God’s Missional People: Reflecting God’s Love in the Midst of Suffering and Affliction

The title of this article reflects a deep and personal conviction founded on the belief that a major solution to lessen the suffering of people living in poverty and in the midst of pandemics such as AIDS, lies within the body of Christ. The focus therefore is on God’s people being called to participate in God’s mission in God’s world. Reflecting on those people, his church, in which he is incarnating himself through his Holy Spirit in an extraordinary and empowering way in order for them to reflect his love on the highways and byways of life – to transform the lives and circumstances of people in order for him to receive glory and honour. The title of this article clearly indicates a fundamental characteristic of God’s people – they are being sent to participate in his mission (missio Dei)

Nonhypnotic low-dose etomidate for rapid correction of hypercortisolaemia in cushing's syndrome

We determined the adrenostatic potential of low-dose nonhypnotic etomidate in six patients with Cushing's syndrome (ectopic Cushing's syndrome,n=2; Cushing's disease,n=3; bilateral adrenal adenoma,n=1). Etomidate was given as a continuous infusion for 32 h in a dose of 2.5 mg/h (n=5) or 0.3 mg/kg/h (n=3), respectively. Saline was given during a control period. The responsiveness to exogenous ACTH was studied during placebo and 7 and 31 h after commencing etomidate by administration of 250 µg 1–24 ACTH i.v. Etomidate (2.5 mg/h) led to a consistent decrease in serum cortisol in all patients from a mean of 39.4±13.3 to 21.1±5.7 µg/dl after 7 h (P<0.05 compared with placebo). After 24 h cortisol was reduced further to a mean steady state concentration of 12.3±5.7 µg/dl (P<0.05). At the end of the infusion period the cortisol increase in response to ACTH was reduced but not abolished. In contrast, a dose of 0.3 mg/kg/h etomidate induced unresponsiveness of serum cortisol to exogenous ACTH within 7 h. However, sedation was observed in two out of three patients at this dose, while during etomidate in a dose of 2.5 mg/h no side effects were seen. We conclude that low-dose non-hypnotic etomidate reduces serum cortisol to within the normal range in patients with Cushing's syndrome. The possibility to dissociate the adrenostatic effect of etomidate from its hypnotic action, the absence of side effects, and the i.v. route suggest that etomidate in a dose of 0.04–0.05 mg/kg/h may become the drug of choice for rapid initial control of hypercortisolism

Deformable Object Tracking with Gated Fusion

The tracking-by-detection framework receives growing attentions through the integration with the Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Existing tracking-by-detection based methods, however, fail to track objects with severe appearance variations. This is because the traditional convolutional operation is performed on fixed grids, and thus may not be able to find the correct response while the object is changing pose or under varying environmental conditions. In this paper, we propose a deformable convolution layer to enrich the target appearance representations in the tracking-by-detection framework. We aim to capture the target appearance variations via deformable convolution, which adaptively enhances its original features. In addition, we also propose a gated fusion scheme to control how the variations captured by the deformable convolution affect the original appearance. The enriched feature representation through deformable convolution facilitates the discrimination of the CNN classifier on the target object and background. Extensive experiments on the standard benchmarks show that the proposed tracker performs favorably against state-of-the-art methods

Microbial degradation dynamics of farmed kelp deposits from Saccharina latissima and Alaria esculenta

Seaweed farming is a growing industry worldwide, and its sustainable management requires detailed knowledge about the environmental implications of detrital release. This study investigates benthic degradation of kelp detritus in defaunated mesocosms. The degradation dynamics were investigated over several weeks by resolving O2 and dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) fluxes as a function of detritus amendments (0.15 g wet weight [WW] m-2 to 1 kg WW m-2), temperature (8 and 15°C), and presence of O2 for 2 commercially important kelp species: Saccharina latissima and Alaria esculenta. Kelp fragments were deposited in 2 different ways to simulate oxic and anoxic degradation: on the sediment surface (surface amendments) and just below the oxic surface sediment layer (subsurface amendments). All amendments resulted in high initial O2 consumption followed by an exponential decrease in O2 uptake over time. The degradation rates increased linearly with the amount of kelp added for both species and for both types of amendments. S. latissima expressed higher decay constants across all experiments and had a higher percentage turnover of carbon. In some instances, microbial priming apparently enabled enhanced degradation of pre-existing resilient sedimentary carbon. The absolute degradation rates of kelp were reduced in the absence of O2, and sulfate reduction resulted in gradual accumulation of iron sulfide. Lower ambient temperature reduced the benthic mineralization rate of both kelp species, particularly during the initial incubation stages. The current study demonstrates the importance of key variables for microbial kelp degradation in marine sediments and their dynamics—variables that should be carefully considered when assessing environmental implications of seaweed farming.publishedVersio

Two-Step Wind Power Prediction Approach With Improved Complementary Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition and Reinforcement Learning

The strong stochastic nature of wind power generation makes it extremely challenging to accurately predict and support the planning and operation of modern power systems with significant penetration of renewable energy. This article proposes a two-step wind power prediction method, which consists of two phases: long time-scale coarse prediction and short time-scale fine correction. In the long time-scale phase, a complementary ensemble empirical mode decomposition-based sigma point Kalman filter approach is proposed to coarsely predict wind power merely with historical data. In the short time-scale phase, a deep deterministic policy gradient approach learns from real-time weather information to correct the coarse prediction result, which results in an improved prediction accuracy. A real-life case study confirms that the proposed method can properly predict wind power generation and have a better prediction accuracy than existing techniques, thus offering a viable and promising alternative for predicting wind power generation

A cuckoo search optimization-based forward consecutive mean excision model for threshold adaptation in cognitive radio

The forward consecutive mean excision (FCME) algorithm is one of the most effective adaptive threshold estimation algorithms presently deployed for threshold adaptation in cognitive radio (CR) systems. However, its effectiveness is often limited by the manual parameter tuning process and by the lack of prior knowledge pertaining to the actual noise distribution considered during the parameter modeling process of the algorithm. In this paper, we propose a new model that can automatically and accurately tune the parameters of the FCME algorithm based on a novel integration with the cuckoo search optimization (CSO) algorithm. Our model uses the between-class variance function of the Otsu’s algorithm as the objective function in the CSO algorithm in order to auto-tune the parameters of the FCME algorithm. We compared and selected the CSO algorithm based on its relatively better timing and accuracy performance compared to some other notable metaheuristics such as the particle swarm optimization, artificial bee colony (ABC), genetic algorithm, and the differential evolution (DE) algorithms. Following close performance values, our findings suggest that both the DE and ABC algorithms can be adopted as favorable substitutes for the CSO algorithm in our model. Further simulation results show that our model achieves reasonably lower probability of false alarm and higher probability of detection as compared to the baseline FCME algorithm under different noise-only and signal-plus-noise conditions. In addition, we compared our model with some other known autonomous methods with results demonstrating improved performance. Thus, based on our new model, users are relieved from the cumbersome process involved in manually tuning the parameters of the FCME algorithm; instead, this can be done accurately and automatically for the user by our model. Essentially, our model presents a fully blind signal detection system for use in CR and a generic platform deployable to convert other parameterized adaptive threshold algorithms into fully autonomous algorithms.http://link.springer.com/journal/5002020-11-03hj2020Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineerin

In Vitro Cultures of Schisandra chinensis (Turcz.) Baill. (Chinese Magnolia Vine)—a Potential Biotechnological Rich Source of Therapeutically Important Phenolic Acids

The contents of free phenolic acids and cinnamic acid were determined using an HPLC method in methanolic extracts from biomass of Schisandra chinensis (Turcz.) Baill. (Chinese magnolia vine) at different stages of organogenesis, cultured in vitro on a few variants of Murashige and Skoog (MS) medium, containing different concentrations of plant growth regulators 6-benzylaminopurine (BAP) and 1-naphthaleneacetic acid (NAA) (from 0.1 to 3.0 mg/l) and in extracts from overground parts of plants growing in vivo. Six of 12 analysed compounds were detected in all extracts: chlorogenic, p-coumaric, p-hydroxybenzoic, protocatechuic, salicylic and syringic acids. Total contents of the examined metabolites in biomass of shoot-differentiating callus culture cultivated on six MS medium variants were dependent on concentrations of growth regulators in the media and ranged from 14.90 to 60.05 mg/100 g d.w. Total contents of the compounds in biomass extracts from undifferentiating callus culture maintained only on two of six MS medium variants were higher and amounted to 74.54 and 78.24 mg/100 g d.w. Maximum total contents of phenolic acids in both types of in vitro cultures were greater than in fruits (55.73 mg/100 g d.w.) and leaves (4.55 mg/100 g d.w.) of plants gowning in vivo. Chlorogenic acid and salicylic acid were the main compounds identified in biomass extracts of shoot-differentiating callus cultures (max 22.60 and 21.17 mg/100 g d.w., respectively), while chlorogenic acid (max 38.43 mg/100 g d.w.) and protocatechuic acid (max 20.95 mg/100 g d.w.) prevailed in the extracts from undifferentiating callus cultures. Other compounds dominated in fruits, namely p-coumaric acid (23.36 mg/100 g d.w.) and syringic acid (14.96 mg/100 g d.w.). This is the first report on biochemical potential of cells from S. chinensis in vitro cultures to produce the biologically active phenolic acids. These are the first results on the analysis of this group of metabolites in overground parts of plants growing in vivo, too

The Bits of Silence : Redundant Traffic in VoIP

Human conversation is characterized by brief pauses and so-called turn-taking behavior between the speakers. In the context of VoIP, this means that there are frequent periods where the microphone captures only background noise – or even silence whenever the microphone is muted. The bits transmitted from such silence periods introduce overhead in terms of data usage, energy consumption, and network infrastructure costs. In this paper, we contribute by shedding light on these costs for VoIP applications. We systematically measure the performance of six popular mobile VoIP applications with controlled human conversation and acoustic setup. Our analysis demonstrates that significant savings can indeed be achievable - with the best performing silence suppression technique being effective on 75% of silent pauses in the conversation in a quiet place. This results in 2-5 times data savings, and 50-90% lower energy consumption compared to the next better alternative. Even then, the effectiveness of silence suppression can be sensitive to the amount of background noise, underlying speech codec, and the device being used. The codec characteristics and performance do not depend on the network type. However, silence suppression makes VoIP traffic network friendly as much as VoLTE traffic. Our results provide new insights into VoIP performance and offer a motivation for further enhancements, such as performance-aware codec selection, that can significantly benefit a wide variety of voice assisted applications, as such intelligent home assistants and other speech codec enabled IoT devices.Peer reviewe