where the dynamics is extremely sensitive to GR corrections, and the...

We investigate the long time stability of the Sun–Jupiter–Saturn–Uranus system by considering the planar, secular model. Our ethod may be considered as an extension of Lagrange’s theory for the secular motions. Indeed, concerning the planetary orbital evolutions, we improve the classical circular approximation by replacing it with a torus which is invariant up to order two in he masses; therefo...

The following demarcates the sens of the human person in Orthodox-Catholic bioethics from the family of senses proper to secular bioethics and philosophy. The radically different sources of knowledge about the senses proper to each discipline suggest that the importation of philosophical and secular psychological distinctions and analyses into true Christianity's concern with the human person, ...