Unveiling Practical Shortcomings of Patch Overfitting Detection Techniques
David Williams, Ioakim Avraam, Aldeida Aleti
et al.
Automated Program Repair (APR) can reduce the time developers spend debugging, allowing them to focus on other aspects of software development. Automatically generated bug patches are typically validated through software testing. However, this method can lead to patch overfitting, i.e., generating patches that pass the given tests but are still incorrect. Patch correctness assessment (also known as overfitting detection) techniques have been proposed to identify patches that overfit. However, prior work often assessed the effectiveness of these techniques in isolation and on datasets that do not reflect the distribution of correct-to-overfitting patches that would be generated by APR tools in typical use; thus, we still do not know their effectiveness in practice. This work presents the first comprehensive benchmarking study of several patch overfitting detection (POD) methods in a practical scenario. To this end, we curate datasets that reflect realistic assumptions (i.e., patches produced by tools run under the same experimental conditions). Next, we use these data to benchmark six state-of-the-art POD approaches -- spanning static analysis, dynamic testing, and learning-based approaches -- against two baselines based on random sampling (one from prior work and one proposed herein). Our results are striking: Simple random selection outperforms all POD tools for 71% to 96% of cases, depending on the POD tool. This suggests two main takeaways: (1) current POD tools offer limited practical benefit, highlighting the need for novel techniques; (2) any POD tool must be benchmarked on realistic data and against random sampling to prove its practical effectiveness. To this end, we encourage the APR community to continue improving POD techniques and to adopt our proposed methodology for practical benchmarking; we make our data and code available to facilitate such adoption.
Practical design and performance of physical reservoir computing using hysteresis
Yuhei Yamada
Physical reservoir computing is an innovative idea for using physical phenomena as computational resources. Recent research has revealed that information processing techniques can improve the performance, but for practical applications, it is equally important to study the level of performance with a simple design that is easy to construct experimentally. We focus on a reservoir composed of independent hysteretic systems as a model suitable for the practical implementation of physical reservoir computing. In this paper, we discuss the appropriate design of this reservoir, its performance, and its limitations. This research will serve as a practical guideline for constructing hysteresis-based reservoirs.
Practical Kinetic Models for Dense Fluids
Ilya Karlin, Seyed Ali Hosseini
Nonlinear idempotent operator instead of a linear projection is introduced to derive kinetic models for dense fluids. A new lattice Boltzmann model for compressible two-phase flow is derived based on the Enskog--Vlasov kinetic equation as an example of practical importance.
Introducción
Daniel J. Fleming, James F. Keenan, SJ, Hans Zollner, SJ
La publicación de esta obra supone cierta urgencia, una urgencia que a menudo no se encuentra en otro tipo de trabajos teológicos. La verdadera escala del daño a la dignidad humana causado por el abuso sexual dentro de la Iglesia plantea profundos dilemas, tanto para las disciplinas como para aquellos que las practican: ¿Hasta qué punto hemos pasado por alto estos problemas? ¿Por qué nuestros esfuerzos en teología y ética teológica han tardado tanto en abordar estos temas? ¿De qué manera están implicadas la teología y la ética teológica en esta crisis? ¿Qué contribuciones específicas podrían ofrecer estas disciplinas para abordar constructivamente este desafío? Este volumen reúne el trabajo de diversos académicos de distintas partes del mundo, todos ellos dedicados al análisis y la reflexión de estas y otras interrogantes.
Practical $0.385$-Approximation for Submodular Maximization Subject to a Cardinality Constraint
Murad Tukan, Loay Mualem, Moran Feldman
Non-monotone constrained submodular maximization plays a crucial role in various machine learning applications. However, existing algorithms often struggle with a trade-off between approximation guarantees and practical efficiency. The current state-of-the-art is a recent $0.401$-approximation algorithm, but its computational complexity makes it highly impractical. The best practical algorithms for the problem only guarantee $1/e$-approximation. In this work, we present a novel algorithm for submodular maximization subject to a cardinality constraint that combines a guarantee of $0.385$-approximation with a low and practical query complexity of $O(n+k^2)$. Furthermore, we evaluate the empirical performance of our algorithm in experiments based on various machine learning applications, including Movie Recommendation, Image Summarization, and more. These experiments demonstrate the efficacy of our approach.
Automating the Practice of Science -- Opportunities, Challenges, and Implications
Sebastian Musslick, Laura K. Bartlett, Suyog H. Chandramouli
et al.
Automation transformed various aspects of our human civilization, revolutionizing industries and streamlining processes. In the domain of scientific inquiry, automated approaches emerged as powerful tools, holding promise for accelerating discovery, enhancing reproducibility, and overcoming the traditional impediments to scientific progress. This article evaluates the scope of automation within scientific practice and assesses recent approaches. Furthermore, it discusses different perspectives to the following questions: Where do the greatest opportunities lie for automation in scientific practice?; What are the current bottlenecks of automating scientific practice?; and What are significant ethical and practical consequences of automating scientific practice? By discussing the motivations behind automated science, analyzing the hurdles encountered, and examining its implications, this article invites researchers, policymakers, and stakeholders to navigate the rapidly evolving frontier of automated scientific practice.
Analysis of practical fractional vortex beams at far field
Eduardo Peters, Gustavo Funes, Lluís Martínez-León
et al.
The subject of calculating the topological charge (TC) or vortex strength of optical vortices has generated divided opinions among scientists. This is due to the fact that proper analytical results are hard to support from the experimental point of view, leading to different results and conclusions. In this work we will present numerical data that shows the limits of TC measurements for practical fractional vortices and the possible challenges that high order measurements may pose. By analyzing the far field phase and the behavior of the transitions we have shown that they follow specific curves that depend not only on the TC but also on the beam waist. This leads us to present a new "strength staircase" for practical vortices. Our aim is to give some insight in practical scenarios that have not been taken into account in previous results.
Sexual misconduct amongst evangelical leaders: a practical theological reflection
I. Hussey
ABSTRACT A number of recent examples of sexual misconduct by prominent evangelical leaders has stimulated conversation regarding why Christian men exhibit such behaviours. This article adopts Osmer’s practical theological method to analyse the phenomenon and suggest more faithful practice for the Church and Christian organisations. Resources for the practical theological activity include three recent prominent cases of sexual misconduct by evangelical leaders brought into dialogue with biblical resources and wisdom related to male hegemony, psychology, power and accountability. The research concludes that sexual misconduct is connected with a faulty hermeneutic, self-justification/rationalisation, power differentials, and the failure of accountability structures. It suggests that safeguarding principles be implemented in evangelical organisations to foster safer environments for members.
Gender-based violence as a destructive form of warfare against families: A practical theological response
F. Freeks
War is an appalling crisis and destructive force on human dignity and life. War was permitted in biblical times at the hand of God, with disastrous consequences for the nations of the Ancient World. The current war between Ukraine and Russia is fast becoming a global catastrophe, with the threat of World War III looming. Warfare destroys families, and families are vital units God instituted in society. The critical issue addressed in this article is the ruining effects of gender-based violence (GBV) on family life. Therefore, this article responds to GBV as a social ill and destructive form of warfare against women and aims to propose feasible, viable, and practical theological ways to curb this ruinous issue. Gender-based violence, as a form of warfare against women and children, is one of the most destructive forces regarding family life and the key reason for unstable, disrupted, and fractured families. Because this article is grounded on a practical theological response, its pastoral role is explored. Practical theology builds a theological framework for critical evaluation. It also takes a more direct role on the moral debates of society on issues such as GBV, father absence, and family violence that occurs in Church, family, and society.Contribution: This article employed a descriptive modus operandi on GBV against women and endorses the journal’s focus on family and society who is experiencing a violation of human rights and a life-threatening issue in the field of Practical Theology.
Decentering the Human in Practical Theologies of Care: An EARTH Method
Cody J. Sanders
Abstract This article addresses the problem of human supremacy in the methods of practical theology. It puts forth a practical theological method for experimentation shaped around five interpenetrating dimensions: Ecological, Anthropological, Relational, Technological, and Health/Harm/Healing (the EARTH method). The anticipated outcome of this method is the construction of practical theological projects that aim toward practices of care that continue to address concerns of the human, but always and only as the human is understood to be inextricably situated in an expansive cosmic web of entanglement.
ESPIRITUALIDADE E RELIGIOSIDADE NA SAÚDE DE PACIENTES ONCOLÓGICOS SOB A ÓTICA DAS CIÊNCIAS DAS RELIGIÕES
Ana Clara de Andrade Patrício, Ana Caroline Cabral Cristino, Thiago Antonio Avellar de Aquino
Esta pesquisa teve como objetivo mapear as produções científicas da área de Ciências das Religiões sobre as implicações da espiritualidade e da religiosidade na saúde de pacientes oncológicos. Para critérios de elegibilidade foram consideradas as produções científicas no formato de artigo, de dissertações e de teses, publicadas no período de 01 de janeiro de 2018 a 30 de outubro de 2022 nas revistas A1, A2, B1 e B2 da área de Ciências da Religião e Teologia e no catálogo de teses e dissertações dos programas de pós-graduação em CR da CAPES, escritas em língua portuguesa (Brasil), inglesa, espanhola, alemã, italiana ou francesa e que traziam como temática central a espiritualidade e a religiosidade na saúde de pacientes oncológicos. Dos 1669 estudos encontrados, 9 foram selecionados para leitura na íntegra, resultando em uma amostra final de 8 estudos analisados. Os resultados desta revisão mostraram que a espiritualidade e a religiosidade vivenciadas pelos pacientes oncológicos os auxiliam no enfrentamento da enfermidade, no bem-estar psicológico, na percepção de sentido na existência e na qualidade de vida.
Religion (General), Practical Theology
Teaching religion as change for social transformation in contemporary African and non-African universities: a South African manifesto
Corneliu C. Simut
This article is a research report on the international colloquium entitled ‘Re-Imagining Curricula for a Just University in a Vibrant Democracy’, hosted by the University of Pretoria in 2017 to address a series of prospective changes in religious studies curricula in African and non-African universities. Anchored in the principles of the Draft Framework Document, a South African manifesto authored by a team of specialists from the University of Pretoria advocating educational reform in the field of religion, the colloquium debated the necessity of curricular change from the perspective of ecodomy, seen as a constructive attempt to modify university curricula to include relevant approaches to religion. Consequently, the discussions revolved around the idea of ‘ecodomical change’ as a socially transformative step towards achieving community development in tertiary education religious institutions.
Contribution: This article, however, focused on the Draft Framework Document and its distinctive contribution to the pedagogy of theology and religious studies within the University of Pretoria.
The Bible, Practical Theology
Reframing Liturgical Theology Through the Lens of Autism: A Qualitative Study of Autistic Experiences of Worship
A. L. van Ommen, Topher Endress
The way autistic people experience worship services is typically different from the majority, non-autistic church population. These autistic ways of experiencing worship, however, are mostly disregarded in practical and in liturgical theology. This leads not only to exclusion of autistic people from the worshiping congregation, but both the church and liturgical scholarship miss out on the opportunity to enrich its worship practices and theology through the diversity offered by autistic participants. This article presents the results of a qualitative study involving thirteen in-depth interviews with autistic people, summed up in three main themes: the experience of worship, community, and encountering God. The ensuing theological reflection on these themes argues that the indispensability of autistic worshipers to the body of Christ, and the theological evaluation of the “normalcy,” are key principles for reframing liturgical theology through the lens of autism.
Lived theology: impulses for a pastoral theology of empowerment
Easten Law
encing of ministering to Eric as friend, pastor, and mentor. This opening led me to hope to learn more about how ‘Eric’s’ experience, and Bellini’s experience of ministering to Eric, had informed the relational theology that Bellini develops across The Cerulean Soul as he reflects on human personhood, depression and mental illness. This hope was not fulfilled. Similarly, given that the subject of the book is depression and mental illness, I had hoped that Bellini’s ‘flexible, integrative model’ might be interdisciplinary, inviting ‘two or more disciplines into mutual engagement, allowing these disciplines themselves to be informed and re-formed by their engagement with each other’ as Joyce Mercer envisages in her chapter in Conundrums in Practical Theology (2016, 165). This hope could be fulfilled, in theory and in practice, if Bellini and others further develop the relational theology that he offers to the academy and to the church (2021, 5, 203, 207). The Cerulean Soul is a thoughtful, and thought-provoking, addition to the Studies in Religion, Theology, and Disability series in which it appears.
Bounded-degree plane geometric spanners in practice
Frederick Anderson, Anirban Ghosh, Matthew Graham
et al.
The construction of bounded-degree plane geometric spanners has been a focus of interest since 2002 when Bose, Gudmundsson, and Smid proposed the first algorithm to construct such spanners. To date, eleven algorithms have been designed with various trade-offs in degree and stretch factor. We have implemented these sophisticated algorithms in C++ using the CGAL library and experimented with them using large synthetic and real-world pointsets. Our experiments have revealed their practical behavior and real-world efficacy. We share the implementations via GitHub for broader uses and future research. We present a simple practical algorithm, named AppxStretchFactor, that can estimate stretch factors (obtains lower bounds on the exact stretch factors) of geometric spanners - a challenging problem for which no practical algorithm is known yet. In our experiments with bounded-degree plane geometric spanners, we find that AppxStretchFactor estimates stretch factors almost precisely. Further, it gives linear runtime performance in practice for the pointset distributions considered in this work, making it much faster than the naive Dijkstra-based algorithm for calculating stretch factors
A Practical Guide to the Partition Function of Atoms and Ions
P. Alimohamadi, G. J. Ferland
The partition function, $U$, the number of available states in an atom or molecules, is crucial for understanding the physical state of any astrophysical system in thermodynamic equilibrium. There are surprisingly few {\em useful} discussions of the partition function's numerical value. Textbooks often define $U$; some give tables of representative values, while others do a deep dive into the theory of a dense plasma. Most say that it depends on temperature, atomic structure, density, and that it diverges, that is, it goes to infinity, at high temperatures, but few give practical examples. We aim to rectify this. We show that there are two limits, one and two-electron (or closed-shell) systems like H or He, and species with a complicated electronic structure like C, N, O, and Fe. The high-temperature divergence does not occur for one and two-electron systems in practical situations since, at high temperatures, species are collisionally ionized to higher ionization stages and are not abundant. The partition function is then close to the statistical weight of the ground state. There is no such simplification for many-electron species. $U$ is temperature-sensitive across the range of temperatures where an ion is abundant but remains finite at even the highest practical temperatures. The actual value depends on highly uncertain truncation theories in high-density plasmas. We show that there are various theories for continuum lowering but that they are not in good agreement. This remains a long-standing unsolved problem.
Online Live-Stream Broadcasting of the Holy Mass during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Poland as an Example of the Mediatisation of Religion: Empirical Studies in the Field of Mass Media Studies and Pastoral Theology
B. Przywara, A. Adamski, Andrzej Kiciński
et al.
The main aim of the paper is to discuss the scale and nature of the practice of transmitting Holy Mass by parishes of the Roman Catholic Church in Poland through online live-streaming in spring 2020. The authors analyse these issues in a multifaceted and interdisciplinary way, mainly within the framework of communication and media studies and theology. The methodology of the paper combines practical theology (its four stages: “see-judge-act-review”), scientific methods applicable to social studies (especially social communication and media studies and sociological studies), and the technical aspect of communication activities (in the form of live video streaming) performed by parishes on the Internet. As it turns out, 40.8% of Polish parishes carried out online Mass broadcasts. In most cases, the main sources of broadcast signal were YouTube (18.9%) and Facebook (18.7%), while less than 5% of the parishes conducted technically independent broadcasts. The research showed a statistically significant correlation between online Mass broadcasting and the region of Poland. There was a statistically significant difference between the parish size and Mass broadcasting—the larger the parish, the more often such activities were performed; a similar correlation was observed between urban and rural parishes. Research has shown that in the dioceses where bishops directly encouraged parish priests to broadcast from their parishes, the average percentage of broadcasts was higher (46%) than in those in which there were no such incentives (38%). There was a statistically significant relationship between having a website and conducting online Mass broadcasting. Similarly, there was a statistically significant relationship between the type of parish (conventual–diocesan) and online Mass broadcasting. Conventual parishes did this much more often than diocesan ones (68.6% and 38.9% respectively).
A Practical Dynamic Programming Approach to Datalog Provenance Computation
Yann Ramusat, Silviu Maniu, Pierre Senellart
We establish a translation between a formalism for dynamic programming over hypergraphs and the computation of semiring-based provenance for Datalog programs. The benefit of this translation is a new method for computing provenance for a specific class of semirings. Theoretical and practical optimizations lead to an efficient implementation using \textsc{Soufflé}, a state-of-the-art Datalog interpreter. Experimental results on real-world data suggest this approach to be efficient in practical contexts, even competing with our previous dedicated solutions for computing provenance in annotated graph databases. The cost overhead compared to plain Datalog evaluation is fairly moderate in many cases of interest.
A simple practical quantum bit commitment protocol
Muqian Wen
This paper devises a simple quantum bit commitment protocol that is just as easy to implement as any existing practical quantum bit commitment protocols but will be more secure. It will be infinitely close to being unconditionally fully secure although neither perfectly binding nor perfectly concealing.
Do We Preach What We Practice? Investigating the Practical Relevance of Requirements Engineering Syllabi - The IREB Case
Daniel Méndez Fernández, Xavier Franch, Norbert Seyff
et al.
Nowadays, there exist a plethora of different educational syllabi for Requirements Engineering (RE), all aiming at incorporating practically relevant educational units (EUs). Many of these syllabi are based, in one way or the other, on the syllabi provided by the International Requirements Engineering Board (IREB), a non-profit organisation devoted to standardised certification programs for RE. IREB syllabi are developed by RE experts and are, thus, based on the assumption that they address topics of practical relevance. However, little is known about to what extent practitioners actually perceive those contents as useful. We have started a study to investigate the relevance of the EUs included in the IREB Foundation Level certification programme. In a first phase reported in this paper, we have surveyed practitioners mainly from DACH countries (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) participating in the IREB certification. Later phases will widen the scope both by including other countries and by not requiring IREB-certified participants. The results shall foster a critical reflection on the practical relevance of EUs built upon the de-facto standard syllabus of IREB.