Theodore Shaw, Debsuvra Mukhopadhyay, Zhuoqun Hao
et al.
We characterize single-mode vacuum squeezing generated by a SNAIL Parametric Amplifier (SPA) operated under conditions representative of practical sensing and qubit-readout experiments. Motivated by prior expectations that Kerr-induced distortion limits squeezing in degenerate parametric amplifiers, we varied external flux and pump power to explore operating points where Kerr nonlinearity is theoretically minimized. We find that for practical applications where the squeezing frequency is fixed, the Kerr was variable by about a factor of two and the achievable squeezing showed no significant dependence on Kerr. Theoretical modeling supports this observation and indicates that baseline Kerr values in state-of-the-art SPAs are already too small to impose a practical limitation. Instead, squeezing was dominated by internal resonator loss and insertion loss in the microwave chain. These results indicate that, in practical SPAs, reducing loss, rather than suppressing Kerr, is the primary route to improved squeezing performance.
Non-Hermitian systems have emerged as a powerful paradigm for ultrasensitive sensing, leveraging unique spectral and dynamical properties that find no counterparts in Hermitian physics. While recent theoretical assessments have established that these protocols offer no fundamental advantage in the ideal shot-noise-limited regime once the success probability of non-unitary evolution is rigorously accounted for, their practical utility under realistic experimental constraints remains largely unexplored. In this work, we shift the focus toward practical laboratory performance by demonstrating that non-Hermitian sensors can significantly outperform their Hermitian counterparts in the presence of various types of technical noise. This enhancement stems from the significantly enhanced susceptibility, which amplifies the signal response to effectively overcome the floor of technical imperfections. By evaluating the Fisher information under different technical noise models, we further substantiate the superior performance of non-Hermitian sensing. Our results delineate the specific regimes where non-Hermitian platforms yield clear practical gains, offering a concrete avenue for building high-precision, noise-resilient sensors.
Based on limited observations, machine learning discerns a dependence which is expected to hold in the future. What makes it possible? Statistical learning theory imagines indefinitely increasing training sample to justify its approach. In reality, there is no infinite time or even infinite general population for learning. Here I argue that practical machine learning is based on an implicit assumption that underlying dependence is relatively ``smooth" : likely, there are no abrupt differences in feedback between cases with close data points. From this point of view learning shall involve selection of the hypothesis ``smoothly" approximating the training set. I formalize this as Practical learning paradigm. The paradigm includes terminology and rules for description of learners. Popular learners (local smoothing, k-NN, decision trees, Naive Bayes, SVM for classification and for regression) are shown here to be implementations of this paradigm.
One fundamental way to leave a mark in life is to write an account of oneself, whether as a memoir or an autobiographical sketch. For Moravians, this practice is a spiritual requirement and takes the form of a Lebenslauf, which translates to ‘life account’. The Edwards family, of which I am a descendant, has been Moravian for many generations and has lived in Moravian settlements across several countries, including England, Ireland, Canada and South Africa. Family records and archival searches have uncovered a number of Edwards’ Lebenslauf memoirs – both short and long, authored by men and women, and encompassing both autobiographical and biographical narratives. These works have appeared in church records, and some remain unpublished, intended to be passed down to family descendants.
Contribution: This article aims to trace the development of the Moravian Church movement in the United Kingdom and South Africa through the life writings of the Edwards family across six generations. It will highlight the differences between the writings of men and women, as well as track the changes in social and religious norms experienced by those who lived through these periods, starting in 18th-century Europe and concluding in the 21st century with the South African Moravian descendants, who have since spread further afield.
Ovaj rad istražuje krštenje kao govorni čin, povezujući klasičnu konvencionalističku teoriju govornih činova Johna Langshawa Austina i pragmatičku intencionalističku tradiciju Herberta Paula Gricea sa suvremenim sakramentalnim pitanjima. U prvom dijelu analiziramo Austinov konvencionalizam te njegove uvjete uspješnosti, s naglaskom na neuspješnosti, pokazujući kako strogo propisana liturgijska formula predstavlja nužan konvencionalni okvir krštenja. U drugom dijelu konvencionalizmu suprotstavljamo Griceovu intencionalističku teoriju, prema kojoj govornikova namjera i prepoznavanje te namjere od strane slušatelja čine srž komunikacijske uspješnosti. Treći dio usredotočen je na slučaj velečasnog Andresa Aranga, čija su krštenja proglašena nevaljanima jer je upotrebljavao zamjenicu »mi« umjesto propisane »ja«. Analizom tog slučaja pokazujemo da krštenje uspijeva samo ako su istodobno ispunjeni konvencionalni uvjeti (ispravna formula, ovlašteni govornik) i intencionalni uvjeti (namjera da Krist djeluje kroz svećenika). Zaključujemo da sakramentalni govor funkcionira po modelu »dvostrukog uvjeta«, u kojem se institucionalna norma i unutarnja namjera međusobno podupiru. Taj model nudi metodološki okvir za daljnja istraživanja drugih sakramenata i ritualnih govornih činova te ukazuje na praktične posljedice nedostatka konvencionalne ispravnosti ili intencionalne primjerenosti u liturgijskoj praksi.
Beáta Balogová, Natália Vranková, Elżbieta Osewska
et al.
The frequently occurring phenomenon of social jetlag is a current problem that stimulates the development of diseases. The starting point for determining social jetlag is time regulation. It is determined by three factors: social time; which determines the interactions and tasks that organize life; physical time regulated by the sun, and biological time; which controls physiology (circadian rhythm). The mismatch between internal time and the social schedule in concert with solar time quanties the social jetlag. At issue is the mismatch between the natural preferences of circadian rhythm and the demands of social life. This results in different times for waking and sleeping. These cause sleep debt, which portends fatigue, insomnia but also longer-term effects on cardiovascular function, obesity and diabetes rates. For social work students, this phenomenon is particularly important in relation to the nature of the work for which they are preparing. Sensitive perceptions of one’s own time preference for work and sleep are part of the self-care toolkit stimulating a reduction in burnout syndrome. The aim of this study is to identify the extent of social jetlag in social work students and to propose effective strategies for its optimization. The quantitative research strategy used predicts effective capture of this phenomenon. Through an original questionnaire distributed to Social Work students in the academic year 2023/2024, the extent of social jetlag was ascertained. The authors’ questionnaire was divided into three sections. These identified the hourly distribution of activities (sleep, wakefulness, and eating) on academic and free days, whereas basic demographic characteristics were collected. Statistical processing was performed using IBM SPSS Statistics 28 and Datatab software. The Wilcoxon test was used to compare time metric data within a single group, while dissimilarity was determined in relation to the social schedule (instructional day vs. free day) of the students. Social jetlag was demonstrated in social work students. Through Mann-Whitney U-test, we identified a possible cause of social jetlag in the area of sleep. Extensive analysis of the results identified online strategy tools (Trello, Todoist, Asana, Forest) that can support effective time management and contribute to addressing the issue in social work students.
Il nucleo centrale di questo lavoro risiede nella proposta progettuale di un percorso educativo sull’ecologia integrale e la sostenibilità che, attraverso un approccio integrato e innovativo, prepari gli studenti delle scuole superiori ad affrontare sfide complesse e a contribuire attivamente alla costruzione di una società sostenibile. Filo conduttore dell’intero percorso sono i valori e i principi etici dell’ecologia integrale e della sostenibilità; essi ne costituiscono l’ossatura e confluiscono in un modulo didattico appositamente strutturato per consentire ai discenti di sviluppare l’intelligenza emotiva e maturare una competenza ecologica specifica: l’empatia e il cambio di prospettiva, che li aiuti a sviluppare consapevolezza di sé e consapevolezza degli altri, virtù ecologiche e amore per la casa comune.
Differential privacy quantifies privacy through the privacy budget $ε$, yet its practical interpretation is complicated by variations across models and datasets. Recent research on differentially private machine learning and membership inference has highlighted that with the same theoretical $ε$ setting, the likelihood-ratio-based membership inference (LiRA) attacking success rate (ASR) may vary according to specific datasets and models, which might be a better indicator for evaluating real-world privacy risks. Inspired by this practical privacy measure, we study the approaches that can lower the attacking success rate to allow for more flexible privacy budget settings in model training. We find that by selectively suppressing privacy-sensitive features, we can achieve lower ASR values without compromising application-specific data utility. We use the SHAP and LIME model explainer to evaluate feature sensitivities and develop feature-masking strategies. Our findings demonstrate that the LiRA $ASR^M$ on model $M$ can properly indicate the inherent privacy risk of a dataset for modeling, and it's possible to modify datasets to enable the use of larger theoretical $ε$ settings to achieve equivalent practical privacy protection. We have conducted extensive experiments to show the inherent link between ASR and the dataset's privacy risk. By carefully selecting features to mask, we can preserve more data utility with equivalent practical privacy protection and relaxed $ε$ settings. The implementation details are shared online at the provided GitHub URL \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/On-sensitive-features-and-empirical-epsilon-lower-bounds-BF67/}.
In this contribution, kernel approximations are applied as ansatz functions within the Deep Ritz method. This allows to approximate weak solutions of elliptic partial differential equations with weak enforcement of boundary conditions using Nitsche's method. A priori error estimates are proven in different norms leveraging both standard results for weak solutions of elliptic equations and well-established convergence results for kernel methods. This availability of a priori error estimates renders the method useful for practical purposes. The procedure is described in detail, meanwhile providing practical hints and implementation details. By means of numerical examples, the performance of the proposed approach is evaluated numerically and the results agree with the theoretical findings.
As the strength of Large Language Models (LLMs) has grown over recent years, so too has interest in their use as the underlying models for autonomous agents. Although LLMs demonstrate emergent abilities and broad expertise across natural language domains, their inherent unpredictability makes the implementation of LLM agents challenging, resulting in a gap between related research and the real-world implementation of such systems. To bridge this gap, this paper frames actionable insights and considerations from the research community in the context of established application paradigms to enable the construction and facilitate the informed deployment of robust LLM agents. Namely, we position relevant research findings into four broad categories--Planning, Memory, Tools, and Control Flow--based on common practices in application-focused literature and highlight practical considerations to make when designing agentic LLMs for real-world applications, such as handling stochasticity and managing resources efficiently. While we do not conduct empirical evaluations, we do provide the necessary background for discussing critical aspects of agentic LLM designs, both in academia and industry.
Using the situation of French Catholicism as a starting point, this article shows how sociologists of Catholicism have continued to refine the methods and categories used to construct the representation of Catholicism and understand the expectations of Catholics. The most recent surveys are based on an in-depth analysis of how Catholics think about “their church,” and identify what is causing the crisis within it. They are of particular interest in understanding why some practicing Catholics, especially younger ones, have shown little interest in the Synod on Synodality scheduled by Pope Francis. In fact, sociological surveys help us understand how the synodal process, through its procedure and legitimization, encourages the participation of certain sensibilities and discourages others. Sociological analysis also enables us to identify resources for overcoming this resistance, developing listening among Catholics and working towards the authentically ecclesial character of synodality. In conclusion, the article argues that the contribution of the social sciences should be taken into account in the development of consultation techniques and ecclesial governance.
This article deals with the profound shifts that are taking place in light of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, in which
humanity’s future is highly topical. The article engages Thomas Merton’s re-evaluation of Anselm’s Cur Homo Deo with Harari’s book Homo Deus (2015) and argues that, while we must take Harari’s views seriously, thefuture evolution of humanity is not the human godsuggested by Harari, but that suggested by Merton, who argues that the incarnation shows God’s love for creation; shows Christ as the pattern of what it means to live a holy life, and, ultimately, shows the future of both the cosmos and humanity, where all is taken into the very heart of God. Harari views the future as the creation of a benevolent human god; Merton views the future as a place where all of creation is divinised.
Christianity, Practical religion. The Christian life
Interdisciplinary integration at theological faculties, as envisaged in the apostolic constitution Veritatis Gaudium, is a demanding challenge. The empirical-experimental method of the natural sciences, which is based on measurable quantities and their mathematisation, is finding its way into research in the social sciences and humanities. The status of science vis-à-vis philosophy or theology can thus be challenged, which makes the dialogue and interdisciplinary cooperation between different sciences, which is necessary for a holistic understanding of people and their actions, more difficult. The development of psychology is driven by the desire to understand people, their emotions and their actions. To achieve these goals, concepts from philosophy and psychology about people and their function are constantly supplemented by new information from empirical research. The article shows the development of family therapy, which is represented in various study programmes at the Faculty of Theology at the University of Ljubljana. A particular example of interdisciplinary integration is the study programme Human and Interpersonal Relationships, which combines the fields of theology, religion, psychology and therapy.
The purpose of the present research is to study viewpoints of student teachers about methods of teaching theology courses at Farhangiyān university. The research method is quantitative survey and the statistical population consists of 1711 students at Frahangiyān university in Arak among whom 313 members were chosen by multistage stratified sampling. For data collection, Halimi Jelodār Questionnaire (2015) was used. The results show that 83% of student teachers assume that using modern methods is necessary for teaching Islamic theology. Besides, they are interested in the adaptation of Islamic theology courses and teaching them based on their own specialized majors. 27.7% of students consider the quality of Islamic theology textbooks as average and evaluate the performance of their professors to be 46%. Student teachers demand profound and practical education of the above courses and emphasize on some elements such as analysis as well as criticism of subjects for the improvement of students.
This thesis rigorously studies fundamental reinforcement learning (RL) methods in modern practical considerations, including robust RL, distributional RL, and offline RL with neural function approximation. The thesis first prepares the readers with an overall overview of RL and key technical background in statistics and optimization. In each of the settings, the thesis motivates the problems to be studied, reviews the current literature, provides computationally efficient algorithms with provable efficiency guarantees, and concludes with future research directions. The thesis makes fundamental contributions to the three settings above, both algorithmically, theoretically, and empirically, while staying relevant to practical considerations.
This article presents the opening keynote address offered by His Eminence Blase Cardinal Cupich at the second convening of "_Laudato Si'_ and the U.S. Catholic Church: A Conference Series on Our Common Home” co-sponsored by Catholic Climate Covenant and Creighton University. Cardinal Cupich observes that following _Laudato Si'_, the U.S. Catholic Church has been largely unwilling to make the sacrifices necessary to care for our common home. This is especially rooted in a distorted concept of freedom that idolizes self-interested economic growth and the “myth of progress,” and which requires three conversions: political and economic, educational, and spiritual.
A set of novel approaches for estimating epistemic uncertainty in deep neural networks with a single forward pass has recently emerged as a valid alternative to Bayesian Neural Networks. On the premise of informative representations, these deterministic uncertainty methods (DUMs) achieve strong performance on detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) data while adding negligible computational costs at inference time. However, it remains unclear whether DUMs are well calibrated and can seamlessly scale to real-world applications - both prerequisites for their practical deployment. To this end, we first provide a taxonomy of DUMs, and evaluate their calibration under continuous distributional shifts. Then, we extend them to semantic segmentation. We find that, while DUMs scale to realistic vision tasks and perform well on OOD detection, the practicality of current methods is undermined by poor calibration under distributional shifts.
This article responds to a critical research challenge in Medieval philosophy scholarship regarding the internal periodisation of the register. By arguing the case for ‘post-scholasticism’ as an internal period indicator (1349–1464, the era between the deaths of William of Ockham and Nicholas of Cusa), defined as ‘the transformation of high scholasticism on the basis of a selective departure thereof’, the article specifies a predisposition in the majority of introductions to and commentaries in Medieval philosophy to proceed straight from 1349 to 1464, understating 115 years of pertinent Medieval philosophical discourse. It is argued that in the modern account of Medieval philosophy, this understatement is manifested in either a predating of Renaissance philosophy to close the gap between 1349 and 1464 as far as possible or in proceeding straight from 1349 to Renaissance philosophy. The article presents five unique philosophical themes from this delicate period, indicating that ‘post-scholasticism’ was indeed a productive period in late Medieval philosophy, which should not be bypassed as an inconsequential entrance to Renaissance philosophy. The period 1349–1464 should accordingly be appreciated for its idiosyncratic contributions to the history of ideas in the late-14th and early-15th centuries, with reference to the political intensification of the via moderna, the pivotal separation of philosophy and theology and the resulting independence of the natural sciences, in res critique of institutions, transforming pragmatics and the rise of philosophical materialism.
Contribution: This article contributes to methodological development in Medieval philosophy by responding to a critical research challenge regarding the internal periodisation of the later Middle Ages. Arguing the case for ‘post-scholasticism’ as an internal period indicator (1349 to 1464 in Medieval philosophy, the article presents unique philosophical themes from the period, indicating that it was a productive stage in late Medieval philosophy which should not be bypassed as an inconsequential entrance to Renaissance philosophy.
Existing verifiable e-sortition systems are impractical due to computationally expensive verification (linear to the duration of the registration phase, T) or the ease of being denial of service. Based on the advance in verifiable delay functions, we propose a verifiable e-sortition scheme whose result can be efficiently verified in constant time with respect to T. We present the preliminary design and implementation, and explore future directions to further enhance practicability.