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Recent Submissions

  • PublicationMetadata only
    Cain and the book of Jonah
    (SAGE Publications Ltd, 2026-02-08) Lasine, Stuart
    Recently a number of commentators have argued that the book of Jonah consistently alludes to the exiled Cain. These allusions are taken as evidence that exile is also a main theme in Jonah, even though the book contains no explicit mention of exile. Kelsey contends that the same sense of exile exhibited in Genesis 4 ‘permeates the book of Jonah’. Some scholars call Cain and Jonah ‘typological figures of exile’, while others view their stories as allegories. These authors base their conclusions on verbal echoes, analogous situations, and similar characterizations. This paper argues that there is inadequate textual evidence to support these sweeping claims. The analysis begins with an assessment of the proposed verbal allusions and then moves on to alleged similarities in plot and characterization. The conclusion considers ways to assess the importance of a given intertextual allusion and comments on the current tendency to find exile in much biblical literature. © The Author(s) 2025
  • PublicationMetadata only
    Agility in new ventures: examining the role of autonomy and trust using a job demands-resources lens
    (Emerald Publishing, 2026-01-20) Kaur, Ashneet; Maheshwari, Sudhanshu; Srivastava, Smita; Maheshwari, Sunil Kumar; Varma, Arup
    Purpose – This study aims to examine how job autonomy promotes employee agility in young entrepreneurial ventures through work engagement and founder trust, drawing on the job demands–resources (JD-R) framework. Design/methodology/approach – We conducted two studies across distinct contexts: a two-wave field survey of employees in young Indian ventures (n = 205) and a survey study through Prolific in the United States of America (n = 184). Confirmatory factor analyses (AMOS) were employed to validate the constructs, and mediation and moderated mediation analyses were conducted using the PROCESS macro in SPSS. Findings – Results indicate that work engagement mediates the relationship between autonomy and agility. Trust in the founder strengthens the effect of engagement on agility, thereby amplifying the indirect effect of autonomy on agility through engagement. This moderating effect was significant in India but not in the United States of America, suggesting that institutional and cultural contexts condition the influence of trust as a resource. Practical implications – The findings suggest that the impact of autonomy on agility is buffered by trust and engagement mechanisms. The results highlight the need for context-sensitive practices, with trust playing a greater role in developing economies and collectivist cultures. Originality/value – This study extends the JD-R theory to entrepreneurial contexts, demonstrating that employee agility emerges from the dynamic interplay of autonomy, engagement and trust, with contextual variations across national settings. © 2025 Emerald Publishing Limited
  • PublicationMetadata only
    A quantum GAN for entanglement detection and image classification
    (Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH, 2026-01-30) Steck, James E.; Behrman, Elizabeth C.; Thompson, Nathan L.; Ali, S.; Chicano, F.; Moraglio, A.
    We build on our prior quantum machine learning work to design and train a quantum GAN. We first demonstrate that it is a truly quantum network by showing that it can successfully classify the entanglement of input quantum states, an open NP-hard problem that is purely quantum mechanical and has no classical analog. We then apply the method of our quantum discriminator in our QGAN to image classification, and demonstrate both efficient encoding of images into quantum states and successful discrimination of database images. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2026.
  • PublicationMetadata only
    Z2[jls-end-space/]-torus actions on positively curved manifolds
    (Elsevier B.V., 2026-01-14) Ghazawneh, Farida
    Kennard, Khalili Samani, and Searle showed that for a Z2[jls-end-space/]-torus, Z2r[jls-end-space/], acting on a closed, positively curved Riemannian n-manifold, Mn[jls-end-space/], with a non-empty fixed point set for n large enough and r approximately half the dimension of M, then Mn is homotopy equivalent to Sn[jls-end-space/], RPn[jls-end-space/], CPn2[jls-end-space/], or a lens space. In this paper, we lower r to approximately 2n/5 and show that we still obtain the same result. © 2026 Elsevier B.V. All rights are reserved, including those for text and data mining, AI training, and similar technologies.
  • PublicationOpen Access
    Harvesting easter eggs: An exploratory study of enjoying transnarrative media
    (Public Library of Science, 2026-02-02) Watts, Judy; Wing, Hannah
    Transnarrative storytelling, or fragmented narratives, has been undertheorized yet is increasingly more common in entertainment. An exploratory study guided by entertainment enjoyment theories explored potential predictors of enjoyment from transnarrative stories. A retrospective survey (n = 956) utilized both close- and open-ended measures and found parasocial relationships and fan behaviors (e.g., internet searches, discussions) were positively associated with intrinsic rewards and enjoyment. Intrinsic rewards were also positively associated with enjoyment above and beyond PSR and fan behaviors. Emerging themes from open-ended questions suggest that easter eggs are discovered by audiences when characters, objects, events/actions, and other forms of entertainment appear. Lastly, participants who found easter eggs described their responses as excited, happy, and full of pride. Implications include the necessity for additional research on transnarrative media processing. © 2026 Watts, Wing. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.