Ad maiorem Dei gloriam: The Jesuits in Albania

When Pope Francis addressed students, teachers, and parents of the Jesuit schools of Italy and Albania in 2013, he discussed the core and the value of a Jesuit-Catholic education, which in essence follows St. Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises and the Constitutions of the Society of Jesus. The Jesuits in all multifarious activities and apostolates put Jesus in the center, thereby making him the prototype. It was Jesus who had trodden a novel way for the Society of Jesus to follow and that meant to live a meaningful life, live well, and live joyfully among the people they were serving. It was Jesus that invited the path was gratuitously provided. Thus, Jesus became the core of the core of a Jesuit education. Education for the Society of Jesus is the formation that brings about and allows room for growth “developing intelligence, but also an integral formation of all the aspects of your personality.” Jesuit education inspires students to seek for more and live enthusiastically. Moreover, St. Ignatius of Loyola left a distinctive gem in Jesuit education: teaching and learning the virtue of magnanimity, which means educating to “have greatness of mind; … great ideals, the wish to do great things to respond to what God asks of us.” The magnanimity of Jesuit education entails a big heart open to Christ and to the human ideals that correspond to the Gospel. Francis concluded his 2013 speech by blessing the audience saying: “The Lord is always close to you, he picks you up when you fall and impels you to develop and to make ever loftier decisions, ‘con grande ánimo y liberalidad,’ with magnanimity. Ad maiorem Dei gloriam.

Conditions for duality between fluxes and concentrations in biochemical networks

Mathematical and computational modelling of biochemical networks is often done in terms of either the concentrations of molecular species or the fluxes of biochemical reactions. When is mathematical modelling from either perspective equivalent to the other? Mathematical duality translates concepts, theorems or mathematical structures into other concepts, theorems or structures, in a one-to-one manner. We present a novel stoichiometric condition that is necessary and sufficient for duality between unidirectional fluxes and concentrations. Our numerical experiments, with computational models derived from a range of genome-scale biochemical networks, suggest that this flux-concentration duality is a pervasive property of biochemical networks. We also provide a combinatorial characterisation that is sufficient to ensure flux-concentration duality. That is, for every two disjoint sets of molecular species, there is at least one reaction complex that involves species from only one of the two sets. When unidirectional fluxes and molecular species concentrations are dual vectors, this implies that the behaviour of the corresponding biochemical network can be described entirely in terms of either concentrations or unidirectional fluxes

Pronunciation development and instruction in distance language learning

The goal of this study was to explore how distance language learners’ pronunciation skills develop with and without targeted pronunciation training during their first semester of university language instruction. To this end, a new computer-assisted method of pronunciation instruction was designed, and its effectiveness, as well as learners’ experiences with the method, were assessed. The study was conducted over the course of one semester with 67 distance learners of German. Perception and oral production skills on the word and sentence level were assessed at the beginning and end of the semester for a treatment group that received targeted pronunciation instruction and a control group that did not receive pronunciation instruction, but otherwise followed the same curriculum. The results of the study showed that distance learners’ pronunciation skills did not improve significantly over the course of the semester in the absence of targeted pronunciation training. Results further indicated that learners who received targeted pronunciation training improved significantly from pre- to posttest and significantly outperformed learners in the control group on measures of perception and production accuracy at the end of the semester. These findings suggest that distance language instruction can benefit from including targeted pronunciation training

Inverse modelling in estimating soil hydraulic functions: a Genetic Algorithm approach

The practical application of simulation models in the field is sometimes hindered by the difficulty of deriving the soil hydraulic properties of the study area. The procedure so-called inverse modelling has been investigated in many studies to address the problem where most of the studies were limited to hypothetical soil profile and soil core samples in the laboratory. Often, the numerical approach called forward-backward simulation is employed to generate synthetic data then added with random errors to mimic the real-world condition. Inverse modelling is used to backtrack the expected values of the parameters. This study explored the potential of a Genetic Algorithm (GA) to estimate inversely the soil hydraulic functions in the unsaturated zone. Lysimeter data from a wheat experiment in India were used in the analysis. Two cases were considered: (1) a numerical case where the forward-backward approach was employed and (2) the experimental case where the real data from the lysimeter experiment were used. Concurrently, the use of soil water, evapotranspiration (ET) and the combination of both were investigated as criteria in the inverse modelling. Results showed that using soil water as a criterion provides more accurate parameter estimates than using ET. However, from a practical point of view, ET is more attractive as it can be obtained with reasonable accuracy on a regional scale from remote sensing observations. The experimental study proved that the forward-backward approach does not take into account the effects of model errors. The formulation of the problem is found to be critical for a successful parameter estimation. The sensitivity of parameters to the objective function and their zone of influence in the soil column are major determinants in the solution. Generally, their effects sometimes lead to non-uniqueness in the solution but to some extent are partly handled by GA. Overall, it was concluded that the GA approach is promising to the inverse problem in the unsaturated zone.</p> <p style='line-height: 20px;'><b>Keywords. </b>Genetic Algorithm, inverse modelling, Mualem-Van Genuchten parameters, unsaturated zone, evapotranspiration, soil wate