Hasil untuk "Practical religion. The Christian life"

Sandip Barui, Shovan Chowdhury

Researchers have widely used accelerated life tests to determine an optimal inspection plan for lot acceptance. All such plans are proposed by assuming a known relationship between the lifetime characteristic(s) and the accelerating stress factor(s) under a parametric framework of the product lifetime distribution. As the true relationship is rarely known in practical scenarios, the assumption itself may produce biased estimates that may lead to an inefficient sampling plan. To this endeavor, an optimal accelerating life test plan is designed under a Type-I censoring scheme with a generalized link structure similar to a spline regression, to capture the nonlinear relationship between the lifetime characteristics and the stress levels. Product lifetime is assumed to follow Weibull distribution with non-identical scale and shape parameters linked with the stress factor through a piecewise linear function. The elements of the Fisher information matrix are computed in detail to formulate the acceptability criterion for the conforming lots. The decision variables of the sampling plan including sample size, stress factors, and others are determined using a constrained aggregated cost minimization approach and variance minimization approach. A simulated case study demonstrates that the nonlinear link-based piecewise linear approximation model outperforms the linear link-based model.

Omer Eldadi, Gershon Tenenbaum, Abraham Loeb

Vickers et al. (2025) established that 58.20% of astrobiology experts believe intelligent extraterrestrial life likely exists, providing the first empirical baseline for public comparison. We surveyed 6,114 highly educated and scientifically engaged individuals (77.60% bachelor's degree+; 67.99% high-to-very-high scientific engagement) to assess their beliefs about extraterrestrial intelligent life existence: (1) personal beliefs, (2) perceived social circle beliefs, (3) perceived expert beliefs, and (4) responses to expert consensus revelation. Results showed 95.01% believed extraterrestrial intelligent life exists, with 62.59% holding definitive rather than probable convictions. Participants exhibited massive pluralistic ignorance, a 'cosmic closet', underestimating social circle beliefs by 46.07 percentage points despite near-universal personal conviction. Participants also exhibited a novel 'conviction intensity gap': while overestimating expert belief prevalence (67.63% vs. 58.20% actual), they underestimated expert conviction strength, perceiving only 21.10% as holding definitive beliefs. Experimental revelation of actual consensus (N = 5,106; 83.51% passed manipulation check) produced negligible personal belief change (d = -0.11) and small social belief change (d = 0.14). These findings demonstrate that consensus misperception operates along two dimensions, prevalence and intensity, and that even scientifically engaged audiences resist belief revision via expert consensus information.

Magezi E. Baloyi

In the past, the role of the pastor was not only recognised by the church in which he served, but also by the entire community. Government, institutions, and society at large to an extent relied on pastors to help build up communities. For this reason, politicians and the media sought pastoral opinions in times of strife, boycotts, and other upheavals. Public offences such as rape, murder, robbery, violence and other crimes have always been described as the deeds of evil people whose lives are far removed from the Christian and other religions. What makes corruption and crime worse in our country, is the perception of moral degeneration, among other reasons. It is a concern of this researcher that, instead of pastoral leadership preaching peace and addressing issues related to moral regeneration, they are becoming part of the problem rather than the solution. This article intends to show, by way of research, that, for pastors and ministers to participate in corrupt and immoral deeds, is problematic not only for the churches they serve, but also the communities in which they live. This article offers pastoral guidelines on the church’s responsibility in combatting pastors’ immoral actions. Contribution: Church pastors, as community leaders, have some responsibility for eliminating and reducing rather than dismissing or contributing to the moral degeneration engulfing South Africa. It is the conviction of this author that, if pastors practise what they preach, half of the fight against moral degeneration would be won through their exemplary lives. The pastoral position has a moral impact and an influence in local communities.

Eric McLaughlin

A vocation to serving in severely medically under-resourced settings invariably means facing of our own weakness in realizing that vocation. Christian teaching proclaims that God’s strength in made perfect in weakness, which is both a comfort and a mystery to many in facing their weaknesses. Without diminishing the mystery, experience demonstrates several ways in which this promise plays out in reality, providing an imaginative stimulus for how it may also be true in ways where it is less understood. Believing such teaching forms part of a necessary theological framework for Christians serving in areas of immense suffering as well as encouraging transparency and vulnerability in regards to their own weaknesses.

Christian Poglitsch, Johanna Pirker

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) can profoundly affect reciprocal social communication, resulting in substantial and challenging impairments. One aspect is that for people with ASD conversations in everyday life are challenging due to difficulties in understanding social cues, interpreting emotions, and maintaining social verbal exchanges. To address these challenges and enhance social skills, we propose the development of a learning game centered around social interaction and conversation, featuring Artificial Intelligence agents. Our initial step involves seven expert interviews to gain insight into the requirements for empathetic and conversational agents in the field of improving social skills for people with ASD in a gamified environment. We have identified two distinct use cases: (1) Conversation partners to discuss real-life issues and (2) Training partners to experience various scenarios to improve social skills. In the latter case, users will receive quests for interacting with the agent. Additionally, the agent can assign quests to the user, prompting specific conversations in real life and providing rewards for successful completion of quests.

Hao Yin, Mark Hutter, Christian Wagner et al.

To take full advantage of twisted bilayers of graphene or other two-dimensional materials, it is essential to precisely control the twist angle between the stacked layers, as this parameter determines the properties of the heterostructure. In this context, a growth routine using borazine as a surfactant molecule on SiC(0001) surfaces has been reported, leading to the formation of high-quality epitaxial graphene layers that are unconventionally oriented, i.e., aligned with the substrate lattice (G-$R0^\circ$) [Bocquet et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 125, 106102 (2020)]. Since the G-$R0^\circ$ layer sits on a buffer layer, also known as zeroth-layer graphene (ZLG), which is rotated $30^\circ$ with respect to the SiC substrate and still covalently bonded to it, decoupling the ZLG-$R30^\circ$ from the substrate can lead to high-quality twisted bilayer graphene (tBLG). Here we report the decoupling of ZLG-$R30^\circ$ by increasing the temperature during annealing in a borazine atmosphere. While this converts ZLG-$R30^\circ$ to G-$R30^\circ$ and thus produces tBLG, the growth process at elevated temperature is no longer self-limiting, so that the surface is covered by a patchwork of graphene multilayers of different thicknesses. We find a 20% coverage of tBLG on ZLG, while on the rest of the surface tBLG sits on one or more additional graphene layers. In order to achieve complete coverage with tBLG only, alternative ways of decoupling the ZLG, e.g., by intercalation with suitable atoms, may be advantageous.

Kelebogile T. Resane

In this article it is aimed to demonstrate that African theology is a public theology and a theology of dialogue based on its vocalism and oralism. The starting point is the definition of African theology, including its theologising methodologies. The method of research is a critical analysis of literature studies across the disciplines. A Sesotho proverbial or idiomatic puo pha! (orality) is used to illustrate that the decolonisation of theology is possible through African proverbs. This approach enhances African theology in its endeavours to unshackle itself from the western theology. As puo pha! African theology is the voice that addresses social menaces without compromises. It is the voice speaking not from the top, but from below. It is the voice of the masses, more than that of the intellectual elites. As puo pha! it engages African realities and experiences to make theological conclusions. It is argued here that African theology operates in public spaces since it is person-centred, expresses itself through processes of inculturation and is prophetic in character. Results show that African theology is a theology of encounter, and it is interactive. It becomes dialogical in nature, as it invites cultural contexts and eco-sciences in through dialogue in order that it may become relevant to African realities. The conclusion is the recommendation that African theologians embrace and promote an integrated theological method that synergises puo pha! with written theology for African theology, to have both biblical fidelity and cultural relevance. Contribution: The article intends to impress the validity of African proverbs in explaining theology, practised within African context. It demonstrates the sensibilities of African theology as a public theology and a theology of dialogue.

Khouloud Abdelli, Helmut Griesser, Stephan Pachnicke

A hybrid prognostic model based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) is proposed to predict the laser remaining useful life (RUL). The experimental results show that it outperforms the conventional methods.

Dimitry Leites

Selected stories about the life of A. L. Onishchik, and a review of his contribution to the classification of non-split supermanifolds, in particular, supercurves a.k.a. superstrings; his editorial and educational work. A brief overview of his and his students' results in supersymmetry, and their impact on other researchers. Several open problems growing out of Onishchik's research are presented, some of them are related with odd parameters of deformations and non-holonomic structures of supermanifolds important in physical models, such as Minkowski superspaces and certain superstrings.

Yfke Dulek, Stacey Jeffery, Christian Majenz et al.

In theoretical computer science, conferences play an important role in the scientific process. The decisions whether to accept or reject articles is taken by the program committee (PC) members. Serving on a PC for the first time can be a daunting experience. This guide will help new program-committee members to understand how the system works, and provide useful tips and guidelines. It discusses every phase of the paper-selection process, and the tasks associated to it.

Jacob M. Springer, Garrett T. Kenyon

Efforts to improve the learning abilities of neural networks have focused mostly on the role of optimization methods rather than on weight initializations. Recent findings, however, suggest that neural networks rely on lucky random initial weights of subnetworks called "lottery tickets" that converge quickly to a solution. To investigate how weight initializations affect performance, we examine small convolutional networks that are trained to predict n steps of the two-dimensional cellular automaton Conway's Game of Life, the update rules of which can be implemented efficiently in a 2n+1 layer convolutional network. We find that networks of this architecture trained on this task rarely converge. Rather, networks require substantially more parameters to consistently converge. In addition, near-minimal architectures are sensitive to tiny changes in parameters: changing the sign of a single weight can cause the network to fail to learn. Finally, we observe a critical value d_0 such that training minimal networks with examples in which cells are alive with probability d_0 dramatically increases the chance of convergence to a solution. We conclude that training convolutional neural networks to learn the input/output function represented by n steps of Game of Life exhibits many characteristics predicted by the lottery ticket hypothesis, namely, that the size of the networks required to learn this function are often significantly larger than the minimal network required to implement the function.

Mangilal Choudhary

The low temperature plasma technology has been emerged as an alternative environmental friendly technology that has a potential to replace the traditional technologies in various sectors such as textile industries, agriculture, food industries and waste water treatment. The future prospective of the low temperature plasma technology on the life of rural Indians has been discussed in this brief report.

Ahmed Elnaggar, Michael Heinzinger, Christian Dallago et al.

Computational biology and bioinformatics provide vast data gold-mines from protein sequences, ideal for Language Models taken from NLP. These LMs reach for new prediction frontiers at low inference costs. Here, we trained two auto-regressive models (Transformer-XL, XLNet) and four auto-encoder models (BERT, Albert, Electra, T5) on data from UniRef and BFD containing up to 393 billion amino acids. The LMs were trained on the Summit supercomputer using 5616 GPUs and TPU Pod up-to 1024 cores. Dimensionality reduction revealed that the raw protein LM-embeddings from unlabeled data captured some biophysical features of protein sequences. We validated the advantage of using the embeddings as exclusive input for several subsequent tasks. The first was a per-residue prediction of protein secondary structure (3-state accuracy Q3=81%-87%); the second were per-protein predictions of protein sub-cellular localization (ten-state accuracy: Q10=81%) and membrane vs. water-soluble (2-state accuracy Q2=91%). For the per-residue predictions the transfer of the most informative embeddings (ProtT5) for the first time outperformed the state-of-the-art without using evolutionary information thereby bypassing expensive database searches. Taken together, the results implied that protein LMs learned some of the grammar of the language of life. To facilitate future work, we released our models at https://github.com/agemagician/ProtTrans.

Baloyi, Magezi Elijah

There is enough evidence that while listening to the preaching and messages of most Pentecostal preachers or watching them on some free television channels today, the emphasis is on freeing people from the oppression of demons and witchcraft. Many people, the poor included, risk asking for cash loans to use for travelling to meet with the so-called prophets in distant areas. There is an example of those South Africans who died in Nigeria when the double storey building fell upon them. Besides promising them prosperity, these prophets also promise to protect them from those who bewitch them. This kind of message is fast becoming the driving force behind the fast-growing megachurches around Gauteng and in other parts of South Africa. The intention of this article is to check if it can be theologically justifiable to use witchcraft to make people come to church. It will be important to also investigate if this kind of advent brings the intended message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Kate Jeffery, Robert Pollack, Carlo Rovelli

We study the statistical underpinnings of life. We question some common assumptions about the thermodynamics of life and illustrate how, contrary to widespread belief, even in a closed system entropy growth can accompany an increase in macroscopic order. We consider viewing metabolism in living things as microscopic variables directly driven by the second law of thermodynamics, while viewing the macroscopic variables of structure, complexity and homeostasis as mechanisms that are entropically favored because they open channels for entropy to grow via metabolism. This perspective reverses the conventional relation between structure and metabolism, by emphasizing the role of structure for metabolism rather than the other way around. Structure extends in time, preserving information along generations, particularly in the genetic code, but also in human culture. We also consider why the increase in order/complexity over time is often stepwise and sometimes collapses catastrophically. We point out the relevance of the notions of metastable states and channels between these, which are discovered by random motion of the system and lead it into ever-larger regions of the phase space, driven by thermodynamics. We note that such changes in state can lead to either increase or decrease in order; and sometimes to complete collapse, as in biological extinction. Finally, we comment on the implications of these dynamics for the future of humanity.

Yfke Dulek, Alex B. Grilo, Stacey Jeffery et al.

The cryptographic task of secure multi-party (classical) computation has received a lot of attention in the last decades. Even in the extreme case where a computation is performed between $k$ mutually distrustful players, and security is required even for the single honest player if all other players are colluding adversaries, secure protocols are known. For quantum computation, on the other hand, protocols allowing arbitrary dishonest majority have only been proven for $k=2$. In this work, we generalize the approach taken by Dupuis, Nielsen and Salvail (CRYPTO 2012) in the two-party setting to devise a secure, efficient protocol for multi-party quantum computation for any number of players $k$, and prove security against up to $k-1$ colluding adversaries. The quantum round complexity of the protocol for computing a quantum circuit of $\{\mathsf{CNOT, T}\}$ depth $d$ is $O(k \cdot (d + \log n))$, where $n$ is the security parameter. To achieve efficiency, we develop a novel public verification protocol for the Clifford authentication code, and a testing protocol for magic-state inputs, both using classical multi-party computation.

Dante R. Chialvo

Why life is complex and --most importantly-- what is the origin of the over abundance of complexity in nature? This is a fundamental scientific question which, paraphrasing the late Per Bak, "is screaming to be answered but seldom is even being asked". In these lectures we review recent attempts across several scales to understand the origins of complex biological problems from the perspective of critical phenomena. To illustrate the approach three cases are discussed, namely the large scale brain dynamics, the characterisation of spontaneous fluctuations of proteins and the physiological complexity of the cell mitochondria network.

Hyeongwoo Kim, Christian Richardt, Christian Theobalt

Many compelling video post-processing effects, in particular aesthetic focus editing and refocusing effects, are feasible if per-frame depth information is available. Existing computational methods to capture RGB and depth either purposefully modify the optics (coded aperture, light-field imaging), or employ active RGB-D cameras. Since these methods are less practical for users with normal cameras, we present an algorithm to capture all-in-focus RGB-D video of dynamic scenes with an unmodified commodity video camera. Our algorithm turns the often unwanted defocus blur into a valuable signal. The input to our method is a video in which the focus plane is continuously moving back and forth during capture, and thus defocus blur is provoked and strongly visible. This can be achieved by manually turning the focus ring of the lens during recording. The core algorithmic ingredient is a new video-based depth-from-defocus algorithm that computes space-time-coherent depth maps, deblurred all-in-focus video, and the focus distance for each frame. We extensively evaluate our approach, and show that it enables compelling video post-processing effects, such as different types of refocusing.

Mustafa Çevik

The problem of evil didn’t use by Hume (and also not by three speakers, Demea, Cleanthes and Philo in Dialogues) as an argument against the existence of God. He on/y tries to reconcile the existence of God and the existence of the evil in the world. And he also insist to refute the inference of perfect attributes of God from the world. Can the prevalence of evil and suffering be reconciled with the claim that an omnipotent, omniscient and wholly good God governs the universe? We can find three affirmative answers for this question from the speakers who practice the Dialogues: Demea, applies to reconcile this contradiction (if it is) by 'the best possible world’ theory. Cleanthes, wants to solve this problem by supposing the ‘Author of nature to be finitely perfect; though for exceeding mankind’. And the other speaker Philo, thinks that the problem of evil is not a problem for theism. Because when God create the world he ‘has no more regard to good above ill then to heat above cold, or to drought above moisture, or to light above heavy. ’

Ramazan Altıntaş

Kader ve tevekkül alanındaki yazgıcı ilahi takdir tezi sosyal hayatın, ahlakın ve çalışma hayatının bozulmasını ve genel olarak ataleti beraberinde getirmiştir. Bu durum kader ve tevekkül anlayışının Kur’an'a başvurarak yeniden düzenlenmesi ihtiyacını doğurmuştur. Tevekkül temelde bir amaca ulaşmak için insanın elinden gelen her şeyi yaptıktan sonra Allah'a dayanıp ona güvenmesidir.  Yani insan bir amaca ulaşmak için bireysel planda bütün çabaları kullanmakla beraber yalnızca bireysel çalışmasına dayanarak Allah'ın takdirini de gözden uzak tutmamalıdır. Yazgıcı tevekkül anlayışı özellikle Emevi yönetimi döneminde ön plana çıkmış ve siyasi bir baskı olarak kullanılmıştır. Ayrıca tevekküle cebriyeci paradigmaya uygun bir anlam yüklemesi bakımından tasavvuf önemli bir rol oynamıştır. Özgürlükçü tevekkül anlayışında bireysel sorumluluk olan kesb ön plana çıkmaktadır.