Breaking Ground A look at the Impact of the Cappadocian Fathers on the Establishment of the Doctrine of the Holy Spirit During the Transition Between the Council of Nigeria (325) and the Council of Constantinople (381).

In lieu of an abstract, below is the essay\u27s first paragraph. At the center of Christian dogma lies the worship of the Holy Trinity. Naturally, with every central focus comes controversy. Throughout history, the interpretation of the Trinity has created a tremendous amount of debate. Opposition to specific interpretation is expected as numerous philosophies are bound to rise due to the simple truth that the reality of God can never be fully comprehended by human efforts. Therefore, with the nature and essence of God being left for definition to a finite source, disagreements about the true nature of God are inevitable

Do Libraries’ Needs Still Match Publisher Offerings? “The Truth Is Rarely Pure and Never Simple” (Oscar Wilde)

Given the continued state of strained library budgets and increasing content offerings from publishers, the authors set out to investigate this current environment from the perspectives of both library and publisher. After reviewing the array of publisher offerings as well as ongoing collection development issues faced by libraries, the authors moderated an open discussion with their peers to determine if any new models and solutions offered by publishers help to address these concerns, and if not, what the library community would like to see as an ideal acquisitions model

Minimalism, Reference, and Paradoxes

The aim of this paper is to provide a minimalist axiomatic theory of truth based on the notion of reference. To do this, we first give sound and arithmetically simple notions of reference, self-reference, and well-foundedness for the language of first-order arithmetic extended with a truth predicate; a task that has been so far elusive in the literature. Then, we use the new notions to restrict the T-schema to sentences that exhibit "safe" reference patterns, confirming the widely accepted but never worked out idea that paradoxes can be characterised in terms of their underlying reference patterns. This results in a strong, ω-consistent, and well-motivated system of disquotational truth, as required by minimalism

Minimalism, Reference, and Paradoxes

The aim of this paper is to provide a minimalist axiomatic theory of truth based on the notion of reference. To do this, we first give sound and arithmetically simple notions of reference, self-reference, and well-foundedness for the language of first-order arithmetic extended with a truth predicate; a task that has been so far elusive in the literature. Then, we use the new notions to restrict the T-schema to sentences that exhibit "safe" reference patterns, confirming the widely accepted but never worked out idea that paradoxes can be characterised in terms of their underlying reference patterns. This results in a strong, ω-consistent, and well-motivated system of disquotational truth, as required by minimalism

Mom

I study the Civil War because of my mother. It\u27s a simple truth. My Mom, more than anyone else in my life, taught me to be the historian that I am. She is present in so much of what I do when I process the past. I lovingly refer to her as my idiot-filter. She was a theology major in her undergraduate training, studying comparative religions. I\u27ve never read her thesis, I know it\u27s in a cupboard at my parents\u27 house, but I vaguely remember that it was centered around comparing Christ with the other messianic figures of his era. She looked at the world as a game of measures, sizing up one thing and another, looking for the moving parts, seeking the humanity in what we call the divine. [excerpt

The Making of a “Philanthropreneur” (Interview with Trevor Field and Mark Melman, Playpumps International)

“Be mindful of taking care of yourself without excesses.” In the case of Playpumps® International, an NGO based in Johannesburg, South Africa, coupling a not-for-profit with a for-profit company produced the needed incentive to bear truth to the idiom that one person, one simple idea can really change the world. Trevor Field and his partner, Mark Melman, former executives in the outdoor advertising industry, have done just that. With the invention of the PlayPump® water system, government agencies, NGOs and for-profit business have converged to address the disturbing reality that over one billion people lack access to clean water. According to Field, “I remember when I first looked at this water pump; I could never imagine that this is something that could possibly change the world. I remember when I came up with this idea and everyone was laughing. They’re not laughing now.

"The truth is never pure and rarely simple" : Understanding the role of repetition and processing fluency on the illusion of truth effect

Tese de Doutoramento apresentada ao ISPA - Instituto UniversitárioABSTRACT: Repetition seems to increase the truth-value of information, generating the illusion that repeated statements are more valid than things we never heard or read before – the illusion oftruth effect. The present thesis aims at providing further and clearer understanding of “why” and “how” we base the important decision of something we hear being true rather than false on repetition. We review the literature evidencing repetition’s impact on judgments of truth and the major cognitive mechanisms that have been proposed to explain it. The first studies investigating the mechanisms underlying the effect show that subjective familiarity is more important than actual frequency of exposure. These approaches further suggested that the automatic memory component of Familiarity has a rather involuntary impact in truth judgments, and is the one supporting illusions of truth when the controlled Recollection process is impaired. A next approach showed that processing fluency experiences promoted by factors unrelated to previous exposure and memory are sufficient to generate illusions of truth. The first accounts suggesting processing fluency to be the process underlying the truth effect maintained the idea that the feelings of familiarity mediate fluency effects on judged truth. However, a more recent approach argues that fluency is an ecologically valid cue for truth, and thus fluency per se directly influences truth judgments, with no need for memory attributions. Drawing from this previous body of knowledge, we pose the question of whether there is something special in the relation repetition has with truth. Some evidence in the literature may suggest so, for example, the fact that illusions of truth have a higher magnitude when they are induced by repetition than when other fluency sources are used. Additionally, repetition has the unique characteristic of aggregating both perceptual and conceptual fluency, which may add an “extra” layer to the association with truth. Exploring these questions, we present three independent papers exploring the differences that may exist between repetition and other factors also able to impact truth judgments, and the relevance that repetition’s unique characteristics may have in the shaping of the truth effect. In the first paper we demonstrate that the association of repetition with truth is more difficult to reverse than when pure perceptual fluency (e.g., color contrast) is manipulated, and that the confounds between the processing experiences and resulting effects on truth judgments the two variables promote can be dissociated. In the second and third papers, we isolate the conceptual and perceptual components involved in repetition, showing that conceptual overlap (a match in the content and meaning) takes precedence over the sharing of perceptual features in the generation of illusions of truth. Only when individuals no longer can access the specific meaning of what was previously presented do perceptual fluency effects emerge. We discuss how our findings integrate and expand what was previously known about judgments of truth, addressing the contributions and clarifications they bring to the main cognitive mechanisms that have been proposed to explain the effect.Programa Operacional Ciência e Inovação (POCI 2010) da Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (SFRH/BD/39153/ 2007)

FSS-1000: A 1000-Class Dataset for Few-Shot Segmentation

Over the past few years, we have witnessed the success of deep learning in image recognition thanks to the availability of large-scale human-annotated datasets such as PASCAL VOC, ImageNet, and COCO. Although these datasets have covered a wide range of object categories, there are still a significant number of objects that are not included. Can we perform the same task without a lot of human annotations? In this paper, we are interested in few-shot object segmentation where the number of annotated training examples are limited to 5 only. To evaluate and validate the performance of our approach, we have built a few-shot segmentation dataset, FSS-1000, which consists of 1000 object classes with pixelwise annotation of ground-truth segmentation. Unique in FSS-1000, our dataset contains significant number of objects that have never been seen or annotated in previous datasets, such as tiny daily objects, merchandise, cartoon characters, logos, etc. We build our baseline model using standard backbone networks such as VGG-16, ResNet-101, and Inception. To our surprise, we found that training our model from scratch using FSS-1000 achieves comparable and even better results than training with weights pre-trained by ImageNet which is more than 100 times larger than FSS-1000. Both our approach and dataset are simple, effective, and easily extensible to learn segmentation of new object classes given very few annotated training examples. Dataset is available at https://github.com/HKUSTCV/FSS-1000

Natural revision is contingently-conditionalized revision

Natural revision seems so natural: it changes beliefs as little as possible to incorporate new information. Yet, some counterexamples show it wrong. It is so conservative that it never fully believes. It only believes in the current conditions. This is right in some cases and wrong in others. Which is which? The answer requires extending natural revision from simple formulae expressing universal truths (something holds) to conditionals expressing conditional truth (something holds in certain conditions). The extension is based on the basic principles natural revision follows, identified as minimal change, indifference and naivety: change beliefs as little as possible; equate the likeliness of scenarios by default; believe all until contradicted. The extension says that natural revision restricts changes to the current conditions. A comparison with an unrestricting revision shows what exactly the current conditions are. It is not what currently considered true if it contradicts the new information. It includes something more and more unlikely until the new information is at least possible

Información y verdad en la cultura tecnológica

La vida contemporánea se funda mucho más en la imagen de la realidad que proporcionan los medios de comunicación de masas que en las creencias tradicionales. La relación humana con el conocimiento verdadero está profundamente mediada por el poderío tecnológico y social de los nuevos agentes que han convertido nuestra sociedad en una sociedad de la información. Vivimos en una época en la que hay un cierto eclipse de la noción de verdad que se ve sustituida, la mayoría de las veces por la simple abundancia de noticias, lo que plantea problemas intelectuales y morales de un tipo inédito en el pasado.The contemporary human life is founded much more on the image of the reality that the mass media provides that in the traditional beliefs. The human relation with the knowledge is deeply mediated by the technological and social power of the new agents who have turned our society in a information society. We live in an epoch in that there is a certain eclipse of the concept of the truth. The real knowledge has been replaced, almost always, by the simple abundance of news, which raises intellectual and moral problems that they had never presented in the past.Peer reviewe