Is mindfulness Buddhist? (and why it matters).

Modern exponents of mindfulness meditation promote the therapeutic effects of "bare attention"--a sort of non-judgmental, non-discursive attending to the moment-to-moment flow of consciousness. This approach to Buddhist meditation can be traced to Burmese Buddhist reform movements of the first half of the 20th century, and is arguably at odds with more traditional Theravāda Buddhist doctrine and meditative practices. But the cultivation of present-centered awareness is not without precedent in Buddhist history; similar innovations arose in medieval Chinese Zen (Chan) and Tibetan Dzogchen. These movements have several things in common. In each case the reforms were, in part, attempts to render Buddhist practice and insight accessible to laypersons unfamiliar with Buddhist philosophy and/or unwilling to adopt a renunciatory lifestyle. In addition, these movements all promised astonishingly quick results. And finally, the innovations in practice were met with suspicion and criticism from traditional Buddhist quarters. Those interested in the therapeutic effects of mindfulness and bare attention are often not aware of the existence, much less the content, of the controversies surrounding these practices in Asian Buddhist history

Is mindfulness buddhist? (and why it matters)

Modern exponents of mindfulness meditation promote the therapeutic effects of “bare attention”—a sort of non-judgmental, non-discursive attending to the moment-to-moment flow of consciousness. This approach is arguably at odds with more traditional Theravada Buddhist doctrine and meditative practice, but the cultivation of present-centered awareness is not without precedent in Buddhist history; similar innovations arose in medieval Chinese Zen (Chan) and Tibetan Dzogchen. These movements have several things in common. In each case the reforms were, in part, attempts to render Buddhist practice and insight accessible to laypeople unfamiliar with Buddhist philosophy and/or unwilling to adopt a renunciatory lifestyle. They also promised quick results. And finally, the innovations were met with suspicion and criticism from traditional Buddhist quarters. Those interested in the therapeutic effects of mindfulness and bare attention are often not aware of the existence, much less the content, of the controversies surrounding these practices in Asian Buddhist history

Steps to an advanced Ada programming environment

Conceptual simplicity, tight coupling of tools, and effective support of host-target software development will characterize advanced Ada programming support environments. Several important principles have been demonstrated in the Arcturus system, including template-assisted Ada editing, command completion using Ada as a command language, and combining the advantages of interpretation and compliation. Other principles, relating to analysis, testing, and debugging of concurrent Ada programs, have appeared in other contexts. This paper discusses several of these topics, considers how they can be integrated, and argues for their inclusion in an environment appropriate for software development in the late 1980's

Low significance of evidence for black hole echoes in gravitational wave data

Recent detections of merging black holes allow observational tests of the nature of these objects. In some proposed models, non-trivial structure at or near the black hole horizon could lead to echo signals in gravitational wave data. Recently, Abedi et al. claimed tentative evidence for repeating damped echo signals following the gravitational-wave signals of the binary black hole merger events recorded in the first observational period of the Advanced LIGO interferometers. We reanalyse the same data, addressing some of the shortcomings of their method using more background data and a modified procedure. We find a reduced statistical significance for the claims of evidence for echoes, calculating increased p-values for the null hypothesis of echo-free noise. The reduced significance is entirely consistent with noise, and so we conclude that the analysis of Abedi et al. does not provide any observational evidence for the existence of Planck-scale structure at black hole horizons.Comment: As accepted by Physical Review

Model-driven engineering approach to design and implementation of robot control system

In this paper we apply a model-driven engineering approach to designing domain-specific solutions for robot control system development. We present a case study of the complete process, including identification of the domain meta-model, graphical notation definition and source code generation for subsumption architecture -- a well-known example of robot control architecture. Our goal is to show that both the definition of the robot-control architecture and its supporting tools fits well into the typical workflow of model-driven engineering development.Comment: Presented at DSLRob 2011 (arXiv:cs/1212.3308

Hubungan Positif antara Ulkus Kaki Diabetik dengan Persentase Sel Bermarkah Cd4+ Pembawa Malondialdehid

Tingginya angka kejadian ulkus kaki diabetik (UKD) dan luka di kaki yangsulit sembuh memberi petunjuk kemungkinan ada proses kematian sel imun yangsangat banyak dan belum jelas mekanismenya secara molekuler pada jaringan UKD.Telah diteliti hubungan antara derajat UKD dengan persentase sel bermarkahCD4+ pembawa malondialdehid (MDA). Penelitian ini adalah penelitianobservasional dengan rancangan cross sectional analytic study yang dilakukan diRumah Sakit pemerintah dan swasta di Denpasar, Badung, Tabanan, dan Gianyar.Parameter yang diukur dari bahan darah adalah kadar gula darah memakai metodeenzimatik (heksokinase), dan dari bahan jaringan kaki, dihitung sel bermarkah CD4+pembawa MDA memakai metode imunohistokimia (reagen dari Biodesign danAbcam ). Dari 80 sampel UKD didapatkan 49 (61,2%) penderita laki-laki dan 31(38.8%) penderita wanita, berdasarkan tingkat keparahan UKD, sampel dipilah lagimenjadi: 29 (31,9%) derajat 2; 20 (21,9%) derajat 3; 13 (14,3%) derjat 4; dan18(19,8%) derajat 5, rata-rata persentase sel bermarkah CD4+MDA adalah 75,0 ±20,5 %, Didapatkan korelasi positif kuat antara persentase sel bermarkah CD4+pembawa malondialdehid dengan derajat UKD (r = 0,71; p < 0,01). Pada penelitianini membuktikan ada mekanisme kematian sel imun dan sekaligus menjawabpermasalahan bahwa pada penderita UKD mudah terkena infeksi dan sulit untukdisembuhkan, dengan dibuktikan bahwa ada korelasi positif kuat antara derajat UKDdengan persentase pembentukan MDA dari sel bermarkah CD4+, ini menyatakanbahwa semakin berat derajat UKD semakin banyak mengalami kematian sel imun.

The development and technology transfer of software engineering technology at NASA. Johnson Space Center

The United State's big space projects of the next decades, such as Space Station and the Human Exploration Initiative, will need the development of many millions of lines of mission critical software. NASA-Johnson (JSC) is identifying and developing some of the Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) technology that NASA will need to build these future software systems. The goal is to improve the quality and the productivity of large software development projects. New trends are outlined in CASE technology and how the Software Technology Branch (STB) at JSC is endeavoring to provide some of these CASE solutions for NASA is described. Key software technology components include knowledge-based systems, software reusability, user interface technology, reengineering environments, management systems for the software development process, software cost models, repository technology, and open, integrated CASE environment frameworks. The paper presents the status and long-term expectations for CASE products. The STB's Reengineering Application Project (REAP), Advanced Software Development Workstation (ASDW) project, and software development cost model (COSTMODL) project are then discussed. Some of the general difficulties of technology transfer are introduced, and a process developed by STB for CASE technology insertion is described

A distributed agent architecture for real-time knowledge-based systems: Real-time expert systems project, phase 1

We propose a distributed agent architecture (DAA) that can support a variety of paradigms based on both traditional real-time computing and artificial intelligence. DAA consists of distributed agents that are classified into two categories: reactive and cognitive. Reactive agents can be implemented directly in Ada to meet hard real-time requirements and be deployed on on-board embedded processors. A traditional real-time computing methodology under consideration is the rate monotonic theory that can guarantee schedulability based on analytical methods. AI techniques under consideration for reactive agents are approximate or anytime reasoning that can be implemented using Bayesian belief networks as in Guardian. Cognitive agents are traditional expert systems that can be implemented in ART-Ada to meet soft real-time requirements. During the initial design of cognitive agents, it is critical to consider the migration path that would allow initial deployment on ground-based workstations with eventual deployment on on-board processors. ART-Ada technology enables this migration while Lisp-based technologies make it difficult if not impossible. In addition to reactive and cognitive agents, a meta-level agent would be needed to coordinate multiple agents and to provide meta-level control