The Hebrew word "DHR" remains a persistent exegetical challenge, with ancient texts reflecting striking discrepancies in its interpretation. As a result, this article aims to decipher the unclear Hebrew term in Nahum 3:2. It addresses this lexical puzzle, using a comprehensive approach, emphasising textual criticism of ancient texts, while incorporating comparative Semitic languages such as Egyptian and Arabic along with a literary-rhetorical analysis of the battle imagery in Nahum. By synthesising these various strands of methodologies, this article seeks to offer a credible interpretation of this puzzling term.
Christianity, Practical religion. The Christian life
Alif Elham Khan, Mohammad Junayed Hasan, Humayra Anjum
et al.
Life satisfaction is a crucial facet of human well-being. Hence, research on life satisfaction is incumbent for understanding how individuals experience their lives and influencing interventions targeted at enhancing mental health and well-being. Life satisfaction has traditionally been measured using analog, complicated, and frequently error-prone methods. These methods raise questions concerning validation and propagation. However, this study demonstrates the potential for machine learning algorithms to predict life satisfaction with a high accuracy of 93.80% and a 73.00% macro F1-score. The dataset comes from a government survey of 19000 people aged 16-64 years in Denmark. Using feature learning techniques, 27 significant questions for assessing contentment were extracted, making the study highly reproducible, simple, and easily interpretable. Furthermore, clinical and biomedical large language models (LLMs) were explored for predicting life satisfaction by converting tabular data into natural language sentences through mapping and adding meaningful counterparts, achieving an accuracy of 93.74% and macro F1-score of 73.21%. It was found that life satisfaction prediction is more closely related to the biomedical domain than the clinical domain. Ablation studies were also conducted to understand the impact of data resampling and feature selection techniques on model performance. Moreover, the correlation between primary determinants with different age brackets was analyzed, and it was found that health condition is the most important determinant across all ages. This study demonstrates how machine learning, large language models and XAI can jointly contribute to building trust and understanding in using AI to investigate human behavior, with significant ramifications for academics and professionals working to quantify and comprehend subjective well-being.
Merely by existing, all physical systems contain information, and physical dynamics transforms and processes that information. This note investigates the information processing power of living systems. Living systems harvest free energy from the sun, from geothermal sources, and from each other. They then use that free energy to drive the complex set of chemical interactions that underlie life. All molecules -- be they simple molecules such as water, or complex molecules such as DNA -- register information via their chemical composition. When these molecules undergo chemical reactions, that information is transformed and processed. These chemical transformations can be thought of as elementary logical operations: such bio-ops include the absorption of a photon in a chromophore during photosynthesis, the formation or breaking of covalent, hydrogen, and van der Waals bonds in the process of metabolism and reproduction, or the release of a neurotransmitter molecule when a synapse fires in the brain. This paper estimates the total number of bio-ops that have been, and are being performed, by life on earth. We find that the current number of bio-ops performed by all life on earth is around $10^{33}-10^{35}$ bio-ops per second. The cells in an individual human being perform around $10^{20}-10^{22}$ bio-ops per second, comparable to the information processing power of all the computers, cell phones, and server farms on earth. Depending on how one defines a neural operation, at most a few percent of human bio-ops take place in the firing of neurons and synapses in the brain. Over the course of life on earth, about $10^{50}-10^{52}$ bio-ops have taken place.
AbstractThe idea of ‘Christian doctrine’ has become sundered over time from its spiritual roots as part of the formative Christian life shaped by a vision of the whole that sees everything in integral and open‐ended relation to God. This review article explores some of the reasons behind this severing of Christian doctrine from everyday Christian practice. It then unpacks how the unity between Christian doctrine and spiritual formation is retrieved in three recent publications that variously explore the nature of Christian doctrine. Together, they offer a vibrant account of Christian doctrine, its formative power and its calling to be humbly confident as a form of life under God.
Jailbreaking is an emerging adversarial attack that bypasses the safety alignment deployed in off-the-shelf large language models (LLMs) and has evolved into multiple categories: human-based, optimization-based, generation-based, and the recent indirect and multilingual jailbreaks. However, delivering a practical jailbreak defense is challenging because it needs to not only handle all the above jailbreak attacks but also incur negligible delays to user prompts, as well as be compatible with both open-source and closed-source LLMs. Inspired by how the traditional security concept of shadow stacks defends against memory overflow attacks, this paper introduces a generic LLM jailbreak defense framework called SelfDefend, which establishes a shadow LLM as a defense instance (in detection state) to concurrently protect the target LLM instance (in normal answering state) in the normal stack and collaborate with it for checkpoint-based access control. The effectiveness of SelfDefend builds upon our observation that existing LLMs can identify harmful prompts or intentions in user queries, which we empirically validate using mainstream GPT-3.5/4 models against major jailbreak attacks. To further improve the defense's robustness and minimize costs, we employ a data distillation approach to tune dedicated open-source defense models. When deployed to protect GPT-3.5/4, Claude, Llama-2-7b/13b, and Mistral, these models outperform seven state-of-the-art defenses and match the performance of GPT-4-based SelfDefend, with significantly lower extra delays. Further experiments show that the tuned models are robust to adaptive jailbreaks and prompt injections.
Conway's Game of Life is a two-dimensional cellular automaton. As a dynamical system, it is well-known to be computationally universal, i.e.\ capable of simulating an arbitrary Turing machine. We show that in a sense taking a single backwards step of the Game of Life is a computationally universal process, by constructing patterns whose preimage computation encodes an arbitrary circuit-satisfaction problem, or, equivalently, any tiling problem. As a corollary, we obtain for example that the set of orphans is coNP-complete, exhibit a $6210 \times 37800$-periodic configuration whose preimage is nonempty but contains no periodic configurations, and prove that the existence of a preimage for a periodic point is undecidable. Our constructions were obtained by a combination of computer searches and manual design.
The growth of Internet of Things devices has shown the need to develop the direction of information security in the field of development and operation of microcircuits, since modern information systems are built around the latter. This article presents the life cycle of secure chips used as a root of trust ( Root of Trust ) information systems. The main stages of the life cycle of protected microcircuits are described, namely, the life cycle models during development and during operation by the end user.
Şiî/İsmâîlî mezhebine mensup Fâtımîler, İfrîkıye’de kuruldukları andan itibaren doğuya doğru genişleme siyaseti gütmüşlerdir. Bu siyasî hedef çerçevesinde Türk hânedanlığı İhşîdîler’in sahip olduğu Mısır topraklarını ele geçirmek maksadıyla çeşitli teşebbüslerde bulunmuşlardır. İki taraf arasında otuz yılı aşkın süren ilişkiler Fâtımîler’in Mısır ve ardından Sûriye’yi ele geçirmeleriyle sona ermiştir. Bu süreçte Fâtımîler ile İhşîdîler arasında siyasî ve askerî sahada çeşitli karşılaşmalar gerçekleşmiştir. Bu makalede Fâtımîler’in İhşîdîler ile olan ilişkileri ele alınmıştır. İslâm dünyasının doğusunda Fâtımîler batısında ise İhşîdîler’in siyasî olarak güçlerini artırdığı bir vasatta iki taraf arasındaki ilişkiler dikkat çekici olayları muhtevi olmuştur. Söz konusu gelişmelerin o dönemin İslâm dünyasını yakından ilgilendirmesi araştırma konusunun önemini artırmaktadır. Dolayısıyla ilgili döneme ışık tutan kaynakların incelenerek yaklaşık otuz beş yıllık sürecin panoramasının ortaya konulması faydalı olacaktır. Fâtımî-İhşîdî ilişkilerini ele alan çalışmamız üç bölümden oluşmaktadır. Birinci bölümde Fâtımî-İhşîdî ilişkilerinin başlangıcı incelenecektir. İkinci bölümde ise Mısır’ın Fâtımîler’in hâkimiyetine geçmesi konusu işlenecektir. Son olarak üçüncü bölümde Fâtımîler’in Sûriye’yi ele geçirerek İhşîdîler’e son vermeleri bahsi ele alınacaktır. Söz konusu çalışmanın öncelikli hedefi Fâtımî-İhşîdî ilişkilerinin İslâm dünyasındaki yansımaları ve etkilerini ele alarak konu hakkında net bir fikir vermeye çalışmak olacaktır.
Artificial Intelligence aims at recreating human intelligence through a computer program. AI programmers tend to see intelligence as what they have, so it reflects the vision of wealthy, able-bodied, white men. This paper examines the experience of poverty in the first world as a challenge to AI research. The poor tend to have their interests dominated and denigrated by the upper classes, make choices good and ill out of desperation for survival, and experience a fractured consciousness of their class status as a result of their situation and exploitation. These epistemic realities are foreign to an AI whose aim is optimal choice selection. As a result, the more common place AI algorithms become for making decisions, the more marginalized we should expect the epistemologies of the poor, and consequently the poor themselves, to be. A Catholic ethic based in the “option for the poor” must prioritize the epistemology of the poor over current AI work and resist definitions of intelligence that fail to account for “the least of these.”
This paper examines Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s understanding of metaphysical certainty in terms of his theory of ta’wīl (interpretation) while showing his optimism in attaining metaphysical certainty. Rāzī, also known as the leader of the skeptics (shaykh al-mushakkikīn) in the Shiʻi sources, while thoroughly criticizing the philosophical and kalam traditions before him, remains a controversial figure among scholars. His critical thinking confounded subsequent thinkers, and thus, various ways of reading about Rāzī have emerged. Some have evaluated Rāzī as a metaphysical agnostic who believed that the intellect cannot attain certainty in theological knowledge. This study positions Rāzī’s account of metaphysical certainty in relation to his theory of ta’wīl. The first part of the article focuses on the history of the relationship between metaphysical certainty and ta’wīl the debates over the relationship between intellect and transmission in theological knowledge and offers the historical context in which Rāzī developed his idiosyncratic approach. The second part identifies Rāzī’s principles of reason in metaphysical knowledge through the interpretation of the concept of istiwā’. This article does not aim to fully investigate Rāzī’s understanding of ta’wīl. However, it analyzes how intellectual truths, one of the main components of the theory of ta’wīl, become metaphysical certainties. The Muʻtazilī mutakallimūn made metaphysical certainties, which are transformed from intellectual truths, a yardstick of understanding and interpreting religion. On the other hand, what some might call their obsession with reliance upon metaphysical certainties became an intolerant attitude towards different interpretations of religion, grew into an oppressive ideology with political power, and ultimately fueled a critical resistance by non-Muʻtazila scholars against rationality (or even rationalism itself). As a natural consequence, the rational development of other doctrines was slowed down by the reaction against Muʻtazilī influence. The first part of the article, while discussing Kalam schools, especially the Ashʻarī school of theology, in terms of metaphysical certainty and the interpretation of revelation, charts the crystallization of the Ashʻarī account of the relationship between interpretation (ta’wīl) and intellectual truths, a historical process inversely correlated with the presence of the Muʻtazila. However, the crystallization process, which was somewhat ambivalent until Rāzī, reaches its ultimate form with Rāzī. The first of the main principles of Rāzī’s theory of ta’wīl is that the intellect is the foundation of revelation (al-ʿaql aṣl al-naql). The intellect becomes the decisive factor not only in terms of authentication and understanding of revelation but also in terms of its interpretation (ta’wīl). Focusing on his Tafsīr, one of his last treatises and which was left incomplete, this article argues against the claim that toward the end of his life, he was inclined to metaphysical agnosticism, falling into an epistemic pessimism with respect to attaining metaphysical certainty. Rāzī takes a firm stance on the probability of transmission in works written throughout his life. Rāzī’s firm stance on the probability of transmitted sources necessarily leads to the principle that reason is the foundation of transmission. Especially with his account of ta’wīl, he offers a rational theology in which he maintains his optimism on metaphysical certainty.
Battery cycle life prediction using early degradation data has many potential applications throughout the battery product life cycle. For that reason, various data-driven methods have been proposed for point prediction of battery cycle life with minimum knowledge of the battery degradation mechanisms. However, managing the rapidly increasing amounts of batteries at end-of-life with lower economic and technical risk requires prediction of cycle life with quantified uncertainty, which is still lacking. The interpretability (i.e., the reason for high prediction accuracy) of these advanced data-driven methods is also worthy of investigation. Here, a Quantile Regression Forest (QRF) model, having the advantage of not assuming any specific distribution of cycle life, is introduced to make cycle life range prediction with uncertainty quantified as the width of the prediction interval, in addition to point predictions with high accuracy. The hyperparameters of the QRF model are optimized with a proposed alpha-logistic-weighted criterion so that the coverage probabilities associated with the prediction intervals are calibrated. The interpretability of the final QRF model is explored with two global model-agnostic methods, namely permutation importance and partial dependence plot.
Drawing on our experience of more than a decade of AI in academic research, technology development, industry engagement, postgraduate teaching, doctoral supervision and organisational consultancy, we present the 'CDAC AI Life Cycle', a comprehensive life cycle for the design, development and deployment of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems and solutions. It consists of three phases, Design, Develop and Deploy, and 17 constituent stages across the three phases from conception to production of any AI initiative. The 'Design' phase highlights the importance of contextualising a problem description by reviewing public domain and service-based literature on state-of-the-art AI applications, algorithms, pre-trained models and equally importantly ethics guidelines and frameworks, which then informs the data, or Big Data, acquisition and preparation. The 'Develop' phase is technique-oriented, as it transforms data and algorithms into AI models that are benchmarked, evaluated and explained. The 'Deploy' phase evaluates computational performance, which then apprises pipelines for model operationalisation, culminating in the hyperautomation of a process or system as a complete AI solution, that is continuously monitored and evaluated to inform the next iteration of the life cycle. An ontological mapping of AI algorithms to applications, followed by an organisational context for the AI life cycle are further contributions of this article.
Economic variables play important roles in any economic model, and sudden and dramatic changes exist in the financial market and economy. For this reason, to price and hedge equity-linked life insurance products, including segregated funds and unit-linked life insurance products on maximum price of several assets, this paper introduces Bayesian Markov-Switching Vector Autoregressive (MS-VAR) process. By assuming that a regime-switching process is generated by a homogeneous Markov process and a residual process follows a heteroscedastic model, we obtain joint distribution of endogenous variables and insured's future lifetime random variable under risk-neutral probability probability measure. Using the distribution function, we obtain net single premiums and hedging formulas of the equity-linked life insurance products. An advantage of our model is it depends on economic variables and is not complicated as compared to previous papers.
The multifarious internal workings of organisms are difficult to reconcile with a single feature defining a state of being alive. Indeed, definitions of life rely on emergent properties (growth, capacity to evolve, agency) only symptomatic of intrinsic functioning. Empirical studies demonstrate that biomolecules including ratcheting or rotating enzymes and ribozymes undergo repetitive conformation state changes driven either directly or indirectly by thermodynamic gradients. They exhibit disparate structures, but govern processes relying on directional physical motion (DNA transcription, translation, cytoskeleton transport) and share the principle of repetitive uniplanar conformation changes driven by thermodynamic gradients, producing dependable unidirectional motion: heat engines exploiting thermodynamic disequilibria to perform work. Recognition that disparate biological molecules demonstrate conformation state changes involving directional motion, working in self-regulating networks, allows a mechanistic definition: life is a self-regulating process whereby matter undergoes cyclic, uniplanar conformation state changes that convert thermodynamic disequilibria into directed motion, performing work that locally reduces entropy. Living things are structures including an autonomous network of units exploiting thermodynamic gradients to drive uniplanar conformation state changes that perform work. These principles are independent of any specific chemical environment, and can be applied to other biospheres.
The Healthy Life Years Lost Methodology (HLYL) is introduced to model and estimate the Health Expenditure in Japan in 2011. The HLYL theory and estimation methods are presented in our books in the Springer Series on Demographic Methods and Population Analysis vol. 45 and 46 titled: Exploring the Health State of a Population by Dynamic Modeling Methods and Demography and Health Issues: Population Aging, Mortality and Data Analysis. Special applications appear in Chapters of these books as in The Health-Mortality Approach in Estimating the Healthy Life Years Lost Compared to the Global Burden of Disease Studies and Applications in World, USA and Japan and in Estimation of the Healthy Life Expectancy in Italy Through a Simple Model Based on Mortality Rate by Skiadas and Arezzo. Here further to present the main part of the methodology with more details and illustrations, we develop and extend a life table important to estimate the healthy life years lost along with the fitting to the health expenditure in the related case. The application results are quite promising and important to support decision makers and health agencies with a powerful tool to improve the health expenditure allocation and the future predictions.
Johann A. Briffa, Victor Buttigieg, Stephan Wesemeyer
\begin{abstract} In this paper we consider Time-Varying Block (TVB) codes, which generalize a number of previous synchronization error-correcting codes. We also consider various practical issues related to MAP decoding of these codes. Specifically, we give an expression for the expected distribution of drift between transmitter and receiver due to synchronization errors. We determine an appropriate choice for state space limits based on the drift probability distribution. In turn, we obtain an expression for the decoder complexity under given channel conditions in terms of the state space limits used. For a given state space, we also give a number of optimizations that reduce the algorithm complexity with no further loss of decoder performance. We also show how the MAP decoder can be used in the absence of known frame boundaries, and demonstrate that an appropriate choice of decoder parameters allows the decoder to approach the performance when frame boundaries are known, at the expense of some increase in complexity. Finally, we express some existing constructions as TVB codes, comparing performance with published results, and showing that improved performance is possible by taking advantage of the flexibility of TVB codes.
Danial Faghihi, Subhasis Sarkar, Mehdi Naderi
et al.
In the present study, a general probabilistic design framework is developed for cyclic fatigue life prediction of metallic hardware using methods that address uncertainty in experimental data and computational model. The methodology involves (i) fatigue test data conducted on coupons of Ti6Al4V material (ii) continuum damage mechanics based material constitutive models to simulate cyclic fatigue behavior of material (iii) variance-based global sensitivity analysis (iv) Bayesian framework for model calibration and uncertainty quantification and (v) computational life prediction and probabilistic design decision making under uncertainty. The outcomes of computational analyses using the experimental data prove the feasibility of the probabilistic design methods for model calibration in presence of incomplete and noisy data. Moreover, using probabilistic design methods result in assessment of reliability of fatigue life predicted by computational models.
Charles of Guise, Cardinal of Lorraine, archbishop of Reims since 1538 until his death in 1574, was a major, but complex and enigmatic character, whose capacity to develop several strategies according to changing circumstances, in France and Europe baffled both his contemporaries and historians. The research on the liturgical policy he conducted in his city, diocese and ecclesiastical province of Reims provides better understanding of Cardinal’s aims and level of seriousness. This investigation is rather instructive, because the history of liturgy has been neglected by historians of the Early modern time, whereas it played a central role in the diocesan religious life and in the confessional conflicts of the 16th century. The parochial manual printed in 1554 reveals an enterprise of moderate, gallican and diocesan reform, which, while perfectly Orthodox also developed the use of the French language. The provincial Council of 1564 was a Tridentine turn, but also a logical continuation of the liturgical reform of the 1550’s, aiming desirable purification of chanting and developing a dream of returning to the antique custom. Finally, the processions clearly expressed the personal devotions of the Cardinal of Lorraine, especially to the Blessed Sacrament and to the Holy Cross, as well as the penitential aspect of the last years of his life.