Research on the birth and evolution of life are reviewed with reference to the maximum entropy production principle (MEPP). It has been shown that this principle is essential for consistent understanding of the birth and evolution of life. First, a recent work for the birth of a self-replicative system as pre-RNA life is reviewed in relation to the MEPP. A critical condition of polymer concentration in a local system is reported by a dynamical system approach, above which, an exponential increase of entropy production is guaranteed. Secondly, research works of early stage of evolutions are reviewed; experimental research for the numbers of cells necessary for forming a multi-cellular organization, and numerical research of differentiation of a model system and its relation with MEPP. It is suggested by this review article that the late stage of evolution is characterized by formation of society and external entropy production. A hypothesis on the general route of evolution is discussed from the birth to the present life which follows the MEPP. Some examples of life which happened to face poor thermodynamic condition are presented with thermodynamic discussion. It is observed through this review that MEPP is consistently useful for thermodynamic understanding of birth and evolution of life, subject to a thermodynamic condition far from equilibrium.
The Synod of the Gereja Bethel Indonesia/GBI (Bethel Church of Indonesia) is Indonesia’s largest Protestant and Pentecostal denomination, with over 7,000 local churches and nearly three million church members. It is, therefore, significant to discuss this church. Over the past three years, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced churches worldwide to adjust to the off-site system of worship and ministry. The pandemic also led to the speedy acceleration of digital technology. Consequently, it called for redefining and repositioning our ecclesiology and praxis. This article presents the theological position of GBI in a new era of adaptation as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. This article uses a systematic approach, by briefly introducing the concepts of ecclesiology and fellowship, then developing these concepts further with concrete and relevant examples in the context of the GBI church.
Christianity, Practical religion. The Christian life
In this work we propose a stochastic differential equation (SDE) for modelling health related quality of life (HRQoL) over a lifespan. HRQoL is assumed to be bounded between 0 and 1, equivalent to death and perfect health, respectively. Drift and diffusion parameters of the SDE are chosen to mimic decreasing HRQoL over life and ensuring epidemiological meaningfulness. The Euler-Maruyama method is used to simulate trajectories of individuals in a population of n = 1000 people. Age of death of an individual is simulated as a stopping time with Weibull distribution conditioning the current value of HRQoL as time-varying covariate. The life expectancy and health adjusted life years are compared to the corresponding values for German women.
surprisingly, Mauldin does not comment on the sharp contrast here with Barth’s assessment.) According to Bonhoeffer, the ‘Two Kingdoms’ doctrine has for a long time helped prevent precisely what Barth thought it encouraged: as long as both the Church and the State had to operate alongside each other, both as partakers in a ‘penultimate’ state of affairs, the State could not declare itself ‘ultimate’—as it did in National Socialism. In Chapter 4, ‘The Divine Mandates and Political Resistance’, Mauldin goes on to show how Bonhoeffer’s account of the ‘divine mandates’ (developed elsewhere in Ethics) is an elaboration of his assessment of the ‘Two Kingdoms’ doctrine: the point of the mandates—viz., Church, government, marriage, work—is that they function alongside and relatively independent of each other, and thus together can prevent the emergence of an overweening or even totalitarian State, including any radical resistance such an emergence would provoke. And this, Mauldin suggests, implies an important reminder for those keen to take their cue from Bonhoeffer’s practical involvement in the resistance: ‘Bonhoeffer has something to say about what do [sic] in a state of emergency. But he also has something to say about how to prevent an emergency from coming about’ (p. 109). With these four case studies, Mauldin persuasively argues that Barth and Bonhoeffer, far from being mere critics of modernity, sought rather to free modern politics from the threat of absolutism lurking within modernity—as expressed in the various narratives of decline, nostalgia or utopia that were rife in their day, and which arguably are still with us today. I did find myself wondering, though, which audience Mauldin had in mind in writing this book. It may be the academic guild of Barth and Bonhoeffer scholars, but I doubt they need to be persuaded of the kind of nuanced reading as presented here. Maybe, then, the audience is a larger circle including political scientists, analysts and commentators? After all, Mauldin is keen to emphasise that the questions Barth and Bonhoeffer address are ‘relevant far beyond the confines of the Church and academic theology’ (p. 141). Yet one might think such a wider audience would need a more thorough introduction to the theology of Barth and Bonhoeffer, and their respective hinterlands, than can be offered in this (pleasingly) slim volume. But perhaps chapter 4—in particular its critique of recent attempts to identify a ‘Bonhoeffer moment’ in US politics—gives us a clue to the audience that Mauldin is really aiming for: the ranks of American Christian commentators and opinion-makers who, given the continuing (if diminishing) role of religion in US cultural and political life, are all too easily tempted (or forced) to cast major theologians like Barth and Bonhoeffer as characters in the stories the culture warriors want (them) to tell. In any case, Mauldin has done a good job in allowing these two major theologians to speak for themselves—and indeed for the benefit of our political life today.
Machine Learning permeates many industries, which brings new source of benefits for companies. However within the life insurance industry, Machine Learning is not widely used in practice as over the past years statistical models have shown their efficiency for risk assessment. Thus insurers may face difficulties to assess the value of the artificial intelligence. Focusing on the modification of the life insurance industry over time highlights the stake of using Machine Learning for insurers and benefits that it can bring by unleashing data value. This paper reviews traditional actuarial methodologies for survival modeling and extends them with Machine Learning techniques. It points out differences with regular machine learning models and emphasizes importance of specific implementations to face censored data with machine learning models family. In complement to this article, a Python library has been developed. Different open-source Machine Learning algorithms have been adjusted to adapt the specificities of life insurance data, namely censoring and truncation. Such models can be easily applied from this SCOR library to accurately model life insurance risks.
We model hypothetical bio-dispersal within a single Galactic region using the stochastic infection dynamics process, which is inspired by these local properties of life dispersal on Earth. We split the population of stellar systems into different categories regarding habitability and evolved them through time using probabilistic cellular automata rules analogous to the model. As a dynamic effect, we include the existence of natural dispersal vectors (e.g., dust, asteroids) in a way that avoids assumptions about their agency. By assuming that dispersal vectors have a finite velocity and range, the model includes the parameter of 'optical depth of life spreading'. The effect of the oscillatory infection rate on the long-term behavior of the dispersal flux, which adds a diffusive component to its progression, is also taken into account. We found that phase space is separated into subregions of long-lasting transmission, rapidly terminated transmission, and a transition region between the two. We observed that depending on the amplitude of the oscillatory life spreading rate, life-transmission in the Galactic patch might take on different geometrical shapes. Even if some host systems are uninhabited, life transmission has a certain threshold, allowing a patch to be saturated with viable material over a long period. Although stochastic fluctuations in the local density of habitable systems allow for clusters that can continuously infect one another, the spatial pattern disappears when life transmission is below the observed threshold, so that transmission process is not permanent in time. Both findings suggest that a habitable planet in a densely populated region may remain uninfected.
Montessori eğitim metodu, özellikle okul öncesi eğitim olmak üzere, eğitimin farklı kademelerinde benimsenmiş ve uygulanmıştır. Montessori eğitim metodunun, geleneksel eğitimden öğrenci, öğretmen, disiplin, okul ortamı, kullanılan materyaller ve gelişim özelliklerine yaklaşım noktasında farklılaştığı kabul edilmektedir. Daha çok genel eğitimde uygulanan Montessori metodu, din, değer ve ahlak eğitiminde de kullanılmaktadır. Bu araştırma, Amerika Birleşik Devletleri Indiana Eyaleti’nde bulunan Montessori okullarını konu edinmektedir. Çalışmada, nitel araştırma yöntemi kapsamında fenomenolojik yaklaşım benimsenmiş olup, veri toplama aracı olarak gözlem, görüşme ve doküman incelemesi kullanılmıştır. Çalışmanın konusu, maksimum çeşitlilik ve kartopu yoluyla seçilen Montessori eğitmenlerinden oluşan çalışma grubu ile Montessori metodunda din, değer ve ahlak eğitimini tartışmaktır. Araştırmaya katılan Montessori okullarında yapılan gözlemler ve bir okula ait program incelemesi araştırma bulgularının yorumlarında yardımcı olarak kullanılmıştır.
defended with so much zeal nowadays, is, perhaps, more dominant wherever Western culture has been influenced by Protestant Christianity, because the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, at least in principle, if not in actual teaching and practice, attempted to hold on to the ancient view of Christian doctrine as vera et divina philosophia (cf. Augustine, Ep. 2.1). G. points out that in our times Platonism survives almost only within the religious, mostly Christian, context and tries to claim back the intelligible world as a rightful domain of philosophy. Thus, he questions the current orthodoxy, which pronounces – following in the wake of a certain madman who was once reported to have cried that God had been killed – that metaphysics is dead too. We are told that we are better off to leave the study of reality to specialists like Stephen Hawking or Richard Dawkins, who, far from smashing their lanterns on the ground, seem quite confident that philosophy has simply not much to offer any more. Brilliant as those scientists proved to be in their particular fields, they have displayed surprisingly little understanding of what philosophy has always been and still (possibly) is. G.’s work can be seen from this point of view as belonging to a wider intellectual movement, represented by such philosophers as David Bentley Hart (The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss [2013]), Edward Feser (Five Proofs of the Existence of God [2017]) and Thomas Nagel (Mind and Cosmos [2012]), which questions the rationality and consistency of contemporary Naturalism. Given the limited space of this review, I have not focused on the weak points of this great book. I am sure there are many other readers who will find time and place to criticise G. not only for ‘Thomizing Plotinus’ (as has already been done: D.L. Ross, ‘Thomizing Plotinus. A Critique of Professor Gerson’, Phronesis 41 [1996], 197–204), but perhaps also for ‘Platonising Aristotle’ and ‘Plotinising Plato’. As one particular blind spot, however, I would point out leaving aside the whole dimension of contemplation and spiritual exercises. G.’s view of Platonism is and has always been quite scientific and dry in that he downplays the importance of the direct experience of the intelligible world and its transformative and healing power as well as of the spiritual practices designed through the ages to access and cultivate this experience. But since the monograph is (as I confess to hope in a completely groundless bout of optimism) only an avant-garde of the new phase of philosophy’s self-understanding, what remains to be studied is not only the relationship between Platonism and the three Abrahamic religions or the contemporary natural sciences, but also the exquisite richness of Platonism as a practical way of life.
Craig Groeschel adalah pendiri dan pendeta senior dari LifeChurch.tv. Ia juga merupakan penulis buku-buku laris seperti The Christian Atheist, Weird, Soul Detox, dan banyak lagi. Craig bersama istrinya, Amy dan enam anaknya tinggal di Edmond, Oklahoma.
In Bayesian accelerated life testing, the most used tool for model comparison is the deviance information criterion. An alternative and more formal approach is to use Bayes factors to compare models. However, Bayesian accelerated life testing models with more than one stressor often have mathematically intractable posterior distributions and Markov chain Monte Carlo methods are employed to obtain posterior samples to base inference on. The computation of the marginal likelihood is challenging when working with such complex models. In this paper, methods for approximating the marginal likelihood and the application thereof in the accelerated life testing paradigm are explored for dual-stress models.
Mohit Chandra, Manvith Reddy, Shradha Sehgal
et al.
The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted people's lives driving them to act in fear, anxiety, and anger, leading to worldwide racist events in the physical world and online social networks. Though there are works focusing on Sinophobia during the COVID-19 pandemic, less attention has been given to the recent surge in Islamophobia. A large number of positive cases arising out of the religious Tablighi Jamaat gathering has driven people towards forming anti-Muslim communities around hashtags like #coronajihad, #tablighijamaatvirus on Twitter. In addition to the online spaces, the rise in Islamophobia has also resulted in increased hate crimes in the real world. Hence, an investigation is required to create interventions. To the best of our knowledge, we present the first large-scale quantitative study linking Islamophobia with COVID-19. In this paper, we present CoronaBias dataset which focuses on anti-Muslim hate spanning four months, with over 410,990 tweets from 244,229 unique users. We use this dataset to perform longitudinal analysis. We find the relation between the trend on Twitter with the offline events that happened over time, measure the qualitative changes in the context associated with the Muslim community, and perform macro and micro topic analysis to find prevalent topics. We also explore the nature of the content, focusing on the toxicity of the URLs shared within the tweets present in the CoronaBias dataset. Apart from the content-based analysis, we focus on user analysis, revealing that the portrayal of religion as a symbol of patriotism played a crucial role in deciding how the Muslim community was perceived during the pandemic. Through these experiments, we reveal the existence of anti-Muslim rhetoric around COVID-19 in the Indian sub-continent.
Life pattern clustering is essential for abstracting the groups' characteristics of daily mobility patterns and activity regularity. Based on millions of GPS records, this paper proposed a framework on the life pattern clustering which can efficiently identify the groups have similar life pattern. The proposed method can retain original features of individual life pattern data without aggregation. Metagraph-based data structure is proposed for presenting the diverse life pattern. Spatial-temporal similarity includes significant places semantics, time sequential properties and frequency are integrated into this data structure, which captures the uncertainty of an individual and the diversities between individuals. Non-negative-factorization-based method was utilized for reducing the dimension. The results show that our proposed method can effectively identify the groups have similar life pattern and takes advantages in computation efficiency and robustness comparing with the traditional method. We revealed the representative life pattern groups and analyzed the group characteristics of human life patterns during different periods and different regions. We believe our work will help in future infrastructure planning, services improvement and policies making related to urban and transportation, thus promoting a humanized and sustainable city.
This paper presents the proportional evolutionary time hypothesis, which posits that the mean time required for the evolution of complex life is a function of stellar mass. The "biological available window" is defined as the region of a stellar spectrum between 200 to 1200 nm that generates free energy for life. Over the $\sim$4 Gyr history of Earth, the total energy incident at the top of the atmosphere and within the biological available window is $\sim$10$^{34}$ J. The hypothesis assumes that the rate of evolution from the origin of life to complex life is proportional to this total energy, which would suggest that planets orbiting other stars should not show signs of complex life if the total energy incident on the planet is below this energy threshold. The proportional evolutionary time hypothesis predicts that late K- and M-dwarf stars (M < 0.7 M$_{\odot}$) are too young to host any complex life at the present age of the universe. F-, G-, and early K-dwarf stars (M > 0.7 M$_{\odot}$) represent the best targets for the next generation of space telescopes to search for spectroscopic biosignatures indicative of complex life.
Since time immemorial life has been viewed as being fragile, yet over the past few decades it has been found that many extreme environments are inhabited by organisms known as extremophiles.Knowledge of their emergence, adaptability, and limitations seems to provide a guideline for the search of extra-terrestrial life, since some extremophiles presumably can survive in extreme environments such as Mars, Europa, and Enceladus. Due to physicochemical constraints, the first life necessarily came into existence at the lower limit of lifes conceivable complexity.Thus, the first life could not have been an extremophile, furthermore, since biological evolution occurs over time, then the dual knowledge regarding what specific extremophiles are capable of, and to the analogue environment on extreme worlds, will not be sufficient as a search criterion.This is because, even though an extremophile can live in an extreme environment here-and-now, its ancestor however could not live in that very same environment in the past, which means that no contemporary extremophiles exist in that environment.Furthermore, a theoretical framework should be able to predict whether extremophiles can be considered a special or general case in the galaxy.Thus, a question is raised: does Earths continuous inhabitability represent an extreme or average value for planets? Thus, dependent on whether it is difficult or easy for worlds to maintain this inhabitability, the search for extra-terrestrial life with a focus on extremophiles will either represent a search after dying worlds, or a search after special life on living worlds, where one focus too narrowly on extreme values.
Francisco J. Rubio, Bernard Rachet, Roch Giorgi
et al.
In cancer epidemiology using population-based data, regression models for the excess mortality hazard is a useful method to estimate cancer survival and to describe the association between prognosis factors and excess mortality. This method requires expected mortality rates from general population life tables: each cancer patient is assigned an expected (background) mortality rate obtained from the life tables, typically at least according to their age and sex, from the population they belong to. However, those life tables may be insufficiently stratified, as some characteristics such as deprivation, ethnicity, and comorbidities, are not available in the life tables for a number of countries. This may affect the background mortality rate allocated to each patient, and it has been shown that not including relevant information for assigning an expected mortality rate to each patient induces a bias in the estimation of the regression parameters of the excess hazard model. We propose two parametric corrections in excess hazard regression models, including a single-parameter or a random effect (frailty), to account for possible mismatches in the life table and thus misspecification of the background mortality rate. In an extensive simulation study, the good statistical performance of the proposed approach is demonstrated, and we illustrate their use on real population-based data of lung cancer patients. We present conditions and limitations of these methods, and provide some recommendations for their use in practice.
The selection of optimal targets in the search for life represents a highly important strategic issue. In this Letter, we evaluate the benefits of searching for life around a potentially habitable planet orbiting a star of arbitrary mass relative to a similar planet around a Sun-like star. If recent physical arguments implying that the habitability of planets orbiting low-mass stars is selectively suppressed are correct, we find that planets around solar-type stars may represent the optimal targets.
Cehennem azâbının ebedîliği konusu,
İslâm tarihinin ilk devirlerinden itibaren bir ilmî mesele olarak ele alınmıştır.
Günümüzde de bu tartışmalar devam etmektedir. Asr-ı
saadetten uzaklaşıldıkça, yabancı kültürlerin etkisiyle İslâm âleminde
Kur’an’dan sapmalar baş göstermiş ve birçok bozuk görüşler, inançlar ve
fırkalar ortaya çıkmıştır. Bunların desteklenmesi amacıyla da hadisler uydurulduğu
tarihsel olarak variddir. Kur’an âyetleri de keyfi olarak te’vil edilmiştir. Makalede
bu görüş müzakere olunacaktır.İslâm’dan önceki inanç sistemlerinde de
tartışılan bu konuda, dinler tarihi alanında önemli incelemeleriyle tanınan
Makdisî (ö.355/966), uhrevî cezanın mevcudiyetini benimsemeyen hiçbir din mensubunun
bulunmadığını ve genellikle cezanın hak edildiği kadar devam edip bir gün sona
ereceğinin kabul edildiğini söyler.Azâbın ebedî olup olmaması noktasında
yapılan değerlendirmelerin, Kur’an’ın ilgili ayetlerinde geçen huld “خلد” ve
ebed “ابد” kelimelerinin sözlük anlamı dışında kazandığı terim anlamı ve yorum
farklılıkları üzerinden yapıldığı görülmektedir. Özellikle mezheplerin ortaya
çıktığı ve insanlara tesir ederek görüşlerini
kendi yollarına çekme çabalarının yoğun olarak
yaşandığı dönemlerde bu tarz tartışmaların hız kazandığı
anlaşılmaktadır.Cehennem azâbının ebedî olmadığı
fikri Mevlanâ Celâleddîn-i Rûmî (ö.672/1273), İbn Teymiyye (ö. 728/1328), İbn
Kayyım el-Cevziyye (ö.751/1350) ve İbnu’l-Vezir’in (ö.840/1436) yanısıra Musa
Carullah Bigiyef ve İsmail Hakkı İzmirli gibi bazı son devir âlimleri
tarafından da benimsenmiştir.Ehl-i sünnet’in büyük çoğunluğu ile
Mu’tezile, Şia ve Haricîler ahirette kâfirlere uygulanacak azâbın ebedî olduğu
fikrini benimsemişlerdir. Ehl-i sünnet kelamcıları, اِلَّا
طَرٖيقَ جَهَنَّمَ خَالِدٖينَ فٖيهَا اَبَدًا وَكَانَ ذٰلِكَ عَلَى اللّٰهِ
يَسٖيرًا “(Allah onları) ancak içinde ebedî kalacakları cehennemin yoluna
iletir. Bu ise Allah'a çok kolaydır.” (Nisâ, 4/169;
Ahzâb, 33/65) mealindeki âyetlere dayanarak, cehennem hayatının sonsuz olduğu
fikrini benimsemiş, bunun aksini savunan Cehmiye’yi bid’atçi olarak
nitelendirmişlerdir.Nitekim zikredilen âyet ile birlikte
yine Kur’an’da geçen : اِنَّ الَّذٖينَ كَفَرُوا وَظَلَمُوا لَمْ يَكُنِ اللّٰهُ لِيَغْفِرَ
لَهُمْ وَلَا لِيَهْدِيَهُمْ طَرٖيقًا “Şüphesiz
inkâr edenler ve zulmedenler (var ya), Allah onları asla bağışlayacak ve doğru
yola iletecek değildir”. (Nisâ,
4:168) âyeti, inkârcılar ve zulmedenler için azâbın ne şekilde olacağını
bildirmektedir.
Araştırmamızda cehennem ve azâbın
ebedîliği süreciyle ilgili kavramlar, Kur’an bütünlüğü bağlamında
değerlendirilmiştir. Kur’an’ı Kerim’deki âyetler, Kur’an’ın bütünlüğü
içerisinde değerlendirilmeyip tek tek ele alınarak yorumlandığında herkesin
kendi doğrularına dayanak bulması son derece kolaydır.Oysa Kur’an bütünlüğü içerisinde
çelişkiden uzak bir kitaptır. Bu yaklaşım tarzı objektif bir sonuca ulaşılmasında
yardımcı olur.
The vast use of the Internet and the increasingly widespread access to the latest technologies
have become the main reason for the development of remote teaching services. In an
effort to modernize the educational offer, higher education institutions placed, in their
programs of studies, different possibilities of teaching using „distance learning”. This trend
is already very common in the world’s largest universities. The Polish higher education
system, keeping the pace with current trends, has created a legal foundation for the use
of modern forms of teaching. The current approach to teaching is also a response to the
offer of leading universities of the world and thus the search for competitive advantage in
the international educational market. The aim of the article is to present main objectives
of the teaching method of e
‑learning, and at the same time, to present the legal status
and the rules for the use of e
‑learning in Polish higher education. The article is based on
the experience of such teaching introduced at the Pontifical University of John Paul II
in Krakow.