Bible study topics in Ephesians, Chapter 5a cover imitating God, Christian living and fellowship. The questions are designed for personal or group inductive style Bible study and discussion.

Bible study topics in Ephesians, Chapter 5b cover husbands and wives and their relationships. The questions are designed for personal or group inductive style Bible study and discussion.

Bible study topics in Ephesians, Chapter 6 cover Christian children, parents, workers and the armor of God. The questions are designed for personal or group inductive style Bible study and discussion.

Introduction To Philippians Bible Studies covers Christ Beyond Reason by looking at the circumstances of Paul and the Philippians. The questions are designed for personal or group inductive style Bible study and discussion.

Outline To Philippians Bible Studies covers Christ beyond reason in chapter-by-chapter study format. The questions are designed for personal or group inductive style Bible study and discussion.

Bible study topics in Philippians, Chapter 1 cover love, knowledge, prison and courage in hardship. The questions are designed for personal or group inductive style Bible study and discussion.

Bible study topics in Philippians, Chapter 1b cover Paul's chains, how they serve Christ and how our suffering can do the same. The questions are designed for personal or group inductive style Bible study and discussion.

Bible study topics in Philippians, Chapter 2 cover unity, self-sacrifice and Christ likeness. The questions are designed for personal or group inductive style Bible study and discussion.

Bible study topics in Philippians, Chapter 3 cover the source of righteousness and pressing on. The questions are designed for personal or group inductive style Bible study and discussion.

Bible study topics in Philippians, Chapter 4 cover attitude, prayer, peace and giving. The questions are designed for personal or group inductive style Bible study and discussion.

It is of note that incoming first lady Melania Trump's autobiography remains No. 1 on Amazon's "most sold" bestseller list. Her book -- which was published Oct. 8 by Skyhorse -- has also reached No. 1 in the categories of memoirs, political leader biographies and -- interestingly enough -- in traveler and explorer biographies.

China's coast guard this week took the most aggressive action to date against Philippine supply boats attempting to provide goods to a grounded navy vessel at Second Thomas Shoal in the South China Sea.

It's no surprise that students are pushing back on cellphone bans in classrooms. But school administrators in one South Florida county working to pull students' eyes away from their screens are facing some resistance from another group as well - parents.

My Little Pony finally made it to the winner's circle.

The Washington Capitals traded a 2027 third-round pick and a 2025 fifth-round pick to the rival Pittsburgh Penguins in exchange for forward Lars Eller, the team announced on Tuesday.

Learn some of the amazing evidence of the eternal spiritual universe of the Bible, and why the physical world is a mere temporary illusion by comparison.

Learn a simple key to Christian life: mercy trumps judgment. Find out how Mercy can be a powerful tool for Christian living and testimony.

Trophy Name Plate

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Defective wristbands and/or trophies will be replaced at no charge.? If we misspell a student name on a trophy nameplate, we will replace it free of charge.? If you misspell a student’s name when you submit it to us for engraving, you can purchase a new nameplate for $3.95 on the Musical Ladder Website.?

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Roger Penske already won two sports car championships this season and heads to Phoenix Raceway with two chances to win a third consecutive NASCAR Cup Series title with both Joey Logano and Ryan Blaney in the winner-take-all season finale.

All four NASCAR Xfinity championship drivers said the right things heading into the season finale.

An underreported aspect of President-elect Donald Trump's victory last Tuesday night was how his historic alliance with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will shift our health care landscape.

United Nations peacekeepers warned Tuesday that the Israeli military has committed "severe violations" of a cease-fire deal with Syria as its military continues a major construction project along the so-called Alpha Line that separates the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights from Syria.

Preston Mattingly, a son of former star first baseman and manager Don Mattingly, was promoted to general manager of the Philadelphia Phillies on Friday under president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski.

Learn the amazingly simple secret to understanding end times prophecy. Find out why we should all be studying and watching, especially now.

The Indiana Fever hired Stephanie White as coach on Friday, putting her in charge of a team led by WNBA Rookie of the Year Caitlin Clark.

Stephen Curry scored 18 of his 24 points in the second half in his return from an ankle injury and the Golden State Warriors won their fourth straight game, 125-112 over the Washington Wizards on Monday night.

Curled up in his father's lap, clinging to his chest, Hussein Mikdad cried his heart out. The 4-year-old kicked his doctor with his intact foot and pushed him away with the arm that was not in a cast. "My Dad! My Dad!" Hussein said. "Make him leave me alone!" With eyes tearing up in relief and pain, the father reassured his son and pulled him closer.

The prequel series will chronicle the rise of the Bene Gesserit order thousands of years before Paul Atreides.

The post First Look At Dune: Prophecy, The Spin-Off TV Series Coming To Max first appeared on SciFi Stream.

The wait is nearly over, as the fourth and final season of Snowpiercer speeds our way July 21 on AMC.

The post New Teaser And Photos For Snowpiercer’s Final Season first appeared on SciFi Stream.

Monographs are fundamental for progress in systematic  botany. They are the vehicles for circumscribing and naming taxa, determining distributions and ecology,  assessing  relationships for formal classification, and interpreting long-term  and short-term  dimensions of the evolutionary process. Despite their importance, fewer monographs are now being prepared by the newer generation  of systematic  botanists, who are understandably involved principally with DNA data and analysis, especially for answering  phylogenetic, biogeographic, and population  genetic questions.  As monographs provide  hypotheses regarding species  boundaries and plant relationships, new insights  in many plant groups  are urgently  needed.  Increasing  pressures  on biodiversity, especially in tropical and developing regions of the world, emphasize this point. The results from a workshop (with 21 participants) reaffirm  the central role that monographs play in systematic  botany. But, rather than advocating abbreviated models  for monographic products,  we recommend a full presentation of relevant  information. Electronic  publication offers numerous  means of illustration of taxa, habitats, characters, and statistical and phylogenetic analyses, which previously  would have been prohibitively costly. Open Access and semantically enhanced  linked electronic  publications provide instant access to content from anywhere  in the world, and at the same time link this content to all underlying data and digital resources  used in the work.  Resources  in support  of monography, especially  databases  and widely  and easily  accessible  digital  literature and specimens, are now more powerful  than ever before, but interfacing and interoperability of databases  are much needed. Priorities  for new resources  to be developed  include an index of type collections and an online global chromosome database. Funding  for sabbaticals for monographers to work uninterrupted on major projects  is strongly  encouraged. We recommend that doctoral  students  be assigned  smaller  genera,  or natural  portions  of larger  ones (subgenera, sections,  etc.), to gain the necessary expertise for producing a monograph, including training in a broad array of data collection (e.g., morphology, anatomy, palynology, cytogenetics, DNA techniques, ecology, biogeography), data analysis (e.g., statistics,  phylogenetics, models), and nomenclature. Training programs, supported by institutes, associations, and agencies, provide means for passing on procedures and perspectives of challenging botanical  monography to the next generation  of young systematists.

The Environmental Change Institute (ECI) in the University of Oxford is seeking to appoint a Research Assistant to join the existing research team on two EU funded research projects.

The role will require the development and application of methodologies for undertaking systematic literature reviews, quantitative analysis of model outputs, contribution to the writing of research papers, organisation of workshops and large meetings, and the performance of other duties necessary for the successful completion of both the IMPRESSIONS and OPENNESS projects

You will have a Masters or equivalent in an environmental discipline and strong quantitative skills. You must have the ability to undertake systematic literature reviews and synthesise findings and assist in the management of large research projects. Excellent organisational and writing skills are essential.

This is a part-time (50% FTE) post and is available for 24 months.

The closing date for applications is 12.00 noon on Wednesday 18 December 2013.

You can find more information and apply here.

The Environmental Change Institute (ECI) in the University of Oxford is seeking to appoint a Postdoctoral Research Assistant to join the existing research team on two EU funded research projects: IMPRESSIONS and OPENNESS.

The role will require the development of a range of methodological and modelling approaches, including quantitative, qualitative and mixed techniques, to address a number of environmental science challenges in the contexts of operationalising ecosystem services and investigating cross-sectoral climate change impacts and vulnerabilities. The post provides the opportunity for a researcher with skills in programming, GIS and statistics to develop innovative solutions in research areas critical to ensuring the resilience of our future environment and to expand the modelling capability of the ECI team.

You will have a PhD in a discipline relevant to modelling or environmental sciences and a background in programming and modelling. You will have experience of using Geographical Information Systems and a strong grounding in statistics and/or operational research. Excellent communication skills both written and oral are essential. You will be self-motivated, with the ability to work independently.

This post is available for 24 months in the first instance.

The closing date for applications is 12.00 noon on Wednesday 18 December 2013. It is intended that interviews will be held during the week beginning 13 January 2014.

For more information and to apply for this position, click here.

The Mediterranean Institute for Biodiversity and Ecology (IMBE, Aix-Marseille University, Aix-en-Provence, France), in its Research Group "Macroecology and Biogeography of Global Change (MacroBio)" has a 36-months PhD position open for applications. The position is funded by the European Commission through the FP7 Research Project OPERAs and affiliated to the French National Scientific Research Centre (CNRS).

The topic is the broad-scale spatial mapping and quantification of ecosystem service trade-offs following from management of agro-ecosystems in the Mediterranean basin. The context of the research includes the environment (climate, land use) as well as trends in societal demands for services. Based on scientific literature, spatial databases and the outputs from a process-based ecosystem model, the candidate will analyze, quantify and map ecosystem service trade-offs. Service valuation and indicator representation methods will be developed with the IMBE team. The approach is pan-Mediterranean: a significant part of the work will therefore consist of helping to reduce gaps in data and knowledge for the sum of countries around the Mediterranean basin. 

The research group works in close interaction with international programs such as Future Earth (through its project ecoSERVICES) and science-policy interfaces such as IPBES.

The successful candidate will have completed a Masters degree (or equivalent) in one of the environmental sciences, have experience in the handling of spatial data from databases, literature and models, have knowledge of existing concepts of ecosystem services, and be able to place results in the context of the Mediterranean basin (this includes the European, as well as North African and Eastern countries). The working language is English, appropriate skills in French or another of the Mediterranean languages will be an advantage.

The position will be filled when a suitable candidate has been identified. To apply for this position, please send a letter of application, demonstrating your ability to understand the task, and your CV as soon as possible, but before the 31st of January 2013, by e-mail to Ms. Gabriela Boéri (Gabriela.Boeri@imbe.fr). For any questions about the task, working conditions, or the OPERAs project, please contact Professor Wolfgang Cramer (Wolfgang.Cramer@imbe.fr).

The Heinz-Nixdorf-Chair for Distributed Information Systems at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena (Germany) invites applications for a fully funded PhD student position in Biodiversity Data Visualization for the data management project of the Biodiversity Exploratories (BE) Priority Program.

Deadline for application: 2nd, May 2014

Start date: June 2014 or later

What this is about

The data management project provides the platform for data storage and information exchange for the projects of the DFG Priority Program "Biodiversity Exploratories". Examples of the thematic focus of the projects include botany, forestry, soil, animal, fluxes, modeling, and remote sensing. This diversity is reflected in the format, structure, and semantics of their data which we manage.

Tasks in this project will be centered on the investigation and development of novel visualization methods and user-friendly tools for exploration, search and discovery, quality assurance and integration of the heterogeneous, large volume biodiversity data.  Overall, the study should contribute to the science of visualization for big-data-driven biodiversity research.

More information on the requirements, conditions and how to apply find in the official job offer attached below.

Target group: programmers, developers and system engineers. The workshop is open to anybody who might be interested to learn more about the DINA-system.

Preliminary agenda:

• Presentations from all DINA-partners
• APIs, service oriented architecture and road map for distributed development, guidelines and principles on how to build a module and join the DINA-system
• Case studies
• Delivery options: creating installations from hosted environment, virtual machines down to code.

A detailed program will be available by the end of August 2014.

There will be a SETF-meeting for DINA consortium members on the 15th of September.

Welcome to register for the workshop here:

DINA - Technical Workshop 16-18 September, Stockholm

The workshop is an activity within WP 1 Task 1.4

The  8th GEO European Projects Workshop (GEPW-8) took place in Athens, Greece, on 12 and 13 June, hosted by the Greek GEO Office - National Observatory of Athens and co-organized by the Mariolopoulos-Kanaginis Foundation for the Environmental Sciences.

The event was intended to bring all those interested in and actively contributing to the Global Earth Observations System of Systems (GEOSS) from all over Europe together, in order to present their work and discuss how Europe can contribute to this international effort, especially in the wake of the launch of the new EU Framework Programme for Research, Horizon 2020, and renewal of the mandate of GEO for another 10 years through the endorsement of the 2014 Geneva Declaration.

Oral presentations, a book of abstracts and the photos from the event are now uploaded and available for download on the events website.

The Mediterranean Institute for Biodiversity and Ecology (IMBE, Aix-Marseille University, Aix-en-Provence, France), in its research group "Macroecology and Biogeography of Global Change (MacroBio)" has a PostDoc position open for applications. The post has a duration of 36 months, the initial contract is made for 18 months, being extended based on an assessment of performance. The position is funded by the European Commission through the FP7 Research Project LUC4C and affiliated to the French National Scientific Research Centre (CNRS).

The main topic is to improve the way LULCC processes are represented in the DGVM LPJmL through enhanced soil and vegetation process representation. Work should improve the model's capacity to project climate-LULCC interactions for the computation of net climate effects, and ecosystem services. One focus is on the representation of diverse agricultural management systems, cropland abandonment/afforestation and forest management, in order to develop ways to account for their effects on biochemical cycles and biophysics.

A new article published in the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering looks at how Aphia, the core platform that underpins the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS),  can Serve the taxonomic community and the field of biodiversity informatics.

Abstract

The Aphia platform is an infrastructure designed to capture taxonomic and related data and information, and includes an online editing environment. The latter allows easy access to experts so they can update the content of the database in a timely fashion. Aphia is the core platform that underpins the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) and its more than 80 related global, regional and thematic species databases, but it also allows the storage of non-marine data. The content of Aphia can be consulted online, either by individual users or via machine-to-machine interactions. Aphia uses unique and stable identifiers for each available name in the database through the use of Life Science Identifiers (LSIDs). The system not only allows the storage of accepted and unaccepted names, but it also documents the relationships between names. This makes it a very powerful tool for taxonomic quality control, and also allows the linking of different pieces of information through scientific names, both within the Aphia platform and in relation to externally hosted databases. Through these LSIDs, Aphia has become an important player in the field of (marine) biodiversity informatics, allowing interactions between its own taxonomic data and e.g., biogeographic databases. Some applications in the field of biodiversity informatics encompass the coupling of species traits and taxonomy, as well as the creation of diverse, expert validated data products that can be used by policy makers, for example. Aphia also supplies (part of) its content to other data integrators and the infrastructure can be used to host orphan databases in danger of being lost.

Original Source: http://www.mdpi.com/2077-1312/3/4/1448/htm

The Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC) at the University of Twente has recently launched an investment programme to strengthen its international academic fields. For 11 pioneering-multidisciplinairy projects a PhD-position is made available, three of them already are filled in. The Department of Natural Resources (NRS) specialises in advanced spatial and temporal analysis and technique development for the environment as well as sustainable agriculture.

Job Description: 

For more information visit the official job offer.

A new EU BON derived paper, publsihed recently in the journal Remote Sensing, introduces eHabitat+, a habitat modelling service supporting the European Commission’s Digital Observatory for Protected Areas.

Abstract:

Protected areas (PAs) need to be assessed systematically according to biodiversity values and threats in order to support decision-making processes. For this, PAs can be characterized according to their species, ecosystems and threats, but such information is often difficult to access and usually not comparable across regions. There are currently over 200,000 PAs in the world, and assessing these systematically according to their ecological values remains a huge challenge. However, linking remote sensing with ecological modelling can help to overcome some limitations of conservation studies, such as the sampling bias of biodiversity inventories. The aim of this paper is to introduce eHabitat+, a habitat modelling service supporting the European Commission’s Digital Observatory for Protected Areas, and specifically to discuss a component that systematically stratifies PAs into different habitat functional types based on remote sensing data. eHabitat+ uses an optimized procedure of automatic image segmentation based on several environmental variables to identify the main biophysical gradients in each PA. This allows a systematic production of key indicators on PAs that can be compared globally. Results from a few case studies are illustrated to show the benefits and limitations of this open-source tool.

Original Source: 

Martínez-López, J.; Bertzky, B.; Bonet-García, F.J.; Bastin, L.; Dubois, G. Biophysical Characterization of Protected Areas Globally through Optimized Image Segmentation and Classification. Remote Sens. 2016, 8, 780. DOI: 0.3390/rs8090780

Pro-iBiosphere meeting 2 will be held from 11 to 14 February 2013 in Leiden. It will consist of three workshops on: e-platforms & e-tools for taxonomy Legacy literature – Semantic mark-up generation, data quality and user-participation infrastructure Prospective Literature – Toward Best Practices for data acquisition and curation using e-tools for taxonomy. More information can be found at: http://wiki.pro-ibiosphere.eu/wiki/Workshops_Leiden_February_2013

Pro-iBiosphere meeting 3 will be held from 20 to 24 May 2013 in Berlin. It will consist of three workshops on: 1) Coordination and routes for cooperation across organizations, projects and e-infrastructures 2) Measuring and constraining the costs of delivering services 3) Stakeholder requirements Second Management committee meeting and Advisory Board meetings will be held from 23-24 of May 2013. More information can be found at: http://wiki.pro-ibiosphere.eu/wiki/Workshops_Berlin,_May_2013

Agentschap Plententuin Meise (Botanic Garden Meise), Bouchout Castle – Meise (Brussels), Belgium

The pro-iBiosphere project supported by the European Commission (DG CONNECT) through its FP7 research funding programme has the pleasure to invite you to join its Final Event.

The project has the vision of implementing an Open Knowledge Biodiversity Management System (OBKMS), i.e. an integration platform that will allow to produce Biotas (i.e. Floras, Faunas, Mycotas and other revisionary taxonomic literature) of the future in a flexible semantically-driven online environment.

During its two year duration, pro-iBiosphere contributed to making fundamental biodiversity data digital, open and re-usable. The achievements of the project will be presented in a series of activities (Event Flyer) detailed below that will take place from Tuesday the 10^th to Thursday the 12^th of June 2014 at the Bouchout Castle (Botanic Garden Meise, Belgium).

Tuesday June 10 (PM)

Workshop on Model Evaluation

Wednesday June 11 (all day)

• Demonstrations on pro-iBiosphere pilots

• Demonstrations on outcomes of pro-iBiosphere Data Enrichment Hackathon

• Workshop on Biodiversity Catalogue

• Training on WikiMedia

• Poster session

Thursday June 12 (all day)

• Final Conference 

• Networking Cocktail

For more information on the Final Event (agenda, logistics,…), visit the dedicated wiki page.

Registration is free of charge but compulsory due to room capacity constraints. You can register by filling out the online registration form at http://tiny.cc/pib-final-event.

In case you are interested in giving a presentation during the Final Event activities or in submitting a poster in the poster session, please contact us at final-event@pro-ibiosphere.eu

Distributed European School of Taxonomy (DEST) is organizing a course in Philosophy of Biological Systematics targeted at MSc students, PhD students, early career researchers,  professional systematists/taxonomists and anyone who is interested in the philosophy of Biological Systematics. The course has a duration of one week and will take place between 8-12 September 2014.

Deadline for registration: 16 June 2014, extended until Friday 20 June 2014. To register and to learn more about the course visit the official webpage: http://www.taxonomytraining.eu/content/philosophy-biological-systematics

Approaching the subject from the perspective of the philosophical foundations of scientific inquiry, this course offers critical examinations of the principles required to judge the scientific merits of systematic/taxonomic procedures by way of the following topics:

• The goal of science
• The goal of biological systematics
• Causal relationships in systematics
• The nature of why-questions
• Three forms of reasoning: deduction, induction, abduction
• The uses of deduction, induction, and abduction in science
• Evidence and reasoning
• Fact, theory & hypothesis
• Theory & hypothesis testing
• Systematics involves abductive reasoning
• Inferences of systematics hypotheses, i.e. taxa
• Implications for ‘phylogenetic’ methods
• Causal explanations, not ‘trees’ or cladograms
• Parsimony, likelihood, Bayesianism: are they relevant to abductive reasoning, thus phylogenetic inference?
• The requirement of total evidence
• The errors of cladogram comparisons & character mapping
• Homology, homogeny & homoplasy
• Character coding
• Mechanics of hypothesis testing: implications for cladograms
• Character data cannot test phylogenetic hypotheses
• The nature evidential support
• The proper testing of phylogenetic hypotheses
• The myths of bootstrap, jack-knife & Bremer ‘support’
• Implications for nomenclature
• Defining biodiversity and conservation

Participants will be provided reprints covering the topics in the course, as well as a PDF file with all course slides (>800) and associated notes.

Target group: programmers, developers and system engineers. The workshop is also open to anybody who might be interested to learn more about the DINA-system.

Preliminary agenda:

• Presentations from all DINA-partners
• APIs, service oriented architecture and road map for distributed development guidelines and principles on how to build a module and join the DINA-system
• Case studies
• Delivery options: creating installations from hosted environment, virtual machines down to code.

Workshop Program.

There will be a SETF-meeting for DINA consortium members on the 15th of September.

Welcome to register for the workshop here:

DINA - Technical Workshop 16-18 September, Stockholm

The workshop is an activity within WP 1 Task 1.4

The University of Bayreuth welcomes the International Biogeography Society for its 7th international conference, taking place on 8-12 January 2015. This modern research university has a major focus on ecological research housed in the Bayreuth Center for Ecology and Environmental Research (BayCEER). Novel concepts for research and teaching are established such as the Ecological-Botanical Gardens and the Global Change Ecology study program.

The surroundings of Bayreuth are characterized by outstanding geological and climatic heterogeneity. Isolated fragments of natural ecosystems occur within a highly diverse cultural landscape. It was in the district of Bayreuth where Alexander von Humboldt, a leader in the early history of biogeography, gained his first experience in fieldwork after he finished his studies. At the end of the 18th century, before travelling the world, he worked as director of mining for the regional administration. Various places close to Bayreuth are linked to his scientific development.

The conference will be marked by four plenary symposia, keynote lectures by the awardees of the society’s Alfred Russel Wallace Award and the MacArthur and Wilson Award, contributed paper sessions, and dynamic poster sessions over the lunch and evening. Topical focus sessions will span the breadth of biogeography, from watersheds to the global scale, from Paleozoic to the Anthropocene, and from microbes to megafauna.   

Essential details about the conference, and about the surrounding area, are available via the links above. Information will be updated as details become available in the coming months, so please check back occasionally or stay informed via Facebook and Twitter.

Symposium: PS-2 Tracking Changes from Space: Advances of Remote Sensing in Biogeography

A key problem that biogeographers and ecologists have strived to understand is the spatial patterns and temporal dynamics of the biota. In this age of climatic and land use changes and rapid rates of species extinctions, such knowledge has become an essential component for management and conservation. The synoptic view provided by earth-imaging sensors constitutes an important source of information on the distribution of habitats and biodiversity patterns at different spatial and temporal scales. The traditional approach to using these data has involved the classification of discrete land cover types which are then related to species distributions. A critical limitation of this approach is that many important dynamics are obscured as the variance is lost within arbitrary land cover classes. In recent years, novel analytical techniques and open source software have been developed that more fully exploit the spatial, spectral and temporal information content of remotely sensed imagery in order to quantify a broader range of ecosystem characteristics. This symposium features advances in the synoptic assessment of species distributions and biodiversity patterns including the development of methodologies for assessment, monitoring, and modeling, as well as their implications for management and conservation.

More about the program and speakers available on the conference webpage: http://www.bayceer.uni-bayreuth.de/ibs2015/

Workshop on beta versions of data mobilization systems at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, Stockholm.

Registration link: http://goo.gl/forms/pCvjglXpcN

The 3rd edition of the DEST course "Philosophy of Biological Systematics" is co-organised with the Scandinavian Research School in Biosystematics (ForBio) and will take place from 10 to 14 October 2016.

Target Audience

MSc students, PhD students, early career researchers, professional systematists/taxonomists and anyone who is interested in the philosophy of Biological Systematics.

Criteria for selection will be scientific merit, motivation and usefulness of the training course for the applicant's career.

For more information and to register, please go to: http://taxonomytraining.eu/content/philosophy-biological-systematics-1