This week’s readings for divine liturgy correct any notion we might have that the physical, material world does not matter. While the physical is ordered under the spiritual realm by God, it is also meant to be taken up into it, transformed. We see this careful balance and valuing of the spiritual and material worlds in the lives of the Theotokos and St. Edith of Wilton, as well as in the Old Testament narratives of the “fiery serpent” and the promised “new heavens and new earth.”

This week we take to heart Jesus’ strengthening words to the seer John, learning what it is to truly fear the Lord, how He is the beginning and the end of all things, and how our times are in His hands. (Rev. 1:17b-20, Genesis 1-3, Dan 10:7-12a; Isaiah 22:22; Psalm 31:14-17a/LXX 30:15-18a)

We consider the first of the Lamp-lighting Psalms, Psalm 140 (MT141), with the help of select Church fathers, and in the light of Numbers 16; 2 Corinthians 5:21-6:1; Romans 5:1-2, and 1 Thessalonians 5:23-4.

At Orthodox Education Day (OED) on October 6, 2018, former SVS Press director Ted Bazil and St Vladimir's Seminary Professor Emeritus David Drillock offered a fantastic look back and wonderful stories from the fifty-year history of SVS Press and Orthodox Education Day.

The Mission will receive a relic of its patron, St. John the Merciful (Compassionate), and Fr. Nicolaie invites us to discover who we are by asking the least of these who we are.

Brother Luke shares three stories from community life.

I forget, in the course of my long life as a Christian, how many times I have heard people assure me that “God will never give you more than you can handle”. By this they seemed to mean that God knows my emotional limits and capabilities, and will make sure that no disaster befalls me that will tax me emotionally beyond my present strength. Sometimes they affix a Bible verse from 1 Corinthians 10:13 to it to make their case: “No temptation has overtaken you but such is common to man, and God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will provide the way of escape also, that you may be able to endure it”. I must report however, on the basis of my long life as a Christian, that the assuring notion that God will never give anyone more than they can handle is nonsense.

Fr. Gregory Hallam gives the homily on Sunday, February 5, 2017.

Bobby interviews Elissa Bjeletich, the host of the AFR podcast "Raising Saints" and the author of the new Ancient Faith Publishing book In God’s Hands: A Mother’s Journey through Her Infant’s Critical Illness.

Dr. Rossi uses a quote from St. Irenaeus to illustrate the need for balance in our lives.

Dr. Albert Rossi reflects on the unexpected turn of events that we often encounter in our lives and how we might respond to them.

Dr. Rossi reflects on how we are Christ's presence in the world.

Fr. Lawrence Farley explains why Orthodox Christians prostrate in front of icons of saints.

Father Irenei examines two passages from St. Irenaeus of Lyons, which speak of receiving the truth of "the Church that has been handed down to us" from the Holy Apostles, and in which right belief is found without adulteration or error.

Miho Ealy, a Japanese Orthodox Christian, talks to us from Japan about life after the earthquake and subsequent tsunami.

Learn about this wonderful resource for Orthodox women as we talk with Assistant Managing Editor Jane Meyer.

Israel recognized no possibility of conflict between God’s will fixed in the Torah and the more fluid guidance He provided in the cloud and the pillar. Fr. Pat offers reflections from Numbers Chapter 9.

In today’s episode, I’m joined by PJ Taei, Founder and CEO of Uscreen, an all-in-one video monetization platform for content creators that helps them build their brands and grow their businesses. The creator economy has changed a lot since PJ first founded Uscreen in 2015. And in that time PJ has managed to grow Uscreen […]

The government has taken control of a decision over 8000 new homes near Sittingbourne.

A mum is sending mobility aid home after she fled Ukraine with her children to live in the UK.

Luton boss Rob Edwards still has his players' backing but admits his future is "out of my hands" after Saturday's 5-1 defeat at Middlesbrough.

A review into the government's handling of a child poverty strategy has found it has failed.

Service Level Agreements are the secret sauce for ensuring marketing and sales are singing from the same song sheet. Qualifying inbound leads is an exercise in cooperation between departments.

This work describes an online handwritten character recognition system working in combination with an offline recognition system. The online input data is also converted into an offline image, and in parallel recognized by both online and offline strategies. Features are proposed for offline recognition and a disambiguation step is employed in the offline system for the samples for which the confidence level of the classier is low. The outputs are then combined probabilistically resulting in a classier out-performing both individual systems. Experiments are performed for Kannada, a South Indian Language, over a database of 295 classes. The accuracy of the online recognizer improves by 11% when the combination with offline system is used.

In this paper, we propose a novel dexterous technique for fast and accurate recognition of online handwritten Kannada and Tamil characters. Based on the primary classifier output and prior knowledge, the best classifier is chosen from set of three classifiers for second stage classification. Prior knowledge is obtained through analysis of the confusion matrix of primary classifier which helped in identifying the multiple sets of confused characters. Further, studies were carried out to check the performance of secondary classifiers in disambiguating among the confusion sets. Using this technique we have achieved an average accuracy of 92.6% for Kannada characters on the MILE lab dataset and 90.2% for Tamil characters on the HP Labs dataset.

One important subject associated with personal authentication capabilities is the analysis of handwritten signatures. Among the many known techniques, algorithms based on linguistic formalisms are also possible. However, such techniques require a number of algorithms for intelligent image analysis to be applied, allowing the development of new solutions in the field of personal authentication and building modern security systems based on the advanced recognition of such patterns. The article presents the approach based on the usage of syntactic methods for the static analysis of handwritten signatures. The graph linguistic formalisms applied, such as the IE graph and ETPL(k) grammar, are characterised by considerable descriptive strength and a polynomial membership problem of the syntactic analysis. For the purposes of representing the analysed handwritten signatures, new hierarchical (two-layer) HIE graph structures based on IE graphs have been defined. The two-layer graph description makes it possible to take into consideration both local and global features of the signature. The usage of attributed graphs enables the storage of additional semantic information describing the properties of individual signature strokes. The verification and recognition of a signature consists in analysing the affiliation of its graph description to the language describing the specimen database. Initial assessments display a precision of the method at a average level of under 75%.

5G mobile communication systems are an in-depth fusion of multi-radio access technologies characterised with frequent handover between cells. Handover management is a particularly challenging issue for 5G networks development. In this article, a novel optimised handover framework is proposed to find the optimal network to connect with a good quality of service in accordance with the user's preferences. This framework is based on an extension of IEEE 802.21 standard with new components and new service primitives for seamless handover. Moreover, the proposed vertical handover process is based on an adaptive heuristic model aimed at achieving an optimised network during the decision-making stage. Simulation results demonstrate that, compared to other existing works, the proposed framework is capable of selecting the best network candidate accurately based on the quality-of-service requirements of the application, network conditions, mobile terminal conditions and user preferences. It significantly reduces the handover delay, handover blocking probability and packet loss rate.

Aim/Purpose: To prepare students with both theoretical knowledge and practical skills in the field of wireless communications. Background: Teaching wireless communications and networking is not an easy task because it involves broad subjects and abstract content. Methodology: A pedagogical method that combined lectures, labs, assignments, exams, and readings was applied in a course of wireless communications. Contribution: Five wireless networking labs, related to wireless local networks, wireless security, and wireless sensor networks, were developed for students to complete all of the required hands-on lab activities. Findings: Both development and implementation of the labs achieved a successful outcome and provided students with a very effective learning experience. Students expressed that they had a better understanding of different wireless network technologies after finishing the labs. Recommendations for Practitioners: Detailed instructional lab manuals should be developed so that students can carry out hands-on activities in a step-by-step fashion. Recommendation for Researchers: Hands-on lab exercises can not only help students understand the abstract technical terms in a meaningful way, but also provide them with hands-on learning experience in terms of wireless network configuration, implementation, and evaluation. Impact on Society: With the help of a wireless network simulator, students have successfully enhanced their practical skills and it would benefit them should they decide to pursue a career in wireless network design or implementation. Future Research: Continuous revision of the labs will be made according to the feedback from students. Based on the experience, more wireless networking labs and network issues could be studied in the future.

This study examines diverse information media in order to identify those formats that are most suitable for consumption via handheld mobile devices, namely, smartphones and tablets. The preferences of the users are measured objectively by analyzing actual data of their relative use of handheld mobile devices and personal computing (PC) desktop devices, including laptops and notebooks, for consumption of information presented in various formats. Our findings are based on Google Analytics pageview data of five course Websites during a period of three semesters, by 11,557 undergraduate students. M-learning contexts were chosen, since in a learning environment the interests of information providers (i.e., the instructors) are in accord with those of the information consumers (i.e., the students), whereas in commercial settings there may be conflicts of interests. Our findings demonstrate that although about 90% of the pageviews were via PC devices, the rate of smartphone use for consuming learning content in diverse information media is gradually increasing as time goes by, whereas the rate of tablet use for these purposes is stagnant. The most promising direction for smartphone development, emanating from the findings, is online video content.

Naoya NEZU,Hiroshi YAMADA, Vol.E107-D, No.11, pp.1408-1421
Modern memory devices such as DRAM are prone to errors that occur because of unintended bit flips during their operation. Since memory errors severely impact in-memory key-value stores (KVSes), software mechanisms for hardening them against memory errors are being explored. However, it is hard to efficiently test the memory error handling code due to its characteristics: the code is event-driven, the handlers depend on the memory object, and in-memory KVSes manage various objects in huge memory space. This paper presents MemFI that supports runtime tests for the memory error handlers of in-memory KVSes. Our approach performs the software fault injection of memory errors at the memory object level to trigger the target handler while smoothly carrying out tests on the same running state. To show the effectiveness of MemFI, we integrate error handling mechanisms into a real-world in-memory KVS, memcached 1.6.9 and Redis 6.2.7, and check their behavior using the MemFI prototypes. The results show that the MemFI-based runtime test allows us to check the behavior of the error handling mechanisms. We also show its efficiency by comparing it to other fault injection approaches based on a trial model.
Publication Date: 2024/11/01

In my knowledge graph class yesterday we talked about the SPARQL query language and I illustrated it with DBpedia queries, including an example getting data about the movie Double Indemnity. I had brought a google assistant device and used it to compare its answers to those from DBpedia. When I asked the Google assistant “Who […]

The post Why does Google think Raymond Chandler starred in Double Indemnity? appeared first on UMBC ebiquity.

7 -ELEVEN MALAYSIA carries on its goodwill by launching ‘Lend a Helping Hand 2021’ campaign to provide relief and help ease the burden of beneficiaries whom are impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic in the country as well as to our heroic frontliners that are working tirelessly to keep us all safe.

From now until July 4, 2021, the public is encouraged to contribute through the campaign by purchasing necessities and supplies from 7-Eleven stores nationwide and placing them into the collection box. Supplies could range from instant food, groceries, beverages, medications, and other household cleaning essentials found in the store. The public may also drop off essential general supplies into the collection box and the contributions will then be channelled by 7-Eleven to the nearest beneficiaries in each area nationwide including government hospitals and medical clinics, other civil service frontliners, charity homes such as those for the elderly and children, public universities, students’ dormitories and more. Contribution handovers will have necessary precautions in place such as minimal interaction between donor and recipients with the collected items dropped off outside the recipient’s facility wherever possible.

7-Eleven Malaysia’s General Manager of Marketing, Ronan Lee, said: “Everybody can play a part to lend a hand during these trying times and we can always count on the extraordinary kind generosity of the public in supporting our efforts of providing any form of relief to the disadvantaged communities as well as our relentless frontliners who have been heroic in the face of unprecedented adversity. We are all in this together and let us all stay strong together and be there for each other as #KitaJagaKita.”

“While the pandemic has been difficult for most Malaysians, there are communities who are more adversely impacted by the pandemic than the others, especially the B40 communities. In acknowledgement of this, it is more critical than ever before for us to shore up our support and deliver the necessary aid to them, not forgetting the frontline workers as well for their resilience, compassion and gallant efforts. At 7-Eleven Malaysia, we want to ensure that no one is left behind in these challenging and unprecedented times,” Lee added.

For more information on ‘Lend a Helping Hand 2021’ campaign, please visit www.7eleven.com.my or follow our official social media pages @7ElevenMalaysia.

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As Techdirt stories attest, Wikipedia has been attacked in the past for publishing true information that somebody doesn’t like. As well as wanting articles to be censored, those behind such attacks often also demand the names of those who worked on the article. Something similar is now happening in India, where the Indian news agency […]

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In understanding and improving the CAPA system as a whole, this book reflects the importance of the investigation/root cause analysis stage as the necessary step of any effective corrective and preventive action system

This undated photo shows the Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission's rover during a test. — APP/File

In a major development, the Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission has announced its collaboration on a groundbreaking lunar...

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