Fr. Pat gave this sermon in Waynesburg, PA, at the funeral of beloved friend Nancy (Katherine) Thompson who fell asleep in the Lord on August 2, 2011.

Fr. Pat reflects upon the healing of the blind man of Jericho as recounted in Luke Chapter 18.

Second Corinthians has been summarized as “strength made perfect through weakness.” Preaching from 2 Corinthians 4:6-15, Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon looks at three examples from the Old Testament of God’s strength being made perfect through the weakness of His servants.

Fr. Pat considers with us the Icon of the invisible God from three perspectives that Christ Himself gave to us when He declared "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.”

The bishops at the Seventh Ecumenical Council reasoned that the legitimacy, indeed, the necessity of icons in the church was an organic inference from the thesis that God became visible in the Man Jesus of Nazareth. Fr. Pat gave this homily on The Sunday of Orthodoxy, 2020.

On the occasion of the third night of Hanukkah, Fr. Pat talks about the divisions God built into creation, about the consecration and desecration of sacred space, and about dedication of God's temple and of ourselves.

The Truth can be hard to see. What are we doing to help people see it better?

Kevin Allen's guest is Fr. Stephen Freeman, the pastor of St. Anne Orthodox Church in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the host of the "Glory to God" podcast. They discuss the idea of "beauty" and its lack in our secularized culture, as well as how to live a sacred life in a secular culture.

Kevin is joined by Dr. Najib Saliba, Metropolitan Philip, and Samuel Noble to discuss the current crisis in Syria as well as the controversy surrounding the pending attack by the US.

Elissa D. Bjeletich, author of In God's Hands - A Mother's Journey Through Her Infant's Critical Illness as well as the AFR podcast Raising Saints, and Elizabeth White, author of Following A Sacred Path - Raising Godly Children, join host Kevin Allen to discuss how to develop the spiritual nature of children and raise them to love and experience God.

St. Luke (2: 20-21, 40-52) treats us to a meditation on the two natures of Jesus Christ: Fully God - Fully Man. So does St. Paul writing to the Colossians (2: 8-12). Why? They both want you to know that your Salvation is found entirely in Him.

(official blog entry)

In a long New York Times piece, top Googlers speculate about the future of advertising, including Google selling TV ads, using more personalized information, and links to store inventory information.

Something for if you’re stuck overthinking something: Very few decisions are permanent. Almost all decisions can be reversed, altered, or adjusted.

Cymru Premier strugglers Aberystwyth Town appoint former Swansea City midfielder Antonio Corbisiero as their new manager.

Nando Parrado and his story of surviving the 1972 plane crash that killed 29 people in the Andes leaves a lasting impression on the Ireland rugby squad.

Several business organisations in Northern Ireland have written to Stormont ministers calling for support with their rates bill.

Conservative MP Alex Burghart has defended not visiting Northern Ireland during his time as shadow secretary.

Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall says trials of the idea have produced "dramatic results".

Proposals for renewable energy schemes in Wales could be sped up under new plans.

Terry Whenham is researching the fallen soldiers of the Northamptonshire Regiment

The trust says it it took the decision following feedback from patients and their families.

A council delays a decision on the Saunton Sands beach proposal for additional survey work.

Middleport Pottery has been given £250,000 by the National Lottery's heritage fund.

An inquest into patients linked to Ian Paterson is told the disgraced surgeon was seen as difficult.

Leonard Stanley School to reopen pool after fundraising drive, Mark Smith reports.

The athlete hopes his own fitness journey will inspire pupils.

More than a year on, some heads say they still do not know when their Raac-hit schools will be rebuilt.

Three mainstream schools in Herefordshire will benefit from the grant and a SEND school will be built.

The rate at which prices are rising has dropped below the Bank of England's target of 2%.

Ben Elton is bringing his new tour to the county, but says he visits Norfolk regularly.

People react to proposals to shut an "expensive" visitor centre in a seaside town.

Isabella Wheildon was made to wear dark glasses in the days before her death, a court hears.

The project's organiser says she wants to show the vibrant lives led by the care home residents.

Social media platform Bluesky says it has gained 700,000 new users in the week following the US election. Bluesky, which was originally conceived as part of Twitter by its former […]

The post Blue Sky gets post-election boost, Apple Vision Pro headset production scaled back appeared first on Tech Digest.

Live Drive, SDrive, Project M, Folders, FolderShare, Windows Live Sync, Live Mesh, SkyDrive, OneDrive. Yes, Microsoft has been at this file syncing game for a long time. The company bought FolderShare back in November of 2005, and has been …

Praying hard for a lump of concrete.

When to go, what to see and how to save money.

Decision-making involves choosing between one ore more alternatives, to achieve one or more goals. To support this process, there are decision support systems that employ different approaches, supporting groups or not. Generally, however, these systems do not have great flexibility; their users have to follow preestablished decision methods. This paper, after exposing some decision-making processes, describes a system, LaSca (from Large Scale), to support decisions in large-scale groups. This system, besides allowing effective achievement of the benefits of deciding in large groups through the proper structuring of the group, also allows its users to define themselves how this structuring will happen, based or not in the existing theories on the subject. So, in addition to facilitate the decision-making process, LaSca also allows its users to decide how to decide.

With the emergence of the Web 2.0 phenomena, technology-assisted social networking has become the norm. The potential of social software for collaborative learning purposes is clear, but as yet there is little evidence of realisation of the benefits. In this paper we consider Information and Communication Technology student attitudes to collaboration and via two case studies the extent to which they exploit the use of wikis for group collaboration. Even when directed to use a particular wiki designed for the type of project they are involved with, we found that groups utilized the wiki in different ways according to the affordances ascribed to the wiki. We propose that the integration of activity theory with an affordances perspective may lead to improved technology, specifically Web 2.0, assisted collaboration.

Petite nouveauté : j'ouvre mon blog afin de faire vivre le débat et certains auront remarqué le changement d'intitulé. Désormais, Il y aura un nouveau contributeur en la personne de Vincent Grenier qui est entrepreneur et membre du Conseil National du...

Des scientifiques découvrent un "troisième état" entre la vie et la mort

« La bisexualité d’Alain Delon était impossible à révéler » : une nouvelle biographie par Bernard Violet  Le Parisien

The current advertising push methods have low accuracy and poor advertising conversion effects. Therefore, a Weibo marketing advertising push method based on social network data mining is studied. Firstly, establish a social network graph and use graph clustering algorithm to mine the association relationships of users in the network. Secondly, through sparsisation processing, the association between nodes in the social network graph is excavated. Then, evaluate the tightness between user preferences and other nodes in the social network, and use the TF-IDF algorithm to extract user interest features. Finally, an attention mechanism is introduced to improve the deep learning model, which matches user interests with advertising domain features and outputs push results. The experimental results show that the push accuracy of this method is higher than 95%, with a maximum advertising click through rate of 82.7% and a maximum advertising conversion rate of 60.7%.

A metaverse is a virtual shared space connected to the real world, an alternative reality that enables economic activities, exchanges, and transactions as well as formation of relationships between user avatars and non-player characters (NPCs). Initial experiences of the metaverse were not very satisfactory; new virtual world metaverses may or may not survive as information services or platforms. The purpose of this empirical study is to identify the characteristics of a virtual world metaverse and their effects on intention to continue usage of the platform. Considering the metaverse as a new type of user experience and a powerful mode of communication, we examine the mediating role of these characteristics according to Pine and Gilmore's (1998) experience economy theory, which enriches our understanding of the factors affecting the success of a metaverse. In addition, since social interaction is important in metaverses, we extend Pine and Gilmore's experience economy model by including Schmitt's (2011) relate experience for better understanding.

The utilisation of big data presents significant opportunities for businesses to create value and gain a competitive edge. This capability enables firms to anticipate and uncover information quickly and intelligently. The author introduces a human resource scheduling optimisation strategy using a parallel network fusion structure model. The author's approach involves designing a set of network structures based on parallel networks and streaming media, enabling the macro implementation of the enterprise parallel network fusion structure. Furthermore, the author proposes a human resource scheduling optimisation method based on a parallel deep learning network fusion structure. It combines convolutional neural networks and transformer networks to fuse streaming media features, thereby achieving comprehensive identification of the effectiveness of the current human resource scheduling in enterprises. The result shows that the macro and deep learning methods achieve a recognition rate of 87.53%, making it feasible to assess the current state of human resource scheduling in enterprises.

With the expansion of business scope, the environment faced by enterprises has also changed, and competition is becoming increasingly fierce. Traditional financial systems are increasingly difficult to handle complex tasks and predict potential financial risks. In the context of the digital economy era, the booming financial sharing services have reduced labour costs and improved operational efficiency. This paper designs and implements an intelligent financial sharing platform, establishes a fund payment risk early warning model based on an improved support vector machine algorithm, and tests it on the Financial Distress Prediction dataset. The experimental results show that the effectiveness of using F2 score and AUC evaluation methods can reach 0.9484 and 0.9023, respectively. After using this system, the average financial processing time per order decreases by 43%, and the overall financial processing time decreases by 27%. Finally, this paper discusses the role of intelligent financial sharing platform in accounting transformation and optimisation of production.