Hebrews 2:11-18; Matthew 2:13-23.

2 Timothy 1:1-2, 8-18; Mark 12:1-12.

2 Timothy 2:20-26; Mark 12:13-17.

2 Timothy 3:16-4:4; Mark 12:18-27.

Hebrews 10:35-11:7; Mark 9:10-16.

The Rev. Dr. Sarah Fogg, Director of Pastoral Care at St. John's Riverside Hospital in Yonkers, New York, delivers the commencement address to the SVOTS Class of 2013.

On today's program, Fr. Evan takes questions from Egypt, South Korea, Texas, Colorado, and more on topics ranging from establishing a relationship with God to the theology of dreams.

Fr. Evan Armatas took some great questions from the audience in this episode ranging from the nature of repentance and confession to the sinlessness of the Theotokos.

In this episode, Fr. Evan takes calls from listeners with questions ranging from the role of the Theotokos to prayers for our non-Orthodox loved ones who have fallen asleep in the Lord.

The Northeast region of OCF was featured in this episode which aired live on Sunday evening April 21, 2013. Students gathered at the University of Connecticut to ask questions on behalf of students from all around the region.

Fr. Evan addresses Orthodox music, commentaries on the Scriptures, the Orthodox understanding of Hades, and the forty days after childbirth that women must wait before returning to church.

Fr. Evan tackles questions about re-baptism and more on the June 16 version of Orthodoxy Live.

In this episode, Fr. Evan takes calls from Manitoba to the United Kingdom on subjects ranging from Godparents who left Orthodoxy to explaining the eternal Nature of God to a 9 year old.

A mix of live calls, pre-recorded calls and email questions make up this episode with questions ranging from capital punishment to being a witness to our atheistic friends.

On this program, Fr. Evan tackles questions about language used in the Liturgy, the role of the Holy Spirit in Orthodoxy, how to know you are called to the priesthood, and much more.

Calls were abundant on this episode on topics like Hades, the atonement, the immaculate conception and more.

The University of Pittsburgh OCF makes up the majority of calls with questions on icons, ethnicity, being single, and more.

Contemporary christian music, funerals, and kneeling in church are among the topics in this episode.

Calls from across the country on subjects ranging from the Orthodox perspective on Halloween to a 10 year old's question about our age in heaven.

A lively show tonight with questions about infertility, confession, and more, including a call from an Australian ex-Mormon living in China who is exploring Orthodoxy!

Fr. Evan takes questions about the nature of prayer, feeling a slump in your Orthodox faith, and more.

On this episode, Fr. Evan takes listener calls asking questions about spouses in heaven, purgatory, confession, and the real presence of Christ in the eucharist.

Fr. Evan discusses the responsibility of wedding sponsors, ways to enhance prayer, dialoguing with Evangelical friends who don't value the physical world, and C.S. Lewis.

Instruments in Church, writing books for profit, Angels free-will, and the nature of Salvation are among the questions Fr. Evan tackles in this episode.

Sitting in for Fr. Evan tonight is Fr. Steven Tsichlis, pastor at St. Paul Greek Orthodox Church in Irvine, CA. He tackled questions ranging from organ donations to the Orthodox view of salvation compared to the Protestant view.

We are pleased to share this panel presentation from our 2013 CrossRoad alumni retreat. Thanks to the generosity of an Archbishop Iakovos Leadership 100 grant for CrossRoad outreach, the OVM was able to offer a new retreat for post-college CrossRoad alumni—alumni who are now in the workforce and wrestling with questions around vocation, profession, and life choices. These questions they asked themselves as teenagers at CrossRoad, but now are finding that they are facing them in a much more pertinent way in their 20s. While the panel is geared for twenty-somethings, we think Orthodox Christians of all ages will find here some wonderful wisdom for living and working in our world today.

Bobby Maddex talks with Dr. Marcus Plested, the Academic Director of the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies in Cambridge, England, about the institute's summer school and distance learning program.

After months of planning, WSO2Con 2013 is starting today in London. We already ran the tutorials in Sri Lanka last week - today (Tuesday 12th) is tutorials in UK and then the main conference is Wednesday 13th and Thursday 14th.

Yes this is a globally distributed conference! We have nearly 500 registrants (which is at least 50% more than we expected) in the two locations and they are connected via 4 high quality video streams so we have 2-way video interaction. The amount of technical details underneath is incredible - we will blog about that later. We even have one speaker doing his presentation from New York as he was unable to travel .. if everything goes off without a hitch that'll be a technological marvel :-).

We have 4 fantastic external keynote speakers:

Eben Upton, Founder & Trustee of the Raspberry Pi Foundation talking about the hottest little computer in the world. Oh and BTW, if you haven't heard yet, we've been putting together around 40 node R-Pi cluster and that system will be live running WSO2 middleware powering the WSO2Con app. Azeez has been blogging about it.

Brian Behlendorf, Founder of Apache, CollabNet and a long time god of open source (and my friend and also WSO2 Advisor) and currently Senior Advisor for Science and Technology at the World Economic Forum talking about how open source can still save the world.

Pankaj Srivastava, Vice President of the Cisco Industry Solutions Group talking about how they are building next generation cloud and embedded business systems. Guess what stuff they use :-).

 Yefim Natis, VP and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner talking about their view of Platform as a Service. Yefim leads Gartner's analysis on PaaS and has a super clear view of the future.



In addition, Paul and I will be doing keynote talks as well - I will be talking a bit about WSO2, our vision and most importantly how we see the future of enterprise computing. Paul will be talking about how to achieve that vision incrementally via a pragmatic milestone plan.

In addition we have nearly 20 external speakers (selected from over 50 submissions which we got in response to our open call for papers) and another 20 WSO2 speakers covering all aspects of our product platform.

We also have some super cool sponsors for the first time this time. Thank you to our Gold Sponsors Suse and Yenlo and our Silver Sponsors Grid Solut, Wipro and Redpill-Linpro.

The App

Oh yes the conference app .. we have a conference app that lets you do a bunch of stuff including rating talks and chatting to others. This too of course was written our stuff (and PhoneGap) and the back end will run on the Raspberry Pi cluster. Crazy? Yes. But super fun and majorly cool :-). Search for WSO2Con in the Google Play Store or you can use it with a browser here: https://wso2con.com/m/.  You need to have a WSO2 user account to log in - get one at https://wso2.org/user/register. Unfortunately the wonderful people in the Apple App Store haven't yet approved the updated version :-( .. we're keeping our fingers crossed it will happen today at least.

Putting it together

This event, like every previous WSO2Con event and all WSO2 events, is being organized by our internal marketing team. Hasmin (Director of Communications) is the general chair and she lives in Saskatoon, Canada and most of the rest of the team are in Sri Lanka! Harindu is out event God and he doesn't seem to lose hair yet. The "advance team" (of Harindu and Tasha) moved to London about 3 weeks ago and have been operating out of our Portsmouth office putting the final touches together. The rest of the marketing folks operating the UK event started arrived a week ago. There's another team managing the event in Sri Lanka. The Sri Lanka event is at a rather odd time since it starts at 2:00pm and runs until 10:30pm! We were very keen to have a live, bi-directional telecast in Sri Lanka as that's where we are based and that's where we have our team and a large community of supporters, users, and customers.

Coming back to London, overall we have nearly 50 WSO2 folks flying in from all over the world to London! I'd be remiss if I didn't acknowledge the infinite amount of work done by Maryam and our outsourced travel team lead by Zakir .. its not easy to manage all of this while still running the daily operations of the company.

Thank you to all the wonderful team at WSO2 for putting this together! And thank you to everyone participating (whether in London, Colombo or just watching over the Internet) ... we're doing this for you.

I look forward to a fun week :-).

As evidenced by recent legislation and media attention, eradicating gender inequity in the workforce is of significant importance today. However, this interest in justice stands in bold contrast to the continued wage gap, the steady number of gender discrimination suits filed, and the plethora of cases exposed in the media. Previous data collected in 2006 suggests that university students do not perceive gender discrimination as a threat of major significance to themselves or others. University students tend to minimize or even disregard the likelihood that they will witness or experience gender bias or discrimination in their career. The current study serves as a continuation of and a comparison to the 2006 study, with the goal of determining whether the perspective of university students has shifted, or whether they continue to consider themselves to be immune to the injustice of gender discrimination at work. Our findings suggest that students in this cohort are not only more acutely aware of these issues, but that this awareness has expanded to include increased concern over gender discrimination against men as well. The reluctance of students to believe that they personally will be unaffected by gender discrimination has been and continues to be surprisingly high.

The Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ is now offering a position for Quantitative Ecologist (Postdoc) in their Department of Conservation Biology. The position is open to both male and female applicants and it runs for 42 months, starting latest on 01.08.2013 in Leipzig, Germany. Salary will be according to the appropriate civil service level TVÖD, salary group 13.

The successful candidate will be focusing on optimizing monitoring designs at different scales under field constraints and assessinguncertainty in biodiversity trend analyses. He/She will have a PhD in an ecological discipline relevant for the research topic (e.g. population biology), excellent statistical and computing skills, a distinguished publication record, experience in international cooperation and strong interest both in theoretical and applied biodiversity conservation. Fluency in English in speech and writing is essential, some knowledge of German is of advantage.

November 19-22, 2013 Alexander Technological Educational Institute of Thessaloniki, Greece

Continuing the successful mission of previous MTSR Conferences (MTSR'05, MTSR'07, MTSR'09, MTSR'10, MTSR'11 and MTSR’12), the seventh International Conference on Metadata and Semantics Research (MTSR'13) aims to bring together scholars and practitioners that share a common interest in the interdisciplinary field of metadata, linked data and ontologies. Participants will share novel knowledge and best practice in the implementation of these semantic technologies across diverse types of Information Environments and applications. These include Cultural Informatics; Open Access Repositories & Digital Libraries; E-learning applications; Search Engine Optimisation & Information Retrieval; Research Information Systems and Infrastructures; e-Science and e-Social Science applications; Agriculture, Food and Environment; Bio-Health & Medical Information Systems.

The 2013 International Conference on Open Data in Biodiversity and Ecological Research took place between 20 - 22 Nov 2013, hosted by Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan. With the aim to promote open data in science twelve foreign speakers introduced relevant projects and initiatives in the sphere of biodiversity informatics: AP-BON, DataONE, Ecological Research, EU-BON, Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), Japan Biodiversity Information Facility (JBIF), linked open data, National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), Pensoft, and Thomson Reuters.

Dirk Schmeller (UFZ) and Lyubomir Penev (Pensoft), who presented EU BON at the conference, share their experience in a recent interview:

Lyubomir Penev (Pensoft)

What are the aims and main outcomes from this meeting?

LP: Taiwan has an impressive national policy with regard to data management in biodiversity sciences. The meeting summarised years of effort of Taiwanese scientists and especially of Academia Sinica to integrate data and make them publicly available. It is sufficient to mention that Taiwan has established four national nodes of the largest international biodiversity platforms, that is TaiBIF (of GBIF), TaiCOL (of Catalogue of Lige), TaiEOL (of EOL) and TaiBOL (of Barcode of Life).

Were there any biodiversity data integration models presented at the meeting that can be adopted and implemented in EUBON?

LP: Perhaps not directly, however the impressive amount and quality of work and the accumulated experience of the Taiwanese and Japanese colleagues would certainly be of value for EU BON. In addition, there are well established contacts already between the FP7 project SCALES and the National University of Taiwan which could serve as a stepping stone as well, because two of the SCALES partners participate in EU BON and at the meeting (UFZ and Pensoft).

The interest to the EU BON presentation by Dirk was great. An indicator for that was that more  than 120  EU BON leaflets have been picked up by the participants from the information desk.

Did you discuss any opportunities for partnership with organizations and initiatives from Asia and America, which deal with biodiversity data integration and accessibility?

LP: Yes, there were a lot of discussions how to mobilize and publish biodiversity data and most probably several data publishing projects will appear as a result of the discussions. These pilots could be used for the EU BON goals.

Dirk Schmeller (UFZ)

US National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) has activities similar to those planned by WP4 Link environment to biodiversity: analyses of patterns, processes and trends. Is there something that EU BON can learn from the experience of its American colleagues?

DS: It is important to keep a close link with Brian Wee and NEON, as they have a head start in comparison to EU BON. I am sure that a collaboration would benefit EU BON to work efficiently.

What is your prognosis for the successful establishment of the data publishing model in scholarly literature, and more specifically in spheres such as Ecology, Genetics, Physiology and Paleontology?

DS: Most research is financed by taxpayer money and should become publicly available once the analyses a researchers has intended are completed. I see a huge potential to publish this data in scholarly literature. I, however, see also quite some difficulties to recombine relevant datasets across different sources for further going analyses. I also see difficulties in the willingness of researchers to share data, as in many cases they see these as their own.

Linked Open Data (LOD) is a new and prominent technology to publish and share data on the web. Could you please explain what exactly hides behind this concept, and how could EU BON benefit from it?

LP: The meeting in Taiwan was impressive also in the wide representation of the Resource Description Framework (RDF) technologies in integration of biodiversity data, especially from a group from the National Museum of Japan and the University of Tokyo. RDF and the OWL Web Ontology Language are definitely the way to go if we want to make diverse data sets interoperable; the implementation of RDF in a pilot phase would be of primary importance for the success of EU BON.

The second joint meeting BioSyst.EU 2013, is organized by NOBIS Austria and will take place in Vienna from February 18–22, 2013. The conference is hosted by the University of Vienna and the Natural History Museum Vienna. Within its frame the annual meetings of GfBS and NOBIS Austria will be held.
BioSyst.EU aims to provide a European platform to:
- hold joint meetings on a regular basis;
- promote research, teaching, and training in all areas of systematic biology, including phylogenetic, taxonomic, and biodiversity research;
- encourage collaboration and interchange among researchers, both individually and through their respective societies and institutions;
- coordinate national and international efforts without infringing on the autonomy of the member societies;
- encourage formation of additional national systematic societies, while continuing to represent systematists in countries still lacking formal societies;
- increase the profile and funding of systematic biology in the European parliamen.

Further Information: http://biosysteu.univie.ac.at/

The annual meeting of the European GBIF Nodes will be organised by GBIF Finland in Joensuu 6-8 March 2013.
The meeting is by invitation only, and available for staff of the GBIF Members in Europe. In addition, any EU-funded biodiversity research projects are welcome to attend as observers. 
Event web page: European GBIF Nodes Meeting 2013

The next GEO European Projects' Workshop (GEPW7) is planned to take place in Barcelona on 8 and 9 April 2013. The event, which will be hosted by CREAF (Centre for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications) of the Universitat Autònoma of Barcelona, is intended to bring all those interested in and actively contributing to the GEOSS from all over Europe together in order to present their work and actively discuss how Europe can contribute to GEO and GEOSS.
The proposed venue is the famous Catalan art nouveau building owned by the university: "La Casa de la Convalescència" (Convalescence House) located in the centre of the city.
All Coordinators of EC projects are informed and encouraged to notify members of their teams or colleagues who may be interested in participating.
Event web page: Geo European Projects Workshop 2013

Organizers: Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ & Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries - IGB
Place: Schloß Machern, Leipzig, Germany
Event web page: BioFresh Annual Meeting 2013

iMarine e-Infrastructure for data driven decision making and research
iMarine  is organising an invitation-only workshop to discuss data driven decision making and research on 14th & 15th May 2013 at DG Connect, Avenue de Beaulieu 33 (BU33), Room 0/54, Brussels, Belgium.
The goal of iMarine is to facilitate policy makers in addressing the global challenges impacting on the marine ecosystem, the fisheries sector, local economies and communities and to demonstrate that science based policy making can benefit from a large and distributed e-Infrastructure for cross-disciplinary data collection, harmonization and analysis necessary for the management and conservation of marine living resources.

The ESWC 2013 takes place from May 26th, 2013 to May 30th, 2013 in Montpellier, France.
The ESWC is a major venue for discussing the latest scientific results and technology innovations around semantic technologies. Building on its past success, ESWC is seeking to broaden its focus to span other relevant research areas in which Web semantics plays an important role.
Event web site: ESWC 2013

 

A conference marking the start of the Natural History Museum’s Biodiversity Initiative has been announced to take place on 3-4 June, 2013 in the NHM, London.  A workshop of the Genomic Observatories Network will be also hosted during the conference

The conference will focus on how inter-disciplinary, genomic approaches can be developed to accelerate the study of biodiversity and function of tropical ecosystems.

More information on the conference can be found here.

The GI_Forum 2013 will take place on 02-05 July, in Salzburg, Austria. The GI_Forum 2013 will aim at communicating innovative research and learning in Geographic Information Science with focus on hardware, software, orgware and brainware for the GISociety, and their inter-relationships. The keynote speakers this year will be Sarah Elwood, Josef Strobl, Geoff Zeiss, Francis Harvey, Xavier Lopez and Carmel Mbizvo.

For more information please follow  the link: http://www.gi-forum.org/, or see the attached programme of the event.

 

The biennial International Congress for Conservation Biology is recognized as the most important global meeting for conservation professionals and students. The congress features a dynamic scientific program with more than 100 cutting edge symposia, workshops, posters, and focus groups; countless networking opportunities, fantastic field trips, and world-renowned speakers.
The 26th ICCB takes place in Baltimore, Maryland, USA, on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay in Baltimore's Inner Harbor.  Chesapeake Bay is the world's most productive estuary and the region is rich in cultural and historical heritage and conservation challenges and success stories.
Event web page: ICCB 2013

From 18-23 August 2013, the 11th INTECOL Congress, Ecology: Into the next 100 years will be held in London as part of the centenary celebrations of the British Ecological Society.The theme of the Congress is advancing ecology and making it count, and will present world class ecological science that will truly move the science forward.
Event web site: http://www.intecol2013.org/

 

Biodiversity Informatics Horizons 2013 (BIH2013) is part of a continuing process that helps to structure and organise the biodiversity informatics community at the European level and beyond. BIH2013 will take place over 3 full days, from lunchtime on Tuesday 3rd September to lunchtime Friday 6th. The venue will be in Rome but is still awaiting final confirmation.

To respond to the challenges and priorities of the next decade in biodiversity and ecosystems research, structuring bottom-up and top-down interactions on informatics and cooperating across the community is now an essential activity. Cooperation avoids unnecessary duplication of activity. It helps to maximise and focus effort on building the information resources, tools and infrastructure the scientists and policymakers need. We all know the importance of this as we face environmental, societal and human health challenges on global scale. Science in support of policy to mitigate biodiversity loss due to climate and other man-made changes, to assure food security, and to combat invasive species (to give just a few examples) can only be achieved by full integration of the biodiversity research community through a commonly-shared, sustainable e-infrastructure across all sub-disciplines that reliably serves science and society alike. Hence, the need to coordinate.

Invited speakers will review challenging areas and promising technologies in biodiversity informatics, pathways to sustainable implementation and changing the community culture. A panel discussion with experts from regions of the world beyond Europe will explore opportunities for international cooperation that lead towards a sustainable global infrastructure. Demonstration and training activities, provided by some of the FP7 projects associated with the conference will allow delegates to see first-hand some of the new and exciting infrastructure building blocks that will come together to deliver the LifeWatch vision.

To read more and register for the conference, please click here.

For early registration conference fee, please register before 31 July.

The IALE 2013 European Congress "Changing European Landscapes: Landscape ecology, local to global" will take place on 9-12 September 2013, in Manchester, UK. This major international event, organised by IALE UK and IALE Europe, will examine how and why European landscapes are changing and how landscape ecology can help us to plan for the future at local to global scales. It will consider local projects alongside international programmes and provide many opportunities for researchers, policy makers and practitioners to interact. The congress will have a European focus but we look forward to welcoming participants from around the world.

More information and how to register find here.

 

The Open Knowledge Foundation is pleased to announce that the 2013 Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon) will take place in Geneva, Switzerland on 17th-18th September.
The world’s leading open data and open knowledge event, OKCon is the latest in an annual series run since 2005. Last year’s installment in Helsinki had more than 1000 participants from over 50 countries and was the largest event of its kind to date.
Find out more about the conference here.
Registration and tickets are already available here.

Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) will hold its annual conference in Florence, Italy on October 28 – November 1.  it  will be held at the Grand Hotel Mediterraneo but attendees will be free to choose from any of the accommodations in the area, many within a short distance.  Registration details will be provided early in 2013.

 

The "ICT 2013 – Create, Connect, Grow" will take place on 6-8 November, 2013 in Vilnius, Lithuania. The event will bring together more than 4000 researchers, innovators, entrepreneurs, industry representatives, young people and politicians. The focus of ICT 2013 will be placed on Horizon 2020 - the EU's Framework Programme for Research and Innovation for 2014-2020. The event will feature top ICT professionals from industry, academia, research, participating in discussions built around 3 thematic plenaries: ICT for Excellent science; ICT for Industrial Leadership; and ICT for Societal challenges. Experts will present details on how to participate in Horizon 2020. A special focus will be placed on Digital Futures - a journey into 2050's futures and policy challenges.

Apart from the conference the ICT 2013 will also feature an exhibition as a unique opportunity for projects and companies to showcase their research, ICT products and innovative creations. In total, 185 projects will showcase the latest findings in advanced research, technologies, new systems, innovation in services & business and ICT products just coming to market.

In addition networking sessions and investment forum are also planned within the event. ICT 2013 is also organizing activities for students and young researchers

For more information and to register visit: http://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/ict-2013

 

Continuing the successful mission of previous MTSR Conferences (MTSR'05, MTSR'07, MTSR'09, MTSR'10, MTSR'11 and MTSR’12), the seventh International Conference on Metadata and Semantics Research (MTSR'13) aims to bring together scholars and practitioners that share a common interest in the interdisciplinary field of metadata, linked data and ontologies. Participants will share novel knowledge and best practice in the implementation of these semantic technologies across diverse types of Information Environments and applications. These include Cultural Informatics; Open Access Repositories & Digital Libraries; E-learning applications; Search Engine Optimisation & Information Retrieval; Research Information Systems and Infrastructures; e-Science and e-Social Science applications; Agriculture, Food and Environment; Bio-Health & Medical Information Systems.