In the Synoptic Gospels and Acts, Thomas is mentioned only in the four lists of the Apostles (Mk 3:18; Mt 10:3; Lk 6:15; Ac 1:13). Appearing about midway through these lists, he seems to have been regarded as relatively unimportant among the Twelve. By contrast, in John’s Gospel, Thomas is presented as a central character, featuring prominently in four major scenes. In three of those scenes Thomas is given the additional name Didymus (Twin), a name exclusive to him in John’s Gospel and later tradition, especially in connection with Syrian Edessa. By the 4th century, Edessa had become famous for its special veneration of the Apostle Thomas, with sources featuring Thomas as the missionary link between Jesus and the early Christianisation of lands from Syria to India. The Edessan School of Thomas developed an encratic school of devotion to Thomas as the mystical twin of Jesus and prototypical Christian healer, and the Syrian city housed an established shrine for his remains. Scholars rightly contest the historical value of these sources, but analysis of their provenance, content and reception allows us to outline a picture whose lines converge in a coherent and plausible tradition of devotion that, in just a few centuries, reached as far east as India and as far west as Spain, Gaul, and Britain.

Procedural justice considerations have long justified both the instrumental and intrinsic value of effective participation among court users, where ideals of impartiality, dignity and fairness remain pre-eminent. However, recent developments in socio-legal research as well as legal policy and practice point to an inchoate normative reframing of the law beyond procedural justice grounds, based on what we call the humanising imperative for effective participation. We utilise the philosophy of Hume to elucidate its distinctive features, namely the significance of partiality and the virtues of humanity. The paper further explores the putative enactment of the humanising imperative in three court settings in England and Wales – the Court of Protection, criminal courts and inquests – that indicates the precarity of this orientation in relation to procedural justice principles.

We provide an assessment of the Infinity Two Fusion Pilot Plant (FPP) baseline plasma physics design. Infinity Two is a four-field period, aspect ratio A = 10, quasi-isodynamic stellarator with improved confinement appealing to a max-J approach, elevated plasma density and high magnetic fields (⟨B⟩ = 9 T). At the envisioned operating point [800 MW deuterium-tritium (DT) fusion], the configuration has robust magnetic surfaces based on magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) equilibrium calculations and is stable to both local and global MHD instabilities. The configuration has excellent confinement properties with small neoclassical transport and low bootstrap current (|Ibootstrap| ∼ 2 kA). Calculations of collisional alpha particle confinement in a DT FPP scenario show small energy losses to the first wall (< 1.5%) and stable energetic particle/Alfvén eigenmodes at high ion density. Low turbulent transport is produced using a combination of density profile control consistent with pellet fueling and reduced stiffness to turbulent transport via three-dimensional shaping. Transport simulations with the T3D-GX-SFINCS code suite with self-consistent turbulent and neoclassical transport predict that the Pfus = 800 MW operating point is attainable with high fusion gain (Q = 40) at volume-averaged electron densities ne ≈ 2×1020 m−3, below the Sudo density limit. Additional transport calculations show that an ignited (Q = ∞) solution is available at slightly higher density (2.2×1020 m−3) with Pfus = 1.5 GW. The magnetic configuration is defined by a magnetic coil set with sufficient room for an island divertor, shielding and blanket solutions with tritium breeding ratios (TBR) above unity. An optimistic estimate for the gas-cooled solid breeder designed Helium Cooled Pebble Bed is TBR ∼ 1.3. Infinity Two satisfies the physics requirements of a stellarator fusion pilot plant.

In this work, we present a detailed assessment of fusion-born alpha-particle confinement, their wall loads, and stability of Alfvén eigenmodes driven by these energetic particles in the Infinity Two Fusion Pilot Plant Baseline Plasma Design, a 4-field-period quasiisodynamic stellarator to operate in deuterium-tritium fusion conditions. Using the Monte-Carlo codes SIMPLE, ASCOT5, and KORC-T, we study the collisionless and collisional dynamics of guiding-center and full-orbit alpha-particles in the core plasma. We find that core energy losses to the wall are less than 4%. Our simulations shows that peak power loads on the wall of this configuration are around 2.5 MW/m2 and are spatially localized, toroidally, and poloidaly in the vicinity of x-points of the magnetic island chain n/m = 4/5 outside the plasma volume. Also, an exploratory analysis using various simplified walls shows that shaping and distance of the wall from the plasma volume can help reduce peak power loads. Our stability assessment of Alfvén eigenmodes using the STELLGAP and FAR3d codes shows the absence of unstable modes driven by alpha-particles in Infinity Two due to the relatively low alpha-particle beta at the envisioned 800 MW operating scenario.

The magneto-hydrodynamic equilibrium and stability properties of the Infinity Two Fusion Pilot Plant baseline plasma physics design are presented. The configuration is a four field period, aspect ratio A = 10 quasi-isodynamic stellarator optimized for excellent confinement at elevated density and high magnetic field B = 9 T. Magnetic surfaces exist in the plasma core in vacuum and retain good equilibrium surface integrity from vacuum to an operational β = 1.6%, the ratio of the volume average of the plasma and magnetic pressures, corresponding to 800 MW Deuterium-Tritium fusion operation. Neoclassical calculations show that a selfconsistent bootstrap current on the order of ∼ 1 kA slightly increases the rotational transform profile by less than 0.001. The configuration has a magnetic well across its entire radius. From vacuum to the operating point, the configuration exhibits good ballooning stability characteristics, exhibits good Mercier stability across most of its minor radius, and it is stable against global low-n MHD instabilities up to β = 3.2%.

Motivated by problems of coordination failure in organizations, we examine how overcoming coordination failure and maintaining coordination depend on the ability of individuals to observe others’ choices. Subjects’ payoffs depend on coordinating at high effort levels in a weak-link game. Treatments vary along two dimensions. First, subjects either start with low financial incentives for coordination, which typically leads to coordination failure, and then are switched to higher incentives or start with high incentives, which usually yield effective coordination, and are switched to low incentives. Second, as the key treatment variable, subjects either observe the effort levels chosen by all individuals in their experimental group (full feedback) or observe only the minimum effort (limited feedback). We find three primary results: (1) When starting from coordination failure the use of full feedback improves subjects’ ability to overcome coordination failure, (2) When starting with good coordination the use of full feedback has no effect on subjects’ ability to avoid slipping into coordination failure, and (3) History-dependence, defined as dependence of current effort levels on past incentives, is strengthened by the use of full feedback.

Learning models predict that the relative speed at which players in a game adjust their behavior has a critical influence on long term behavior. In an ultimatum game, the prediction is that proposers learn not to make small offers faster than responders learn not to reject them. We experimentally test whether relative speed of learning has the predicted effect, by manipulating the amount of experience accumulated by proposers and responders. The experiment allows the predicted learning by responders to be observed, for the first time.

This paper studies how subjects in a three-person sequential step-level public good game learn to punish free riders more over time. Our current work makes several additions to the literature on other regarding behavior. First, our experiment provides evidence that subjects care about the actions that lead to an outcome as well as the outcome itself, replicating the results of A. Falk, E. Fehr and U. Fischbacher (Economic Inquiry, in press), J. Brandts and C. Sola (Games and Economic Behavior, 36(2), 138-157, 2001.) and J.H. Kagel and K. Wolfe (Working paper, Ohio State University, 1999). Second, our experiment provides one of the first tests of the newer theories of reciprocity by A. Falk and U. Fischbacher (Working paper, University of Zurich, 2000) and G. Charness and M. Rabin (Quarterly Journal of Economics, in press) that take a psychological games approach. We find that these theories fail to explain the experimental data. Finally, we examine the mechanism by which subjects learn to punish free-riding more ofter over time.

We augment a standard bilateral gift exchange game so employees can send messages at the same time as choosing an effort level. Employee effort (controlling for wages) is unaffected by allowing messages, but wages dramatically increase. Messages affect wages because employees give managers advice to set higher wages, usually explaining that this will result in higher effort. This advice prompts managers to try higher wages, helping them learn that raising wages increases their payoffs. In a follow-up experiment, we directly provide managers with additional information about the relationship between wages and effort. This too causes wages to increase, but to a lesser extent than allowing messages. Our results highlight the critical role of learning in generating gains from positive gift exchange.

We conduct experiments comparing the performance of individuals and teams of four subjects in solving two rather different tasks. The first involves nonograms, logic puzzles that require a series of incremental steps to solve. The second task uses CRT-type questions, which require a single, specific insight. Contrary to the existing literature, team performance in both tasks is statistically indistinguishable from that of individuals when communication is costless. If a tiny message cost is imposed, team performance improves and becomes statistically better than that of individuals, although still worse than previous research on teams would have suggested. To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first to find that imposing friction on communication leads to more effective performance in teams. Message costs reduce the quantity of messages but increase the quality, specifically the mix of good and bad suggestions. The improved quality of communication with message costs allows teams to out-perform individuals. Our analysis suggests that organizations would do better by identifying an able individual to perform an intellective task rather than using teams; prediction exercises indicate that this will not harm, and will generally increase, performance relative to a team, and only requires the cost of paying one individual rather than many.

We study how the heterogeneity of agents affects the extent to which changes in financial incentives can pull a group out of a situation of coordination failure. We focus on the connections between cost asymmetries and leadership. Experimental subjects interact in groups of four in a series of weak-link games. The treatment variable is the distribution of high and low effort cost across subjects. We present data for one, two and three low-cost subjects as well as control sessions with symmetric costs. The overall pattern of coordination improvement is common across treatments. Early coordination improvements depend on the distribution of high and low effort costs across subjects, but these differences disappear with time. We find that initial leadership in overcoming coordination failure is not driven by low-cost subjects but by subjects with the most common cost type. This conformity effect may be due to a kind of group identity or to the cognitive simplicity of acting with identical others.

We study the ability of subjects to transfer principles between related coordination games. Subjects play a class of order statistic coordination games closely related to the well-known minimum (or weak-link) and median games (Van Huyck et al. in Am Econ Rev 80:234–248, 1990, Q J Econ 106(3):885–910, 1991). When subjects play a random sequence of games with differing order statistics, play is less sensitive to the order statistic than when a fixed order statistic is used throughout. This is consistent with the prediction of a simple learning model with transfer. If subjects play a series of similar stag hunt games, play converges to the payoff dominant equilibrium when a convention emerges, replicating the main result of Rankin et al. (Games Econ Behav 32:315–337, 2000). When these subjects subsequently play a random sequence of order statistic games, play is shifted towards the payoff dominant equilibrium relative to subjects without previous experience. The data is consistent with subjects absorbing a general principle, play of the payoff dominant equilibrium, and applying it in a new related setting.

Using data aggregated from seven papers that study repeated play in standard ultimatum games with either stranger or absolute stranger matching, we show that the behavior of responders changes with experience. High offers are more likely to be accepted with experience and low offers are more likely to be rejected. At the individual level, there is a negative relationship between the likelihood that a given offer is accepted and the size of the preceding offer. We compare the results with predictions generated by static models of distributional preferences, implicitly dynamic models of preferences with reciprocity, and explicitly dynamic models of adaptive learning. The data is most consistent with models of preferences with reciprocity.