Churches are considered one of the important structures responsible for providing care and support to vulnerable populations. One such population are children in need of care and support. This article presents the support provided by Pentecostal religious leaders to children needing care and protection. The study was conducted in Pentecostal churches in Tshwane Metropolitan Municipality, which is found in Gauteng province, South Africa. This qualitative study used an interpretative phenomenological analysis design. Data were collected from nineteen purposively selected leaders in Pentecostal churches using face-to-face semi-structured interviews. Data analysis was guided by the interpretative phenomenological analysis framework for data analysis. Findings indicate that religious leaders within Pentecostal churches are involved in providing care and support to children in need of care. The process they are engaged in include proper identification of those children, attending to physical, psychosocial and spiritual needs. However, each religious leaders use their approach depending on the relationship they have with members of government institutions such as police services and social workers. In order to enhance the support provided the children in need of care and protection, by religious leaders within Pentecostal churches, it is recommended that religious leaders are well informed about the role of different members of multidisciplinary teams such as social workers, psychologists, police officers, parents and other community structures. Moreover, there should be formalised collaboration and referral processes that will ensure that the child’s rights are not further violated in the process of provision of support.
Contribution: The study contributes to the body of knowledge regarding the role Pentecostal church religious leaders are playing in child protection. Furthermore, it sheds light on the importance of a multidisciplinary approach to ensure that children in need of care and protection are holistically supported.
Algorithms for continuous optimization problems have a rich history of design and innovation over the past several decades, in which mathematical analysis of their convergence and complexity properties plays a central role. Besides their theoretical properties, optimization algorithms are interesting also for their practical usefulness as computational tools for solving real-world problems. There are often gaps between the practical performance of an algorithm and what can be proved about it. These two facets of the field -- the theoretical and the practical -- interact in fascinating ways, each driving innovation in the other. This work focuses on the development of algorithms in two areas -- linear programming and unconstrained minimization of smooth functions -- outlining major algorithm classes in each area along with their theoretical properties and practical performance, and highlighting how advances in theory and practice have influenced each other in these areas. In discussing theory, we focus mainly on non-asymptotic complexity, which are upper bounds on the amount of computation required by a given algorithm to find an approximate solution of problems in a given class.
Lukas Hughes-Noehrer, Matthew J Parkes, Andrew Stewart
et al.
As computational analysis becomes increasingly more complex in health research, transparent sharing of analytical code is vital for reproducibility and trust. This practical guide, aligned to open science practices, outlines actionable recommendations for code sharing in healthcare research. Emphasising the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles, the authors address common barriers and provide clear guidance to help make code more robust, reusable, and scrutinised as part of the scientific record. This supports better science and more reliable evidence for computationally-driven practice and helps to adhere to new standards and guidelines of codesharing mandated by publishers and funding bodies.
Passive human speed estimation plays a critical role in acoustic sensing. Despite extensive study, existing systems, however, suffer from various limitations: First, the channel measurement rate proves inadequate to estimate high moving speeds. Second, previous acoustic speed estimation exploits Doppler Frequency Shifts (DFS) created by moving targets and relies on microphone arrays, making them only capable of sensing the radial speed within a constrained distance. To overcome these issues, we present ASE, an accurate and robust Acoustic Speed Estimation system on a single commodity microphone. We propose a novel Orthogonal Time-Delayed Multiplexing (OTDM) scheme for acoustic channel estimation at a high rate that was previously infeasible, making it possible to estimate high speeds. We then model the sound propagation from a unique perspective of the acoustic diffusion field, and infer the speed from the acoustic spatial distribution, a completely different way of thinking about speed estimation beyond prior DFS-based approaches. We further develop novel techniques for motion detection and signal enhancement to deliver a robust and practical system. We implement and evaluate ASE through extensive real-world experiments. Our results show that ASE reliably tracks walking speed, independently of target location and direction, with a mean error of 0.13 m/s, a reduction of 2.5x from DFS, and a detection rate of 97.4% for large coverage, e.g., free walking in a 4m x 4m room. We believe ASE pushes acoustic speed estimation beyond the conventional DFS-based paradigm and inspires exciting research in acoustic sensing. Code is available at https://github.com/aiot-lab/ASE.
Let $A$ be a set of positive integers. We define a positive integer $n$ as an $A$-practical number if every positive integer from the set $\left\{1,\ldots ,\sum_{d\in A, d\mid n}d\right\}$ can be written as a sum of distinct divisors of $n$ that belong to $A$. Denote the set of $A$-practical numbers as $\text{Pr}(A)$. The aim of the paper is to explore the properties of the sets $\text{Pr}(A)$ (the form of the elements, cardinality) as $A$ varies over the power set of $\mathbb{N}$. We are also interested in the set-theoretic and dynamic properties of the mapping $\mathcal{PR}:\mathcal{P}(\mathbb{N})\ni A\mapsto\text{Pr}(A)\in\mathcal{P}(\mathbb{N})$.
There is an ongoing and dedicated effort to estimate bounds on the generalization error of deep learning models, coupled with an increasing interest with practical metrics that can be used to experimentally evaluate a model's ability to generalize. This interest is not only driven by practical considerations but is also vital for theoretical research, as theoretical estimations require practical validation. However, there is currently a lack of research on benchmarking the generalization capacity of various deep networks and verifying these theoretical estimations. This paper aims to introduce a practical generalization metric for benchmarking different deep networks and proposes a novel testbed for the verification of theoretical estimations. Our findings indicate that a deep network's generalization capacity in classification tasks is contingent upon both classification accuracy and the diversity of unseen data. The proposed metric system is capable of quantifying the accuracy of deep learning models and the diversity of data, providing an intuitive and quantitative evaluation method, a trade-off point. Furthermore, we compare our practical metric with existing generalization theoretical estimations using our benchmarking testbed. It is discouraging to note that most of the available generalization estimations do not correlate with the practical measurements obtained using our proposed practical metric. On the other hand, this finding is significant as it exposes the shortcomings of theoretical estimations and inspires new exploration.
This study aims to reveal the interaction of local Javanese culture with an Islamic philosophical approach originating from the Cowongan tradition performed by shamans accompanied by dances with holy ladies and reciting mantras. This tradition is a prayer asking the gods to send down rain. This article emphasised that the Cowongan tradition places mystical power as the dominant element in life, which is embodied in symbols. The study of mysticism is closer to the study of Sufism which presents it as Islamic mysticism with the color of syncretism of religious teachings with local cultural practices embodied by mystical-occult practices as the Penginyongan culture.
Contribution: This research contributed to the fact that traditions that are good and acceptable to society can become the law as part of the Urf, which need to be maintained as long as they do not conflict with Sharia.
Alan Williams, Miroslav Krstic, Alexander Scheinker
We introduce a type of safe extremum seeking (ES) controller, which minimizes an unknown objective function while also maintaining practical positivity of an unknown barrier function. We show semi-global practical asymptotic stability of our algorithm and present an analogous notion of practical safety. The dynamics of the controller are inspired by the quadratic program (QP) based safety filter designs which, in the literature, are more commonly used in cases where the barrier function is known. Conditions on the barrier and objective function are explored showing that non convex problems can be solved. A Lyapunov argument is proposed to achieve the main results of the paper. Finally, an example is given of the algorithm which solves the constrained optimization problem.
The article presents the meaning of the principle of separation of Church and state in the European context. Christian teaching distinguishes between the secular and the spiritual sphere. In European society, such a division is accepted, but questions about the correct relationship between the Church and the state have been arising throughout history. The Church and the state seldom lived in a peaceful coexistence, and the state often interfered with the Church and vice versa. The correct understanding of the separation of Church and state means that spiritual leaders should not act as state leaders and that state leaders should not express their opinions on spiritual and moral matters. Church and state must work together for the welfare and progress of both the entire community and the individual.
History and principles of religions, Practical Theology
Acep Aripudin, Mohammad T. Rahman, Dede Burhanudin
et al.
This article describes a new method of viewing a historical phenomenon based on its social significance. This method enabled the classification and analysis of a group in a context simultaneously and chronologically. Using historical phenomenology, the authors found a polarisation of Chinese Muslims’ thoughts and practices in the Indonesian context. As an example, the technique of classification of Islamic thoughts is illustrated to discover Chinese Muslim figures’ religious activities. This method allows an improved social investigation to probe deeply into Chinese Muslims’ formal religious life. The evaluation of the effectiveness of the new method is confirmed by the calculation of the polarisation of Chinese Muslim religiousness, leading to the fragmentation and diversification of Indonesian Chinese Muslims in the realms of politics, economic practices or Islamic rituals. New research results improve the understanding of how a social history of an ethnicity could grow and assimilate in a context. The assimilation could contribute to religious harmony in such a pluralistic country such as Indonesia and can be used for making better social decisions, especially related to the lives of minorities, who urgently need policymakers and stakeholders to accommodate the rights of those who are still in the process of gaining fairer recognition.
Contribution: Using historical phenomenology, this article tries to classify and study a group in a setting concurrently and chronologically. An in-depth social inquiry into the formal religious life of Chinese Muslims discovered a calculation of religious Chinese Muslims’ polarisation, which led to the dispersion and diversification of Indonesian Chinese Muslims’ politics, economic practices and Islamic rituals. New policy proposals can be made by evaluating religious polarisation.
Als ’t danst, wat danst er dan? In welke zin kan, vanuit kernthema’s uit het eigen onderzoek gereflecteerd worden op de dans als metafoor voor lichamelijkheid in religie, of in religies? Schrijven over de dans lijkt een engagement te vragen van de hele mens – lichaam en geest. Dat laat niemand onbewogen.
Sai Teja Somu, Ting Hon Stanford Li, Andrzej Kukla
A positive integer $n$ is said to be a practical number if every integer in $[1,n]$ can be represented as the sum of distinct divisors of $n$. In this article, we consider practical numbers of a given polynomial form. We give a necessary and sufficient condition on coefficients $a$ and $b$ for there to be infinitely many practical numbers of the form $an+b$. We also give a necessary and sufficient for a quadratic polynomial to contain infinitely many practical numbers, using which we solve first part of a conjecture mentioned in [9]. In the final section, we prove that every number of $8k+1$ form can be expressed as a sum of a practical number and a square, and for every $j\in \{0,\ldots,7\}\setminus \{1\}$ there are infinitely many natural numbers of $8k+j$ form which cannot be written as sum of a square and a practical number.
Franz-Georg Wieland, Adrian L. Hauber, Marcus Rosenblatt
et al.
We discuss issues of structural and practical identifiability of partially observed differential equations which are often applied in systems biology. The development of mathematical methods to investigate structural non-identifiability has a long tradition. Computationally efficient methods to detect and cure it have been developed recently. Practical non-identifiability on the other hand has not been investigated at the same conceptually clear level. We argue that practical identifiability is more challenging than structural identifiability when it comes to modelling experimental data. We discuss that the classical approach based on the Fisher information matrix has severe shortcomings. As an alternative, we propose using the profile likelihood, which is a powerful approach to detect and resolve practical non-identifiability.
Abstract This paper presents the gap in practical theological research in relation to the devastating effects of the environmental crisis. The paper argues that, because of its silence, the field of practical theology is complicit unwittingly in perpetuating the environmental crisis. The paper identifies three potential causes that predispose the field to fall silent before the enormity of the crisis: 1. The human-centricity of its methodology, telos and theological anthropology; 2. The anthropocentricism of its theology based on dominant Western formulations, and; 3. The power of eco-anxiety to trigger defense mechanisms that foreclose acknowledgement of the crisis. Importantly, the paper also identifies interdisciplinary resources and conversation partners with whom the field of practical theology may re-construct creation-centered pathways forward.
1720 BARNARD, A .C . Die historiese ontwikkeling van die Prak tiese Teologie. DKW 1979-80 31-52. 1721 DRESSEL, L .C . Die werkgemeenskap v ir die Praktiese Teologie 1979: 'n oors ig . DKW 1979-80 58-61. 1722 DREYER, T .F .J . Die studieveld van die Praktiese Teologie. DKW 1979-80 1-8. 1723 LOUW, D.J. Die metode-vraagstuk in die Praktiese Teologie. DKW 1979-80 9-19. 1724 VILLIERS, D.W. de. Die beoefening van die Praktiese Teologie in Duitsland. N C T T 20(2, 1979) 113-119. 1725 WALT, J.J. van der. Die verhouding van die Diakonologie tot die ander teologiese dissiplines. DKW 1979-80 20-30. 1726 WET, J .I . de. Die herlewing van h ou definisie van Prak tiese Teologie. HTS 34(3, 1978) 5-11. 1727 WOLFAARDT, J .A . Die verhouding van die Praktiese Teologie tot die ander wetenskappe. DKW 1979-80 53-57.
In this article, the authors bring two personal journeys together: one author’s liberationist journey, sparked by a search for justice and liberation in the slums of Guatemala City, and the other’s lifelong commitment to practical theology and spatial justice in South Africa. A practical theology of liberation is the result of life experiences in countries of the Global South amidst the search for justice and liberation. The worlds that come together in this article are Rene Girard’s mimetic theory, liberation theology and practical theology. This article raises the question of the cross-contextuality of practical theology and the theological application of mimetic theory to develop innovative theological methodologies that respond to the collective woundedness of the urban context in the Global South. Contribution: The main contribution of this article is the use of three seemingly different theological approaches in conjunction. This article opens the door to inform practical theology with Rene Girard’s mimetic theory and liberation theology.