Absolution: Divine and Human

This article is a contribution to an ecumenical theology of the Word, examining how divine absolution is realized in concrete human experience. It addresses both the scriptural and sacramental mediation of divine absolution, emphasizing the commonality of both resting on the power of God\u27s word spoken in human concrete actuality. The philosophical literature concludes that human beings, in order for forgiveness to be real to them, need to hear and know that they are forgiven. In other words, for forgiveness to be complete, the wrongdoer requires an act of “absolution” (even in a secular sense), which may be verbal or gestural. This observation then drives our theological inquiry. How does divine Providence condescend in the economy of Revelation to make divine absolution available in the concrete details of human life, since it must be available to us, if it is to be received and accepted and be real to us? This investigation assumes that understanding forgiveness in human experience better serves to enrich theological reflection on divine forgiveness. The fact that forgiveness in human experience is primarily a dialogical affair, worked out in a “dialogical narrative” (Griswold) that parallels the dialogical nature of salvation, is evidenced in Scripture. In scriptural mediation, divine absolution becomes a living reality through a “hermeneutic of identity” by which the hearer of the Word appropriates the indexical language of a text, and, for example, self-inserts into a ready-made dialogue. In this way, God\u27s absolution is effectively made a present reality. Finally, the article argues that Christ\u27s words should be considered among his salvific acts, including his absolutions of individual sinners. The immanent expression of divine absolution, therefore, comes through the hypostatic union of the divine and human natures in historical concreteness, providing one avenue of response to the timeless theological question Cur Deus homo

Automatically detecting important moments from everyday life using a mobile device

This paper proposes a new method to detect important moments in our lives. Our work is motivated by the increase in the quantity of multimedia data, such as videos and photos, which are capturing life experiences into personal archives. Even though such media-rich data suggests visual processing to identify important moments, the oft-mentioned problem of the semantic gap means that users cannot automatically identify or retrieve important moments using visual processing techniques alone. Our approach utilises on-board sensors from mobile devices to automatically identify important moments, as they are happening

Mining user activity as a context source for search and retrieval

Nowadays in information retrieval it is generally accepted that if we can better understand the context of users then this could help the search process, either at indexing time by including more metadata or at retrieval time by better modelling the user context. In this work we explore how activity recognition from tri-axial accelerometers can be employed to model a user's activity as a means of enabling context-aware information retrieval. In this paper we discuss how we can gather user activity automatically as a context source from a wearable mobile device and we evaluate the accuracy of our proposed user activity recognition algorithm. Our technique can recognise four kinds of activities which can be used to model part of an individual's current context. We discuss promising experimental results, possible approaches to improve our algorithms, and the impact of this work in modelling user context toward enhanced search and retrieval

Summarisation & Visualisation of Large Volumes of Time-Series Sensor Data

a number of sensors, including an electricity usage sensor supplied by Episensor. This poses our second With the increasing ubiquity of sensor data, challenge, how to summarise an extended period of presenting this data in a meaningful way to electrictiy usage data for a home user. users is a challenge that must be addressed before we can easily deploy real-world sensor network interfaces in the home or workplace. In this paper, we will present one solution to the visualisation of large quantities of sensor data that is easy to understand and yet provides meaningful and intuitive information to a user, even when examining many weeks or months of historical data. We will illustrate this visulalisation technique with two real-world deployments of sensing the person and sensing the home

Retrieval of similar travel routes using GPS tracklog place names

GPS tracklogs provide a valuable record of routes travelled. In this paper we describe initial experiments exploring the use of text information retrieval techniques for the location of similar trips from within a GPS tracklog. We performed the experiment on a dataset of 528 individual trips gathered over a seven month time period from a single user. The results of our preliminary study suggest that traditional text-based information retrieval techniques can indeed be used to locate similar and related tracklogs

Information access for personal media archives

It is now possible to archive much of our life experiences in digital form using a variety of sources, e.g. blogs written, tweets made, photographs taken, etc. Information can be captured from a myriad of personal information devices. In this workshop, researchers from diverse disciplines discussed how we can advance towards the goal of effective capture, retrieval and exploration of e-memories. Proposed solutions included advanced textile sensors to capture new data, P2P methods to store this data, and personal reflection applications to review this data. Much discussion centered around search and navigation strategies, interactive interfaces, and the cognitive basis in using digitally captured information as memorabilia

Tmesis and Verb Second in Early Irish Syntax

Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (2000

The colour of life: novel visualisations of population Lifestyles

Colour permeates our daily lives, yet we rarely take notice of it. In this work we utilise the SenseCam (a visual lifelogging tool), to investigte the predominant colours in one million minutes of human life that a group of 20 individuals encounter throughout their normal daily activities. We also compare the colours that different groups of people are exposed to in their typical days. This information is presented in using a novel colour-wheel visualisation which is a new means of illustrating that people are exposed to bright colours over longer durations of time during summer months, and more dark colours during winter months

Public access to the countryside: An exploration of the costs and benefits of farmland walking trails

To date, estimates of individuals’ willingness to pay (WTP) for access to the countryside have typically been on sites of special interest such as developed walking routes, public rights of way in specific areas, national parks and forests (see Lockwood and Tracy, 1995; Bennett and Tranter, 1997; Crabtree and MacDonald, 1997; Liston-Heyes and Heyes, 1999; Garrod et al., 1998; Bennett et al., 2003; Buckley et al., 2009; Morris et al., 2009). There has been little if any attempt to derive estimates of individuals’ WTP for the provision of walking trails in the wider countryside at a national level. The present study aims to build on previous work by examining the demand for particular types of walking trails through a nationally representative survey of the Irish population. One further advantage of this research is that apart from valuing walking activities in a generic sense this paper investigates what types of investment in facilities associated with walking trails generate the greatest welfare gains. Furthermore, using a nationally representative survey of the farming population this paper examines farmers’ willingness to participate in a hypothetical walking scheme whereby the general public will be allowed access to specific trails. First by way of background this paper will discuss the situation in relation to access rights to the countryside across a number of countries. Second this paper will outline the research approach which is followed with a discussion of the empirical results. Finally this paper will conclude with a discussion of the papers main findings and their implications for the provision of public access to the countryside.This work was funded by the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food under the Stimulus Funding

Green multimedia: informing people of their carbon footprint through two simple sensors

In this work we discuss a new, but highly relevant, topic to the multimedia community; systems to inform individuals of their carbon footprint, which could ultimately effect change in community carbon footprint-related activities. The reduction of carbon emissions is now an important policy driver of many governments, and one of the major areas of focus is in reducing the energy demand from the consumers i.e. all of us individually. In terms of CO2 generated from energy consumption, there are three predominant factors, namely electricity usage, thermal related costs, and transport usage. Standard home electricity and heating sensors can be used to measure the former two aspects, and in this paper we evaluate a novel technique to estimate an individual's transport-related carbon emissions through the use of a simple wearable accelerometer. We investigate how providing this novel estimation of transport-related carbon emissions through an interactive web site and mobile phone app engages a set of users in becoming more aware of their carbon emissions. Our evaluations involve a group of 6 users collecting 25 million accelerometer readings and 12.5 million power readings vs. a control group of 16 users collecting 29.7 million power readings