Is human life exceptional when compared to the animal kingdom? Some scientists do not think so!

Dr. Rossi interviews Dr. Paul Meyendorff on the topic of Baptism. Dr. Meyendorff was the Alexander Schmemann Professor of Liturgical Theology at Saint Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary in Yonkers, NY.

Fr. Lawrence Farley discusses what it was that made the Child of the Desert so controversial—namely, baptizing Jews.

Dan Bein, the most recent Media Student Leader of Orthodox Christian Fellowship and a Coptic Christian, comments on the recent bus shooting of the Coptic Christians in Egypt who refused to renounce their faith at gunpoint.

Ancient Faith Radio presents Fr. James Early speaking at the Festival of Icons in Houston, Texas. Fr. James Early serves as the assistant pastor of St. Joseph Antiochian Orthodox Church in Houston, Texas, and the title of his talk is “From Baptist to Bosnia to Byzantium.”

This past Sunday, a video titled “A Message Signed With Blood to the Nation of the Cross,” released by the media arm of Islamic State, showed the beheadings of 21 Egyptian Christians on a beach in Libya. We talk with Egyptian native and Antiochian Orthodox priest Fr. Nabil Hanna who just returned from Egypt. The interview closes with a prayer for the martyrs, their families, and the end to violence.

Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick journeys into the hollers of central Appalachia and encounters one of the least-known forms of American Protestant religion, exploring their faith, their music and one of their churches, through the eyes of an Orthodox priest raised in that tradition.

Baptism and the Chalice represent the sacramental initiation into a new identity founded on union with Christ; thus the two questions Jesus put to the sons of Zebedee are for us today as well.

Father Pat looks at what we can learn about prayer from the story of the Syrophoenician woman found in Matthew 15. This is part one of a two-part series.

On the feast of Theophany, Fr. Pat looks at the juxtaposition of two texts from Matthew: the baptism of Jesus in Chapter 3, and Jesus’ sending the apostles out to baptize others in Chapter 28.

On the 5th Sunday of Lent, Fr. Pat preaches on the request by James and John from Mark 10: "Grant us to sit, one at Thy right hand and one at Thy left, in Thy glory.”

When we are baptized, we are made a child of God, a member of the body of Christ, and a temple of the Holy Spirit.

Our lives can feel empty and alone. But the Church offers us a different kind of emptiness: one that will lead us to be full of the Holy Spirit.

“If you cross the Jordan, you will find glorious rest.” (Life of Saint Mary of Egypt) Jesus tells us that He came to shed His blood and "give His life as a ransom for many.” But what exactly does that mean? What does the Orthodox Church teach about atonement? We're going to learn about the redemption and atonement that Jesus offers us. And this redemption isn't simply *from* something, but also *for* something. And Saint Mary of Egypt (who we celebrate on the Fifth Sunday of Great Lent) is a perfect example of what that looks like. Christ saves us *from* sin and death so we can be *free* to live as Christians, loving and serving both God and neighbor. As always, we've prepared a FREE downloadable workbook to help you act on what you'll learn. https://mailchi.mp/goarch/bethebee173

Are Humans the Centerpiece of Creation? This episode deals with "Human Exceptionalism" and its threat by the animal and nature rights movements. Kevin Allens's guests are lawyer and award-winning author (and Orthodox Christian) Wesley J. Smith ("A Rat Is a Pig is a Dog is a Boy"), and Fr Christopher of New Skete monastery.

Many Orthodox Christians are wondering how to live and raise their families in an increasingly secularized and anti-Christian culture in the U.S. and Western Europe where many believe Christianity has lost the "culture wars." In this episode of Ancient Faith Today, host Kevin Allen speaks with author and journalist Rod Dreher, of The American Conservative, about what he calls "The Benedict Option."

Are you baptised? Are you hoping to be baptised? Then this is for you!

I am asked all the time about the process of becoming foster or adoptive parents. Before you get started on the journey to foster/adopt, there are a few hard questions you should ask yourself

Why would someone baptize an infant? What about their right to choose Christ for themselves?

In the end, your success or failure is a combination of what you control (your decision making) and what you don't (timing). Most people aren't really great at decision making. But that's something you can get better at. So let's move to the harder dynamic that we can't control – and that's timing. Everything in ... Read more

The post Premature Optimization is a Timing Mistake appeared first on Chris Lema.

If you’re looking for a robust tool that transcribes your calls in real-time, integrates with the most popular meeting platforms, and can even attend meetings in your place, Otter.ai is for you. In this post, we’ll share exactly how to use Otter, plus we’ll give you some alternative options for […]

The post The Best Way to Get Call Transcriptions (+5 Alternatives) appeared first on .

Recruiting and hiring call center employees can be a pain, but it doesn’t have to be so bad. For example, depending on the roles you’re looking to hire, you may not even have to write a job description—because you can just use ours instead.  Below, we’ve put together four of […]

The post Steal These Free Call Center Job Description Templates appeared first on .

Under co-option, parties can fill vacancies in the assembly and councils without holding a by-election.

A police force formally rejects 72 complaints against officers by patients' relatives.

Rachel says adopting her daughter has been exciting and scary but she wouldn't have it any other way.

The comedian has been praised by students at the Royal National College for the Blind, where he studied.

Content may be king, but data sits behind the throne and has the king’s ear. 

You want to be informed by data before you make changes to your marketing strategies. This is never truer than in the case of your website, which is a rich source of behavioural analytics and, therefore, a valuable insight into your audience’s interests.

What was this Aston Martin mechanic thinking during the Brazilian Grand Prix weekend? Can you come up with the best caption for this picture?

¡La APTIJ está de cumpleaños y celebra su X Aniversario! Para la ocasión se ha organizado un programa de dos días que incluye una jornada con conferencias y mesas redondas en la sede de la Comisión Europea de Madrid y un taller que estará a cargo de Esther M. Navarro-Hall: Viernes 3 de noviembre 9.00-17.30: Jornada […]

We investigate ambiguity for symmetric difference nondeterministic finite automata. We show the existence of unambiguous, finitely ambiguous, polynomially ambiguous and exponentially ambiguous symmetric difference nondeterministic finite automata. We show that, for each of these classes, there is a family of n-state nondeterministic finite automata such that the smallest equivalent deterministic finite automata have O(2ⁿ) states.

E-mail spam is no more garbage but risk since it recently includes virus attachments and spyware agents which make the recipients' system ruined, therefore, there is an emerging need for spam detection. Many spam detection techniques based on machine learning techniques have been proposed. As the amount of spam has been increased tremendously using bulk mailing tools, spam detection techniques should counteract with it. To cope with this, parameters optimization and feature selection have been used to reduce processing overheads while guaranteeing high detection rates. However, previous approaches have not taken into account feature variable importance and optimal number of features. Moreover, to the best of our knowledge, there is no approach which uses both parameters optimization and feature selection together for spam detection. In this paper, we propose a spam detection model enabling both parameters optimization and optimal feature selection; we optimize two parameters of detection models using Random Forests (RF) so as to maximize the detection rates. We provide the variable importance of each feature so that it is easy to eliminate the irrelevant features. Furthermore, we decide an optimal number of selected features using two methods; (i) only one parameters optimization during overall feature selection and (ii) parameters optimization in every feature elimination phase. Finally, we evaluate our spam detection model with cost-sensitive measures to avoid misclassification of legitimate messages, since the cost of classifying a legitimate message as a spam far outweighs the cost of classifying a spam as a legitimate message. We perform experiments on Spambase dataset and show the feasibility of our approaches.

Nowadays, one of the main issues discussed at the Community level is represented by the mobility of students and workers across Europe. During the last years, in order to deal with the above picture, several initiatives have been carried out: one of them is the definition of the European Qualification Framework (EQF), a common architecture for the description of qualifications. At the same time, several research activities were established with the aim of finding how semantic technologies could be exploited for qualifications comparison in the field of human resources acquisition. In this paper, the EQF specifications are taken into account and they are applied in a practical scenario to develop a ranking algorithm for the comparison of qualifications expressed in terms of knowledge, skill and competence concepts, potentially aimed at supporting European employers during the recruiting phase.

No Comment : l'éruption d'un volcan cloue les avions au sol à Bali

Improving website structures is the main task of a website designer. In recent years, numerous web engineering researchers have investigated navigation recommendation systems. Page recommendation systems are critical for mobile website navigation. Accordingly, we propose a smart and adaptive navigation recommendation system based on reinforcement learning. In this system, user navigation history is used as the input for reinforcement learning model. The model calculates a surf value for each page of the website; this value is used to rank the pages. On the basis of this ranking, the website structure is modified to shorten the user navigation path length. Experiments were conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed system. The results revealed that user navigation paths could be decreased by up to 50% with training on 12 months of data, indicating that users could more easily find a target web page with the help of the proposed adaptive navigation recommendation system.

1. Why is Trump’s election as US president prompting a Bitcoin surge?  Al Jazeera English
2. Why crypto mania is reaching new heights  The Economist
3. Cryptocurrency traders: share what got you into crypto, and how you feel about recent developments  The Guardian
4. Bitcoin Continues Its Ascent To $100,000 Amid Ethereum, Solana, Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, BNB, XRP, Avalanche Rebound  Forbes
5. What to know about bitcoin’s post-election rally  BNN Bloomberg

Des files d'attente, la nuit, devant les prￜfectures, pour tenter d'obtenir un rendez-vous afin de demander ou de renouveler un titre de sￜjour. C'ￜtait la rￜalitￜ au dￜbut des annￜes...

The problem of dispatching is key to management of shared bicycles. Considering the number of borrowing and returning events during the dispatching period, optimisation plans of shared bicycles dispatching are studied in this paper. Firstly, the dispatching model of shared bicycles is built, which regards the dispatching cost and lost demand as optimised objectives. Secondly, the solution algorithm is designed based on non-dominated Genetic Algorithm. Finally, a case is given to illustrate the application of the method. The research results show that the method proposed in the paper can get optimised dispatching plans, and the model considering borrowing and returning during dispatching period has better effects with a 39.3% decrease in lost demand.

In this paper, a second-order sliding mode adaptive controller with finite time stability is proposed for trajectory tracking of robotic systems. In order to reduce the chattering phenomenon in the response of the variable structure resistant controller, two dependent sliding surfaces are used. In the outer loop, a kinematic controller is used to compensate the geometric uncertainty of the robot, and in the inner loop, the proposed resistive control is used as the main loop. On the other hand, considering the dynamic uncertainty and disturbance of the robot, an adaptive strategy has been used to estimate the uncertainty limit during the control process in order to eliminate the need for basic knowledge to determine the uncertainty limit in the resistant structure. The proposed control method demonstrates significant enhancements in performance, with the linear velocity error improving by approximately 80%, leading to a more accurate and responsive system.

Image encryption is a critical and attractive issue in digital image processing that has gained approval and interest of many researchers in the world. A proposed hybrid encryption method was implemented by using the combination of the Nahrain chaotic map with a well-known optimised algorithm namely the grey wolf optimisation (GWO). It was noted from analysing the results of the experiments conducted on the new hybrid algorithm, that it gave strong resistance against expected statistical invasion as well as brute force. Several statistical analyses were carried out and showed that the average entropy of the encrypted images is near to its ideal information entropy.

Access to quality healthcare is a fundamental right but unfortunately, India suffers from gender disparities in healthcare access. Telemedicine has the potential to improve access to healthcare services for women by eliminating traditional barriers. Therefore, our research aims to investigate the factors influencing the adoption of telemedicine among Indian women. This study has collected 442 responses and analysed them through structural equation modelling. The result indicates a strong and positive connection between the willingness to adopt telemedicine services and factors like performance expectancy, perceived benefits, e-health literacy, and perceived reliability. Notably, perceived reliability emerges as the most impactful predictor, closely followed by perceived benefits, while factors like effort expectancy and user resistance show no significant influence. This underscores the pivotal role of reliability and perceived benefits in shaping women's inclination toward adopting telemedicine. The study provides practical insights for telemedicine providers and policymakers to customise strategies and policies for effective promotion.

Supply chain management practices are vital for success and survival in today's competitive Indian retail market. The advent of COVID-19 pandemic necessitates a digital disruption in retail supply chain management centred on efficient technology like blockchain in order to enhance supply chain performance. The present research aims to decipher the nature of associations between supply chain management practices, blockchain technology adoption and supply chain performance in retail firms. The research is based on primary survey of specific food and grocery retailers operating on a supermarket format stores in two Indian cities. The findings pointed towards the presence of significant and positive association of all the constructs with each other. Moreover, the mediating role of blockchain technology adoption was also revealed, i.e., it partially mediates the effects of supply chain management practices on supply chain performance.