Maria Florencia Muratore, Alejandro Gangui, Maitane Urrutia-Aparicio
et al.
We present the results of an analysis of the precise spatial orientation of colonial Christian churches located in the Canary Island of Fuerteventura (Spain). Our sample consists of 48 churches, most built during the period between the Castilian conquest led by the Norman Jean de Béthencourt in the 15th century and the end of the 19th century. We examine whether the standard tradition was followed regarding the orientation of the apses of historic churches eastwards. While most of the religious constructions in the sample have their main axes oriented within the solar range, the statistical analysis also reveals the presence of two different groups of churches with different possible interpretations. For the first group, mainly composed of churches located in the central part of the island, an anomalous tendency to orientate them towards a declination of c. -14 degrees is detected. We provide some possible explanations for this, which include the date of a traditional Canarian celebration, an eventual imprint of topography, and the possibility of sunset orientations. Also, this particular value of declination is close to -16.3 degrees, the declination of Sirius during the 17th century. Therefore, we provide ethnographic data that might support an eventually controversial 'bright star' orientation. For the second group, meanwhile, we find a pattern of orientation where the apse of the churches points slightly to the north of due east. We propose this might signal constructions that were oriented to the rising Sun on dates close to Easter, one of the most important festivities of Christianity.
From Paul’s statement in 1 Corinthians 2:1 that he did not come to the Corinthians with eloquence/superiority of word or of wisdom, the question arises whether Paul was against the use of ancient rhetoric. Different references in this letter point to criticism against Paul where his authority was threatened, and the expectation was that Paul could easily fall into the trap of rhetorical display in his defence and presentation of himself in the letter. It becomes clear that Paul’s persuasion strategies, used in 1 Corinthians to present himself, are in line with ancient rhetorical guidelines. However, even in the events of Paul’s authority being jeopardized by the Corinthians, he could not be forced to exhibit his character in 1 Corinthians and fall into rhetorical display. In his presentation of himself, Paul presents a picture of dependence on God. Paul’s use of rhetoric in this letter, confirms his avoidance of persuasive words of wisdom as claimed in 1 Corinthians 2:1.
Christianity, Practical religion. The Christian life
Naser Ahmadiniaz, Victor M. Banda Guzmán, James P. Edwards
et al.
It has been known for many years that methods inspired by string theory, such as the worldline formalism, allow one to write down integral representations that combine large numbers of Feynman diagrams of different topologies. However, to make this fact useful for state-of-the-art calculations one has to confront non-standard integration problems where neither the known integration techniques for Feynman diagrams nor algebraic manipulation programs are of much help. Here I will give a progress report on this long-term project focussing on photon amplitudes at one and two loops, in vacuum and in external fields.
Luiz Morais, Georgia Panagiotidou, Sarah Hayes
et al.
Data physicalizations have gained prominence across domains, but their environmental impact has been largely overlooked. This work addresses this gap by investigating the interplay between sustainability and physicalization practices. We conducted interviews with experts from diverse backgrounds, followed by a survey to gather insights into how they approach physicalization projects and reflect on sustainability. Our thematic analysis revealed sustainability considerations throughout the entire physicalization life cycle -- a framework that encompasses various stages in a physicalization's existence. Notably, we found no single agreed-upon definition for sustainable physicalizations, highlighting the complexity of integrating sustainability into physicalization practices. We outline sustainability challenges and strategies based on participants' experiences and propose the Sustainable Physicalization Practices (SuPPra) Matrix, providing a structured approach for designers to reflect on and enhance the environmental impact of their future physicalizations.
Christian Bluethgen, Dave Van Veen, Cyril Zakka
et al.
At the heart of radiological practice is the challenge of integrating complex imaging data with clinical information to produce actionable insights. Nuanced application of language is key for various activities, including managing requests, describing and interpreting imaging findings in the context of clinical data, and concisely documenting and communicating the outcomes. The emergence of large language models (LLMs) offers an opportunity to improve the management and interpretation of the vast data in radiology. Despite being primarily general-purpose, these advanced computational models demonstrate impressive capabilities in specialized language-related tasks, even without specific training. Unlocking the potential of LLMs for radiology requires basic understanding of their foundations and a strategic approach to navigate their idiosyncrasies. This review, drawing from practical radiology and machine learning expertise and recent literature, provides readers insight into the potential of LLMs in radiology. It examines best practices that have so far stood the test of time in the rapidly evolving landscape of LLMs. This includes practical advice for optimizing LLM characteristics for radiology practices along with limitations, effective prompting, and fine-tuning strategies.
Industrial production processes, especially in the pharmaceutical industry, are complex systems that require continuous monitoring to ensure efficiency, product quality, and safety. This paper presents a hybrid unsupervised learning strategy (HULS) for monitoring complex industrial processes. Addressing the limitations of traditional Self-Organizing Maps (SOMs), especially in scenarios with unbalanced data sets and highly correlated process variables, HULS combines existing unsupervised learning techniques to address these challenges. To evaluate the performance of the HULS concept, comparative experiments are performed based on a laboratory batch
Christian Marius Lillelund, Fernando Pannullo, Morten Opprud Jakobsen
et al.
Predicting the remaining useful life (RUL) of ball bearings is an active area of research, where novel machine learning techniques are continuously being applied to predict degradation trends and anticipate failures before they occur. However, few studies have explicitly addressed the challenge of handling censored data, where information about a specific event (\eg mechanical failure) is incomplete or only partially observed. To address this issue, we introduce a novel and flexible method for early fault detection using Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence and RUL estimation using survival analysis that naturally supports censored data. We demonstrate our approach in the XJTU-SY dataset using a 5-fold cross-validation strategy across three different operating conditions. When predicting the time to failure for bearings under the highest load (C1, 12.0 kN and 2100 RPM) with 25% random censoring, our approach achieves a mean absolute error (MAE) of 14.7 minutes (95% CI = 13.6-15.8) using a linear CoxPH model, and an MAE of 12.6 minutes (95% CI = 11.8-13.4) using a nonlinear Random Survival Forests model, compared to an MAE of 18.5 minutes (95% CI = 17.4-19.6) using a linear LASSO model that does not support censoring. Moreover, our approach achieves a mean cumulative relative accuracy (CRA) of 0.7586 over 5 bearings under the highest load, which improves over several state-of-the-art baselines. Our work highlights the importance of considering censored data as part of the model design when building predictive models for early fault detection and RUL estimation.
L. B. Soros, Alyssa Adams, Stefano Kalonaris
et al.
Artificial Life (ALife) as an interdisciplinary field draws inspiration and influence from a variety of perspectives. Scientific progress crucially depends, then, on concerted efforts to invite cross-disciplinary dialogue. The goal of this paper is to revitalize discussions of potential connections between the fields of Computational Creativity (CC) and ALife, focusing specifically on the concept of Open-Endedness (OE); the primary goal of CC is to endow artificial systems with creativity, and ALife has dedicated much research effort into studying and synthesizing OE and artificial innovation. However, despite the close proximity of these concepts, their use so far remains confined to their respective communities, and their relationship is largely unclear. We provide historical context for research in both domains, and review the limited work connecting research on creativity and OE explicitly. We then highlight specific questions to be considered, with the eventual goals of (i) decreasing conceptual ambiguity by highlighting similarities and differences between the concepts of OE and creativity, (ii) identifying synergy effects of a research agenda that encompasses both concepts, and (iii) establishing a dialogue between ALife and CC research.
The Ecumenical and Reformed Creeds and Confessions hold a continuity of Trinitarian doctrine as formulated since the Nicene creed (325 AD). Yet the role of the spirit seems to be undermined in such formulations. The historical context of the Nicene creed emphasized on the homoousios of the Son. Thus, the filioque in the Nicene later formulation. In this article, the author addresses the lacuna of the role of the Spirit in the traditional Trinitarian formulations. Based on John Calvin’s understanding of an autotheos Trinity, and his timeless view of eternity, the significance of the Spirit should have an equally prominent role. The renewed position should leave no ontological subordinationism either of the Son or the Spirit—a correction to the Eastern and the Western church formulations. In addition, the reformulation read in autothean interpretation shows how the inherent hypostasis submission fits with God’s mission in the history of salvation.
Christianity, Practical religion. The Christian life
For the first time in detail the influence of Orthodox Christianity on the development of cosmological ideas in Ukraine. The evolution of existing models of the birth and structure of the universe at that time was investigated. The connection between Orthodox ideas and cosmological notions in Ukraine is shown. The little-known works of the first teachers of Ukrainian academies on the studied topics are analyzed. It was established that all the models of the universe were known in Ukraine, but the texts of Orthodox theologians had great authority and influence on the development of cosmological ideas.
In recent years, there is strong emphasis on mining medical data using machine learning techniques. A common problem is to obtain a noiseless set of textual documents, with a relevant content for the research question, and developing a Question Answering (QA) model for a specific medical field. The purpose of this paper is to present a new methodology for building a medical dataset and obtain a QA model for analysis of symptoms and impact on daily life for a specific disease domain. The ``Mental Health'' forum was used, a forum dedicated to people suffering from schizophrenia and different mental disorders. Relevant posts of active users, who regularly participate, were extrapolated providing a new method of obtaining low-bias content and without privacy issues. Furthermore, it is shown how to pre-process the dataset to convert it into a QA dataset. The Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), DistilBERT, RoBERTa, and BioBERT models were fine-tuned and evaluated via F1-Score, Exact Match, Precision and Recall. Accurate empirical experiments demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method for obtaining an accurate dataset for QA model implementation. By fine-tuning the BioBERT QA model, we achieved an F1 score of 0.885, showing a considerable improvement and outperforming the state-of-the-art model for mental disorders domain.
U. Sansom-Daly, C. Wakefield, Sarah J. Ellis
et al.
Simple Summary Adolescents and young adult cancer survivors are vulnerable to psychological distress after completing cancer treatment. Telehealth (online videoconferencing) interventions may be able to address the gap in tailored, evidence-based supportive interventions. We evaluated an online, group-based, videoconference-delivered cognitive-behavioral therapy intervention (‘Recapture Life’) in a randomized trial. Forty cancer survivors between the ages of 15–25 years participated. No positive impacts on participants’ quality of life emerged immediately following the intervention, but Recapture Life participants reported using more adaptive coping skills. Recapture Life participants also reported higher negative impact of cancer, anxiety and depression at a 12-month follow-up. Additional analyses suggested that survivors benefitted differently from the two online interventions (Recapture Life vs. peer-support group) depending on how recently they had completed their cancer treatment. Our data highlight that different survivor sub-groups may find group-based, telehealth psychological interventions more or less helpful at different points in survivorship. Abstract Telehealth interventions offer a practical platform to support adolescent and young adult (AYA) cancer survivors’ mental health needs after treatment, yet efficacy data are lacking. We evaluated an online, group-based, videoconferencing-delivered cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) intervention (‘Recapture Life’) in a 3-arm randomized-controlled trial comparing Recapture Life with an online peer-support group, and a waitlist control, with the aim of testing its impact on quality of life, emotional distress and healthcare service use. Forty AYAs (Mage = 20.6 years) within 24-months of completing treatment participated, together with 18 support persons. No groupwise impacts were measured immediately after the six-week intervention. However, Recapture Life participants reported using more CBT skills at the six-week follow-up (OR = 5.58, 95% CI = 2.00–15.56, p = 0.001) than peer-support controls. Recapture Life participants reported higher perceived negative impact of cancer, anxiety and depression at 12-month follow-up, compared to peer-support controls. Post-hoc analyses suggested that AYAs who were further from completing cancer treatment responded better to Recapture Life than those who had completed treatment more recently. While online telehealth interventions hold promise, recruitment to this trial was challenging. As the psychological challenges of cancer survivorship are likely to evolve with time, different support models may prove more or less helpful for different sub-groups of AYA survivors at different times.
Much like philosophy and psychology, theology also deals with the phenomenon of fear, each field of study defining it in their own way. What they all share is the understanding of fear as a deeply human phenomenon, affecting man in his entirety and diminishing his abilities. This study aims to present a theological approach to understanding fear, including elements of a therapy that promises man’s liberation from fear. Tomislav Ivančić classifies fear as a spiritual illness affecting both man’s body and soul. This realm of the spirit is healed by a transcendental power rather than by man, and it is precisely this what makes his hagiotherapy special. The therapy seeks to heal both the source and the cause of fear and to equip man for a new life, a life in trust that Ivančić sets against a life in fear. The presented theological method is underpinned by theoretical tenets and emerges from practice. The authors point out its potential contributions in today’s age of increased care for personal health. The study, which is the first of its kind to have been done in relation to this topic, used the hermeneutical approach of interpreting texts within their given context.
The article analyzes the religious situation in the Ukrainian society, as well as its impact on the formation and development of military-religious relations in the Armed Forces of Ukraine in 1991–2017.
Religion, as one of the leading forms of social consciousness, is an important factor in the formation of civil society and in the development of channels of its communication with state institutions. The Church has traditionally played the role of an important subject of the socio-political life in the history of the Ukrainian people.
The relationship between Russian-Ukrainian relations and their impact on state-religious relations in Ukraine and its Armed Forces has been studied. The main tendencies of the development of military-religious relations in the Armed Forces of Ukraine have been clarified. The transformation processes that influenced the change of the existing models of support of religious needs for the servicemen of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the studied period, are analyzed here/in this article.
In particular, some historical aspects of socio-political processes that influenced the formation and development of military-religious relations, and the institutionalization of the military clergy (chaplaincy) of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the period under study are highlighted.
In today’s conditions, military chaplains have gained significant experience of service in the war zone, have strong national and patriotic convictions, are able to withstand significant psychological and physical stress, and are ready to carry out pastoral service in any environment.
Simo Linkola, Christian Guckelsberger, Tomi Männistö
et al.
Which factors influence the human assessment of creativity exhibited by a computational system is a core question of computational creativity (CC) research. Recently, the system's embodiment has been put forward as such a factor, but empirical studies of its effect are lacking. To this end, we propose an experimental framework which isolates the effect of embodiment on the perception of creativity from its effect on creativity per se. We not only manipulate the system's embodiment, but also the perceptual evidence as the basis for the human creativity assessment. We motivate the core framework with embodiment and perceptual evidence as independent and the creative process as controlled variable, and we provide recommendations on measuring the assessment of creativity as dependent variable. We hope the framework will inspire others to study the human perception of embodied CC in a principled manner.
The process of development of various directions of objective scientific analysis of the problems of the theory of state and law is studied; the analysis of transformational processes of Christian-legal traditions in the legal system is carried out. The author argues that the Christian-normative values of Christian traditions are unique religious and social values, as they embody the fundamental principles of civilized organization of social relations in society, their normative requirements. The implementation of Christian normative traditions, principles, values through justice in law contributes to the understanding of law as a means of achieving social stability in public life, embodying the idea of justice in the mechanism of legal regulation of social relationships. The author notes that in modern society, justice, which contains Christian normative traditions determines the unconditional authority of law not only in regulating social relationships, but also in the formation of man as an person, because it contains Christian fundamental values that determine the humanistic nature of law in the practical aspect of regulation public relations. Due to the law, the idea of justice finds its normative manifestation, is protected by the rights and interests of citizens. Without losing touch with morality, religion, justice is a value-moral, spiritual criterion in the process of creating and implementing legal norms. By integrating the notion of justice into the legal system, the socio-moral (spiritual) value of the legal system itself increases. Legal norms promote the spread of justice in society as a basis and value-moral (spiritual) criterion for reconciling the interests of the subjects of social relations. As a universal category, justice includes both the moral (spiritual) aspect (serves as a criterion for evaluating law, as well as the principle and ideal of law) and legal (contains ethical and legal aspects and is a common law principle). The point of view is substantiated that Christian-normative values on the basis of connection, interaction, are the basis of convergence of justice and law. After all, the social nature of Christian-normative values in the legal nature of justice explains justice as an “idea, absolute, requirement”, determines the law in its natural sense. Christian-normative values as a source of justice and natural law, embrace human consciousness, determining the development of legal sense. In addition, justice, which is the basis of many legal phenomena, is in the process of influencing public relations as a special regulator of public relations. Thus, justice formed on the basis of Christian normative principles is an ideal for law. Based on Christian values, justice is important not only as a symbol of good social status, but also as a real goal-setting means of society. That is, it is appropriate to consider justice as a semantic component of the value-oriented and normative-regulatory social system. Key words: justice, legal system, Christian-legaltraditions, Christian values, legal culture, legal consciousness, morality.